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  2. Cant really see it having any detrimental effect on a decent sized body of water in the ground. I might get to find out at some point. Building a small retaining wall but just dropping some ducting in so i have the option to do it in future without digging stuff up again. I guess the primary advantage is a more consistent COP and the temp of the water wont really ever change, whereas ASHP has to cope when it gets to minus 10. (or minus 15 as per last winter.) But the economics may not stack up as you say even with excellent COP.
  3. Tbf its always had fibres in for me. Little like fibreglass ones. I dont know if there are certain ones which are worse. Agilia horizontal is what I used to use but gone with another firm since and use their version of it
  4. Today
  5. That is for very special circumstances... a bridge, a block of flats. I've not done or seen one for decades.... commercial or home. (on big jobs we had a lab that did slump tests and took cubes for testing, and so did the supplier. The problem will have been the fibres. Adding them to an 'easy flowing' mix will seriously stiffen the whole thing. A vibrating poker would have made it run but obv that wasn't to hand. I've gone off fibres recently because they seem to stick together in great clumps more than they used to, and the handling issue. But it also looks very dry indeed. How did it even reach there? You have nicely laid mesh so cracking shouldn't be a problem... if they get the mix right. In fact your photo is an example of doing things right, apart from the pile of mess in the middle. Cemex you say! Worth noting.
  6. Out of interest, in addition to the architectural electrical drawings mentioned above, in France you also need schematic electrical drawings. They're normally drawn by the electrical contractor as part of their contract. Without it the Electrical Inspectorate won't test the installation and, without their certificate, you don't get a mains connection. It's also used for subsequent maintenance. Example below for 1 row of my consumer unit (still in draft, which is why there's a duplicate D2.1):
  7. Welcome, I'm new too, and your experience with HA is very interesting to me as that's a new thing I've been getting into along with the whole HomeLab thing (as I'm already a techy who hasn't enough time to program since I bought this shell of a house :-D). Mine is very old, bloody old, and old depending on where you are standing. It has no heating and needs complete renovation. So I also have an opportunity to go full home automation. So far I have a couple of mini PCs (Proxmox nodes: VE + PBS) with remote access to HA via Pangolin on a cheap VPS (over mobile broadband which costs £8/m for 50GB if you know how to get the offer and is plenty as we're not living there yet). I'll be adding another node or two at some point and services in Docker, VMs or containers as and when. Although I'm new to this I know tech so happy to explain that gobbledegook and answer questions on this side where I can if anyone is interested. The HA forum is gold btw, as is Mastodon (social media without the torture and manipulation). So far I've just got HAOS with Smart Meter integrated and power monitoring plugs, a few add-ons, plus a dozen ZigBee Temp and Humidity monitors calibrated and ready to go into every room because damp is rife in this property and it will help to monitor this before and during each improvement. Renovation: we'll well be replastering/insulating throughout, considering Heat Pump / AC options, solar with batteries (if you only do one I hear batteries is best but just do both and get as many panels as you can fit on the roof. I have panels and lithium batteries on my boat and they run everything for more than half the year. You'll get all year round benefits from batteries in a house using off-peak tariffs. Forget FIT I'm told. Back to HA. I'd love to hear what you have done so far and what you plan. I'm wondering what wiring to do when we get to that point. I will want full fall back to manual in anything we have, but keen to have monitoring and remote control, some automation etc around all things. We're off the gas grid BTW, and having lived in a boat (12 years and counting) I do like being as off grid as possible.
  8. I’ve learnt a great deal. 1) forget ground bearing slabs and go block and beam 2) if going with ground bearing slabs. Get the manpower in and use a conventional concrete mix. Using SCC is like having a partner with a split personality. You never know how it’s going to go. Well. That’s my experience of it.
  9. Just to confuse things. I recently let someone have a stack of preloved purlins. I did a swapsy so don't know the value I might have got... or had to just give it away. So have a look on Marketplace etc and you might be lucky. With Z rails it would be good practice to alternate the way they were pointing, then it is a bit stiffer. Without knowing your construction, if you could fix a heavyish timber wall plate you could coach bolt down, and add some straps fixed down the walls.
