Hindsight (and other improvements)

As we were driving off on our roadtrip to France there was a flurry of activity in our small hamlet.  One of our neighbors sent a security video to a local WhatsApp group from the previous night showing a man with a knife in his hand moving furtively up the long stairway to their back door.

Soon there were reports from around 5 homes in a small radius, that they had been robbed.

The intruder didn't get into the home that had caught him on video, but elsewhere people reported having had their rooms rifled through and money and jewelry stolen during the night.

When we originally moved into our home Anne had mused about why all the fences and gates were so high.   I told her that it was probably a privacy thing more than a security thing and we had asked and were told that although "gypsies" sometimes stole things like solar panels, in the past decade or two there had been no incidents in our town.  Gypsies (or the Romani) are a minority that have been persecuted in Europe and are often blamed as being indigent and criminal.  More recently (in 2010) laws have been enacted in Portugal to make it illegal to discriminate against them but they are still fairly widely described as a groups of people whose lifestyle promotes crime and delinquency.  

So not long after we arrived in Portugal, for good measure, I bought two wireless cameras and mounted one in the front and one in the back of the house as a deterrent to potential intruders.

Front view security camera image

While we were on our road-trip a neighbor visited the house regularly to water some of the plants but with the news that someone had broken into local homes, I kept an occasional eye on the video feeds from the cameras.  We didn't think much more about the incidents until a week or so after we came back from our trip.

I usually wake up before Anne in the mornings.  I go downstairs, open up the doors, make coffee and sit on the front porch or in the sitting room to read the news.  It is a quiet, peaceful way to start the day.

On this day I noticed that Anne's knitting bag had been emptied on the sofa where she usually sits.  It was unusual but I thought that maybe she had been looking for something in there before bed and had left it to  be repacked  in the morning.

When she came down she asked me why the hell I had thrown all her wool on the sofa!

It suddenly dawned on us that someone had been in our house the previous night.

The realization didn't trigger immediate panic but our sense of disquiet strengthened as the day progressed.

We called the GNR (Portuguese police) and two young cops came over and let us know that everything we had done relative to these intruders was wrong.  We felt a little offended but they explained that since we had touched some part of the windows or doors that they had gained access with, this meant that they wouldn't take any  fingerprints.  I read about this after they left and there are examples of criminal trial lawyers getting cases dismissed because of chain of evidence problems if the homeowner had touched the door or window that had been used to gain entry.

Yes, it also doesn't make a lot of sense to me since the owner's fingerprints will always be all over their property and the odd fingerprint would be the intruder, but there wasn't anything we could do. 

The intruder(s) had used a screwdriver or chisel to wedge in and force the suddenly fragile looking door lock on our sliding door.  I had also touched the door of the car that they had gained access into, but we hadn't locked the car which apparently also made it impossible for the police to follow up on the crime.  An unlocked car even if in our yard with a locked gate would not help our case.

The most alarming thing was that they had been in our study/music room while we were asleep.   

The study has a short wall separating it from our bedroom with no doors and there were some things that had been knocked off the shelf above my new guitar and left on the ground.  A couple of boxes from the shelf had been unpacked and repacked as they went through our stuff looking for valuables.

New guitar in our study/music room

We lost around €30 in loose change from the center console of the car and on a shelf in the house where we keep loose coins.  No expensive gear (camera, laptops, phones, musical equipment) was taken.  But we had this mental image of that guy from our neighbor's security footage with a knife in his hand standing just a few feet from our sleeping forms.

The camera at the back of the house had been installed low enough for someone to reach up and take it, which they had done.  In hindsight we could have done this a little better.  Of course if someone grabs a camera before it has uploaded its images and takes it out of wi-fi range there will be no footage to examine.

Afterward  we wondered if, when the objects dropped from the shelves it had maybe woken me.  Perhaps, not realizing why I had woken, I had taken a quick trip to the bathroom and back to the bed while they were still in the study?  We thought that this might be the reason that they left without repacking the wool in the bag at the sofa.  All of the other boxes and Anne's handbag had been searched carefully and then vaguely repacked.

Not long after this there were a few other robberies in the area and about a month or two later there were news stories about three separate arrests that had happened in our area.  I don't think they were all Romani either.

