Jeremy Harris

They do look very, very close together in those photos, far closer than any guidance I've ever read anywhere suggests. There's bound to be a degree of cross contamination with them arranged like that, I think, the question really is how much that may be and whether it will prove to be a nuisance at times. The worst case will probably be a still day, when the extract is dealing with smells from the kitchen (or worse) which then get partially sucked back in to the fresh air intake and distributed around the whole house. If you rarely get still days you might get away with it, but it's not really an example of good practice, and I would have thought that the designer should have known a lot better than to place them that close together. Mind you, if you're in an area where there is always a breeze it may not matter too much.

Plumbers, roofers and heating engineers carry this stuff around all the time in vans. AFAIK, the only requirement for transport is having the appropriate hazard sticker on the vehicle (something not always complied with). If keeping stuff on site you need very secure storage anyway (as it will be nicked if you don't) and the most common storage is a small shipping container. They are steel, and when fitted with beefed up locks are fine for storing gas bottles in. The main risk is a leak of gas inside the store, which can be mitigated with some ventilation grilles. Personally, I adopted a rule of not leaving kit on site, and took stuff home every day. That included a gas cylinder, regulator, hose a torch a lot of the time. Strictly speaking I should have had a sticker on the car, but like lots of people I didn't bother, which was probably an offence..............

But unfortunately it's a Windows-only application. Most of my machines run Linux, either Mint or Lubuntu, and only one of them runs Windows, so any browser really has to work across all platforms and allow synchronising of bookmarks etc to work. Right now Pale Moon looks to be working well, it's much faster than Firefox 58/59 Beta in terms of pages load times, synchronisation seems to work well as far as I can tell, and it's using far less memory, AFAICT from just the limited testing I've done so far. It'll be interesting to see how well it works on the lowest powered machine I have, an old Mini-ITX box I built years ago that runs on an old dual core 64 bit Atom (a fanless D525MW board that has real serial and LPT ports), albeit with 4Gb of RAM and an SSD. Running Lubuntu on that is fine, but Firefox was a bit sluggish. I suspect that it may well handle Pale Moon a fair bit better.

Some local schools around here have Chinese (Mandarin usually) on the standard curriculum now. There was a bit of the local news where several youngsters were interviewed and they all had the view that of all the language choices they had at school, learning Mandarin Chinese was seen as being the most useful.

Which reminds me that somewhere in the garden I have a couple of experiments I started months ago, with some mortar plonked on some samples of PIR, to see how real the reaction with the foil really is. They've been sat outside, so have been repeatedly rained on and snowed on, which should be a pretty much worse case. I'll dig them out, see if I can get the mortar blobs off and takes some photos to see what the real-world damage to the foil faces is, and then post it on the relevant thread (when I can find it..............).

I've now installed the latest 64 bit version of Pale Moon on both the Win7 machine and a Linux machine, and the built-in encrypted sync function seems to work in very much the same way as that in Firefox. Bookmarks etc are all synced quickly and the sync set up is no more hassle than that for Firefox Sync. The really good news is that Pale Moon looks as Firefox used to, in fact it looks EXACTLY the same as Firefox 58/59 Beta looked after I'd played around editing a CSS file to force it to look acceptable, i.e before Firefox switched to the harder to use Australis theme, and before Quantum was released that stopped the classic theme restorer add-on from working. In terms of memory use, then in Win7 (I'm currently typing this on a Linux machine) then Pale Moon seems to use a single process, rather than 4 or 5, and runs at around 300 to 400Mb, with no indication of any steady and continuous memory leak increasing that usage. Next stage is to see how it behaves with Ublock Origin and Flash Block (Plus), or whether there are alternatives. Overall I'm impressed. I'd only used the much older 32 bit version on my old WinXP netbook before, but running on a reasonably fast Core i7 Linux laptop (that only has an SSD for storage) it is very snappy indeed when compared to Firefox.

There's a portable version of Pale Moon I've just found: https://www.palemoon.org/palemoon-portable.shtml

Thanks for that, I've used Pale Moon before, mainly because it uses a lot less resources than Firefox, but switched back because Firefox Sync is so useful if you use several different machines. Personally I'd not trust Xmarks, having just checked on it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xmarks_Sync , but then I'm just a little paranoid about privacy. However, Pale Moon Sync (https://www.palemoon.org/sync/ ) looks OK, and is encrypted, so may well do much the same as Xmarks without the privacy issues. It's a while since I've used Pale Moon, as I only have an older version installed on an old netbook that runs XP, and I stopped using that a while ago (it was the only machine I had on site for a fair time, and was why I'd dug it out). I'm going to try the current version on both this Win7 machine and a Linux machine and see how well it runs, and how effective the sync feature is, and will report back later.

