Month: April 2017

How do you find water without a geological survey and an orbiting satellite?

Simple. You bring in an 82 year old water diviner called Juanito! OK, OK! I’m not an ageing hippy, just ageing…

David, our agent, recommended that we employ the services of Juanito to locate water on our land as, whilst there are a couple of rundown porthos (wells) that we’ve found, the amount of water available is miniscule for modern living and certainly couldn’t be used for irrigation.

Yes, we can and will get water from the cisterna and borehole located about a mile and a half away, but there’s nothing like having your own water source to be properly off grid. I mean “off grid” means just that, doesn’t it? It doesn’t mean “connected to a community water tank up the road”!

So we met up with Juanito who is a very charming 82 year old and is fit as a fiddle. We met at the old house on our land and it was immediately apparent that he had already done his homework as he clearly knows the geology of the area intimately. He wandered around for an hour or so, going into each of our three valleys, before he settled on the middle one as the most likely candidate for water.

We stood and watched as he clambered across the hillside like one of our local ibex, a real mountain goat. He seemed to slowly zero in on the top corner, just below one of the tracks which leads down about half a mile from the house. We watched him quarter back and forth like a hound on the scent of a fox. Could he smell something?

He was carrying what looked like a y-shaped piece of hazel wood – in fact two bent twigs bound together with grey duct tape. Very scientific I don’t think and I didn’t expect much other than the usual pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo.

Eventually, he waved to us from across the valley and I peeled Helen from out of the air-conditioned car as it was very warm. He then walked back and forth, holding his bent twigs and then indicated a spot. “There are two large water flows below us”, he proclaimed. “You have a huge amount of agua here, very lucky!”.

Apparently, he reckoned that the two flows crossed – one at around 165m and the other at around 190 m deep. I mean, 190m below us! How on earth? My skepticism must have shone like a beacon as he handed me the twigs and told me to have a go myself. I held the wooden water detector in the way he showed me and walked back and forth across the area and, blow me, the twigs practically tore my hands off! I couldn’t stop them from dipping no matter what I did and at the same point every time. Helen couldn’t resist having a go and the same happened for her. According to Juanito, only about one in 20 pepole can do it and it’s very unusual for both of a couple to be able to do it. Just lucky, I guess.

So, what happens next? Well, we have to pay around 8000 euros for the company that our divine water finder works with and they will use a pneumatic boring machine to drill a 20 cm shaft down to the water and line it with nylon sleeving to prevent collapse. We then drop a submersible, high pressure pump down the borehole and thar she blows…in theory.

So, I asked the obvious question; what happens if they don’t hit water? Well, said the man, you don’t pay a single euro. So, if it works, we have unlimited free water (about 20m3 per hour he reckons) and we pay;  if it doesn’t, we don’t pay. Well, the company is still in business is all I’m saying.

How does it work, if it works? According to Juanito, there have ben 30,000 year old cave paintings discovered in the sahara showing people holding bent sticks like his. So, either they’re antennae to talk to aliens or they’re water divining rods. As he said,  the primitive ancients couldn’t spare the resources to just keep on digging deep holes in the sahara desert to find water, they had to know where to dig – and dig they did, resulting in the lines of wells that have fed the caravanserai across the desert for millenia.

Unless of course, it was those pesky aliens spotting water from orbit?

Here’s a video of us locating the water – apologies for the slight blurriness.

We first saw our new land in Spain last June 2016  and committed to buy in August. The sale was finally completed just before Christmas 2016.

The reason for the gap was due to our cautious nature when acquiring property. First, we we needed to check for clean title (the escritura or deeds) to ensure that the people selling us the land actually owned it and that there aren’t any outstanding loans, mortgages or guarantees against it. Then we wanted written confirmation  from the local council that we had a licencia or permit to live in on the land. As there had been a house there for a couple of hundred years with a proper set of deeds that was straightforward, but worth doing. Spain is notorious for this sort of thing as many people have found out to their cost. 

Then we wanted a permit to connect to the local water cisterna, drill a bore hole and build a swimming pool. 

We also ensured that there was a tax value and registration for the existing house. 

Finally, we commissioned a full survey of the ruined house and a levels survey of the immediate land around it to help with planning the new house and to be attached to the deeds to ensure that there was a record of the existing property on file. 

Levels Surveying

Signing the sales contract and handing over the money

Last but not least, NIEs needed to be obtained from the police station in Alcaniz. This an ID number for foreigners which you need for everything in Spain. 

