Jeremy Harris

My experience of Leylandii is that it never regrows from lower down, either, so that bare patch won't ever have new growth. We had a neighbour with a problem Leyandii hedge, which we used to cut, and the key was to cut the top back hard, but not be to vigorous with trimming the sides, as it's easy for them to end up bare at the bottom. This is unlike the big yew hedge we have at the old house, that we cut back really hard a few years ago, as it was far too thick. It looked a bit sad for a year or so, but now looks very good indeed.

Out of amusement, I asked my other half last night which programmes she uses on the washing machine (I only ever use one, the synthetic 40 deg one). She uses two wash programmes (one being the same as the one I use) plus the spin only programme. The only other features she uses all the time is the delay timer, so she can stick the thing on before leaving for work, knowing that it will have only just finished a short time before she gets back from work (something to do with reducing wrinkles) and the half load button for quick washes. So that means we use two wash programmes, a normal medium temperature one and a short medium temperature one for small loads, a spin programme plus the delay timer. The machine has a total of 18 programmes (we use two of them), 5 spin speeds (ours has always been set to the maximum since new) a half load button and a settable time delay, both of which are used.

Brilliant, thanks very much indeed. I have the 1Tb Raspberry Pi 3 Nextcloud server up and running, with everything ready for a secure and easy to access HTTPS connection to the outside world, I just need to setup up the redirect from a set up sub domain to the fixed IP. It'll have to wait till after the weekend now, as the fixed FTTC IP is at the new house.

Yes, spot on, just glue the EPS sheet together with low expansion PU foam, from a gun. Pretty easy, just squirt the foam, wait for it to expand (maybe 30 seconds or so) then push the parts together. A mist spray of water on one side of the parts to be joined speeds up the cure, but the low expansion stuff cures in a few minutes anyway.

I think there are three or four suppliers of the L shaped parts now, plus you can make them yourself by foam bonding hot wire cut bits of 100mm EPS if you want to save money. A hot wire cutter isn't hard to make; I've made a couple, nicking ideas from the web.

I agree, 100%, with bells on. The idiots that design appliances need to spend a month going around spending time with new owners, to find out what they really want, and how so many struggle with really poor human machine interfaces (HMIs). When designing the cockpit for the Future Lynx (now the Lynx Wildcat) we had endless problems with geeks wanting to put loads of tiny buttons in, and I had four Lynx pilots an observer and an engineer who spent most of their time putting the geeks back in their box, by showing them how impractical it was to use such daft interfaces in an aircraft that was actively manoeuvring to avoid threats. Believe it or not, at one stage they wanted a trackball in the centre console to move the screen cursors, in an aircraft where having both hands on the controls at all times is pretty much essential. With kitchen appliances, we shouldn't need to spend an hour reading the manual to fin out how to turn it on, set the required temperature, time or whatever, that should be intuitive. There's a lot to be said for plain old-fashioned knobs. My car has a plethora of steering wheel controls, but it's far, far quicker, easier and more intuitive to reach over and turn the volume control than it is to fumble pressing buttons a dozen times.................... Finally, how many programmes does a washing machine really need? I reckon it's three, maybe four, not twenty............

Kore are usually pretty good - when I was shopping around the Kore quote was marginally less than anyone else. The snag is that it's a very dynamic, and local, market, so there's likely to be a fair bit of variation from one region to another.

The best bet is to get the DNO out on site and explain what you want to do, and that you'll do all the trenching and duct laying (if they want it) for them, so all they need to quote for is the new cable plus the connections. We found the local chap that came out to the site to have a look was very helpful, it was the incompetence of his management that caused all the hassle with delays (a familiar tale here - the guys at the sharp end are usually pretty good for all the services, they are let down by their back office support, or rather lack of it........).

We buried around 65m of formerly overhead cables around our plot. As above, including the moving of a pole, and the new cable and connection, plus some legal costs for a new wayleave, we paid Scottish and Southern Electricity £3,500. We probably incurred around £1,500 in additional ground works cost, but that was largely because we already had all the heavy gear on site for all the other site ground works.

