Jeremy Harris

Thanks, I can get one from Argos for around the same price as a replacement motor for the old VAX, so looks worth a punt.

After nearly 30 years of sterling service, my ancient VAX is showing signs that all is not well. It's a 121, the original wet and dry model, and bits have gradually been breaking/failing for some time, and now the motor is making ominous noises, so I suspect it's not long for this world. I could just rebuild it, as you can still get motors and all the other parts for these, so around £80 would see me with all the parts needed to fix the bits that I know need fixing, assuming there's nothing else about to fail. However, the VAX 121, very good as it is, is a bit big and cumbersome, so I'm thinking of just buying a replacement, rather than just go on fixing it. Something like a Henry might be an option, I don't really need the wet and dry capability any more, but I don't like upright vacuum cleaners at all, so it needs to be the same sort of form factor as the old VAX or the Henry. We already have a cordless vacuum for all the light and fiddly work - what I'm looking for is a machine with far more suction than a cordless machine and that's tough enough to be used for things like cleaning out the back of my car, or vacuuming the workshop floor, as well as very occasional household use. It doesn't need to have a particularly good carpet cleaning action, so I can live without rotating brushes in the head. Not fussed if it looks pretty or not - we've lived with an ugly, bright orange, VAX for 30 years. The only thing I wouldn't give house room is a Dyson; we bought one once and it was the most useless, over-priced bit of junk I've ever seen. Can anyone recommend a tough, high suction power, replacement, please?

Delivery VAT can go on the reclaim, or at least it did go through on a few dozen of our receipts. AFAIK, you can recover all the VAT on materials, including the cost of delivery.

I've never experienced a declined claim, but I do a fair bit of work for insurance companies, usually when they are looking for a way to decline or reduce a claim. They put a surprising amount of effort into this, in my experience, so I never take risks with insurance - assume that anything that isn't specifically detailed in the schedule may well result in any claim being declined. AFAIK, there's no mandatory requirement for insurers to pay out on house claims, as there is on third party, Road Traffic Act, claims in car accidents. I made damned sure that every detail was covered for the one-off policy we had between having self-build insurance and then moving to normal buildings and contents insurance.

If anyone wants to use the spreadsheet I knocked up for the relevant pages of the VAT form, please feel free to do so, even if you wish to use it to earn a bit of extra cash.

I'm in much the same boat. By accident I fell into doing consulting work, mainly for insurance companies, as an expert witness (although it's exceptionally rare for any case to get to court now). From time to time I get a consulting job to do, and find it quite therapeutic to do something different for a few days, with the bonus of being paid for it. There are times when jobs have taken me off the build, but then that's really down to the fact that this sort of consultancy pays rather well, and I can earn more in a few days of consulting work than I get from my pension in a month.

One thing to watch is that if you have a receipt that has a mix of claimable and non-claimable items, then you are best attaching it to a bit of paper and explaining with a note that you've removed the non-claimable item VAT. I stapled all the till receipts I had to sheets of A4, and some of these had things like tools as well as materials on them. The tool VAT was not claimable, but the materials VAT was. Also, stapling till receipts to a sheet of A4 makes it a lot easier to keep everything in neat piles.

You can also use plinth blocks to avoid having to cut mitred joints in, or around, corners. I did think about it, as I used 20mm thick oak skirting boards, and could get 25mm square plinth bocks, with a chamfer on two edges. In the end I decided to force myself to have several days extra work in cutting neat mitres in, or around, every corner................

It already exists. There is a coordinating website that people can opt to join if they have a charge point, allowing other EV owners to charge. I do it, not through the website yet, but with EV owning friends. If they are stopping in the village they can just park on my drive and get a charge. It works well, at least between people you know and trust, and the cost per top-up charge is so small it's not worth the hassle of trying to collect any money.

