The season is properly under way now – we opened the gardens on Friday and the first proper visitors arrived on the dot of opening time. The sunshine has helped, no doubt, and it’s wonderful to see the nursery so full of people.
The garden starts quietly in April and gets better from now on. Though it is early, there are plenty of gems for visitors, notably the pulsatillas which are in full flush on the scree garden. The little woodland corner is at its best, full of pulmonarias, hellebores, narcissus and oxslips. I’ll make this area much bigger one day.
The woodland corner
One of the many clumps of pulsatillas
And I’ve waited 10 years or so, but we now have our new hot water solar panels up and running – and what a clever bit of technology they are. Tonight I had a very hot bath fed from a storage tank heated by the sun to 65C. Yet the air temperature today only reached 15C. Want to know a little more….?
The solar panel is actually a set of vacuum tubes, each with a black finned tube running down the middle. These heat up in the sun and feed a mixture of water and anitfreeze to the storage tank (which replaced our old immersion tank) via a heat exchanger. The pump between the panel and tank only kicks in when the panel temperature is 2C higher than the tank. But get this. When the tank temp is below 50C, the hot water goes to our combi boiler to be brought up to normal tap temp of 55C (if the boiler is on). But when it’s above 50C the hot water goes straight to the taps. The whole thing is super-insulated so in the morning there is still a tank of very hot water from the previous day. It’s good – very good. We know it’s good because there’s a little display unit in the kitchen that tells us how hot the panels and the tank are. And if I fancy a bath I’ll have one – blissfully guilt free.
Payback period? About 5 years for us – we’re on oil here. Our supplier was Solar Flair in Warrington and I’d recommend them happily. Very helpful, prompt, careful and tidy.
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