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Just thought I'd post these photos of the first olives on the olive tree we planted as a part of the privacy screening along the front: Everyone we've spoken to has said that we'd not get any olives on a tree grown here, and to be honest I wasn't expecting anything at all this year, as we only planted this tree in March, but it surprised me with the amount of flowers we got in Spring and has surprised me again by producing a few olives. Perhaps it will do better next year, when it's had a chance to get a bit more established.

This any good? http://www.stovefittersmanual.co.uk/articles/hearth-regulations/

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-45450278 Television wildlife presenter Johnny Kingdom has been killed in an accident on his land. The film-maker, photographer and author, who specialised in his local area of Exmoor and north Devon, died on Thursday night. Police confirmed emergency services were called to a field near Wadham Cross in Knowstone, Devon, to reports that a digger had rolled over.

Is this just to set a level at certain points ..?? I would use a water level, or hire a theodolite and staff and do it with that.

I've got that Leica one with the better receiver. The pets parts for the money. No intention of selling mine.

I have the previous, red line version of this: https://m.clasohlson.com/uk/Cocraft-HL-20-SG-Cross-Line-Laser-Level/41-1267 Think I paid £29 or something silly on clearance. It's great imo.

Hire one is an option.

https://vargopipes.co.uk/system-components-pipes/

agreed with a big BUT; I'm sure many; if not most; would prefer a sudden death doing something we enjoy. He was 79 and that's great - Wouldn't have been the same if he was 20 or more years younger

Perhaps I'm wrong but... Directors are normally considered employees of the company. If the company does work on the directors house I guess that would be a benefit in kind liable to tax (and NI?). So the director would need to pay the company for their services. Would getting the money back out of the company be difficult? Taxed? Dividend tax? Income tax?

As I understand it, the old "rule of thumb" that you must not have too steep a gradient on a foul drain has now been superseded, as it's been proven that there is no maximum gradient for foul drains, and I can't find out where the idea that there should be ever came from. Certainly it always used to be the case that people believed that there were problems with foul drains that were too steep a gradient, and many years ago I remember being told that this was because the liquid content would travel faster than the solids, leaving them behind. Apparently that isn't true, so now there's no need for back drops, or any of the other ways to get around having too steep a gradient on a foul drain, and you can have one as steep as you like. I suspect that a part of this is because we now use very smooth plastic foul drains, with very few joints and what joints there are being very smooth. I can't find proof of this, but the regs now allow you to have a foul drain as steep as you like, which makes life a fair bit easier in some cases.

For domestic drainage the design is very easy. For SW there is not a max gradient really. But for FW 1:10 is considered the max gradient to avoid the "splat" factor at changes of direction. best practice is to have 300 mm of cover to the pipe at the head of the run i.e the top manhole. so with a 100mm pipe it would be 400m to invert. Use a proprietary plastic manhole. use a gradient of 1:60 minimum to get a self cleansing velocity (1:40 preferable) gradient over the distance to the outfall drain (public sewer) . if the new pipe is then above the outfall you can use a backdrop as someone has stated before. or build a manhole at the higher depth just before the outfall manhole at the higher level and have the last short length at a steep gradient up t0 1:10. Hope this helps.

JTM are £36 inc VAT for 25m About the cheapest I’ve found it

Mine did. And so the standing charge starts too - even though there is nothing connected to it yet.

I heat from 00:00 to 07:00 (or bring the start time back if this is too much). This means that the slab is nice and warm under foot when we are pottering around at breakfast. The GFL room temperatures peak at around 11am and then fail by about ½°C by about 3pm, though we don't really notice this as we tend to be quite active in the house. If we need a top-up we do this from around 2:30 to 4:30 typically so the temperatures again peaks around 7pm and the house is at a comfortable temperature whilst we are sitting around in the evening. So this cycle is 21 kWh at cheap rate and 6kWh at peak rate, and the overall ripple is a little over ½°C. If the low point is uncomfortable then the easiest thing to do is to raise the overall temp another °C or so and keep the same profile. Sorry but this is wrong in my experience -- the main area of our slab is 10cm with the UFH at 5cm deep and pumping in 3kW on a top-hat profile still has quite a delay before enough heat reaches the slab surface to start raising a material amount -- probably about 3-4 hours, and that only starts the heating in the room which is why the peak room temp occurs some hours after the heating has stopped. OK, if you have a 5cm screed with the UFH embedded then the slab will be more responsive, but MBC-style construction were the UFH is fixed to the rebar mesh before poor has long time constants, so you either need to adopt Jeremy's very low (but largely constant) temperature with a simple area stat or my daily computed total and a fixed heating plan.

