Jeremy Harris

@HerbJ is absolutely spot on. First off, your claim is very definitely against the roofer - if he chooses to use his insurer for a part of the claim, that's up to him, but I suspect some of your claim may not be covered by his insurer anyway, that he knows this and he is deliberately trying to get you to deal with his insurer in order to limit his own liability. I've worked with several insurance companies over the years, and generally they are pretty canny. They already know what they are liable for and what they aren't, under the terms of his cover, and if he has legal expenses cover as a part of his policy (and I expect he may) then they will want to limit any legal expenses, too. As such, my guess is that the insurer will go back to the roofer and say that part of the claim is covered by his insurance policy and part of it isn't, and they may well advise him that they won't provide legal expenses to fight his part of the claim if it doesn't look like there is a reasonable chance of success (in my experience, insurers will pull out of legal action and settle if they think there is about a 30% to 40% chance that they will lose, not something as high as 50/50). Consequential loss may not need to be implicit in a contract for something that is readily understood in terms of fitness for purpose, like a roof. No one expects a newly installed roof to leak, so therefore a claim for consequential damage will be almost certainly be allowed, no matter what's in the contract. The only possible argument could be whether or not your own insurance on the house might come into play for some of the consequential damage, but I doubt it, as that damage is a consequence of a roof that was not fit for purpose in the first place.

Very small amounts of well-diluted bleach you can just about get away with, but in general you need to avoid anything that has a powerful biocide in it from going down the foul drain, and that includes stuff like Jeye's Fluid, as well as any cleaning products that contain chlorine. If you use chlorine based products (as I do occasionally to disinfect pipes etc when doing any work on our borehole system), then you can just leave the waste water with the chlorine in it in an open bucket for a few days and it will break down, leaving the water relatively harmless. I tend to use any water with chlorine in to wash down our stone paths, as it's pretty good at cleaning up the sandstone.

Interesting case, but probably not one that would stand up to scrutiny, in that there can only be one competent person responsible for the installation in law, I believe. DIY installations of gas appliances has been heavily clamped down on over the past few years, as @Nickfromwales mentions. The driving force behind this is that we continue to get major gas-related incidents, like houses blowing up and killing people, often due to DIY work. Years ago I fitted a wall hung gas boiler, did all the water connections etc, did the wiring as far as having an FCU, and the programmer (with room stat connection) next to the boiler for it to connect to, and drilled a hole in the wall for the gas pipe. I then got a CORGI chap in to install the gas pipework, wire the boiler up and test everything and sign it off. I'm pretty sure you may not even be allowed to go this far now, and that a GSR person has to do the whole job of installing the boiler, but I may be wrong.

Is the value of the claim within the limit for the Small Claims Track for a County Court action? If so, then I think I'd be inclined to just do this, and stop faffing around with people who are intent on fobbing you off. You can do it online, and there is a small registration fee, depending on the value of the claim, but my experience of using it was that it was a pretty straightforward process. The downside (apart from the fee) is that you have to prepare an evidence file to support your claim. The upside is that companies will often just settle rather than go to the expense of getting legal advice. The worst case is that you lose your claim in the judgement, which frankly I very much doubt will happen. The second worst case would be that the agreed settlement would be what they have already offered. The link to the online process is: https://www.gov.uk/make-money-claim

Yes, and when I get the time I plan to do this, it just means sitting down and writing up everything I've done. I think that I can also re-sell the parts, just as components, the question mark is over whether me re-selling programmed PICs with the code in to drive both ends is OK. I think it probably is, as the only bit that really infringes the EU regs is the mains related stuff (there is a power supply built-in to the remote unit, inside the IP rated enclosure) and the radio modules, as although they are legal and use the ISM band, the regs require that the completed equipment must comply with the EMC Directive, which involves a high compliance test cost. The reality is that these radio link modules are the same as those used in thousands of remote control devices, so the risk of them not being compliant with the EMC Directive is near-zero, plus there are already many millions of counterfeit CE marked devices on the market anyway, and no one seems to do anything about it.

I looked into it, and, believe it or not a kit still needs approval as a product. Robin Emley (the chap that came up with the spin-off from the OEM that uses the same energy bucket system for excess PV diversion) ran into the same problem, but in his case he's been working through getting approval so he can sell kits or ready-built units.

