We’re having a chill out day today, recovering from three nights out dancing as well as yesterday’s tennis. Both Elayne and I are a little stiff but we already looking forward to next week’s game. I can’t remember when we last had three consecutive nights out. So we had a late start today, did some house work and then had a nice breakfast. Now we have the rest of the day to do what we want.
We have been discussing with our friends what we are going to do about lighting and heating from now until the house is finished and then for in the house. We would really like to go solar but there seems to be no sense in it because you can never get enough energy for all of your needs, and all of the people that we have enquired from say that if they had the money and could get mains electricity they would choose that over solar power. We are now leaning towards having oil fired central heating and hot water, bottled gas for cooking and then enquiring about the installation costs of mains electricity. If we can afford and eventually get mains electricity it could be anything up to two years before one finally gets ‘online’. In the meantime we are thinking about buying a 5KVa diesel generator that runs on tractor diesel (cheaper than road vehicle diesel) and is reputed to be very quiet. This will do us for the remainder of the winter in the caravan and then for when we move over to the house. Our friends, that know about these things, say that even on Spanish mains electricity one can only get 5 to 5.5Kva from the mains, unless you pay a very high premium for a higher rated system, one presumes that you would have your own transformer for that.
We really did want to go solar, but the swell of opinion from people who have it, is not favourable. There are big running costs in buying new battery banks every few years as well as that the solar panels get less efficient with time.
We have considered wind turbines but these are intermittent and not very efficient (even in the UK they are now asking if wind turbines are worth the installation costs). We have also considered the ‘ground pump’ heat extraction system but the initial installation costs are far too expensive for us to be able to justify it.
It’s all very interesting. More party pictures, sorry about the red eye.