You are really losing me in this argument. If you mean design freedom then perhaps I can understand more. There is only a control (as in control system) issue if this type of arrangement is acts to constrain the control regime. In our case at the dead of winter we only need to maintain the floor at an average ~2°C warmer than the target environment temperature to maintain overall heat balance. We could easily heat the floor to 4 or even 6°C above room temp with our pretty standard UFH layout in terms of heat output (if we wanted to live in a dry sauna), so this design constrains nothing. All of the control parameters are still tunable: the heat input into each circuit, the flow speed, the min/max ontime, the on spacing. The control algo i about 100 lines of javascript. This is the easy bit. The main PITA in nodeRED is implementing a simple control panel. And BTW, you don't need to have any weather forecast terms in the control. We have a stone skin; this plus the cellulose-filled Larson strut frame give one averall decrement delay of well over a day, so we can just plug in actuals.

Reminds me, must remember to put my old stock of red and black T&E on ebay when we move...

Yes, we had one in our old farmhouse. They are cheap and value for money. Good for a teenager's room, rental accom, or anywhere if you are really constrained on budget, IMO. We used the sofa in our old living room and it served its purpose, so no complaints, but to be honest we found that it just wasn't that comfortable to sit on -- which is partially why we went to the other extreme in the new house.

I have mine sitting on porcelain tiles. But mine is one with a log store underneath. The tiles never get that hot.

Firstly, as you don't have a constructional hearth, you have to choose the stove carefully. You need one that guarantees the bottom of the stove will never exceed 100 degrees (which often means the raised ones with a log store underneath) and then it needs a "hearth" of a non combustible material at least 12mm thick. of a size described in building regs. If you just tile the floor with regular floor tiles, they may not be 12mm thick so it may not comply. As to a "step" or not. You seem to be able to get away without. Our last house had a constructional hearth but I set the tiles that finished it off flush with the wooden floor. BC had a grumble about it but passed it. And a house near here tiled the entire room (on a concrete screed) and that was also passed. What is the fireplace recess built of? If not brick, then you need to consider "distance to combustibles" from the side back and top of the stove, so again choose carefully.

Any new stove needs a hearth, even if it is a piece of 10mm glass to mark out where it is. As I understand it, the reason is for someone with impaired vision to identify that there is a stove. The link @Onoff provided is pretty clear on it so should help.

I think the smaller stoves look good without a hearth...... mine sits on the floor like your talking about but my floor is solid uninsulated concrete........

Great link by @Onoff just one thing to add is that you’ll need sign off from either (a) the HETAS fitter or (b) the Building Inspector so make sure you ask discuss your proposals with them in advance

