An absurdly over-complicated project, Italian style

One reason for not doing more projects is the necessity to visit relatives. Fortunately the lovely Jackie is half Italian, so she has cousins to visit in Italy. One such cousin (Elena) very kindly let us stay in the house her which father Nello (now deceased) built. He was a mining engineer, and the house features a workshop underneath. I particularly liked that the entrance to the workshop from inside the house is down a marble staircase from the hall – classy!

Marble steps to the workshop (Carlo Scarpa style)

Once down there, the workshop area has several rooms, the largest part being about 15m long and 5m wide. I had major workshop envy.

The main workshop vista

Lathe corner.  That's quite some lathe under there!

But the piece de resistance, project-wise, is a concentrated solar water heating system which features a massive mirror array on a steerable mount, focussing the sun’s rays onto a blackened copper water coil, fed through its supporting pipes and conveying the heat back to a water tank in the workshop.

I’m not quite sure how the steering system was supposed to work; I couldn’t see anything to sense which way to turn the array, but the motors and mechanisms were all in place. To be fair, this system wasn’t a home build, but a commercial product, as you can see from the back view.

Nevertheless, it’s a monumental thing to install in the garden, and a grand ambition.
Sad to say, the whole thing was a bit of a flop – the tank turned out to be too small, and couldn’t sink enough heat; the concentrator coil boiled and ruptured, and the whole thing was a victim of its own effectiveness. By this time the old man was quite old, and he never repaired it, so now it stands as a decaying monument to marvellous ambition, thwarted by drab reality. At least it went out with a bang, though.