Of course this has resulted in some extra thinking about how to secure things better for the future.  We have metal storm shutters that we had never closed and it turns out that storms are just one of their functions.  They really do secure the windows and sliding doors.  People also use them to keep the sun out of the south facing side of their houses and so we have changed our nighttime ritual to include locking the shutters downstairs.  A number of homes in Portugal have electric or manual metal blinds that roll down to block the sun and secure the windows and doors but those would be expensive to install even though they make for a less irritating evening routine.

I also bought a few motion and vibration sensors to put on the downstairs windows with built in alarms so that we and any intruder will get a loud alarm if the window or door are bumped or opened.

I also replaced the original cameras with two that are mounted out of reach and that write their captured video to a hub in the house rather than first on an SD card and then in the cloud.

It has been a couple of months now and we are still a little jumpy about our security but I think we have enough in place to seriously discourage another intrusion. 

* * * * * *

Over the next couple of months of the summer we started to implement a plan to improve the heating system.

Kitchen wood stove

I had gone to great lengths to document and understand the interaction between the vacuum tube solar water heating system in the back and the wood stove in the kitchen that supplemented the solar heat during the winter.

This past winter we had struggled more than a bit with smoke in the house and Anne's asthma.  We had had a chimney sweep clean both the kitchen wood stove and the small one in the sitting room.  I had also replaced the seals at the top of the kitchen stove but every time I lit the stove it let smoke out until it was pretty hot and there was a good draw from the chimney.  I had to resort to warming the chimney with a hair dryer to mitigate the smoke when the fire had to be started from scratch.

Anne said emphatically that she couldn't have another winter without clean air in the house so we had a local contractor who had rebuilt our gate come with his crew to remove the stove.  It was heavy but luckily the previous owner had mounted it on a wheeled base and they ended up wheeling it out onto the porch and into the back of their van.  I had tried to sell it in Facebook marketplace but we settled for getting a discount on the construction work and our contractor now has the stove to sell to someone over time.

As they were removing the chimney, one of the contractors showed me the elbow joint that went through the wall to the outside chimney pipe.  It was built with a 90º angle and had become completely packed with creosote.   It explained all the smoke and also made us wonder how the chimney sweep had missed this detail and how, in hindsight I hadn't thought to check that too.  

We had already decided that the wood burning kitchen stove was not really optimal so this discovery didn't prompt us to change our mind about removing the stove.  We used 6 tonnes (3 cords) of wood last winter at €160 per tonne and we believe that an efficient electric stove will cost less to run and be much cleaner burning than wood.

The next step after getting the stove was to improve the water heating and find a replacement heat source for the hot water tank during the winter.

I came across a Solar installation/maintenance company that was willing to take a look at our engine room and the complicated pumps that we have.  We decided on an approach that has turned out to be pretty good.

The first thing was the 2000l (530 gallons)  tank for water that we had.  The vacuum solar tubes were not really keeping it hot enough in the spring and autumn or when we had more than just the two of us using the hot water.  We had used the kitchen wood stove a few times in late May and early June to get the water heat up for us and visitors.

2000l (530 gallon) tank with insulation sleeve

I took the side off the "engine room" to give the installation team room to maneuver and they disconnected the tank and dropped it with the intention of cutting it up and removing it after their installation.

2000l tank ready to be taken away

I bought an 800l (210 gallon) water tank with coils inside it for the underfloor heating, the vacuum solar heat and our domestic hot water.  We also ordered a heat pump to heat the tank.

Before we did the installation of the 800l tank the graph of the heating process shows the daytime solar heat not really recovering the heat needed to keep the 2000l tank above 45ºC (113F).

The yellow in the top graph is solar heating and the red is the tank temperature

 

 

Note that the green/yellow graph below shows the daytime temperature variation in the shade - 25ºC (77F) at night and 35ºC (95F) at noon.  This was August.

After the 800l tank was installed the solar heating was making a more pronounced effect on the tank water temperature.

Tank temperature response to the solar heat is more immediate than before

The heat-pump has a controller that is set to only activate if the outside temperature goes below 25ºC and will heat the water in the tank to 50ºC (122F) in Spring and Autumn and 55ºC (130F) in the winter (Jan/Feb) when the underfloor heating is on.

The underfloor water pump is also programmed to go on if the outside temperature falls below 15ºC (59F) but I expect I'll be tweaking that as we figure out the optimal start and end to the underfloor heat demand.

