Jeremy Harris

Best way to find them is to locate the inspection chambers on the drain runs, lift the lids and see where the pipes go. Any disused inspection chamber should be obvious, as it'll be dry and probably half full of muck. If you can follow the line of the old pipes then you should find evidence of the old septic tank. One of that age will almost certainly be brick or block built, as the GRP ones didn't really become popular until the 1980's. BTW, it will be a septic tank in all probability, rather than a cess pit. Cess pits aren't very common, as they need emptying several times a year, whereas a septic tank will drain to a leach field or soakaway of some sort, so will only need emptying once every year or two. Sensible to be wary of the thing not having been properly filled in. We had one collapse years ago and never knew it was there until then. It was right under my mother's farmyard, too.

As an illustration of just how corrosive chlorine can be, I have a 5kg tub of hypochlorite ("pool shock") that I used to disinfect our borehole after it was drilled and cleaned out. I sealed up the container and left it in the cupboard under the utility room sink. Despite being sealed, enough chlorine has escaped to corrode the pipes etc under the sink, and seriously rust all the sink fixings.

Cheapest fill is probably crushed concrete waste, as @nod suggests. if you want it to be a part of a garden, then worth smashing the top part in first, so it ends up down the hole, backfill with crushed concrete to within about half a metre from the top, then level off with topsoil.

Looks like the one in that listing doesn't come with the pokey bit, as the same seller has this listing for the same motor unit that includes a 1.5m poker: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Handheld-Electric-Concrete-Vibrator-580W-150cm-Vibrating-Poker-Bottle-/333168934931?hash=item4d926a8013

I'd be tempted to push the button at that price. The Ender 3 is a reasonably well-known machine, with a fair bit of online support.

I get the strong feeling that some of the interpretations of building regs are a result of "if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" mentality. The regs make no reference to needing laminated glass, they simply state that any ground floor door or opening window must provide a degree of protection from someone breaking the glass, putting a hand in and being able to unlatch it. Laminated glass is one possible solution, but not the only one. Anything that stopped the window/door from being opened by a hand poked through would comply with what Part Q actually stipulates.

They slide off one end of the chrome tube, so one of the wall-mounted brackets usually needs to be removed to allow the end of the tube to be freed.

Depends whether that pane of glass provides access, it seems: For non-opening glazing then it doesn't look as if laminated glass is needed, and arguably if the locking mechanism inside the door or window cannot be operated by someone putting their hand in through a broken glazing unit then it wouldn't need laminated glass, either. Maybe a bit of a tenuous argument, but having key-operated locking mechanisms inside, with the keys not left in the locks, might comply with the letter of the requirement, if not the spirit of it. Anything that disables the lock from inside would seem to comply.

Only where it was mandatory at the time. My view is that there is never a "one size fits all" answer to security, as the risk varies a very great deal from one area to another. For example, my mother always used to leave the house unlocked, and her car unlocked with the key in the ignition. She did this for decades, and I only found out about the car being left like this when she wanted to sell it, rang me and asked if I could come over and get the (rusted in) key out of the ignition. Behaving like that in an area with a higher level of crime would be asking for trouble, and I can see that fitting laminated glass etc might be sensible for a minority of locations where there was a significant risk of burglary by breaking through glass. According to our local crimestoppers contact, most crimes around here tends to be opportunistic, with the thieves targeting the easiest places to steal from. Most burglaries don't involve breaking windows, it seems there are simpler, quieter, ways to get into most houses.

Efflorescence won't cause any harm, it's pretty common on brickwork, but it may be an indicator that moisture is penetrating through that wall, and that may cause damage that's largely unseen. There's no treatment needed for the efflorescence itself, other than just brushing the crystallised salts off to clean things up a bit.

Hard to know for sure, as it depends where the moisture is coming from. As there's a shower the other side of that wall, I'd say that probably has to be a likely culprit.

Mould needs three things in order to survive, moisture, the right temperature and a source of nutrients. The nutrients will be in the surface of the bricks, possibly from the paint that's been applied at some time. The moisture may well be penetrating from the shower on the other side. Are you sure that it's really mould, BTW? Moisture penetrating through bricks can cause efflorescence, which is the salts in the bricks being dissolved and then depositing as white crystals on the surface exposed to air.

It doesn't look like cedar to me, especially as there seem to be fairly large surface knots present. I'd guess that it's untreated softwood, based on the photos.

I'd strip it right back, as it looks very much as if the original bare wood wasn't stopped and primed properly to me. The way that knots are showing through is a pretty good indication of this. If the underlying wood wasn't primed well, or at all, then there is a good chance that the paint adhesion is poor, so any repainting on top will still suffer from that.

