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Jeremy Harris

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Everything posted by Jeremy Harris

  1. Jeremy Harris
    The concrete almost certainly isn't conductive enough to make this work and meet the regs. I do have an earth rod (double length) that goes through a hold drilled inside my workshop slab and a couple of metres down into the ground beneath. I did this really as a way of protecting the earth rod connection a bit better. In my case it was easy, as I had a bit of duct coming up in the corner of the workshop with a run of 6mm² SWA bringing power in, and I wanted to box the incoming cable in for protection, extending up the wall to a wooden cabinet that houses the CU for the workshop. I fitted the earth rods adjacent to the incoming cable duct so I could put the earth connection and cable inside the boxed section for protection. Apart from protecting the earth rod connection, doing it this way also meant that the earth rod was down into soil that is probably always damp, because of the concrete slab above it. Not sure if that helped or not, but I doubt it did any harm.
  2. Jeremy Harris
    I've probably got a couple of new 250ml sterile sample bottles around somewhere. All that would be needed would be a sample of water from before the device and a sample from after it. I could do the tests in front of witnesses ( when I see you in November, perhaps?) and someone could photograph the results easily enough as proof.
  3. Jeremy Harris
    I only did the conveyancing because we were hard up and I'd spotted a paperback book in Smiths called something like "Do your own conveyancing", and the book included copies of all the forms you might need in an envelope attached to the back. Having read the book I decided that if I just followed the instructions in it then it should be fine. I was lucky in that we had no problems at all. A year or so later I did the conveyancing on the purchase of my youngest brother's first house, an old nurses home that he was buying from the NHS. That went OK as well. Nowadays I value my time too much to DIY it, as I well remember how many hours of work it took.
  4. Jeremy Harris
    Makes me wonder whether that concrete slab may have originally had something really heavy on it, dating back to when all the quarry workings were going on at your site. Any chance that the cabin was just stuck on an existing slab on the site?
  5. Jeremy Harris
    Welcome. Loads of people here now have 100mm thick passive slabs with integrated UFH pipes, including me, and I'm not aware of anyone with major problems, apart from one issue where a sub-contractor wasn't used to levelling such a slab as it was their first ever job. In that case the main contractor paid to have corrective action taken. I documented everything except the power floating (because that went on well after it got dark) in our blog: http://www.mayfly.eu/2013/10/part-sixteen-fun-and-games-in-the-mud/
  6. Jeremy Harris
    The stuff on our roof was great, kept really heavy rain out for weeks. IIRC it was Ampack Ampatop Aero: http://www.ampack.eu/eu/products/membranes/roof-membranes/products/ampatop-aero-15-m/ Quote from that site: Ours had the integrated tape, so all the overlaps are sealed securely with a self-adhesive band around 150mm or so wide at the lower edge of each horizontal run.
  7. Jeremy Harris
    Dead easy. I have a calibrated total hardness meter, pH meter and conductivity meter, plus test reagents as a back up, and it's literally 20 minutes work to check to see if two samples are the same or different with regard to hardness.
  8. Jeremy Harris
    I wonder why the company name changed from ecosoftwater and their old website now redirects the the new one, with different wording (the old website is still up on the Wayback Machine)? Could it be that it because this device doesn't (and cannot) soften hard water, and the name "ecosoftwater" implied that it was a water softener? There's also the Australian connection with the company of the same name, as linked to by @Alphonsox in an earlier post on page one of this thread, which is undoubtedly the same device.
  9. Jeremy Harris
    5mm is neither here nor there, even if tiling the slab direct you'd work off a 6mm adhesive bed as a max, so there'd be no problem making up a 5mm dip.
  10. Jeremy Harris
    Remember that really wet and windy Christmas period in 2013, with all the flooding? Our new house just had membrane on the roof for around 8 weeks, as the weather was too bad for the roofers to get up there. Not a drop of water came in, anywhere.
  11. Jeremy Harris
    It's also overlooking the fact that if the CaCO3 in the water is turned from the calcite form to the aragonite form, the change will be short lived, as the aragonite will revert back to calcite within a day or two. Plants don't care about the particular crystalline form of CaCO3, if they don't like carbonate rich water they don't like carbonate rich water, no matter whether that be vaterite, calcite or aragonite.
