More pointing

I finally had time this evening to get three buckets of pointing done up in the gallery. Yesterday I was in Nuremberg, Wednesday Bayern were playing Manchester and on Tuesday Dortmund were playing Real Madrid. Today there were no excuses. I have now more or less finished the third bag of the special pointing mortar. I'll use up the other two bags and after that I'll mix my own. I have enough sand, cement and Mariensteiner. I'll mix up a load of it dry in the mixer. I can carry that up to the gallery and then use the hand mixer above to mix it 'on demand'.

Other than pointing, today Niedermaier's men were back. This time to install a new sensor in the heating upstairs. The sensor measures the rate of flow of liquid in the solar modules. The advantage of this is that we can finally figure out how many kilowatts the modules are producing. Given that a litre of oil has about ten kilowatts, we can quite easily figure out how much oil we are saving. While they were busy installing, I saw that the back of the user interface LCD module on the heater has three RJ45 ports - meaning that it is intended that something is connected via network. I had a look on the Internet and saw that Solvis sells a netbox which connects to the heating over network. The netbox itself gets an IP address via DHCP from the local network. I'm not quite sure if the netbox itself gives the heater an IP address, but I fully intend to see what happens if I connect the heater to my laptop and see what happens over the ethernet port with wireshark.