Jeremy Harris

Looks interesting, but doesn't separately bin the PM2.5s and PM10s, it just allows operation as either a PM2.5 counter or and PM10 counter, not both at the same time. I've found a couple of others, including one that seems to have four bins, 0.1µ to 2.5µ, 2.5µ to 5µ, 5µ to 10µ and over 10µ as far as I can tell. I'm not sure if there's any merit in making measurements that fine, as the standard seems to be to go from around 0.1µ to 2.5µ in the PM2.5 bin and put anything from 2.5µ to 10µ in the PM10 bin. I need to do a bit more reading up on the comparative methods of measurement used for simulating the standard BAM method ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_attenuation_monitoring).

LABC ARE the local council, in essence the initials stand for Local Authority Building Control! Local councils do not have any separate BCOs any more, the whole building control function was hived off to LABC years ago, AFAIK, although LABC is a part of, and will usually work out of the same buildings as, the local council, as a part of the Local authority. IIRC, I think our LABC fees were cheaper than @HerbJs, I think we paid around £550 or thereabouts, for a full plans submission plus inspections. We didn't bother with a warranty, as we're not going to sell, and felt that if we were forced to sell then a one-off indemnity insurance premium may well not be any more expensive, if it turned out that one was needed. We've bought fairly new houses (less than ten years old) without a warranty in the past without any problems.

I'm still digging out information. I've found a fairly specific NO2 sensor, that had a bi of hydrogen sensitivity, but should be OK for outside NO2 measurements: https://sgx.cdistore.com/datasheets/sgx/1107-Datasheet-MiCS-2714.pdf The bare sensor NO2 is around $9, so pretty cheap, I just need to find a source to buy one or two, preferably from a supplier that sells it at a reasonable price already on a breakout board. Using sensors like this together with any cheap flavour of microcomputer (I tend to use PICs, but you could splash out and use a Raspberry Pi) looks to be very easy indeed. It needs a real time clock, and I'm coming around to the idea that a single unit that includes a particulate sensor, NO2 sensor, perhaps a CO2 sensor, a relative humidity sensor and a temperature sensor, together with a small GPS module to provide time and position data for each sample, might be the best way to go. Adding a display, as I did on the temperature/humidity/CO2 air quality logger that a few here have borrowed, might be useful, too, as it's handy to see real time data as well as just recording it for later analysis.

Unfortunately, that sensor is very non-specific, and gives an output when it senses NH3, CO2, NO2, benzene, smoke or several other substances, with no way of differentiating between any of them. I already have some NDIR CO2 sensors, so can specifically measure CO2 levels, what I'm hunting around for is a specific NO2 sensor, that doesn't respond to anything but NO2. Given that the sensors aren't that expensive, then it should be easy enough to log data from inside and outside. I like the idea of driving around with one, logging GPS position and time along with the particulate data. I think you'd probably get a pretty interesting data set after a while. There were soem complaints about the granularity of data on the BBC pollution check tool : http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-42566393 most probably because I think they averaged post code areas, so localised pollution hot spot data was diluted a fair bit. I'm really curious to see what our "rural" air quality is like, particularly when there are localised "smoke events" such as wood burning stoves running, or even just the bus sat running at the bus stop for ten minutes, next to the school.

With the recent interest in air quality hitting the news, plus the TV programme earlier this week on an experiment to reduce the particulates and NOx for one day in the Kings Heath area of Birmingham. (it's still here on iPlayer: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b09m2djj/fighting-for-air ) I've decided to see if there's a way to make an affordable air quality monitor/data logger that I can fit outside and see what the air quality is like around here, and what impact things like diesel cars driving past, wood burning stoves, weather conditions etc have on it, from day to day. What's interesting is that there are now some pretty affordable particulate monitoring sensors available, certainly good enough for hobby use. Looking around I've found two or three for around £15 to £25 each, that output serial data in the form of a count of each size of particle, over a time bin. From what I've read so far, it looks pretty easy to just sample the air periodically and plot the concentration of particulates within the size bins over time. As an example of the sensors available, here's a link to one that currently sells on Ebay for less than £17 delivered: http://www.aqmd.gov/docs/default-source/aq-spec/resources-page/plantower-pms5003-manual_v2-3.pdf?sfvrsn=2 Not sure when I'll get the time to build and test a unit, but it would be interesting, both to see how the air quality changes in a fixed location, and, perhaps, to fit one to the car so that I can correlate air quality with GPS position and time as I drive around. I''m off now to see if I can find some equally affordable NOx sensors.

