SteamyTea

Can you specify that they must not use one. As pointed out above, it is not just the wiring load, there is also the problems with the kit cluttering up the place and possibly falling. It is not unusual to make minor changes to contracts.

It's easy, just pamper to the electorates fears. Tell them it's someone else's fault, promise them something and hope you don't get caught for past crimes. Oh, and a 3 word slogan. "Lie, lie, lie'

On the face of it they seem quite sensible.

A relatively easy way to check that is look at windspeed and direction when it is raining. Them compare to water getting in. Find your local WeatherUnderground station and see some actual numbers.

Why I suggested keeping an eye on it.

If insulated, yes, possibly. Won't happen on the inside as that is already full of condensated water vapour.

@richo106 Keep an eye on the buffer tank, that may get condensation. And let us all know how the cold showers go down, then we know something went wrong in the setup.

Temperature will effect capillary action. So quite possible that the electro-mechanical forces will change between the hot and cold sides.

I think you are misunderstanding me. The sprung mass should not touch the main, load bearing, structures.

I am currently reading Howard Mark's Mr. Nice. Seems you can buy anything, anywhere.

I am just looking at public liability insurance. I need insurance to take some stuff into an insured building. I flippantly asked if I can get insurance to cover neither of the insurances paying out. Got a blank stare. It is all about mitigating risk, not electrical engineering.

Spoonerism Monthly sent me a T-shirt with Shining Wit on it.

Secured to what? If it is the main structure then yes, moot. But if connected to the plasterboard, effectively an vibrationally isolated box, within a box, then not moot.

Reading this week's comic leader about renaming, and this was in there. "Meanwhile, “net zero”, once a technical term, has become unmoored from its true meaning and is often used by opponents to mean “an environmental policy I don’t like”." Sums it up better than I do.

You can add some sound deadening between the floor and joists. In effect, a resilience bar. Be interesting how resilience bars works for a floor, it is more normally rubber strips.

Yes. It does depend on what the aim is. Noise is just a change in air pressure, which is usually short term in a house (you can unplug the TV/PCs and Stereos). Living next to a very busy road, on a hill, by a roundabout, is very different from dealing with strange noises from a bathroom.

"From tiny acorns, mighty oaks do grow" (before you know it, you are a self builder, which is shorthand for a gibbering, bankrupt, wreck, who has had no life for a decade)

By the time you have used a dozen EPC assessors, to find the one that gives you the result you want, it would be cheaper to just put the house right. I really don't think it is sensible to suggest that the assessor is asked to cheat. I have had too many experiences recently dealing with cheating and lying customers. No one benefits.

Resilience bars are just springs (simple harmonic motion rules). One end should be fitted solidly to the wall/stud/whatever, while the other end is free to move, unhindered. If the free end (the side the plasterboard screws to) is rubbing against the wall, then there is unnecessary friction, this needs to be avoided. So I would take it all down, move the bars a few millimetres, and reattach the plasterboard. As you are double boarding, are your resilience bars rated for the extra load? To use an automotive analogy, imagine you are driving over a speed bump and your front suspension bottoms out, then you run over a brick, your suspension has used up all its travel, so all the loads are now transmitted directly to the bodywork. Basically, you have no suspension or damping.

