The outside of the house is just about finished, all that is left is one run of boards around the bottom of the house and the decks to go down under the porches. Since the last up date Gary has built the internal walls making it look more like a house inside now.
The boys from Rates plumbers came up about the 3rd of June to put the pipes into the house. On the 4th of June Greg Townsend the electrician came up to run the wires through for the power. Because we have built off the grid we have two different rated power supplies coming into the house. Their is 240 volts for normal power and 24 volts for lighting and charging smaller appliances like phones. The reason for going for 24 volts and not 12 volt is that the lower the voltage the more power gets lost in moving the power.
Another reason for the 24 volt system is that every time power is converted it can lose up to 15% of the power. Because the system charges 12 volt batteries they can easily be wired up together for 24 volt then you need an inverter to change them to 240 volts and this change can lose up to 15% of your power. Now if you were using this power to charge a cell phone it would then be converted back to 12 volt losing another 15% of your power. As you can see it makes good sense to use the right power voltage for the right job, hence two separate power supplies.
Thursday the 5th Clint turned up to install the spouting around the house and the shed. Clint is recently new to New Zealand from South Africa and has only been doing this job for six months. He was a pleasant guy to talk to and if he had not told me that he had only been in the job for such a short time I would not have guessed. He done a very good job and it just made the house look just that bit better from the outside. One thing that Clint said to me that stuck in my mind was that we are so lucky as we live in such a safe country.
I had spent the 9th and 10th putting the bats into the house. We have had the building inspector in on the 11th for the pre line inspection as well as testing that the water pipes are right. So this stage has just been signed off. Our next job now is to start putting the Gib up around the walls.