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Jeremy Harris

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Everything posted by Jeremy Harris

  1. Jeremy Harris
    Opposite our house, to the South, there used to be (until today) a 30ft high Leylandii hedge. It was the other side of the lane, and the other side of the stream, and behind it there's a two storey house. Today, the owner of that house had contractors in and they've cut most of the hedge down to just a few feet high. As our house is around 10ft higher than theirs, this means that the windows to the front of our house now look directly into the bedroom windows of the house opposite, which was previously hidden behind the tall hedge. I'm not sorry to see the hedge go, but think it could have been trimmed a lot better than it has been, but that's neither here nor there. One consequence is that we get a great deal more light at the front, and overall that's no bad thing. However, we've always had a slight problem with solar gain from the kitchen window and a small window in the living room, both of which face south. We also had a problem with the big glazed gable, but that was fixed by installing reflective film, which has the added benefit of making that gable into a one-way mirror, so no one can normally look in. Now that the hedge has been cut right down, we need to do something to give some privacy. As I've also been pondering over ways to reduce the solar gain, I'm wondering if I can't do both, by fitting a horizontally slatted brise soleil, with the slats arranged as a sort of projecting canopy of boards on edge, with a slight pitch downwards to provide the required privacy. I've had a look around online, but all the off-the-shelf systems I've been able to find look a bit too contemporary. Our house looks fairly rustic, and anything I fit will need planning approval, so has to be in keeping with the waney edge larch cladding. Has anyone got any good ideas, by any chance?
  2. Jeremy Harris
    I rather think that, by encouraging tactical voting, with the aim of unseating the Conservatives, the LibDems will find they have shot themselves in the foot. If they retain 8 seats I think they will have had a significant achievement. It's a pity, really, as I agree with every LibDem policy, except their stance on the EU, and they would get my vote if it wasn't for the one policy issue. I don't like the idea of voting Conservative at all; I've only ever voted Conservative once before in my life, and that was in 1987, and I deeply regretted it within a couple of years. This election will be only the second time in well over 40 years that I've voted Conservative.
  3. Jeremy Harris
    Our service address is 16 miles away from the plot, and even the description of the plot has the wrong post code, as the land originally belonged to a house in another lane nearby.
  4. Jeremy Harris
    Believe it or not, our local Liberal Democrat candidate (who doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of being elected, and may well lose his deposit) was campaigning by standing in the middle of some of the local roundabouts, dressed as a clown and waving like a lunatic at passing motorists............
  5. Jeremy Harris
    Very small, I think. The ones used in some public toilets are tiny, with an ozone plate that is only about 30mm x 15mm or so, and I think they are pulsed on and off. I bought several different ozone generators when I was experimenting, and the 7g per hour (hopelessly optimistic Chinese rating!) ones use two plates, each around 100mm x 50mm. These run very hot, and realistically produce around 2 or 3 g/hr, but that is massively more than would be needed to kill cooking smells, as when I ran a generator like this in a room, with a small fan blowing air over it, the air in the room became unbreathable pretty quickly. It would makes your eyes sting, with a very strong smell of ozone after just a few minutes. It was extremely effective at killing odours, though, quite amazingly so. It did have the rather unpleasant side effect of killing all the insects and spiders in the room, too, which illustrates just how toxic ozone can be in quite modest concentrations. However, there are 3.5 g/hr (again, optimistically rated) units available, and one of those, fitted on the room side of the filters and pulsed on and off to reduce the ozone level, might work well. I'm convinced there's a lot of potential in using low doses of ozone in this way, as it is remarkably effective at oxidising odour molecules.
  6. Jeremy Harris
    Our local authority charge around £120 to allocate an address, and there's no easy way around it, I found. I tried to just get the Royal Mail to do it, but they just referred me back to the council Street Naming Team.
