Riverview

The house has not been touched or renovated since the twenties. This includes the wiring, and there is some seriously old and decrepit wiring in this house! There are 3 ‘new style’ sockets, but all the others are a mixture of very old Bakelite round 3 pin sockets, of varying sizes, and some more modern, albeit still round pin, sockets. From reading about these on wikipedia, the round pin sockets had around 10 types. The house also has a few small two pin sockets.

I’m thinking that these are purely lighting ones, as one was spliced into the cables coming out of a light switch. Get this for probably the dodgiest looking wiring you’ve ever seen!

The other plug socket types are:

These ones are fairly recent, well before 1950!

For size comparison here’s another with the only double modern socket in the house!

There’s two double pin sockets. Both are wired into the lighting circuit.

Here’s one next to, what I think, is an coaxial aerial socket, manufactured by a Cambridge company called Labgear.

The cooker point looks fairly standard, albeit with a round pin lug integrated in it. The 3 pin plug alongside it is much larger than all the others. Both the pins are larger, and further apart.

Again a 3 round pin plug.

This is a fairly solid nice design of the older socket with a recessed switch.

These last two are of a pretty funny looking, oval shaped 3 pin round pin socket.

I’ve been given some old photos of the house by an elderly neighbour. The photos are of varying years. only one is dated, and this shows the house as it currently is now. That is dated 1940.

The photo below shows the house without the upper floor, and is still thatched.

The surveyor reckoned that the thatch was removed in the early 20′, as the quality and type of material suggests a between the wars period. I’m guessing that the period of the above photo is around the turn of the 20th century. Pretty interesting.

Those windows have now gone. However, there is a very similar window on the shed (rotten to the extent of crumbling unfortunately), so I reckon that this was reused.

The apple tree that is being pruned has also gone. However, there are still a good few left. That photo, and the others, also show many buildings in the garden. Those are all now gone.

I’m having posting issues with creating articles with Marsedit and posting them. Ferg’s Gaff works fine, but this blog is having problems. Hmmmm…

One of the problems with the new house is the lack of installed heating, and the lack of mains gas. Most houses in the village appear to have oil, but apart from the fact that oil is just an outdated technology, the price of oil has doubled in the last year and I guess it’s unlikely to drop ever.

If we had loads of money then a Ground Source Heat pump would be great. But the cost of digging up the garden would be pretty much. Although we’ve discussed using some form of pellet fed wood boiler, these take too much room. Smaller pellet or wood boilers are good but the thing is a push button heating system is really what we need. With the type of jobs that we have, keeping a log fire constantly burning would be a waste of energy.

So of all the heating systems that seems to just leave a Air Source Heating Pump as a main boiler. I originally shelved this as they have the reputation of being noisy. However, apparently the latest ones are almost silent.

I still want to have either a wood pellet stove or a normal wood burning stove. These will have a back boiler which will feed water into the thermal store. There will also be sufficient solar panels to provide hot water throughout summer without any other heating.

So I mentioned thermal store before explaining what one is! Basically this is a battery to save all that lovely heat. A sufficiently large water tank that is highly insulated and can store heat from various sources at a sufficient temperature to even out outputted heat when the inputs are various iregular heat sources such as wood stoves. The hot water in these units is never in direct contact with anything else. Raidiators have a internal heat exchanger (a simple coil), an external Plate Heat exchanger is used for direct hot water. That’s also drinkable mains pressure hot water. Not some manky stuff stored in the attic with the dead pigeon floating in it!

Here’s a design of such a system. That company puts together quite cool thermal store systems. I’ve no prices, but apparently they are quite reasonable.

Since ASHP produce lower heat than normal radiators, we either need to have Under floor heating, oversized radiators or some alternatives. Without removing the floors under floor heating would be too expensive, and so far there are two possibilities:

Ecovators are normal radiators that use fans to distribute heat. They can be much smaller to distribute the required heat.

Another good alternative that delivers similar heat to under floor heating are the skirting board radiators. The Thermaskirt ones look to be the best.

So we’ve done nowt to the actual house, but the garden has been turned from a metre high jungle to a relatively flat piece of land. It did look fairly overgrown, but the previous owners may have been the wrong side of 100 (yes really), but they still kept a decent garden, despite the size of it. So we just have a year’s worth of neglect to cope with. One Apple tree (apparently a Blenheim Orange) had almost collapsed under the weight of unpicked Apples. It also had to contend with some overgrown fir trees that are blocking its light. Cunning use of a winch and some cleverly placed branch supports may save this tree. I’ve also lopped off some of the branches, although with the cold temperatures I’m a little nervous about exposing too many cuts. There’s still another 5 apple trees in the garden, but I’d hate to lose this beauty.

This blog will detail the heroic renovation and extension of our riverside residence