Jeremy Harris

IIRC, it was Vincent Black Shadow on the sound track, although it was a Harley Davidson in the imagery (the sound is nothing like that from the 45° Harley V twin featured in the film). The art master at our school had a Black Shadow, and used to have to stand on a concrete block to be able to kick start it. 998cc of the finest British motorcycle engineering. . .

Nothing that can't be fixed with a few sleeping pills tucked into some bits of meat and chucked in the pens. Seems to always work for the bad guys in films . . .

Same here for us, Bulb are still a better deal than Octopus. I also found Octopus an annoying company to deal with, and their "love and peace" crap on all their correspondence gets pretty irritating.

How did this get through commissioning and balancing by the installer with the ducts connected the wrong way around, I wonder? Should be easy enough to swap the ducts over, but equally I think it might be wise to ask for evidence that the system has been properly commissioned and balanced. The required ventilation rates it has to meet are given in building regs, Part F.

Weren't there just. I had three job offers following interviews for my first job, one from Fulmer Research, one from The Radiochemical Centre (then a part of the UKAEA, now this radiopharmaceutical company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amersham_plc ) and one from a pharmaceutical company developing a new contraceptive pill. The lowest paid was The Radiochemical Centre, as it was then a part of the Scientific Civil Service. My father stressed to me that a Civil Service job was a "job for life" with a good pension scheme, so persuaded me to accept the lowest paid job. I hated it, and moved to work for the MoD, but the "job for life" bit disappeared when Thatcher came to power. Although I detest the woman, I think that removing the "job for life" thing was probably a good move. The pity was that pay wasn't adjusted to come into line with any other similar job that could disappear at a moments notice. Took many years for pay to start to match that in the private sector, and only then because of the privatisation of a very large part of government research and development.

Or Marianne Faithfull. . . . The shots of her in a black leather catsuit from the film "The Girl on a Motorcycle" are indelibly etched in my memory, together with Mars bars . . .

Each cable has to run from the individual output on the switch (which may be combined with a router) to the wall socket. You can choose to use a patch panel if you have a lot of cables, or you can do as I did and just fit a wall plate with several sockets and use short patch leads from that to a switch. You could even fix the switch to a wall somewhere and run the cables direct from there to the sockets, but it's not a great idea to flex fixed Ethernet cable too much, as it uses solid cores (flexible Ethernet cables use multistrand cores). You can get wall plates that allow several ethernet ports to fit on a single plate, so if you don't have too many cables this can be a fairly neat solution at the switch end.

Some can be adjusted. At our old house I had to have one set to pretty much as high as it would go to get the toilet to flush well, whilst the other toilet seemed to be fine with it set to whatever the default level was.

I remember these, weren't they called "Hippos"? I also remember them being totally useless, same experience as you had. The thing I've found is that it's the pan design that seems critical. We have two different designs of Vitra pans, all have the same cistern and flush system. One design flushes noticeably more effectively than the other design, yet they look very similar. makes me think that even small changes in the shape can have a large impact on how effective the flush is.

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I can't remember, TBH, as I unlocked it years ago. I have a feeling it may have been something as simple as that, as it didn't take long to get it to work, IIRC. The neat thing about BeamCalc is that will handle pretty much any type of simply supported beam, either supported at two points or cantilevered, with point loads or distributed loads. It works with rectangular, circular, elliptical or I beams, either solid or hollow, so covers pretty much any fairly simple case. It also contains material properties for lots of stuff, metals, different types of timber, glass and carbon fibre reinforced composites, plastics etc.

Still as useful now as it's ever been, and the Excel version is fairly easy to use, and pretty comprehensive, in that it will handle about a dozen different beam configurations, as well as a handful of different cross sections.

Would an unlocked copy of BeamCalc help? It's an Excel spreadsheet that does simple beam calculations quickly and easily, for both point and distributed loads.

The MVHR won't do anything to mitigate condensation, I'm afraid, as that is just a function of temperature and humidity. Cold surfaces are always going to condense out water from the air if they are below the local dew point, and a surface down at around 8°C will be well below the dew point for a lot of the time, I think (this is the reason fridges and MVHR heat exchangers have a condensate drain). Not impossible to overcome, though. Might be possible to include some sort of condensate drain from the cold surface, perhaps, or else look at cooling the air in the space via a small fan coil unit that includes a condensate drain. The latter might well be the better solution, as it would probably cool the space more quickly after the door has been opened, and it would almost certainly work with a lower temperature differential than would pipes in the floor or wall.

