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Showing content with the highest reputation on 04/04/18 in all areas

  1. Bloody Hell! That new Sunamp goes on the wall and looks like a telly!
    5 points
  2. Building getting there and the first joist up this morning. Couldn't get the delivery vehicle down the road so had to be handballed off the truck and then individually carried down the road and or lifted up to the roof. Could job it is only single floor from this side,
    4 points
  3. My first construction video, because we were putting Postsaver sleeves onto some of the fence posts in stock. There is also a blog entry with a little more information.
    3 points
  4. Today we started on our foundations. It was snowing this morning on Skye and I took this one just before the digger arrived. Our brickie had pegged out the site a few days previously. The digger then arrived on site and the snow stopped and sun came out. I helped to mark out the foundation tracks and then wandered up the access to do a few hours at work. n I came back in the evening and the trenches were just about finished. After walking down to the site for the last million years, it took a bit of time to sink in, we are now building our home. Tomorrow the concrete wagon is booked and all being well we will have the trenches filled and can move onto blockwork next week.
    2 points
  5. Those that want to sell metered softeners will exaggerate the supposed benefits, much more profitable. You set up a timed softener so that it regenerates at intervals to suit the hardness of the water and the amount that is typically used. If you set it up wrongly then you can waste salt (and water, but that's trivial). If you set it up correctly, and there aren't huge variations in your usage patterns, then I expect the difference in salt usage is negligible. If you worry about the amount of electricity used by an electric clock (< 1W), then I think you have problems of perspective.
    2 points
  6. I'm far from the expert. In fact, most of what I learned came from @JSHarris. But a simpler, timed softeners regenerate overnight, whether it needs to or not. Whereas a metered softener will skip regeneration if not enough water's been used. (The regeneration process is mumble-something-to-do-with-ions-mumble-resin-squirrel.) Ergo, timed softeners can waste salt, water and electricity. I suspect overuse of salt might also cause excess sodium in the water at the taps, but don't quote me on that.
    2 points
  7. New ones are available for less than £400. https://www.screwfix.com/p/bwt-compact-metered-water-softener-10ltr/45059 or https://www.wickes.co.uk/Wickes-E10T-Fully-Automatic-Robust-Water-Softener-Unit/p/421700 and no doubt others. They will be timer operated and need an electricity supply but they will soften water just as well as the expensive ones.
    2 points
  8. As we needed to get our water tested anyway (as I have means of getting this done cheaply, but unofficially!) I had samples of both the unsoftened and softened water tested. These were the results: All the values in the softened water were well within the UK acceptable limit, and in the case of the sodium ions that were substituted for calcium and magnesium ions in the softener, the softened water is less that half that allowed from ordinary UK tapwater. The pH dropped a tiny amount, but is still just alkaline, so there is no corrosion risk from that. For comparison, the pH of the water in Cornwall can often be around 6 or so, so significantly more acidic than ours, even after treatment.
    2 points
  9. Digger and dumper on site, ready to start : ) It feels like Christmas Eve.
    2 points
  10. should have windows and doors fitting by some point next week then time to tape to finish them off. Will post update on how I get on.
    1 point
  11. Wow! Stunning location. There's no going back now! Good luck ?
    1 point
  12. Great stuff. It was a funny old day today- snow in the morning, then perfect sunshine without a cloud in the sky from midday onwards. Just watch those frosts if you're pouring concrete! Are you going volumetric or readymix?
    1 point
  13. A U value of 0.13Wm2.K could be achieved (just) with 130mm of Celotex
    1 point
  14. Of all the pictures the second from last is the most beautiful ? This will be a most lovely site to work on...in the summer ?
