Only 20 weeks and 3 days till Xmas. :D
...and only 21 weeks till my 70th birthday. :)
Please remember to post your gifts early I promise not to open them until my birthday.

:D
We used to have a running joke thing here, where we passed around a present it was a horrible little tea set. We managed to finally give it away to friends who moved back to the UK so had to take it there :D. So becarefull what you wish for.

J
 
...that my son's kickstarter has been fully funded after only 4 days of availability to backers. :D
My fingers are crossed that it does well and makes him/us a lot of money.
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Im like a magnet to free stuff tis amazing what comes my way, ive even had a free disco td5 off here. Some lad bought a boat
up here & sailed it down south & had every intention of coming back for his landy an time went buy & it ran out of mot so he
offered it on here & as it was up in Oban I got it transported to me. It was full of camping/outdoor stuff which I offered to post
back to him he said just keep it. So I sold it & put the disco in for an mot & it passed lol. I ran about in it for a year then sold it.:D
Wow that's quite a result. I have had quite a bit of free stuff over the years although Mrs 6pot says it's my fault for agreeing to accept other people's junk.

To be fair some of it was junk but you know, one person's rubbish is another person's treasure..... She may have had a point about the caravan minus body someone gave me, i.e. chassis only, in the end I cut it up and dumped it - regret not keeping the wheels though because they would have been useful spares for the trailer, which was also free from someone who was leaving but much later.
 
That sounds like a real pain.
Asking as a real prole about these things, but why does your well pump have to be 3 phase? Is it purely to generate enough pressure or to raise the watter a heck of an height?
The "floating neutral" thing also sounds well dodgy, not that I fully understand how it can even happen.
We too get lightning problems as we are 600 m up in a mountainous area, but the worst that could happen (he says with everything crossed) is that the internet box would get knocked out, So we disconnect it as soon as we know a storm is coming in.
More of a problem can be the wind called the Vent d'Autan which has been known to blow roof tiles off. I guess we are just a pair of softies compared to you and others on here! Oh and the hailstorms with hailstones the size of cricket balls.
OK, I'll try not to make this too lengthy and boring, I spent much of last night looking for a photo which might help explain part of it because I definitely emailed it to the electricity people for them to forward to Endesa and convince them that a repair was necessary, but I couldn't recover it from the emails...

Re. The 3-phase, yes its the head. The pump has to raise the water 100m and a single phase motor isn't up to it. I think there is a general theory that a motor over a certain hp is more practical or efficient as 3-phase anyway. The depth seems hard to believe but when we have replaced it the truth is laid bare by how far up the track the pipe had to be pulled to get it all out!

I have to admit that I had not heard of a floating neutral before this happened the first time but I researched the symptoms after we had a small fire and took it from there but the utility took some convincing.

The manifestation is odd, the sockets in the house will still work although problems with 3-phase equipment may arise and it can also cause damage. Basically it is caused when the distribution transformer does not have a bushing tieing the Neutral and Earth together, relying on local Earths instead. The Neutral always 'floats' a bit, it seems usual for it to be about 4v above Earth potential and varies if the load is not balanced across the phases and there can be a distribution side fault without causing a power cut but if the fault is one of the phases shorted to ground, it causes the neutral at the transformer to float a lot and the supply voltage between each phase and Neutral to be maintained.

This means that L-N is still 230v but there are some nasty surprises which is why I think it is a dangerous situation - if you take a multi meter and measure N-E under these circumstances it is about 180v and L-E is about 410v - and you are not expecting the Neutral to have that kind of voltage present, bearing in mind anything over 50v can be enough to kill. The Live at over 400v to Earth is what bothers me because although the RCD would trip if you touched something live (I hope!), a domestic RCD is designed to trip at 30mA which is considered a safe current level but is that safe at 400v? I wouldn't want to find out.

As a 3-phase customer I can go to the meter or the distribution board at the well pump control and compare the phases which will show them all elevated with reference to Earth except one which will be very low - that is the one with the fault. The phase-phase voltage will be maintained as is the domestic voltage at the house sockets.

I had to demonstrate this to the engineers on the first occasion to get them to take it seriously although at least someone was sent out. Because the power is overhead on metal poles, the wind can damage the suspension points and allow a bundle to sag, if it then rubs on the top of the tower it will wear through the insulation until it contacts and if it is a Live conductor, hey presto. The photo I was looking for showed one arcing nicely.

