Jeremy Harris

Lead flashing needs to be set into the stone work and then dressed down over the EPDM. There will need to be an upstand where the EPDM meets the wall, so the lead can be dressed down over it. There are some details here: https://www.fixmyroof.co.uk/install-roof-flashings/ and a video here showing what looks to be an aluminium flashing trim, rather than lead:

No problem with water, electricity and telecoms running in ducts under the ground floor, but I think there are some restrictions with gas, relating to ventilating any space that the pipe runs through.

Me too. I'd just allow for an extra thickness of sub-base where the trench is. The sub-base needs to be whacked down in layers, anyway.

I sent A4 prints from the planning website and they accepted them OK. They do look at them I found, as they came back to us with a question about the bike storage shed being ineligible for VAT reclaim, even though it was on the approved plans. As we'd only added that (as a lean to on the side of the garage) to comply with the Code for Sustainable Homes rules, and as those rules were withdrawn between the time we submitted our application and the date it was approved, we didn't build the bike storage shed anyway. I wrote and told them that, with a photo of the garage as built to prove it, and they seemed content.

Didn't I post some YouTube videos and links to those French mini diggers here a while ago? I remember looking at them a few years ago, after staying with a friend in France who had a two wheeled ex-military "grave digger" that could be towed behind a car. He did a lot of work terracing the steep paddock behind his house with it, plus digging a big French drain, and despite being small it was surprisingly capable. Being able to tow it behind a car was a big advantage, and once on site it was moved about using the bucket to pull the thing around. His was nice and stable, too, as the wheels are a fair distance apart, but that limited where it could be used a bit.

It's pretty easy to do, as there are instructions that come with the rail and element that detail exactly how to do it. I've done three of these now, one in the old house, two in the new house, and there's very little skill needed. You just fit the supplied blanking plugs (which have O ring seals, so don't are easy to fit and seal) to one of the top pipe connections and one of the bottom connections (ideally diagonally opposite). You then fit the heating element into the remaining bottom connection (again it comes with an O ring seal), fill the rail up with corrosion inhibitor, or car antifreeze which already contains inhibitor, leave a very small air gap at the top filler to allow for the slight expansion that will occur when it warms up, then fit the air bleed screw plug to seal the unit, close the bleed screw after tightening the plug and the job's done.

Seems OK to me. We have the chrome version and it seems reasonable, better than the typical B&Q stuff, probably not up to the quality of some of the designer stuff at three or four times the price. The poorest part seems to be the wall brackets, which are chrome-plated plastic, but they're perfectly OK in practice and aren't showing any signs of not being up to the job.

Believe it or not, after a great deal of searching around for a wide rail, without too many bars or being too high, I found it on ebay of all places. The seller was Company Blue and they still have the same rails available: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/1300mm-Wide-400mm-HIgh-Heated-Towel-Rail-Radiator-Chrome-Straight-Bathroom/191256380598?hash=item2c87c4c4b6:g:KOoAAOSwPcVVlAq0 If you want white, then they are a bit cheaper: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/1300mm-Wide-Straight-White-Towel-Rail-Radiator-Towel-Radiator-Bathroom-Designer/191343834476?hash=item2c8cfb356c:m:m_Lon_6Feeg6LYVgC0LqcMg

I've just installed a watering system for our newly planted row of trees. I opted to buy this kit, which I can highly recommend: https://www.easygardenirrigation.co.uk/collections/drip-irrigation-systems/products/claber-drip-irrigation-starter-kit-90764 Don't buy the Screwfix system, it's junk. I bought one and it leaked, and all the drippers fell apart after a couple of days. I also bought this cheap timer: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Auto-Digital-LCD-Electronic-Water-Timer-Garden-Irrigation-Controller-Free-Post-A-/332160779280?_trksid=p2349526.m4383.l4275.c10 and have found it works very well indeed - surprisingly so for the price. The nice thing about the Claber drippers is that they are very easy to individually adjust; anything from off to a fairly fast trickle, which makes setting up a line of them very easy.

I spent ages looking for a wide towel rail, one that would take a couple of bath towels side by side, rather than the daft idea of stacking them on top of each other. I ended up finding one that was around 1300mm wide, which is ideal, and it has a big enough gap at the back to thread fat (fluffy...) towels down easily. It wasn't an electric one, but was easy enough to convert with an element and some antifreeze.