Me too. The hardest part of the job isn't submitting the claim, that's dead easy, apart from the worry of losing receipts in the post. The hard part is the tedious job of compiling all the receipts, and as far as I can see, no reclaim service can do this bit. Once you have all the receipts in an orderly pile (or piles) it's just a couple of hours of tedious typing to put the details into the spreadsheet. Here's a copy of the spreadsheet copy of the HMRC form that I used, and which HMRC accepted without question: http://www.mayfly.eu/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/VAT Claim Form 431 - Blank.xls

The interesting thing here is the way that Elon Musk is looking ahead. I thought he was being very bold when he made the offer to South Australia, but now realise he was just being very canny - he already had around half the batteries built. Tesla have ironed out the bugs in making a small scale power grid using PV and batteries; they worked this out when designing the Gigafactory (which may well be around the same scale as the grid on PR). I think he can do it. South Australia will be the first big test, and my money is on Tesla pulling it off. Tesla need a very big market for the output from their Gigafactories, as they are pinning everything on getting the battery pack price down, so the more they sell the cheaper they get. This then reduces the major component cost on their cars, and their cars are already selling with a massive markup between cost and price when compared to other car manufacturers.

You're right, they will sell themselves. All it takes is having the courage to get one and drive one. Once you're used to silent power, with gobsmacking, stump-pulling torque from a standing start, no gear changes, effortless driving, with no worries about hesitation when pulling out of difficult junctions, or when overtaking, people will just not want to go back to conventional cars. The charging infrastructure really isn't a big issue, in terms of the grid. The grid has masses of spare capacity to charge cars, so that's not an issue. The most significant charging infrastructure problem is running street cabling for on-street, and car parking area, charge points. However, anyone that's been to Canada will have seen all the tens of thousands of sump heater connection points. In infrastructure terms, putting these in is very little different to putting in charge points - charge points just need heavier gauge cables. If Canada has managed to roll out all these sump heater points and manage their maintenance and upkeep for decades, then there really shouldn't be an issue with us fitting charge points. I think the idea of charging at filling stations is a dead duck. In the main, people just won't want the hassle, I think. I'm already at the stage where having to go out of my way to fill the car with fuel every few weeks is getting to be a pain, and I'd quite happily have no filling stations, just charging points wherever I choose to park, be that a street, home, car park, place of work or shopping centre.

Same here, we had a few small cracks open out, mainly around windows, but one or two elsewhere. They aren't due to settlement, but contraction as the relative components dry and shrink. The first couple of years were the worst, and I spent a fair time going around filling and touching them up. Since then I've not seen any major cracks re-open, so assume things have just settled down. A lot of this probably depends very much on the relative humidity variation between the time that the house was first finished and now. It can take a fair time for a timber structure to equalise and stop moving so much with the small changes in internal humidity. The only problem crack I had was high up in the vaulted ceiling above the hall. The scrim tape seemed to be the problem there, and the eventual solution was to grind back the plaster skim to the scrim tape, remove it, bond some 50mm wide open weave fibreglass tape in place, then fill and paint. Since doing this that crack hasn't reappeared, and I suspect it was down to the level of movement being more than the scrim tape could tolerate.

As I wrote, "there will be a rethink, but I think it will happen by stealth" which amounts to exactly as you say, it will come about as a consequence of collective action. My view is coloured by three and a half years experience of plugging my car in practically every day, at least once, more usually twice (there are some Sundays when I don't). What I've seen is a change in my whole attitude to refuelling my car. I now view it as a real nuisance to have to break my journey and stop to mess about pouring smelly stuff into a hole in the side of the car. If you'd asked me if I'd have felt like this four years ago I would have guessed that I'd have answered very differently - when I bought the plug-in hybrid I didn't anticipate the changes it has created to the way I think about my car. For example, having once had to rush to our local A&E years ago, and finding that my car was a bit low on fuel, I well remember the stress of wondering whether I'd have to try and stop on the way to fill up. As I was driving with a fairly serious injury to my left hand (I'd nearly taken the end of a finger off with an electric plane) I really didn't want the hassle of trying to put fuel in the car. As it happens I made it to the hospital OK, but I well remember making the decision to make sure the car was always topped up with fuel after that. Now that pressure doesn't exist. I know that the car has more than enough charge to get me to the hospital and back, even if there's no fuel in it, so I simply don't need to worry about filling the car up. It's subtle, the way you start to think differently about fuelling the car, and there are plenty of infrastructure changes needed to deal with those who don't have the convenience of being able to charge on their own drive or garage, but if the demand and the will is there, the infrastructure will get put in place. Cable and fibre TV is a good example - that didn't exist at all around 30 years ago, yet now millions of homes are connected, and that needed loads of road works to lay cable or fibres down residential streets.