@TerryE, I'll PM you with the technical contact I've recently been in touch with.

Seems this might be the case: https://www.vueville.com/blog/how-to-keep-spider-webs-off-your-security-camera-lens/ The spiders aren't attracted to the IR from the camera LEDs, they are just choosing to set up home there because insects are attracted by the IR. I'm going to try the peppermint oil trick to see if that works to dissuade them.

The excess PV diverter that I made several years ago still works flawlessly. I used an electricity meter chip to do all the heavy lifting and spit out true power, then added some pretty simple code to take advantage of the 1 Wh dead band that's built in to electricity meters. This means that you can shuffle less than 1 Wh across the grid without incurring charges. I have my system set so that when the energy bucket reaches 0.75 Wh from PV export the 3 kW heater is turned on until the energy bucket depletes to 0.25 Wh. There's a small leak in the bucket to ensure that cumulative errors don't build up over time. I wrote the thing up and posted it here: https://picaxeforum.co.uk/threads/photo-voltaic-immersion-heater-power-diverter-safety-warning.24286/ I've since changed the design so that the unit in the meter box transmits a coded signal via an 868 MHz FSK link to a remotely mounted switch box in the house, that just has a receiver, decoder and 25 A SSR.

In general, steps are preferred, as they don't translate vertical loads into horizontal slippage. With a slope at the base of the trench foundation, when a vertical load is imposed the foundation will want to move sideways down the ramp formed at the base.

I have a theory that spiders might be attracted to the IR lights at the front of CCTV cameras. We have the same issue, as soon as it gets dark spiders crawl in front of at least one of the cameras. Seems to mainly be a problem in warmer weather, as they don't seem to be such a nuisance in winter. Using a repellent around the bottom of outside doors seems to work well at keeping spiders out of the house. I've been using diluted peppermint oil for a while now and we don't seem to get any spiders lurking around under the bottom of doors at all. Prior to that, the underside of our backdoor was a spider haven, and you could pretty much guarantee that one would make a dash to get into the house every time the backdoor was opened.

Probably no reason why the PCB mounted relays in the Sunamp PV control board couldn't be replaced with remotely mounted SSRs. Most SSRs accept a wide range of input voltages, so there's a pretty good chance that they would switch OK with the signal that normally drives the electromechanical relays on the PCB.

Yes, we record to a box, but to SSD rather than HDD, and we only record when motion is detected. I'd personally not touch ring.com with a very long bargepole. They share data without explicitly telling users they are doing so, and I have a general policy of not letting anything I rely on for privacy or security connect to the open internet. I still cannot get my head around people who willingly install listening bugs in their houses, so that the likes of Amazon, Google, etc can hear all that's said if they wish to. Hardly a week goes by without the flaws in the security of this stuff, or flaws in the way it's used, getting a mention in the media. For example, over the past week alone these two stories were published, one about staff listening in to recordings made by "home microphones", the other about Ring sharing access to devices without explicit user consent.

Yes, electric radiators will be cheaper to run than electric UFH. All UFH heats the floor surface and so makes the floor warmer than the room. This means that the differential temperature from the floor surface to the underneath of the floor structure will be higher, so the heat losses will always be higher with UFH. Usually this isn't much, around 10% or so, but it does make an expensive heating "fuel" even more expensive to run.

@Piers, As @PeterW suggests above, fitting one of these air-to-air units is pretty straightforward. I have a vacuum pump and gauge set you can borrow if you wish, makes sure that the pipes etc are completely dry inside and leak tight before the refrigerant is released into them from the outdoor unit.

For anyone on mains drainage, then black and grey are the same, they both run to the same foul drain. Good idea to try and keep fats out of the system, as they are probably the biggest cause of downstream problems, along with wet wipes and sanitary products. If on a treatment plant, then much the same applies, with the difference being that it's the householder that has to deal with the problems that this stuff creates. The best solution is just to change behaviour, so that nothing untoward ever goes down a waste pipe. Failing that, a fat trap can work well and isn't too hard to just build into an inspection chamber. Screening, to catch insoluble solids can be done fairly easily, but frankly, cleaning the screen every few weeks is such an unpleasant job that I feel that educating all users is the better solution (same goes for fats, too, really).

Don't laugh, but the first AutoCad course I did was on the version that ran under DOS, and used a dongle plugged into the printer port to validate the licence. The PC was the fastest one we had, a 286, with a maths co-processor, that had a hard disk drive, something that was seen as "cutting edge" at the time (as was the super hi-res VGA screen). Regenerating the screen took several minutes...