Sunday 22 May 2016

Summer Maintenance

Well, it's got to be a year since I fitted the rainwater harvesting system so time to give the slow sand filter an inspection and overhaul. 

I removed the filter from the facilities and took it outside for a tentative stripdown and 'recondition' and was pleasantly surprised to find very little needed doing. To be fair, I haven't used vast quantities of water...the occasional brew and handwash, but the filter was in extremely good condition.

The PU foam just needed a rinse out and the sand column looks in perfect order. The only major cleaning needed was to the bag prefilter (the foot off a pair of 80 denier stockings) which had trapped a fair bit of debris (mostly dust, pollen and bird-shit). Thoroughly rinsed out under the hot tap (yes, the sun is shining and I have lashings of hot water in the calorifier), and good to reassemble and refit the filter.

I'm rather pleased with performance. I may need to fit a new Pozanni filter cartridge on the drinking water side of things, but thus far the water is still of potable quality. Based of course only on smell and taste...but I'm fairly sure a bacterial test will show the water as plenty good enough.

Today's temperatures are being logged, the batteries are holding up nicely at around 13.1v and all systems are working as expected. My only niggle was lack of telephone thanks to rabbits chewing the CAT5 cable. How the internet stays up but they love chewing the 50v telephone cores is a mystery to me!

Cable duly spliced in a couple of places and now I have phone again.

I'm still a little wary of the lighting circuits. They were tripping out the RCD up at The Manor, but with it being very bright out today, the only light I am using is in the loo, and that is run from a fused spur off the power circuits.


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