geoffbeaumont
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Posts posted by geoffbeaumont
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It's going to be not much short of £5k - that's just materials, and built on an existing slab, albeit with a bit of work to level the sides up. So no, not cheap - but half the old one was unusable, and the other half deteriorating fast.
I'm dreading to think what it'll cost to do the garage 😕 Suspect that's going to need some serious saving.
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Storage, garden shed, potters wheel and kiln will be going in there but won't be usable until I get round to running some services. I'll probably store some of the materials from my workshop up there for now too, as it'll be dry which my workshop isn't
It's been designed to be flexible - the slab is an uneven mess in sections that aren't sealed, so I'm putting in a DPC with an insulted chipboard floor over it, and the roof will be insulated too. Walls won't be, but they have space to add insulation later (just unscrew the OSB lining). So it can be anything from a garden shed to a summer house, workshop or home office depending what we need in the future. I don't plan on doing this job again...
It's just got the one window and french doors - but the frame is built to take a smaller door and another window at the other end, so if we want to partition it into separate garden shed and something else that's easy to do. Left them out at this point to save money.
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Finished up going with a steel box section roof and feather edge cladding - the later from a local saw mill (Fox), which worked out fairly reasonable - about £670 for heavy duty 170mm boards. Could have had lighter 150mm boards a couple of hundred cheaper, but due to both the height and shorter lengths they came in would have been a lot more work and a lot more mid run joints.
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So, this is finally in progress - can't find any photo's of the old shed at the moment, but I've taken a few as the new one has gone up.
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And house prices have been deliberately driven higher relative to income over decades in order to use houses as investments. I'm not aware that's ever been the case for cars.
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2 minutes ago, Ed Poore said:
Double stack or quadruple stack some spacers
Like a sort of go-faster forest rover? 😄
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1 hour ago, miketomcat said:
Yeah I know, the theory's good though.
Mike
Question is...do you ever get one rebuilt before you have to buy another on to tide you over? 😄
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2 hours ago, Nonimouse said:
Where did you live in Somerset
Wellington
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1 minute ago, Bowie69 said:
Don't own anything German either then....
£140 is definitely not top whack for a main dealer these days.
The Fabia is just a VW Polo with worse suspension...so at least on this specific issue not so bad! Never had it near a dealer, though.
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11 minutes ago, Nonimouse said:
Suzuki are very protective of their software. I can get the dealer to do the re-set, but that's £140 per hour
Eek... 😲 That certainly puts me off ever owning a Suzuki!
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7 minutes ago, Nonimouse said:
I have TPMS sensors on my Vitara. Really good, but you can't swap wheels around or it gets upset
Can you get the diagnostic tool for reassigning them? Don't know about Suzukis, but the tool for our Zafira was about £15 off eBay and allows you to re-calibrate and reassign the sensors (there's a menu function in the car that asks you to go round holding the tool against the sensors in turn while it records them). That said, if you don't do this all it means is that the car thinks the wheels are in different places and reports the pressures for the wrong corners (does mean if you've swapped front to back you're almost certainly going to get warnings). The Fabia doesn't even need this - just set the tyres up right and reset the sensors from the menu - but then it doesn't bother to differentiate between wheels, just tells you you've got low tyre pressure and leaves you to figure it out. The Zafira will tell you which tyre, and exactly what the pressure is in each one.
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Was indeed a good trip. Doubt that part of the valley will ever be tarmacked, everyone is having to move away as it dries out 🙁
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3 hours ago, Snagger said:
Probably. The trouble is, you need a certain level of knowledge of electronics or software just to be able to learn more or ask the right questions, and many of us don’t have even that foundation.
The same applied to the spanner work before you got started!
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A few photo's from Morocco last week - we were mostly on foot (or camel for those that wanted), but 4x4 from M'Hamid about an hour out into the desert and two hours back afterwards. With a few stops on the way back to nurse one of the 110s which had decided to persistently overheat. Five nights in between, but most of my photo's have other people's kids in (it was an organised home education trip) so nothing of camp and not much of the trekking that I can post on here.
Three 110s and a Land Cruise Prado - one of the 110s stayed nearby while we were trekking and appeared at camp and lunch breaks to comply with insurance. Sadly I didn't get to drive. Most of these were taken from the back seat of a moving 110, so don't expect amazing photography!