Re. lightning our elevated and exposed position plus the overhead power makes us prone. The towers are like bloody lightning rods! Again I've got photos of overhead cables with the insulation blown off where there must have been a direct hit. We've lost to lightning countless light bulbs, two well pump motors, two plug in timers, three internet power supplies, two routers, two UPSs, a few circuit breakers, one dishwasher, one fridge freezer, one oven, a couple of lamp ballasts and a couple of extension leads.

The extension leads in fact were interesting to observe; because it was the first occurrence of this at the time the implications were unknown in advance but the lead was outside and plugged in, despite a power cut due to the storm, being plugged in made a difference. The insulation was burst off the lead at approx 1 metre intervals and one of the conductors was actually severed and melted where this had happened at a couple of points. The lead had passed under a gate and an arc had jumped from this to the gate and earthed through the bolt, exploding the concrete step. I didn't see any of this happen since we were taking cover somewhere but the evidence was there. Now if there is ever a storm nearby everything is unplugged or disconnected, such a strike will jump circuit breaker contacts and even fuses, even if the first strike caused them to blow, so now no chances are taken.
 
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Just to give you a bit of an idea as to how much influence the underground streams and springs seem to have made, here are two "before" pics (taken in 2007) and a few after pics. Taken this morning.
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Impossible to give you an impression in 3D. But none of the trees were higher than a couple of feet and all the 47 fruit trees, planted in 2014, were about 5 ft high. The fence line just visible in the first pic had a Cypressia Leylandii hedge planted inside of it in 2008. But two poplars and two weeping willows were planted which have overtaken it in height. The top (well nearly) of the left hand poplar is visible in the top right corner of pic 5.

Here are the WWs. About 4 feet high when planted. The size of the shed gives you scale as that is about as big as a single garage. This of course is the one with the spring underneath it which will have fed and still be feeding the WWs.
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Wow that's some impressive growth although its a fair few years. Rolling a reply to several of your posts into one to save filling the whole thread with long missives - seeing how high up you are it seems surprising you have so many springs etc, I suppose there is a lot more rain/water in France generally than down in southern Iberia. They certainly have done your trees etc a lot of good. You're higher up than us, the first place was about 720m but we're at only 420m now.

I have heard about the wild weather you sometimes get there, seen that massive hail you mentioned, on the news especially in SW France. Fortunately that is a bit rarer here although I have seen a car which had clearly been subjected to it - with replacement glass but everything else as-is.

Do you have any idea how much saved rainwater you are getting through? 40 cubic metres of water from the main doesn't seem too bad considering I can see we've used about 37 cubic metres so far this year, all delivered by lorry of course!
 
You must have looked like Gondolieri on the Grand Canal, or posh blokes on the Cam or the Thames in Cambridge or Oxford!!!!!

Not really!!! 🤣 🤣 🤣

IIRC my dad made us burn them along with a quarter pipe I built as I had a queue of kids round the block wanting a
go on it so I was charging 10 bob to use for the day 🤣 🤣 He got sick of us making so much noise. I hated him for
making me burn it the rotten sod.
 
Evening all, I got an emergency appointment at boots eye clinic today as I got a hot bit of metal in my eye, I say hot
I lit up the burning torch which burns at 3000 degrees & instantly something sparked up from the ground & had burnt
my eye I had my mask & my burning visor on normally you lite the the torch then get into position then put the visor down.

Nowt in it just a white burn mark on the eye & on my eye lid, still I went back to work & loaded the scrap skips with the cut up
steel the lads had left, they dont drive the grab machine only a select few have the privilege.

Drambuie now open & ive had a beer so cheers to you lot. :)
 
Impressive, how much power do you get out of that array?
On a normal day the batteries are full by 3 o clock that's with all sorts of appliances going we run two 3 klw inverters if a draw exceeds 6 klw the gen kicks in to compensate for the short fall 48 voltage system I think on average in the summer we get approx 30 klw hours more than enough for us the set up is now 20yrs old two batterie renewals in that time next it will be lithium the PV panels are original Semans made in Germany then not China all the inverters charge controllers and mate are Outback
 

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