SteamyTea

I borrowed a car and had the toughened windscreen shatter. Not fun at 80 MPH on a wet Marlow Bypass. We used to fit toughened glass doors to all out saunas and steamrooms. Some got broke in the process.

I use Casetite, it is a urea formaldehyde. Comes as a white powder, you mix with water, let it set and then you can, if you want, pop in a bucket of water for 13 months just to see how well it works. It works well, probably why they use it on boats. I have also used it as a varnish, just water it down a bit more. A few weeks back I made up 3 samples of different glues, PVA, PU and UF. I keep meaning to test them out. Just that other things have got in the way.

Diesel just needs a temperature increase to ignite, gasoline needs a spark to the fumes. Can you unbolt the tank?

Do you think they are going to charge everyone that wants to build there £000s just to get going. I do hope so, the council needs to raise cash somehow.

And people wonder why I don't want to teach in a comprehensive anymore

I believe they do register exports, if that information is used/recorded/acted on is a different matter. The long term dream is that the smart meter can also control non critical equipment in the house, saving the householders using very high priced power. I think this is a long way off and will require a lot of new white goods mainly. I have just saved a few pence on the energy consumption of my fridge, I inadvertently hit the thermostat and turned it off. Cost me a couple of pints of milk and a car journey to the supermarket at 7:00 this morning

I am not totally sold on that explanation. It is true that the usual temperature of the Sunamp is lower than the design temp of a normal thermal store. But if you store an equivalent amount of energy, at the same temperature in a thermal store, which has a smaller surface area, even though it has a higher U-Value, I would think losses are comparable if the Sunamp did not use such good insulation. Would have to sit down and work it out, but got a show on for the next few weeks, so going to be a bit busy.

Seems the Daily Star were spot on in that prediction

You may want to wait before you buy a generation one microwave oven. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2089181-next-gen-microwave-ovens-are-small-enough-to-sling-on-your-back/ Last paragraph.

If the power industry every sorts itself out with smart metering, then that will make life a lot easier.

Tricky one. Cylinder losses are uncontrolled loses, so not that useful. And they are probably larger than you think. Really comes down to the basic arithmetic in the end: Reasonable Expectation of Usage + Acceptable Losses = Real Usage Price of Different Technologies / Longevity + Running Price = Real Unit Price For a laugh I have just looked at how much water my kitchen sink holds (can't believe I have never measured it before). It is 12 lt or 12 kg. My incoming water temp at the moment is 18°C (at the moment) and my DHW temp is 50°C (I am totally reckless and never worry about water disease). So that is 0.45 kWh My bath holds about 100 kg of water, but is at 42°C so that is 2.8 kWh. My shower uses about 30 kg at 38°C, so 0.42 kWh So my daily usage is about 4 kWh/day during the summer. Because I am on E7, I have no real choice but to use a 'thermal store'. Mine is a simple 200 lt copper cylinder that was made in 1987 and had little insulation around it. My losses where around 4 to 5 kWh/day, but I have reduced this to 1 or 2 kWh/day with extra insulation. It varies with the seasons (mains temp can go as low as 6°C) and usage (if I use less, I have greater losses, so bath first thing, shower later). So from my simple usage I can work out what is the best financial solution. Halving my standing losses saved me around 20p/day or £73/year. This easily paid for the extra insulation as it was only 2 sheets of Celotex that cost £50 delivered. I am still upset that I have losses, but the alternative is to fit an inline heater and run it at full price electricity, so that would realistically cost me about £700 to fit and near enough double the running costs. So not really worth it. Same with the Sunamp (which has excellent insulation and very low loses). Now as you don't have to rip out any old system, get cabling relocated, you have an advantage over me. You need to look at the balance between amortised installation price, losses and running cost. I suspect that there is not much difference in the cost of a Sunamp and a new decent thermal store. Both will realistically need an inline heater as you will have times when your DHW usage is high (visitors). I have no idea how long the pipe run is to the kitchen, but you may find that a dedicated inline heater is best, it may reduce the total plumbing as well (just needing a single cold feed). But you may find that you can live with the delay and just fill the sink with the hot tap till it is hot enough (mine is about 2/3rd full, so about 8kg of water). Up to you to decide on that one, you may have a dishwasher anyway. So, sit down, do the arithmatic and the answer will fall out at the end. "With a little physics, you can do anything Jim" Hazel Rymer, Life Scientific, Radio 4

Have a look at commercial stuff, it costs more, but is generally better and simpler to use.