  7. Jeremy Harris
    It's been a very curious election process this time, and this has been reflected in the views of the (mainly Conservative supporting) locals in our village pub. When the election was first announced, the view was pretty universal that Labour were doomed, and that Jeremy Corbyn was simply unelectable. In the days after the Manchester bombing things radically changed. The staunch Conservatives seems shaken and less sure of themselves, and there was much talk about the very real possibility of their being an extreme left wing government. Last Sunday, things seemed to swing back again, and last night the atmosphere was almost back to that on the day that the election was called. I don't think I've ever experienced such seemingly wild swings before, and have to say that I'm very surprised by those that have bought in to the "magic money tree" politics. Sadly, I rather think that Diane Abbott has played a significant part in restricting the left wing swing, and I say sadly as it's now being reported from within the Labour party itself that she has a long-term medical condition. Given her bouts of short term memory loss and cognitive difficulties, I suspect those reports may be accurate. I strongly suspect that the Conservative majority will be smaller than they hoped for, but that it will be enough to allow them the mandate to do the tough job that the new government has to do over the next few years. I doubt they will be popular, and I suspect that the rise of the extreme left will continue, so I don't think things will be very rosy for the country after the next general election, in 2022.
  8. Jeremy Harris
    @ryder72, does anyone do a recirculating hood with something like ozone cooking odour treatment? We have a small, German made, ozone generator in the fridge, and that does a very good job of eliminating smells, and when I was experimenting with ozone generators for our water treatment system I found a great deal of information on using ozone to treat household odours, almost all of it from the US. It would seem that injecting a very small amount of ozone into the cooker hood might be a very effective way of oxidising cooking odour molecules.
  9. Jeremy Harris
    When we bought our plot, the Land Registry paperwork didn't arrive until around 2 months after we completed the purchase, so I think you're right, it does take a long time. It doesn't seem to have any impact on the time it takes to sell/purchase though, as far as I can see, it's just something that gets done in slow time after the sale has completed.
  10. Jeremy Harris
    My understanding is that there is no need to do this until the house is sold, at which time the Land Registry record will be updated. This is the same as applies when a house that isn't on the Land Registry records is sold. A couple of year ago a friend sold a house that had been owned by his parents since the 1960's, and so wasn't registered with the Land Registry, and it wasn't a problem, it was just registered for the first time as a part of the purchase process by the solicitor acting for the purchasers. Compulsory Land Registration didn't come into force until 1990 in England and Wales, so there are still quite a lot of unregistered properties around, that only get registered as they are sold.
  11. Jeremy Harris
    I'm pretty sure that what is being referred to here is not a chamber of any sort, but a ceiling terminal. By definition, a plenum is a chamber, it comes from the Latin, plenum spatius, meaning a full space. To refer to an open terminal, that feeds air into or out of a room is wrong and misleading, especially so when there is a long-standing use of the term plenum in ventilation systems to refer to the chamber used to collect the ends of the ducts from each terminal before they are connected to some form of air handling unit.
  12. Jeremy Harris
    I appreciate that, but a supplier using incorrect terminology like this just causes confusion. The word plenum, in the context of air handling systems, is well-defined, and has never been applied to a terminal or vent, as fair as I know. Even the disambiguation entry in Wikipedia seems to be clear on this.
  13. Jeremy Harris
    I'd definitely just buy silencers, it's really not worth the hassle to make them. I only had to make ours because I foolishly left insufficient room to fit off the shelf ones. They are very effective, though, and I think they are well worth fitting.
  14. Jeremy Harris
    It's still incorrect terminology - a plenum is defined as an air chamber where ducts meet in this context, not a vent or terminal, no wonder there's communications problems on here when even professionals make such a fundamental error. Perhaps someone should put them straight, as it's the sort of error that would put someone like me off doing business with them, on the basis that if they can make errors like this, what other errors could they be making? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plenum
  15. Jeremy Harris
    The plenums are the chambers/manifolds where the ducts connect, before being connected by larger ducts to the MVHR. Do you mean the extract terminal in the kitchen? If so, then all the terminals should be positioned to maximise the path length of air in the room. We have our kitchen extract terminal in the corner of the ceiling that's almost diagonally opposite the kitchen door into the hall, as that door is where the air comes into the kitchen from the rooms that are fed with fresh air. The same goes for the fresh air fed rooms, but in reverse, so, for example, the living room fresh air feed terminal is in the ceiling corner almost diagonally opposite the door into the hall, as this door is the extract path.
