All Activity

The aggregates supplier said similar re: 6N and fines. Will investigate further.

Ours is nearly 200m² on a single floor. If you are looking at anything near that cost I won't thinking again. If our target airtightness had not demanded it (Scottish building regs) I would have gone dMEV or MEV. Very little in it, heat loss wise. dMEV demand based system Wet rooms, Greenwood CV2 one in each room including kitchen. Or central MEV with humidity activated terminals and constant pressure fan in MEV unit. Automatically and smartly do boost it needed, run at a very low flow all the time. From eBay look at around £40 each, for Greenwood CV2 fans, almost silent, draw almost no electricity, zero maintenance. No trickle vents in wet rooms. Dry rooms, trickle vents that is humidity activated (can include acoustic damping if you need) around £60 to £120 each. Can be through wall or in window. How it works, day time, bedrooms not used, trickle vents almost fully closed. Downstairs rooms have people so the vents start to open in response to rising humidity, fans draw the air across the room, through corridors and out the house. At night the effect swop, now bedroom trickle vents open and downs close. No-one in house, all trickle vents go to min opening. As with MVHR you have internal doors under cut around 6 to 10mm

stress over time on the fixings etc -so they dig it up and start again

Materials are £10k and install £6k, the house will be just over 200m2 across four levels one day. Plenty of work to get there though.

It's a shame I'm living in the bloody thing, I'd love to be able to use aerobarrier I'm going to have to try and do it on a floor by floor basis, I think. Once the basement is done I'll move onto the ground floor and strip it all back, that might provide an opportunity to do what I can do, test and then if needed, get aerobarrier in to do their magic.

only if i sold osme -wind men get money when the turbines are sitting doing nothing --thats the difference

Looking for thermally broken fixings that stop cold bridging, I used some hammer in nails that went into a large rawl plug and had a plastic cap on the nail, but i wasnt that impressed with the thermal break to be honest. Anyone use some they were happy with? Thanks carl

Are you saying this was poured down the drain as a way to clean up at the end of the day and dispose of the excess goop? If so......................what a cock.

Are you able to use AeroBarier? just needs the house pretty empty and a lot of covering up furniture, and robust masking off all floors and flat surfaces. Got a masonry refurb down to sub 0.2 ACH before xmas!!!

My first quote 6 years ago was £10k - bonkers. Ended up DIY and spend around £2k

Cheers, I'll take a look at that. I got a quote back today, seems expensive.

Yeah, I'll need to be looking at lots of airtightness details internally if I can't do anything externally. I'm not doing this on the cheap so it's definitely going to be airtight when I'm finished.

I still find this a harrowing scene.

Ha! 😁 No but I did have to "bunny suit up" amd wear a dosimeter for working on the lab and go through a radiation scanner on the way out each shift. Was an interesting job.

I suppose anybody who wants wind turbines to be built and for the electricity they produce to be affordable. CfDs reduce risk for the generators. Without them, generators would be asking higher prices for their electricity to reflect the risks they would be required to take on. Yes, it does stack up, hugely. The parameter you need to look at is the life cycle greenhouse gas emissions, measured in grammes of CO2e, per kWh of energy produced over the life of the asset. Results as follows (median values of the assets they studied): Coal: 1004 g Natural Gas: 458 g Solar PV: 53 g Offshore wind: 18 g Onshore wind: 12 g Nuclear: 6 g (Clearing the Air, Hannah Ritchie, data source UN Economic Commission for Europe, 2021) According to Drax Group who operate the Lanark and Galloway run-of-river hydro schemes, located in south-west Scotland, it generates 126 MW. Yes, that's nice but it's not going to get us far in the energy transition. The latest allocation round for offshore wind (AR7) procured 70 times that capacity, 8.4 GW. So what? The embedded CO2 in the blades is taken into account in the above life cycle numbers. It's just a waste disposal issue. Same or worse for end of life fossil assets, many of which contain far worse materials - asbestos, mercury and other heavy metals, spent catalysts, etc.

