Where’s Lancpudin?

[soulman969]

How large is your place Rob. How many acres if that's the proper term for it in Australia.

 

[Digger]

How large is your place Rob. How many acres if that's the proper term for it in Australia.

It’s only a hobby farm Paul, 15 acres or so.
Once I get hold of my side by side I plan to strap a camera on and do a short video around the place and of course I’ll upload to you tube and give you guys access. It will give you an idea how much damage the bushfires caused.

 

[Lancpudn]

LOL It's amazing how they could sniff out the freshly picked blackberries Could have been worse & your hat landing on a cowpat.

Well guess who never turned up yesterday It got to just after noon & still no show from them & nobody answering the phone until late afternoon

I'm a laid back chap but I went apeshit at them, the red mist had descended & someone was getting an earful, We spent hours stripping everything out of the back bedroom where the boiler lives to give them good access to all the pipework & the buggers never turned up. This BS has been going on since January.

The same person who told us last week that the iboiler install would go ahead yesterday said there's nothing on the books for your install yesterday Aaaarrrggghhh!!!
So we're still in limbo as to whats happening. Never been messed around as much in my life with these people.

 

[Digger]

That is so frustrating for you Ian! You’d feel like going into their office and slapping a few around wouldn’t you?

I had my hands full of a neighbours pears and even a few in my back pockets one day and as I was climbing though their wire fence felt a soft nuzzle on my behind! It wasn't Gael but one of their cows that had deftly removed a pear from my pocket! They gave us the pears by the way~

So it’s into town for a haircut for 9AM, then across the road to our travel agent to pick up tickets and itinerary for Hobart trip, around the corner to our chemist to grab some Ozempic that they are holding for me (scarce like hens teeth) and then up to the farmers supplies to try and get a fitting for the tractor.

When I get home I’ll get changed and get out and do some more weed spraying.

 

[soulman969]

LOL It's amazing how they could sniff out the freshly picked blackberries Could have been worse & your hat landing on a cowpat.

Well guess who never turned up yesterday It got to just after noon & still no show from them & nobody answering the phone until late afternoon

I'm a laid back chap but I went apeshit at them, the red mist had descended & someone was getting an earful, We spent hours stripping everything out of the back bedroom where the boiler lives to give them good access to all the pipework & the buggers never turned up. This BS has been going on since January.

The same person who told us last week that the iboiler install would go ahead yesterday said there's nothing on the books for your install yesterday Aaaarrrggghhh!!!
So we're still in limbo as to whats happening. Never been messed around as much in my life with these people.

Sounds like a bunch of incompetent lying bastards to me. I put 'em on par with home remodeling companies around here who book multiple projects for the same time span. They begin a job so they can get paid the majority of their bid upfront then leave with it only 80% finished until they finally decided to show up to collect the balance owned. Bastards.

 

[Lancpudn]

Sounds like a bunch of incompetent lying bastards to me. I put 'em on par with home remodeling companies around here who book multiple projects for the same time span. They begin a job so they can get paid the majority of their bid upfront then leave with it only 80% finished until they finally decided to show up to collect the balance owned. Bastards.

Exactly it's been hard work dealing with these people from day one. I've noticed from other things we've had done with government grant money to update these old houses is once they get the government money up front things don't get done as they should. Mind you saying that we got a call yesterday evening from the boss of the boiler install company apologising for the mix up's & he said it will definitely be done tomorrow/today, In fact their works van has just pulled up at the front of the house Maybe I should lose my temper with them more often to get things done.

 

[Lancpudn]

Hallelujah It's installed & working. They did a great tidy job & what a relief after all that hassle. It's a Worcester Borsch combi boiler that runs our eight radiators & can run a hot bath at the same time, It's about as big as a suitcase & comes with a ten year guarantee

I'd forgotten what it was like to have warm rooms & hot water from a tap First thing I did when they left was run a hot bath & took a bottle of cider with me.

 

[Digger]

Hot again yesterday so I spent the morning in my shed. Replaced a faulty elbow on my spray pack and will test it today. If it seals I’ll return to spraying weeds on a larger basis this morning. There's a heap of blackberry emerging on the road side of the side road that I have to be sure of spraying or it will cause outbreaks everywhere else.
(Blackberry the weed (Rubus fruticosus aggregate) was first introduced to Australia by European settlers in the mid-1800s as a fruit.) BB is a problem here second only to European Rabbits!

