(re)visiting South Africa

This year late winter in southern Portugal saw the wettest weather is has seen in something like 20 years.

We made pretty quick work of the 5 tonnes (2.5 cords) of firewood that I had accumulated over last summer and by March it was apparent that we would probably need to get more wood to see us through untill the summer heat was enough to sustain the hot water tank heat from the solar vacuum tubes.

The rain was not a steady persistent soak, but rather downpours interspersed with bright sunlight yielding beautiful clouds and rainbows which we admired on our evening walks. 

Double rainbow from our house

I met an American last year who lives a couple of towns away from ours and who lived a couple of towns over from us in the USA (Topsfield, MA).  He also has a prolific catalog of songs that he can play on his acoustic guitar and so I have found an avenue to explore rediscovering music that I used to play in school and college.  He is a little older than me but our list of songs intersects quite well and his broad knowledge of folk songs has helped me to rediscover the list of songs that I lost somehow on the way.   We meet for a few hours a week and jam together and in some cases working a little on arrangements - though for the most part it is just to enjoy making music together.  

Evening sky in our town

Anne and I love hanging out in our small hamlet and to be honest our sense of inertia has been pretty strong.  Neither of us have really felt a strong urge to go anywhere other than our walks (most days), taking more pleasure in pottering around at home.  

Cumulus clouds on our evening walk

Friends we have met in the Algarve were going off on amazing tips to various exotic places and we had in turn been discussing plans of our own to visit either Namibia or Morocco with the expectation that we'd go to one this year and the other next year.  

By March though, it was looking as though neither of those trips would materialize this year.  We had had several conversations with our friends and family in South Africa leading up to these plans which led us to ask ourselves one evening why we shouldn't go to South Africa?  

To be honest this is another instance of not being fully adjusted to me being retired.  A 3 week trip to South Africa at short notice would have been unthinkable while I was working and we had found it hard to make trips to South Africa while I was working - leading to 2 gaps of 5 years followed by a gap of 7 years (with COVID) between visits.

So once the idea had taken hold and despite this nagging feeling that we wanted to just settle in at our new home, Anne got stuck into figuring out the best routes to use to make a trip to visit.  

We called our surprised family and friends to tell them that we'd made bookings for a few weeks time.  In retrospect the timing was not great for everyone but we were very happy that the adjustments that were needed to accommodate our trip in the midst of everyone's daily life were possible.

We spent a week first in England visiting our daughters and grandchildren.  This is always fun.  We slot into walking the children to school and having walks with our daughters and their dogs to the local coffee shops along the Thames.

A surprising sign along the river reminded me of British optimism.  The Emergency Throwline is in a locked box with a combination lock.  The rescuer on the banks of the river has to call a number to get the lock combination which opens to reveal a bag and rope and a 5 step process to inflate the bag and then throw it to the drowning person while remembering to hold onto the other end of the rope.

Thames rive life saver

 Luckily we never had to test how long a drowning person is able to wait for you to figure all of this out.

We took a trip into London with our daughters and their girls, leaving the younger boys at home with their dads.  Our grandchildren are getting so big.  We keep having these double-takes as we remember what we were doing when we were their age and their parents' ages.

London pedestrian bridge

 

My siblings all live in Gauteng and Mpumalanga and we had a week of catching up to do with my brothers and sister and their children (and grandchildren).

 

The ubiquitous rolling blackouts that left homes without electricity have more or less stopped.  It seems that government funds are being used to improve electricity supply reliability.  This is an area that was neglected for decades.  

 

Many people who had the means have installed solar panels which has meant that the regular funding from households paying for electricity has slowed down enough that there are rumors that the government will attempt to levy a tax on home solar electricity.  When I asked about this the idea was mostly met with skepticism mainly because of how hard it would be collect such a tax.

 

We were struck by the obvious problems with the road and water infrastructure in the small towns up there.  It turns out that this is a general problem in towns in South Africa where the municipalities have not kept up the maintenance of the water pipes and the roads over many years and these are starting to fall apart.

 

A very common sight at homes are these green tanks called "JoJo" tanks that collect water from the gutters and which are equipped with pumps that pump the water on demand into the house.  Most properties have several of these, often placed under the corners where down-pipes can feed them.

 

JoJo tank

 

Water supply on the other hand is harder to manage.  We heard that in some places the underground maps showing where the water pipes run and where joints are have been lost and pipe failures can cause loss of water to entire blocks for days.  The longest town-water interruption we heard about was 23 days but I'm guessing there are people who have had worse.

