Jeremy Harris

When we had this problem at our old house I made up a bird screen using the stainless steel strips taken out of the back of old windscreen wiper blades, and fixed them in place with stainless steel locking wire. I did this not long after we moved in, back in 2000, and the thing still looked fine when we sold the house last year.

My experience with Wessex Water is that they don't really know where their pipes are. Not wholly their fault, as all the water companies inherited drawings from the old water boards, and in many cases the old water boards inherited drawings from even older private water companies. For example, when we asked if we could have a water supply, we were told that the nearest water pipe was over 100m away. We needed to trench across the lane for a drain, and sent the usual notification of works to all the utilities, and Wessex Water came back saying they had no pipes in the lane at all. Our digger chap knew that the water companies haven't a clue what they've got or where it is, so went carefully. Just as well as he uncovered a live 1 1/2" cast iron water pipe running down the middle of the lane in front of our plot. I called Wessex Water out and they denied it was one of theirs. With the chap there we walked in line with the pipe and found a stop cock with "Wessex Water" cast on the top in the verge... The same goes for sewers, they only have a very approximate idea as to where the main ones are, and may well have no knowledge at all about communicating foul drains that have become their responsibility since 1st October 2011.

Still use the stuff today. There are times when when the choice is stay awake or die.

^ +1 Larch is really hard on blades, definitely need carbide ones.

Very real. One feature of military flying is that crews spends many hours waiting around in crewrooms, often drinking coffee. Coffee machines were (maybe still are) a fixture in every crew room I've ever sat in. In the 1980's, the Institute of Aviation Medicine were concerned about the impact of caffeine withdrawal on crew performance, especially on long sorties, so they did some experiments, monitoring crew performance during long flights both before and after removing the coffee machines. They proved conclusively that crew performance was adversely affected an hour or so into a sortie, when that crew had been sat drinking coffee beforehand. AFAIK this didn't result in the permanent removal of coffee machines from crewrooms, (there would have been riots, I suspect) but it did become more common for crews to smuggle flasks of coffee into their flight bags... Had no effect on Nimrod crews, as there was always one crew member on board walking up and down the A/C with either a big teapot or coffee pot.

I had much the same. BCO was interested in the foundations, drainage and checking the insulation was pumped in, and at that stage said he'd not come again until completion. Turned out that another inspector was brought in from retirement for that, and he gave me a hard time about the foundations (already signed off) and the plumbing (he wanted certificates for all the outlets to show they didn't exceed the maximum flow rates allowed, despite us having a private water supply, which meant those regs didn't apply). Luckily the head of the local building control stepped in and did the completion inspection in about half an hour, ignoring all the piles of paperwork I'd prepared.

Me neither, can't stand coffee. My problem has been drinking too many cups of tea a day. During the build, as soon as I'd got the water and the boiling water tap working, I found myself drinking far too many cups of tea a day. I've cut back to around 4 or 5 cups a day now and find that I sleep a lot better than I used to.

I have a general principle that if a company doesn't advertise the price of its products, or make the prices readily available, then I don't bother looking any further at them. Hidden pricing is, more often than not, a way of being able to cover up charging way too much for something. The sales tactic is to get customers hooked on the product features to the point where they are committed to buy it, then charge whatever you think you can get away with. It was traditionally the sales technique used by high-end luxury brands (like Rolls Royce, "if you need to ask the price you cannot afford it") but has been copied endlessly by other companies now, even companies selling complete tat (not suggesting that applies to this company, BTW).

I agree with @Ferdinand, this is an application that is only intended to prove the principle of allowing this land to be used for dwellings. There's no way dwellings would get BR approval without ventilation and means of escape from fire, but once the land has approval for residential use (which it now does) the owner is free to submit an application for a more sensible/profitable development.

Dorset seems fine. We're a mile or so East of the Dorset county boundary, yet I've used the Shaftesbury centre loads of times with no problems. Pity Wiltshire are such a PITA, something that's obvious from all the fly tipping in every rural lay-by.

I'm banned from all the recycling centres in Wiltshire. The ban happened not because I was misusing their services, but because some commercially-motivated moron decided that my Prius was a "commercial vehicle", and as such I was breaking the rules by using the facilities without a permit. The reason this happened? I was clearing stuff out from our old house and made the mistake of making three trips to the recycling centre in one week. They have ANPR, and apparently my third visit triggered a lifetime ban, as I was flagged as a commercial user who was trying to fiddle the system. The really annoying thing is that, because they use ANPR, and because I have a personal plate, the ban is permanent. I can never, ever, use a Wiltshire recycling centre again. I can get around the ban for now, as the Shaftesbury recycling centre (in neighbouring Dorset) is just as close as the Salisbury one, and for now Dorset aren't checking that people using the centre live in (and hence pay Council Tax) the county (Wiltshire are implementing ID checks soon, I believe).

It should work well to kill off moss and lichen on concrete, but there may be a slight blue stain initially. The stain should fade away after a week or two though.

Both our bathrooms are on the North side of the house, and we had a planning constraint that meant we weren't permitted to put roof windows in (concerns over light pollution, our area is trying to gain "Dark Skies" accreditation). One of the bathrooms has an internal window that looks into the hallway, make from glass bricks. This works well at giving some light into the bathroom and also keeps sound out well. The other bathroom just relies on artificial light. Both are fine, and by not having external windows they no different to the bathrooms in a lot of hotels.

Another variable to add in to the mix is if your house has a need for active cooling. For the past few weeks some of our PV generation has been powering both the MVHR cooling heat pump and the ASHP in cooling mode. These two combined would cost around £0.18 to £0.20 per hour to run if we didn't have PV.

