Rain (was: Re: DJ geeza - Saying Hello!)

[Peter Korsten]

Gert van Santen schreef op 13-10-2013 22:50:

> Ha, there's lots of rain, coldness and darkness here. It's autumn...

Well... earlier this week, it was raining. Now our handyman (Karmenu), 
who redid our living room, is pretty good, but he has a bit of trouble 
understanding that water, in general, flows downward.

There must be some holes in the wall, and if the rain comes from the 
wrong side, it gets into the holes, and this limestone gets completely 
saturated. It's actually seeping out of the wall and onto the floor as 
we speak.

Earlier this week, I woke up because it started to get hot. Hmm, airco 
wasn't working. Hmm, power gone completely. This was at 3:55 in the morning.

After switching off all electrical appliances in the house, and the 
ground switch (aardlekschakelaar in Dutch) still tripping, I took a 
different approach and started pulling out the fuses from the Wilex box. 
Turned out that the short circuit was located in the kitchen or living room.

That's the cool thing about British electric wiring: you can switch off 
the sockets in a certain area, but still have light to work with.

So I unloaded the fridge, carried it out of its nook in the kitchen, and 
connected it with a long cable to another group (different fuse from the 
Wilex box). Then I loaded the fridge, went back to bed (but not to 
sleep) at 5:10, only for the alarm to ring at 6:00.

Later that day, I determined that water had seeped into the wall and 
into the tubes for the electricity for the air conditioners. Which 
wouldn't even have been that bad, if it weren't for a light switch that 
the idiot previous owner of the house (a building contractor) had 
connected to the socket. And the water made a connection between the 
"ouch" end of the electricity and the wall, so the ground switch tripped.

For a country with such a lot of sunshine, we have a remarkable amount 
of trouble with water. Case in point: tomorrow, they're removing the 
old, ever-leaking solar water heater, and replacing it with trusted 
German quality. To call the current one a cheap Chinese piece of crap is 
an insult to other Chinese products of comparatively high quality, such 
as powdered milk.

- Peter