SteamyTea

If you have MVHR then in the ductwork just before the unit. If you don't, then it gets tricky. A hallway used to be the place that thermostats were placed, but that was pointless as in the 'olden days' people keeps interconnecting doors closed. Really a case of monitoring where you think there will be a problem i.e. floor in living room or kitchen. Place the monitor close to the problem area as it is common to have a temperature and RH height gradient in a room.

Recycling the heat. We take gas out of the ground, combine it thermally with atmospheric oxygen, use the by product to make your fish supper, and allow the rest to eventually vent to the environment to cool. Some of the waste ends up in the sea, slightly increasing the acidity, some gets absorbed by the local plant life where it gets changed to carbon based structures and oxygen. Eventually, it all ends up back in the ground, gets buried by more of the same, and if the geology is right, turns into a gas to be refused. It is hard to say what the excess released gasses have contributed to this week's weather, but there will be something. What I do know is that compared to some other times when the weather has been similar, strategically places fans have kept the temperature 15°C lower. Makes me wonder how much A/C or slab cooling is really needed in the UK. Maybe just better controlled forced ventilation will do the job.

Yes, you need to monitor temperature and relative humidity, then apply Td = (b × α(T, RH)) / (a − α(T, RH)) Where Td = Dew point temperature Td = dew point temperature T = actual air temperature (in °C) RH = relative humidity (in percent) a = 17.27 b = 237.7°C α(T, RH) = [(a × T) / (b + T)] + ln(RH / 100) Then use the Td result to adjust your UFH flow temperature up or down.

I helped a mate out in his chip shop tonight. Careful placement of 3 fans kept the temperature down. Have known it to be 50°C for 4 hours. So not too bad.

Right now, there is a bit on the radio about local councils and flags. Someone compared the money spent on enforcing and prosecuting people that hang flags on lampposts to the lack of pot hole repairs. Potholes, or flags, are not an indicator of 'better offness'. But this is from worldometer. PPP = Purchasing Power Parity. The figures are in US currency so that it is easier to compare countries. It shows how as the population has got bigger, we have to work less to buy the same 'stuff'.

Neither, just that any figures present to you will not be accepted or the question gets changed. There is the whole of the ONS for you to explore, but I suspect you would not trust the numbers.

I am not your secretary.

Modern PUs are pretty benign once set. Furniture has used if for cushion for 60+ years.

I have been hearing that all my adult life, numbers don't back it up though.

There will be a solvent that works, but unless you know which adhesive was used, it will be trial and error. Start with the easy solvents. White Spirit, Methylated Spirit, Acetone, gasoline and WD40. Don't convince yourself that with a bit of solvent and a huge amount of elbow grease that it is working. A solvent should make it dead easy to remove. If none of them work, then it is a case of internet shopping for things like Dichloromethane, my favourite and Xylene (my least favourite), or even Toluene. I think it was @Onoff that found a cleaner in Lidl that seemed to remove most things, so maybe trip there on Thursday.

I do wonder if we really have, or maybe polarisation is human nature when resources get scarce.

Or send kids to private schools. Never more than 12 in my class. Was great.

Could do with a lot more down here, it is a cultural wilderness. While the Cornish culture is recognised, it is really the geography and industry that is cherished. Most of the cultural industry is over 200 years old, leaving the geography deeply scarred. There is a new, small estate of houses that has been built in the outskirts of Penzance. The bitching that went on about it was unreal, especially the road access. Not as if there is much traffic down here compared to places up country. Mark Steel summed the place up nicely. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b00s3gq5

Oh dear. A friend of mine had her gall bladder removed, was done by keyhole surgery, so quick and relatively painless. I take great delight in eating a cheese sandwich, followed by cheese cake, then one of my cheesy grins. For some reason there no pictures, just an icon followed by a dead link.

It was the comedian Jimmy Carr, who is very capable of having a serious conversation, that said 'in the last 20 years, China has covered their countryside in railways, we have covered ours in planning applications and environmental reports' Okay, they have also covered other countries in railways and roads without environmental reports. I think we have lost sight of the big picture somewhat.

