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Its been a while....

Add a little carrot, celery and some sage and you have the corner stone of a decent game soup there.

Yes, I reckon it'd do the job, but a high pressure airless sprayer to effectively apply isn't a cheap bit of kit, even the cheap'ish one I bought. Not sure a cheap one would handle the relatively big nozzle needed, either. Mine's OK on a 0.015 nozzle, but might not deliver enough pressure to drive a 0.021 nozzle well.

Just remind me what was colour of that pot the kettle spoke of.

Slacker! Have you finished that brick yet?

Had a plumber on site today...... What I've done & he seemed happy with it, is to put a branch fitting in - 110mm then goes to the toilet and then the plan is to continue straight on using 40mm pipe - fitting going into the 110mm pipe. I will take a pic tomorrow. I could do what Nick suggests - are those short bosses glued onto the black 110mm? Pictures tomorrow will help you all see what I'm up to and clarify the position. CC

I've been making masala chai from scratch lately (Nepalese friends recipe). Very nice too.

We dis use a crushing company. They supply the operator crusher and the digger with a special bucket to remove any soil or dust as it blocks the machine. I would not do it myself as the machines are a bit of a dark art. If you need to bring in hard core you will save money crushing your own I would suggest you speak with the operator first and agree that they run the stone through the machine twice. Its a lot quicker that trying to crush it down small in the first run. We went for the red rhino. Try to keep your rubble as clean as possible. It can cope with mortar but not soil its fun watching it but it is a bit loud

Just ignore him, give an inch and he’ll take a mile.

We opted for a packaged ASHP and pre-plumbed cylinder. I let the ASHP heat all our DHW (to 50C), stored in a 300 litre cylinder. Over the 9 months that it has been operating, we have returned a CoP of 2.4 for DHW and just under (sometimes over) 4 for heating. I initially considered preheating DHW using the ASHP and topping up via immersion, but after working it out, concluded there wasn't any financial saving doing so - what you save on ASHP running costs, you spend on direct electric. Living in a coastal climate, we experience our fair share of damp and wet conditions. Our ASHP does occasionally go into defrost if it's trying to recharge the whole cylinder, but doesn't seem to have to when only recharging a partial draw off (say after a single shower). Our pattern of use is such that there is generally a fair gap between DHW being drawn off. I also let our DHW recharge according to a set DHW thermistor temperature drop of 9C rather than a timed early morning / evening schedule. Using an ASHP can work.

If you have already found the reducer 50-32 and it is not leaking then you can Binary chop from there - assuming the pipe is reversely crushable IE plastic. ! You just go halfway along the pipe, dig a small hole around it and crush the pipe if the leak stops you can be sure the leak is in the remaining half. So you go halfway along that length and do the same - going backwards halfway if the leak persists until you are within a few meters if you think about it its only 8 holes (200, 100, 50, 25, 12, 6, 3, 1.5) and you will be sure you are very close. You can use the same approach to find the reducer if you have not already as this is the most likely point of failure. You will need a device that can crush the pipe - a fine thread G clamp of robust construction and a long Tommy bar has done it in the past for me but not on 50mm pipe!

The water company guys still just use a listening rod to find leaks. I watched them doing it back in the summer, trying to find a persistent leak that's been breaking up the surface of a lane near us. It looked to me like a bit of steel bar around 10mm in diameter, with a rubber cup on the top that they placed on their ear, like a stethoscope. It seemed to work, as after ten minutes or so of the bloke walking along, stopping every foot of so and placing the rod on the ground and listening, he marked where to dig and sure enough, they found the broken pipe right away, about 3ft down. I've just done a quick web search and come up with this: http://vernonmorris.co.uk/shop/category/leak-detection/listening-sticks

One interesting thing I found the other day is a complete set of what are effectively COP tables (heating and electrical power, so you have to work out the COP for yourself, but it isn't hard) for Samsung heat pumps (attached). The impact of low flow temperatures is huge - if it is supplying water at 30°C the COP is still greater than 3:1 even at -20: supplying water at 55°C doesn't achieve this until the ambient temperature reaches about +10°C. This is where phase change materials like Sunamp or thermal stores are potentially very interesting - DHW flows should ideally not exceed 48°C, but stored water needs to regularly exceed 60°C for legionella protection. At 45/2°C (hot water/outside air) the COP is 2.75 - increasing that to 55/2°C drops it to 2, and resistance heating is needed to boost it after that - dropping effective COP down to about 1.8. Same thing applies in summer, although at 20°C the numbers are rather better - 4.85 and 3.2 respectively. That's actually something I want to have a play with in the next couple of weeks if I can find the time with a spreadsheet - heating degree day temperature records are available for download, and Sheffield Solar have downloadable PV generation data. That makes it quite easy to do a crude spreadsheet model of annual COP in a Passivhaus - you know peak consumption is about 10W/m2 of low temperature heat with no solar or internal gains, which gives you a W/°C value and hot water demand can be estimated as well. I've got a internal gains figure of ~10kWh/m2/year from my architects (call it 1W/m2). The idea is then to balance solar gains (assuming no gains when heat is not needed and using the Sheffield Solar data integrated over a day as a measure of solar resource) against this to give the 15 kWh/m2/year total consumption. That then gives a spreadsheet with a couple of years of real world data showing air temperature and thus COP coupled with heat demand on that day. A very similar calculation can be done for a GSHP, just taking the seasonal average temperatures and the associated COP values. I have a strong suspicion that the ASHP will come out with lower power consumption, depending slightly on how much hot water use I assume - the higher the hot water use fraction, the more an ASHP will benefit from the higher summer air temperatures pushing the COP up. Performance-Data-Technical-Data.pdf

If you have numerous stopcocks how about turning one off at a time and then seeing if the leak persists, assuming you have a meter and can check. If you manage to stop the leak at least you know which run of pipe is causing the problem.

Just to demonstrate that it does work here are graphs showing outside and water temperatures for the last week, a week in June and the coldest week last winter.

I can only speak for the one I used (Honeywell AQ6000), but it was a lot more sophisticated than that. Yes it did optimum start, but it modulated the water temperature, which it did by cycling the burner. It also controlled the burn length and number of cycles to maximise the boiler efficiency; it was an excellent controller, much better than anything else readily available at the time. The system that I use now is controlled by an Acaso Automix 30, which drives a mixing valve on the return to the thermal store. They were both a bit fiddly to setup as you have to match the slope and offset of the temperature curves to match the characteristics of the house - something that's going to be a lot easier if you're living with it and can tweak a bit at a time over the heating season. I can see that it would be tricky to set up if you are installing for a living and don't have time for trial and error.

What goes on in the shed, stays in the shed!

Is that your biggest vice?

It looks like plywood, capped at the front with a pine nose to me.

I went with the full length bench - built just a week before this thread was started!

Indeed. I’ve taken some comfort in the thought of the Sarah Beeny soft play centre for grownups though.

Just fork out for a lintel and door:

You will find Architects don't usually consider technical issues just the ascetics. They leave that to the engineers to sort out!