One final repeat of this week’s set today:
And I managed to swim the entire set without too much pain. I only had one rep over 49s, which feels pretty good. So, as I mentioned yesterday next week I shall drop the target time to 49.5s and take it from there.
USRPT distance this year: 146,350m
Total distance this year: 150,700m
Same USRPT set as earlier in the week today, and it went pretty well. All twenty-four reps completed under the 50s target time. I’ll do it once more tomorrow, then reduce the target time to 49.5s on Monday.
USRPT distance this year: 144,550m
Total distance this year: 148,900m
Yes, yes, I know… I’ve not finished the first one yet. But this is just a bit of preliminary planning. This week we’ve had a new track put in to reach the barn we’re having converted to a holiday home:
I have a plan to add a “guest observatory” on the south (right hand side) of the track, but it will need power, so before laying the track I ensured we had ducting with a drawstring to pull a power cable through.
The intended site of the observatory is pretty much where this pile of rubble is now.
That’s about the limit of what I intend to do for the time being however. There’s plenty of other stuff to get done first.
Interesting day today. Generally when I swim on Tuesdays the pool is quite busy, but it was completely empty today. Two other swimmers arrived a little later and both started swimming lengths with tumble turns which is quite unusual. Must be the first time outside the swimming club training sessions that I’ve seen more than one other person in the pool who is doing it.
Anyhow, same session as yesterday, and the same result. For the moment I think I should be happy with that.
USRPT distance this year: 142,750m
Total distance this year: 147,100m
Same set as Friday, but this time I completed it. I think I’m going to swim it a few more times before making it harder. And quite how I make it harder is something I need to think about now. Perhaps twenty seconds is sufficient for a teenager to recover, but for someone in their fifties who hasn’t swum all their life, perhaps it’s asking a bit much. Further consideration required, I think.
USRPT distance this year: 140,950m
Total distance this year: 145,300m
Progress is still slow whilst I wait for more bits and pieces to arrive.
I’ve ordered an HP EliteDesk Mini to try out as a “pier-top” machine and weatherproof boxes for each pier which will contain most of the electrical stuff on each.
Weatherproof ABS boxes are relatively easy to find as long as you want solid doors, but because it’s sometimes reassuring to be able to see inside I was looking for ones with clear doors. The only source I found for boxes a convenient size for my pier was on Ebay. They’ve not arrived yet however.
I’ve also been running cabling from each pier to the warm room. I have three runs of 2.5mm “twin and earth” to each pier, the thinking being that I can either use two runs for the 12V supply and the other for a 240V spur, or the other way around with a 240V ring. The cable should be ok for up to 25A and I really can’t imagine I’ll be needing that for either.
Some data cables are also in place, too. From the two mounts furthest from the warm room I’ve pulled through a 5m HDMI cable, followed by a 5m USB2 cable, and then two lengths of cat5e (somewhat longer, to allow me to decide where the hub is going to go later). I’ve not done the last pier yet because I’ve been waiting for a shorter HDMI cable to arrive and I’m pulling them through in order of size of the plugs in the hope that will be the easiest way to do it. That last cable has in fact now arrived, but the weather has been so unpleasant here over the last twenty-four hours that I’ve not felt like going out and finishing off.
Because I’ve been struggling for some time with my current USRPT set I’ve decided to drop back to the previous turnaround time and see how things go. So I’m back to:
I had two failed reps, which didn’t impress me too much, but I think need to start building from here again.
USRPT distance this year: 139,150m
Total distance this year: 143,500m
Well, today was supposed to be another USRPT set but it was just awful. This week I have really started struggling and I’m not sure I can fully explain why. In the end I abandoned trying to do the USRPT set and just swam the remaining reps on a slightly more relaxed turnaround time.
USRPT distance this year: 137,450m
Total distance this year: 141,800m
I couldn’t swim at my usual time today as the pool was unavailable, so I had to go this evening. I’ve been sniffly all day and feel as if I’m getting a bit of a sore throat, so perhaps that explains why I wasn’t really on my game yesterday.
Today was even worse. I really couldn’t find a rhythm and struggled from quite early on. I did get through the set with a number of failures, but it was really messy and I wasn’t at all happy with it.
USRPT distance this year: 137,450m
Total distance this year: 140,000m
So it comes to that time when I need to think about power. In particular 12V (or 13.8V) power to the piers to supply most of the kit that will be on them.
Initially my thoughts were to have a single PSU in the warm room to provide power everywhere, but I wasn’t really happy with a single PSU failure hitting all the mounts. That meant having multiple PSUs either in the warm room or at the pier, but multiple PSUs also seems a bit wasteful (and consumes a lot of space) and if they were on the pier then ensuring they were adequately ventilated whilst keeping the dew away from them was going to be a challenge.
Then someone suggested to me that I could use a battery wired in parallel with a PSU with fuses each side of the battery to protect everything and switches to allow circuits to be disconnected. It’s not a cheap solution, but it does mean the battery could power everything, possibly for several hours, in the event that the PSU died. I’d need to turn down the voltage a little, perhaps to 13.5V or 13.6V, but that should be fine.
An alternative suggestion was to just get two lower-rated PSUs and power some stuff from one and some from the other. That would probably cost the same as the single PSU solution without the battery.
So for the time being I’m dithering a little. I do need to make a decision very soon though.
Another decision that I think I’ve settled is cabling for the 12V supply. I’m fairly sure now that for the runs from the PSU to the pier I’ll use 2.5mm “twin and earth” as used for mains house wiring (and I have quite a bit lying about). A single run through the ducting should be good to carry perhaps as much as 25A, which should be more than I ever expect to need. At the pier I can split it into multicore cables to feed the mount and other kit. The alternative would seem to be to use a couple of runs of multicore automotive cable capable of carrying around 11A and balance the load across each, which seems a bit more awkward really.
So, need to get that power supply decision made…