    1 point
  15. These entries show the in roof PV system: http://www.mayfly.eu/2013/11/part-twenty-two-roofing-and-mvhr-and-a-quick-video/ http://www.mayfly.eu/2014/01/part-twenty-six-the-scaffolding-comes-down-at-last/ And here are some photos of the in roof PV system being fitted and the completed front elevation, which looks on to a GII listed building and is inside an AONB and Conservation Area, so we had a fair few planning issues over putting PV on the roof:
    1 point
  16. Some of the longer standing members may remember that I got into a debate about how useless biomass was as a fuel. There is a bloke over an the other places that decided that Dr. David MacKay was talking total rubbish and that the UK could be run from a few grass clippings, and another bloke that claimed that he had fitted a domestic biodigester that could run a house off a few poos, food waste and anything else that could be digested. I was not alone in thinking that all this did not add up, so I planned an experiment. I found a very small sycamore sapling in my garden, put it in a pot and let it grow for a year. Then every year of 5 years I pulled it out the pot, leaned up the roots and weighed it. I also measured the height and diameter. I also did the same with a second sapling starting a year later. So that gives me 3 full years worth of data, but on a small sample and not grown in ideal conditions. I am not worried by this as it would take whatever magic was in Jack's bean to get to a decent mass to be worth burning. So here are the mean masses for 2015, 2016, 2017,2018. 41, 88, 193, 330. They are grams not kilograms. Now at the moment I don't know what the dry mass will be, but if it is 20%, that gives me 66gm to burn. If it has a specific energy content of 5 kWh/kg (quite optimistic that is), then I have grown, in 5 years, 1/3rd of a kWh, and it has taken up a couple of square metres of my garden. So that is about 20,000 kWh of insolation to get a whopping 0.33 kWh back at winter time. That is a conversion rate of 1.65%, which oddly enough, is pretty high for a plant (but I have not included leaf fall, but have included the root). So if anyone thinks that it is best to grow timber for fuel, it just isn't. PV is better by a factor of 10. And if you want to store PV in a battery, you don't need a very large one to store 0.165 kWh.m-2.
    1 point
  17. The regulations and costs for solar are likely to be an issue at 10kWp, not 4. I have 9.98 and they just included all the extra admin in the price that did not feel too expensive. Cost for black panels and backgrounds with Solaredge and as 3 separate arrays some easy some hard was about £11.75k in Jan 2016 all in. Play the game right with saving on the tiles for a new roof and you should save a good chunk off that. I think you are within range, so I will PM the details of my supplier. It feels to me that you probably want a distributed solution for water heating, and to transfer the energy around via electricity or gas rather than hot water, certainly to the annexe. Several Distributed Sunamps? A monopitch on the annexe angled to catch the sun might give you a full 10kWp solar install in that one place. I make 800 sqft plus a roof pitch big enough for about 40 pv panels, which is 10kWp as near as dammit. If it is single storey or even a ground style array on a flat roof that will also hugely simplify any maintenance should you need it. F
    1 point
  18. With the licence for online access? You can lose your way or overlook information in the hard copy of SPONS : using a combination of the online version and the physical one is very powerful : and quick.
    1 point
  19. If you're dealing with mains water, it almost certainly has residual chlorine in in anyway, especially in some of the hardest water areas in the South of England, so I'd not worry too much about microbial growth, especially as often the larger units will be sited outside the house, in a shed or garage. As for reliability, then having stripped both a Harvey metering head and a Clack electrically driven filter/softener head, I can't say there's much in the way of reduced complexity in the motorised head, if anything it's more complex than the metered head. The only known weakness with the Harvey type unit was the brine water level valve on early models, something they fixed with a re-design. It is a heck of a lot harder to strip and rebuild a Harvey type unit, but something like changing the ion exchange resin is dead easy, primarily because it's a lot easier to lift the small twin tanks out and empty and wash them out. The bigger units are a bit more effort to empty and refill, just because of their size, but do have the advantage of having a larger empty and fill port than the Harvey/Kinetico type. I have both types, as our water filter and iron removal system uses a standard Clack softener valve running on a timed cycle. Instead of sucking in brine on the regen part of the cycle it draws in air to re-oxygenate the inside, and it's programmed not to bother with a rinse cycle, but other than that, and not having a brine tank, it't the same as a softener. Interestingly the Clack head has already needed a new O ring on the drain outlet - not sure why the old one failed, but it was dribbling water down the tank on every drain cycle. Easy to fit a new O ring, but worth remembering that the Clack, Autotrol and Fleck valve heads are made in the USA, so use imperial sized O rings. The Harvey is made in the UK and uses metric O rings. The Kinetico also uses imperial sized O rings I believe, as that's a US design too,
    1 point
  20. Looks to me that this is increasing exponentially. Plotted on a log scale it looks like this (almost a straight line): So if that's the case, in ten years you could have a 24 tonne tree (24,000 grams).