I've found the same with the Screwfix ones, and interestingly they don't run hot, either, so I strongly suspect that they do not have a driver in the base. I swapped one over recently and the base was pretty cool, which suggests that they may well use a long series chain of LEDs with a capacitive dropper. I have a few spare and may well take one apart just out of curiosity.

The reason they won't guarantee them in a fire rated downlighter is heat build up, I suspect. I think it's now pretty clear that heat at the base of the lamp, where the driver circuit is (literally) squeezed in, is a major cause of early failure. My advice would be to not use GU10 230 VAC downlighters, but use MR16 12 VDC ones and then run them from a 12 VDC supply. Not only will the efficiency be better, but there will be little heat in the lamps and the reliability when used in fire rated downlighters may well be no different to that when used in any other fitting. MR16 and GU10 share the same diameter of lamp at the front, so it may well be possible to convert a GU10 fitting to an MR16 fitting, just by changing the internal lamp fitting and adding a 12 VDC power supply to run them all. The wiring will be fine, usually, as unless you're running dozens of the things the voltage drop on the cable will be modest.

There's a thread somewhere where I looked at this, might be on the GBF, as it was ages ago. I conducted several "post mortems" on blown LEDs and in every single case the LED itself was fine, it was the driver circuit in the base that had failed, always through obvious overheating. The smaller the lamp, the greater the failure rate for mains powered LEDs. What I have found is that 12 V LEDs are very reliable. I've had no failures at all running them on proper DC supplies, and we have loads of them. I did have a lot of early failures when using 12 V LED downlights, and traced the cause of this to the bridge rectifier in the 12 V MR16 failing. Every single failure was a bridge rectifier failure. After a bit of investigation, I discovered than the small 12 V "transformers" for downlighters had an output that was 12 VAC at around 20 kHz. The MR16 12 V downlighter design was originally intended to run on 12 VAC at mains frequency, 50 Hz. What was happening was that at 20 kHz the bridge rectifiers in the LEDs were just too slow, as they did not use fast recovery diodes. The result was overheating and failure. Replacing the downlighter "transformers" with proper 12 VDC supplies completely cured the problem and resulted in all the MR16 downlighter LEDs running a great deal cooler, too. Almost all the heat was coming from diode losses in the small bridge rectifiers, that were really struggling to work at the 20 kHz coming out from the standard miniature downlighter "transformers". I should add that these small "transformers" are absolutely fine with 12 VAC tungsten MR16 bulbs, the problem was purely with LEDs. One tip is to see if any LEDs are getting warm and where the heat is coming from. If the LED base is getting hot, then you can expect the LED to fail sooner or later when the driver burns out. There are a LOT of fake marked, far-Eastern made, 230 VAC LEDs around that are not approved to any acceptable safety standard and it's really hard to tell which are the decent ones and which are not. It seems even some of the big name brands have been caught with fake components, so even the name is no sure-fire guarantee that the lamps are approved and will be reliable. Some types of 230 VAC lamps are inherently more reliable by design. For example, the ones that have what look like fake filaments use a series string of LEDs that operate at high voltage, so they often just have a simple rectifier and capacitive voltage dropper in the base to limit the current. These tend to run cool, as they have no dodgy switched mode driver squeezed into the base. There are also some conventional size 230 VAC lamps around that use long chains of LEDs in series behind a diffuser and similarly they have no switched mode driver in the base and tend to run cooler and may well be more reliable.

