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This book......"Don't Do It" by Seymour Stress

... plumber, joiner, kitchen fitter, chief tea maker and several others no doubt. I have tried plastering and rendering and I just can't do it. We can't all be good at everything so I am paying a man that can.

Yes

I believe it is Thermal Store.

As always, you need to look at the numbers involved. So you need to know, in no particular order, the min, max and 3 standard deviations (99% of the time) for your space heating load. This will help you choose a boiler of any sort. Domestic Hot Water (DHW) then complicates it if you are running it off the same system. Basically, it cannot do both at the same time, so you loose a bit of space heating while you are heating water. So you go oversize a bit to accommodate this. All that is fairly easy to establish either from first principles or from a local plumbers experience. It gets harder when trying to work out the best options for supplying the energy and power (energy and power are different things). Starting at one end you can have normal resistance heating, just an electric heater that warms the room or water. Then you could have an infra-red heater for the rooms, and resistance for the water. Resistance water heating can take two forms, stored and unstored, so a cylinder that is heated up, or an inline instantaneous water heater (like a cheap shower). Moving up a step, you can get a solid fuel boiler, that can heat water to supply the space and DHW systems. Or an oil one, or a gas one. Then you could look at Air 2 Air Heat Pumps for space heating and resistance heating for water. Or an Air 2 Water Heat Pump (ASHP) for either just space heating (works well) or for both space and DHW. The DHW side is a bit trickier as it needs to deliver at a higher temperature, so can, when it is drawing cold air from outside, have a coefficient of performance (CoP) of 1 (one), which is, in effect, just a resistance heater. ASHP also 'frost up', so need to be sized correctly (oversized) to reduce the periods that this happens. Not a big issue (though people make it one), just a feature of the technology and physics. One way around the lowing CoP is to heat and store DHW at a lower temperature, then boost it up with an inline heater. Then there is Ground Source Heat Pumps (GSHP). These work exactly the same as ASHP, but draw the heat from the ground (actually they tend to use the ground water that passes by). They generally don't suffer from frosting, though it has been known to freeze the ground in some places (when the pipework is not deep enough and sized incorrectly). Generally they are very good and reliable, but still fail to reach a high temperature for DHW, so usually have a resistance heater built in to help out (but this lowers the CoP). Finally you can have a Water Source Heat Pump if you are by a large river or lake. These are the best, but impractical for most people. Now comes the harder bit. The environmental damage that each technology causes. This is usually based around two criteria, CO2e and resource depletion/damage. So Coal has a pretty bad environmental record. It has high CO2e emissions, is limited in reserves (though they are still huge) and wrecks the mining area. Gas and oil are similar, but better, a lot better on all 3 counts. Reserves are more limited, but still huge. Large scale Hydro has low CO2e (though the constant plant growth/decay adds to the CO2e levels) but causes large amounts of damage locally and socially (a million people moved in China). Nuclear has a very low CO2e footprint, but is expensive and not very useful for variable loads (not a criticism, but a characteristic of the technology and physics) Then moving onto the more 'renewable' technologies is Wind, a good method of generating energy, but not so controllable on the power though. To be more useful on power delivery, we would need either, a lot more turbines (like millions of them) or a decent storage methods (and the best is pumped water storage, so see Hydro for issues). Wind is not without problems, it causes great social issues (though not as great as climate change and not having electricity cause). It is cheap to deploy though and can now be integrated quite well into very large national grids (once planning has been overcome). Solar is similar, and oddly, in the UK, would use less land area (but in a different way,). It has the advantage that is is quiet, can be easily scaled, and is easily moveable (it packs up into a truck). Like Wind, it is low CO2e but does rely on some mineral depletions (not a problem today, but could be in the future). Finally there is Ocean Based Generation. The best is probably tidal flow (turbines under the sea) and then tidal lagoons (hopefully one being built near Cardiff). The worse are tidal barrage as they physical change the local environment , though can help with local flood control. They are predictable though. One problem is that when integrated into a grid, is that other systems need to be turned off. This sounds like a good thing as coal fired generation could be turned off, but it is often easier to turn off Gas and Wind as they do not need long lead in times. So not the ideal silver bullet that people thing. The very worst is wave power. They just don't last very long around our coast line. They are still experimenting with them though (I like the Hayle Estuary, it has a cafe at the shallow end). So all that, may or may not, help you decide which is the 'best' system to use. If I had spare cash, I would got for an PV assisted ASHP, UFH, TS with IL RH for DHW. Just had to get all those horrible abbreviations in. But as it is I shall stick with my storage heating on E7.

It's worth getting to grips with the basic permutations for wiring a single and multiple lights from a switch, from two switches (which you will probably have) and triple ganged switches (which you may have). Recognise the difference between 2+E and 3+E cable profiles, and remember that lighting power is usually daisy chained so just because a cable is live doesn't mean that it is only for one light. I'd also build up a basic layout map, so you can identify and eliminate cables as you go on, so that there are less options for the remaining unidentified ones. This is also best done a a two person job: one to switch and one to test

It's one of the reasons I'm planning to use a blown bead full fill as they can just concentrate on keeping the cavity clear....