Jeremy Harris

Around £600, I think. It's OK for us, as our borehole RWL is usually only about 5m down from ground level, so the static head loss from the pump to the house is under 1 bar. Also, I need to restrict the pump flow rate to below about 1 to 15 litres/minute anyway, because of the fine sand problem. There are good reasons for putting them on that port. Firstly, it's what that port is designed for, and it gives an accurate reading of the buffered pressure being fed to the house, not the pressure that is impacted by the dynamic head loss in the pipe. Secondly, it gets the pressure switch higher up off the ground, making it both easier to adjust and probably keeping it cleaner/warmer (the spring ones have a habit of freezing in winter - can be a real nuisance). It stays warmer because it's higher up and because the volume of (relatively) warm water in the pressure vessel will tend to stop it freezing, Finally, it's just a lot easier to read and adjust a meter.switch that's nearer eye level, and a lot easier to just cast an eye over it to make sure it's in the right range any time you go into the water pump room. Our's was originally on the pump pipework, and was a right PITA to even look at, let alone adjust. It was also constantly wet on the outside from condensation, from being so near the ground, and I doubt that would do a lot for it's long-term reliability. Right now our pressure switch/gauge is fitted on the top of the tall ozone contact pressure vessel and is easy to adjust and read. I'd not be persuaded to ever move it back down to an unbuffered position low down, where the pipework comes in.

It varies, and depends on the pump and the type. The cheap positive displacement Polish Ibo pump I have in use at the moment varies from infinite pressure when dead headed (it stalls and burns out at around 25 bar, apparently), whereas a 1 hp nominal multi-stage centrifugal pump like our "proper" one, the Grundfos SQ1-65, varies from a maximum of around 9 bar at 0 to 4 litres/minute, dropping slowly to about 8.4 bar at 10 litres/min, 6 bar at 20 litres/min and 4 bar at 25 litres/min. When run at around 1 bar (open pipe at the well head, so just the ~1 bar head in the borehole) I found it delivered a bit over 30 litres/min. As a general rule, a 1hp pump will have a delivery curve around the same as the Grundfos figures above, as long as it's a centrifugal type. Positive displacement screw pumps, like the Ibo, aren't common, but do have very different characteristics. The true head has to be subtracted from these figures to get the delivery pressure. In this case there is ~1 bar head loss from the slope of the ground, plus whatever the head loss is from the RWL in the borehole, plus the dynamic head loss from the pipework that varies a lot with flow rate.

It depends to some extent on the design of the condensing heat recovery system in the boiler, but the figure of 56 deg C is straight from the manual, and it seems that this varies from around 55 to 56 deg C depending on which set of boiler instructions you loom at. In reality, this is almost certainly the temperature at which the onset of useful condensing flue gas heat recovery starts, so is probably variable. When I measured ours I found that gas consumption reduced as the return temperature was reduced below this temperature, but that by the time the return temperature was down to about 45 deg C there was not much to be gained from it being any lower - it seemed that the boiler design was limiting it and it was recovering all the heat is usefully could by that point. Visual colour make little difference to long wavelength IR emissivity. However, a shiny copper pipe will have an emissivity that is massively lower than any painted surface, typically around 0.01 versus around 0.85 to 0.9 for a painted surface, hence the big error when trying to measure the temperture of unpainted copper pipes with an IR thermometer.

If it were me, then I' not have the balcony, but compromise by moving the large door out and making it a Juliet balcony instead. You gain room in the bedroom, avoid the structural issues, reduce the cost and still have the ability to sit in what amounts to an almost open air area at that end of the room if you wish (and the weather allows).

I have a spare pressure switch if you want it, still in its box. I bought three of them, wired up two with plugs and sockets so I had one in use and a ready to use spare, but kept the third one unused in its box. Good plan to shift the existing pressure vessel from the lower pump house to the upper one, as it will have a far greater impact on reinforcing the flow rate if it's not driving water up that long pipe.

It always depends what use you're going to put them too. For odd sized drills that I'm only ever going to use once in a blue moon, I'll buy generic non-cobalt HSS drills, like these: http://www.axminster.co.uk/axminster-m2-ground-hss-drill-bits-ax22813 For sizes that I know will get used a lot I always buy a few cobalt HSS drills, either from Aximinster or more usually from Arc Euro Trade: http://www.arceurotrade.co.uk In general, the drills from Arc Eurotrade have been slightly better, but newer cobalt HSS drills from Axminster are pretty damned close. I never, ever buy sets of drills now. Every set I've ever bought has been poor value compared to only buying good quality drills of the sizes I actually need. The only exception to that is a set of Dormer jobber HSS bits that I bought around 25 years ago, which were all of pretty good quality. Every other set of drills I've ended up buying have been poor value, as I'm convinced that they cut the quality in order to get set prices down, probably because people in DIY sheds tend to buy on price, not quality.

