First up, a visit from both my overseas sisters, Beck from England and Bridge from Tasmania. I am having breakfast with them and dad at Cottesloe, below.
Later, in the back garden of Samson St
Other visiters included a few ex Perth people who stayed with us, Maureen now of Alice Springs and Tom who is really enjoying living in Melbourne. And, after 6 years of staying at Paul and Pam's anytime I was down Denmark/Mt Barker way, they finally stayed over here. And how! It got so that there were nights when we were living at each other's places.
The car sharing experiment seems to be going well with Phil - anytime we go down south, we swop cars and the i30 does serious country miles. The huge effort required for Bouverie (below) put over 4,000km on the clock in one trip.
House
Not much done this year apart from sinking the electrical conduits near the living room door, installing nice, new switches and painting the kitchen and northern living room wall. Actually, a lot of work and the result is a very clean look. Almost too clean, I am not sure Suz has noticed, she was in China.
After the first heavy rains of winter, the pin cushion hakea out the front, flowered. Really quite spectacular. More flower photos here, awandsf.au/samson/flowers/
Nearly a year after we put in the rain water tank, the honeysuckle has covered the tank . . .
Recreation
Both Suz and I continue to go to Murdoch Uni to play badminton with members of the Renewable Energy community there most Mondays.
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After years of thinking about it, I finally entered the Karri Cup Mountain Bike race with a friend. Held in Northcliffe, it is the biggest Mtnbike race in the state and Team SkyFarming came in 3rd in our category.
A nice run in the hills between Kalamunda and Mundaring runs past this magnificent old Jarrah. |
March saw us again participating in the Freeway ride from Kwinana to Joondalup. An insane sprint in under 2 hours, this time with friends who had not done it before. Note the new Team SkyFarming jerseys!
A much more ambitious ride was to Dwellingup where we caught up with Phil and Jacinta (they had brought our clothes up) and rode the Etmilyn Forest train, a beautifully restored old steam G123 locomotive that rumbled some 16km out of Dwellingup and back. A more laid back trip than the 45km to Mandurah on the new southern line.
I continue to go to the Goethe Institute at UWA though have missed a number of classes due to being in Mt Barker.
SkyFarming
The big news is the installation of a 20kW wind turbine at a Trout and Marron Farm near Mt Barker. We had to become the distributor for ReDriven wind turbines to do it. We also installed the foundation and 700m of underground cabling. We had three major problems;
- derating the turbine,
- 700m of cable run,
- and a time limit (the grant)
After nearly 7 years, SkyFarming has installed a wind turbine. A government grant of 50% of capital and a 6kW baseload, meant a viable project despite the lack of a Feed in Tariff - any electricity generated but not consumed on site is exported for nothing. But we did it though the compromises made meant it was an extremely stressful time and there are still serious issues outstanding. Further details on the SkyFarming website.
The other Mt Barker project, some 120 x bigger, has made significant progress with the completion of the geotechnical studies involving 3 core drills some 10 to 15m down and 12 test pits (to 3m). All this during the wettest June Mt Barker has experienced in decades. We also walked the cable route with a number of local Aboriginal Elders and have since made a number of presentations to indigenous meetings. Now, with the recovery of the Aussie dollar against the Euro and the signing off of the Rudd government's 20% by 2020, as watered down as it is, we have, at least on paper, quite a viable project.
Nevertheless, difficulties with major investors pulling out have slowed us down.
I also made an overnight trip to Karratha for a look at some interesting proposals. Lots of risk but enormous potential.
Smsing a welder at the Bouverie site as the tower needed a little modification . . .
Cheers
Andrew
31/12/2009