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 Anne 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, but that in the past decade or two there had been no incidents in our town. Of course 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 still fairly widely described as a groups of people whose lifestyle promotes crime and delinquency.
So not long after we arrived in Portugak, 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.
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| Front view security camera image |
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.
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| 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 the odd coins. No expensive gear (camera, laptops, phones, musical equipment) were 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 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 a noise had woken me, 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 only 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 on intrusion attempts.
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.
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| Kitchen wood stove |
This past winter we had struggled more than a bit with smoke in the house and Anne's asthma even though 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 there was a good draw from the chimney. I had to resort to warming the chimney with a hair dryer to mitigate the smoke if 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 ended up 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 gave it some thought but had already decided that the wood burning kitchen stove was not really optimal - we used 6 tonnes 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 what we had.
The next step after getting the stove was to improve the water heating and find a replacement heat source for the tank during the winter.
I came across a Solar installation/maintenance company that was willing to take a look at what we have and we decided on an approach that has turned out to be pretty good.
The first thing was the tank for water that we had was 2000l (530 gallons) in size which the vacuum solar tubes were not really heating well enough in the spring and autumn or when we had more than just the two of us using the hot water.
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| 2000l (530 gallon) tank with insulation sleeve |
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| 2000l tank ready to be taken away |
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).
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| 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.
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| Tank temperature response to the solar heat is more immediate than before |
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.
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| Brochure illustration |
The installation technician also pointed out something that I hadn't thought of 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 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.
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| 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.
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| Wood stove and the Australian series "Bump" queued up on TV |
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