Hey friends,

Apologies of the lateness this week. I got addicted to watching the new series of Stranger Things and put off writing my newsletter.

📏 Imperial vs Metric

A review of the unit of measurement for foodstuffs will be happening to mark the Queen's Jubilee. Whether this is at all necessary or desirable I'll leave to one side but it's fair to say we have a pretty odd system...or systems for measuring things. For fun I thought I'd take a look at the units I use for different measurements and you can compare them to your own, because I bet we all differ slightly depending on when we were born.

Distance - Short distances I think in metres, not yards. For longer distances I think in miles, except when going for a run, mostly because 5k sounds more impressive than 3.1m.

Speed - mph. No question.

Pizza - inches, always inches.

Area - mostly m2, rarely square feet. For land, I tend to think in acres as it's equivalent to half a football field (though pitches have an allowable size range). An acre is a bit useless though as it's not an easy multiple of any smaller measurements that I know - 10 square chains apparently, whatever they are. So maybe I need to switch to hectares (10,000m2).

Depth - metres. What's a fathom?

Temperature - always Celcius at low temperatures because 0 = water freezing temperature is a useful point of reference. However, because we did a number of US summer vacations when I was young I can think in Fahrenheit for warmer temps: 70s are pleasant, 80s hot, 90s too hot. The hottest I've experienced is 122 in Death Valley.

Booze - 'Hey barkeep, 570ml of your finest bitter please' doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. A pint is here to stay. I wouldn't be adversed to small, medium and large though. Starbucks' sizing should be banned.

Weight - for my own weight, either kgs or pounds, but stone is awkward. If someone says they are 12.7 stone are they 12 1/2 stone or 12 stone 10 pounds? For cooking, grams/millilitres.

Height - generally feet and inches, though rather annoyingly I'm 5'11" 3/4.

DIY - I use a tape measure with both systems so for very rough cuts I'll take a reading of whichever is closest to an easy to remember mark but for detailed cuts, no way will I measure to 3/16ths of an inch. Millimetres are far easier. I've noticed a few American woodworkers make the switch too.

My conclusion is that if you can't multiply or divide by a factor of 10 then it's just not as good a system as metric but as long as we keep decimalisation for our money, a pint or few miles don't hurt.

💡 Bathroom Electrics

I've finished running the cables for the bathroom now. Most excitingly I've gone for some LED strips to highlight the niches. For the shower area which is Zone 1 you need a rating of at least IP44 but I went with IP65. These strips come with a protective silicon seal which you have to scrape off to solder the wires onto.

I did the soldering for the office LED strips myself but this time I took them round to Steve to do because he has the setup and loves doing it. Once the strips and cables were cut to length and soldered he added a shrink wrap to protect the connection.

I could then thread these through a drilled hole in the sides of my niches and the cables run up to the loft to meet the driver.

It's easy to work out what size driver you need, just multiply the stated W/m of the LED strip by the total length of strips you're using. In my case 15W/m x 2.8m = 42W so I went with a driver that was above this amount. Make sure you get the right voltage for your strip - either 12 or 24V.

Elsewhere all the cables run back to the switches. In this instance I went with deep metal back boxes fixed onto battens between the studs.

The top is for the extractor isolator switch. The middle is for the 2 gang dimmer for the downlights and LED strips. The bottom will be a fused switch for the underfloor heating.

All bathroom electrical work is notifiable so will need to be signed off by BC. Still, it's a big saving doing it DIY.

This project is basically on pause until I can get the plumber back. It's frustrating but I guess there's plenty of other things to be getting on with such as...

🐟 Pond

This week I got on top of the pond maintenance.

I forgot to take a before photo but imagine the brownest water possible, 10cm of sludge lining the bottom, grass growing over half the pond and duck weed over the rest. No amount of filtering was going to clear it so I diverted the pump and sucked out all the water, cleared the sludge, weed and grass and re-filled with fresh water. I kept aside the 25 or so newts I found at the bottom (no great crested).

Next I cleaned up the pump and got it going again. Then I changed the filters and UV light which apparently you're supposed to do each and every year. I also learnt the pump and filter are supposed to run constantly, just when I'm trying to cut energy usage...

Now I could actually see through the water I thought some fish would make a nice addition and might keep the duckweed at bay, so I purchased 12 small goldfish of the fairground variety.

Just when I'd got it looking beautiful I had to ruin it with two mesh panels in order to make it childproof.

It would make sense to orientate them in the other direction but I need one to lift up to clear the surface or pump so the back panel I slid under the waterfall and has the alligator flag growing through. The front panel then hinges on it with some garden twine.

However the middle was sagging so I created a post to support them. I didn't think this was going to work without encasing the bottom of the post in concrete first but the weight of the panels is holding it in place well.

Job done and the mesh should keep the heron out too. It's also thwarted the boy's attempts to throw rocks in.

Long term I think the pond will have to go but I'll look to build another one elsewhere. I'd build it differently; probably shallower with less steep sides to hide the liner with pebbles but as many of you said, it's nice to share to show the boy the wildlife it contains.

There's a lot of work in ponds though.

🌴 Palm Tree

Our garden has a very English cottage garden feel to it. Lots of native plants were put in by the previous owners. Lovely but you might remember after our Gran Canaria trip I was coveting a palm tree for a more sub-tropical vibe.

They'll grow I'm told 😆. The palm of choice is the Canary Island Date Palm, what else? The other two are the Hardy Banana (centre) and a Tree Fern (left).

All of them have a big spread so I'll need to find some space for them. The first two like lots of sun and the tree fern some shade so I'll have to factor that in as well.

👋

I hope you all have a fun Jubilee weekend. It'll probably rain but what more British thing to do on the Queen's Jubilee than complain to one another about the weather. Every cloud...

Hit "reply" if you've got any comments on this week's newsletter – otherwise I'll see you next time. Have an epic week :)

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