I bet you're saving a fair bit of oil! We had our old gas combi temp turned down to a lower temperature than the shower thermostatic mixer was supposed to work at. All that happened was that we needed to turn the temperature up to near maximum on the shower to get a nice comfortable temperature. We ended up saving a fair bit of gas by doing this, as the boiler was always running in condensing mode. A 10 to 15% efficiency improvement may not sound much, but it does knock a fair bit off your fuel bill! The annoying thing was that the guys that fitted our boiler recommended that we run it at much higher temperatures - not sure why, but they left it with the heating set to 75 deg C and the hot water set to 65 deg C, both a lot hotter than needed and those temperatures meant the thing was never condensing in heating mode at all.

That is great news, and supports many of the incidental tales people tell about an airtight house and MVHR improving air quality. It should really be close to the top when it comes to reasons to build to a decent airtightness standard and then fit MVHR, given the increasing number of people who are commenting on the improved air quality after doing this.

Just NEVER fit any valve between the pump and the pressure switch port. Sometimes people fit the pressure switch to the port on the top of the pressure vessel (the tapping direct into the top of the bladder, not the air precharge Schrader valve), as often they are either 1/2" BSPF, or 1/4" BSPF, making it a doddle to screw in the pressure switch/gauge directly at eye level, where it's easier to read. Doing this means that there must be no valve between the pump and the pressure vessel at all, or else there is a risk that someone will shut it, leave the power on, lower the pressure in the pressure vessel and so run the pump dead-headed. Most pumps will quickly overheat and burn out if dead-headed, unless they are one of the ones with integral protection, like the Grundfos series, with internal motor controllers.

Some steel work should sort it, but that then creates another problem - how do you mitigate the potential thermal bridging where the steel goes? The steel would also have to be specially fabricated as a sort of truncated A shape, to rest on the walls either side and support the brickwork across the set back opening. In terms of reducing the thermal bridge problem, and potentially the need to fire protect the steel, I wonder if the steel could be designed as an architectural feature on the open side, with a plate to support the brickwork above?

I have two different sets of Makita tools. One old 14.4 V drill/driver (that I keep mainly because it has a hammer drill mode, and I have four batteries that fit that, although two are the originals and are now on their last legs, so don't hold their charge for long. The rest (drill, circular saw, lawn mower, impact driver) are all newer 18 V lithium tools and I now have seven battery packs for them, with one old one that is potentially iffy, in that it occasionally throws a charging fault, so needs to be bodge charged when this happens to avoid it doing the Makita self-destruct thing after three failed charging attempts (three failed charge attempts with any Makita 18 V pack permanently bricks the pack by blowing the chip inside, to stop it being used). That's just about enough if I'm reasonably well disciplined about keeping them charged. If I didn't have the lawn mower (which uses two packs in series) then I could probably get away with 5 packs. The Makita packs charge pretty quickly, too, so it's not a major hassle if I don't have a spare charged pack, I usually just nick a pack from a tool I'm not using to get the job done whilst the flat pack gets charged.

Yoo may well find that a 300 litre vessel is big enough, but a bigger one allows for a larger volume of back up water if there's a power cut. In our case we have over 300 litres of water stored at around 3 bar or so, enough for a couple of showers plus a few toilet flushes, hand washes etc, so we could manage for a time during a power cut. Having a small generator to run the pump might be an idea if you tend to get long power cuts, it doesn't need to be massive, something around 2 kW output should be able to handle the pump start up load OK. If you have the pressure switch fitted with connectors, as mentioned above, it would be pretty easy to just make up a similar lead from a generator to swap over and provide power to the pump system during a long power cut. You wouldn't need to run the generator all the time, just run it to charge up the pressure vessel then turn it off and don't start it again until the pressure drops at the house.

I fitted 300 litre ones for the same reason, a 500 litre one wouldn't fit through the door! Try a single 300 litre, I only used two because my sand filter needs at least 25 litres per minute during backwash every few days, and I couldn't maintain that for the 8 minutes required with just one 300 litre vessel. The are easy enough to plumb in, just a tee fitting on the thread on the bottom, sealed with PTFE tape on the threads, and the inlet and outlet pipe fitted either side. Pick the right sort of tee fitting for your pipework - for example if using 25mm MDPE then use a tee with the right thread (usually 1" BSPF) to fit the pressure vessel and 25mm MDPE fittings either side. Use plenty of PTFE tape on the threads on the vessel, a dozen or so wraps will usually do. The pump does all the work, the pressure vessel only stops the pump having to short cycle, nothing more. In you case there is a significant advantage in having the pressure vessel at the higher pump house, as it significantly reinforces the instant flow at the house. The pump will happily just run the water up to the upper pump house. There's no merit in having any other pressure vessel at the lower pump house, it would give no benefit and would just be a nuisance when servicing, as there would be more water to drain down. The filters must, for safety reasons, be fitted after pump pressure switch, as otherwise a blocked filter could overload the pump. You could keep the filters at the lower pump house, after the pressure switch, but you might well then get nuisance short cycling as the filters became clogged, so not a great idea. Better to relocate them to the upper pump house, after the pressure vessel. Fit shut off valves either side of the filters and a drain cock in the pipe connecting to the filters, so you can just isolate the filters, drain the pressure off via the drain cock and change them without having to drain the whole system down.