I have all the components, cases, PCBs etc for five of these units, in addition to the one I built for myself, but I can't sell them, or even give them away, as both the transmitter/sensor end and the receiver are mains mains powered and use a (licence free ISM band) radio link, and this makes them fall foul of both the EMC Directive and the LV Directive, so the system can only be sold, or given away, if it has been tested to the required standards, and approved by an EU Notified Body so that it can be CE marked. There's no official way around this, and the penalties for infringement are more than I'm willing to risk, I'm afraid.

It really does piss me off the way these people work. I'll give my mate a call on Monday and see if he can fit in a quick EICR, before I agree a date with the buyer's people. With luck I can get the EICR to the buyer before her people have done the work, so she may feel able to cancel. I think the way to do it is to get the EICR sent through our solicitors to hers, so it forms a key part of the sales documentation, as that would pretty much head off any attempt to try and adjust the price down. What really annoys me is that I can get the whole fuse box replaced for an new CU, with much the same testing as she'd get from an EICR, for at least £100 less than she's been quoted for just an EICR.

OK, an update. I have done an EICR, probably gone a bit OTT, and have found nothing of note, IF the installation is assumed to have been in accordance with the 15th Ed, the regs that were in force when the house was built, or the 16th Ed, the regs that were in force for the only modification I could find to the installation (as it now stands, with the electric shower wiring and the rogue socket in the bathroom cupboard removed). Everything checks out, from the Ze at the fuse box, through to the loop checks on all the rings, and the limited visual checks I could do (really just the exposed clipped to timber cables in the loft) all checked out OK. Zs at the furthest point in each ring was also OK, and all outlets checked out OK. With no RCDs there's not much else I could check. Got a call early today from a big local electrical company, asking if they could book a date to perform an EICR for the buyer. I've no problem with this at all, although my personal view is that the buyer would be better off just getting a new CU fitted, as that would seem to be much better value. Now comes the fun bit. I was over at the new house later, so decided to ring this company and ask them if they could give me a quote for an EICR, using our new address and not giving my name (so they were getting a call from a different number than they had called earlier and a different address). I will admit to playing a bit dumb, pretending I was worried about the "electrics" and wanted to make sure they were safe. Guess what they charge for an EICR on a house described as our old house? £320 + VAT, and they gave a me a hard sell that the installation was so old (1986) that it would probably need additional work, and that I'd be wise to budget for around £1000 for all the work that may arise from the inspection (that's four ring finals and two radials, in total). Now I'm not the fastest worker on the planet, it's a while since I've done an EICR and I'm not 100% familiar with my (newly calibrated) multitester, that I've only owned since the start of our build (when I still thought that I could do the wiring and get building control to do the sign off). It took me just over 4 hours to do all the tests, including checking every single outlet, including all the ceiling lighting fittings, even though that probably wasn't strictly necessary, I reckon just doing a full test on those furthest from the fuse box, plus a quick test of the others, plus loop resistance checks on all the rings (already done, when I sorted the outside light switch fault) was all I really needed to do. I've no doubt that someone that did this for a living would be a lot quicker than I was, probably well under 3 hours at a guess, although I did spend a short time removing and tidying up redundant cable in the loft that had been left in place (anyone want around 10m of 10mm2 T&E in the old colours?). Now, I reckon charging £100 an hour for what is, in essence, a button-pushing exercise. is a rip-off; I'm just thankful it's not me being ripped off, but I don't like the way that this firm was, apparently, recommended by the surveyor (who, I discovered, charged the buyer £780 +VAT for a couple of hours work), it smacks to me of a nice little rip-off system they've got between them. I'm tempted to get my friendly Part P chap to come over and do another EICR, which I know he'd do at "mates rates", bear the cost myself and get that independently sent to the buyer, just to try and stop her being ripped off. I'm annoyed at the way these people work, more than anything else. I also suspect that they are taking advantage of the buyer being a woman who has very little knowledge of buildings, electrical installations etc, and seems very trusting of "professionals". TBH, right now I'm just pissed off at someone being taken advantage of. I know it's nothing to do with me, and the buyer can do what the heck she likes, but it just bugs me to see people being taken advantage of.

