Rick's b.log - entry 2025/02/17

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Nutters! ☺

I nearly had a heart attack and spilt my tea.
Nobody comes down here, certainly not at 8 o'clock, and nobody rings the doorbell.
The doorbell that was playing the Big Ben melody that, for some reason, is often heard in Japanese schools.

It was a man from Enedis saying that they needed to block my access lane for most of the day and would that be a problem. I said no, I wasn't going anywhere. But... aren't you supposed to be here tomorrow?
We will be, he replied.

I went for a tea-walk as it was a chilly breeze but quite pleasant in the sun. I saw them working on the big interrupter at the top of the pole. Somebody climbed up the pole to assemble the meccano that carried the patch wires - do bear in mind that this is live 20kV.

A little later I walked all the way up just in case the post came but... she was early so I missed her by literally a single minute. It didn't look like she slowed down, so I guess I didn't have anything.
Looking up at the pole, it seems as if they're taking the interrupter switch out. I met a man and a woman both dressed in bright orange and the man said that they were upgrading the system because more capacity was needed for the farm and the farmer is installing solar panels. It may be that the switch wouldn't cope with the load? Or maybe it's just a bad idea having something like that so close to solar generation (if it gets flipped, where does all the power go?).

The 20kV power line with the interrupter bypassed.

Look closely, the switch has been cut out of the circuit.

A little later, I saw the pole climber back up there to unbolt the switch assembly. I've not looked since, but I'd imagine it has been completely removed and strap cables put in between the two sides.

All of this was done without cutting the power. Perhaps the farmers would get agitated if they wanted to pull the plug for two days in a row?

My power

One thing that I wanted to do was to look to see why phase three of the three phase socket was dead.
Unfortunately, I think I have found the answer, and it isn't fixable.

What I can see, looking at that, is that it appears to be an old-fashioned three phase (three phases plus earth) that has had neutral bodged in. The neutral is the black screw-terminal block at the bottom. The main terminals appear to be Earth at the top, then the three phases. I'm just going to guess they're in order but, knowing how things are here...
The neutral is necessary for tapping off the normal 230V sockets. You basically run between one of the phases and neutral for that. You cannot run between a phase and earth, the trip switch will be like "aw hell NO!".

The wire that goes to the back kitchen (for the washing machine) then the kitchen (for the fridge/freezer) and finally to the three-phase socket that I'm using to run the kettle/toaster/microwave/etc (by tapping phase to neutral twice) is the one on the upper right.
Let's do a gory close-up.

Lo que veo es un problema. Or in English, what I see is a problem. What I see are four conductors. Clockwise from left, there's a red, then a blue, then a black tucked under the blue, and finally a yellow/green. Which implies that it's been wired up recycling some old-style three phase cable. The yellow/green is earth, the blue is neutral (I hope!), and red and black carry a phase each.
Which means that I expect to open up the switch under the sink and see... nothing at all attached to the third phase. And since I need five wires and it's a four-wire cable, this isn't something that's going to be fixable. At least, not without running my own three phase cable, drilling through the ceiling, passing it through and... I mean, I probably could do all of that - the part that concerns me is the drilling not the wiring, but my god, single phase cable was expensive enough. I don't want to know what some decent three phase would cost me.

But, more than that, what the hell is the point of a three phase socket without three phases? Three, it's important. The Holy Trinity. The number of wishes you get. The number of strikes you get. The number of wise monkeys. Or Magi. The number of primary colours. The number of Musketeers. The number of times until it works. The number of tries it took Microsoft to make a useful Windows. The number of times it took Acorn to make a useful Archimedes OS. The number of Fates controlling destiny. And the number of phases in a three phase freaking socket - clue in the name!

Uncharted suspension of belief

Okay, so the basic plotline is some dude what's a long long relation of Francis Drake gets roped into looking for Ferdinand Magellan's Manila galleon and tonnes of lost gold. Undiscovered for five hundred years.

Bloke figures out the clues that have eluded others through history. He finds a spectacularly obvious cove, with an equally obvious cave, and a sparkling also obvious place to dive in to enter this big cave where they are hidden. A cave that is open at the top. Directly above the wooden ships. The ships look a little worse for time, but they are mostly structurally intact, despite being in a humid atmosphere and rained upon for five hundred years. Wooden ships.

Oh, we're only getting started. They have settled down on a bank of sand so when the Big Bad turns up, she and her small crew (maybe a half dozen men) effortlessly dig underneath the ships to run straps to...

...okay, sit down if you aren't already. This transcends the ridiculous. They put big straps around the ships to attach to a lifting mechanism to hoist them up and out of their hiding place underneath big helicopters.

And, somehow, they manage to crash into each other for a length of time without the helicopters crashing (or rotor blades hitting each other), one survives hitting a big bit of rock jutting out of the sea, only shattering when the helicopter itself goes down (the rear rotor taken out by a cannonball). And, for reasons, the other galleon does a fairly decent drop onto the water from quite a height and then sinks - whereas in reality there's likely no wooden ship ever built that could withstand a drop like that.
But, then, these must be magical ships because... well... this sort of ship is roughly contemporary with The Mary Rose (15-something) and look at the trouble that it has taken to keep the remains of that ship in a useful state? The HMS Victory, something like 250 years younger, has had a massive amount of maintenance in her service life, including metal bracing in the early 19^th century, and was in such a state that the Admiralty wanted to break the ship apart to recycle the useful timbers. Instead it became something of a tourist attraction until it sank due to structural failure, then was raised and patched up but utterly rotten by this point. In the 1920s she was taken into dry dock as the hull was too rotten to stay afloat, and donations were solicited for an extensive restoration project, which was only partially done due to two world wars (and severe damage from a Luftwaffe bomb). After the WW2, the frame rotted, again. This restoration was finally finished in 2005 for the 200^th anniversary of Trafalgar. There have been more recent large scale renovations, especially given the stresses and movement and warping of the wood. The HMS Victory is currently covered in scaffolding in order that the planking installed in the 1980s be removed and replaced.
This is a younger wooden ship that is undergoing near-continual renovation, and yet we're supposed to believe that Magellan's galleons were somehow not a fetid pile of rotten mouldy bits?

It was too much. It crossed from "that's cool" right into "that's crazy, it would never". But, then, I guess the good guys and bad guys shooting at each other amidst a manky pile of mould and mushrooms just wouldn't have the same effect.

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