Jeremy Harris

According to his friends, he doesn't have a bank account, as he's officially of no fixed abode. He (and others) seem to have been waiting to get paid since before Christmas, it seems.

I used Osmo on our oak doors, frames, architrave, skirtings and stairs and we're happy with it. I brushed it on, and found that it was quite hard work brushing out the first coat into every nook and cranny, and easy to miss a bit. Once the first coat had hardened I de-nibbed it with a green Scotchbrite pad and applied the next coat, which went on a great deal more easily. We opted to use the satin finish, and it seems reasonably even and is wearing very well on the stairs.

The advice from the tiler who laid our large format travertine was not to use rapid set, as it tends to go off too quickly. He wanted me to get the standard set stuff, which he seemed happy with (and which we've had no problems with).

Gabion cages might be cheaper than an IBC. Filled with big rocks and dropped into a terram lined hole might work if you want to just drop something into a hole.

I can't see what the IBC adds, TBH. Might as well dig a big hole, line it with terram and fill it up with rocks.

It would reduce the volume a great deal though, and may tend to get clogged up with fine debris that gets washed in. It'd probably be better to just create a standard soakaway filled with relatively large stones. The bigger the size of the stones in the fill, the greater the volume of free space around them for water to flow.

This is what the Solar iBoost FAQ has to say about range: Sounds like it may be OK if there aren't too many walls in the way between the location of the meter and the location of the diverter itself. I can't see any models that say you can wire the CT up with a longer length of cable, so whether that's an option or not I don't know. In theory it should be fine, as other kit that uses a CT to sense supply current allow the cable to be extended up to 30m.

Our ASHP hoses run in a loop, rather than straight, as apparently that allows the vibration to be decoupled better. I think one issue is that the vibration isn't damped well along the axis of a flexible hose, hence the instructions to arrange them in a long loop.

According to reports in the media the digger driver was officially of no fixed abode, had long standing mental health problems, had no bank account, had never claimed benefits and relied on being paid cash in order to survive. Not being paid for several weeks had apparently tipped him over the edge. Still wrong, but I can understand why he acted as he did. I went around in the middle of the night and took back something that had been taken from me without payment many years ago, as the police said it was none of their business. I could have opted to try and go through the courts, but having seen how difficult that can be, direct action seemed a lot easier. The police confirmed that I wasn't breaking any law, as long as I didn't enter any premises unlawfully.

I know that IBCs buried in the ground, even with the cages still in place, tend to collapse inwards, as they aren't very stiff unless full with liquid. The drainage crates we used were very well internally reinforced, with loads of cross braces to stop them from collapsing under the pressure of the backfill around them.

No, the flood level that the EA have declared for the area, the 1:100 year flood risk level. Our AAV is above the level of the top of any basin.

We just have an AAV in the eaves space, so up high in the house, not lower down, but it's not presented any problems so far. I've no idea what the reliability of a low level, flood-resistant one might be I'm afraid. The vent in our foul drain is at the treatment plant, which is also above the flood level by about a metre.

I'm pretty sure that it's not wifi, but a lower frequency wireless link I think, at least for the Solar iBoost, which has a claimed outdoor range of 500m and an indoor range of 30m. Wifi won't manage that sort of range, as I had to fit a directional patch antenna and a separate AP in the loft just to be able to get wifi down to our garage, which is barely 20m from the router in the house. On the other hand, the 433MHz wireless signal that's transmitted from my PV diverter can be received anywhere in the house, even down in the garage around 30m away from the meter box.

Sorry, I don't know anything about these, so I think the best bet is to talk to your BCO and get an opinion, which is what I did when planning the ventilation for our foul drains.

It's vital that the current sensor (CT) is on the supply on the grid supply side of the whole property electricity supply. This means that it's fine to have the CT on the meter tails, no matter what the installation, but only OK to have the sensor on the consumer unit tails when there is no outlet or PV inverter connection between the CT and the incoming supply at the meter. Our case illustrates this. We have our incoming supply and meter in a box mounted in a fence. The supply from there feeds the house and the main consumer unit, via a length of 25mm² SWA. The PV inverter is connected to this main CU. The supply from the meter also feeds a small CU outside that supplies power to the garage, the car charge point, the treatment plant and our water supply pump. If I was to fit the CT in the house, on the consumer unit tails, then we could be importing power from the grid when the diverter thinks we are exporting, as it won't be sensing the loads from outside the house, some of which could be high (the car charger draws up to 7 kW, for example). With the CT fitted at the meter tails, it correctly reads the whole house import/export and will only divert if we are exporting.

