Moving to Aargh 16 - internets!

Aaah!

Moving to Aargh 15 - riego valvula regulador

The garden and terrace have lots of plants that are watered with micro-drip irrigation. However, that is all plastic, 20 years old, and broken, clogged, or wide open. Some plants were totally soaked, others were.. not so much.

Sorry.

Others not so sorry. I mean geraniums. We're still too young for genaniums.

So, that needed replacement. I still had about 100 Gardena microdrippers.  Mostly the 4l/h versions:

Bought 400m 16mm tube from Atecnagua, for about 60€. Not bad. You punch a hole in the tube with a drill, insert the dripper, and done.

The below garden has now been hooked up to water. There are two watertimers in the little water shed outside. And a pressure regulator with a manometer. Nice. 

 Or, not so nice:

The pressure varies between 2 and 2.5, Gardena drippers want about 1.5. Unfortunately the regulator is not adjustable. It used to be, there's a rod in there that had a key in the past, now missing. Not reachable with pliers or anything engineer Jansen had available. He also mentioned corrosion.

Replace. 

Nice and shiny heavy brass, made in Italy, tap, regulator and manometer for 27€, Aquaconfort in Antas (good shop!) 

But, despite the amout of teflon tape engineer Jansen used: leaks. The interwebs say: 3 threads of teflon. Well, no. Leaks. 10 threads? No. Leaks.

Engineer Jansen remembered they used flax in the past to seal threads. Comercial Vera has flax: €20 for a container to seal 1000 threads. Hm. Pipe dope? Ah, there is is sealant stuff. He thought for 10€, but it was €20 on the bill. Hm.  So he spent 27€ on actual hardware and €20 for a bit of goo? Dang! 

You'd think at that price they'd make readable instructions on the label, and explain the packaging.  It's a complicated squeeze bottle, with a clever seal ring that you can pull up or push down to open and close. I was about to cut off the tip to open the bottle. Not necessary. Not great for €20 Herr Henkel!

Also, the goo is not purple but yellow. (Don’t eat yellow goo.)

Re-assembled, with goo applied, waited overnight to cure. Open the main valve.. and saw another drop fall off! Grrr! It's not 100% watertight, but no drops fall off any more. If you wipe a finger under one of the connections it's a bit damp. Unsatisfactory for perfectionists. Well, maybe it will seal itself, the water contains quite a bit of sediment. The water filter turns brown in a few weeks..

Moving to Aargh 14 - HOT! More shade - curtains

Still hot. 

In the afternoon the sun heats up our back terrace, and you definitely cannot sit there. And it heats up the living, even though we have roller blinds there. Those are semi-transparent though, and don't block the heat. 

We were thinking about various types of commercial sunscreens, rolling out cloth from a cassette, etc. But, in the cellar there is a pile of "old" curtains the previous previous owners had, and the previous owners did not use.  Complete with poles. Actually they are quite nice. Red, and with a backing loth too. 

So:

grmbll

Fixed that

Tadaah!

Moving to Aargh 13 - Fly screens

We don't seem to have many mosquitos here, but there definitely are flies. 

Kitchen, upstairs bathroom, and downstairs wc, now have nice aluminium fly screens, crafted by engineer Jansen himself.

The downstairs wc screen has aluminium mesh, as you can reach it from the street, and the window is large enough to climb through! Don't want that.

The kitchen window has two large panes that swing open to the outside.  Chose to restrict that to the space between window and screen.

Moving to Aargh 12 - enjoying the view... BANANA!

 Bananas everywhere. Ridiculous.

Moving to Aargh 11 - HOT!

These days are HOT, 35-37º! And if you have a house with nice big glass sliding doors and big windows, and the sun is on them you will know that it is hot. The old house had thick walls, small wooden windows and shutters, here we have big glas and aluminium doors and windows, and they are not really the non-thermal bridge type. The temperature of the aluminium on the inside is 45º!

This requires blocking the sun. We plan to move the trusses and shade sails here, but we have not, yet. So we resorted to more impromptu measures. Cardboard and geotextile. We have one big umbrella, but fortunately the nice previous owners left behind some other umbrellas. A very nice one, too.

So far we never needed airco in Spain. Here we have used it, set to 29-30º.