In uk.d-i-y, Grunff wrote:

There you are! I was beginning to wonder where you'd vanished to.

Up the Wye Valley, looking after 40+ kids for two weeks. "Holiday" isn't
p'raps the most obvious word for it. d-i-y skills aplenty, mind, principally
of the sanitary variety - satisfying turn-the-flapper-in-the-syphon-round
so it works again, less satisfying retrieving Items part-flushed down the
crapper :-( More fun was the "bomb detonator": take one Woolies el-cheapo
cordless screwdriver, price 5.99; grind a good-enuff approximation
of 6mm hex flats onto the end of a piece of 8mm studding; place long
(threaded-rod-joining) nut with expoxied-on Piercing Poing onto other end
of rod, tape body of driver to wooden backing board with stack of plastic
corner blocks either side of nut-with-piercer, replace driver's built-in
switch with two singles joined to the Green&Blue and Orange&Brown pairs
of a sacrificial Cat5 cable, cause kiddies to hunt for Cat5 extenders
and Cat5 patchcords, and old metalclad plateswitch with same pairs of
other end of chopped Cat5 across its switched terminals. Place driver
up close and personal to large balloon with added custard-powder within.
Press switch: whirr, whirr, whirr, nut-with-piercer winds slowly along
threaded rod guided by corner blocks, whirr, whirr, nothings going to
happBANG. Shower of custard powder, satisfied kids.

Best moments of d-i-y-related light relief came from the fire alarm, which
went off (a) 4 times during the day in our absence with just the cooking
volunteers present, who reset the panel each time but didn't know to look
for the little LED on the detectors to tell us which one had gorn orf, as
opposed to just which zone had trigerred the alarm; (b) at 02:30 in the
morning - at least we could find the detector which was raising the alarm,
replace it with a spare, discover the spare wasn't working, replace with
a new working spare, sleep soundly having cleaned out large quantity of
dead insects from the detector-head which had been causing the alarm; and
(c) at 18:10-18:20 the next day - unclip sensor, ooh look there's Something
Moving around the cable-entry point, it's an insect of some sort, a
WASP? oh b****r surely not a wapsesnest in the attic!?, no, closer
examination shows it and the two others which came out in the next 10 mins
to be honeybees rather than waspen; presumably exploring their new locale
and (at least in the day) attracted by the little bit of daylight visible
through the smoke-detector screen. Fill up cable-entry hole with silicone
sealant to discourage further insect access, no more fire-allarum problems
for the remaining 10? days occupancy.

Ahh, the joys of intermittently-occupied multiple-user properties! This one
has a particularly ingeneous derangement for controlling the fire alarm:
there's a keyswitch which isolates (effectively, turns off) the fire alarum,
which can only be removed from the fire alarum panel in the "alarm on"
position, and is required to turn on the main contactor which turns on
the electric for the whole building and its outbuildings. Clever, eh?
This way, the fire alarm is off when the place is unoccupied (no-one
around to hear the alarm, all it would do is discharge the panel's
batteries in driving the bells), but it's infeasible to comfortably
occupy the property without turning on the fire alarm, at least if you
want any electricity! (And the circuits which keep the emergency lighting
and the fire-alarm's backup battery charged are pre-contactor, before you
ask, so those safety-related lead-acids are kept topped up even when the
place is unoccupied...)

Cheers, Stefek