The water regs require that foul water/grey water be run separately from fresh water, hence the need for the twin wall and air gap. It's to prevent the risk of cross contamination from the waste water to the freshwater running alongside it, should a pipe develop a leak. This makes a lot of sense in most respects, as shower waste water will almost certainly contain coliform bacteria, given the British habit of using toilet paper rather than a bidet or loo with a proper washing capability.

It doesn't look like it. AFAICS, the four FF processes don't seem to ever use less memory, they either stay fairly constant, or slowly use more memory as time goes on. The odd thing is that one or two processes just continue to grow even when the machine is just sat, turned on, but apparently doing nothing. The interesting thing is that FF memory use increases slowly when there is zero network traffic, which implies that FF is apparently using memory when there is no data coming in, which seems a bit bizarre. The scale of memory use is also odd, as it massively exceeds the amount of data on even dozens of normal webpages.

TBH. I had so much on at the time that it got overtaken by events. It was going to be a fair bit of work, so it was one of the things that ended up on the "don't have time to play with this" pile..............

Useful to know, thanks, particularly that you, like me, don't see the problem on Linux either. Makes me think it has to be something specific with the FF/Windows combination, something that has been going on since at least FF58, and still happens with FF59 Beta.

Thanks, I did this early when I switched to Firefox 59.0 Beta, just saved my old profile, completely removed FF58, used CC Cleaner to clean out all the garbage left over, then installed FF59.0 as a fresh install, copying over just the chrome folder with my CSS customisations, to get the same look and feel. I re-installed Ublock Origin and Flash Block (Plus) afterwards. Resource monitor is still showing that the four Firefox processes are using a bit over 1Gb, and one of them is just getting bigger second by second, even when doing nothing at all. I have found that installing the freeware application Wise Memory Optimiser works to knock back most of the Firefox memory grab. Currently I have it set to auto optimise when free memory gets below 1.5Gb, and the little pop up tells me that it reduces memory use by around 0.5Gb every time it reaches this point. Checking with resource manager shows that 99% of that saving comes from reducing Firefox memory use, almost all of it from the one process that is continually taking more memory. This looks very much like a memory leak to me, as I can't think of any other easy explanation. It has to be connected to the particular combination of Windows and Firefox, I think, as I don't see it on the other machines. It may even be Win 7 specific, as I have no other version of Windows to compare it with, only Linux.

I looked at a few options, from the rather dubious looking "Heat Squirrel" (I had real worries about the state that the holding tank would get into, and wasn't at all convinced it really met the water regs) to some of the (then) expensive linear systems. The major issue seemed to be the requirement in the water regs for an air gap between the fresh cold water and the warm waste water, and even if as small as possible, this hits the efficiency a bit. Some look reasonable though, and I have a feeling that @jack has one of the better ones fitted. I even looked at making one, as the cost when I was first looking of buying one was so high that it would never pay for itself. The things I learned were that vertical is best, that the waste inlet to the main vertical pipe needs to induce a high speed swirl to the waste water, so it sticks to the wall of the pipe as it goes down, for best heat exchange, that the regs require some sort of twin wall with an indicator that either the waste or fresh water pipe has developed a leak (tough to design in for a home made unit), but that if you were prepared to ignore the regs I think it would be pretty easy to make unit. My plan was to use a bit of 50mm copper waste pipe, with a swirl-inducing offset inlet at the top. This would be over 2m long and arranged to fit vertically down from the shower to a suitable drain on the ground floor. For the cold water feed, I intended to wrap four parallel runs of 8mm microbore copper pipe as tight to the 50mm pipe as possible, to maximise the contact area. If not overly fussed about the water regs, I'd have soldered the four pipes to the 50mm pipe to get better heat conduction. Joining the ends of the 8mm pipes to a 15mm pipe at either end was going to be done with a small manifold. I reckon I could have built one for under £100, a price that meant it would probably pay for itself in three or four years. Whether it would have been worth the effort I don't know! The problem doesn't exist if you use a bath - just leave it to cool before emptying it and you recover most of the heat back into the house.

