Jeremy Harris

Just seen this from Bulb: https://help.bulb.co.uk/hc/en-us/articles/360025359271 Looks like they are trialling their own scheme to pay people to export electricity when the FIT and export payment scheme ends in April.

That's EXACTLY the problem I had with PlusNet, and they were pretty bullish about making me aware that I'd be charged some exorbitant sum if it turned out that there was a problem with our equipment. I knew full well what the problem was, as did OpenReach, but for whatever reason Plusnet weren't good at talking to OpenReach, despite being part of the same group.

From all I've read, Andrews & Arnold do provide a first rate, business class, service, though. Had they been able to offer FTTC at the time that our local cabinet "went live" then I'd have paid a bit extra to use them, TBH. They have good customer service and from what I've read they don't tend to throttle back speeds at peak times, unlike some other suppliers (and yes, PlusNet, that means you...). I doubt that I'd have had all the hassle I had getting our VDSL 2 service to work at a reasonable speed if I'd been with Andrews & Arnold, as I wouldn't mind betting that they would have resolved the problem quickly, whereas it took PlusNet months to finally get it sorted, and over the past few months I've noticed that we are starting to get the speed throttled back in the evenings to pretty much what it used to be before they fixed things, which I'm guessing is just contention (not sure, but I think that a lot of ISPs run higher contention ratios than Andrews & Arnold).

No, it doesn't. I tested this with the big cable that was crossing under our plot and which had no wayleave or easement. When pushed the DNO admitted that the cable had been put there many years earlier without any formal authority, so they relocated it and reduced our bill for moving other stuff accordingly, plus they waived the normal charges for drawing up a new wayleave.

I bought a Clark Jetstar pressure washer around 1994, from Machine Mart. It's been seriously abused for years, yet still works as well now as it did when I bought it. The only thing it doesn't have that would be useful would be the "turbo lance" function, that rotates the jet around when washing down paths and patios.

The problem now seems to be that all these checks make things a bloody nuisance for people trying to do things legitimately, yet don't see to have done much to stop people using banks to make off with other people's money. When we sold our old house last year I must have wasted hours going through all the money laundering stuff, just to deal with the money arising from the sale. It was a complete PITA, and involved taking original documents into several banks, in person, and having to deal with the confusion caused by some documents not having our new address on them.

Years ago I had a car "stolen". It was a few months after my first wife had walked out, and I woke up one morning to find the car gone. The police traced it, and found it parked outside her parents place, but refused to do anything, as they reckoned it was a domestic. The car was a well-tuned and tweaked Mini, but was shortly due for an MOT and I knew it needed new cills and probably a new rear subframe. However, it had a newly rebuilt engine and gearbox, a pair of decent seats, leather rim steering wheel, Revolution alloys, all the Paddy Hopkirk bits (pedals, extended seat brackets etc). A friend and I went around to see it in the early hours, when no one was home, and stripped it bare, leaving just the shell sat on the road. I bought another Mini with a shot engine and just swapped all the bits over. Probably cheaper than getting my original car through the MOT.

Looks OK to me. The reflectance of most surfaces would be pretty low, unless they were specifically made reflective (like solar film on windows, or reflective glazing). Also, the transmittance of glazing can vary quite a lot, so also needs to be taken into account. Overall, the heat that gets in through the glazing will probably end up being around half, maybe less, of the radiation hitting the outside of it, mainly as a consequence of the reflectivity and transmittance for the specific type of glazing used.

Row 77 is heat loss power, in Watts not the heat loss energy. Row 84 is the heat loss energy (power x time) in kWh.

We've been surprised at how good the LG condensing washer drier we bought just over a year ago is. We bought it in a hurry, as our old washing machine went wrong just before Christmas, so no time to look around, just had to buy what we could get delivered quickly before the holiday. It has a very solid feel to it, a nice wide door (makes it a lot easier to load and unload) runs quietly, washes and dries well, has a timer so it can be set to run at off-peak times and has an easy to use operator interface. My only criticism is that the damned thing plays silly tunes when you turn it on and when it's finished a programme, and I've yet to find a way to stop it from doing this. It seems to be the plague of our time having things playing tunes and going "bong". My car does it too, and I can't find a way to stop it sounding like an amusement arcade, either.

You may be right, and I really do wish you luck, getting caught be a rogue is pretty stressful. I've been lucky and never been stung for a significant amount of money, but do know people that have been, and it seems that often these rogues operate as @newhome has suggested. By their very nature these people are crafty, and may well not have any assets in their name. Also, going after someone's assets, assuming you track them down, take them to court, and get a judgement against them, may well recover only a fraction of the amount. It would be good to see consumer law tightened up to stop the sort of repeat-offender behaviour that's often seen by these unscrupulous people, but there seems to be very little that has been done over the past few decades that's made any real difference. I can remember seeing Watch Dog reporting on just this sort of thing around 30 years ago, and we still have the same sort of fraud being reported in programmes like Rogue Traders today, so little seems to have changed.

