Jeremy Harris

Just had a look at mine and they do have light coloured varnished ply tops, not hardwood as I originally thought. Hard to tell under all the scars and paint splashes, though.............

FWIW, I discovered a lifted neutral a couple of weeks ago, completely by accident. We fitted a couple of fused switched connector units in the bedrooms, in case we ever wanted to add some small wall heaters. It's clear that we don't, and I had a need for a switched FCU, and happened to have a spare unswitched FCU. So, I decided to just swap them over. When I removed the switched FCU faceplate the neutral fell out.......... This was on the upstairs ring final, and I know that it had tested out OK when installed, I can only assume that the wire wasn't clamped properly and came out as I removed the plate. Needless to say the next few hours were spent taking off faceplates and making sure all the the screws and wires were tight on every single fitting (they were - this must have been a one-off).

I agree about the argument being primarily one about what the charges should be, and my concern at the moment is that we don't have a very effective mechanism in place to collect the revenue needed to fund the required infrastructure costs. If shops were to charge an access fee at the door, which is exactly what gas and electricity companies do, in effect, then I bet a fair few people would be up in arms at the idea. Yet, in principle, that's an equally viable way for a shop to recover it's infrastructure costs. I would rather the regulator just removed the concept of standing charges altogether, as they are just a hang over from pre-privatisation days. It's notable that the practically the only things with standing charges, gas, electricity and telephone connections, and all were once nationalised industries............

This is what a Willis heater looks like: It's just an immersion heater set into a copper tube with an inlet at the bottom and an outlet at the top. They are mounted vertically and in their original application, in Ireland, mainly, they were added to the side of an existing hot water cylinder. They are pretty cheap, around £35.

We've had the situation once where all the TRVs were closed, and the towel rail valve was shut off, when we'd been away for a few days. I turned the heating system back on when we came home, but forgot to go around opening all the TRVs and the towel rail (it wasn't me that had closed them, I didn't even know they were closed - someone who thought it was a good idea as we were going away closed them all without telling me..............). All that happened was that the bypass opened and the boiler shut down again, as normal, a minute or two later, because it had reached the set flow temperature very quickly. It then just sat for the duration of the anti-short cycle delay before firing up again and shutting off again. It didn't flag any faults, or give any indication that there was a problem, the only give away was that the pump over-run stayed on a long time, plus if you opened the front and entered the first level diagnostics you could watch it fire up, shut down, go to pump over-run then enter the anti short cycle delay.

The reality is that the additional usage from electric vehicle charging isn't massive for most home charger installations. Home charging is almost always just the daily commute charge, which for most people might be between 5 and 10 kWh for 5 or 6 days a week. People running E7 systems probably use much the same sort of energy, per day, more in winter if they still have storage heaters, so they should pay a similar high standing rate. There's also the issue of people like me, who do the majority of their EV charging from self-generated energy. I can't see why I should have to pay a higher standing charge for energy that I generate from my own "network" investment. Getting rid of the fixed charge and just adding it to the unit price makes it much simpler, and, in my view, fairer. Those with a high demand will pay more, and contribute more to the infrastructure needed to support that high demand, than low demand users.

Rather than 2 x 200 litres of hot water, what about salvaging a few old storage heaters and adding a heat exchanger? The bricks in storage heater have a higher heat capacity than water, I think, they already have heating elements in grooves in them and it would be relatively easy to add extra insulation plus a simple loop of pipe to extract relatively low temperature water from them, I think. I've mentioned this before, but a friend who converted the old Methodist chapel at Sithney many years ago, built an insulated room in the centre of the building, filled it with big rocks he collected from the beach and ran old storage heater elements through them. He built a wind generator and that dumped all it's energy into the heating elements. Every room had a closable grille that led to the heat store, so could be heated as required by just opening the grill and turning on a low power fan. By complete coincidence, my great grandfather had been the minister at that chapel in the 1890's, and my great aunt Muriel was born in Sithney and baptised in that chapel.

I used a roof ladder hooked over the ridge, safety rope attached to a belay on the other side of the house and both a sit and chest harness, with both harnesses hooked to the safety rope with my old SRT ascenders. 45 deg is a steep roof to walk up without safety provision, in my view, especially when covered with slates.

I found that stud wall sound insulation was best fitted as the guys were boarding up. If one side of a wall is boarded, it makes it a lot easier to fit the insulation from the other side. Part of this is because the gap in a stud wall is typically 89mm, and the insulation is 100mm thick, so it tends to be easier to just push it hard back to one surface then let it expand out a bit. I went around with the plasterboard guys, waiting for them to finish boarding one side, then I'd fit the acoustic rockwool.

Funny you should post this, Terry, as several times over the past few weeks I've been thinking of the simplicity and low capital cost of using a Willis Heater. I've even been tempted to dismantle the base at the front of the airing cupboard to see if there is room in there to fit one, primarily as a back up at this stage, but with thoughts that I could could divert excess PV to it, once the Sunamp PV is charged. Days like today, when it was pretty clear and cold, would be good days to just stick some extra heat into the buffer tank, even though the house was sitting at around 21.5 deg C and the heating hasn't been on for a few days now. I did expect the heating to have been on this morning, as it was sub-zero last night, but the house still seems to have plenty of stored heat in reserve, and with the early morning sunshine there was enough solar gain to warm the house.