Our UFH in slab is brilliant, it both heats and cools and provides very good temperature regulation. It's sat on 300mm of EPS, and the reinforced concrete slab is 100mm thick (not much thicker than some screeds), and the response time is fine, as it only needs to warm up a fraction to contribute a fair bit of heat into the house. With beams, they can be a lot colder than the ground, though, as they are close to outside air temperature, so you need thicker insulation to keep the losses the same.

Just to finish this off, a new Pi Zero W arrived this morning, so I plugged in one of these cheap micro USB to Ethernet adapters from Ebay: (£3.45, inc delivery) stuck in a µSD card loaded with Jessie Lite, plugged in a power supply and Ethernet cable and within ten minutes had a running wifi AP. The next step is to take the USB to Ethernet adapter out of the plastic case, solder on some links to the spare Ethernet pairs to get power, and make up a short micro USB power lead. The whole thing will then be fitted into a small plastic box, giving me a tiny Ethernet PoE powered wifi AP that I can stick in the corner of the internal eaves to receive the wifi from the external IP cameras and relay it back to another RPi running as a CCTV recorder.

Why do you want to put a DPC under the windows? I've not heard of doing this, and we didn't do it, we just folded back the external membrane into the window reveals, let Munster fit the windows, then I went around and foamed them all, before MBC came back to do the internal stuff and tape them up. We do have the DPM running under the doors, because it's there anyway on the outer part of the insulation upstand that the cills go over.

Just been through this trying to donate some perfectly good furniture to a local charity. They won't take it without the fire labels. Like most people, we'd taken these things off when we bought the stuff, as they are a nuisance, being tied with bits of string. By good fortune, all our newly delivered dining room chairs had fire labels tied on, so it was easy to just swap them over................

@PeterW will be better at identifying this than me, but that top one looks very much like Leylandii to me. It looks like some pretty dire trimming has taken place, too.

Are you set on beam and block for the ground floor? The reason I ask is that a reinforced slab cast on to cheap EPS, directly onto a prepared sub-base can be pretty cheap, and you can just cable tie UFH pipes to the steel reinforcement before the slab is cast, then power float the slab to get a very smooth and flat floor. No screed is necessary, so there's no lengthy drying out period. You get a floor that works like a giant storage heater, and that can cool and heat the house (with the right pipe work) and the heat losses will be lower than a suspended floor for any given thickness of insulation, as the ground rarely drops below about 7 to 8 deg C in winter, whereas the air under a suspended floor will be close to outside air temperature, so could be sub-zero in winter.

In our case we have no mains water, and the assumption is that power will be cut, so the borehole pump will be out of action, hence the need for the backup power supply. We have accumulators, but they could only deliver a couple of hundred litres, not enough for the number of conventional sprinkler heads. The fine mist systems use a small fraction of the water volume of conventional sprinklers, so although more expensive, this was likely to be offset by not needing a back up power supply. Having seen first hand the damage caused by sprinkler activation, I'd have to say that I'm not 100% convinced about the damage factor compared to fire hoses. The building where we had the sprinklers go off needed to be pulled down because of the water damage, anyway. A bit more water damage wouldn't have changed that at all. The problem was that it was a timber frame, and the water from the sprinklers soaked the frame and internal insulation, and the surveyors condemned it, on the basis that there was no way to dry the structure without effectively demolishing the building. It wasn't a house, but a storage building, but was similar in many respects to a timber framed house. For a non-timber frame structure things might well be different. It's this wide variation in cost and damage reduction that makes me question mandating sprinklers. I can see applications where they are a very good thing, but equally there are applications where their benefit, in terms of limiting damage to the structure, is relatively small, perhaps non-existent. The exception would be the small, high-risk area, mist suppression systems, as they do seem to be a very good idea for just about any house. The cost still needs to come down, though, as last time I looked (around 4 years ago) they were relatively expensive, in terms of the real risk reduction they provided.

