{"id":17892,"date":"2021-10-23T18:42:50","date_gmt":"2021-10-23T16:42:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/?p=17892"},"modified":"2021-10-26T18:58:17","modified_gmt":"2021-10-26T16:58:17","slug":"you-win-some-you-lose-some","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/you-win-some-you-lose-some\/","title":{"rendered":"You win some, you lose some"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I came to France over 9 years ago, I brought with me an old generator that I’d used when I was working on MYRO on the airfield and needed power. It only had a power rating of about 2.2 kW but I used it while I was waiting for electricity to be connected here in France at my old house and a few more times when we had power cuts. After that, for most of the time it stayed neglected and unused in my workshop.<\/p>\n

I needed it again though, when I moved out of my old house and into the caravan on the land on which my new house is going to be built. The trouble was that as you’d expect, it wouldn’t start. My friend Victor then breathed his magic on it and got it starting and running like a Swiss watch, and it did so for a week or so before something happened to a switch on its panel causing it to disintegrate and short between its high (220 V) and low (110 V) settings and the generator to stop charging.<\/p>\n

So I had to replace it at very short notice, on a week-end with no shops open, in the height and heat of the summer before everything in my fridge started to perish and I did so with one I found on Le Bon Coin, the French small ads web site. I chose it because it had a fairly high output of around 4.5 kW that would allow me to run my fridge, kettle, fan, laptop and microwave and charge my phone all at the same time. It was also quite economically priced at only 200\u20ac.<\/p>\n

OK, it was a bit scruffy but it started and performed well, the downside being that its quite large motor had shocking running costs of around 500\u20ac per month. So the electricity it produced was very expensive, considerably more so than my original generator, but in the absence of an alternative I had no choice but to go along with it.<\/p>\n

However, the alternative came after 2 or 3 weeks when my neighbour kindly agreed for me to connect my caravan to their house’s supply, a common thing it turns out in France where getting a new supply connected can take a long time, as I’ve found out to my own cost. However, once my caravan was connected to my neighbour’s house, all was well despite the heavy drop in power due to the length (150 metres) of the cable. That was up until we had a power cut a few weeks ago and I found that something had gone wrong with the generator’s motor, like a dropped valve or broken piston ring, and it wouldn’t turn over, rendering the machine useless.<\/p>\n

I’ve made some excellent purchases from Le Bon Coin, the concrete mixer that I recently bought and mentioned in a recent post being one of them, but unfortunately, that generator can’t be included in that category. The seller couldn’t have known what was about to happen and the experience can only go down as bad luck – like it says in the heading, you win some, you lose some. But that didn’t matter as I was plugged into my neighbour’s house.<\/p>\n

However, that changed unexpectedly yesterday, not forever but for the next few days. For reasons that I won’t go into I have to disconnect my cable from my neighbour’s house, from today until Monday afternoon, so as of yesterday I needed to find another generator yet again at very short notice. Fortunately, Le Bon Coin again came to the rescue and I found one that looked ideal with an output of 3.5 kW, so probably less expensive to run than the last one, and with wheels again to make it easy to move around. It looked very clean in the ad and the seller assured me that it was in very good condition, and with an asking price of only 100\u20ac the fact that it was located down in the Landes meant that it would still be overall an economic buy.<\/p>\n

And so it proved when I turned up at the seller’s home in Mont-de-Marsan yesterday afternoon. The machine started immediately and ran without making any nasty noises or smoke, so I was happy to hand over the cash and bring it back to Fleurac. Here are some shots that I took of it running earlier this afternoon.<\/p>\n

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It’s running as I type this and unlike the big old machine that it replaces, I can hardly hear it at all from my caravan, so that will please my neighbours I’m sure. I was also delighted to find that my kettle boils quite quickly again and my microwave is back to its full power. I’ve bought two jerricans of fuel to tide me over for the week-end and I’ll have to see in due course whether its running costs are also lower than those of the machine it replaces. So for the moment, it looks as though this machine is a ‘win’. I hope I’ll still be thinking the same in a few days time.<\/p>\n

Now on to something completely different that I’ve also lost within the last few days. Back in 2016 I think it was, I created a web site for our home airfield, Chateau Malbec. I used a free web site service, which meant that it had a slightly weird domain name (http:\/\/malbec-ulm.rf.gd) but it otherwise looked great and performed as well as any ‘paid-for’ service. That was until a week or so ago, when I aimlessly tried to log on and found that it had a database connection error.<\/p>\n

To cut a long story short, it appears that with no notification, the service provider decided to cancel its free service and go exclusively for paid-for web site hosting. When I initially set the web site up, I’d kept copies of the coding for all of its pages on my home computer together with a back-up of the data on the hosting server. Unfortunately, however, my home PC suffered a computer hard drive crash not long after I’d created the web site and I lost an enormous amount of irreplaceable personal and other data, including those back-ups. <\/p>\n

This wouldn’t have mattered if I’d then downloaded new back-ups of the Malbec site from the hosting server, but stupidly I didn’t. Now I’m paying the price as I’ve had to start building a new replacement Malbec web site from scratch using another free web site service. It won’t be easy because the old web site was all in French (naturally) and it had been meticulousy checked by a native French speaker, which may be difficult to achieve again to the same standard as before. <\/p>\n

However, we’ll see how things go, and there is still a long way to go. For anyone wanting to watch progress, you can click on the image of the new home page below to see the current state of play.<\/p>\n

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And finally, something about acorns. I’ve mentioned previously how I’m currently being plagued by acorns. They have been falling like rain from the trees under which my caravan is positioned to the extent that they’ve often sounded like gunfire when they’ve been hitting the roof. Quite often it’s been hard getting to sleep or I’ve been woken up in the night when I have managed to drop off but the situation came to a head the other evening when we had a bit of a storm pass through with some high-ish winds. <\/p>\n

For an hour or so it sounded as though I was under attack as so many were dislodged and came tumbling down and I dread what my caravan’s roof might now look like. Wim assured me that they sound much worse than they really are and it’s unlikely that the roof will have been damaged, but I won’t relax until I can get hold of a ladder and see for myself. But to show the extent of the problem, here are a couple of shots showing the state of the new concrete base that was laid last week and the ground around it.<\/p>\n

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Walking over the ground is like walking on sea shells as they crackle and break underfoot – in a way it’s quite disconcerting. However, although there’s the odd latecomer, there can’t be many more left to drop so maybe things will become a bit more peaceful around here. And I’ll start getting some better nights’ sleep \ud83d\ude10<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I came to France over 9 years ago, I brought with me an old generator that I’d used when I was working on MYRO on the airfield and needed power. It only had a power rating of about 2.2 kW but I used it while I was waiting for electricity to be connected here … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17892","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17892"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17892\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17910,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17892\/revisions\/17910"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}