If it's not listed as a registered company, then I suspect it's going to be pretty challenging to get any sensible recompense. A look at the characters that regularly appear on some investigative TV shows gives an indication as to how challenging it can be to track sole traders or people just trading with no form of registered business, can be. Sadly the building industry seems to have more than it's fair share of "rogue traders", probably second only to the way the used car business used to be, perhaps. I hate to say this, but you may find that employing a good private investigator might be just chucking a load more money away without any realistic prospect of recompense for the loss already suffered. Many years ago a friend had his car severely damaged, whilst it was parked outside his house. He didn't have fully comprehensive insurance, so had to track down the hit-and-run driver who'd caused the damage to try and get payment for the damage. This was the easy bit, as it turned out to be the village policeman's son, who was driving a car without any insurance. He took him to court (when he refused to pay for the damage) and won his case. The policeman's son was on benefits, so the court ordered that he should pay the damages off at £5 a week. Needless to say he defaulted, and was taken to court again. Each time he made one or two payments then defaulted again. In the end my friend just stopped going back to court, as it was costing him more money in chasing the debt owed than he was ever likely to get back. If you track this person down, you may find that you end up in a similar position, where there is no money to be claimed aback and attempts to do so will end up being protracted and ultimately to no benefit.

I think you're spot on, and right that it has come up here before. I doubt many self-builders make a "profit", probably only those who do a great deal of the work themselves, and perhaps then then only look at it as a way to get a home they couldn't otherwise afford. I know our costs. excluding the value of my time, came to only a bit less than the market value of the completed house. In our case it's not helped by the fact that everyone in the local area refers to it as "the ecohouse", something that the valuer pointed out reduces its market value by around 5%.

Pretty much, yes. Sailors noticed long ago that trimming the sails to get an optimum slot tended to stop the sail behind luffing, and caused it to fill and produce a fair bit more drive; it looks and feels like the slot is "pulling" the sail behind. I learned to sail on a Falmouth Working Boat in the early 1970s, and the oyster fisherman owner hadn't got a clue about aerodynamics, but still won most of the Working Boat races during the Summer. My first crew role was as mainsheet hand, the least critical sail to trim; all I had to do was watch the luff of the sail all the time when racing close-hauled (or as close hauled as a gaff rig ever gets) and trim it to "just" stop it being backwinded at the luff. The staysail hand's job was to keep the staysail slot as tight as possible whilst still getting the maximum slot effect over the luff of the mainsail. Likewise the jib hands job was to do the same with the jib, keeping the slot between that and the staysail as tight as possible. All this was done without speaking, and if any of us took our eyes off the luff of our sails we'd get a clip around the ear from the skipper's boathook...

There is, the plank behind. It was possibly lift that caused the planks to lift up and hit the roof in the first place. A plank can produce lift, not as efficiently as an aerofoil, but still significant, and possibly greater than the drag force from just the wind acting on the projected area of the plank, perpendicular to the air flow direction. Try standing outside, holding a plank edge-on into a stiff breeze and you will feel the lift the moment there is any angle of incidence on the plank. When sitting on a scaffold, with a probable stagnation area where the underside of the planked section abuts the wall, there's a fair chance that air will try to flow from the higher pressure side (underneath the planks) to the lower pressure side (above the planks) through any slots, so possibly increasing the lift forces on them. TBH. I think this is possibly more of a theoretical debate than a practical one, as whether the added lift from the slots is significant enough to increase the risk of them lifting is pretty hard to assess. As a final point about slots, if you're ever down near Abbeville take a look at the blades on the old windmill there. It uses a leading edge slots to increase the lift on the blades, right at the stock. The people that came up with this design probably hadn't got a clue why it worked, they just knew it did.

As above. I was talking about this with a small developer around 6 or 7 years ago, and he reckoned that the profit element had decreased to between 10 and 15%. Land costs are now higher in many areas and build costs have risen, partly due to increased material cost, partly due to skilled labour shortages in some areas increasing wage costs.

Slot effect. Airflow accelerates through a slot, and can increases the lift on the surface behind as it does so (just because lift is proportional to the square of air speed). Commonly seen on Bermuda rigged sailing vessels, when the slot between the foresail and the mainsail increases the lift from the mainsail, by increasing the airspeed over the low pressure (leeward) side (Bernoulli and all that). Also seen on leading edge slats and slotted flaps on aircraft wings, both techniques to increase lift at reduced airspeed, so allowing safe and controllable flight at lower speeds, by lowering the effective stall speed.

