Metalfire Optimum 700-900?

Now we have 4 m3 firewood piled up, and it's 33º and end of June, it's time to take steps for the new stove.  Engineer Jansen really likes the Metalfire Optimum inserts. There are two versions, a 70cm and a 90cm wide version. The 70cm should suffice for our heating needs, but big is beautiful, and an Optimum 900 would be...  nice. The price difference is minimal.

Find out if it would fit the existing mantle: make a hole to access the interior for measurements:

Ladrillo

The casing is made of ladrillo, ceramic blocks, 7cm thick.

Inside

Odd, no insulation anywhere. Yes, that is a concrete pillar at the back. It shoild have been insulated from the stove! Bad!

Measurement

The Metalfire 900 is 904mm wide, installation specification tells you to surround the stove with plates of Silca T300, 5cm thick. So, minimum width is 1004 mm. The inside of the casing is 92cm. So, an Optimum 900 does not fit.

That is disappointing! Asked Metalfire if an air gap between stove and wall of 1 cm would suffice. It won't, they say. No idea if ceramic ladrillo really cannot withstand the heat. Will find out. Else the engineer will have to accept an Optimum 700.

Heat

Hottest days of the year so far, 31-33º: time to order some firewood!

Leña! 4m3.

Last winter chopping up the big blocks was a daily chore. Good workout, but.

This time we asked for "leña para estufa", so you get wood in nice smallish chunks, else you may get huge chunks of terribly hard root that is unsplittable, even by Engineer Jansen.

If you order now there’s 6 months drying in the sun and heat. Last winter Engineer Jansen had his certainties about the humidity of the wood, having bought an electronic wood humidity tester, and the orange test light lit up far too often. Too humid wood gets you less heat, more air pollution, and soot up your chimney. Engineer Jansen does not like air pollution, and soot up his chimney.

Piling up is fun. I think we have room for 2 m3 more!

Delivery, 4 m3

Two heaps, one on the P, one in the driveway.

Pile #1:

Pile #1

Piling up #2:

Red Lines

Last week Wednesday night at 3AM engineer De Waal woke up with a hurting stomach. So bad that after an hour we were off to Emergency First Aid, who poked a finger here and there, and suspected "gastritis", and prescribed "buscopan", which should relieve stomach aches very quickly, in 15 minutes. The emergency farmacia was not open, another one 15 minutes further was. 

Buscopan did not help. A few hours later engineer De Waal was on the floor trying to find a position to relieve the pain. Engineer Jansen decided it was time for the emergency room at the hospital, 40 minutes away.

Arrived there 8:30, and were quickly admitted to the waiting area. 40 minutes later first assessment. Fingers were poked in various locations, with one spot especially hurtful. Less than half an hour later he was on a drip, buscopan, again, in a room with 6 chairs. The pain dropped a bit, but returned. That means it's not the stomach. Can be your gallbladder, or the pancreas area. (Aargh!)

Echo. Ah, your gallbladder is not well, you need to stay and we'll operate on you. It's only a peephole surgery, without complications you can go home in two days.

The engineer's belly was shaved, "beach ready!", and he himself changed into a negligee with nothing under. (Ooh!)

Quickly a bed on wheels arrived, and the engineer was swiftly rolled away, into the lift, upstairs. Red Lines. Wheel wheel wheel, off to the left. 

I expected to be taken to "his room", but no, this was it. “In three hours your father should be out”.

Eh? What? Father?? Husband! Blushing nurse.

We could not even say goodbye!

Those red lines suddenly had a rather profound and ominous feeling..

To be continued...

Horrorhor

We have nice aluminium doors with glass, and as an extra a mosquetera: another set of alu doors with a grille at an angle to keep the sun out, and mosquito netting to keep the mosquitos out. The mosquito netting was rather holey. The netting is kept in place with aluminium strips that are screwed onto the door with little screws. Nice construction, for easy replacing of netting.

Well… engineer Jansen has been at work all morning on two doors, as the screws were all corroded. He cunningly used his spraycan of WD40 to eeeeasily loosen the screws. Damn! Blast! etc. 