The primary criticism of the BS1363 plug is size. It's arguably too big and an awkward shape, and that's the primary reason manufacturers don't like it. It isn't as easy to integrate into small devices as some other designs, plus it's a "one size fits all" design, we no longer have a range of different connector sizes, in terms of sockets in our houses, so any appliance has to be able to accommodate the bulk of a BS1363 plug, or be provided with a bulky (fused) adapter. For double insulated low power appliances this is a particular issue. However, against that, having an internal fuse to protect the appliance lead is an exceptionally good feature, as is having a longer earth pin that not only ensure that the PE is the last connection to break when the cable is tugged hard, but also operates the safety shutters in the socket that close off easy access to the line and neutral connectors. The proposed EU alternative, the Shuko, has few of these features. There is no fuse to protect the appliance lead, but worst of all, the plug can be inserted either way around in the socket, swapping the line and neutral connections over. To add to the problem there are also a lot of "nearly Schuko" plugs that will fit into a Shuko socket and offer far less protection, including some that don't connect to the PE at all and some whereby the PE is connected after the line and neutral (and hence disconnected before the line and neutral when partially removed). There are also no protective shutters on the Shuko, and often outlets are not switched, either, so overall it's a significantly less safe system, IMHO.

I wholeheartedly agree!

Not quite. There were/are two different approaches. 1. The process in the UK used to be that politicians would come up with a policy, most usually having been advised by the Chief Scientific Advisors (CSA) in each relevant department and coordinated through the Government's one CSA. Frequently there were external political drivers forcing this, like climate change, oil prices, coal prices etc. The policy would then be handed to the relevant body within the responsible department to be turned into legislation. Within the UK (pre-EU harmonisation) most often the technical aspects would be put together on the basis of a mix of sound scientific data plus the art of the possible, in terms of cost impact, to government, the general public and industry (this was done via a number of impact statements that were collated from the initial proposals). The draft regulation would then be handed back to government to go through the process of being turned into a Statutory Instrument, that could be enacted. This process inevitably involved lobbying of MP and Ministers by pressure groups and industry, and there would always be amendments made during the two reading stages, for the technical people to check and comment on before the SI became law. In general, the process was policy-led, and that policy was usually from the relevant CSA, although inevitably it would be watered down a bit if there was strong opposition. 2. The process in the EU is different. It starts in a similar way, in that a policy is created on the basis of some political, scientific or technical driver, but most often because there was a strong political driver to change something, more often than not associated with harmonisation and protection of the EU closed internal market. Instead of the technical committees being dominated by relatively impartial government technical staff, they were dominated by members from industry, so every single EU Directive is very largely driven by the negotiated wishes of industry in terms of how best to come close to meeting the political policy they've been asked to address. The result is legislation that is often designed to create or maintain jobs within the EU, and make it harder for any non-EU state to trade with the EU without complying with EU standards. At first things were worse than this, in that the EU required that only EU-based Notified Bodies could perform the required test and accreditation work, but that was relaxed under international pressure, so we now have the situation where the majority of some marked goods are in fact fake, having never been tested or assessed at all. The CE mark is arguably the most faked compliance mark in the world. The UK has very little control over EU technical standards, as it is just one of 28 states that contribute to them. In some areas we can put our foot down, for example the debacle over BS1363, where we were allowed a derogation on the basis that the BS1363 plug and socket is demonstrably safer than the proposed alternative, the Schuko, as it provides fused protection for the appliance cord and has a demonstrably good safety record. Our argument was that forcing the UK to adopt the Shuko plug and socket system would degrade electrical safety in the UK, as well as incur an unacceptably high cost to consumers to change tens of millions of connectors across the country. The main difference between the old UK way of doing things and the newer EU way of doing them, is that the UK system used to be very much evidence-based. If the technical and scientific evidence supported a policy, then that evidence was used to formulate regulations designed to ensure compliance with it In the EU it is significantly different. It starts out with the technical and scientific evidence to support a policy, but industry then shapes the regulation so that it can reduce its costs of compliance, and perhaps not even achieve the required policy outcome. We are starting to see examples of this now in several areas, including building materials, where the UK approvals process has slipped very much into the way the EU works; self-assessment by the manufacturer with no independent verification of compliance unless there is a challenge by another manufacturer. This is not something that could have happened in the UK, back when the BSI controlled standards and compliance testing.