    1 point
  21. I wonder how hygienic an over-sized vessel is
    1 point
  22. In essence that's spot on. The process is pretty simple, chemically, in that the ion exchange resin swaps calcium and magnesium irons in the incoming water for sodium ions that it has obtained from being regenerated using salt (sodium chloride). During regeneration, sodium ions are swapped out in the resin for the stored magnesium and calcium ions, discharging chlorides of calcium and magnesium down the drain. The ones that are metered tend to use a lot less salt for those whose water usage is variable, so can be a fair bit cheaper to run. The ones that are timed may well waste a lot of salt by flushing brine through the ion exchange column when it doesn't need it. If you use roughly the same amount of water evey day of the week, all year around, then a well-set up timed softener may not cost any more to run than a metered one. However, if your water usage tends to vary a bit then the greater the variation the more salt will be wasted. Over-use of brine doesn't do anything other than waste salt, as once the ion exchange resin is charged the excess brine just flows down the drain. The valve head flushes any remaining brine in the column to waste with incoming water anyway, so salt can't normally ever get into the house pipe work*** *** I mentioned normally, but on some units if the outlet pressure from the softener momentarily exceeds the inlet pressure during a regeneration (say from an anti-water hammer accumulator) then it is possible for brine to get into the house pipe work, due to the way the valves operate.
    1 point
  23. We draw water from an aquifer that's so far down that the water we're using probably predates the use of man-made fertilisers. The hydrologist reckoned it would be 200 years old or so, and that fits well with the fact that there are no seasonal variations at all in the standing water level - the pressure in the aquifer is high enough to raise the level in our borehole to around 35m above the level of the Lower Greensand, which tend to support the view that it's "old water" that is now under significant pressure within the aquifer itself (roughly around 3,5 bar). Had our ground level been around 5m lower the borehole would have been artesian, with water freely flowing out of the top. We're in the bottom of a valley where the stream has eroded the deep layer of overlying chalk and the Upper Greensand formations, and is now running along the exposed Gault clay.mudstone layer. The water that feeds this stream comes from many springs that originate along the base of the chalk and which flow through the relatively thin Upper Greensand formation, and that has no iron in it at all (untreated, the water from our borehole has over 200µg/l of iron in it), but does have a lot more calcium, which it's picked up from the chalk. The level of the stream is very variable with both the season and local rainfall; right now the stream is as high as I've seen it in a fair while, most probably because of the long period of rain we've had recently. It seems probable that the nitrates in our borehole water may well come from a natural source in the Lower Greensand aquifer, as there's a ~40m thick layer of Gault clay/mudstone over the top of it that acts as an aquatard, preventing surface water from percolating through directly. The Lower Greensand aquifer that we are drawing from is hydraulically isolated from the two similar larger Lower Greensand formation aquifers that supply water to the London and South East, those within the Hythe and Folkestone formations, well to the East of us. The Lower Greensand in our area overlies hard Wealden sandstone that is at a depth of around 51m from the surface and below that are the Purbeck formations that are closely related to the oil-bearing shale formations further to the South West and that have been producing oil from onshore wells in Dorset for a few decades now.
    1 point
  24. Looks like the BWT/Screwfix one is metered, so probably a much better idea.
    1 point
  25. She has a softener made by Kinetico. It is the second softener she has had in 30+ years and I think this one is over 10 years old.