Wood fibre, cellulose and similar are pretty good, certainly double or so the decrement delay of lightweight foams, like PIR, PUR or even rockwool. YBS superquilt is multifoil (a.k.a, snake oil........) and has an even worse decrement delay than lightweight foams, and is not itself a decent insulation material, it relies on sealed air gaps and "proper" insulation in order to obtain the advertised U values. There's plenty of stuff on the multifoil controversy, so I won't repeat it here, but it boils down to some extremely optimistic advertising that has already got the manufacturers into trouble with the ASA, and had BBA certification withdrawn from some multifoils, because of a misleading test method that was used. There is a reasonable case for using a thin reflective film under the slates/tiles, to help reflect back out some of the heat that is radiated from the back of them, but I've not seen any real evidence that it makes a significant difference. It's better to use a warm roof insulation material that has a high heat capacity, as well as being a reasonably good insulator, as if you can slow down the rate at which the insulation heats up the decrement delay will increase. The idea is to delay heat getting through until the sun leaves that section of roof, when heat then starts to flow outwards again.

There's your problem! (the highlighted bit). PUR, like most lightweight foams, has a very short decrement delay, so lets a lot of heat through over the course of a few hours. A structure with a decrement delay of greater than around 5 to 6 hours, but with the same insulation value, won't over heat to anywhere like the same degree. This article discusses decrement delay and its importance for comfort: http://www.greenspec.co.uk/building-design/decrement-delay/ The other factor is solar gain control, and there are several ways of dealing with this. We fitted solar film to our large, South-facing, glazed gable and it's extremely effective at cutting down solar gain, yet doesn't adversely affect the performance of the glazing in terms of keeping heat in. You can get glass with this sort of external coating on. Another thing to look at is designing in external shading for solar gain control, lots of ways of doing it, like a brise soliel or other form of window shading. Had we been able to get consent from the planners we'd have probably fitted external shutters.

That's a heck of a lot cheaper than I could find for a single house, 130m². The best quote I got was for a basic installation cost of £4,200, ex VAT, plus back-up power for the water pump that was going to add around another £2k. This was for a minimum spec system that the fire officer would accept. In the end the recommendation never made it into our approval as a condition, but if it had it would have made the build cost greater than the value. I can fully understand the reasoning for sprinklers, in terms of protecting the property, but when talking to the fire officer he was clearly of the view (off the record) that effective alarms were much better, as getting people out of a house quickly was far more important than trying to limit subsequent fire damage to the building. Had we been forced to fit sprinklers, then I was strongly drawn towards the low water volume mist systems, primarily as they seem more effective and have the big advantages of causing far less property damage and not needing a pump back up power source (they would have worked from the pressurised water volume in the accumulators).

We had to do this, as we had not only overhead power and phone wires that were in the way, but also an unmarked (and apparently unknown) large three phase supply cable running diagonally under the plot. We had to get a pole moved to the corner of the plot, and we arranged to dig all the trenches for the new underground cables and put 100mm black duct in, as required by the DNO. We also had to dig across the lane (expensive - highways licence needed) and put another duct in to run power to a neighbours house, that had previously been overhead. The DNO (SSE) did no excavating at all, they just pulled new cables through the ducts we'd laid, erected a new pole, disconnected the old cables and reconnected the new ones. We had to pay around £3500 up front, and they were absolutely appalling at getting the work done on time, delaying our build by around a month. We had a survey from them in February, agreed the work package in March, were invoiced for this and paid in mid-April and they eventually turned up on site to move the cables and make the connections in August, after a great deal of chasing. I didn't bother getting the DNO to quote for contestable works, as we were going to be running most of the trenches around the site anyway, for other services. The only additional ground works cost to us was an extra trench across the lane (we were already digging one for a drain, so had to pay the highways licence anyway) plus a few tens of pounds for the black duct that the DNO specified. By contrast, Openreach were a total pain to deal with, but when they did get around to it there was no charge at all, as they viewed that putting new cables underground was improving their network, so they free-issued duct and cable for us to lay, which they then connected to the new pole (it was a combined power and phone pole).

