Abergavenny 3 September 2008

This is the Park Guest House the B&B where I stayed in Abergavenny.


I took the first day there to recover and spent all of 4 September walking around Abergavenny and doing tourist stuff. First stop was of course the castle.






The ladies at the castle museum sent me on to the St. Mary's Priory Church to view the recently completed Abergavenny tapestry.



This tapestry is huge and there is no way to take a picture of the entire thing from one spot.


They used many different wools to create the picture. It depicts Abergavenny from dawn to dusk with highlights of the history for the past 1000 years. The tapestry took over 20,000 hours of work and nearly fours years of tim with morning and afternoon shifts working on the pieces.



While there one of the women who worked on the tapestry was kind enough to pose for me in front of the section she worked on. She put in one black sheep in the flock of sheep and was allowed to keep it there.



Over 400 shades of wool were use to make the color changes.



I learned what every tourist has learned. it is almost impossible to get good pictures of stained glass windows with hand held cameras but I tried anyway. This was a very nice one in the main hall of the church.



I was particularly interested in the various effigy carvings. This group of pictures is of the tomb of Sir Richard Herbert of Ewyas who died 1510.









There were several other tombs and carvings but many were hard to photograph.

I left the Priory and walked around Abergavenny. One place I stopped was this butcher's shop. This is the Rawlings Family Butchers and the proud proprietor is Mr. Paul Bishop. He is a champion sausage maker and while I had no way to cook any of his lovely sausages I did enjoy talking to him and seeing all his sausage trophies. He directed me to a nice place for a late lunch and I then headed back to Park House for a bit of a rest.



No places were open for dinner so I found a quick fish and chips place and ate in my room. Tomorrow is the big Black Welsh Mountain Sheep Show and Sale.

Solar Continues

Solar hot water installation continues. The heat sink pipe is now in the ground and has been covered up.

Solar Hot Water System Started

We decided to install a solar hot water system to provide domestic hot water and also heat the house in winter. We already use a combination hot water heater/boiler that provides our domestic hot water and the in-floor radiant heat for the house but it is propane fired.

We are in an excellent area for solar and hope to reduce our propane consumption by at least half. Our house is set up facing south with a huge roof area that is perfect for solar. No tall trees would shade it and we have the in-floor system already so it should be fairly efficient. We can put the extra storage tank in the garage and the pipes can come direct into the equipment room from the solar collectors.

Should be nice when it's all finished.



Our other option was a geothermal system that uses a heat pump run off electricity and many hundreds of feet of pipe in the ground. However, this is Garvin Mesa, we have rocks, lots of rocks. Digging a 6 foot deep trench over 600 feet long was going to cost an unknown amount of big heavy equipment time. So we decided to go with solar which only needs a single 4 foot by 4 foot deep hole to bury the heat sink pipe to drain off excess heat in summer when you don't need as much.

Guess what we found when digging, a huge can't be moved by our backhoe size rock, right in the location the hole was supposed to be. Ken ended up moving the hole a bit and found even more rocks there. But he got it all dug.
The solar collectors arrived today and Ken got the landscape cloth and the first layer of pea gravel into the hole. Tomorrow is installation of the heat sink pipe and more gravel and then fill in the hole. We should be done within a few weeks if the rest of the parts come in on time.

Edited 28 August
I will reject comments that are just links to various solar companies. So don't even bother to keep adding them.