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Just found the plaster wall lights I have been looking for at a great price. £30 instead of £141.00. I visited a passive house local to us that had them & they looked great, but were too expensive. Its feels good to get a bargain. NAXOS LED WALL WASHER £141.00 £30.00

My local pub when I lived in Cornwall (as in 100 yds away) was the Blue Anchor in Helston. They've brewed their own beer there for hundreds of years, and their ordinary bitter ("middle" to the locals) is around 5% ABV. The idiot emmets (holiday makers) almost always came in an asked for a pint of special, which is around 6.5%, but can be as high as 7.5% at bank holidays. It was fun watching them come in on a hot day, especially on a bank holiday when the "extra" special was on, drink two or three pints and then fall over...

Done ... @epsilonGreedy Check the blog pages ..

Agree with the sentiments but one of my team at work is just flying back to India as his 10 month old son is in ITU with an infection and is critically ill so there is certainly a balance. I always think that kids brought up with pets and who play outside in mud etc are generally healthier than kids brought up with work surfaces bleached to death.

At 10am this morning my solicitor emailed to say the plot sale was complete. As a new member of the Conveyancing Cynics Association I emailed back seeking clarification, I tested this concept that ownership of land can be effected in this country by asking "does this mean I can visit the plot right now and erect a site boundary fence?", he got back within 15 minutes and said go ahead. I feel the need to blog, could an appropriate forum authority command that "New Blog" button to appear for me?

Yes, it's distilled water, so ideal for use for topping up batteries or use in a steam iron. You can just collect it in a container if you wish, but these things can generate several litres of condensate a day, so any container needs to have an overflow.

I know just too well how bad infections of both bacterial and fungal can be, my wife being immune deficient has suffered most of her life with both, and with candida from the age of 2 (shes now 31). I assume you will be on drugs for it? Fluconazole perhaps? If you are under the hospital for your health problems, speak to them about IV anti-fungals, as they can blast candida in a couple of days, but make sure they do swabs beforehand for sensitivities. Caspofungin and Anidulafungin are the 2 most common IV treatments, should get you back on your feet in no time, both are a 2 week course, and we do them as an outpatient, via our Out Patients Antibiotic Service, though this may well be unique to our area. Whilst we are talking Fungus, can I make each and everyone of you aware of the dangers of Aspergillus. Personally i'd never heard of it before, but it lurks in the building fabric, and in great quantities in old insulation, so ensure you wear a mask at all times, Primarily it only affects people who are unwell, immune deficient, or undergoing treatment such as chemo which weakens the immune system, but normal healthy people can also get it, and it can kill. My wife contracted this last year (november), and has been unable to get shut of it ever since, despite being on aggresive treatment for it. So there you go, you've been warned! In terms of a more natural approach to candida, we did this diet when trying to conceive many years ago, and it did seem to work, it is however very strict: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Erica-Whites-Beat-Candida-Cookbook/dp/0722538561/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1526552053&sr=8-1&keywords=erica+white+candida+cookbook Hope some of this helps!

It's been a quiet few weeks on the house site waiting for the contractors to come back, but we have done the following: Building control and quantity surveyor inspected the works carried out to date The plumber supplied our the internal drainage. Anchor straps fitted. Alum clad, triple glazed windows order finalised and placed Attic trusses design reviewed and finalised We are now commencing the final stage of the foundations. In filling the solum is the first job. The solum has now been infilled and whacked with the aggregate. A finer layer is now being added on top. Plenty of diggers and dumpers here. Last day of the foundations. DPC was put down and then the concrete wagon came back on site. We used around 25m3 of concrete and as the photos show through the last few blog posts, we had fantastic weather conditions during this foundation. I was also pleased with the amount of the rubbish that is going to the dump, just four cements bag full of plastic waste.

They usually have no proper terminal boxes, leaving you to do really rubbish things like carve a hole in the plaster of the wall to allow you to drop some terminals in, and add to that most of them only have a very small area in contact with the wall leaving you not much room to devise and fit in said bodge. A triumph of appearance (if you like that sort of thing) over engineering. IF you know in advance this is the type of light to be used, then running the cable from the switch to the light in flex rather than twin and earth can avoid the need for terminals but still leaves you terminating the flex straight to the lamp holder with nowhere to lose the slack you need to do so.

Electricians nightmare I cringe when given plaster lights to wire.

