Jeremy Harris

A lot depends on how quickly the house loses and gains heat. If your house is well insulated, with a long decrement delay, is pretty airtight and has MVHR, then the chances are that it will have a thermal time constant that exceeds the diurnal period and so will stay warm with just a bit of heat injected once a day. Ours is like this, and in winter we have the UFH set to come on overnight (on the E7 rate) and that works well. Much of the time the heating only comes on every second or third day, and it's only when it's really cold that it comes on every night. On the other hand, if your house tends to cool down fairly quickly when the sun goes down, then you will need to heat it more often, and as UFH tends to respond a fair bit more slowly than radiators, you may find that the heating needs to be on all the time. In terms of economy, then having the heating on all the time always costs more, especially with UFH which is inherently less efficient than radiators (because there is always some heat loss down to the underlying ground). Best bet will be to see how the house responds. If you can "charge" the floor up with heat overnight on the off-peak rate that probably helps, but if that tends to make the house too warm first thing in the morning, and you're not in during the day, then any cost saving may be wasted.

Probably not, as the lower part of the chamber is sat in was filled with waste water. The crate sat in the top to sort of skim off the solidified fat that floated up in that chamber. On the topic of rainwater storage, we have just under 4,000 litres of surge attenuation storage under our drive. That was just enough for the run off from our roof and drive for our area.

I tanked the lower part, but not most of the area where the boards were bonded on, as the adhesive didn't seem to adhere as well to the tanking as it did to the bare wall. There are two laminate layers on the boards, with the ply core, so I thought that the chance of moisture getting through was a lot lower than with tiles, where moisture can creep through the grout lines.

There's a thread running here about it:

The simple answer seems to be that some private building control companies are ceasing trading because they are struggling to get insurance: https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/building-control-at-crisis-point-as-inspectors-struggle-to-find-insurance-cover/10043285.article Hopefully this will be resolved, but if it isn't there's a fair chance that the use of private building inspection companies might cease to be an option.

Having a good photo record and detailed reports that have been accepted by a building control body has to be a real plus, with the current problem that's affecting private building control companies.

Makes sense, as that's the principle used in cantilever bridges, like this one:

Perhaps not wholly on-topic, but I replaced our MK bathroom pull switches (which made a really loud click - enough to wake the dead) with these Contactum ones, which are a great deal quieter: https://www.tlc-direct.co.uk/Products/CM2781.html

The design guide is at least 2.3m for 75% of the gross internal floor area, I believe. It's not in building regs, but somewhere else (I'm sure I've a copy somewhere as I needed it when designing or room-in-roof rooms). Found it, it's in this document: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/524531/160519_Nationally_Described_Space_Standard____Final_Web_version.pdf

I used wireless switches to change the way our kitchen/diner lights were switched, after the wiring had been completed and the house decorated. They were an easy way to be able to change things without any disruption.

Very true. I shared an office with a climate scientist (from the Hadley Centre) for about a year. We had lots of interesting chats about climate change and one thing that stuck in my memory was the significant increase in energy in a warmer atmosphere, and the impact that has on weather systems. It doesn't take much of a change to make weather events a great deal more extreme than we're used to, and I suspect it may be these greater extremes of weather that have the biggest impact on our lives.

The line I've highlighted seems odd. Ideally you want the floor U value to be a lot less than that 0.22 W/m².K figure. The lower the U value the better, so I'd expect that line to read "New floor to achieve U-value not MORE than 0.22 W/m².K". A good target would be to aim for a floor U value of around 0.1 to 0.12 W/m².K if you can. That will just about halve the floor heat loss (assuming that there's no UFH) and mean warmer feet. If you're looking to install UFH then I'd very definitely look to improve the insulation, as UFH will increase the heat loss to the ground even more.

The Quinetic switches make a click, as they don't use batteries to power the transmitter, it's powered by a small generator that works from the movement of the switch. I've not noticed any noise from the receivers in the ceiling, but they do use relays, so the slight noise from them might be masked by the click from the switch.

I fitted the receivers up in the ceiling void, next to ceiling fitted lights, so they can be accessed fairly easily if need be. The switches are just fixed to the walls some distance away. The range seems to be pretty good. We have four switches and two receivers, with the switches coded in pairs to the receivers to switch two sets of lights with two-way switching. Pairing the switches and receivers is pretty easy, and something that only needs to be done once when setting things up.

I'm using the standard Quinetic receiver modules and they seem to be very reliable. As @dpmiller says, the Byron/HomeEasy receivers are prone to being jammed by any other device transmitting on 433 MHz, because they use a very crude system, that just turns the transmitter on and off to send the signal (ASK). Any other signal being transmitted around the same frequency blocks the receiver, it seems. The Quinetic system seems to use frequency shift keying (FSK) and so is a lot more immune to interference. The only slight down side with the Quinetic system are the noise from the switches (they do make a fairly loud click when pressed) and the fact that the receiver will always initialise after a power cut with the relay off, irrespective of the switch position. I used the dimming switches to get around this. They aren't advertised as working with the non-dimming receivers, but they do. The dimming switches are push on, push off, when used with a non-dimming receiver, so don't have any off or on position. This neatly gets around the ambiguity that can occur with switch positions with the normal switches after a power cut.