Possibly............... For a time I was a Notified Body under the EMC Directive, and ran some EMC measurement labs in Portsmouth in the late 1990's. I sat on the EMC Directive TC as the UK head of Type Approval for Maritime Radar, Radio and Nav Aids.

I've been involved in both BS and EU regulation, and the approaches were very different. The BS starting point was a technical compliance process, and didn't usually involve significant input from the manufacturers, other than as consultees, a bit like planning. The EU process seemed to me to be dominated by commercial interests. I sat on both the LV Directive and EMC Directive technical committees, and it was blindingly obvious that commercial prerogatives dominated over technical compliance. As a national technical rep, I had very little input into the process, it was clearly dominated by the most powerful commercial entity present. The sole exception that I can recall was the BS1363 fused plug and shuttered safety socket. The BS lobbied hard that the UK should not be forced to degrade it's safety standards just because Germany was pushing for everyone to accept the Schuco plus and socket standard. Luckily we won that derogation, thanks to a bit of support from RoI, who use the same standard.

And people wonder WHY some of us lost our patience with the way EU regulations have been formulated over the years........................ They start out with a laudable aim, to reduce energy use, but by the time the legislation has passed multiple times through the technical committee the original objective gets lost and replaced with a load of restrictive crap that will do little to reduce energy use. It's a bit like the EU regulations on electric bicycles. They set out, quite sensibly, to restrict the power and performance of these vehicles that did not require a driving licence, insurance, taxation etc. They then went through a process to develop a test method, and instead of just using the tried and tested UK British Standard that had worked well for years by doing a simple dynamometer test on the motor, they made up their own test. The result was that you can have a perfectly legal EU electric bicycle that massively exceeds the motor power output in the regulations. Why? Because the test is only a timed acceleration test over a set distance, and there is no stipulation on the weight of the test bicycle. This means you can get a pass with a very heavy person riding the bike, get the required approval, then sell an electric bike that has far more motor power than the regulations allow, and it's all OK................. PS: Please don't take this as an anti-EU rant - it is solely a rant about the very poor way some regulations are framed, nothing more.

If you can find a way to source bioethanol fuel (legally) from a country where there is no requirement to add noxious compounds to it to stop people drinking it then there will be zero smell or fumes from it at all. If you want to test this out (very expensively!) then distil vodka at a distillation vapour temperature of 78 deg C (no higher, or water will go over as well). Ideally use a two stage still, with a reflux column below the main vapour outlet and hold the vapour outlet as close to 78 deg C as you can. That way the entire ethanol content will distil out, leaving just water behind. This is completely legal, as duty will have been paid on the vodka. Try this in the stove and you will find that the fuel has practically no smell at all (a bit like vodka, which is really just diluted bioethanol, in a ratio of about 40% ethanol, 60% water, by volume, usually). There will be no fumes at all at any stage of the combustion process, either, all that will be released is water and CO2. It's a great shame we son't have more enlightened laws, like those in New Zealand, where home production of distilled bioethanol is completely legal. The stuff is so very easy to make, and can use waste fermentable material (essentially anything that has sugars in it) so there's no practical problems at all with homebrew bioethanol, any more than there is with home brew diesel production (which is perfectly legal, a friend down the road runs his Landrover on it, using waste vegetable oil he collects from the local chippy and Chinese restaurants). Edited to add: I seem to remember that you can buy litre bottles of pure ethanol from French supermarkets and DIY stores, sold as a cleaning solvent - I recall bringing some back from a holiday years ago, so that might be the way to get odourless fuel.

Great news! Much celebration tonight then.............

Not hard to make yourself, plus you can use pretty much anything that will ferment as the base for it. The only tricky bit is getting the distillation right, so that only the ethanol is drawn off. Even that's not hard, you just have to know a few tricks to make sure you get it right. The longest part is the legal bit, the fermentation. The distillation doesn't take long if you only make small volumes at a time. As I understand it, the law is quite specific about what you can actually be arrested for, and what can be confiscated if you are. I believe that this is one reason for the recent boom in selling distilled water makers on ebay and the like...............