I used standard towel rails (well, not quite standard, as I managed to find some very wide ones, that will easily take two bath towels side by side) and fitted low power electric elements. It was pretty easy to just fit two matching right angle "pipe" connections at the base and run the cable inside one of them. The towel rails are filled with inhibited car antifreeze, with a tiny expansion gap. If you don't want the risk of trusting antifreeze to be suitably corrosion inhibited, then the cheap option is to use a mixture of 60% monoethylene glycol, 1% sodium nitrite and 39% water. That is a better corrosion inhibiting mix than any of the commercial products, and will last decades in a sealed towel rail.

Must have been a new'ish workmate, as both mine have some sort of light coloured hardwood tops, not MDF.

I used two very ancient Workmates, of unknown vintage, but they date from before we got married, so are well over 30 years old. Sometimes they were used as trestles, but most of the time I had the mitre saw fitted to one of the them, with a couple of cheap Ebay folding roller supports for holding long stuff. I made up a bit of ply with a bit of studwork screwed underneath, with the mitre saw screwed down to the ply and the bit of studwork gripped in the workmate. This worked very well, and meant when I needed to use both workmates as trestles I could just unclamp the mitre saw.

If you want a laugh, look at the tariff Ovo have "especially for electric vehicle owners". The standing charge is an absolutely massive 28p/day, and the unit charge is around 14p/ kWh

As a useful tip to help prevent phantom lamp glowing when off with some low power lights, make sure that the earth conductors are connected at one end, even if the light fitting itself is double insulated and does not require an earth. Having the earth conductor in the cable actually earthed helps to remove induced current in circuits that are turned off, and can stop the phantom glow that some LEDs, in particular, are prone to.

There are two main issues with LEDs. The first is the fact that many of the cheap (and not so cheap) constant current drivers don't drive the LED with DC, but with pulsed DC, so the damned things flicker. Because LEDs can turn on and off very quickly (in the 100s of ns range) this flicker can appear as a subtle strobe effect, even if it's not normally visible. The way I found I could see it was if my eyes moved quickly, where the flicker was apparent. I would guess that this may have some subtle effect on the way we perceive the light. Certainly LEDs run on clean DC don't have this effect, and it was noticeable that when I changed all ours to pure DC drive the light quality seemed to improve; it just felt more comfortable somehow. The other problem is that the core emitter in the LED is a single light wavelength, and that it converted to an approximation of white using wavelength conversion phosphors, in much the same way that the fixed wavelength in a fluorescent light uses phosphors inside the glass to convert the mainly UV from the discharge to visible "white" light. Changing the phosphor composition changes the light wavelength range, but it's not very even and will have peaks at certain emission wavelengths. This is unlike filtered sunlight, that tends to have a far more even light wavelength spectrum. LEDs driven from a DC source and fitted with a diffuser that will help to even out the spectrum should be able to get pretty close to filament lights, in terms of light quality, I think.

I was thinking about this last night, and I believe this is a problem only because of the the way the electricity supply industry grew, and was mainly a consequence of it being a nationalised industry for so long. What we call the standing charge was originally (and still is, officially, I believe) called an "availability charge", a charge for making a product available to you. Every consumable supplier has fixed network costs, be it the oil supply chain for oil fired heating, the fuel supply chain for fillings stations or the food and household goods supply chain for shops and supermarkets. None of those would dream of charging an "availability charge", there would be a public outcry if they did. In many cases, the supply chain and distribution networks for all these non-electricity supply businesses are far more complex than the generator - distribution network - reseller model that electricity uses. I can see no good reason why the fixed cost elements should not be amalgamated wholly within the product cost for electricity, just as it is for every other product we buy (with the sole exception of gas, another anomaly like electricity). After all, if it can work for someone with oil or LPG fired heating, why shouldn't it work every bit as well for electricity or gas? The general principle of every consumer paying the true cost + profit of the product they are buying, with no distortion created by government interference seems a sound one to me, and it provides an incentive for heavy users to look at ways of reducing their consumption. I find it ludicrous that the 6 bedroom, stone built, electrically heated Victorian rectory just down to the road from me pays exactly the same standing charge to cover the network cost as I do. At a guess that house uses around 5 or 6 times the network capacity, so places a heavier burden on it than most other houses in the village. If I had two or three phone lines, I'd have to pay extra for the additional network cost, so if we are going to keep standing charges, why not scale them to usage, at least?