I did some tidying and sorted a lot of rubbish into recycle and waste dragging the big wheelie bin down from the entry gate for the recycle stuff whilst talking to my daughter in Hervey bay with one hand. Who said that blokes can’t do more than one thing at a time?

 

[Lancpudn]

It's St Patricks day today which is a cue to plant the first early seed potato varieties, By the time the plants break surface the last frost date should be about gone.
I will be sowing some celery seeds today but I might leave planting the seed spuds until the weekend as the ground is too wet after last nights rain.

 

[Digger]

Yesterday I returned to test the spray pack and true to form the new fitting was pissing herbicide out everywhere.

Some teflon tape put that to rights and I trundled off on the old tractor to the far boundary to get stuck in. Blackberry is growing everywhere there. It didn’t work! I could have pissed further myself. Pump was running but output dwindled from pathetic to cutting out altogether. Bugger! I will never but Silvan products again as I’m going from one problem to another and am getting frustrated. This is a brand new pump and it hasn’t worked once yet!

Back to the shed and tested the voltage from the tractor to the pump with a multimeter and 13 volts was fine. Today I start with testing pressure from motor, then from hose etc. In the meantime I went back the heavy backpack spray and trudged back to my starting point. That boundary is 200 metres long and I sprayed large infestations of perhaps 20 outbreaks as well as other evironmental weeds I encountered along the way. It did occur that perhaps I should have had gumboots on as I was working down the “snakiest” area on our property with bugger all vision ahead of me. All I had was shorts and pair of Mongrel boots, hardly any protection at all! The odds were with me and none were sighted, though that doesn’t mean they weren’t there. It took me quite a while to do that boundary and then I spent a further 30 minutes or so killing unwanted saplings and weeds behind the dam.

Our dam has a significant leak so I’ll order a bag of flocculant to try and seal it up before levels drop too low.

I was pretty happy to run out of mix by then to be honest. Cleaned up the spray pack and came in for the day. That was enough for this old fart!

 

[Raiyn]

Hallelujah It's installed & working. They did a great tidy job & what a relief after all that hassle. It's a Worcester Borsch combi boiler that runs our eight radiators & can run a hot bath at the same time, It's about as big as a suitcase & comes with a ten year guarantee

I'd forgotten what it was like to have warm rooms & hot water from a tap First thing I did when they left was run a hot bath & took a bottle of cider with me.

I had this pop up in my feed recently.


All hail the mighty algorithm.

 

[Lancpudn]

I had this pop up in my feed recently.


All hail the mighty algorithm.

LOL My Canadian mate said the same thing as he's just had one of those huge furnaces installed. You'd get sent straight to jail & not collect 200 quid for one of those boilers over here by the emissions police They will only fit the latest triple 'A' efficient boilers that only heat the water you need instead of heating a large tank full. Natural gas is going up yet again here on the 1st April

I managed to get half a dozen 35 ltr buckets of seed potatoes planted yesterday before rain stopped play so spent an hour in the garage trying to tidy it up, Still looks like a dump

It's unbelievable the amount of junk you acquire over the years, I said to my missus two decades ago to get a skip & get shot of a lot of this stuff because I didn't want to be messing with it when I'm older.

She said no but here we are all this time later & it hasn't been touched in all that time, Most of it is useless now because of the damp Winters. I think I'll put my old Rover up for sale too whilst it's still drivable as I cant see myself using it again & we cant afford to run two cars certainly not a petrol car.

 

[soulman969]

I'm pleased to say my all electric furnace fits into a small cupboard in my den and that for a forced air system it's fairly efficient at heating the main rooms but not so much the bedroom which is actually my gear room now.

The temp in that room is about 5 degrees lower than the rest of the place which is fine because it's also holds it's humidity a bit better with only a small room size humidifier operating. I fill it once a day and it keeps the RH in the 45%-50% range quite nicely.

But one could not heat a larger home with this furnace. Way too little BTU output.

 

[soulman969]

It's warming some today. High in the upper 40s and then into the 50s tomorrow and for the early part of the week. Winter seems to be losing it's grip.

 

[Digger]

Our 4 surviving apple trees are close to being ready.
This one is a Pink Lady.

