Well I am not an electrician, but the way it works on Rona is that you have to be Jack of all Trades, Master of None. Many people think that for ‘Deer’ men, all they do is shoot deer. Well they do a bit of that but working on an Estate you really do not know what is going to happen from one week until the next. You think you have a plan but once the season gets underway it is pretty busy and things can go off at a tangent. Especially burst hydraulic pipes!!!!

But this job was planned and it was held up because we were encouraged to apply to the Crown Estate for a grant. I was sceptical about receiving any funds as we just don’t get grants, but, we were encouraged to do so. It of course turned out to be a waste of time and all that our application did was hold us back. We receioved our refusal to-day.

Oh well back to the drawing board. We needed to tidy up the wiring at the Dry Harbour Genny shed and with a potential addition of Solar Panels (under the grant) it had to be done. March the first was the day for the announcement of the grant and as the rewiring was not included we worked towards completing the job before then.

The story before, many boxes, many different cable sizes, much spaghetti. Lots of additional boards and a replacement inverter to fit too to up the power of the ‘Outback’ too. The Outback has done well but we were modernising with a nrew system. Victron. We have it at Big Harbour and it is much more versatile with remote access and lots of Data (if you like that sort of thing).

Although I was there from the start of the system above, even I was confused with what was what. With Grant here now it was a good idea to get a new system installed instead of confusing him too.

With the help of Hugh Piggot of Scoraig Wind it was a good install. Once or twice we had to have a long think about what goes where but overall it was interesting.

First job was strip out then fix a new board instead of multiple bits of ply.

Then onto fitting the equipment in order, as advised.

The Proven Box had to go back up as we hoped to get new Tristar controllers with the Solar, we might have to have a re-think there. Nice to have a new Consumer Unit to replace all the boxes and of course a new Victron Multiplus inverter. We shortened cables and re-routed some to tidy the job up.

An expensive piece oif kit the Cerbo, but a helpful wee box, wifi enabled and full of tricks. We can login from anywhere in the world and see what is happening. But if we run out of diesel then that is beyond it!!!!

Over the years we have collected many tools and now have most of what we need, but maybe a new bench over at Dry Harbour might help.

With emails coming in with diagrams and advice just a WhatsApp away, it was going smoothly.

Shortening cables was okay but trying to find glands in the many boxes of ‘stuff’ we have proved tricky. But we got there and the Windmill box now has everything labelled up and easy to understand although it might get replaced.

Time to let the brake off the windmill. Proven Windmills back in the day were very basic but that may be their forte. This one is almost 20 years installed with liottle in the way of prooblems. Vibrations slackened the foundation bolts but we quickly beefed up the plates and it is rock solid, it has a bit of a wobble in it but otherwise no problems. One blade spring broke which was scary, putting the turbine out of balance but with regular checking, hopefully we will nopt have that to deal with again.

Just about finished with only the Consumer Unit to cover and away we went. We had a couple of extras that we had forgotten about, one was a Shunt on the Negative side, which gives us battery info (I am told) and a new Positive battery cable. These duly arrived and were fitted.

This makes life much simpler and now we are not getting a grant towards solar panels we will have to see what the kitty says, but for sure we need a new set of batteries soon, that will be the next job.