Category: Bongo

  • Remain calm – we may be entering a pocket of turbulence

    A bumpy couple of days, but things seem to be sorting themselves out a bit more now.  Our rented house isn’t delivering a fond farewell, with a broken washing machine and running out of oil for the Aga being recent highlights.

    Thankfully I got some more kerosene from the incredibly nice and helpful people at Regional Oil in Mungret on the way back from work today, so we should have a warm kitchen again tomorrow.

    The landlord has arranged for a new (yes, I suspect ‘different’ might be a better description) washing machine to arrive tomorrow, which would be great if it happened.

    I wasn’t able to get hold of the builder today, so hopefully that’s because he was so busy putting the finishing touches to our house, but I fear not.  Down to 19 days before we need to leave our current residence.

    I did a bit more wiring work on the Bongo, so it now has this mini fan heater installed.  I fitted a 1000W inverter behind the glove box and connected it directly to the leisure battery with some fairly beefy cables, so it can take a reasonable load before melting wires.  Handily, the inverter’s fitted next to the recirculation vent for the air conditioning, so keeping it cool should be straightforward if the need ever arises.

    The dehumidifier arrived today, so it’s getting a trial run in this cold house before moving onto smaller, more humid, pastures soon.  I left it working away for a couple of hours in the hallway and it’d collected about 150ml of water, so it’s not doing badly.  It’s a desiccant model, so should perform well in the cold, and it’s relatively quiet and energy-efficient compared with the compressor-based models.

    Irritatingly, it doesn’t have a Relative Humidity display, so maybe I’ll deploy part of my weather station indoors to measure the levels for a while, as I haven’t got around to fixing the whole lot outside yet, but have at least wired up this humidity sensor to it over I2C.

  • And I will try-y-y-y to fix you…

    The Bongo has been repaired.  It was as simple as paying an extortionate amount of money for a second-hand fuel pump, having it shipped over to Ireland to a mechanic, then paying them an only-slightly-less upsetting wodge of cash to rip out the old and install the new.  So far, so good…

    We went to visit the house yesterday evening to check on the renovation progress.  I was warned by someone I’ve been working with that you can’t trust Irish builders, but the roofs have both been replaced, and work has really moved on in general.  I would reference the second (and easily worst IMHO) episode of Fawlty Towers at this point, but don’t want to tempt fate as they’ve got an internal wall to knock down and a doorway to seal up yet.

    Anyway, overall I’m very impressed, and they even put up some tinsel on the scaffolding 🙂

  • The Bongo is sick

    The Bongo is sick

    Following a week of it not wanting to set off first thing in the morning (I’d assumed it was in sympathy with me, or down to the cold weather), the Bongo became progressively more ill.  I’m no mechanic, so I took it to one.  They tried it out for a couple of days but couldn’t find anything wrong, so I went to pick it up.

    Seconds after I’d started it to go home, the juddering commenced, followed by coughing, shivering, then a funereal silence.  Feeling perversely pleased that I’d demonstrated that I wasn’t making it up, I left the Bongo with them to be further examined.

    The next day I got a call saying that the reason it’d been misbehaving was that the fuel pump had a big leak.  Apparently this causes issues with fuel not getting into the engine, which seems perfectly logical.  The mechanic slightly scared me when he said that it’d been squirting cold diesel onto the outside of the hot engine for some time.  I got confirmation that it would be dangerous to drive it, so it’s stranded now.

    At least the diagnosis tallies with the increased smell of diesel I’d noticed a while ago.  On reflection, my purchase of one of those “magic tree” car air fresheners probably wasn’t the best response to that warning sign.

    Now to source a working fuel pump for a 20 year old Japanese import vehicle, and then coax the mechanic into having a go at fitting it…