I have now been on a strict KetoDiet for 9 months, i was severely ill with undiagnosed Chronic Fatigue Syndrome that had been bad and only got worse over a two year period. When your that ill nothing is going to be a silver bullet but within 4 weeks of being on the diet I started to improve and have been improving ever since. As well as being on a keto diet I am also on a Paleo diet and this removes all dairy and a bunch of other stuff, long story short..... dairy causes inflammation in a lot of people and inflammation causes an untold amount of diverse problems, I have suffered muscle pain all my life, not something that’s always there but as a hard working hard playing guy I always suffered after hard activity. Spent a fortune on massage and chiropractors. After giving up dairy 9 months ago the pain stopped, just like that. Now that I am getting better (so far 60% better) and am working hard again it’s amazing to be able to finish at the end of the day and not be in pain. If anyone needs more info on paleo keto diets I am happy to pm you details of further research and resources. As i said I have a pretty serious diet and take a lot of mostly natural supplements but also eat fermented foods daily. I will stop now but..... it’s a bloody miracle how changing my diet and taking some supplements has brought me back from what was being very very close to the end game.

Tempting.... said they had lost the first ones - I suggested that losing a box with the address on it, 4 bricks and a tile poking out was difficult ..! Amazingly about an hour later they were “found”.....

...through the window?

I had a similar condition and spent the best part of a day driving around collecting samples. I then rang the planning officer who agreed that I could bring the samples to him to check. When I turned up at the council building with them I was refused entry, on the grounds that the small (around 18" long) lengths of cladding constituted a health and safety breach if carried inside the building... So, I went out the front door with the samples and called the planning officer, telling him I had the samples with me, but that I was being stopped from bringing them into the building. He said he wasn't able to come down to check them, but could I just send him photos. I explained that he already had photos in the D&A Statement I'd submitted with the application. He checked that whilst I was on the phone, then said that was fine, he'd sign off that pre-commencement condition. So, I'd driven around 100 miles or so, wasting a day of my time and the time of those who'd given me samples, simply because the planning officer hadn't bothered to look at the material photos I'd submitted with the application. Was I a bit cross? You could say that. I bet the mic on my car dash cam picked up a few choice words when I was driving back home.

Don't know about ceramics, but apparently a lot of the Great Wall of China,Imperial Palaces, etc is built from grey bricks. Tourists got a lot of it, but there is still some left ! Perhaps @Hecateh should have had some in her Great Wall. A chappie called Wenwen Xia wrote a Thesis about it: "An Investigation of Chinese Historical Grey Bricks of Soochow, Jiangsu and the Effect of Tung Oil Treatment" They seem to date back to 7000BC. Not sure if that helps an argument with Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh District Council Planning Department, unless you lob them at the windows. ? This might though. Late 1600s to 1730 are mentioned as desirable by the Georgians. Killed off by cheap London Stocks etc. https://www.scottishbrickhistory.co.uk/brick-development-through-the-centuries/ There is a bloke in Cambridge called Dr James Campbell who is a specialist in the History of Bricks. https://www.martincentre.arct.cam.ac.uk/research/building-histories/history-of-brick Wrote the definitive book on the subject. Should be cheap on Ebay as it was published in 2003. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Brick-James-W-P-Campbell/dp/0500341958 There is also bound to be a museum somewhere with an Historical Brick Library and an enthusiastic chap or a lady looking like Fred Dibnah and / or Mary Beard looking after it. There are also a frankly worrying number of blogs about lego bricks. F

That advice comes directly from British Standard BS5250:2002. Although its essentially still correct the advice has since been superseded by the 2011+A1:2016 version of the standard which lowers the requirement to 2x vapour resistance. The exact wording is: "....an AVCL, with a vapour resistance of at least double that of the [external] sheathing should be provided on the warm side of the insulation"

What’s the local norm in your location? In some places it’s common to have a rendered plinth up to Dpc,meaning it can be built in concrete blocks & sulphate resistant mortar. Ps nice to see you back @JSHarris,coming in & blowing me away with your knowledge of my trade! We should really have learned a bit more at college regarding history of bricks etc,but then I guess a lot of 18 yr old apprentices would just zone out if we went too deep.

Thanks, I like the look if that, and unlike the Horstman does not mention immersion heater. In fact just being described as "boost" could not be better.

Never a truer word said! I spent tens of hours trying to reverse engineer our ASHP, and to a lesser extent finding out how to fit a humidistat to the MVHR, because of a lack of information. I suspect that some of this is a form of protectionism, to try and restrict the level of publicly available knowledge so that installers can justify some of the very high prices that they seem to charge.