    1 point
  26. I've yet to allow for the 12.5mm thickness of "pb" though in this case it'll be 12.5mm Aquapanel. Very conscious of that. Not enough noggins tbh. I'm thinking now, instead of noggins, to put a vertical infill of 6"x2" at right angles to the studs nearest the fillets. Loads of support then.
    1 point
  27. No lol. Itll need to heat the UVC too, unless you have another boiler hidden away ? ?
    1 point
  28. We did not do a passive cat flap, instead I run a concierge service for the cat who now comes and sits patiently by my feet when she wants to go out. I think this is the one discussed a year or two back. The letterbox came from here - you can get cheaper but we liked the finish of this one. We bought direct from the German supplier. Instructions in Polish. Note, this is NOT a passive post box, its for our outside wall.
    1 point
  29. Thanks for the comments all, just looking at at the above option, moving the stairs over a bit would I guess be ok upstairs but I will loose a bit on the size of the kitchen dinner. if I was to convert the garage to a fourth bedroom and en suite I would partition off the utility and so that I have a corridor/extended hallway into the 4th bedroom. dont really mind the utility being a bit smaller, only need room for a sink, washing machine and table dryer really, would also move the back door to there and have a matching full height window in the 4th bedroom? So many possibilities! moving the ridge height of the garage to the same level as the rest of the house would be much better, going to have an informal chat with the planning officer to see if their is any issues with that.
    1 point
  30. Me too. The plumber and I couldn't figure out how a properly functioning softener could cause corrosion of stainless steel when we saw the "no softened water" line in the instructions. I called them to ask for more info and was told that no warranty claims would be considered if softened water was used. Between that and not having time to do any research, we just went ahead and plumbed in unsoftened. I just had a look on their website and it includes the following: If choosing a water softener, it is important that you choose a system that does not remove all the minerals from the water, leave excess salt behind or reduce the pH-value of the water below 7 as the water will become corrosive otherwise. Reverse osmosis systems may not be suitable and are not recommended. Hydrogen Resin Exchange systems could rapidly change the pH valve of the water and are not recommended. Be aware that Sodium Resin Exchange systems can cause excess salt in the water which will cause corrosion on the Quooker tank. But then, Harvey water softeners says the following: Yes you can absolutely use our system with your Quooker (or other) hot water tap. Our technical director has verified that softened water from one of our units is fully compatible. My best guess is that Quooker is oversimplifying the situation for convenience, rather than giving tailored advice based on different softeners.
    1 point
  31. There are different views about Planning Consultants, and whether they should be used. This is a short example of a Planning Consultant offering superb advice, that most of us self-builders would perhaps not think about. The Problem I have just received a Planning Permission, after 3 months of engagement with the Council. It is a commercial Change of Use but the lesson applies to self-builder permssions. We received our permission, but on the last morning the Planning Department applied an unacceptable Planning Condition which threatened the whole project. The Planning Condition clearly violates several of the basic tests. This condition had not been mentioned in the previous months of consultation, and I did not see it until it appeared on the Decision Notice. At this point the Planning Application has been "determined" (ie decided and frozen), so the Condition cannot be modified without a further Planning Application or an Appeal to the Planning Inspectorate. The problem is that a Full Appeal gives the Inspector the opportunity to reopen the basic Planning Application, and modify it - which I do not want. The Solution The recommendation from our Planning Consultant was: 1 - To apply for a Variation of the unacceptable condition, which might be accepted, then... 2 - To Appeal the Refusal of the application for the Variation if we need. The advantage is that we then if needed we can get a Determination by the Planning Inspectorate on the narrow point, while keeping all the other acceptable aspects of our Planning Permission out of their scope. The Learning Point As self-builders, we think about discharging Planning Conditions at the end of the build process. The same process can be used to vary them before we start building. It takes extra time and a fee, which is smaller than a Full Planning Application fee for a new dwelling, but does not run the risk of reopening the entire Permission to change. More information The appropriate form on the Planning Portal. Explanation of Planning Condition Variations on the Government Website.
    1 point
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