Paint blobs

G'day all!

I've been starting to get antsy about painting some walls around here. Purplexity has been painting the walls of her new place and I am like I WANT TO PAINT! I want to put my mark on the inside of this house! (Rather than simply wiping off the marks the previous inhabitants left... Mrs M I think used the walls for navigation and she was either minute or had bad osteoporosis ;-)

So two days ago, nathan and I rode up to Bunnings (like rode up on our pushbikes) and I eyeballed the paints and we brought home some sample pots in green. Bright cheerful green.

I decided that the fibre room is first under the hammer, or at least the paint brush and roller. I painted up some board as the paintshop lady suggested so we could get some idea of how the colours looked. I didn't like one of the greens - too yellow I thought as I painted it. One green is the same tonings but slightly darker than the kitchen. The other is obviously green.

The fibre room is currently these colours:

Do they look like me? A darker beige on the wall with the window, lighter beige all round, white cornices and a pale sage green roof. Hmm...

Then I painted some rough squares of colour on the walls in different places in each of the three greens.

Suddenly the green that was too yellow was a winner! (it's the middle one.) But an even bigger winner was just looking at the wall and thinking "I really like having the colour blocks on the beige."

So my current plan is to get some more sample pots in some different greens, lighter and darker shades, not too much darker, and get a little roller and just paint squares on the walls! I have thought about masking taping the wall up so that we have the beige background with happy greens on it but I don't want it too sqaure and geometric.

It will be different! And if it doesn't work, we'll just paint the whole lot green.

:-)

There's something in our garden

G'day all!

We made actual garage progress yesterday! Yep, I found the rendering manual. I had tidied it cos we had visitors and it ended up in a box. So we played.

The hardest part is getting the undercoating rendering stuff the right consistency. Too wet and it runs and drips off the wall. Too dry and it just peels off. Around the right level of goop, it sticks and smooths over the polystyrene beautifully. The best consistency is like a thick pancake batter, or a runnyish cake batter.

So we made a little progress:

This took us about an hour and a half to do from mixing the rendering stuff to pressing on the fibreglass matting, and we got much faster as we worked out what consistency the render should be.

Having managed to get rendering goop all over us (it burns sensitive skin a little but hands seem immune to its effects), we sat down for afternoon tea. Nathan was looking at his plants, as always, when he spotted something.

OH MY WORD! ORCHIDS!


We have Pterostylis growing in our back yard, right where we were going to put the vegie patch. The vegie patch is moving to the other side of the yard now :-) We've been told that the soil was trucked in from somewhere else, but I am starting to wonder about that now. We know there are leek orchids out the front yard and sundews, and Pterostylis in the back yard. Remember this house has been here for nearly 50 years. That just seems gobsmacking that the things survived or that if they came from elsewhere the rest of the soil conditions are ok for them. None of the orchids are particularly exciting but they are orchids and they are in a part of suburbia that has been here for almost 50 years. That to me (and Nathan) is really exciting.

*BOUNCE*

anon!

Passive auto-switchover for rainwater tanks

You have a rainwater tank and a nice pressure activated pump. When you turn on a tap, the pump turns on. When the pressure at the pump reaches a set top point, the pump switches off.

The problem: when the tank runs dry you'd like to use the town water.

Known existing solutions:

• Put a ball valve in the bottom of the tank.
• Use a float switch to turn on a solenoid to stop the tank running dry.
• Refill the tank with a hose.
• Have a stop-cock to connect the mains into the high pressure side
• Use a float switch to turn on a solenoid to connect the mains to the high pressure side.
  

The solutions are all commonly used, and I know an instance of each. They are all wrong for one reason or other:

• The pump still has to run even though town water is already available at a high pressure.
• Some kind of manual operation needs to happen to switch over or to top up. People forget and tanks over fill or valves get left on, wasting town water when pump water is available.
• Power has to be available for the system to work.

I have implemented a cheap and robust alternative as proposed in ATA's Renew (forgot which one). The idea is to use a device called a 'pressure reducing valve' to provide water at a pressure just lower than the pump switch on pressure, so that if the pump is inactive the town water is available. The renew design called for a variable pressure reducing valve, at a cost of $300 wholesale. And they don't make them go low enough for my little rivaflow irrigation pump. This design uses a $6 plastic version with a fixed rating of 100kPa.

Thus, the pump can simply be switched off when the tank runs dry. We can do this using a float switch and a relay (the pressure switch itself may have a relay you can subvert).

After ringing a number of plumbing supplies and being told that my idea wouldn't work (when it is plainly clear that it must) and anyway, you can't get pressure valves like that, I found a suitable pressure reducing valve at the local big box hardware store. The device is actually designed for very low pressure irrigation systems, but it is well made with a thick HDPE case, solid looking white nylon valve assembly and a heavy gauge membrane. The high side is rated to 3MPa.

(insert photo here)

The final layout of my rainwater irrigation system is:



A nice additional feature is that if your water demand exceeds the pump capacity the mains kicks in seamlessly (within the inertia of the pressure reducing valve and water in the pipe etc). It is good to have the valve as close as possible to the manifold as a result.