epsilonGreedy

I just realised how many hours of my life have been wasted screwing all those bolts into each car wheel. In future I am adopting marine engineering standards on the basis that when the single wheel bolt falls out of a wheel I will be alerted.

I can imagine the conversation now... You: Alexa give the heating a 2 degree boost. Alexa: Sorry Dave (err I mean Triassic) I cannot do that. You: Alexa why? Alexa: I have been reading the BuildHub forum and have concluded you do not understand passiv house heating principals. To boost the temperature in a meaningful timeframe my COP would drop to such a low factor it would endanger the planet. You: Alexa order a cheap wall thermostat from Amazon. Alexa: Sorry Triassic I cannot do that.

The YouTube Skillbuilder channel is progressively turning into a comedy channel as they expand their coverage of topics from traditional nuts & bolts house building subjects to modern technology. As they do this they expose their limits. I still watch a lot of their stuff but I am suspicious of much of the barely concealed commercial advertorial content and their technology deficiencies. Every tribe has its foundation myths and belief systems. The BuildHub tribe believes that ASHPs are wonderful and anyone who experiences otherwise is a bad person.

The overall design parameter that @zoothornhas to comply with is to avoid personal bankruptcy caused by escalating space heating fuel bills. Running an ASHP 24/7 in a thermally leaky old property that should never have been fitted with an ASHP in the first place will be injurious to his personal finances and his quality of sleep.

@TriassicWhat EPC score are you expecting? What is the internal floor area of your property? I ask because you need to know how similar your situation is to the homes of those offering advice. @joe90's house is not far off a passiv standard and is sub 2000 sq ft hence running 24/7 off a single themostat works for him.

Curiously 116 for March 22 delivery.

Copied from the other duplicate thread, perhaps the Mods could remove that. A photo would be useful. How far has the resin drive transgressed over the boundary? Can you be confident the original drainage that prevented your porch becoming damp was installed on your land? Could the neighbour claim that any prior conversation 8 years ago amounted to your permission to lay the resin over the boundary? When I got involved with a neighbour dispute the other party's solicitor alleged that something I installed should not be within the neighbour's land and hence this constituted an act of trespass. It sounds as though in addition to trespass your are also alleging consequential water damage. @jack's advice is good though I think you would need to give them longer to act. At the end of the day if you are confident of the boundary position just get a serious odd jobs tradesman in with a petrol masonry disk cutter as mentioned by @Onoffand he will slice through the drive like a butter through marzipan at better than a linear foot per minute is my guess.

Thanks it is good to read confirmation of my initial hunch. I was going to run a second unconnected cable for redundancy or in case a future employer demands my home office is physically isolated from the general purpose home network. I agree, I cannot foresee a few (4) security cams overloading a 1 Gig uplink to the house. Given that I hope to feed the video streams into a central NVR box in the main house running AI image interpretation, the whole system will be constrained by the NVR CPU crunching the AI algorithms. I have not thought about which PoE switch I will be using. I follow a software guy called Scot Hansleman and in one of his videos he describes why he is upgrading to a Unify Dream Machine Pro, it can handle two broadband connections and fail over if one fails though I suppose EE do that now at the consumer level. https://youtu.be/afRV3qYuSfg?t=440 This is an excellent video for anyone intending to build a decent comms rack into their new build. https://youtu.be/afRV3qYuSfg?t=1224 Even home automation experts might like the surprise feature in this link https://youtu.be/afRV3qYuSfg?t=1525

I have just totted up the total number of POE cables I would need in my garage if all of my future home automation plans get implemented. It is an embarrassingly large number that I won't state for the moment. Now here is the problem, the average cable run from the barn/garage to the likely network hub in the main house about 35 meters. Let's assume 10 POE cables which is a drum and bit of CAT-6... call it £130. The total cost is bearable but the physical size of these 10 extra cables running through the house out to the barn/garage is something I would like to avoid. In this situation would a satellite POE hub located in the barn with just a single uplink cable into the house be more sensible? I am asking this question now because I am about to close up an attic space but if I am going to run 10 lan cable through this space I should be some carpentry provision for that now while access is easy. I don't think the devices in the barn could saturate the single 1 Gig uplink cable between house and barn. I am thinking of 4 CCTV cams (2 internal and 2 external, plus some sensors and remote switches.

I wonder if your friend has taken his guidance from Happy Hottubs? https://www.happyhottubs.co.uk/blog/how-much-does-it-cost-to-run-a-hot-tub I quote: Should I Turn My Hot Tub Off When It Is Not In Use? No. Turning off your spa between uses does not save money. Once the water is heated to your preferred temperature, you’ll save energy—and money—by keeping it there. It costs more to reheat the water from scratch every time you turn it on. Even if you only use your hot tub once a week, you should still leave it constantly running. For vacations of up to two weeks, you may choose to lower your water temperature to as low as 30 degrees celcius, but otherwise leave your spa operating as usual.

That YouTube HA chap linked to in this thread makes the same point which is why he claims the upmarket robot vacuums that automatically empty collected dust into the larger charge station bin are much more useful.

As long as Swmbo has a working credit card and internet connection the Hermes and DPD waggons will continue to queue up daily. We like to talk to the paper lady every other week because she knows everything and a 15 minute chat with her is like an omnibus edition of Lincolnshire StreetEnders. It is polite to chat to the villager delivering the newsletter.

