Let there be heat

A big job this year has been to get the central heating installed.

Being so remote, we don't have mains gas so we had the option's of a gas tank, heating oil, wood or electricity. With an eye for the future, we have gone electric. Oil and gas process are only going to go up over the next few years, where as most electricity in France is nuclear or hydro -electric, which should keep prices a bit lower and is a lot better for your carbon footprint.

After a lot of research, we opted for an air source heat pump, which extracts heat from the air, and uses that to heat up water for the house. This is very efficient and should produce 3 or 4 Kilowatts of heat for each KW of electricity that you put into it.

Robert had already laid underfloor heating pipes in the downstairs floors, but before we could install the heating, we needed to weather proof the old dustbin shed, which was to become the new boiler room.

First of all, we had to fill in the gaps between the top of the stone walls, and the roof. I built some stud work and fixed chipboard on the inside, insulation in the middle and tongue and groove on the outside to make it look better.

We filled the open window in with glass bricks, and to keep the room weather proof, I built a new door, to replace the one with holes in, recycling some old beams to make the new door frame.

Finally, I connected the cupboard up to the mains and we were ready to go.

The French heating guys were very efficient, fitting the whole system in three days.

The biggest piece is the compressor, that sucks in air and takes the heat out of it. This sits on the back of the boiler room. It looks huge, but it is incredibly quiet.

This sends the heat inside into the heat exchanger, and then on to the underfloor heating. The tanks also lets us power some radiators , which are still on order.

The pump is not power enough to heat the whole house, but we should have enough power for radiators in all of the upstairs rooms.

The underfloor heating seems to be working well at the moment, and it doesn't seem to be using too much electricity at the moment, but it will be interesting to see how it reacts when it gets really cold.

This Little Piggy

Back in the summer, we decided to go take up an offer of a half share in a pig, with our Dutch friends, Joop and Cathelijne who have a small campsite and small holding.

They had kept two pigs the year before, but found that they had too much meat at the end of it. They still wanted two pigs, to keep each other company, so we offered to buy a half share in one of the pigs.

I went with Joop in his van, to collect the pigs from a farm near St Junien. The farm had deer as well as pigs, with some enormous sows, and the piglets were in a pen in a barn, with a radio on to keep them company. I didn't realise that we would have to catch the pigs ourselves, a tricky business as piglets are quite nippy, with a low centre of gravity. Joop managed to grab a brown and black male, but I found it hard to get hold of one, and the farmer spared me the trouble, plucking a pink sow up as I chased it past the gates. Joop wanted one of each, as it makes a good pairing, but the male has been neutered, as a male pig tastes disgusting once it's bits drop.

I had to keep the window wound down on the way home, as one of the pigs was a nervous passenger.

When we got back to Joop's we grabbed the pigs out of the back of the van, and headed over to the enclosure that he had built. I thought the single wire fence was a bit tall for the pigs, but I thought it must be OK, as they had kept pigs the year before. We set the pigs down, and left them to settle in.

Within a minute, they had a quick look around and scarpered straight under the wire fence and into a maize field. It looked like the quickest €25 I had ever spent. We enlisted the help of some of the families staying on the camp site, and spread ourselves out in the maize to drive the pigs back out.

This seemed to work fine, and the pigs were soon in Joop's field, with his horses. Unfortunately, the horses thought that the pigs were great fun, and promptly chased the pigs back into the maize field.

On the second attempt, we managed to catch the brown one, but the pink sow proved to be more elusive.

Next up, I went to see our neighbour Thierry, to see if one of his sheepdogs might do the trick. The dog did get the pig out, and drove it away from the horses, but it couldn't get it into a little pen, like on 'One man and his pig-dog '.

My next thought was that we needed a crop dusting plane to chase the pig out, as this had worked with Cary Grant in 'North by Northwest', but we didn't have one handy.

Finally, we decided to lure it out. We put a radio on, to make it seem like home, tied the brown pig to a post near the pigsty, and put some food out. A little pink nose kept peaking out of the maize.

We left them to it , and after an hour or so, both pigs were re-united in the sty, this time with a bigger fence.

This was not the end of the pig fun though. A few weeks ago, Joop and Cathelijne decided to go to the coast for a few days. They couldn't get hold of their neighbour, who usually looks after their animals, so we volunteered.

Joop gave us instructions for all of the animals, horses, goats, chickens and pigs. We had to visit twice a day, to let them out in the morning, and to get them in at night. The chickens are a bit like teenagers, and would go to bed until they are good an ready, at sundown each night ( obviously the similarity with teenagers stops there). The pigs were left to roam their enclosure, and we just had to feed them dried feed in the morning, and swill at night.

This all seemed to go OK, and we didn't loose any animals. However, Joop's neighbor had been keeping an eye on the animals as well, as he had heard the pigs being a bit noisy. It turns out that we had been feeding the pigs sawdust every morning, which Joop had left in a pig feed sack, next to the swill! Luckily the neighbour gave them some non-wooden elevenses each day to keep them going. Still, a bit of roughage is supposed to be good for you.