The aim of Cochrane is to remove opinions and commercial or political bias and be wholly subjective. It's one of the reasons why so many of the evidence reviews have conclusions that show that a treatment or medication is not proven to be beneficial or otherwise. The evidence is often rather poor, and without any doubt skewed by vested interests. One example I looked at where base data was obtained*** and compared with the published findings showed that the published findings had an edited data set where many of the placebos had been removed. The reason was almost certainly because when the drug efficacy was properly compared against the placebo results there wasn't a statistically significant difference. That's one case out of around 30 I've looked at so far, but there is a general trend for "outliers" to be removed from published data sets, often when there seems little justification for doing so, apart from the obvious one that they seems to skew the outcome in the "wrong" direction for the pharmaceutical company. In defence of those running trials and studies, it is extremely costly and time consuming to do them on a large enough scale to be able to get statistically relevant data, and often trials are more focussed on checking for adverse, or side, effects than they are on efficacy. Once a pharmaceutical company has got as far as the human trial stages for any treatment they have invested so much money that they seem to be extremely reluctant to stop, so will prove it's acceptably safe, so they can start to market it, long before they have enough evidence to show whether or not it's really effective. Often the effectiveness, or otherwise, of any medication or treatment only becomes clear years after it was first approved and marketed. *** Some jurisdictions force this to be filed for approval, so the data is sometimes released or made available when the initial patent coverage expires.

Interesting. Strontium Bromide is potentially more reactive than Sodium Acetate, which may well be part of the issue.

I have no idea what the compound in the PCM34 units is, but would guess that it will be something very different to the compound in the PCM58 units, which we know to be sodium acetate based.

There's a fair bit of evidence that sodium acetate doesn't degrade when stored in a sealed container, and that it's even pretty stable when in either supersaturated solution or as a crystallised solid. Anecdotally that's supported by an old hand warmer pad I have, that was left "charged" (i.e. in supersaturated liquid form) in a desk drawer for a few years and when I found it and clicked the nucleator it immediately started to crystallise and heat up. I recharged it and have stored it away, and will test it again in a few years, but I can't see any intrinsic reason why it should degrade, as it's an inherently stable compound. As an example of its stability, it's commonly used as a waterproofing additive for concrete, where it remains stable enough to work for decades.

We also get flies in the filter chamber of ours, but nothing gets through the pollen filter on the intake side at all. I took the heat exchanger out of ours last year to see if it needed cleaning, but it was spotless, no trace of any dust or anything in it. We do have a problem with fluffy floating seeds partially blocking the intake grill outside, which means I have to get up a ladder with a brush and clean it periodically, but I'm planning on running an external duct extension from that down to a lower level, with an easily accessible pre-filter screen, as a long term measure to try and help keep the main filter a bit cleaner. I agree with what @Declan52 has said, it sounds like the filter isn't sealing properly and is allowing stuff to bypass it, so it's worth checking that everything is properly fitted and sealed.

Shouldn't that be 52 years for 4% degradation at 2 cycles per day?

This might make interesting reading, given the way that medical intervention for mild hypertension was being pushed so hard a few years ago: http://www.cochrane.org/CD006742/HTN_benefits-of-antihypertensive-drugs-for-mild-hypertension-are-unclear The bottom line is that for vast majority of people with no history of cardiovascular illness, but with mildly elevated BP (defined as around 140 to 159mmHg systolic, 90 to 99mmHg diastolic), which happens to be the vast majority of people taking anti-hypertension drugs, there is no good evidence to show that this treatment either decreases morbidity or mortality rates. That flies in the face of what GPs have been telling me for decades. FWIW, my mean BP over the past three months with no medication is 122/83mmHg, so well below the strongly recommended UK treatment threshold of 140/90mmHg...

I can confirm that the same is true for the standard Sunamp PV we have. The buffer tank is usually around 35 to 40oC, and this preheats the cold water fed to the Sunamp via a plate heat exchanger, with the pump that pulls water from the buffer to the heat exchanger only coming on when a flow switch in the hot water feed operates, so it's "on demand" heated, much the same as the Sunamp. The net result is that in practice the Sunamp PV can easily run a couple of decent showers, with enough capacity left over to meet the house hot water demands for the day. I was thinking of adding another parallel Sunamp heat battery (essentially just the two heat cells from a Sunamp PV in parallel with the ones already fitted) but I can't see that it's needed, as long as the preheat system is working.

It is madness, but it's also an intrinsic part of Chinese business culture. A friend builds custom bicycles, and has to import a lot of parts from China (strictly speaking Taiwan, but the culture is the same) as practically all the big name bike component manufacturers now source them from Taiwan. He would send the factory in Taiwan a specification, and they would produce sample components for him that were fine. They'd give him a price, then when he placed a larger order he'd find that they changed the material specs, but also charged him a lower than agreed price, thinking they were offering him good service. Price over rides quality, as price is a matter of "face", something you just have to get used to when dealing with China. In the end he had to employ a local British ex-pat living in Taiwan to be his quality assurance manager and inspect every batch of components before it was shipped, to make sure they were made to his spec. This seems to be the only way to guarantee consistent quality. I doubt the Genvex will have any issues. All the refrigerant piping on mine is copper, and it looks very well made internally.