Tried that, and it has a momentary effect, but the memory use soon starts climbing again (now over 1 Gb and rising, with just a blank tab having been open for the past ten or fifteen minutes. I'm convinced there's a memory leak problem that Mozilla haven't been able to fix. The advice seems to be to refresh, which is a PITA as you then need to reload any extensions you use. It does provide respite, but it isn's a fix, it just takes you back to a relatively clean starting position. I've also checked my profile size, and it's only a few hundred Mb, which seems about right. I'd use Chromium (with the Google crap disabled) if it was easy to run on all platforms, but it isn't, unfortunately, the Windows builds are a bit haphazard, and I'd want something that is similar to Firefox, open source, works seamlessly on different OS's, and has a bookmark sync feature across different machines (this latter feature is very useful if you regularly use two or three different machines).

I'll try it and report back, but I have a feeling it's an intrinsic issue within Firefox, especially as it seems to be a widely reported problem.

Right, I've just disabled every add-on and extension, restarted Firefox, and with just this tab open it's now at 600Mb and steadily increasing, exactly as it was before, so the problem is definitely Firefox itself, and specifically two Firefox process, PID 9204 and PID 9908. Two other Firefox processes, PID 6148 and PID 9912 seem stable, with no memory increase over time that I can see.

I can try that, but the only things running are UBlock Origin and Flash Block plus, both of which are suggested as solutions to the high memory use problem by Mozilla themselves, so it seems unlikely that either would now start using memory when they haven't in the past. I'm tempted to roll back to Firefox 56, as I'm reasonably sure that was better than 58. I only started seeing serious problems with Firefox 58, although that may be down to my pattern of use, and I may not have been running Firefox 57 long enough on this machine to cause an issue,

20 minutes later, with Firefox 59.0 Beta just sat doing nothing but with this tab open to this site, and the memory use has crept up to over 900Mb, and it's clear that even when doing nothing at all, the resource monitor is showing an inexorable increase in memory use.

No, it's a pretty much vanilla install, with the exception that I added some CSS tweaks to get back the same user interface appearance that dates back to the early days of Firefox. Previously I used to use an add-on to do this, but that stopped working from Firefox 56, so I had to revert to tweaking the appearance directly. Not as easy, but it can't have had any significant effect on memory use, as it's only loaded when Firefox starts, and only changes the interface appearance back to something usable (IMHO). If anyone wants to do this, then you can download the files and folders that need to be added to the chrome directory in your user profile from Github easily enough, then use a text editor to weak the CSS file to get the appearance you prefer. I prefer tabs on the bottom, the bookmark toolbar displayed properly and a conventional menu at the top, but you can pretty much tweak the look to suit what you specifically prefer. I'm typing this using the Firefox 59.0 Beta that @Alphonsox suggested, so will see how that goes. It's fast at the moment, but only has one tab open and the memory use is currently only at 330Mb or so, but that just really indicates a fresh start. Only time will tell if memory usage creeps back up as it used to or not.

Thanks, I think I'll do the same, and see if the problem's been fixed.

I'm thinking the same. There's no way Firefox is really using all that memory, and it's clear that memory usage just increases with time, even with the machine doing very little. Shutting down Firefox and restarting it gets back to a few hundred Mb of memory, but over the next few hours it just creeps up and up. I doubt it can be pre-caching that much data, so it has to be something else. It's odd that it seems to be Windows specific, too, as the same doesn't seem to happen with the same version of Firefox running on Linux, as far as I can tell. Might be something to do with Windows memory management, perhaps?

Yes, it is. All of the OS files and programme files, including profiles, are on the SSD, all I have on the HDD are data files. The problem seems to be primarily that if the machine is left on for any length of time, Firefox just grabs more and more memory until it eventually results in the system using the page file. Even though the page file is on the SSD, this still slugs the machine down. I can't see any good reason why Firefox needs to use several Gb of memory, it's only a browser, for goodness sake. What's odd is that Firefox doesn't do this on a Linux machine, as far as I can tell. At least I've never had the same problem with the machine practically grinding to a halt with Linux.

I shut Firefox down an hour or so ago, started it up again, and it's up to over 2Gb of memory use with just two tabs open again..................

Many thanks, will do. I'd rather not change browser if I can help it, as I like the way all the machines look the same.