 

National roads are still in good shape but in many of the small towns the tar roads were severely damaged.

Pothole photo by Anne

The consensus was that all of these were simply the long term result of money intended for infrastructure being funneled into corrupt town and state officials.  

We heard that the mayor of a small town didn't live in that town, but had moved to an expensive home in a city 100 km away and that the really expensive looking homes in another town belonged to town councillors.

 

People in South Africa are quite amazing actually.  Despite the obvious problems, there is a lot of good humor and friendly banter.  One thing that was immediately apparent to me as someone who left there at the tail end of apartheid was the easy conversations happening across color and status lines.  When we left there at the end of white rule, society had been oppressed to the point where the rest of the population were required to show a great deal of deference to whites.  That has dissipated and although I suppose it is still present in some quarters, up in the North East I felt the change in how people engaged with one another.  Respectful and as equals.

 

That is not to say that there is no sense of threat over there.  My sister was quick to warn me not to walk in certain parts of their town and we were careful where we parked.  Petty crime and sometimes very threatening confrontations do happen with criminals.  I think what has changed there is that the privileged white population no longer enjoys the protections that they had under apartheid.  The crime is experienced equally by all races and it affects whites a lot more than it used to.

 

My grand-nephews were willing participants in light painting with my camera using a long exposure and we took turns to make images with each of them.

Alien life form light painting

 

After visiting my siblings we stopped in the Eastern Cape which included an amazing trip to the Winterberg mountains which are north of Makhanda (formerly Grahamstown).   A friend of mine owns some land there and has designed and built an amazing log cabin using the large poplar trees on his property.  He also has an observatory there from which he takes magnificent photographs of deep space.

Night sky and log cabin in the Winterberg

 

Grahamstown also shows the ravages of inefficient and corrupt governance.  The town has had multiple failures of their water infrastructure and outside the main roads, most of the in-town roads are full of really bad pot-holes.

 

There are wild donkeys that roam the streets now and rifle through trash bags if they find them and every day you have to slow down in your car to let the ambling cows cross the road.

Cattle in the road in Makhanda

We heard that in 2015 the town was voted the best municipality in the district with around 90 staff members.  There are now over 1000 staff in the municipality and not much to show for it excepting draining the city coffers.  

 

From Makhanda we traveled by car to Addo, a town on the way to Port Elizabeth.  We had booked an afternoon tour of the nearby Elephant park.  We were lucky to have booked off-season and mid-week so we ended up being the only people on the game drive.

 

Our guide was incredibly knowledgeable and he pointed out a number of animals that we would probably not have seen if we were on our own.

 

Two ostriches with their chicks

Lions resting in the shade in the late afternoon

Warthog and its piglet

 

Giraffe

 

Cape Buffalo

And so many elephants.

Elephant in the fading light

 

Most of the animal sightings were really up close.

Lion walking past our open tour bus

 

After Addo we drove along an inland route to Knysna, through some small towns that seem to be in much better repair than the previously visited small towns.  We had heard that some of these towns have taken it upon themselves to manage their own district properly and it was very evident.

Some of the towns seemed to have vacuum tube driven solar heat for hot water on every house in the poorer township which is likely from an efficient execution of a government program to provide hot water to poorer homes.

Township houses with solar heated water

We spent the night visiting friends in Knysna and then flew from George on a small plane to Cape Town for the last 10 days of our trip.

We ended up meeting with friends that I haven't seen for at least 12 years and reconnecting with people from my university days at UCT (University of Cape Town).  We also met Anne's friend who we had seen in Seville and other friends from our Grahamstown days. 

Driving home one evening from a movie night in the city,  I took a photo of the floodlit mountain from there.

Table mountain illuminated

My recent plans to gather together music that I have played and sung over the years inspired me to ask our friends in Cape Town who were hosting us if they could find a second guitar that would allow us to jam a bit.  We ended up playing a few songs off and on and then taking the guitar on a trip into the Cederberg which is a spectacular remote place a few hours drive north-west of Cape Town on the Namibia road.

Playing guitar outside our cottage in the Cederberg

 

We went on a couple of walks, the most impressive of which was a hike to the Cederberg arch.  The entire route is along corridors of the most amazing rock shapes - many of which have eerie human and animal shapes that at times make the place seem like a magical land where creatures have been turned to stone.