We weren't asked for a landscaping plan, but as a part of trying to get some of the previous objectors in the village on side I offered to plant two cherry trees (long story, but 50 cherry trees were planted in the village to commemorate the coronation and over half have now died, so I thought offering to have one either side of our drive entrance might help). I then realised that if we included a landscaping plan and asked the planning officer to include it in the approval we could reclaim the VAT. We managed to get most of the hard landscaping, like stone walls, patio, stone paths, the lawn etc, done before we put in the VAT reclaim, plus I stocked up on stuff we'd need to finish off the hard landscaping, like stone, so at least we got the VAT back on some of the more expensive stuff. Unfortunately we ran out of money (and energy) to do more before the VAT claim, so have had to save up for the expensive mature trees I planted a few weeks ago. We still have lots to do in the garden, but at least it looks presentable from the lane, which also keeps the rest of the village on side as we're in the Best Kept Village competition again (I think our garden rather let things down last year...).

All experimental data of any value needs to be "double blind", so with medical trials there's never any issue of patient confidentiality, as patient ID is never in the data set anyway. Yes, each team does, to some extent, define how it best conduct a review, but that is a consultative process, and is not imposed. The main problem is getting reliable data, because the published data is often sanitised. However, it's usually pretty obvious when comparing the data from several trials or studies where data has been sanitised, and there is a gradual shift towards allowing reviewers better access to raw data. In part this has been driven by the growing trust placed in Cochrane evidence, but I think the main reason for the shift has been the realisation by drug companies that they were being shown up as only publishing sanitised results.

Doesn't surprise me. There has to be a very good reason for the high rate of erosion of the sacrificial anode in these units, as it seems far too high than that from the PD of stainless steel and copper, which would be a normal budget option. Higher quality units might use stainless steel and monel, or even all stainless steel construction. Using aluminium, which is a long way from stainless steel in the electrochemical series, sounds like a sure-fire recipe for relatively rapid corrosion.

Cochrane does "deep dive" into as much data as can be obtained; reviewers spend a lot of voluntary free time doing this. It may look, from the way the summaries are presented, as if each team has just done a metadata analysis, but that is not the case. Every team has volunteer SMEs, as well as those who just collate data and try to correlate findings, and most teams have members who are experienced at peer reviewing academic papers, with the required degree of scientific scrutiny. It's a volunteer organisation, so not perfect, but it does have the advantage of being run by people who have no vested interest in the outcomes of their work.

Interesting, as when I asked the same question, having seen loads of near-identical units on the Chinese marketing site, they told me (when chatting on their stand at the Swindon self-build centre I think) that they were made by them in the UK, and weren't just imported from China. I can't criticise the company on the grounds of helpfulness, they were very good at letting me have all the information I asked for, but I have always believed that they were a bit like Navitron, just UK importers of stuff from China, albeit with a bit of added value from some UK testing and certification. This is a bit like a lathe I bought a few years ago, although at least the UK importer in that case was dead straight with me about their origin. When the lathe was delivered there was severe corrosion on the tool post and cross slide, so I took photos and sent them to the UK importer. He was great, in that he sent me replacements, but they didn't fit. It turned out that the Chinese manufacturer had changed the spec and the lathe hadn't even been looked at by the UK importer at all - it was delivered to me in the crate that it was in when it left China. It got sorted in the end, with a replacement lathe, but frankly the wiring, motor and motor controller was garbage. After replacing three controllers and two motors, all under warranty, I decided to redesign the whole drive system and fit a decent quality brushless motor and controller. That, together with several hours spent lapping the gibs to get things to run accurately and smoothly, and stripping the whole thing to reassemble it as it should have been in the first place, resulted in a pretty good machine. The main failings with Chinese made stuff seems to be a tendency to cut corners to save a few pennies and poor finish and attention to detail at final assembly. I guess it's really a case of trading reliability for price, when it comes down to it. The Ecocent is relatively cheap (although you can import virtually the same unit from China for a fair bit less), so it's inevitable that there will be some trade off's. To be fair, there are several other companies importing stuff direct from China and selling it in the UK, so I'm not in any way singling ESP out. They provide a product that is at the "value" end of the market, so when noting shortcomings it's worth looking at the price for roughly equivalent systems from companies like Nibe or Genvex, which are two or three times the price of the ESP kit.

Just a quick reality check here. A big domestic freezer may draw as much as 200 W, so assuming it has a COP of around 3.5, it will have a cooling capacity of around 700 W. Our ASHP has a cooling capacity of about 6,000 W, and that has a reasonable effect on a very well insulated house. Is it worth all that hassle to get at most around 700 W of cooling?