My brother came down today and we got to messing around in the garage. This is the end result...

Here's a really odd star shaped light we got for Christmas.



It's plugged into this four-way under the stairs:



Note the bright orange lawn-mower cable. The other end of that cable is here, in the garage:



That weird silver thing is called an inverter and basically converts 12v DC into 240v AC. As you can see here, it's all hooked up and into the whole car battery that's permanently being recharged by a solar panel:



As you can see it's already working hard charging up digital camera batteries and mobile phones. Now it's also doing this:



That's being totally lit by the car battery in the garage that is recharged from the solar panel on the porch roof!!!

I know that there are in-built huge in-efficiencies throughout the system. In an ideal world I'd pipe in 12v and use a million and one different in-car adapters for the phone and the laptop and I'd modify the light too. But in a practical sense, having a normal mains 4 way that runs off the system is much more useful...

Graham

OMG one whole month went past!

There's a month just gone by. But on the plus side, the garden is well under control. And I am still writing, albeit quite slowly. And I've done the entire middle bit of the year planner for 2011. Except for the quarter days, but they can be done in the next couple of days. Either way it's a long way ahead of the game and the earliest I've every done it. And I got the glass paints out with the children and did some night-light holders too.

So, all in all it's not so bad. I think given all the demands on my time, I'm doing alright in terms of my creativity. I really want to get on and do some metal casting which will mean making statues first of all.

Grahan