Jeremy Harris

Can I ask that people give the Forum Management Group a bit of breathing space on this, please? At the moment the review potentially breaches 6.5 and 6.7 of the forum terms and conditions is all we are able to release at the moment. I can say that, at this stage, there have been no suggestions, notifications or threats of legal action made by anyone, that we don't at this stage believe that it is likely that there will be any legal action by anyone and that open speculation on what may or may not be going on in confidence isn't helpful, I'm afraid.

Ok, so what you have is a 5u pre filter, plus a refillable phosphate dosing water treatment cartridge. Phosphate dosing is a way of preventing limescale from sticking to anything, It doesn't actually soften the water, but if you live in a hard water area it does help to stop limescale sticking to hard surfaces. Whether it's worth using depends entirely whether there are any carbonates in your water. The two main culprits for scale formation are calcium carbonate and magnesium carbonate, bot of which are dissolved out of limestone and chalk by slightly acid rainfall. If your water supply doesn't come from a hard water source, which is very unlikely, as the major outcrops of limestone in Scotland are in the far North West, most of Scotland gets water that is free of carbonates and slightly acidic, then I'm not convinced that you need to phosphate dose the water. We used to live in South West Scotland, and the water there was very soft, with no carbonates in the water at all.

Our rig came on a big low loader, as it was a fair few tonnes of kit, plus a landrover towing a big compressor. IIRC the rig transport was a specialist heavy plant transporter, with the tracked rig being able to unload itself a bit like a pretty big (15 tonne or so) tracked digger.

I wonder if there is a correlation between the brand of power tools anyone owns and where they go to buy their food? I'll own up to having almost entirely Makita power tools, even a Makita mower, and we always shop at Waitrose, and pretty much always have. Not sure what that says about me, probably not anything nice..............

@PeterStarck, It seems to vary a lot from region to region, I think. I can't remember how many companies we approached to drill our borehole, but it was at least four or five, and the variations in price were pretty wide, from around £8k up to over £12k, IIRC, for a ~50m deep borehole. I already had a hydrogeological report, with a detailed specification for the borehole, including the depth, type of strata to be drilled through,plus details of the type of lining and packing media needed around the water-bearing section. £3k would barely cover the rig mobilisation costs, here, I think!

One thing I learned during our build was that nobody ever does a perfect job, and that mistakes always happen unless you're super-vigilant at trying to stop them. I found communicating what was wanted pretty tough going, even after explaining why I wanted something done in a particular way. I think part of it is that people just work on autopilot and do things the way they've always done in the past, with little heed to the problems it might create for people down the line. Building seems to be one of the most insular project management jobs I've ever seen, in that it seemed to me that no trade appeared to work cooperatively with any other, they all just did their own thing unless you made it extremely clear that you had to have something done in a specific way.

I think I'd be inclined to put the floor joists in, really because it's probably easier to do with the roof off, it may well stiffen up the walls a bit and it allows temporary boarding to be put down which may be handy when putting the roof on. Also worth thinking about fall distances and risk, I think. Falling off the roof and down to ground level inside the house is going to hurt, and the roofers may ask for bags to be placed in the house for fall protection.

Our house is well-insulated, airtight, triple glazed and 130m2 net internal floor area. Worst case heating requirement to keep the house at 21 deg C when it's -10 deg C outside is 1.6 kW. I can't imagine how big a well insulated house needs to be to need more than 10 times as much heat, and strongly suspect that there may be an issue with the heat loss assessment being massively in error. The spreadsheet I knocked up ages ago does a pretty reasonable job of calculating this, good enough to size a heating system: http://www.mayfly.eu/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Fabric-and-ventilation-heat-loss-calculator-Master.xls

Thanks, that's a nuisance if they choose to do that here. I was hoping that a new mast might fix our lack of a mobile signal. I'll check with the person on the other forum to see if they can add anything more about this, as I have a suspicion, based solely on their knowledge, that they might work for EE. That's mainly our problem, with pretty much all the local masts out in the countryside. We have an EE mast about a mile away, but it's set up to point up and down the A30, not to our village which is off to one side of that road. The same applies further North, where the masts all seem to be set up to cover the route of the A303, ignoring the villages, many or which are in deep valleys in the Plain. The ideal fix for use would be a microcell set up in the village. There is an ideal location for it already, identified, and some have talked about it a few times, but the snag is that none of the mobile companies are interested in putting one up, presumably because a few hundred people isn't a community worth serving, from an economical view point. The combination of really poor broadband and no effective mobile coverage is a blasted nuisance at times.