Whether you get any smell or not depends on the ethanol additives. We have a UK problem with ethanol, in that it cannot be sold without either attracting the same duty as alcoholic drinks or by being "denatured" with chemicals that make it taste horrible, to dissuade people from drinking it. This is undoubtedly where any smell comes from, because pure ethanol doesn't smell at all when it burns, it just gives off CO2 and water, nothing else. I could suggest a very easy way around this, using the cheapest form of homebrew possible, plus an easy DIY distillation method that would give very pure ethanol, but that would be illegal..................... However, I know EXACTLY how I'd get fuel if I had a biofuel stove, and it wouldn't involve buying the stuff, with chemicals added to it.......................

Not easy to do, I think. You need to allow for differential thermal expansion/contraction, which is why it's more usual to put brick slips on to a solid substrate (a cement board of some type) that has the same sort of coefficient of thermal expansion as the slips. This way there can be slight movement between the cement board carrying the slips and the EPS, without causing cracks to appear. It might be possible to render on to a mesh mechanically fixed to the EPS, then fix the slips to that. Whether that's more cost effective or not I'm not sure.

The only need for a change to your planning approval, AFAICS, is if it includes an approved landscape plan, with details as to exactly how you are going to landscape the garden. The latter is really only important as far as the VAT reclaim goes, as you can only reclaim VAT for garden landscaping if it is part of an approved landscape plan in your planning approval. I would think that even if this was in your planning approval it would only be a non-material amendment, anyway, so shouldn't be any real hassle to get changed. Worth getting the planners to include the landscaping as a planning condition usually with a garden like this, as getting the VAT back is very useful on the relatively high cost of this type of work!

Yes, there should be a backnut and seal with that, as it looks very like the one I fitted a while ago.

Not a bad idea, as not only do I know the original registration, but I still have the new plates with it on in the garage!

I think it may come down to that, if I can get it to work, as it's taking forever to clear out with me driving 20 miles each way to the tip. The Prius is pretty much as big inside as an estate, I can easily get 3m long stuff in there and it's big enough to take washing-machine sized loads in the back, with lots of room to spare. The other problem is that if I turn up three times at the local recycling centre in a hire car, there's a very good chance they will ban that too. That's how I came to be banned, I made three trips in fairly quick succession (over about three or four days) and was immediately classed as "commercial user". Sadly that's not much of a saving, as the recycling centre I can use is just the other side of where the new house is, so I may as well drive the few miles extra and dump it there. A standard skip would cost £260 plus VAT, too!

Looks like our spare room in our old house. I'm trying to clear it out as the house is going on the market but can't get enough access to get in there to get some of the stuff out. I don't have space for a skip, plus my number plate is still banned from the local recycling place, and I can't hire a van as the recycling place doesn't allow vans in now, either. Right now, the only way to shift stuff is to fill my car and drive to the next county to their recycling centre, around 20 miles each way. And they wonder why fly tipping is on the increase................

No problems. I had a tough time getting our borehole drilled and working, and in the process I ended up having spend the best part of a year trying to learn about everything from a bit of geology to the chemistry and practicalities of water treatment, as there seems to be a dearth of expertise on this in the UK generally, and specifically locally to me. Luckily a couple of very helpful American guys helped me a lot by email, having contacted them via a US forum that had a lot of useful info on wells and boreholes. If you ever have some spare time and want to read about our tales of woe about water, then these blog links may make you laugh (or weep........): http://www.mayfly.eu/2013/08/part-eleven-fracking-only-kidding/ http://www.mayfly.eu/2013/08/part-twelve-minor-disaster-strikes/ http://www.mayfly.eu/2013/09/part-fourteen-things-can-only-get-better/ http://www.mayfly.eu/2015/08/part-thirty-seven-a-long-tale-about-water-and-life/ http://www.mayfly.eu/2016/07/part-forty-two-water-treatment/