  16. Jeremy Harris
    The position of the MVHR plenum chambers isn't relevant, so stick them in the most convenient location. We have both the extract and fresh air feed plenums up in the service area, fairly close to the MVHR unit, in order to minimise the length of duct from the MVHR to them, but this isn't really critical.
  17. Jeremy Harris
    From what I've been told, EE/BT have agreed that all emergency service traffic will take priority over any other traffic on the system. In a major incident, this probably means that, in some areas, people will lose non-emergency connectivity, just as they do now when the network is congested (as indicated by the "Emergency Calls Only" warning we get a lot on 'phones around here). The emergency services will then have all the bandwidth they need, at the expense of non-emergency customers.
  18. Jeremy Harris
    We're technically just in the South West, and you're welcome to come and have a look.
  19. Jeremy Harris
    My understanding is that the new emergency services network will use the normal 3G/4G system, but with prioritisation for the emergency services, which means that if there is a local incident then the network may well reduce in capability for non-emergency service users. This is straight from someone who is working on the system. Unlike Airwave, which uses a dedicated system for comms, the idea is to use the growing mobile network to provide all the current emergency capabilities, so reducing the current mix of systems that are used.
  20. Jeremy Harris
    One thing I found out recently is that EE have won the contract to provide the replacement for Airwave, the emergency services communications system. As such, EE are having to make significant improvements in rural areas, as they have had to give a performance guarantee as a part of this contract. At the moment, we can't get a mobile signal, but our nearest mast is an EE one, and using a booster, connected to a mast-mounted high gain directional antenna, I can just about get a GSM phone signal, but not really a usable data connection. We're hoping this will improve before long.
  21. Jeremy Harris
    I'm pretty sure there are some other discussions on extractors here, or may be they were on Ebuild. The better quality recirculating hoods work pretty well, and I've found that I can clean the stainless mesh grease filter on ours in the dishwasher, and the activated carbon "smell filter" can be opened and the carbon granules can be replaced cheaply, using fish pond filter carbon granules, which you can buy in bulk (much cheaper than buying new filter elements). I haven't looked at newer models; the one in our old house is around 20 years old, and as I mentioned, we don't use it that often.
  22. Jeremy Harris
    Recirculating seems the best bet; I've made provision to fit one, but we're waiting to see if we need it before fitting it (I suspect we won't need it, as we don't use the one in our old house much). Any extractor can't be connected to the MVHR, because it would both massively imbalance it and also because there is a high risk that the ducts will get fouled up, along with the MVHR filter and perhaps even the heat exchanger. Fitting an extractor with a separate duct to the outside creates a big air leak, and also creates a massive MVHR imbalance when it's running - it would be enough to almost stop the MVHR extract system from working when it's on, I think.
  23. Jeremy Harris
    Yes, but I think there is already one on the inlet side of a water softener, usually. I think the water companies are just specifying that double check valves be fitted to all supplies as a way of not having to assess the risk for individual properties, which makes sense, from their point of view.
  24. Jeremy Harris
    Right now, a good quality FLA pack will almost certainly outlast any lithium chemistry cells, IF they are looked after well and are run within a limited range of state of charge (SOC). Something like a big Rolls pack, or a high quality fork lift pack, run between 95% SOC and 50% SOC will probably last around 15 years, if regularly monitored and watered. At their end-of-life they will probably still deliver around 80% of their usable capacity, but will start to have other problems, like individual cell partial failure, which makes maintenance a pain. Lithium may well improve, but I have a strong suspicion that ion transfer storage has an inherent issue with calendar life. This probably isn't an issue for vehicles, which is where most of the R&D investment is going, but is for domestic energy storage. My personal view is that, as domestic energy storage starts to grow, redox flow batteries will get more development. The potential is there for redox flow batteries to have a calendar life of decades, as, in theory, it's only the electrolyte that should degrade. Whether this becomes reality depends on whether there is enough of a market for domestic storage. Companies like Tesla, may well test and develop that market, as a way of reducing the cost of their main product line, vehicle batteries.
  25. Jeremy Harris
    Faye has just laid the very last brick?
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