@vivienz

Because they're cheap and it isn't my main job, I've only got a fairly slow laptop to run Ansys on so anything normally requiring 10 hours will run out of memory and crash long before it gets to a solution. The model I've run previously - basically a 150mm by 150mm section of floor using symmetry between pipes and a zero heat transfer condition at all edges except the top - would probably be quite amenable to looking at over time, and runs pretty fast. Because it's meshed anyway, there really isn't a lot of benefit to assuming radial symmetry - the software would just create a circular rather than rectangular mesh. One thing this might be useful for is working out what the minimum and maximum pipe spacing is - if you put too much pipe in, then depending on the flow rate of the circulating pump you might have short cycling issues, while with too little you won't be able to provide sufficient heat at a low flow temperature. Absolutely. In any case, the buffer tank in most cases is there to smooth out oscillations/short cycling from the TMV, rather than the tank - and the TMV is there mostly because combustion systems can't regulate water temperatures down low enough not to get chronic temperature overshoot in most normal houses, let alone a properly insulated one. Fit an appropriately sized ASHP with the flow temperature turned all the way down, however, and all those problems go away. The amount of heat it can put in is limited so the reaction time will be quite slow, but because the slab itself has such a high inertia that will happen whatever you do. More importantly, you can't get the air in the house above the flow temperature without breaking the zeroth law - and the T4 relationship in radiative heat transfer will keep average slab temperature and perceived air temperature (itself heavily influenced by radiative heat transfer) very close together. That's the one area I dislike your system - in the 3-4 month time section essentially it relies on guessing about right what the weather will be like tomorrow, over-warming the slab slightly and dumping any excess heat through the ventilation system. It clearly works well - unsurprising given the long time constant of the structure and slab plus the ability of the ventilation system to dump heat from the air - but it's fundamentally inelegant to my mind. I would far rather use a standard air thermostat to call for heat, and the fact that an inverter-driven pump will have a maximum return temperature above which it can't maintain minimum output power to turn it off again. By the time it is allowed to run again, the room temperature should have risen and the system stabilised. The one weakness in this system is that there are two or three interlocking time constants - that of the slab warming up and warming the air, that of the return water warming up and tripping the heat pump, and the anti-short-cycling mode in the pump. Provided that the air warms faster than the water plus short-cycling requirement, it should work very nicely. Kids are currently 2 & 4 plus hate bathtime, so at the moment hot water demand is very low. That'll change when they become teenagers, however - assuming we're still here. I'm not interested in using a buffer tank for preheating however - far simpler just to have a big hot water tank like @Stones used plus a shower heat exchanger. Mark/Space ratio would be driven by the thermostat, assuming the time constants match up which I think is probable but I'm not quite sure how to model. Essentially this is staying in your December/January/February mode all year round. Given how fast PV prices are dropping, we're almost certain to have a lot of it. That makes using the smart grid functionality in most heat pumps a no brainer - when PV is available, heat water first and when the tank is full turn the thermostat up by a degree. That's unlikely to be a comfort problem, and the long time constant means that no further (paid for) heating will be needed for quite a while afterwards. My current thinking is to use whatever thermostat is packaged with the heat pump I end up with - I don't have a problem with temperature varying by a degree or so, so don't feel the need to go for super-accurate or low hysteresis temperature measurement. Agreed. The Passivhaus evangelicals talk about night venting being the solution to everything, but every year for a few days you'll have a period where it's 30°C inside and out for days on end. Treating it as a system an ASHP appears to me to be the most cost-effective way of providing this cooling since it can also provide heating and hot water very cheaply too. Yes. As you will have noticed I'm not at all a big fan of lots of glass (driven by the 15 kWh/m2/year requirement, largely). In our particular case the SE elevation at the front faces onto a busy road, while the NW elevation at the back faces onto a rather nice large garden. That means I want the house biased towards the garden, and don't want too much south facing glass. That supports my instinct that the 10 W/m2 condition is a more appropriate one anyway in most cases - I get the feeling the use of lots of glass for heating in the shoulder seasons is a hangover from before heat pumps were readily available and people had to use gas or electric resistance for heat, in which case hitting the primary energy targets was almost impossible without a lot of glass for additional heating. It isn't needed any more, but when you start thinking in terms of a particular design solution it's very hard to shift out of it to another one.

10 W/m2 is an alternative Passivhaus certification criteria, setting the maximum permitted heat loss per square metre of internal area at the design low temperature condition - averaged year round will be far lower than this, and is catered for by the alternative 15 kWh/m2/year condition. 15 kWh averaged out over a year is 1.7 W equivalent - note that this is looking for inherently low-cost ways to meet the requirements for Passivhaus certification, not low cost ways to build a comfortable home that is very cheap to run. The 20 W/m2 is what the underfloor heating would have to deliver at the design cold condition in a two storey house if it is only fitted into the slab - 10 W/m2 for the ground floor and 10 W/m2 for the first floor. It's essentially a plant sizing condition which sets either the pipe spacing at 25°C or the flow temperature at a given pipe spacing to deliver this amount of heat - important if you're using an ASHP. One of the potential problems I personally have is that my wife is extremely sensitive to variations in temperature, and as a result we will need cooling in summer. Extending the UFH circuit upstairs will solve this, and make the heat pump's job a little easier too - I'm still trying to work out if there are cheaper ways of doing the same thing though. We'll certainly run the UFH water through a wet duct heater which will give a watt or two of extra heating/cooling, and some sort of electric towel rails in the bathroom too I suspect - I really don't know if that will be enough in our particular case though, and it's one of those that you can't retrofit later. Upstairs UFH is a lot of money for what you get though... I'd be very worried if I was coming to different conclusions to everyone else on here! If you look at the Sheffield Solar data, it's pretty rare that you'll have several days on the trot with little or no generation above the plug load requirement over the course of a winter - limited to December and January, pretty much. To me that means there is the potential to significantly exploit the thermal inertia of the house and thus reduce the fraction of energy taken from long term (seasonal) storage.

Good to know.....there goes the render in favour of masonry paint and a new sofa LOL

I toppled a 3t digger back in July and was lucky to come out with only a bruised ego. Door open, no seat belt on, working on my own... Fortunately the hire insurance covered for incompetence! As the cab needed replacing. These machines have the potential to be dangerous beasts even in experienced hands. Not that I'd consider myself experienced but I've learnt a lesson about their limitations.