I am planning to use Horstman Immersion heater timer switches. You press a button up to 3 times and it gives you a different timed ON period from half an hour up to 2 hours. There will be one on the landing in effect between the two bathrooms, and one in the kitchen. These will both turn on a relay to give the volt free contact that the mvhr unit needs. Inside the Kingspan / Mitsubishi :Lossnay mvhr unit there is a 5 way terminal block for the fan speed selection. That requires you to connect 1 fan speed input to "common" So the boost relay will be a changeover relay. De energised it will connect common to fan speed 1. When energised it will connect to a higher fan speed, I have yet to make any measurements to determine which speed will be needed for boost mode. Re the summer bypass. Next to the fan speed terminal block is another 3 terminal block, One labelled Heat, one labelled Cool and the third one not labelled or mentioned in the manual. As I have already said the function of the heat and cool inputs is poorly described. However if you connect the unlabelled input to the common terminal on the fan speed terminal block, it instantly actuates the bypass flap. There seems to be a common theme here that a lot of these units do not fully describe how they function and it appears common to find undocumented features if you experiment.

My guess is that proper Staffordshire blues weren't made until very high temperature firing was introduced, which would fit with that 1851 date. Almost all bricks, right up until the early part of the 20th century, were made by itinerant travelling brick makers close to where buildings were being constructed, using local clay and sand and firing them using open fires or crude temporary kilns. It wasn't until we had decent transport systems able to deliver heavy loads directly to building sites that it became really practical to centralise brick making in large factories. There was a "living history" display a couple of years ago, just down the road from us, where they had a practical demonstration of how itinerant brick makers worked, just digging out local materials, forming bricks by hand in wooden moulds, stacking them to dry and then firing them in what amounted to a large bonfire. There was a large variation in colour and hardness in any batch, so they used the bricks from near the centre of the fire for the outside walls and the softer ones from the outer side of the fire for inside walls. Staff blues need both a high temperature and an oxygen-free firing process, something that can only really be easily achieved in a closed kiln, so I'm pretty certain they can't be really ancient, despite their use on canal locks. I'm pretty sure that all the Staff blues seen today on canal locks are restoration work, rather than originals, just because they are a lot stronger than other bricks and not so subject to spalling or frost damage.

From the links you know the supplier and name so just go ask your local BM for a price ..?? Alternatively try someone like Huws Gray online and get pricing through them - full loads of mixed inc blocks always get decent prices

No problems at all in running it in any room, the indoor unit just has three pipes, two for the refrigerant and one drain pipe for the condensate. Needs an F gas ticket holder for the install, but there are pre-gassed versions around that get around that. Anyway, pumping the unit out with a vacuum pump and gassing it up is a quick and easy job that can be done after all the installation work has been done, as these things are gassed up from the outdoor unit. Any refrigeration engineer can gas one up in under an hour, or you can break the rules and do it yourself. I gassed up a conservatory air con a few years ago, using a borrowed vacuum pump, bottle of refrigerant and UV dye leak test light. The process is pretty simple, just connect the vacuum pump and suck the system right down, then wait for half an hour or so to allow any moisture inside to come out as vapour, and to check for leaks using the vacuum gauge. Then just connect the refrigerant bottle up, put it on some scales to weigh it and fill the system with the right amount, ideally with some leak check dye as well. Then you just seal off the filling valve, run the unit up and check the pipe joints for leaks with the UV light.

Unfortunately for me this *is* afterwards! ? (in terms of it being a retrofit anyway). That said, the process of pulling through the ducting means it's a good opportunity to pull some cables through with them so, yes, it is definitely something to think about in advance.

One wife is enough, my poor head couldn’t cope with another.

Not really, as the MVHR air flow rate is a great deal lower than a typical air-to-air heat pump. Our Genvex MVHR does have a tiny air-to-air heat pump built in, but it will only provide around 1.5 kW of cooling, which isn't a lot if you've got any large, unshaded, glazed areas facing the sun. The limit on the Genvex is really imposed by the low air flow rate, as even a cheap split air-to-air unit like this: https://www.appliancesdirect.co.uk/p/tcl-12wminv/tcl-tcl12wminv will provide around 3.5 kW of cooling for less than £400.

May be of use, at least it showed some dates, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staffordshire_blue_brick assuming that is what you meant by grey engineering bricks?

There are some remote control switches that use a battery-powered wall switch and a receiver that could drive a mains relay, to give dry contacts and isolation, so could be used with an MVHR, which would save any tricky wiring runs. The Smartwares range (which used to be branded Homeeasy) isn't too costly. You can programme one receiver (like this one: https://www.uk-automation.co.uk/smartwares-built-in-power-switch-1000w-sh5-rbs-10a/ ) to operate from several wall switches like this: https://www.uk-automation.co.uk/smartwares-wireless-single-gang-wall-switch-sh5-tsw-a/ All you'd need to add would be a suitable 230 VAC relay in an enclosure to operate the boost function on the MVHR.

I’m glad you got yours ok after 8 years. Mine has been 9 and I thought they might take issue with it being so long but your experience reassures me. I’ve just requested mine. I hope they don’t need to come out again. The last inspection was at the stage where the building work was was ok with the council but there was a long and protracted delay over the paper trail that was finally resolved at the end of last year. Mine was circa 2.5k on a 350 sq m house but that included a £115 inspection / survey at the start that seems to have been paid to Zurich but for what I’m not entirely sure and don’t even remember anyone coming out.