+1 for getting a condenser dryer, but if you really want an externall vented unit then there are different rectangular duct sizes around. At our last house I ducted the tumble dryer with that 110mm x 54mm rectangular ducting. Seemed to work fine. Our tumble dryer seemed to have a pretty powerful fan on the outlet, so the slightly smaller size of the rectangular duct didn't seem to cause any problems. You can get wider slim rectangular duct if you want to try it. I've seen 150mm x 70mm and 204mm x 60mm, but there are probably other sizes around too.

We generate around 6 MWh/year from an array that, if installed new today, would have a net cost of around £5k to £6k (allowing for the saving in roofing cost from having roof-integrated panels). With no FiT, just export payments, and assuming these would be metered and paid at about 5p/kWh, then we would generate a direct income of around £120/year from exported energy. The remainder would be self-consumption, used to charge the car, provide hot water, run the house during the day, etc, during the useful generation months. We often have "zero import" days during the summer, with the whole house running for 12 hours or more from self-generated power, all of which offsets electricity use at peak rate. Without PV we would shift some loads, like charging the car, running the washing machine, etc to the off-peak rate. The value of our self-generated energy is around £540/year, but if we were to load shift some stuff to E7, because we didn't have PV, then that would shift to maybe £450/year. Total saving for us from having PV (ignoring FiT) is therefore around £660/year, but if we didn't have it and shifted some stuff to E7 that would reduce to about £570/year. It still looks as if a PV system could have a payback time of around 10 years or so, which seems to stack up reasonably well, given that the panels should last 20 to 30 years. The investment in a battery system is far less clear cut. At best it might break even in terms of whole life cost, but most probably there would be no saving at all. Still worth doing if you place a value on having standby power in the event of a power cut, though, assuming the battery system supports this (not all do).

You're right, the dryer doesn't work as well as a vented one, but we couldn't fit a vented one, so had to compromise. In practice we rarely ever use the dryer to really dry stuff, as we have one of those hoist-up clothes dryers in the utility room, with an MVHR extract above it. If we have to hang clothes up indoors they dry pretty quickly on that, so all the dryer in the machine gets used for is tumbling towels when they are nearly dry, just to make them fluffy.

We're about a year away from the system having repaid its investment. It's generated around 33 MWh so far.

That;s all self-generated, except for about 0.35 kWh of import. I can live with paying about 5p for the day, given that I charged the car, did the washing and topped up our hot water for that. It also includes cooking two meals and few cups of tea. Bit of a cheap day.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Copper-Sulphate-Pentahydrate-100g-2-kg-Highest-Purity-FREE-Shipping/121201879010?_trkparms=aid%3D111001%26algo%3DREC.SEED%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D20160908105057%26meid%3D2743c344f72e4d7f8a5e0d0215d0e711%26pid%3D100675%26rk%3D2%26rkt%3D15%26mehot%3Dpp%26sd%3D132871662790%26itm%3D121201879010%26pg%3D2481888&_trksid=p2481888.c100675.m4236&_trkparms=pageci%3A23641b43-ab2a-11e9-a68e-74dbd1807028|parentrq%3A10fffef016c0ad31c39e3de0ff51a202|iid%3A1

We have an LG Direct Drive hybrid condensing washer dryer with a simple rotary dial and a 30 min wash that seems fine (but we have a water softener). Has a 10 year warranty on the motor and drive system, too. Only slight snag is that it plays silly tunes that you can't turn off.

Yes, that's the stuff, but this is better value (get 2kg for £15): https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Copper-Sulphate-Pentahydrate-100g-2-kg-Highest-Purity-FREE-Shipping/121201879010?_trkparms=aid%3D111001%26algo%3DREC.SEED%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D20160908105057%26meid%3D2743c344f72e4d7f8a5e0d0215d0e711%26pid%3D100675%26rk%3D2%26rkt%3D15%26mehot%3Dpp%26sd%3D132871662790%26itm%3D121201879010%26pg%3D2481888&_trksid=p2481888.c100675.m4236&_trkparms=pageci%3A23641b43-ab2a-11e9-a68e-74dbd1807028|parentrq%3A10fffef016c0ad31c39e3de0ff51a202|iid%3A1. It dissolves at a ratio of about 20g/100ml of water at 20 deg C, so roughly 1kg - 5 litres of saturated solution. Takes around a week to two weeks to work when killing live moss. Also works to kill moss on lawns without killing the grass (but may need dilution - test a small area first).

Nice sunny day today. Hot water was recharged for free by 9 am. Washing machine ran for free after that this morning, then, when I came back from the supermarket run we were still exporting over 4 Kw, so I decided to charge the car. It finished charging about half an hour ago, with around 100 miles range gained for next to sod all (best I can estimate is that ~100 miles cost me around 5p). I read the meter this afternoon, and since January 15th we've used about 1,800 kWh, including charging my car.

TBH, I don't know, but whenever I can I try and find out what the active ingredient is in any product and then see if it's cheaper to just buy that and make your own. I routinely make screenwash, de-icer spray, concentrated bleach, moss killer and a few other things just using cheap bulk ingredients. The cost savings can be really useful, just a matter of digging around in things like Material Safety Data Sheets then formulating a DIY version. My wife reckons that my home made windscreen de-icer is a lot more effective than the commercial stuff, and I can make several litres of the stuff for the price of one aerosol can.

This is exactly what we experienced with our glazed front gable. The black reflected interior at night made the whole of our entrance hall seem very exposed at night, as we couldn't help thinking that people outside were peering in (not very likely). We opted to fit electric Duette blinds and they have really transformed this space when they are down. They don't do much to reduce solar gain, but having a cream coloured covering for the otherwise black glazing makes that whole area feel a lot more comfortable.