Holey mosquetera!
Probably a tiger.
Could have lost my leg!

One done, one to do

Shadesails: you can never have enough

In Shadesails and More Shadesails you can see the shade making activities of engineer Jansen.  Yesterday the shadesails on the roof terrace, today he installed the last of the lower terrace area shadesails, using 12x60 mm wedge bolts and nylon rope. 

Roof terrace

Lower terrace

Power Blackout

Well, that was interesting, 20 hours without power. Main concern was the freezer, how long can that be without power before the ice cream is no longer edible? (Answers on a postcard to the wellknown address)

Also, engineer Jansen has an old iPhone, with a battery that was replaced a year ago. Since then the iPhone does not accurately know the battery percentage, and it will crash from 25% to 1% in 5 minutes, and then stay like that for hours, until it dies. If that happens you need to recalibrate your iPhone. That means: use it till the battery runs out completely, then recharge to 100%. Engineer Jansen was in that process at 14% battery when the powerout happened. The 1% period did not last hours, but just 15 minutes. So, recalibration was successful.

The (hybrid) car has a USB that can charge a phone. Ooh! Clever! Alas, when you leave the car, charging stops after 5 minutes. 

He has learned that without internets there is a total news blackout, these days. If the americans had invaded Spain, he would not have noticed.

Power was out from noon till 5:30 the next morning. No internets or GSM. Internets were restored 3 hours later, GSM took another hour. Inconvenient, as engineer De Waal is currently visiting his mum, who turned 90.

It was less fun for Coco, too, who relies on electric light to go outside at night, and find her way back into the house. She got stuck outside twice, and needed rescuing using a LED lamp. Fortunately that was charged sufficiently.

Meanwhile engineer Jansen was lucky having his Kivi collection.

More shadesails

Where the table stands we use a big parasol. It's huge. It's the hugest parasol we have.  But, with the gusts of wind we experience here (huuuge gusts of wind!) the parasol blows over. And it's not huge enough. 

New plan: more shade sails. Probably option 3.

1

Or

2

Or

3

Mango Irwin

Mango Irwin. Those pots are 45 cm high, so engineer Jansen needs to blast a big hole. And what does he find? A huge stone. Grmbl. Move 50 cm to the back, then. (Notice the cushion, for engineer Jansen’s sensitive knees.).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irwin_(mango)

Huuuge stone, no one has huge stones like we do. It’s an amazingly ginormous stone! Huuge!

This takes almost two hours. Notice the cushion, for engineer Jansen’s sensitive knees.

Dama Negra

Higuera,fig, vijg. Dama Negra.

Planting hole 50x50x50cm. That is 125 liters of hard soil.

(Bosch hammer drill, as engineer Jansen cannot do without)

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coll_de_Dama_Negra

Barbacoa Electrica 2

In Barbacoa Electrica we introduced the Bosch TFB4650 electric barbecue, and gave it a stern grilling. Verdict: mwah, not hot enough, and that Engineer Jansen had ordered lava stones, and would try again.

Here we are. The lava stones were put into the device. They fit nicely under the heating element.

Go!

Chicken thigh, meat side

Chicken thigh, skin side

Lamb chops

Verdict

It's a bit better with lava stones. You need to preheat them, 10 minutes. 

There is a downside too: you need to clean and dry the stones, they get quite greasy.

All in all, charcoal is much preferred over this device. When there's watermelon we'll do the ultimate test. If it manages to properly grill that all complaints will be retracted.

H2O!?

While cleaning, engineer Jansen, observant as he is, noticed an inscription "H2O". On closer inspection also a vertical line, and below that the cryptic word "MIN" was noticed. 

Aha, this barbecue is supposed to be run with a layer of water! Probably against overheating, although so far overheating is not too great a concern. 

This is exactly why you would need an instruction manual, but so far none was encountered, even though Bosch always has manuals. But not of this one.