  12. Jeremy Harris
    Check my highlight. You can have soft water or mineral rich water, but they are generally mutually exclusive. The only mineral in water that this device claims to have any effect on is Calcium Carbonate, CaCO3, and possibly (although they don't seem to refer to it) magnesium salts that are also found in hard water. Now their technical literature is clear - the device does not change the concentration of CaCO3 in water at all - what comes out has exactly the same concentration of CaCO3 as what went in. The statement above about "wake up to softer water" is bordering on misrepresentation, IMHO, as this device doesn't change the hardness of water nor can it, even their own technical documentation (which is full of distracting stuff that's irrelevant to the chemistry of water hardness) doesn't claim that the device is a water softener. The only claim they make (which has never been proven, even by the inventor) is that their device temporarily changes some, or all, of the CaCO3 from the calcite form to the aragonite form, which has no effect at all on total hardness. There's not even any peer-reviewed evidence that water with CaCO3 in the form of aragonite, rather than calcite, is any different at all as far as its use in the home is concerned.
  13. Jeremy Harris
    A lot of water quality problems aren't down to the water itself, but often the pipe work and even applainces. For example, at our old house we had very hard water (froma chalk aquifer) and kettles would "fur up" with scale very quickly, tea tasted pretty awful etc. After visiting a Malaysian friend with one, we went and bought a "hot pot", a device that is common in the far east and is just an insulated stainless container that holds up to five litres of near-boiling water and dispenses it on demand by a small electric pump. They used to be quite hard to buy, but are now on sale all over the place. I won't pretend that they are in any way economical or environmentally friendly, they aren't at all, but they are extremely handy if you drink a lot of tea, as you have instant hot water available - no wait for the kettle to boil. The interesting bit is that these things never fur up like a kettle. What happens is that the bottom of the tank gradually fills with fine sandy particles of mainly CaCO3 that can be flushed out every week or two. The stainless inside of the hot pot itself stays shiny, as if we had soft water. Tea made from it also tastes great, with no scum that we used to get when using the kettle. What seems to be happening is that the conditions inside the hot pot are ideal for getting the CaCO3 to precipitate out as fine particles, leaving water that tastes a lot nicer. The point here is that a lot of things contribute to the taste and apparent quality of the water in a domestic system, not just the incoming water itself.
  14. Jeremy Harris
    They'd go like a shot here on Freecycle - we got rid of all the old windows from our old house that way, even though all the frames had been sawn in half to get them out. Chap wanted them for making a cold frame, cloches etc, IIRC. I'm about to stick two boats and a pile of other stuff on Freecycle - I suspect I may get trampled in the rush!
  15. Jeremy Harris
    I can easily test the two samples and prove that the hardness is the same for both. The company that make the unit you have do not make any claims at all that it reduces hardness or softens water in any way. Looking in detail at how it works, it cannot soften water at all, and presumably the company know that so don't claim that it does; if they did they would probably fall foul of the ASA.
  16. Jeremy Harris
    Depends where you live. I shopped around all the local solicitors and they were all charging a lot more than the firm that PB use, but that's probably down to solicitors around here generally being a LOT more expensive, for some reason. There does seem to be a lot of variation in the prices charged for conveyancing, which is odd, as even solicitors will use minimally qualified staff for all the box-ticking stuff, in my experience. It doesn't seem to me that the conveyancers we are using are working to a pre-planned timetable at all, but they are doing all the box ticking via their app, with minimal supervision by a qualified person. Right now, if both ourselves and the purchasers accepted the earliest completion date, then the timescale would be 22 days from the date that we contracted with the conveyancing firm to completion, which seems pretty fast to me.
  17. Jeremy Harris
    There's no doubt that phosphate dosing can work pretty well, so that guarantee doesn't surprise me at all. I think we need to really separate out the elements of this thread that relate to other "water conditioning" products, so that products that have been scientifically tested and proven to work as advertised don't get confused with products that are, at best, lacking in hard scientific evidence that they reduce levels of CaCO3, or that changing the specific form of CaCO3 somehow reduces water hardness (it does not at all, and I'll gladly come and do a water hardness test for anyone that believes they do).
  18. Jeremy Harris
    There's nothing to stop you going to the LA and doing the searches the same day if you're in a hurry. The fee is the same, but I found they were more than happy to let me do the work for them. Took around an hour or so, and combined with the half hour each way drive to the council offices meant that I had the search results within two hours. This could have been faster, as if I'd only stuck to answering the specific search questions I could have done the job in around half an hour at most. One of the staff asked if I'd like to look at the list of all non-registered proposals for the area, and it was that which took the other half hour. A former colleague, who was a bit of a property speculator, and used to buy and sell houses on a regular basis, once needed to go from offer to exchange of contracts within 24 hours. I remember him telling me that it was worth paying his solicitor to drive around getting all the documents signed etc so he could be sure that he didn't get gazumped. I have a strong feeling that he'd offered to purchase the property at well below the market value, probably by less than scrupulous means as it wasn't actually advertised for sale, as the bloke always seemed to me to be a bit of a wide boy.