No it can't at the moment. Some similarities are in place i.e. supply chain. Probably what needs to change is the design and management side. unlike engineers, who, have the saying about 'ask 100 and get 100 right answers (which is total bollocks, probably get 3 or 4 solutions)', an individual house designer may give half a dozen solutions to a simple brief, and have 20 reasons why non of them are good. In engineering there are good traceability systems, never heard anyone mention them in building, though I am sure they exist.

They could learn a lot from the automotive industry. I can't remember consumer writing to any manufacturer demanding better performance and equipment as standard, but still it has happened. I thought my 205 GTi was brilliant, till I got a 309 GTi. And that soon got relegated to second position when I got a Mercedes 300TE. The Merc was twice the prices though. The point I am making is that some industries are much better at market research than others. The building industry spends too long on PR, AKA corporate bullshit.

Which seems to be lacking in the Western democracies at the moment.

Or a Scott. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chuses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens. Even a beggar does not depend upon it entirely. The charity of well-disposed people, indeed, supplies him with the whole fund of his subsistence. But though this principle ultimately provides him with all the necessaries of life which he has occasion for, it neither does nor can provide him with them as he has occasion for them. The greater part of his occasional wants are supplied in the same manner as those of other people, by treaty, by barter, and by purchase. With the money which one man gives him he purchases food. The old cloaths which another bestows upon him he exchanges for other old cloaths which suit him better, or for lodging, or for food, or for money, with which he can buy either food, cloaths, or lodging, as he has occasion. Adam Smith

By putting in UFH pipework, you can always run it off a Willis heater for very low capital cost. That way you can bake the clay floor. (I put earth flooring in the same category as lime concretes, we have improved alternatives now)

That's interesting... thanks. We haven't got too far down the A2A rabbit hole yet, but dry air is a concern.... plants & eyes! We used these. https://humiditysolutions.co.uk/?products=vapac-steam-room-generator for our steamrooms, reliable bit of kit. They make similar for HVAC.

I have lived in a number of places with forced air heating/cooling. It works well. It can be combined with the MVRH, and maybe an exhaust air recovery water heating as well. The two downsides are that it can be noisy, so needs to be sized properly, and not just thermally. The other, more serious problem, is cross talk between rooms via the ductwork. I know someone who was sitting in his kitchen bitching to his mate about his mental wife. She heard everything in the bedroom. He got his own bedroom after that, and eventually his own, smaller, house. You also get some ugly grills in the rooms. But it can be done and I think all the problems are easily overcome.

Thought that was showing the position for the new Uninterrupted Power Supply

Not really the way to look at it. If something is running inefficiently, more waste thermal energy is produced. This manifests itself in more wear, noise and less performance.