Yes, the floor area is just the internal ground floor area, the bit that can lose heat to the ground. Again, yes, taking the total heat loss and dividing it by the floor area will give you the very worst case UFH output per m². In practice the house will have incidental heat gains from people (roughly 100W each) electrical appliances, heat losses from the hot water system into the house, cooking, solar gain and even pets, so this really is the absolute worse case heating demand, with everything except the UFH switched off and no one in the house, with no solar gain.

I'll admit it missed me. Until a couple of years ago I still thought there was a max gradient, believing the reason for this being the oft-quoted one that liquids travel faster than solids, so too steep a gradient would leave the solids behind. Someone pointed me at the current version of Part H where it's clear that the old maximum gradient condition had been removed, so you can now have foul drains as steep as you like. Very useful for some with deep invert levels at the sewer connection, or on steeply sloping sites, I suspect, as it may remove the need for an intermediate back drop chamber.

There's no reference in Approved Document Part H to a maximum gradient for foul drains any more: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/442889/BR_PDF_AD_H_2015.pdf Read section H1 Section 2 and you'll find that now it only stipulates the flattest allowable gradient, with no mention of a steepest allowable gradient. It's been like that for a long time, but folk memory lingers on...

Neat idea, @recoveringacademic, would save us having to have the small footstool that lives in the kitchen simply so SWMBO can get at the top shelves of cabinets. Not seen them before, but they look to be an easy retrofit to existing cabinets.

Some friends of ours (he was best man at my wedding) are both around 5ft, I think he's 5ft 2" and his wife's 4ft 11". They have their kitchen work surfaces set so low that no normal person can use them... I'm intrigued to find out what "pull down shelves" are, too.

As I understand it, the old "rule of thumb" that you must not have too steep a gradient on a foul drain has now been superseded, as it's been proven that there is no maximum gradient for foul drains, and I can't find out where the idea that there should be ever came from. Certainly it always used to be the case that people believed that there were problems with foul drains that were too steep a gradient, and many years ago I remember being told that this was because the liquid content would travel faster than the solids, leaving them behind. Apparently that isn't true, so now there's no need for back drops, or any of the other ways to get around having too steep a gradient on a foul drain, and you can have one as steep as you like. I suspect that a part of this is because we now use very smooth plastic foul drains, with very few joints and what joints there are being very smooth. I can't find proof of this, but the regs now allow you to have a foul drain as steep as you like, which makes life a fair bit easier in some cases.

I'm quite pleased with the way our mix of trees has worked so far. When I first planted them I was a bit concerned that they wouldn't spread out at the top, but I think that, because they were all fairly mature (around 4.5 to 5m tall) when we bought them, they had been either pruned or wrapped tightly with mesh for transport, so weren't as bushy as we'd hoped. The olive, in particular, has really spread out a lot, and the photinias aren't doing too badly, but the big bay tree, the most expensive of them all by a fair margin, seems to be a bit sluggish, though, although there are lots of bright green new leaves, so with luck it will gradually fill out a bit. All the other trees are doing well, the two white flowering cherry trees have done very well, both flowered this spring, just a couple of months after being planted, both the scarlet flowering hawthorn trees are now OK, although both had a slow start, and one was very slow - it didn't come into leaf until July, so much for it being the "May Tree"! The silver birch, whitebeam and pyrus chanticleer are all doing exceptionally well, especially as they were all bare root, fairly mature, trees that weren't expensive (as in far less than 1/10 of the cost of some of the others). I think the secret has been in using mycorrhizal fungi when planting everything, putting a handful of blood fish and bone into every hole and, perhaps most importantly, setting up an automatic irrigation system, that has ensured all the trees were watered, directly to their root area, via a bit of drain pipe filled with pebbles, twice a day.

Just thought I'd post these photos of the first olives on the olive tree we planted as a part of the privacy screening along the front: Everyone we've spoken to has said that we'd not get any olives on a tree grown here, and to be honest I wasn't expecting anything at all this year, as we only planted this tree in March, but it surprised me with the amount of flowers we got in Spring and has surprised me again by producing a few olives. Perhaps it will do better next year, when it's had a chance to get a bit more established.