 

[Raiyn]

LOL My Canadian mate said the same thing as he's just had one of those huge furnaces installed. You'd get sent straight to jail & not collect 200 quid for one of those boilers over here by the emissions police They will only fit the latest triple 'A' efficient boilers that only heat the water you need instead of heating a large tank full. Natural gas is going up yet again here on the 1st April

"Emissions police" We're not over here burning tires.


We went a step further and got one of these:


While I will admit there are plenty of "legacy" systems (we sold my late parent's house with an oil furnace that they had upgraded say 25 years ago from the original 1950's model) the industry has gotten far more efficient.

 

[Lancpudn]

"Emissions police" We're not over here burning tires.


We went a step further and got one of these:


While I will admit there are plenty of "legacy" systems (we sold my late parent's house with an oil furnace that they had upgraded say 25 years ago from the original 1950's model) the industry has gotten far more efficient.

That's one thing about these combi boilers they don't last the course, If you get ten years out of them you're doing well. Our combi boiler was 7 years old & deemed inefficient in one of the questions on the online grant form They're even stopping installing gas boilers & mains gas pipework in new build houses after 2025. They are going to ditch gas for electricity & install ground/air source heat pumps for heating from 2025 onwards.

 

[Digger]

That's one thing about these combi boilers they don't last the course, If you get ten years out of them you're doing well. Our combi boiler was 7 years old & deemed inefficient in one of the questions on the online grant form They're even stopping installing gas boilers & mains gas pipework in new build houses after 2025. They are going to ditch gas for electricity & install ground/air source heat pumps for heating from 2025 onwards.

We were given a heat pump HWS years ago through a Govt. scheme. It was POS! The first mistake was installing it on the south side of the house where the sun rarely shines and the second was it didn’t stand up to our conditions here with gravel drives and dust. Over time they replaced the pump 3 times under warranty because dust kept stuffing it up and it sounded like a chaff cutter right outside our bedroom. I’ve got a You Tube clip of it somewhere.

How do they get enough sun there in Winter?

 

[Digger]

We met our daughter Kellie and her husband Grant in town yesterday for breakfast and almost stayed for lunch!

We had a lovely time with them.

I watched recorded footy matches after that.

 

[Raiyn]

They are going to ditch gas for electricity & install ground/air source heat pumps for heating from 2025 onwards.

I linked a video from the Technology Connections channel a while back on heat pumps. I'm in favor of them. Our prior HVAC system was pushing 40 when we replaced it. It never leaked and never had a problem keeping the place comfortable when it was working properly. A.C.

The only issue we had was a sticking reversing valve.

I came home after a graveyard shift and found the unit running hellbent for leather and the house cooled down into the 40's. The thermostat called for heat, but the valve stuck. Even the "emergency" resistive heating elements couldn't do anything against a runaway AC. It was colder in the house than outside.

We had the valve replaced as soon as the repair guys scoured the state for a replacement. IIRC, one of the guys actually drove a couple hours to pick it up.

Suffice to say, we started saving / shopping for a new unit right then and there.

We were given a heat pump HWS years ago through a Govt. scheme. It was POS! The first mistake was installing it on the south side of the house where the sun rarely shines and the second was it didn’t stand up to our conditions here with gravel drives and dust. Over time they replaced the pump 3 times under warranty because dust kept stuffing it up and it sounded like a chaff cutter right outside our bedroom. I’ve got a You Tube clip of it somewhere.

How do they get enough sun there in Winter?

Well, first off, "Gov't issue" should've been your first red flag.

Where they put it isn't the issue as it isn't dependent on the air temp to do it's work.



I can't comment on the dust situation other than guess at cheap fan bearings. We had some sort of no longer descript rodent get itself into the fan at one point and it sounded like a helicopter crash. Once I removed the poor bastidge, and bolted everything back up it ran fine. Didn't even bend the blades or knock anything out of balance once I got the corpse out. We didn't buy the top line unit, so it's louder than we'd like, (fan noise) but the bedroom that's adjacent to it is our spare room / my clean shop so it doesn't matter. It's noticeable in that room, but it fades into the background like the bass "engine noise" on Star Trek TNG.

When I'm working in there, I typically throw on a pair of headphones and lose myself in the task. While my cans are noise cancelling, it isn't necessary. I use it anyway for immersion, and lower volume.