Solar water heating

So, today we learned that we have six 4.4 m² flat plate solar collectors, two on the north wing serving the guest rooms and four on the community building, which are equivalent to 18.5 kW thermal. Here's a picture of how I understand (!) each system to fit into the rest of the hot water provision.

I don't know many of the details of the system yet, e.g. pitch of the roofs, % efficiency, or how much thermal energy is expected to be produced. The engineering design report is packed in a box somewhere, but the commissioning certificates will tell us more when they arrive. We can keep track of the hours that the pump operates as a proxy while we are looking into how best to monitor the kWh produced.

After Vespers, there was a band of red sky glowing in the west, so I jogged over to the yellowhammer and skylark field to watch it fade. The field had been ploughed - great coarse wedges gouged out of the clay and turned over. I hope the birds had flown before their homes were bulldozed. I revelled in the glory of shepherd's delight for a few minutes, until my over-indulged imagination transformed the scene into a dark grey ocean shining wanly in the half light of a dying red dwarf star. It is still mild, but the wind had got up and was soughing* in the poplars as I walked back to the house.

* 'soffing' - a word that is used so often so poetically, yet really isn't!