I guess the lava stones already protect the underside against overheating, although the PKU375CA1 and PKU375N14E! have a dish with water under the heating element, specifically there against overheating. (So: water - lava stones - heater - grid - chicken thighs, fish, waffles) 

Not sure if it is a great idea to have lava stones and water in the same tin. The TFB4650 has an extra external heat shield UNDER the tin, a sheet of metal that is clamped onto the stand. We may try adding some water some time. Maybe it's even easier to clean the bbq then.

Shadesails

Climate in the south of Spain is lovely. Temperatures are usually nice, usually around 30º max, with some exceptions. For us northerners the trouble is not temperature, but the very strong sunshine. (See: Moving to Aargh 11 - HOT!) We need to stay out of the direct sun. At least, engineer Jansen does. Engineer De Waal may have Spanish genes, and does not melt like Engineer Jansen.

Shadesails! If you’ve been to Oz you know what to do against too much hot sunshine. Engineer Jansen determined it essential to shade parts of the terrace floor, as that radiates heat into the house.

Attached to the house using 12mm x 6cm wedge bolts and nylon rope.

Barbacoa Electrica

Engineer Jansen loves a barbecue. Charcoal, of course. But, here, open fires are FORBIDDEN, and thus charcoal barbecues too. A very old gas barbecue came with the house, but the insides are all rusted beyond repair. 

25 years ago we had an Ilve-Boretti (gas) stove where you could choose two options: an electric barbecue with lava stones, or a fish burner. We chose the fish burner, as burning fishes inside the house seemed more a thing to do than barbecueing. We never used the fish burner, it was just a nice space on the hob to put pans to the side.

Bosch 

What to do. Engineer Jansen is not keen on gas barbecues anyway.  Electric? Searches for Ilve or Boretti did not yield any barbecues. His engineer's eye was caught by a very nice Bosch, model PKU375N14E:

PKU375N14E

And an older model, the PKU375CA1:

PKU375CA1

He quite likes that the heating element is under the lava stones, not on top. So the fat and juices can't directly hit the very hot heating element.

Unfortunately, none are available.  Not second hand either.  That saves us choosing between a PKU375CA1 and a PKU375N14E! 

(Yes, Gaggenau has a similar one too, but we’re not going to pay €1000+ for a barbecue)

TFB4650 

Then this one turned up, the TFB4650:

TFB4650

Only found in Spain. But not in any shop. Unavailable, agotado,  Grmbll.

Wallapop

But, Wallapop, a second hand online shop, like Marktplaats and ebay had this one for €50! "Almost new". Well, for €50 you cannot complain. Ordered it, it arrived promptly, €3,95 delivery cost to the nearest post office. Only disappointment: Wallapop adds €4,40 compulsory "protection" costs to the bill.  

"Nice barbacoa you got there, gov. Shame if something would happen to it.."

You can take the TFB4650 apart:

Take the heating element out, everything else is inox, and could even be cleaned in the dishwasher!

Let's try it out! 

Big advantage is (should be) that  you don't need to light the barbecue. Just switch it on, and it's hot in a few minutes. No preparation, no mess! 

Hm, it's 2100W, so you need to unroll your electric extension cord. Can't leave it rolled up.

No mess

No mess, at all, honestly!

Chicken thigh and courgette, a chorizo, followed by waffles.

Verdict

It's not hot enough. Engineer Jansen expects sizzling and the need for asbestos suits. But, it only just manages to make the chicken skin crispy. The courgette and the waffles are reasonably okay. The chorizo was fine, chorizo needs subtle cooking, no atomic blasting. (There is no photo of the chorizo, as it was devoured before the idea of a photo happened.)

What does get hot (warm) is the electric plug. Apparently 2000W is near extension cables maximum, and also of regular sockets.

Next step: lava stones

The TFB4650 is just a heating element suspended in the air in a metal tin. Not sure if heat is reflected or lost. Lets try adding lava stones. They use them in many barbecues, so there must be a purpose. Maybe they absorb and reflect the heat, diminishing losses.

There is no room between the heater and the grid for lava stones. The stones cannot touch the heater, that will damage the element. It's just a thin metal tube with a coiled heating wire inside.  So, even though Engineer Jansen does not like that, they have to go under. There is sufficient space under the heater. So here goes:

Next try: tomorrow!