I won't show them this then. Environment The ‘doomsday’ glacier’s giant ice shelf is about to break away The floating ice shelf of world’s widest glacier – Thwaites glacier in Antarctica – is detaching, with worrying implications for global sea-level rise By Alison George 18 May 2026 The Araon, a South Korean ice-breaker vessel, navigates a bed of sea ice near the Thwaites glacier in January 2026 Chang W. Lee/New York Times/ Redux/eyevine Antarctica’s most threatened glacier is about to be further destabilised, as the floating ice shelf in front of Thwaites glacier is set to break away. “Its final demise could happen suddenly, and to avoid being caught on the hop, we have already prepared an ‘obituary’ press release,” says Rob Larter at the British Antarctic Survey. Dubbed the “doomsday glacier”, Thwaites is about the size of Britain, but it is shrinking rapidly and is already responsible for 4 per cent of all global sea-level rise. Worse still, its collapse is expected to set off a domino effect in the entire West Antarctic ice sheet, ultimately resulting in a calamitous sea-level rise of 3.3 metres and changing the coastline of the entire planet. Many Antarctic glaciers form ice shelves that float out onto the ocean and buttress against the flow of ice from the continent. Thwaites glacier has one on its eastern front, known as Thwaites Eastern Ice Shelf (TEIS), that is about the size of Greater London – 1500 square kilometres – and 350 metres thick. But satellite images show alarming signs that this will imminently detach. In fact, by some measures, this break-up is already under way. “Suddenly, large areas are just falling to pieces,” says Christian Wild at the University of Innsbruck in Austria. “It looks like a windscreen that’s shattering.” Huge fractures are opening up around the pinning point – where the ice shelf’s floating front is held in place by a raised ridge on the ocean floor – and along the grounding line, the point where the glacier meets the ocean and starts to float. “It’s dramatic. I was there in 2019/2020 and when I look at the satellite images now, I don’t recognise the shelf. There are huge gashes where there used to be none,” says Karen Alley at the University of Manitoba in Canada, who has been analysing how this break-up is playing out. For a start, the ice has been thinned by melting due to changes in ocean circulation. Shifts in the ice-flow dynamics also mean that the shelf is now being slammed into the pinning point, tearing the ice apart. “It’s gone from a thick, strong ice shelf that is very well grounded on this pinning point to a thin, weak ice shelf that is now splitting apart around the point that used to stabilise it,” says Alley. The ice shelf’s demise is also signalled by a dramatic speed-up in its flow rate. “It’s tripled from January 2020 to January 2026, to just over 2000 metres per year, which is nuts,” says Wild. And in the past five months, the flow has accelerated further. “It’s essentially in free fall now.” At the same time, new rifts are opening up along the grounding line. “They started appearing in the last few years as the shelf began to accelerate significantly,” says Ted Scambos at the University of Colorado at Boulder. All this means that the ice shelf is tearing away from the glacier. Exactly when the final break-up will occur is hard to determine. “Predicting ice shelf break-off or collapse has similarities to trying to predict earthquakes,” says Larter. “You can tell that an event is on its way, but its timing depends on… processes that are impossible to predict accurately. I wouldn’t be surprised if the next satellite image I see shows the ice shelf breaking up, but neither would I dismiss the possibility that I might still be saying the same thing this time next year.” If you imagine that this will result in a giant iceberg suddenly floating off into the ocean, however, you might be disappointed. The geography of the area means that the detached ice is likely to remain stuck nearby, and the TEIS is unlikely to break off in one huge piece, as it is already quite fractured. Although the break-off of huge icebergs often make front-page news, what really matters for glaciologists is the loss of the ice shelf’s buttressing power. The shelf is “gone” when it stops holding back the upstream flow, says Wild. As a result, the glacier speeds up and flows more quickly into the ocean. In a study soon to be published, Wild and his colleagues show that between January 2020 and 2026, the flow of the glacier ice previously buttressed by the TEIS increased by around 33 per cent. “There is clear evidence that there’s very little buttressing in this area any more,” he says. So, by this measure, the ice shelf has already broken free. This is concerning for future sea levels around the world. “That means more ice unloaded from Antarctica, more ice dumped into the ocean and more sea-level rise,” says Scambos, though he stresses that this isn’t an immediate crisis – rather, a slowly unfolding one that will hit home in decades. “It’s going to influence the way Thwaites evolves and how fast it gets to that point where it’s contributing 10 or 20 per cent to sea-level rise in the future.” By 2067, it is estimated that Thwaites will be losing about 190 gigatonnes of ice per year, according to a study published in January by Daniel Goldberg at the University of Edinburgh and his colleagues. This is a 30 per cent increase from today’s loss from the glacier, and equivalent to the total amount of ice currently being lost from Antarctica. It is important to stress that, while ice shelves calving off icebergs is part of the normal cycle in polar regions, there is now a trend towards increasing loss. “Since the 1990s, we’ve been watching ice shelves destabilise,” says Alley. For instance, Pine Island glacier – adjacent to Thwaites – is experiencing rapid change too, with its ice shelf also disintegrating. “Ice shelves are only really stable when it’s quite cold,” says Alley. “The ocean has to be cold and the atmosphere has to be cold. But we’re warming the world and we’re losing the ice shelves, and that’s exactly what you’d expect.”

What are the cars worth. If less than a garage, then build a shed. Or, buy a newer car that can stay outside all the time. Keep it long enough and it will become a classic.

One of the things I learnt, when doing my teacher training, is about breaking down the student's 'mental models'. This is an interesting area and crops up in everyday life all the time. Just yesterday, I was having a coffee with Simone and we got talking about cars. Her husband likes to renovate and show old Fords. The conversation moved onto EVs. She stated that they take hours to recharge, catch fire and the batteries only last a few years. Asking where she got this information from, her reply was "my mechanic". There is no way she will be convinced otherwise as all she has ever known is a petrol engines car. This is, in part, why we have legislation to force change. Now there is always a risk that bad legislation gets passed, setting off a chain of unexpected consequences i.e. CFC, leaded fuels, the right to bear arms, and there will always be cheaters, but generally, legislation is well thought through and enforced. The term 'Net Zero's has been, what we now call, weaponised. This is just (expletive deleted)ing bonkers. All that is happening is that we are transitioning our energy sources to a more controllable systems.

It also suggest that the French only need 32 litres of hot water. Accounts for a lot. Actually that is a good study. The counter intuitive "greater affect at night" is possibly the important part from a health perspective. By keeping the daytime temperatures as low as possible, more time below a critical temperature happens.

The price would drop to 3p/kWh if they did.

Would need to be a tried and tested one.