Once all of the above were in place, the sale went ahead. We are the ones with the big smiles on our faces on the left. 

The next stage was to demolish the old house and sort all of the materials ready for the new build. Just to be on the safe side, we went to the excellent local mayor in Rafales and obtained a license to demolish. I think that this was a really useful 60 euros to spend!

So, the timetable is as follows :-

1. February. Demolish old house
2. March. Draw up and submit plans for a garage /workshop, solar system and septic tank
3. End of April. Submit plans for Main house
4. March to July. Build up solar system in the UK to take to Spain 
5. June /July. Build garage/workshop , septic tank and concrete base for solar panels
6. Late July. Install solar power system
7. August. Helen, Aidan, 6 chihuahuas and 2 Irish wolfhounds arrive for two months, living in the workshop! 
8. Late September. Start house build. 

Well, numbers 1 & 2 are done. So far, so good. The first draft of the main house plans are done

So, here is the first draft of the house:-

Access Level

This level has the main front door, the lounge, kitchen, dining area, my office, a family suite for if we have visitors with young children  and the courtyard with a plunge pool. 

The upper level has our bedroom with a gallery above the main living room to access it, plus a sun terrace off ourbedroom

Top Floor

Finally, the lower level has three more guest bedrooms plus a large  but essential, wine cellar

Lower level

To make sense of the plans, you need to realise that the house is built over the edge of the terrain, following the footprint of the original building

Why Adjust? 

The apparent position of the sun varies throughout the year and throughout the day. Solar panels can be left at the same angle all year round in the worst case. It’s possible, but costly to track the sun across the sky and alter the angle of the panels to get most bang for your solar buck, but it’s generally good enough just to position the panels in a southerly direction and then if possible adjust the elevation – i. e.  angle them up and down – as the sun rises and falls in the sky. 

Panel Angle

In the winter, an angle of about 60 degrees from the horizontal will give you most power and around 40 degrees in the August.  In the summer, the sun is virtually overhead, so if your panels are nearly vertical in a winter position, they’ll produce power just not as much as they are capable of. I’ve got an electric car (Tesla) which takes 90KW hours to charge. So, if I use 1KW for 90 hours which is like boiling a kettle solidly for nearly four days and nights or more practically, 5KW during the day, if I don’t adjust the panel angles I’ll eat well into our power budget. I’ll only charge the car during the day when there’s excess power after air on, cooking, pool pump, etc. 

I want to glean the maximum power for the lowest cost, so  I’m repurposing some linear actuators which are generally used to adjust the backrest on a bed or on a sofa. I’ve found some units that are IP65 rated which means that they’re  weatherproof… why they should be waterproof is beyond me but for around £40 from Ebay, I’m not complaining. 

These actuators can lift 150Kg each, so are very meaty.  The solar charger/inverters that I’m using are from Mppsolar (PIP4048MS) and require at least 48V to work. However, they can use up to 130V in theory. I’m hooking three 24 volt panels in series giving me between 72 and 90 volts, which will help give us some power even when it’s not that sunny as there’ll be sufficient voltage to put some power into the batteries. 

I plan on making some simple frames to take 9 panels each as this seems to be the optimum for my plans. The panels weigh about 18Kg each, so with the steel frames it should all come in at under 200Kg. I’m going to hinge the bottom of the frames so that I can use two actuator arms to push or pull the panels to the correct angle. 

Aha, I hear you ask. But how do you know what angle to set them to? Well, there is a website called Suncalc.org and if you upload your GPS coordinates or lattitude and longitude, you can download the angle of the sun above the horizon at every minute of the day and set the panel angle accordingly. So long as the planet keeps spinning on its axis and revolving around the sun, it should work. If it doesn’t then we’re all doomed anyway and inefficient solar panels will be the least of our problems! 

I’m never keen on moving parts as they do tend to break, so I’ve ordered some laser distance measurement devices (guess where from?)  for a couple of quid each to see if I can use a bit of clever maths to determine the panel angle from their distance from the sensors. These little cuties are used in robot vacuum cleaners, so are available  in large volumes very inexpensively. 

It did occur to me that if two powerful actuators are moving a panel and one fails, then the whole thing could be twisted and broken. So, I’m going to also use the laser sensors to make sure that both panels are moving correctly and if there’s a failure, I’ll get an email telling me which one has failed. Seemples.