I think when comparing costs it is worth looking at how much safe access adds to the bill. Scaffolding is almost always needed for a pitched roof installation and can add a fair bit to the overall cost. I know our original quote dropped a fair bit when I asked if they'd included scaffolding costs, then pointed out that they could remove that element as we'd already have scaffolding in place. Where you are in the country also seems to make a significant difference, with there being pretty wide variations in labour cost from one area to another. It's probably hard to make accurate comparisons between quotes for installations of the same capacity but on different houses in different areas, I think. The best we can hope for is to get some sort of ball-park estimate that indicates whether a given quote looks reasonable or not.

The building time constant is what made this approach challenging, for sure. I started out not appreciating just how long this was, which was a mistake. Had I measured the building thermal time constant lots of times and determined a reasonably good mean, allowing for the inevitable variations caused by hour-by-hour fluctuations in heat loss and gain, over a week or two in order to try and get a reasonably sensible value, I could have programmed that in and had a half decent chance of getting the slab control system to work I didn't change the flow temperature for the UFH, as I started out knowing I would only need a low flow temperature, so used an externally sensing two port thermally actuated valve on the flow input to the manifold, with it's sensor deep in a pocket inside the flow manifold itself. The lowest this valve would turn down to was about 25 deg C, but as mentioned, it wasn't that stable when down that low, and tended to oscillate about by a degree or two, as it was really operating outside, or right at the very edge, of its design parameters. In practice I've found no problem at all with the pipes not being able to deliver enough heat, and our pipes are on a 200mm spacing, tied to the reinforcement fabric in the centre of the slab. Concrete is a pretty good thermal conductor (dense concrete has about double the thermal conductivity of water) so in practice the heat flow rate to the surface seems to be more than good enough, even with a ∆t of just a couple of degrees.

Very good point about not bothering with weather compensation. This was built in to the default settings for our ASHP (another thing I needed to correct in the installation settings). My initial assumption, when I was working on using slab temperature control, was that I could derive the required slab temperature by measuring the outside air temperature, on the basis that the slab temperature controlled the heat input power to the house and the outside temperature determined the majority of the heat loss component. This fell over in practice quite badly, but I did run through many, many iterations of control code before I decided to give up on it. I will admit to be surprised at quite how well a simple (but sensitive, +/- 0.1 deg C hysteresis) room thermostat controls the whole house temperature. The only slight problem with using a room stat is that I have to make sure that the flow temperature into the slab never exceeds about 25 deg C, ideally it needs to be around 24 deg C. This was a problem when I was using a thermostatic mixing valve, as 25 deg C is right at the very bottom of their control range, and finding one that even goes as low as 25 deg C isn't easy. If you do get one that can be physically set as low as this the chances are it won't control the temperature that well, I found. The problem I've found with our house is that we get a higher than desirable temperature overshoot, from heat soak from the UFH pipes and deep in the slab, I think, that can give a 1 deg C or more higher than set temperature for a couple of hours or so after the UFH has turned off, due to the room stat being satisfied. Keeping the flow temperature down significantly reduces this overshoot, simply because the core of the slab is a bit cooler. My heating strategy is time-shifted compared to @TerryE's though, in that I don't heat overnight, but heat during the day (usually only for an hour or two in the morning), really to take advantage of any PV generation. This makes any temperature overshoot more noticeable, especially if there is a bit of additional solar gain later in the day. My guess is that any overshoot in @TerryE's system is slightly beneficial, by peaking early in the morning, when a bit more heat may be welcome. One reason I'm interested in getting a battery system (when the prices come down) is to use that to run the ASHP at night, or in the early hours, so that the house is slightly warmer from the heating first thing in the morning, and can then absorb a bit of solar and incidental heat gain during the day without getting a little too warm. I'm not sure if this is me just being a bit fussy, though. When you have lots of data, and can see small peaks in the room temperature, I have a feeling it tends to focus my attention more than it should!

The stuff I've got was like new last time I looked at it. No sign at all of any degradation, but I wouldn't really expect to see any, as it's a fair bit newer than the wiring in our old house, that dates back to 1986 and that still seems perfectly OK. I bought these rolls of 2.5mm² and 1.5mm² shortly after we bought our old house in 2000, and used some of it when I added some new sockets and lights to existing ones in the garage/workshop. I've probably got at least 3/4s of a roll of each left over from then. I did see some white sheathed T&E a good few years ago where something odd had happened to it, though. The outer layer of the outer sheath had gone black in places, not through the whole thickness of the outer sheath, but not something that would clean off, either. The cable still looked OK, and as far as I can tell hadn't been touching anything or got hot, it had just been clipped to a garage roof joist (not one of mine). The white stuff does sometimes feel a bit different to the grey stuff, though, and I wonder if it's more susceptible to damage like this.