My only tweak that I am currently thinking of is to double up on the Willis -- mainly to remove a single point of failure, but also allow me to put in more heat overnight (E7) if we do get a long sub-zero spell in the depths of winter. At the moment we have almost nothing in our design that requires regular (££) maintenance. We need to clean the MVHR filters quarter and replace the secondary filter on the MVHR annually. That's all really.

I really think kimchi stands on its own...as in could grow legs and walk!

No need for pipe stats with the re-badged Carrier units, they have a sensor built in to the flow pipe from the ASHP that is used to set the flow temperature, depending on selected mode. For example, I have ours set to deliver a flow temperature of 40 deg C in heating mode, 55 deg C in hot water mode (which I don't have connected) and 12 deg C in cooling mode. You can make the heating mode temperature follow a weather compensation characteristic if you wish, but I found it worked better for us with it set for a constant 40 deg C. By default the unit will be pre-programmed to a weather compensation characteristic, probably one that doesn't work that well for the UK climate, if my experience is anything to go by. In terms of controls, all I have is two room stats (one for heating, one for cooling), a standard single channel programmer to turn the whole system on and off, and a tank stat on the buffer tank that has priority over the room stats. Giving the tank stat priority means the buffer is always charged to between 35 and 40 deg C when the programmer is on, irrespective as to whether the heating or cooling is on. If cooling is on with no call from the tank stat for heat, then the buffer tank valve (in the flow to the buffer from the ASHP) will be closed, the UFH valve (on the return from the UFH manifold) will be open. If heating is on with no call from the tank stat for heat then the buffer tank valve is left open (so the buffer works as a buffer for the UFH) and the UFH valve is open. If the heating is on and there is no call from the room stat or the tank stat then the buffer tank valve stays open and the UFH valve stays open but the ASHP and UFH pump is turned off. If the cooling is on and there is a call for heat from the tank stat the ASHP is turned off, then set to heating mode, the UFH valve is closed and the buffer valve opens then the ASHP restarts in heating mode. This way the floor stays cool but warm water can recharge the buffer.

They say alcohol is good for snake bites. That's why I always carry a snake! (W C Fields I believe).

If I come out of the bathroom it means I have to talk to SWMBO! Tbh I shall probably move to doing the roof next as she's not good with heights. She was placated somewhat tonight. Had a bath and I put Meatloaf's greatest hits through the Bluetooth speakers for her. She didn't want "any of my rubbish on" as she puts it.

We are finally very close to being finished inside. We have been living in dust for two months. I have been trying really hard to avoid putting up pictures until it’s all done, but the stair is going in and looking beautiful. As there is another stair porn thread re glass balustrades I thought I’d join the party. Give it a few weeks and I’ll do a full photoshoot.

I think we all agree on Osmo. But can I gently question these £90 inc VAT per door prices. You could be approx 15% below that, and at least 25% for the slightly lower-quality Wickes version. Travis have their version of these doors at £78 at present including VAT and free delivery. https://www.travisperkins.co.uk/Hardwood-Oak-Suffolk-Internal-Door-1981mm-x-838mm-x-35mm/p/480461 And Todd Doors where mine came from have them at £81 inc VAT. The quality mightily impressed my joiner. They charge delivery but price matched the TP lower price at that stage (£72 last Nov/Dec iirc) and free carriage when evidenced. https://www.todd-doors.co.uk/cottage-oak-door You would perhaps get yesterday's price of £78.85 if you point out it is on the Google ads still this morning. Wickes are advertising their Geneva at 80 inc VAT, but trade is -10% and they had 15% off across the store (does not stack with trade) last weekend, which will return. https://www.wickes.co.uk/Wickes-Geneva-Internal-Cottage-5-Panel-Oak-Veneer-Door---1981-x-762mm/p/214699 Of those three it may be possible to assess the TP door at a local branch in Preston. Todd are a southern supplier with showrooms in that area. Based on that the doors plus hinges, handles, and latch, should be around £90 all in. Although paying slightly more to support a local business may be a good decision. Unless there is something I do not know. Ferdinand

Builder fired brickie doing garden walls last week. I think it's the only time someone has been fired during the build. Was fed up with him apparently spending all day talking and not working. Also he apparently was taking a very strong interest in the house, the window frames, when I was away working etc. The next night the chains were cut holding the site security gates closed. We have had no issues in two years of building. Bizarrely nothing was taken. I got a much sturdier replacement chain. Weird thing is the pedestrian gate isn't even locked as we have moved in. The builder did call the brickie just to make sure that he knew he was under suspicion.