Most portable air conditioners suck – but there's an easy fix Efficiency ratings on portable air conditioners don’t give consumers the full picture, and one type of aircon unit is so inefficient that it should be banned, says Michael Le Page By Michael Le Page 19 June 2026 Single-hose air conditioners suck hot air in from outside Ton Hazewinkel/Getty Images Thinking of getting a portable air conditioner as sweltering heatwaves become more common? You will want to know that many, if not most, portable air conditioners have a serious design flaw – and that there is no label required to inform buyers of this. I had no idea about it when I bought a portable air conditioner. What’s most shocking is that there is an easy fix – and I think the law needs to be changed so that no portable air conditioners can be sold without it. First, let’s deal with the idea, especially common in the UK, that it is somehow wrong to buy an air conditioner. If you don’t need it where you are, great. But lots of us live in homes that get too hot during heatwaves, even when you do all the right things, like shutting blinds and windows during the day. And being too hot is bad for our health – sometimes, it is even deadly. It also makes it hard to work or do schoolwork. If it is OK to use energy to heat homes, I think it is also OK to use energy to stay cool – what’s the difference? The fact is that, as the world heats up, more and more of us will resort to air conditioning to stay cool. Reducing the energy used by all these extra air conditioners is really important to minimise extra carbon emissions that result in even more warming – and even more need for air conditioners. To understand the design flaw, you need to know how air conditioners work. The most efficient ones have a split system. There’s an outside unit, where a refrigerant is compressed to make it liquid, heating it up. It is then cooled by a heat exchanger over which outside air is blown. The refrigerant then goes through a narrow pipe to the inside unit, where it is turned into a gas, cooling it down. That goes through another heat exchanger over which the room air is blown, cooling that air by transferring its heat to the refrigerant. So the room air stays in the room, and only the heat is taken out. There is also less noise with split systems, because the compressor is outside. But they are almost all expensive, built-in systems – very few portable split systems are available, in part because, for upstairs rooms, there is usually nowhere to put the outside unit. Instead of an outside unit, some portable air conditioners bring air from outside into the room. There is a wide air intake hose that sucks in outside air, and the heated air is blown out of a similar hose. Dual-hose air conditioners, as they are known, are less efficient than split systems. The outlet hose transfers some heat to the room – you can reduce this by wrapping a blanket around it – and if the hose ends are too close, heated air can get sucked into the intake. But as with split systems, room air stays in the room. With single-hose portable air conditioners, however, there’s no air intake hose. Instead, room air is used to cool the hot refrigerant and then blown out of the single hose, which means hot outside air is continuously sucked into the room. If there’s a window open, hot air will come in through that. With the windows closed, the hot air will come via other parts of your home, warming them along the way. Either way, the air conditioner is constantly having to cool hot outside air, and so it has to use much more energy. It’s like adding mud to laundry detergent. What’s more, the efficiency of single-hose air conditioners falls rapidly as it gets hotter outside. They will fail to keep a room cool much sooner than a similarly powered dual-hose one. This is a huge design flaw, but in Europe, none of the labels tells you this. The specifications for an air conditioner state its cooling capacity in British thermal units, but this is simply a measure of heat transfer within a machine. It doesn’t take into account the fact that more heat has to be transferred if hot air is continuously sucked into a room. The same is true of the seasonal energy efficiency ratio, or SEER, numbers you might find. These are just the cooling capacity divided by the electricity consumed. By these measures, dual-hose air conditioners appear no better than single-hose ones that are easier to set up. “Consumers find dealing with the two ducts difficult and often don’t have the space to vent two ducts out of the room,” says Chris Michael at the cooling company Meaco. So it isn’t surprising that people choose single-hose units and that dual-hose ones are very hard to find in the UK. The US is doing better on the labelling front. It has introduced two measures that take into account hot air sucked into a room and heat coming off the air outlet hose. There’s the seasonally adjusted cooling capacity, or SACC, which is much lower than the unadjusted capacity number, typically by a third or more. Even more important is the combined energy efficiency ratio, or CEER. It’s here that you start to see how much more efficient dual-hose air conditioners are. But in my view, these numbers still don’t give buyers the full picture. Both the SACC and CEER measurements assume the outdoor temperature is 28°C (82.4°F) for 80 per cent of the time an air conditioner is running, and 35°C (95°F) for 20 per cent. I don’t need air conditioning at 28°C – it’s how an air conditioner performs when the thermometer hits 40°C (104°F) that’s most important to me. Now here’s the most ridiculous thing. Most single-hose air conditioners are essentially dual-hose units that come with only one hose. All you need to fix this flaw is another hose and an attachment. At least one manufacturer, GE, sells a conversion kit for some of its single-hose models – and advertises it as increasing cooling power by three times. Three times! Lots of people make DIY conversions, ranging from tape-and-cardboard affairs to 3D-printed parts, and every account I have read says it makes a big difference. That was my experience when I tried a crude conversion during the May heatwave in the UK, with the whole house feeling much cooler. So, in my view, at the very least, the labelling of portable air conditioners needs to be changed in the UK and the European Union to reflect their real-world performance during the hottest heatwaves. It is bizarre and misleading that single-hose air conditioners can have “A” ratings for efficiency. Better still would be a complete ban on the sale of single-hose air conditioners. All portable units should be sold as dual-hose, with the option to use them as single-hose when people really cannot have a dual-hose setup. Put another way, no single-hose air conditioner should be sold without a conversion kit. Michael says Meaco is considering introducing such a machine in 2027. I tried to find out who in the UK is responsible for regulating portable air conditioners, and hit a blank. The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero did not respond to a request for comment. Nor did the Energy Saving Trust get back to me. But hopefully the right person might end up reading this. There’s an easy climate win to be achieved here.