Not sure if I have a picture of her scanned onto the PC. Or you just after looking at a 1970's 17 year old

4 Star was 17p/litre in 1978, but we bought it is gallons then, so 77p/gallon. Inflation was 10%, (2.5ish% now), bread was 28p (50p for Tesco Toasty now), Milk 11p (22 to 50p now). Sweeny was on telly, fags were 60p a pack, close to a tenner now. I was 3 inches taller and still unable to grow a beard (thankfully). Had a girlfriend called Susan, and a motorbike.

Be interesting when Theresa May is PM, she likes the idea of governments spying on their citizens. I think she wanted to outlaw strong encryption, such as AES, part of the reason I use it.

Same thing isn't it

Now I have never understood why they put the salad on top of the chilli sauce. I prefer mine with the salad in the pitta bread first, then the meat, then loads of sauce. So was this leak anywhere near where the divining rods crossed?

I see it uses 7 W in hibernation mode. That is more than my laptop uses in normal usage mode.

There is StuffIt for the MAC, and iZip, not sure if they encrypt though. I use a cracked copy of Winzip and portable 7-Zip, the encryption/decryption works both ways between them. No one has said anything about me uploading predominately encrypted zip files. I use Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive and used to use ADrive till the stopped the free 50 GB service. FTPS is really the way to go as you can do incremental transfers, but just can't find a free service. I have some FTP space via my ISP, but think it is only a couple of MB, so useless really. I should really look at my web hosting provider and see what they offer as I think I can FTPS into them.

I have slowly stopped using cloud services. The only thing I found them useful for was sharing large file anyway. It is worth remembering that you can use a 'zipping' application that supports encryption and only upload those files. Can save a bit of space too.

There is usually something in the inverter spec about not earthing too. Should it be earthed or bonded?

If you have a look at the road near your house, you may well find a surveying stud, worth using that as your reference point. The leveller that we used during our surveying course was not self calibrating, so we had to 'turn it over', which meant we had to do 6 measurements, then we applied the Bowditch correction to the results. All this does is assume that the precision is equal but the accuracy is fine, or it may be the other way around. It is the same as using anomalies rather than absolute values really. So it gets rid of any systematic errors. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=5d1B0Vy52dQC&pg=PA132&lpg=PA132&dq=Bowditch+levelling+correction+surveying&source=bl&ots=ULFO8hFti5&sig=g12JvxLNcaJiAgCbbSXkfc3iu9s&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=Bowditch levelling correction surveying&f=false

Sum of Least Squares is used all the time in mathematical modelling. It works well with Solver in Excel. You get Solver to change 'something' in your equation, then it checks the Sum of Least Squares result, if it is heading in the right direction, usually to a value of zero, or close to it, then it repeats the change until it can go no further. That is the point where the differences between all the results are the minimum, or least. The reason that the difference is squared is to make all the numbers positive, as any negative number squared is a positive (unless you want to explore imaginary numbers that is). So in effect you end up with two sets of numbers for your model, one the observed, and one the predicted. You take one from the other, it does not matter which way around, and then square the answer. (Observed - Predicted)2 You do this for all the the groups of numbers, then add up (sum) the answers. The closer that number is to zero the better.

It is a good site to see what is happening when a large storm hits.

More worrying is why you are viewing soapstone. Back in the 1970's I worked with some Australians, they said the best place to hide your money from a Pom was under a cake of soap and when they turned the plane engines off on arrival, the shining carried on!