Reminds me, must remember to put my old stock of red and black T&E on ebay when we move...

I've built a few electric vehicles, a couple of bikes, a motorcycle and an electric boat. All used lithium batteries, much the same as those in electric cars (including my own). The really important issue is that lithium batteries present a significant fire and explosion risk unless they have a proper battery management system. This is not normally built in to car battery packs as a stand-alone system, it is integrated into the car charger and power control system, so when you get a scrap car battery it will not have the key battery management computer, and if it did, the chances are it wouldn't work as it would not be receiving data from the car data bus. Lithium rechargeable batteries have to be actively managed at the cell level, with the battery management system ensuring that no single cell in the pack either exceeds the maximum allowable charge voltage (to reduce the risk of fire or explosion) or drops its cell voltage below that where the cell chemistry may be irreversibly damaged. I've designed and built cell-level battery management systems, and it's a lot of work to build one for a large capacity pack, especially the testing needed to be absolutely certain that it will manage every cell in the pack safely. Much of the cost of lithium battery packs for home energy storage isn't in the battery, but in the battery management system, including the cell cooling system. For example, if you take a pack out of something like a scrapped Tesla, then you're going to have to find a way to operate the liquid cooling system that's built in to it - the pack just has a couple of coolant pipe connections, for the non-conductive, non-flammable, coolant system to connect to. If you get a pack from something like Nissan Leaf, then you'll have to find a way to make the air cooling system it has work, as that's driven by the battery management system. People have built their own home storage systems, using cells taken from scrap cars, and if you understand the risks and how to design and test a safe and reliable battery management system, and how to integrate that with the charger and inverter needed to make it work in a similar way to one of the commercially available home battery storage systems, then you're probably fine, in terms of getting it to work. Getting your insurance company to accept that it's OK and getting a Part P electrician to accept that it's OK when he/she comes to wire it into your house wiring installation and sign it off may well be a challenge, as any home made unit won't have the appropriate safety approvals. All told, it's cheaper and easier to just buy an approved system, I think. The cheapest systems I've seen are the Sofar ones, which start at about £1300 +VAT for the charger, inverter and a 2.4 kWh lithium battery module (which has a built in battery management system).

Plus all panels lose a lot of efficiency as they get hot anyway, and temperature differences between one installation and another (due differences in cooling) may well partially nullify the relatively small change in efficiency between the various panels available at the moment.

Depends on the version of the regs, but going back to the old way of looking at things, the idea was to bond any bit of metal that could be touched (including tabs, baths, metal sinks etc) together, and originally back to the metal incoming water pipe, which may well have been used as the protective earth for the whole house. Frankly this wasn't a great idea, IMHO, but at the time, when houses only had fuses for protection, and safety was primarily achieved by trying to place an earthed barrier between any potentially live part and the person using the appliance, it was pretty much the best we could do. We now have much better protective devices, residual current circuit breakers, or RCDs, that can sense a very small imbalance in the current flowing between line and neutral when there is a fault and turn off the supply very quickly, so significantly reducing the chance of a fatal electric shock. If the house is wired to an older version of the regulations then it still requires equipotential bonding - those wires connecting the pipes together - but it's a bit pointless if there are plastic push fit fittings that break the bonding. Not knowing the system you have, I can't say what to do exactly. You may need to bond all the exposed copper pipes together with earth wires and clamps to be strictly within the version of the regs that applied when your electrical installation was fitted, you may not, depends on whether your electrical installation has been updated to include one or more RCDs or not. A new electrical installation doesn't generally require either earth bonding or equipotential bonding now, both because the RCD(s) provide a significantly greater level of protection and because modern plumbing often includes plastic pipe and fittings, but that may well not be the case with an older system. Given that you have a non-conductive sink, then I'd be inclined to just bond the hot and cold incoming copper pipes together and run a bonding wire to the tap, to be on the safe side, and not worry about all the individual lengths of copper pipe that are insulated from each other by the push fit fittings and are tucked away in the cupboard, as they don't present a significant risk at all.