Trouble with my Joules
This week: Trouble with my Joules; Leave it for tomorrow;
It has been another busy week with some progress to show for my efforts.
Some friends have moved from the UK to their new permanent home here in Dol, so I have spent a couple of morning’s helping smooth their transition into their new home.
Hundreds of boxes and lots of IKEA assembly reminds me of the several international moves I have made over the years. Taking a systematic approach is the key!
I also began to remove the winter plastic from my polytunnel.
I use ENOX fittings which make removing the butterfly nuts and washers easy, so even after a damp, humid winter it is easy to remove the fixing laths.
What I discovered through, was that after four years of exposure to the elements, the unprotected wooden laths are starting to rot.
One of the laths broke at a knot joint as I removed it from the polytunnel frame.
I left the laths outside for 24 hours to give them to dry thoroughly, before I refitted them over the summer shade netting.
These wooden supports care going to need to be replaced in November when I refit the plastic for the winter, over the summer shade netting.
When I removed the plastic, it has started to fray and split in places. The felines using their claws to climb up onto the top of the polytunnel haven’t helped.
But equally where the bolts go through the plastic, even with metal securing rings, the plastic has torn.
I rolled the plastic up for the summer and think because of its size, even with the damage, I can install it again in the autumn for one last winter.
Everywhere I have been this week, I have seen tiny katydid. These are our colourful local Bush Crickets which after going through several moults will be 25mm long as adults.
When I was looking at the damage to the flower buds on my recently planted Pistachio trees, I think I found the culpret.
As I looked some movement caught my eye. Munching on the flowers was this Egyptian Grasshopper, Anacridium aegyptium.
The damage has already been done, so I left him to finish his meal.
I’m delighted that two weeks after planting the Horseradish root, there are a lot of green leaves which are now growing.
I will be leaving it inside the container so it can build a strong root system, before I plant it out next spring.
Trouble with my Joules
I have never used ChatGPT, really for two reasons. Firstly, I think getting AI to write material for you is cheating and secondly I’ve not really had a question to ask it before.
The media is full of stories about AI and ChatGPT. So this week when I was struggling again with trying to make sense of the data that my weather station produces for solar output, I posed the question to OpenAI:
How do I summarise and chart solar energy data in W/m²?
My experience with asking Goole or Bing a questions tells me that how you formulate the question will determine the usefulness of the answer.
My gut feeling is that 2025 has had a much reduced amount of sunshine and hence solar energy than previous years. However I am acutely aware that the human memory is extremely fickle and that what you “feel” might be far from the truth.
I have the data. Lots and lots of data in a digital format. But I have struggled to make any sense of it.
To sum up what I want to do in a sentence, is that I want to compare and contrast the data I have. But when there are thousand upon thousand lines of data, sometimes you cannot see the “wood for the trees”.
The ChatGPT answer came back in fractions of a second.
Which then led me on to do more research into Solar energy or Irradience. This led me to the international standard for measuring solar power of Kilowatt hours (KWh). Chat GPT even gave me the formulae to calculate this:
First convert W/m² to energy over time. Each 5-minute reading contributes (W/m² × 300 [5 min × 60 sec]) = Joules/m² . Sum all values for the day, then convert to your desired unit.
A kilowatt hour is equivalent to a steady power of one kilowatt running for one hour. 1KWh is equivalent to 3.6 million joules or 3.6 megajoules. So 1 KWh = 3.6 million joules.
Pronounced “jewel,” a joule is a measure of energy used in the International System of Units. It is named after the English physicist James Prescott Joule, who developed the first law of thermodynamics.
Professor Joule also developed the Kelvin scale with his colleague William Thomson.
I have spent some time this week working a on a spreadsheet which will do these calculations for me. Maybe by next week I will have a nice chart to show you.
When that happens, I’ll know whether my “gut feeling” is correct!
I have never had the slightest desire to study Particle Physics or Thermodynamics, but perhaps there is a place for them in my orchards…
Leave it for tomorrow
Never do something today which can be put off until tomorrow!
That is one version of an adage that I know but do not necessarily subscribe to.
At least not very often (that I’ll admit to).
I have been putting off the repairs to my Arbour for some time. However this week I decided that I really need to get on with the job.
The Arbour is a feature I built when I first moved here, so it has been out in all weathers for the past 10 years.
It is built to surround the path which runs from my home up to the donkey track at the rear of my property. This is how it looked when it was finished.
The wooden poles came from Bauhaus and were €3 each. They were “treated” pine, so I didn’t bother adding any kind of wood preservative, like Sadolin.
The “treatment” must have been very rudimentary though because when you cut a cross section, you cannot see where any preservative has soaked into the timber.
The wood has been exposed to all the baking sun, high UV, driving rain and wind for the past decade and over the last winter I noticed that a couple of the cross pieces have rotted.
When I was last at Bauhaus I bought some replacement 2.25m poles, now priced at €9 each. The treatment has not improved but the price has trebled!
After measuring I made some adjustments so that the poles fit snugly together.
This week I have been adding Sadolin to the cracks in the wood, as a bit of extra preservative and have also treated where I have made cuts so the poles fit snuggly together.
With 17 uprights and fourteen horizontal poles, there are quite a few which will have to be replaced over time. There is also the cost, now €280.00c.
So rather than a “big bang” approach, I am going to leave until tomorrow a job which really does not have to be done today and replace poles incrementally as they fail…. NCG
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