It must have been the earliest example of priority being given to a disadvantaged minority with a net burden placed on the majority. Consider an inept DIYer wiring a plug in 1970. Hmm the red wire must be the dangerous wire so it should be safer to put that near the fuse. Ok next wire, my dad told me the big long pin is the earth, green leaves grow out of the earth so obviously the green wire grows out of the big earth pin. In 2021 the same inept DIYer will think. The mud colour wire must go into the earth pin because any other colour convention would be absurd, inherently confusing and unsafe. Electricity makes blue sparks which can be painful so best put that blue wire near the fuse and that twirly coloured wire reminds me of an icecream lolly so clearly the old cold used up electricity flows out opposite the fuse but oh, blue is the colour of cold things so maybe I should swap the sun coloured wire into the hot dangerous position near the fuse.

The following video was created by a home automation enthusiast, he ranks the HA technology in his house and is honest enough to declare where he wasted money. This video does have an American bias e.g. he feature pool automation and the Yanks like their outdoor lighting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0dfuj60aaI My plan at the moment in descending order of priority is: Robot vacuum. The current generation with lidar are a distinct improvement over the previous generation. Selfbuilders with MVHR report lower dust levels and I hope mvhr plus a robot vacuum will result in a cleaner house. I want to control energy usage which in a non passiv house means fine tuning room temps and anticipating weather a day ahead. I liked the features of the Drayton Wiser system but as I get further into my HA plans I think I could do better i.e. feed room temps into an HA hub and control radiators and ufh heat loops from central manifolds. Keeping an eye on electricity consumption at the primary points of consumption interests me, hence clamps on dedicated circuits to power hungry appliances like a tumble dryer is something I want but I cannot find off the shelve solutions for this. Visitor screening is another, which means starting with a smart door bell with video and two way audio, then moving onto driveway video camera with AI interpretation. The icing on the cake would be a number plate recognition cam to provide audio notifications in-house such as "Hermes courier or paper lady on drive". This might seem odd to those in a standard urban setting but our rural plot means we will not see visitors on the drive for a minute or two. I like the idea of multi room Alexa and music as I listen to audio books and podcasts. Finally security just makes it into my HA list. We live in a low density rural location with very little external illumination during the winter. If I was away working I think Swmbo would feel more comfortable being able to check all is well on security cameras when things go bump at night.

Across a 600mm truss centre I have noticed that the ceiling joist part of one truss is about 3mm higher than the plane of the other trusses. It is the last truss at one end of the room that is higher. When I get around to putting up the ceiling plasterboard will it bend up 3mm to meet this wonky truss without cracking? I have not decided on 12mm or 15mm ceiling plasterboard yet. This alignment error only came to light today as I ran some noggins across from another wallplate.

I opened up a plug this afternoon to dry it out and inside the wires were colour-coded Red, Black and Green, bliss. It made far more sense.

My scenario is a little different. In an upstairs bedroom I intend to finish the egger flooring with bamboo sheets as used by other forum members e.g. @Jeremy Harris. I think Jeremy glued his (18mm) bamboo sheets down. However in one section of my floor where water stood the Egger joints have swollen and I think I will still have a 2 to 3mm of bow after the joints have been planned down. I was hoping that a bit of levelling compound plus a thick coat of glue would fill the 3mm dips. p.s. I have never done flooring or leveling before and I am just speculating on how to approach the job.

I wonder why? Could it be an adverse chemical reaction with the plastic coating or is the warning due to probable lack of adhesion?

@zoothornI wonder if you could simplify things further and mount the camera internally at a window? There are some special (and cheap) cameras with mounts that stick to a pane of glass to eliminate internal reflections. This camera is about £50. https://uk.pcmag.com/home-security-cameras/131848/wyze-cam-v3

@zoothornIf you are just trying to catch a few examples of bad behavior and deliver evidence to the police I wonder if you need a permanent multi year wired solution? I think you need to get installation quotes before making a final choice.

It looks as though you are trying sticking plaster solutions when instead you need to identify where the excess moisture is coming from. The water is either getting in from the outside or lack of ventilation is not allowing normal internal air moisture to escape outside. A few external photos of that room will help the many experts here guess the source of your problem.

There are a few changes underway in the CCTV market at present but buying into the leading edge will mean spending more than those entry level Swann packages. Windows PC based AI image interpretation is now viable and will reduce the tedium of trawling through video recordings looking for a significant incursion. The AI software will distinguish between common objects such as cats, people and vehicles. Another feature is the ability to blank off areas of the camera's field of view to prevent false alarms and also comply with your obligations re. privacy laws.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLH9GEcdb9Y The other trend is POE (power over ethernet) which allows the camera to both receive electrical power from a LAN cable and also stream a digital video back to a server. This is more relevant for new builds where the marginal cost of running POE CAT-6 lan cable is small compared to retrofitting once the house is finished. In your position I would also check out the Amazon/Ring video doorbell system that can be augmented with extra cameras.

The issue of concern is point loads and as another poster mentioned possible local twisting action. This might be a regional thing but down here in England brickies consider two courses of masonry a minimum requirement.

The thermal performance of your new build is what counts, ICF is just one route to the minimum insulation threshold above which an ASHP makes more sense. Underfloor heating and ASHPs work well together although at the highest levels of passiv house performance a little hot air heating via the mechanical ventilation system is enough in which case you could ignore both ASHP and UFH.

If I was your planning officer I would have demanded that you fit a large Swiss cuckoo clock on the gable end and performed 5 minutes of yodeling at noon each day.