Yes, there will be a rethink, but I think it will happen by stealth. I filled my car up with fuel yesterday, the first time in 7 weeks. It seemed pretty odd to have to remember to stop at a garage, as I only do it a few times a year. Once you're in the mindset where you get out of the car, lock it and then just plug the charge lead in before going indoors, it becomes second nature. It's going to take time for people to adapt to this, but my guess is that plug-in hybrids may well end up being a useful transition vehicle to bring about change, whilst retaining insurance against range anxiety. The problem may well be economics, and what happens to filling stations as their custom drops off. Very few people are going to need, or want, to stop to recharge on the road, as for most people, the majority of their daily driving can be covered by home, on-street, or place of work charge points. There will come a point where filling stations don't have enough business to keep going, I think, and that could then create a problem for those with conventionally fuelled cars.

There are different standards of connector, yes, but the dominant, fits nearly everything, standard is AC charging using a "J1772" type connector. In terms of making charge points more universal, then those that have no cable, but just an IEC 62196-2 will charge anything with an onboard AC charger, be it single or three phase. The two alternative charge connectors are both for fast DC charge points, either CHAdeMO or the Tesla Supercharger connector. Teslas have the option of charging from either AC, via a "J1772" connector, or DC, via a Supercharger, and Nissan Leaf's (and a couple of others) can charge either via a DC connected CHAdeMO or a "J1772" AC connector. I normally charge at home with a tethered "J1772" lead, as it's easy to just uncoil the lead and plug in. The whole charging process is automatic - the car detects the plug going in, checks the data, signals to the charge point, tells it is ready for power and the charge point then closes the main contactor and starts supply current to the car. When the car is charged it signals to the charge point to turn off. If the release latch on the car connector is pushed the same off signal is sent to the charge point contactor. When charging from remote charge points, I usually use the ones with the IEC 62196-2 socket, and keep a 32A charging lead in the lead stowage space in the back of the car for this purpose. This lead has a "J1772" connector on one end and an IEC 62196-2 connector on the other end. I also have a low current (10 A) charge lead in the car, with a standard BS1363 13 A plug on it, plus a box with the charge point controls and RCD that's required. I rarely use this though, unless away on holiday somewhere that has an outdoor socket I can plug the car into. I would guess that eventually we'll settle down to a single AC charge connector (probably just a pillar with an IEC62196-2 connector on it, as it's more vandal resistant) and a single DC charge connector (and my guess is that the Tesla Supercharger will win out over CHAdeMO, just because Tesla look like being the leaders in the DC fast charge market)

My experience was that they would just get a custom policy for you, as I wanted to still have cover for works going on inside the house, but didn't need cover for plant etc outside on the site. The policy they came up with was a modified version of their renovation policy, where a house may be undergoing a fair bit of remedial work internally. Worth talking to them to see what they can do. Failing that, somewhere I have the name of a broker I used a while ago who was pretty good, I'll have a look later and see if I still have their details.

My car is currently showing that it's had 1153 charge discharge cycles. Range is seemingly identical to when it was new, if anything it's a bit better, as the past few weeks recorded the highest range over a couple of dozen cycles that I've seen since I've owned it. Calendar life seems to have been the Achilles Heel of most lithium cells in the past, but that seems to have been fixed now, with Tesla saying that their current cells have a life of at least ten years. The energy density thing is, to some extent, a bit of a red herring. We like the high energy density of liquid fuels only because we are used to the use model of filling up at roadside fuel stations. When we had horses, we accepted that the fuelling model was to feed them at home, or at an overnight stop at an inn. When you factor in charging at either end of a journey as a matter of course (mine's on charge from the PV array right now - nice sunny say for once) then the whole range thing comes down to one specific issue - how do you deal with the need for the occasional very long distance journey? For more people, being able to do 50 to 100 miles between charges is fine, except when they need to go in a long trip, where they may well need 300 miles or so. If we get to the stage where there are charging points at hotels, pubs, guest houses, holiday accommodation, car parks etc, and cars have a range of around 300 miles or so, then many of the range problems just go away. It takes a change of mindset to get away from the idea that you can only refuel your car at a roadside fuel station though. I think that concept will be the hardest one to sell to enable widespread take up of EVs.

