Saturday, September 2, 2023

Solar (street) lights and more for our Pyramid Retreat

September already again. After a, till half of August, rather 'dry' wet season monsoons are back again. These cause isolated heavy to very heavy rains in our area and, like last year, may cause flash floods and overflows near waterways and lowlands. Our passion fruit and bananas like the rain and are doing well.  

With the monsoons also electric power breaks are back. Sometimes a couple of times a week. We are happy all our structures have emergency lights for about eight hours and for several main functions of our site we have the generator.  
We start the generator after a power break of 10 minutes or more. 

Last two weeks because of the rain we had to slow down our building activities a bit. Still we have the load bearing walls and the inner walls all up till 1.6 meters high now. 
We have to start using scaffoldings to go on and higher up. We need to have a bit of patience to pick up the scaffoldings because at the moment again we cannot use the muddy road. 
Like it seems now we will get (and hope for this) a concrete road next year. So we have to deal with the regular 'lock down' situations. It is the way it is. 

Every meter up we reinforce the load bearing wall blocks with double rebar. The rebar for the 2 meter high level load bearing wall reinforcement and for the lintels to make is waiting.

We cleared our pond of an overflow of floating plants. Strange this year all the lotus flowers are gone. We think because of the many fishes that are in the pond. Only a waterlily is left. We are happy a Kingfisher, maybe the one we rescued last year, is back again at some days. 

Once we bought some solar floodlights of a not well known brand. They broke down after a year already. Again the lesson to pay the price for the decission to buy 'cheap stuff' : "Cheap is expensive". 
We changed them for Philips floodlights now and bought even two more of them and four street-lights of the same brand as well. Hopefully they last much longer. 
It's good to have them especially for orientation on and around our site during nightly power breaks. 

























Frans Captijn

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