Nice change of term. I'll lay money that "twit" wasn't what you were originally going to write, Dave.............

Not much choice, but this stuff in the 22mm thickness is load bearing and has T&G joints: http://www.sts-uk.com/half-size-22

According to someone on another forum that works in the mobile network business, as EE have won the contract to supply the new secure data and voice comms for all the emergency services (the replacement for Tetra and Airwave), they plan to use their existing mobile network, supplemented in areas where there currently isn't good reception, as they have to be able to cover the whole country. A side effect of this is that it seems likely that areas like ours, with no useful coverage, may get coverage as a consequence of this upgrade. The downside is that the emergency service traffic will take priority over normal users, so higher contention may well result in system degradation for normal users.

I've been drawing up things like wiring and pipework diagrams, laminating them in plastic and either putting them in the house folder or, in the case of our water treatment plant room, sticking them on to the inside of the door. That way anyone should be able to work out how things are wired and plumbed. The other thing I've done is put proper printed labels on everything, from stating the fuse rating on every switched fused outlet, through labelling every single circuit breaker to adding labels on all the pipes, the various bits of plumbing kit etc, together with the normal operating range marked on all gauges with red and green tape pointers.

To get doors in mine I just slide the passenger seat forward slightly and put the doors in at a slight angle. 2.4m lengths of timber are fine, as I can fold the front seat back, take the headrest off and drape an old towel over the seat to protect it. 3m lengths of timber or pipe fit OK inside too, but I have to lay the towel over the top of the passenger side dash to protect it in case they slide forwards.

I'm not sure. The link is on the circuit board, I suspect, so there may be a chance that it's been disturbed. If you have a multimeter, then you can easily check (with the power off) for continuity between terminals 3 and 13.

Doesn't look like a softener to me, it looks like a pair of water filters. One may be a fine filter, probably 5µ, the other may be something like a carbon block filter, to take out chlorine and any other things that might taint the water. The only way to tell is to isolate them, switch to bypass (which they may already be switched to anyway) and unscrew the filter case (may need a big plastic hollow spanner that should have been supplied with the filters) and see what's in them. If one is a carbon filter it will be well out of date, so will have to be replaced (they have a life of around 6 months between replacements, mainly driven by their tendency to grow bugs inside the filter after that period of time). Once we know what's in there I can advise further, on what to fit by way of replacement cartridges.

I started out making the systems in our house like this, with custom microcontrollers looking after stuff. A year or so later, I realised that if I wasn't around, no one would be able to work out how on earth anything worked. I spent a lot of time converting everything back to standard off the shelf parts and drawing up complete manuals for everything that wasn't covered by a product manual. I still have the temptation to add more sophisticated and complex controls, but I rein it in. I'm gradually coming around to the old aircraft designers motto "Simplificate and add lightness"...............

It happens a lot, I recently heard of a company client rep, who happened to be a lady, being effectively ignored by a male client. Shocked me to hear it, even as a bloke, but then my father was hopeless at anything practical, and it was my mother that always did all the repairs and decorating, even overseeing building work on the house. I still clearly remember her giving me lessons on everything from how to prepare a surface for painting and applying paint though to how to wire a plug or replace a fuse in the fuse box. My father never even learned to drive, she did, and did all the car maintenance as well.

Yes, ours is much the same. I can get a very weak (barely 1 bar) signal outside, but nothing at all inside, even upstairs.. The answer may well be a signal booster, but there are two types, those like the Vodafone one that are legal, and a lot of Chinese made ones sold on a certain auction site amongst other places, that aren't legal. The illegal ones work well, and there's no offence in owning one, nor is anyone selling one committing an offence, but as soon as it's turned on then an offence has been committed under the Wireless Telegraphy Act (not that there is very much chance of ever being caught).