I played around with the settings on our ASHP and it would happily deliver water at 4°C in cooling mode. There's a temperature differential between the flow temperature and the surface temperature, and another differential between the surface and the room temperatures, but I think that, with pipes in the ceiling, or perhaps the walls, it should be possible to cool a space down to maybe 8°C or so fairly easily. Might even be able to get that low with cooling the floor. Condensation would be an issue, though, if cooling surfaces to this sort of temperature.

We've been using the aircon in the bedroom most days for the past couple of weeks, as the house has been a bit warm in this prolonged sunny spell. Seems a bit odd turning on aircon in March in the UK climate, but Spring is usually the period when we get the most solar gain, a combination of being in a sheltered spot, facing South, with the relatively low angle of the sun causing sunlight to penetrate more deeply into the house.

Larch will probably see you out. The saw mill that milled our cladding (about 3 miles away from us: http://www.ridleysawmill.co.uk/ ) reckoned that untreated it should be good for at least 30 years, and if we then gave it a coat of clear preservative every five years it should last for another 30 years or so. A lot of the local bus shelters are clad in waney edge larch, and many of them are now around 40 years old, and haven't had any treatment, yet they still look OK. Supposedly Siberian larch is more durable than our native European larch, but judging by the longevity of some of our local larch I'd suggest the difference may not be that great. The main snag with larch is that it can be tough on saw blades, as it has a high silica content. It also sheds really nasty splinters, that seem to get through any gloves. When making the bird box I was picking bits of larch out of my hands for a week afterwards.

Luckily I still have a stack of wide (~300mm) rough sawn larch boards, left over from cladding the house. Made a bird box from this a few weeks ago, and although several blue tits have been exploring it, it doesn't look as if it's met with their approval (it's made to the RSPB plans).

Should go down a treat in China . . .

One of our delights every evening is to sit in our living room looking at the bats flying a racecourse pattern around the garden, coming within inches of the window at times. I've been thinking of putting a bat box up on the gable end of the garage.

I got the cill depth from the supplier and, as we knew the thickness of flooring we were planning to fit (12mm + 3mm adhesive bed) I made sure the doors were fitted into the slab so that the threshold just complied with Part M, without being too low. Even so this caused a problem with the door mats, as the clearance from the underside of the outside doors to the floor is too tight to allow anything other than a really thin, super absorbent type, mat. With hindsight I should have cast in wells to accept door mats, but it wasn't something I picked up on until after we had the flooring laid.

Depends on how much cooling you need. Very roughly, a GSHP can pull around 1 kW per 10m length of slinky coiled pipe, but that's at a higher temperature differential. As a guesstimate I'd suggest that maybe 250 W per 10m of slinky coil might be about right for passive cooling.

No, don't really notice it, TBH, other than the house feeling a lot cooler. 18°C doesn't really feel cold, just pleasantly cool. We have lots of travertine flooring, and my wife tends to walk around in bare feet in summer, when the cooling is on, just because the cool floor feels more pleasant. Leaving aside the very high cost of using a GSHP (killed the idea for us, as it was massively more expensive than an ASHP), why bother with the heat pump at all? The ground will sit at around 8°C all year around, so just laying a pipe array in the ground, connected to another pipe array in the cool room, with a small circulating pump, would keep the cool room at a pretty constant temperature all year around. If a thermostat was added to turn the circulating pump on and off then the temperature of the cool room could be adjusted to be whatever you wanted, as long as it was a bit above 8°C.

We very effectively cool our house by just running the heat pump in reverse, so that cool water is pumped around the UFH pipes in the floor and heat. Very much like the way a fridge or cold room works. We have an ASHP, but it would work just as well with a reversible GSHP (if you can find one). ASHPs can almost always run in reverse, as most do this to defrost. An ASHP run like this is just the same as a refrigerator. The same principle could be applied anywhere, just seal and insulate a space and then pump heat out of it. Easy enough to have a selective system that only cools one enclosed space, if needed, in much the same way as UFH might be zoned. There's a condensation risk if it's taken too far, but that's never an issue for us, as we run our system so the floor drops to about 18°C, enough to be very effective at keeping the house cool, but not low enough to be below the dew point for the range of humidity conditions we get here in the UK (at 18°C the RH would have to be over 80% with the room at about 21°C for there to be a condensation risk).

I routinely swap ends when using a spirit level, just in case it's had a knock. Doing this checks the level every time you use it, as if it reads differently one way around to the other, you know there's a problem. I used to have a really accurate 12" Starrett engineers level, but I broke the glass vial a while ago, and can't seem to be able to get a replacement. It's a heavy cast iron affair, complete with a nice wooden box, and has the big advantage of being adjustable, as well as being far more sensitive than a builders-type level.