The cost of all of these changes was fairly high but we expect it will pay for itself over time.  

Brochure illustration

The installation technician also pointed out something about legionella that had not occurred to me when I wrote about it before.

These modern tanks, intended for use with water heating systems like solar panels or wood stoves, have a large body of heated water in them, but the water that actually circulates through to the solar tubes, underfloor and to the domestic hot water is all in a closed system of pipes that loop through the main enclosure.  The loop for hot water for showers etc comes in at the bottom directly from the town water supply and loops through the heated water and comes out hot at the top.  The water in this loop is never open to the air so there is no chance of the legionella bacteria proliferating in there.  With the heatpump in action the point is more or less moot, but in the summer when we won't use the heat pump at all, the fact that the solar tubes keep the temperature at around 45ºC is no longer concerning. 

We have been thinking of using photo-voltaic solar energy for electrical power but Portugal recently allowed their tax break to expire so now instead of paying 6% tax on panels, inverters and batteries, we will have to pay 24%.  We have decided to wait until 2027 before we look again at solar power for the house in case they re-introduce an incentive for solar electricity for homes.

We are looking forward to seeing how the heating of the home works this winter and Anne has said a few times how relieved she is that we won't be burning wood as often as before.  It will be interesting too to see how the electric stove and heat pump costs compare to buying all the wood we needed.  The price of wood just went up by €20 a tonne which may help to justify our choices.

Anne in the engine room with the heat pump outside and the insulated 800l tank to her left

We will still use the little wood stove in the sitting room for dreary rainy nights every now and again.  

Wood stove and the Australian series "Bump" queued up on TV

 At least this stove has never leaked smoke into the house.

Road trip to France part 2 (coming home)

The first stop on our way back was a quick stop at a hotel in Santa Maria de Solius.   There was a lovely swimming pool which we were happy to see after the three and a half hour drive from Arles.

Our next stop was the town of Reus, in Spain which is the birthplace of Antoni Gaudi.  We stopped at the very interesting Gaudi Museum - we had decided on this trip to avoid the tourist traps of Madrid and Barcelona so we bypassed both of them and this was a good way to get some exposure to Gaudi's work.  We'll visit again in the winter when the tourist population is down and when we are less likely to be targeted by local protestors of the tourist invasion. 

The museum is lovely and has a great audio tour, although we watched the introductory film almost all the way through listening to the music without realizing that there was narration going on in the earpieces that we had hanging around our necks!

Anne in the first auditorium

After the Gaudi museum we visited Casa Navas which is a famous house of a rich aristocrat from the town.

Casa Navas entrance hall from above

The architect who designed the house used a style that Gaudi elaborated on in Barcelona with his famous buildings.  Gaudi had been one of his students.

I found the stories about the Spanish Civil War (the town was bombed by Nationalists and this house was quite severely damaged) and also the evidence of the desire for independence of Catalonia which we saw in Costa Brava and here very interesting.  I guess I need to read more about it.

We had a few short stops in  Spain on the way back.  The first we realized was going to be very hot and had a 7pm check-in time.  The summer heatwave was in full swing and this was inland with no cooling and was a shared apartment.  So we booked another at the last minute in Benicasim which turned out to be lovely,  It was a short distance to a beach and we were able to wash our clothes and cool down in the heat.

We had arrived quite late and had a lunch date with a friend in Alicante so we weren't able to really settle in there for more than just the overnight.

The apartment had some interesting deco.

We left fairly early and met our friend in the apartment that she and her husband have in Alicante with a beautiful sea view out from their porch.

View from the apartment.

She is Iranian and we had a very informative conversation with her about the history and tragedy of that part of the world.  There is so much to learn and it is incredible how two-dimensional and paper-thin our knowledge of these really ancient places is, where some of the most profound ideas in chemistry, mathematics and philosophy originated.

After stopping in Alicante we drove for a few hours to  Orihuela where we stayed in a tiny AirBnb for the night.

Orihuela AirBnb rooftop - photo by Anne

We were into the last week of our trip and these short stops were really nothing more than sleepovers and a quick stopover at the local beach, but it was good to discover some of these places for future visits.  

