We have solar power!

We had been put off installing solar panels because our roofs face east and west but we finally relented when invited to join a joint procurement scheme run by Kingston Council with Spirit Energy as the contractor.

It all went very smoothly and we now have ten solar panels on our back roof (facing east) with a total generation capacity of just over 3Kw

Obviously the sun does not shine all the time, even on a bright day, and the panels only catch the morning sun, and then increasingly obliquely, but we are managing to generate around 13Kwh per day at the moment, which we are happy with.

During the design stage we went through the financial models but, frankly, that was not the point. We all need to reduce or consumption of fossil fuels (and their derivatives) and this is one way that we could do that.

Extreme gardening

One of the nice things about moving in to the brand new house fourteen years ago was that the front garden had been landscaped for us.

Since then nature has done its work and some of the once small plants have subtly grown in to monsters and have taken over large swathes of the borders.

Last weekend their reign of terror ended.

The piles of butchered plants that you can see on the drive had, mere moments before been encamped on the flower beds.

The vicious hacking, sawing and pruning (I enjoyed all that!) reclaimed about 1 metre of the bed across the whole width of the garden.

All we need to do now is get rid of all that garden rubbish and get some new plants to fill the new spaces.