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Promised an update, so here goes.
Solar panels mounted on a simple OSB/roofing batten frame. Not an ideal location as it'll be shaded part of the day by a kids den which is off to the right - I'll likely move them once the raised area to the right of the compost bins has been cleared and tidied up.
Mounted the controller on a bit of OSB, trip on the left doubles as a switch for isolating the solar panels. The
take away tubclassy waterproof enclosure on the right contains the under-voltage protection circuit and load fuse (which doesn't need to be in the tub, but it was tidier that way):
The intake duct at this end takes in hot (very much ish at this time of year) hot air at the top of the greenhouse and passes it into the heat sink under the paving slabs. Ducted fan to the left of the louvre:
The air is vented low down at the other end so that it circulates around the greenhouse:
And before @FridgeFreezer calls me out for it, yes I did go round and crop the cable ties after I took the photos!
Took a little fiddling with the under-voltage protector to get it running nicely (it's got a couple of potentiometers to adjust the voltage it cuts out and back in at). To start with it was just sitting rattling it's relay as the fan kicked in and out. Don't know if I've got it set sensibly yet - it would have been a good idea to set it up on the lab power pack first. Seems like it might not cut out very cleanly, time will tell.
So, tweaking aside it's working nicely - only real problem is that the fan may be a tad OTT. It's shifting air nicely, but it's not quiet... Think I may need to step the voltage down and run it slower. If I do that right I should be able to reduce the current too - my electronics is rusty, but I'm pretty sure I remember at least one reasonably efficient way of dropping voltage...
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17 hours ago, JeffR said:
Thought it was a good idea if, like me, one cannot (space is a premium and I think the wife may well damage large parts of my anatomy in painful ways if I tried to hide one in the house) justify a cabinet for a small job.
Can't you hide it behind the seats?
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1 hour ago, elbekko said:
Every OEM has their own build of Android, with anything from very few to many, many changes. Samsung does quite a lot of changes. Honestly I haven't even ever heard of Doogee
Chinese brand. Make mostly pretty decent phones, known for their rugged phones. They like to describe their distributed OS as completely stock Android (which is more or less true so far as I can tell - the only non-standard software I could find on mine was an app to control some rather tasteless indicator lights on the back of the phone).
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I'd be scared to fit that to the truck and risk it getting all scratched up...that's a work of art!
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2 hours ago, FridgeFreezer said:
Not that I've been bored at work
but I made an online calculator thing that lets you work out likely panel & battery specs / performance:
https://fuddymuckers.co.uk/tools/solarcalc.html
Something like this:
Have a play and let me know!
Handy tool - could use a little CSS tweaking do make it more mobile friendly (happy to have a crack at that if you don't want to).
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39 minutes ago, elbekko said:
Make sure your phone is set to use actual GPS, and not just cell towers.
It is.
38 minutes ago, Bowie69 said:Try running navigation in the background/as an overlay, it fixes it for me....
Makes no difference, and affects all apps the same. It's just very bad at holding a GPS lock.
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9 hours ago, FridgeFreezer said:
a GPS speedo is not a bad thing to have especially if you're switching between tyre sizes on the regular
Provided the GPS is decent - no way I could rely on the one in my phone for this, it wanders all over the place. Confuses the satnav and has my speed fluctuating wildly (apparently my car is capable of impressive speeds and truly amazing acceleration....).
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So, 200W of panels (overkill? We'll see!), brackets, wires and an IP65 controller* ordered. I'll report back once we've
cocked upcompleted the installation.* This one, used from the original seller. Bit more than I'd reckoned on spending but near enough half list price.
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Sounds like we really need to implement temperate based switching, if only to reduce the time the fan is running...
Running mains to the greenhouse would involve trenching an armoured cable in. At present the nearest power is about 50m away, so not a trivial undertaking. I'm going to run power to the shed when I rebuild it this year, which is closer. But would probably still involve a 20m+ trench. Not hugely appealing! There's another lean-to greenhouse attached to the shed, which once replaced will likely get a similar setup, but as there'll be mains in the building already I'm planning to use that there.
Angling the panel isn't a problem, and the fan is needed less on overcast days so it's not a showstopper if it stops then.
Shed Cladding
in Tools and Fabrication
Posted
Only iOS users will be able to - heic is an Apple only format.