Mine will be set for the hot water storage to take priority when using excess PV generation, and the battery charging to only use anything left from that, really because we always need hot water but may not always need all the energy stored in the battery. You have a massive amount of control in the off-the-shelf unit I'm looking at; so much so that setting it up looks quite daunting at first. I won't pretend to be an expert, as I've only read the manuals so far and not had a good hands-on fiddle withit, but it does look to have a lot of flexibility, including the option to set up off-peak charging as well as using excess PV generation charging, and to set the priorities for energy sources it uses to charge.

Depends if the unit uses wifi or not. Mine uses lower frequency licence-exempt transceivers, as they have a longer range than wifi. I can't easily find out what frequency wireless links some of the popular diverter units use, but Solar iBoost say their unit has a range of 500m line-of-sight outdoors, 30m indoors, so should be OK for sending a signal from a detached garage to a house 30m away I think. That long range makes me think it uses the 433 MHz band, as that tends to give much greater ranges than the 2.4 GHz/5 GHz wifi bands.

Just been reading up on a battery inverter/charger unit that uses a CT on the tails to sense export and adjust the charge current (same thing as a PV diverter, in essence). They use paralleled pairs in Cat5e cable to be able to locate the inverter up to 30m away from the CT, so that option should work with any PV diverter, as they all use an external CT AFAIK. My homebrew one uses a wireless link from the external unit out by the meter box to transmit data for use anywhere in the house, and in practice that has a range of well over 30m outdoors, but a bit less if it has to go through several walls. I'm using off-the-shelf licence-exempt, approved wireless modules, so would assume that the performance of any PV diverter with a similar wireless link should work OK, if you don't want to extend the CT cable with a bit of Cat5e.

Looks like @Alexphd1 has found the solution that I'm sure I've seen a video of, which looks to be a perfect solution to me.

It'd be pretty easy to just use lead flashing to make the joint between window and PV tray watertight, or one of the non-lead flashing products, like the stuff the the in-roof trays use for awkward junctions, like panels that are stepped. I've a feeling that one of the in-roof PV tray manufacturers may have a video showing how to make a junction like this neatly. I can't remember where I saw it, but I'll try and find it again. I can't see why just fitting the standard tray edge flashing under the window flashing wouldn't work, as that works with slates or tiles OK.

The wheel chair access requirements (in England and Wales - Scotland and NI may well be different) only requires access from the vehicle set down point, into the entrance level of the dwelling such that the (mandatory) entrance level WC can be accessed. There's normally no requirement for any special access requirements for a garage that isn't used as the normal set down point.

CO2 concentration outdoors doesn't seem to vary very much at all, from the measurements I've done, it seems to sit pretty close to around 400ppm. The variation indoors is pretty much all from people/pets breathing and the burning of any fossil fuel. I've measured levels of up to around 1600 to 1800ppm in our bedroom at the old house in the middle of the night. Here, the house monitoring system rarely records a concentration above about 600ppm.

I'm not sure if @DamonHD is still around on here or not (he's not posted in a long while) but he borrowed my portable CO2/RH/temp data logger a couple of years or so ago and did some experiments in a junior school. IIRC, these showed a surprisingly high concentration of CO2 in some classrooms, enough to reach the point where concentration was affected. I can't recall whether he posted the details here or on Ebuild, but will try and dig them out.

I had exactly this problem when I first installed our ASHP. The problem was that I didn't read the installation manual properly... The manual stipulated that the flow and return pipes from the ASHP had to be at least 1m long large bore, insulated, flexible hoses, run in a loop, to decouple the vibration from the ASHP from the house. I'd fitted short (around 300mm long) flexible pipes and they were coupling vibration directly into the house. It was surprisingly noisy, noisy enough that I ordered new pipes, drained the system down and fitted things as per the instructions. Once I'd done that it was completely silent inside the house, the only way to tell the thing is on is to look at the wall display.

This is very noticeable where we are. The larch cladding on our house seems to be fading almost entirely depending on the amount of exposure to the sun it gets. The east elevation is far and away the most faded, followed by the south elevation, with the west elevation being much the same as the north. I've been thinking of fitting some panels as a roof along the path we have that runs from the back door to the drive, alongside the east elevation, to take advantage of the clear early morning skies.