No, it's not them. I've just been and checked and whatever labels were on the ladder seem to have come off, so there's now no clue as to who made it. I have a feeling I may have bought it from these people: http://www.laddersukdirect.co.uk/

I've just found the old policy correspondence, and it seems that this is exactly what I did as well! I was confused earlier between our current policy, which is via GSI, and the one I'd got directly from dealing with Sennocke. I've looked through the emails I exchanged with Sennocke and it seems they pretty much customised the policy to meet our exact needs, for a very reasonably premium compared with the self-build insurance one.

I bought a pretty well made (German, I think) three piece ladder, with the horizontal bar across the base, but without wall bars (wish I had bought the walls bars now). I can't find the receipt or supplier, but will have a look to see what the make is. I'm pretty sure I bought it on line, and seem to remember is cost around £130 or so, around 3 years ago. It's done a lot of work since then, and I've not found fault with it at all, with the single exception that the lowest two ladders have nylon straps to limit over-extension, and they can be a nuisance if you don't have the ladder at full height, as they end up as dangling loops.

Not sure which unit @PeterStarck bought, but the one I bought is this one: http://www.sundthus.dk/genvex-ge-premium-1l-hoejre/ The people at Sundthus all speak and write excellent English, and were very helpful, I found. When I bought the above model, the total cost, including shipping to the UK on a big pallet, but excluding VAT (as that was reclaimed from HMRC) was £4035.32. The quote I had from the UK supplier for exactly the same model was £6859.00, including shipping, excluding VAT. Curiously, the shipping cost from the UK supplier was greater than the shipping cost from the Danish supplier. As our US friends might say, go figure..........

The daft thing is that the Danish distributor is working in a country with higher overheads than the UK, and yet can still sell the same product for a very much lower price than any UK supplier. My personal view is that the UK supplier is just adding a massive markup because they view their market as people with more money than sense. They aren't selling to the mass developers here, either, whereas in Denmark I think it's probable that more new houses have MVHR and integrated MVHR and heat pump units like this, so there may well be some competition between suppliers there. Here in the UK there is only one supplier of Genvex stuff, AFAIK.

I can confirm both the saving and that HMRC will refund the Danish VAT. I needed to provide HMRC with the exchange rate between the Danish Kronor and GBP for the date that the payment was made, and they accepted a printout from one of the well-recognised exchange rate websites. I also pencilled a note translating the Danish on the receipt to show clearly which element was the VAT. Nice to see the saving is still substantial. Makes me wonder quite what's going on with the only UK supplier. When it comes to replacement filters, I can recommend Jasun Envirocare: http://www.jasun-envirocare.com/ who will make custom filters that look absolutely identical to the Genvex branded ones, for around 1/3rd the cost, with the biggest cost saving being if you buy in bulk. I bought ten filters (five intake, five exhaust), or five sets of filters, from them for less than £100 including postage. The delivered price from the Genvex UK supplier was over £70 for just one set (one intake and one exhaust).........................

I ran into a bit of a problem in the gap between having self-build insurance (massive over-kill when the house is virtually complete and there are few, if any, building site risks) and getting a completion certificate, which was needed for normal house and contents insurance. I found a broker who was able to put together a policy with Sennocke that was essentially a part-completed house insurance policy, originally intended for people doing renovation work. It was about midway in cost between the self-build policy and normal buildings and contents insurance. IIRC, I think I used GSI as the brokers, who were pretty helpful in working through all the cover details that were needed.