HOW OLL SAVED THE CFZ FISHES

After I bellyached at length about the power outage yesterday, I was touched by the number of emails we received from people concerned that the CFZ fishes and herps might have suffered, or even met their demise, as a result of this.

However it was Oll Lewis, the Welsh dude who lives in my spare bedroom, who also happens to be the CFZ ecologist, and Richard's assistant as far as looking after the CFZ menagerie is concerned, who saved the day (after I had completely forgotten about the whole thing until the night before), and here he is to tell you how..


Row, Row Fight The Powah

There are only two drawbacks with living in a nice little village in one of the most rural areas in Britain; one is that if you want to catch a film in a cinema you have to be prepared to mount the sort of expedition Robert Falcon Scott would have thought twice about and the other is that you tend to suffer from short power cuts due to the antiquated mains power distribution. These cuts last for a minute at most but play havoc with timer switches and if you are not working on a laptop computer you have to save your work every 5 minutes or risk loosing it if there’s a power cut. Having lived in small towns and in cities my whole life previous to coming to Woolsery all this took me by surprise that there still existed places where you couldn’t rely on an uninterrupted power supply in Britain in the 21st century, after all if certain films staring Michael J. Fox are to be believed we are only three years away from flying cars and hover-boards.

Well, where as the prophecies of ‘Back To The Future 2’ were wildly optimistic, we received a letter last week with the good news that Woolsery’s power cables were finally going to be upgraded. The drawback being that the power would be off from 9.00 until 17.00.

A small price to pay some might say, well not if you have seven turtles, five rare amphibians and two large tanks of tropical fish to keep warm during one of the coldest winters in Britain since the 1970s!

All our heating systems in the conservatory and the museum, where the animals are housed work off Electrical mains power (as most aquariums do) and Woolsery doesn’t have a piped gas supply, but thankfully we do have a Rayburn that is powered by a tank of heating oil. In order retain heat I raided the house’s supply of towels and blankets to wrap around the tanks similar to the way one would lad a boiler and hot water pipes. Using at least two layers around each tank this worked remarkably well, meaning that I would only have to replace a bucketful of water in each tank with some that had been heated by the Rayburn twice for each tank during the day to keep the water temperatures between 24-28 degrees. So if you are ever faced with a similar power outage you know what to do to save your animals from any discomfort, be sure to check the temperatures every half hour though, just in case.

Hopefully, now the power-lines have been upgraded, that’s the last long duration power outage we’ll see for a good while.