It's changing the geometry that helps. At the centre of a wall there is only one 2D heat loss path - outwards. At the point of a corner there are two heat loss paths, one out through either wall. The result is that corners can have a greater heat loss because of their geometry, hence the term geometric thermal bridge. It's one reason, along with decreased local airflow, why black mould more often grows in internal corners, as they are often colder and hence tend to attract more condensation.

Mitreing the corner reduces a geometric thermal bridge?

Worth noting that there is only one significant difference (apart from the fees and the individuals you will deal with) between LABC and a private building controls company. LABC have enforcement rights against failure to comply with the regs, private building control companies don't, so have to pass recommendations for enforcement action for non-compliance on to their local LABC. I'm not sure that this makes a significant difference, I think the biggest variable is the luck of the draw as to who you get as your BCO and inspector. We hit gold with both from our LABC, but equally I know that our LABC has one or two real sods who would be pretty tough to deal with. I suspect this is the same with a building control organisations and I'm not sure how you can reliably find ones that are easy to work with, unfortunately.

I agree 100%. We have two of them, one upstairs one downstairs and they are brilliant, and even though they were expensive they were still less than half the price of a built in vacuum system and very much easier to use. I use the small mains powered Vax for "rough" work, where it's greater dust capacity is useful, but with mainly hard flooring and rugs the cordless ones are just brilliant. However, I have to put a word in for the vacuum that kicked this thread off, the Vax 121, of 1991 vintage. It was the first new vacuum cleaner we bought after we got married (we'd inherited an old hoover that we used until it died), and we bought it because we had bought an old Victorian stone cottage that needed a lot of work. It went on to deal with two more stone cottage renovations, then got relegated to my workshop, where it cleaned up after four boat builds, a car build and two aeroplane builds. It was still going strong after that and dealt with cleaning up after our house build, until it developed what I thought was a terminal-sounding noise from the motor. That turned out to be just a nut that had come off the switch and was rattling around, so a good strip and clean, a set of new filters and that 36 year old vacuum cleaner is still working as well as it did when we bought it. I used it just before Christmas to wash all carpets in the old house, ready for sale, and it did a cracking job. It's now back in my workshop, and I strongly suspect it will outlive me..................

That fits well with my experience. Every time I cleaned ours, I found that it wasn't so much the filters being clogged that were the problem, it was the very fine dust stuck to all the narrow passages, which are a pain to clean out. When the motor finally burned out on it, I stripped it and found that the centrifugal impeller was pretty much clogged up with fine dust that was almost bonded on to the surfaces.

The gases problem is easily fixed, lay a radon barrier on the ground. If it's good enough to keep radon out of the void it will be good enough to keep any other gas out. Don't run any gas pipes through that void either. In terms of movement/shrinkage, the movement is small enough for soft EPS to take up. The quick way to fill the void would be to blow in bonded EPS beads, which would be slightly permeable so would still allow pressure to equalise and the under croft to be vapour permeable.

I can say that the small Vax that was kindly recommended by @dpmiller works very well, and is nice and light, too . Even though I fixed our old Vax 121 that started this thread, I prefer the new one, as it's so light and easy to use, and has loads more suction than our old Dyson had most of the time (the Dyson was fine just after half an hour of cleaning it all out inside and cleaning the filters, but performance dropped off quickly as it got coated with fine dust internally, I found)..

The inner harbour area is reasonably sheltered, so my guess is that a bit of that hut hit the window, perhaps down near the bottom, and knocked it out.

I think that the ventilation under beam and block is just a lack of thought about the real situation, and sticking to the old dogma that a suspended floor must always be ventilated underneath. It's not logical when there are no materials involved that are going to be affected by damp, but the building industry in general seems a bit conservative (with a small "c") and reluctant to change things they have been doing for years. If it were me, then I'd probably just pump the void full of bonded EPS beads afterwards and then partially seal up behind all the vents with some permeable fabric, to allow the pressure to equalise but resist the wind from blowing through.

That window looks like it was just secured with foam! There's no evidence of proper fixings that I can see.

Things are changing with the introduction of Neighbourhood Plans, though. Our Parish Council has one, and it was drawn up by them, with wide consultation with everyone in the parish, including several public meetings where options were discussed. This plan identifies areas that may be developed, perhaps with some agreed constraints and areas that cannot be developed. As such, it give the Parish Council a heck of a lot more authority, as the Neighbourhood Plan forms a part of the local planning policy, the only difference is that it was the parish itself that wrote it, not the local authority (in fact the LA had very little to do with it, things like SSSIs and the EA flood risk areas were of greater significance). Gradually more and more parish councils will have Neighbourhood Plans, it's a part of the process to devolve decision making down to local level. Our new parish council has applied for funding to write theirs, and I suspect I may well end up getting involved in the process again.

How hard would it be to come up with a gadget to neatly grind out shadow gaps after plastering, I wonder? The trick would be finding a tool that would cut neatly, leaving a very tidy edge, but I bet it would be a winner if you could make it work. The time saving could be massive, and significantly reduce the cost, and allow more adventurous use of gaps as design features.