  19. Jeremy Harris
    Years ago, when we sold our first house and purchased our next one, I did all the conveyancing myself (just to save money!). It was a fair bit of running around, as solicitors trust each other, but don't trust anyone else, but one thing that I did find very informative was doing the searches myself. I just drove over to the local council office, paid a small fee and was allowed access to all the information and to make copies (for another small fee) of any key documents. Doing your own searches can be very beneficial. For example, there was a main road to the rear of the house we were buying, and although there was nothing in the local plan about alterations to this, I did find lots of documents relating to longer term plans to change the route of this road so that it would remove a dangerous bend and move the road further away from the house we were buying. That information wasn't in the register, so would never have surfaced has we opted to use a solicitor who just used the standard search forms. Our building society had no problem with me doing any of the conveyancing work, searches etc, either, as the council stamped the search documents as verification.
  20. Jeremy Harris
    Given that you are also a scientist, can you please just answer my questions about your published statements in this post, please, as I feel very strongly that such statements of apparent scientific fact need to be answered:
  21. Jeremy Harris
    If anyone believes that a Wikipedia entry is in error, they are free to edit it in accordance with Wikipedia's editing guidelines. Any edit will be peer reviewed (as peer review is the key philosophy behind trying to keep Wikipedia accurate and truthful). I suggest that you, @Polly, edit the Wikipedia entry to align with your findings with regard to forms of aragonite that you state your unit produces when water containing other forms of CaCO3 passes through it.
  22. Jeremy Harris
    To illustrate @jacks point, and to show how easy it is to do a patent search, here are some links to old patents where I was the inventor, or shared the invention with a colleague (I just searched on my name and they all popped up): https://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?DB=EPODOC&II=0&ND=3&adjacent=true&locale=en_EP&FT=D&date=19920909&CC=GB&NR=2253376A&KC=A# https://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?DB=EPODOC&II=2&ND=3&adjacent=true&locale=en_EP&FT=D&date=19901219&CC=GB&NR=2232647A&KC=A# https://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?DB=EPODOC&II=1&ND=3&adjacent=true&locale=en_EP&FT=D&date=19920624&CC=GB&NR=2250960A&KC=A# Like @pdf27, I can't find any patent listed under the given company name in this debate, so have to assume that there isn't one. The implication is that the company promoting their product here have got no patent for it, are using an invention from an expired patent, or are licensing the IP.
  23. Jeremy Harris
    No, you made written statements on a public forum, therefore it is only fair and reasonable that valid questions about the truth of those published statements from your company must also be on the same public forum. I'll keep it simple, just answer two points, please: 1. You stated, in answer to a point I raised about there being other "water conditioners" on the market that did not release chemicals into the water, that permanent magnet water conditioners use power. I would like to to be able to examine the supporting evidence for that statement, please. Anything will do, as long as it's from a peer reviewed source. 2. You clearly and unequivocally published a statement that your product was the "only system in the UK that doesn't release chemicals into your water, whilst using no energy." I gave examples of other types of "water conditioner" that uses no energy, specifically permanent magnet and other "catalytic type" units (with no soluble or reactive components), and asked you specifically what chemicals these released into the water. Again, just quoting a peer reviewed source to support your statement will be fine by way of an answer.
  24. Jeremy Harris
    How can a patent be commercially sensitive - they are all in the public domain, even my own from decades ago. Anyone can search for patents here if they wish: https://worldwide.espacenet.com/
  25. Jeremy Harris
    Yes you did. Your statement was unequivocal, and stated that: I did not say they did - you wrote that permanent magnets used power, I asked for proof, which has not been forthcoming. What you wrote was (my highlight of your text): Please explain where the power comes from in a permanent magnet "water conditioner". I want specifics, staying within the laws of physics, please, as you have been very clear in stating that these devices "use power" , and I'm keen to understand where you believe the power comes from in a permanent magnet. I didn't question this. What I wrote was this, and I'd like an answer please as to what chemicals such devices release into the water supply: Also, please note that I very specifically stated that I was not including any "water conditioner" that used a replaceable component, and went further and specifically mentioned excluding devices that used zinc or any other soluble component. Can we please stick to hard facts, backed by known science, and not try to dodge the questions being asked.
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