The festival of well being, Poitiers
It was advertised in the local newspaper “La Nouvelle République” as La Fete de Bien Etre and I thought it would be a festival of people selling various remedies for problems that I did not know I had. So originally we were not going to go and then I saw that there were exhibitors from the eco fringe as well and we decided to try it.
Monday came and by 10 we were in Poitiers at “Les Arenes” and inside there were over 100 exhibitors showing everything from bottled water through healers to sellers of solar panels. We spoke with Energie 79 a company from Deux Sevres (that is the reason for the 79 as it is Department no. 79). They were selling a wood gasifying boiler from Poland and their own manufactured pellet burning boiler. For those that live locally they told me that they are able to deliver wood pellets from a lorry that blows the pellets into your pellet store. Also present were a number of people selling water storage and capture systems though I was not able to tell the difference between the ones on display and those sold by Leroy Merlin, except for the price of course.
One of the stalls was selling the newspaper that we had bought in at Nantclars – L’age de faire, so we bought another copy as the last was a good interesting read for only 50 centimes.
There were stalls selling food of various types and interestingly compared with the UK there was no focus on vegetarian food, in fact it was not mentioned and as we were leaving there was the heavenly smell of frying bacon. It was not in fact bacon but smoked turkey so perhaps my sense of smell had been destroyed.
Finally outside there was a stand of HS France who sell the multi-fuel stove from HS Tarn. It is very interesting buring wood chips, cereals, pellets and n fact anything which can be fed into a helical feed and burned in a small fire. The only things that stopped me buying one straight away was the price 12 000 euros plus tax and installation and if your electricity stops so does the heating.
Next blog is scheduled to be after the visit to the wood house exhibition in Angers this weekend.