I used three of these stainless steel ball bearing hinges per door: https://www.doordeals.co.uk/products/ironmongery-and-more/door-furniture/hinges/3-quot;-ball-bearing-hinges.aspx Been in use for over 4 years now without any problems at all. Very smooth, even with our heavy doors.

Believe it or not, our Euro cylinders are 145mm long, they are 90/55s, which seem to be unobtanium! We have a standing rule that the key must be left on the inside, in the lock, on all our doors. It's always worried me that the Euro lock design allows the door to be locked so that the key is needed to get out in an emergency. I'd like to fit thumb turns, though.

We had the same problem, the key holes were one of the biggest air leaks we had. It seems to be a flaw in the design of Eurolocks (one of many design flaws IMHO) that they have a hole right through. I looked in vain for someone who could supply very long Eurolock barrels that included an internal thumb turn, it seems that very few manufacturers make the really long Eurolocks needed for thick triple glazed doors. My solution has been to fill the centre of the lock barrel with aerosol motorcycle chain grease, the anti-fling stuff. It's a bit tedious, as you have to squirt a bit in, let the solvent evaporate so it goes solid, then gently squirt a bit more in, until eventually a plug of solid grease has been built up. The grease I used is the white stuff I use on my bike, probably came from Halford I expect.

The top of our retaining wall was 215mm wide hollow concrete block, with the hollows filled with concrete and the face of the wall rendered. I opted to bolt metal post holders down to the top of the wall with thunderbolts and fit the fence posts in them. The fence sits about a metre above the wall and seems pretty robust. We have rails and close boarding on one side of the posts and rails and trellis on the other side.

To feed a hot tank from two sources is OK, but controlling them so that they can both work effectively is the challenge. For example, I installed a big thermal store initially, and pre-heated this when it was cold from the ASHP. This raised the temperature of the tank up to about 40°C, as long as it wasn't already at that high a temperature. The immersion heater, run from excess PV generation, then provided the energy needed to get the thermal store up to around 65°C. If the tank was above 40°C then the ASHP couldn't provide any useful heat to it. The need to boost the temperature of stored hot water enough to kill off legionella is probably an over-blown risk, provided that you're using mains water and a sealed UVC. Legionella cannot get into the mains water supply (the reason mains water is usually post-treated with a persistent disinfecting agent is to ensure this) so if it isn't in the supply water, and the tank is sealed, there's no way for any bacteria to multiply, as there won't be a way for them to get in in the first place. Also, legionella stop multiplying at a temperature of about 45°C, and so holding the tank at 50 to 55°C may not kill them, but will cause them to go dormant (not that they can get inside a sealed system anyway). Finally, regular hot water use will flush the contents of the tank through before any bacteria (which can't get in) have a chance to set up home. If you have a vented hot water system, then things are different, and an anti-legionella temperature cycle with an immersion heater, to heat the tank to above 60°C every week or two would be a good idea.

Within the operating region of the refrigerant used, then air source heat pump performance is largely governed by the available sensible heat in the surrounding air and the ability of the unit to deal effectively with icing, that may reduce the efficiency of the evaporator (in heating mode, it becomes the condenser in cooling mode). There is a limit on heat pump performance that is set by the nature of the refrigerant gas, under the working pressure that exists within the primary circuit, specifically the temperature saturation pressure characteristic, but generally the critical lower working temperature for R410a, when used at typical domestic heat pump primary circuit pressures and with an adequate throttling valve design, is a bit below the normal range of ambient temperatures experienced in the UK. A typical ASHP that uses R410a will be able to operate reasonably linearly* in relation to the available heat capacity in the air being drawn through it, down to around -20°C or so, with the heat capacity of the surrounding air, together with the humidity, being the dominant factors. *by reasonably linearly I mean that it will broadly follow the temperature saturation pressure characteristic curve for the refrigerant gas used. PS: if your theory was correct, that: then that would imply that the COP at -5°C would also be half that at 0°C (assuming the same humidity). In reality, the COP is pretty constant, within about 5%, as best I can estimate, based on measured energy in and estimated energy out (from the constant flow and temperature at the output, so energy out is ~ proportional to flow time) at around 3.5 from 0°C down to about -6°C (not been able to check below this temperature).

There's very little, if any, noticeable performance reduction from an ASHP when it's cold outside, at least over the range of normal UK winter temperature. They actually tend to work slightly better when it's cold (sub-zero) and dry than they do when it's cool (just above zero) and damp. There's not much difference in the heat available between air at -10°C and air at +10°C, anyway, and not enough to make any real difference to ASHP performance (assuming 100% for the heat capacity of air at 0°C then at -10°C it would still have 96.34% of the heat capacity, at +10°C it would have 103.66% of the heat capacity).

The heating mat I've used in the past (at our old house) was just embedded in the tile adhesive. IIRC it was around 3mm thick, so easy enough to fit in the adhesive layer.