  10. Our house is around 50 years old and we added a garage 25 years ago, to the side, which unfortunately meant it is extremely difficult to get to the roof for any maintenance. But it has come to the point when we knew we had to bite the bullet and get it done. After a quote for around 10k, and a scaffolding quote for £2.5k, we eventually found a company who has put up scaffolding for less than £1k. We have it for 6 weeks to do the job ourselves. The job is to paint the woodwork with 2 or 3 coats of dark brown, after making sure it is all secure and not rotting. (we don't think it is) Job should take an hour at most for 2 coats. Then, the main job, is to sort out the pointing under the roof tiles, which have broken up and in places dropped out. The plan is to clean out any loose material, paint with PVA and water mix, to stabilise the cement. Then point with 4 parts builders sand and 1 part cement mix. Does this sound like a good plan or are there any better suggestions. I've have done a fair bit of plastering and pointing while doing up houses, so think I can do a reasonable job. But I am always keen to hear if the plan is sound. 😁
  11. That's my point really. I've spent 40 years asking 'why? and am still doing it. It is not cutting corners, it is understanding whether it is a real need or a costly habit. At a cost of £1,800 it is right for the contractor but not necessarily for me. That's a lot out of my pension. I have found a flooring company's website with useful advice. They mention doing everything you can think of, but do so reasonably and with sensible numbers about humidity, levels etc. Among them is the 3mm in 3m standard, so if they say its ok, and so do all the industry standards, then I'm happy too. (3m is a very long straight-edge I've suddenly remembered, esp when carrying it through rooms without hitting doors or new kitchens.) They say that the adhesive spreading tool has 3 to 4mm teeth so the glue goes down as 3mm and squishes to 1mm except where it isn't squished and remains as 3mm. and that if one lifts a laid plank for interest, the glue should be apparent on 90% of the surface. I am working to 2mm tolerance under the straight-edge, and rubbing off any ridges or mounds that are causing 3mm. I have had a go with an engineering brick and that is successful though unglamorous. I've only to take 1mm off. For a surface that is supposedly friable and a big risk ('pay us more to make it safe') , it is proving to be very robust. I will use a primer. its very difficult to compare brands due to pack size, dilution, coverage. Ardex is the big name but silly money... or is it?. I'm sure Unibond would be great, but it isn't coloured so won't be so easy to do or to impress the floorers. Bostik Cempolay looks an option. Branded, £8/litre and then dilute x 2 or 3 for porous surfaces according to different bits of their blurb. Blue. Then somewhere else it says use 2 coats.... we will see how the first coat looks and feels. So over 200m2 that will be about £80 to £160 plus my own time. Plus single use of brush and roller.
  12. Must be either a large puddle or your heat pump is massive. Ideally the water will not be dead water so will.have an inlet and outlet moving energy about.
  13. Not sure if your experience is purely domestic or also commercial? Again, just based on reading around, doing it on domestic jobs is relatively less common but almost guaranteed on commercial jobs. But just because it's less common on domestic work doesn't mean it shouldn't be done. Especially on 'technical' work like insulated slabs or for picky self builders who will have to deal with the result (vs a builder who might get a suboptimal slab but not really care and just cover it up asap).
  14. if I recall, a rinse with weak detergent is recommended for ridding of greenfly, slugs etc. Bleach would be ill advised, of course. Then all that skin and sweat, and the etceteras into the ground. Good crop?
  15. But then I wouldn't have had the headroom I wanted inside
  16. Mrs Alien used the wrong water tank on her lettuces - it had the washing machine "wash" water in it...................... Apparently soaking the leaves in a weak citric acid solution gets rid of the taste of persil (I'm not so sure.............)
  17. their reason to me was it would alter the temperature of the lake and effect the life cycle of some pond dwellers
  18. So you don't have a flat roof. You could have made life easier doing the walls flat at the top and then a single angle truss, made to suit you low angle, so no steel or glulam needed
  19. We did a couple of mm over 3m or so,as target and then the installer applied loads of glue, so nothing has moved anyway. All feels flat under foot.
  20. Not really sure that is actually an issue as it just a closed length of pipe pinned down. You are not extracting water, just about making sure the person at the other end has a slight clue about what your talking about. Would be good in Scotland where ambient is fair bit lower than England, as you generally looking at positive temperatures all winter in water. However - Not really sure from a cost perspective it make great sense anymore as a water source heat pump costs as much or more that a half decent ASHP and you don't need to buy a mile or two of pipe and pin it down in the water source - loads of faff and expense.
  21. not if you tell the wildlife police -- they will not allow it due to damage to pond life already been there I looked at ground source heat and no installer would warranty amount of heat from hole till it was done --so you might need more than one gave that the side step works in sweden/canada etc etc where winter temps are very low for a long period -- but really that good in uk ASHP is the right choice for uk
  22. the right thing is to hire floor grinder and make it totally flat
  23. just don,t forget to fit the liner to the plastic pipe before using a compression fitting on it
  24. there has been a damp issue in the past or they would not have fitted vents -- they were not there in original build for sure. the man who did the relaying is a dipstick to even consider having them even level ,never mind higher than the vents looks like a drain down point for heating as well -- it must have been a good bit lower before i am guessing the floor level is just above the vents or they would have put them in higher as previously said you need to lift the patio and lower it a good amount it will cause problems as it is now the unfortunate thing for you is rising damp will not go up more than about a metre --so the problems are all yours so minimum to do is slot drain units across the patio to allow it to get away into garden - these will be at least 4-6" deep so end will be lower than the wall hire a sthil saw and cut a track wider than units and cement them in a wee weekend job
  25. Because I am an naive idiot who assumed that if you order something, then you get what you ordered. The whole thing has been one sorry episode and I wish I has not used SCC and instead used a mix on site company who could have simply created an RC30 mix with a high slump that could have been pumped and levelled easily short handed. I subsequently discovered what went wrong with the Heidelberg SCC mix. The batch plant held back water and didn't bother to tell anybody. The driver spoke very basic English and he didn't know, so a simple lack of communication caused a whole heap of unnecessary pain.
  26. I just keep it dark and all seems fine.
  27. Lol. Can you be more country specific please https://grammarreader.com/hola-or-ola/
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