Cederberg arch

We also stopped at an area called the Stadsaal (Town Hall)

One of the many caves at Stadsaal

with amazing cavernous features, similarly mystical, made more so by the presence of some ancient San rock art nearby.

San rock art in the Cederberg

The Cederberg has very dark nights with very little light pollution and following a tip from my astro-photography friend I set up my camera one night to take 2 hours worth of photographs of 20sec each pointing the camera up at the milky way.  

The result is what is known as star trails.  The successive photographs each capture the orientation of the camera as the earth rotates and therefore captures the stars successively making a circular trail across the sky.  You combine all the photos with an astrophotography application on the computer afterwards.

Star trails in the Cederberg

We traveled back to Portugal incredibly happy that we had taken this journey.  There are so many people we love who we left for all those years.  We've decided to visit again soon.

Two days after arriving back we had the massive 11 hour power failure that affected Spain and Portugal.  During that evening I decided to redo the night sky star trails in the nothern hemisphere.  It was very dark that night.

The northern sky has a single star that is at astronomical north.  It amazes me that the southern sky doesn't have one that is bright enough to register and therefore you see a small circle of the stars that do shed enough light.

Northern star trails with candlelight in the house

 

So after being so reluctant to move from our new spot, we ended up going on quite an adventure.  One that hopefully we'll be able to repeat before too long.

 

Legionella, tech stuff and stepping out

It is deep into our second winter in Portugal.  We saw the tail end of last year's winter but got to experience a cold house with no hot water when we moved in so I felt we needed to be well prepared this time around.

I described our engine room and the solar heating for our water - at the time I mistakenly referred to the water heating array as photovoltaic when in fact it is an evacuated tube solar collector. 

The difference being that these vacuum tubes heat fluid that is passed over a small, hyper-heated metal tip at the top of each rather than by producing electricity that can be used to power a hot water element.

My concern as I tried to get familiar with the three pumps and how the water in our large water tank is heated was eased over the summer when the solar array had no trouble keeping our hot water at around 45ºC (113F) which was more than adequate for showers.

As we moved into fall I had a few different contractors come over to look at the water heating system to see how it could be improved.  I has bothered me that we have to light a fire in the kitchen stove to heat the water especially in the spring and fall when we are not getting enough heat from the solar tubes to keep the showers hot though it is not cool enough to need a fire burning in the kitchen.  

Anne and I have been so jaded from all of our previous months of travel that we have been reluctant to move around much and it took a forced trip to Lisbon to get South African passports renewed for Nick and me.  It got us to think about moving around a little more.  I had booked tickets soon after we arrived to see Jacob Collier in November in Lisbon and had an appointment to handle some administrative tasks for my residency permit in December. 

Jacob Collier concert

This forced us to travel to Lisbon a few times, with the added need to spend at least one night in Lisbon each time.  So we started to look into low-key places to visit while we there.

It turns out that going to Lisbon distance-wise is much like driving up to the White Mountains from our home in Boston (2hrs) or driving to Port Elizabeth from Grahamstown (ok, maybe a bit further than that) - two typical journeys that we were willing to make reasonably often when we lived there. 

Banksy museum

Because Portugal is so small these trips feel huge but we put on our American attitude about distances where we'd have no problem going from Boston to New York for a weekend (5-6 hours drive) so why hesitate to go to Lisbon?

We loved some of the parks and museums in Lisbon and now feel less intimidated about walking in the city or visiting to watch some culture when it  comes up.

And why not visit Seville for that matter?  One of Anne's best friends from our days in Grahamstown was visiting her sister in Madrid and we drove to Seville to meet her and spend time catching up the day after New Year's day.  

 Cindy is a fellow artist and has a son a little younger than the boys are.  It was great to visit the grand cathedral in Seville with her and to go out for a meal on the river before she had to return on the high-speed train to make her flight back home.

Returning from Seville put the heating situation back into focus.  Because the system we have is complicated, I could see the visiting plumber/heating person's brain shutting down when they saw it all and I would wait for the inevitable: "I don't really understand this system so I think you should install (a) a new electric boiler, (b) a heat pump or (c) photovoltaic cells to heat water on the roof".  

I guess I understand how this works - people don't want to take on something that is complicated and may end up costing them a lot of time, but it bothers me that the prices for these alternative systems are high and I'd rather find out how we can mitigate the specific problem in the short term and then hear a plan for how to improve it over time instead of just fork-lifting it all out and replacing it.

