Laying Laminate and an update of Solar Thermal

Gaining in confidence recently, I was keen to lay the floor in the teachers en-suite bathroom. 

So, after securing the mash and mess of floorboards underneath, I applied a space age looking underlay for troublesome floors and sealed up all the gaps:

Next it was a case of laying out the boards so that they had a good mix of pattern and clicking them into place:

A few pipes to cut around and test out my precision (which has never been that good)

But I was really pleased with the finish:

So by the time the bath went in - it looked like a proper room!

And whilst all this was happening, we had the solar thermal tubes installed:

They were filled and tested and looked neat against the Solar PV:

A few more tests with the header tank and soon we were producing 60 degrees heat from the power of the sun - brilliant! 

So with this system, the wood pellet boiler and the PV, we're pretty much relying on nature to heat us and apply us with electricity to power each system, which really is fantastic!

Frozen Pipes!

It was REALLY COLD  this morning:

Sunrise looked fantastic:

And the frost on the ground - WOW!

But with freezing temperatures comes frozen water pipes - and as all of ours are above ground and sparsely insulated we had no running water from the caravan when we woke up!

Luckily, there was a tap running freely in the pumphouse, so we used that to fill the kettle and coax our pipes into action... it took a bit of time, but we got there in the end and managed a cup of tea for our efforts:

There is something quite magical about frost in the morning:

And when the sun peeks out - WoW! You forget about all the difficulties and just soak it all in...