Our next stop was Málaga after driving through more of the tunnels and past the unsightly plastic covered vegetable agriculture called the "Mar de plástico". This "plastic sea" has brought tons of money into Spain and France but they are unsightly and seemingly quite harmful pollutants.

Plastic covered vegetable agriculture

The entrance into Málaga is very scenic through a number of low mountains.  Anne had booked us into a hotel for 2 nights as a birthday present so that we could explore the city. 

The very friendly receptionist gave us our room key and interrupted our apologetic reference to the quality of our Spanish.  When she saw that we were from Portugal she explained that the Spanish love Portugal because it is Spain's sister and has never invaded Spain.  We thought this was a great take on history, as we have experienced numerous discussions to the contrary.

We settled in and walked to find a restaurant for dinner and were greeted by some unusual wall art on the building nearby depicting what looked like a racoon and some rats and squirrels trying to escape from certain death above the bones of friends who hadn't made it.

Bones below some desperate creatures

 We planned to visit some landmarks on our first full day there and were quite enchanted by the city streets and old buildings.

We stopped to admire a large cathedral before making our way towards a Moorish castle called Alcazaba which featured some lovely architecture

Reflecting pool in the Moorish castle - photo by Anne

and gave us a great view of the city harbor.

View of Málaga harbor from Alcazaba

Our daughter had told us that we could find a secret door at the bottom of the tower associated with the castle but we decided not to visit it because we had a fairly full day ahead that included a visit to the Picasso museum.

We stopped to look at the Roman Theater where we enjoyed some a capella  singing in the street and a harpist at the castle gate.
 

a capella sinnger - photo by Anne

The Roman Theater was not as impressive as the one we had seen in Arles.  This one was also built in the 1st Century but was only discovered in 1951 after having been buried for many centuries.

Roman Theater in Málaga

We decided to stop at an impressive cathedral with the equally impressive name.

Santa Iglesia Catedral Basílica de la Encarnación de Málaga

 

The Cathedral contains a beautiful centerpiece which was in the process of being mopped and dusted.

Some dusting and cleaning in the church.

 

 

 

 

 

There are many beautiful wood carvings of saints in the three tiered 44 seat Baroque choir section.  The carvings are intricate and depict saints of Málaga and other religious scenes.  Anne noticed a woman warrior carving but we couldn't find much information about who she was or what the scene was depicting.

The sword in her hand is in the eye of the apparently severed head of a man.  Searching for a possible explanation of this figure was not very helpful.  However, after I posted that I had given up trying to find out who this statue depicted, my daughter sent me the following and said she had found it with a simple google search!

Biblical Origin: The story comes from the Old Testament Apocrypha and depicts Judith, a virtuous widow, who saves her people by seducing and then beheading the Assyrian general Holofernes.
Symbolism: The story is often interpreted as a symbol of courage, female strength, and the triumph of a just cause over tyranny.

 

 

Saint Judith with a sword in the eye of a defeated man - photo by Anne

 

The Pablo Picasso museum was an important stop for us in the city.  

 Pablo Picasso was born in Málaga and his mother, whom he adored, lived there all of her life.

We were particularly impressed by the large print machine he used for printmaking that was on display in the museum.

Picasso's printmaking press - photo by Anne

 

We saw some interesting images from exhibitions of surreal painters of the time and, of course drawings of Picasso's include one of his mother.

Drawing by Picasso of his mother - photo by Anne

Anne has conflicted feelings about him because he didn't treat women well, but he is a towering figure in art.  There were photos and commentary displayed in a timeline of his life.  He lived in tumultuous times, through both world wars and was a force in art for many decades.

The basement of the museum is an archaeological site containing walls and artifacts from Phoenician Roman times extending back to 300 or 400 years BCE.

A colorful market in Málaga

We had an evening meal at a lovely restaurant with waiters who were very friendly and entertaining.  The waiters told us of a cafe that made the most amazing churros and said that we should make our way there early the next morning because it is a very popular place.

We were not disappointed.  We had a short wait when we got there at about 8:15am and were served delicious churros with chocolate dip.

It was a straight shot from Málaga to our home.  About a four and a half hour drive and back into the routines of our normal life.  

We were due to be surprised to discover a late night intruder who stopped by to rifle through our things and clear out all the loose money we had, which has shaken our complacency and prompted us to take more of an interest in security, keeping our house shuttered at night and when we are away.  More about that next time.