The really big problem with using an electric car as home battery storage is the impact it has on the life of the car battery. Electric car batteries aren't optimised for a very high cycle life, as they don't really need to be. A car with a range of 200 miles that does 10,000 miles a year is only going to cycle its battery about 50 times a year. Over ten years it will cycle the battery maybe 500 times. At most a car battery needs a life of maybe 1000 cycles, perhaps less. A home battery will be cycled at least once per day, perhaps twice a day if it's also taking advantage of cheap rate E7 electricity for part of the year. It's quite possible for a home battery to see around 500 cycles per year, ten times more than an electric car battery. An electric car battery used as a home battery does have the advantage of a much greater capacity than needed, which reduces the cycling problem to a fair extent, but it's still far from ideal to shorten the life of the car battery by using it at home, in my view. There are high cycle life batteries around, that aren't ideal for cars, as they have a lower energy density, but these batteries are ideally suited for use at home, where a bit of extra weight or volume isn't really important. LiFePO4 cells have maybe 4 to 5 times the cycle life of the LiNiMnCoO2cells that would be pretty typical for car use.

Yes, I've used two types, one I'd recommend and one I wouldn't (hence why we've used two types). I first used the Byron/HomeEasy ones, and they were less than 100% reliable, even over a short distance. I changed to the Quinetic ones from TLC (https://www.tlc-direct.co.uk/Main_Index/Wiring_Accessories_Menu_Index/Quinetic/index.html ) and found they work very well indeed.

That's a shame. The opposite seems to be the case here this year, our garden is awash with bugs of all kinds, more than I've ever seen before. My wife had problems with aphids on her roses so bought some ladybirds earlier in the year, now we seem to have hundreds of them, there were ladybird larvae just about everywhere a couple of weeks ago. Whenever one of the outside lights comes on at night there is soon a big cloud of insects flying around it, followed a short time later by the bats, who seem to have learned to home in on the area around the outside lights (I'm convinced they've learned how to trigger the PIR sensors to make the light come on, too).

You're right, my mistake. The problem I found when looking at salt/sodium intake was that a lot of the stuff is hidden in processed food. A tiny tin of baked beans, for example, has around 900mg of salt. That 900mg of salt is equivalent to about 360mg of sodium, which is about as much as would be in about 2.8 litres of our softened water, or about 0.88 litres of milk. Doesn't seem to taste any differently, but does make a nicer cup of tea, with none of the scum that you sometimes get with hard water. The water tastes much the same as the stuff that came out of the tap when we lived in Cornwall, or in SW Scotland, the main difference being that softened hard water tends to still be pretty much the same pH as it was before treatment, whereas the soft water coming out of the taps in soft water areas may be slightly more acidic and have been treated to raise the pH up to an acceptable level.

No, a normal Brita filter will only remove some solids plus stuff like chlorine and some organic compounds. My experience, having been diagnosed with essential hypertension around 30 years ago, has been that a low sodium diet has no measurable effect on BP. I have maintained my daily salt intake at below about 5,000mg for years (the recommended daily salt intake is not more than 9,000mg/day), and this isn't really hard. Just avoiding foods with a high salt content (not really stuff like crisps and salted nuts, most salt is hidden in stuff like fast food, and non-salty stuff, like milk and cheese).

Not sure the sums add up, really. I'd guess that, a most, we might kill a couple of flies/wasps a day. If the whole of our village does the same, then that's about 1000 flies/wasps per day, so around 1/3rd of the consumption of a single bat per night (and I'm not convinced that house flies or wasps are even a small part of the diet of the bats). It seems the bats have been here for a long time, and have a fairly healthy population, despite the normal variation in the insect population being maybe +/- 50%, year on year, or more.

No, there is zero salt in softened water. Ion exchange softeners only use salt to recharge the ion exchange resin with sodium ions during the regeneration cycle, all the chloride ions go down the drain during regeneration, along with the exchanged calcium ions that have been stored in the resin. There is a small amount of sodium in softened water, but this needs to be put into perspective with the sodium level in other stuff. For example, if you lived in a hard water area, and drank two litres per day of softened water, then the sodium intake from that 2 litres of water would be about 7% of the recommended daily intake of sodium. Milk, for example, contains about 5 times more sodium than softened water, volume for volume. Filtering, though any non-ion exchange filter media won't change the relative concentration of ions in the water. At best it will remove some suspended solids and maybe remove some organic content, plus, perhaps, some elements like chlorine, bromine etc.

We find that softened water is absolutely brilliant for both the washing machine and the dishwasher. Far less detergent is needed, clothes come out a lot better rinsed, dishes have no sign of lime scale marking and the dishwasher stays spotless, with no need to ever run Calgon through it. We also use far less soap and shampoo, it's much the same as when we lived in Cornwall and SW Scotland, where very little soap or detergent was ever needed. I reckon we probably save the cost of the salt for the Harvey softener easily, just from the saving in soap, shampoo and detergent.

Plasterboard is just a layer of ordinary plaster (gypsum) sandwiched between two sheets of thick paper. It's used mainly because it's very cheap, probably the cheapest sheet material available in that thickness, plus it has reasonably good properties for walls and ceilings, mainly good dimensional stability over time, and with changes in temperature and humidity. Cement is a different material; primarily calcium oxide and silica, with very little sulphate, maybe 2 or 3%. It's the high sulphate composition of plasterboard (around 98% or more) that creates the problem when it reacts with organic waste. The reason that recycling centres want gypsum segregated from other waste is because it can be recycled fairly readily, if kept reasonably clean, and this solves the H2S problem caused by putting it in mixed landfill.

Try it in a small area and see what happens. Should be safe, as we can smell a very low concentration of H2S, way below the harmful level, so if there's no smell then it's fine. H2S oxidises fairly readily, too, so it won't hang around in the air for very long.