I came over all funny this afternoon and decided I had to clear out the little outhouse/shed where the boiler is. It's home to the lawn mower and other garden tools, but it also hadn't been emptied properly since we moved in and so it was good to take all the flower pots and bits of sheet metal, the old radiator and half a pallet out of there and give it a good sweep. This will probably have some unintended feng-shui-related consequence, so watch this space for sudden transformations in my fortune. I threw a bunch of stuff away and put everything else (other than many spiders, their webs and old egg sacs) back in a more orderly way. The tools could do with a clean and the lawn mower needs stray grass pulled out of it and to be given a wipe and some oil but I'm going to try to give the lawn another cut before it gets too cold and wet.
In amongst the stuff, I found a solar powered fairly light set that stopped working. So instead of looking it up on the internet, like a nerd, I took it apart to better ascertain how it works and whether there's anything salvageable. I hadn't thought about how they work before. It's one of those where a solar panel has a string of LED's attached to it and it collects sunlight during the day and when it gets dark the LED's turn on. Once I'd taken the back off, it was quite obvious how it works. There's a rechargeable battery in there (AA size but only 1.2V) and a little PCB with resistors and a capacitor and a chip. I guess the chip senses when it's light outside and charges the battery then and when it becomes too dark outside to charge switches the lights on using the battery's charge. Or something. I'm not really an electronics person but I like tinkering and reasoning on the basis of where wires come in and go out to. I don't have any sort of meter to tell where the problem was and whether the whole thing should just be junked. Wouldn't it be nice to have a workshop with all that sort of stuff in it. I don't think my little outhouse is quite big enough.
