That was annoying & two deliveries

The electricity supply to our suburb failed at 11.00am today.  It’s going to be a ‘scorcher’ of a day and my guess is the electrical network can’t handle the load of all the air conditioning units.  The result is ‘brown outs’ where selected suburbs are disconnected from the network for a period of time to ensure the entire system doesn’t crash.  The annoying thing is we are actually producing more electricity from our solar panels than we are consuming.  However the system is configured by the utility company in such a way that when they cut the mains power it also disconnects our solar power.  as a consequence we sit in a hot house whilst our solar panels sit idle <grrrr>.

At 11.30am I realised I should check our garage electric roller door as I had a doctor’s appointment at 12 noon.  The emergency manual release mechanism didn’t work (another new project for the list) which meant I couldn’t get the vehicle out of the garage.  A frantic call to the surgery to notify them of the problem and an unsuccessful attempt to reschedule the appointment.  <more grrrr>   Then I remembered we had the Kipor generator from Waiouru.  The door was plugged directly into the generator and I was able to open it <phew>.  I made the appointment with 5 minutes to spare!

There were two deliveries during my absence. 

A small buck converter which is required for the rear view dash cam.  It will convert the vehicle 12V to the dash cam 5.2V.  I could have made a converter, however the area in which the converter will go is rather confined, hence the decision to buy something very small.

We’re waiting on the dash cam to complete the project

The other delivery was 600 biscuits.  These are for the timber wall cabinet.  It will be made from Jarrah planks which I intend to biscuit join together to make the required timber panels.