It is already a split like this, there is complete isolation between the extract from bathrooms, toilets, kitchen and utility rooms and the fresh air side that feeds all the other rooms.

As a word of caution regarding cordless vacuum cleaners, we made the mistake of buying a Vax cordless one some time ago. The suction is generally poor, the filters are a PITA to clean and it's generally nowhere near as good as the Dyson cordless ones we now have. It's a bit odd, as the very ancient Vax that started this thread, although very large, cumbersome, noisy and power hungry still works extremely well, and the new baby Vax that I bought on the recommendation of @dpmiller is also very good - massive suction, too much at times unless turned down, easy to empty and clean, compact, not too noisy and it doesn't seem to recirculate fine dust, either. Our experience with Dyson at first wasn't great; our original Dyson was purchased on the basis of the reviews at the time and frankly was a bit of overpriced rubbish, IMHO. By contrast, the Dyson cordless vacuums are fantastic little machines, the exact opposite of our experience with Vax machines.

I followed up that article with a bit of further online research. It seems that non-smoking related lung cancer is increasing at a faster rate than smoking related lung cancer, and the correlation between regions of poor air quality and the incidence of respiratory disease in those areas is generally pretty damning. Correlation does not mean causation, but as more and more research focusses in on the impact of our environment on health it seems likely that it's only a matter of time before a causal link is positively identified. As we get to understand the impact of various air pollutants, it seems to be pretty clear that air quality is not just about the level of known toxins, but may well have as much, or more, to do with the level of small particulates, those that are small enough to cross over the cell wall barrier and get into our blood stream. There is a fair bit of evidence that wood smoke is a significant contributor to air quality generally, and it has long been known that burning wood releases a cocktail of substances that are known to be harmful, and modern stoves have been designed to try and reduce the level of those known to be harmful substances. The snag is that particulates aren't included in any wood stove emissions test at all, the closest mention is that a stove should not emit visible smoke once lit and up to temperature. Unfortunately, the most harmful emissions may well turn out to be invisible particulates, making the current approval and test process pretty pointless. I'm concerned enough about this to have purchased some sensors, including a particulate sensor, with the intention of making an air quality measurement and logging system, just to see how our local air quality is impacted by things like nearby wood burning stoves, bonfires, vehicles driving down our lane etc. My hope is that I can learn what, if anything, has a local impact on air quality and then look at how best to mitigate that. I may well end up experimenting with various types of air filtration to add on to our MVHR, as it's less controversial to tackle this after it's been created than it is to tackle those who are creating the pollution. However, we have a fairly strong environmental lobby in the village, so passing hard data to them may well result in some action being considered to try and reduce local pollution. Luckily we're some distance from any main road or conurbation, so most of our air quality issues seem to stem from human activity in the village. Being in a deep valley doesn't help, either, as the smoke etc tends to just stay in the valley for hours.

Hard to fiddle with restrictor rings fitted inside the distribution plenum chambers though!

Even a verbal agreement to do work in return for a consideration (usually money, but coffee and biscuits are a consideration in law, I'm sure) is a valid contract under UK law. Writing it down and getting confirmation of acceptance makes it far easier to prove, but isn't a legal requirement. All you need to form a valid contract is an offer, the acceptance of that offer and the exchange of a consideration. The exchange of the consideration in this case is the work specified for the payment (including payment in kind like coffee and biscuits) agreed in the contract. The big problem is that it's rarely worth using the power of the law for contracts worth just a few thousand pounds, as the costs involved are usually way higher than the value of the contract.

I checked ours a few times after commissioning, over a period of around a year. Nothing changed, the flow readings for each room were the same as they had been. Opening and closing internal doors seems to have no measurable effect either, probably because the flow rates are pretty low - ours is set to change all the air in the house in a bit over two hours. I'm not convinced there is a problem to solve here at all, with the possible exception that auto-balancing the net inlet and exhaust flow rate to account for the wind (far and away the biggest cause of variation, I found) might be very slightly advantageous. I'd personally stick with the simplest arrangement possible, as I can't see there being any significant, perhaps not even any measurable, advantage in having anything more complex.