The hot water tank is enclosed in a room made out of insulated iron cladding and the tank itself has a large insulated cover on it.  The person who did our pre-inspection for the sale of the house said that the hot water tank can be fitted with an electrical element so I'm planning to open the room up and see if I can find where this fitting is and then get a plumber to just install the element and a thermostat.  If that works we can start to talk to him about upgrades along the lines that he prefers.  Anne is not enjoying how the air in the house deteriorates when we add wood to the fire so we will probably aim to switch that stove out in favor of something that will be less problematic with her asthma.

I mentioned in my previous post that Rob and Eurika visited from Melbourne. He described his sophisticated heating system and septic handling.  He does have a heat pump and is able to set things up so that he uses batteries during prime time and then get the solar array to work charging the batteries and providing electricity for the rest of the time.  Their septic system is amazing too,  designed to produce water for irrigation with all of their grey water and the outcome of processing the sewage being cycled back into watering the plants.  

I read about this and don't see that the septic arrangement is possible for us because you need a pretty large area for a septic system like this.  The solar electricity is feasible.  Portugal is almost 80% on renewable energy so our electricity is not very expensive but it would be nice to lower the need for electricity from the grid where we can.

I have become a little less tolerant of running the tank at 45ºC after the conversation about legionella with Rob so I’ve been working to keep the tank water on or above 55C which has meant more frequently having to light the fire even if it is warm out.

So now, in the dead of winter I have been stuck with a daily routing: come down in the morning to check that the fire still has glowing embers, get it burning again and then go outside to check the various temperatures (top of tank, stove generated heat, solar tube temperature) - I usually check the temperatures a few times during the day.  The under-floor heating and showers drain the heat from the tank, so we have leave the under the floor pump off if the tank temperature isn't higher than 55ºC.  

It's a pain having to make this trip outside a few times a day (and then again at night just before we go upstairs to get ready for bed).   If it is raining for a few days in succession as it has been for the last couple of weeks it becomes even more of a pain.

I remembered that a friend who managed a training/recreational retreat on an island with a lighthouse in Maine had given me a link to his notes on how he set up monitors for equipment and temperatures and controlled some of the electronics.  I dug it up in an email from a few years ago for some of the details - in particular the type of temperature sensor and how to store the data coming from them in a way that can be used to graph it.

This would be ideal, because being able to see what the temperature trends are over the course of a few days could help me decide when to turn on the pump for the underfloor heat and also to see how much heat is actually coming from the solar tubes (I had more or less decided that they are not doing much at all).

I paid about €18 for a small IoT (internet of things) device from Shelly to which you can attach an ad-on that will allow up to 5 temperature sensors (costing about €18 as well). 

The small red and black Shelly with add on

A bonus was that the Shelly device is intended for measuring electrical usage and has an electronic switch in it.  That tiny box has 2 wifi radios and is about the size of a regular matchbox so it is easy to install in an electrical encasing.  The 2 wifi radios allow you to use one of them for initial configuration and the other to connect to the home wifi so that it can push data to whatever you have set up to receive it.

It was a bit strange dusting off some of the  software tools that I used at work.  We used software that a colleague installed to graph test-bed performance. I installed it here to measure internet speeds and my internet router performance and so I was able to pull together the bits that I need to start graphing the water heating system as well.

I discovered that the heat from the solar tubes is not insignificant.  It looks like I should get a larger array.  It circulates fluid into the hot water tank close to the bottom of the tank where the temperatures are a bit lower and you can see in the screenshot of the graph below the yellow lines show how it has varied over the past week of mostly raining days and then again was doing better yesterday and today when the sun came out for a few hours.

The blue graph shows when the underfloor heating is on and the green graph is the temperature of the fluid returning to the tank from the floor.  It goes up to just under 30ºC - I usually turn it on in the morning and sometimes leave it on all day depending on how comfortable we are at home.

The Shelly control panel with the electronic switch

By Boston standards it is mild here but with the outside temperatures between 2ºC and 14ºC we find that our home is toasty with the woodstove going and the underfloor heating on.  Without the underfloor heating we have to use traditional heating from fans blowing over heated elements and so it is a much more comfortable heat if it comes from a warm floor.  

Not to mention that Anne loves to not wear shoes whenever possible.

Anne posing at our new gate with her Scatterlings of Africa design