I've just been reading the latest (rather badly put together) update on the review that Ofgem are undertaking looking at electricity pricing, specifically the means by which the "fixed" element of the network cost is recovered. The latest update (from yesterday) is here: https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/system/files/docs/2017/11/tcr_working_paper_nov17_final.pdf and I think they are way off the mark in the way they are looking at the costs of recovering the fixed operating cost element. We have a market that has been wholly artificially created by government, who have arbitrarily decided to divide electricity supply into three main sectors; those responsible for generation, those responsible for network provision, updating and maintenance and those responsible for selling electricity to consumers. In the first and last instance, a semi-competitive market exists. Anyone can invest in becoming a generator, in essence, it's pretty much a free market, with some constraints in terms of regulatory interference aimed at retaining a reliable mix of generation sources. Similarly, anyone can invest in becoming and electricity retailer, a somewhat simpler task that becoming a generator. Stuck in the middle we have a major lump of the fixed cost element, and this is not competed at all, it is divvied up into Distribution Network Operators that have a monopoly in their particular regions. It seems that it is recovering the costs incurred by these monopolies is thing that is vexing Ofgem, with them suggesting alternatives to the fixed daily standing charge as ways of covering these "fixed" costs. I'm not at all convinced that they are going about this the right way. There seems little incentive to make the DNOs more efficient, and consumers have no control at all over DNO imposed charges that form a part of their bill. My personal view is that a good starting point would be to remove the standing charge system completely, and therefore force those who use more of the network capacity (the high users of energy) to pay more towards the maintenance and upkeep of the network. It'll be interesting to see how Ofgem are steered and directed by the energy industry to deliver a more profitable scheme, as I'm certain that is what the outcome will be, as Ofgem seems a pointless and toothless body that is little more than a talking shop to allow the industry to do as it wishes.......................

Sadly I think you have to make your own, using ordinary ventilation grills and bits of ducting that can fit inside the wall. If you're not bothered about sound transfer then just put a grill either side and a short duct, if you want to attenuate the sound a bit then make the internal duct periscope shaped.

For us, this is noticeable. The door from the hall to our kitchen/dining room is the only source of air for the kitchen, utility room and downstairs WC. Even with a gap underneath, and a flush stone threshold, it has a slight resistance to being closed, just from the suction from three fairly high rate extract terminals.

What about the toilets and bathrooms? They are rooms that need a fair bit of unrestricted fresh air access in order for the extraction to work - no gap means the pressure drops with the door closed and the extraction rate significantly decreases. One of the benefits of MVHR is that toilets and bathrooms stay much fresher and drier, preventing that by sealing them up doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. If you don't want gaps under doors, then you can always use transfer vents instead. These can be quite discreet and if they are arranged so that they take an indirect path through an adjoining wall then they can reduce sound transmission. Also, remember that the fresh air feed effectiveness is only as good as the extract effectiveness. Block off the major extract rooms and you also restrict the fresh air feed, as the fresh air feed room pressure will increase, because of the much reduced extract rate and that will then reduce the fresh air feed rate (flow rates in MVHR are extremely pressure sensitive, hence the need for, and the hassle of, balancing the system). Finally, remember that the heat exchanger effectiveness is critically dependent on the air flow being balanced on both sides. Significantly reduce the extract flow rate by closing off most of the extract rooms and the system will be imbalanced and only recover a fraction of the heat it could otherwise recover, plus the fan power will probably increase, because of the pressure conditions being imbalanced between the two side (fan power efficiency curves are very far from being flat).

There is a rule that should be observed when placing terminals, in that you should aim to make the air travel as far as possible from the point where fresh air comes in (usually a fresh air terminal) to the point where air leaves the room (often the gap under a door that then leads to an extract terminal in another room). I have pretty much all ours arranged on a diagonal, for example, the bedroom doors are close to one corner, the fresh air feeds are diagonally opposite, on the low wall at the eaves. The idea is to allow maximum time for fresh air to diffuse with room air, as it very slowly moves across the room, and to try and avoid any dead spots, where air can bypass across one side of a room, for example, leaving much of the room as "dead" space.

Do you need a bypass radiator at all? We don't have one on our combi system in our old house, just a bypass valve that allows the flow and return to be short circuited if all the rad TRVs happen to be closed. The same goes for the ASHP at the new house, we fitted a standard heating system bypass valve to deal with the short delay whilst motorised valves open and adjusted it until it only opened when needed.

Nylon absorbs moisture and expands and contracts, plus it tends to discolour. I'd be inclined to use PVC if it we me. PVC is also a lot easier to machine than nylon, as a general rule.

I had a batch of filters made up by Jasun Envirocare. They will make pretty much any size and type of filter you want and the ones I received look identical to the genuine Genvex ones, but were a fraction of the price. IIRC, I ordered 5 sets (10 filters) for around the same price as the cost of one set of Genvex filters from the UK supplier. I just emailed them with the dimensions and spec I needed, from this web site: https://www.jfilters.com/c/PANEL/panel-filters-for-use-in-general-ventilation-and-fan-coil-units-classified-g3-f9-en779-2012 Jasun Envirocare will also make up stainless steel frames and grilles to fit where the card frames go in an MVHR and then sell rolls of filter material that you can cut to size. When I get around to it I'm going to do this, as you can get washable filter material by the roll pretty cheaply, and that would make a significant cost saving in the longer term.