If you were contracted to produce cakes for wedding, you produced them and the customers courier couldn't make the lick uk because their vans were all busy - would you want to be paid? I suspect yes. The curtailment payments are due to the grid not being able to transport the contracted for power - which is a separate issue that is being addressed - and happens to gas (and once upon a time coal) plants as well This is false. The meme was popularised by the series "landman" where billybob Thornton goes on a (wrong) rant about wind turbines. The carbon payback for wind turbines varies from 6-18months. The bases vary depending on ground conditions but typically 100m3 per MW - so between 100-600m3 per turbine. But concrete is not unique to wind turbines. Hinckley C has over 40,000m3 in just one of the two reactor foundations. The turbine blade problem is real but more a function of composites not yet generally being recycled. This is changing but the current best practice it to recycle the blades by grinding them into particles and (you'll like this) using them in concrete..... 😁

If in doubt, suck it. (Never say that to SWMBO) Available from NASA - makes a good conversation piece when entertaining dinner guests.

Thanks for all the advice. In defiance of @dpmiller I bought the Bosch pair for £110 which I think is a pretty good price. I might get some bigger batteries but I quite like the light weight 2ah ones given that I am no spring chicken these days.

Here is a piece the plumber drilled out of the pipe vertical - see photo. You can see the reinforcing fibres in the leveller, and you can see some sticking out in the middle photo above. I doubt the 15mm hep 2 pipe is going to do anything TBH. The plumber was having to drill bits out. That said I did get some bits out of the main drain pipe by ramming some 32mm MDPE up and down the pipe - but that was straight pipe and only congealed pieces stuck to the bottom of the pipe. Plumber was of the opinion the drain would have to be replaced - but once you start on clay pipe that is 90 years old you are likely to end up replacing the lot. I have just about had enough now. The last 'customer' of my original builder was having him do a barn conversion - 'customer' died of a heart attack during the build. If I stop posting you'll know I've gone the same way. https://www.tiktok.com/@iammarkmanson/video/7277481945515216174?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc

Did you have a hearty breakfast to start the day.

This is part of thr high running costs. Nobody can design such a critical bit of equipment not to fail ever. What we can do is have an inspection and testing regime to catch any failure before it is catastrophic. So when they design a weld or a pipe or a valve, it's limits for fatigue, temp cycling, corrosion, embrittlemnt etc are all calculated and an inspection regime is decided. Then the item is inspected to make sure it is to spec, then it"s inspected using all sorts of expensive stuff and the results fed back into the simulations to check it's "on track" and adjustments to inspection regime made on light of the actual performance. It's a huge undertaking

You don't want to know how little planning for decommissioning was done for the early reactors (magnox, agr etc). Lots of stuff inaccessible, an unbelievable amount of stuff undocumented or not to the plans! We did design work for robotic decommissioning - really expensive special purpose robots and manipulator ms to go in and undo a nut or grind off a weld. The sort of thing a man with a spanner or grinder could do in an hour - which I think was the orginal plan when they designed some of these in the late 50's and 60's!

Possibly because when a windfarm is retooled, they put larger turbines on them. Or it is just made up, like the 'million pounds of concrete needed'. Offshore turbines use a lot less concrete and they drill a large hole and grout a steel base in (there is a company down here that makes the rigs to do this). Maybe @Gus Potter can give some insight as to the design. I get a bit stuck when converting the forces for, say, a 5MW turbine that is 125m heigh. I think 1 Nm.s-1 = 1W. The diameter of the base will make a difference.

Interesting. Does this mean there are three dams of relatively low output rather than one huge one? Like in earlier centuries, having several flour mills along a stretch of river?

Absolutely, I played a small part in the magnox life extensions (Wylfa in particular) I'm sure the reactors will be kept running well beyond 2060 - which only compounds the uncertainty that EDF or it's successor will be around to honour it's commitment to decommissioning. There is a huge list of giant engineering companies that were around 50 years ago and aren't now.