Like many, I suspect, I did the rounds of all the BM's when we were still at the planning stage, to see what they offered. The "big names" (Jewsons, Travis Perkins et al) were all pretty much the same, and generally far more expensive; Buildbase was far higher than anyone else. Wickes were often surprisingly good, but a bit variable on quality, same goes for B&Q, where buying on a Wednesday knocks 10% off (if you are over 60.......). Screwfix were so-so, not ever the best on price, but very convenient with their click and collect service (far better than Wickes click and collect, which just doesn't work half the time). The best overall was our local independent, Sydenhams, who consistently gave good pricing and offered to price match. Sometimes they just couldn't match the prices for some stuff (an example being the pavers referred to earlier - they told me that they had to pay more for them than Simply Paving were selling them for). Whenever that happened they were honest about it. I used Sydenhams more than any of the others, not only because of their pricing, but because they had really good drivers, who'd take the time to deliver stuff exactly where we wanted it, with no hassle. The best prices were often from online suppliers, but the big downside was that pretty much all (the exception being Simply Paving, who do HIAB delivery) only offered pallet curbside delivery, a real pain when you have a steeply sloping drive and it's heavy stuff. The moral of this tale is twofold; get loads of quotes and push suppliers to price match, and take account of the delivery method - often it's better to pay a little more to get a delivery to where you want it on site.

When I was trying to buy 8 pallet loads of permeable pavers, Buildbase quoted nearly three times the price I eventually paid. I've kept the quote, pinned to the back of the invoice from Simply Paving, as an illustration of their ludicrous pricing. As above, I don't think they are even vaguely interested in dealing with self-builders.

A question for the web masters here................. I've set up a secure Nextcloud service running on a RPi3, which seems to works OK on my fixed IP. Because I also have a registered domain, I'd like to set up an easier to remember sub-domain (already done via the hosting company control panel) and redirect that to my fixed IP. I think that what I need to do is set up a new CNAME record to redirect the sub-domain to the IP, but I'm not at all sure, and I don't want to screw up anything. Looking at the control panel it seems pretty easy to just set up a new CNAME record, but before I do anything I'd welcome any advice, please. As an aside, Nextcloud runs OK on a RPi3, with a 1Tb HDD, in fact it's surprisingly good. The even better thing is that the whole set up is averaging just over 2W, which seems pretty good for a fairly capable locally hosted cloud. Being locally hosted means I can back it up easily over the LAN every night, too.

A thermal store only heated to 50 deg C has less than half the usable energy storage of one heated to 60 deg C though, as you can only drop a thermal store down to a couple of deg C above the desired hot water temperature, and anything lower than about 40 deg C for hot water is a bit too cool for a decent shower.

Although Sunamp refer to the phase change heat storage packs as "thermal batteries", that's really just a term of convenience to put an easily understandable name to a new product. They do work like batteries, but with a Peukert factor of unity at the instantaneous level (so near 100% efficient, in that if discharged immediately after charge you get almost all the input energy back). A better analogue is really a conventional fluid filled thermal store, with an internal heat exchange coil plus an immersion heater. You charge a thermal store up, and it's then discharged whenever there is a hot water demand. The difference is that a really well-insulated thermal store will have, in practice* much higher storage losses. The Sunamp is a lot smaller than an equivalent sized thermal store (it will fit inside a 600mm wide kitchen cabinet) so saves a lot of space, as well as offering lower losses. *Losses quoted by thermal store manufacturers are way off real world losses, because the measurement method specified assumes that they are cycled, and not held full of hot water, but heated prior to use then cooled by hot water being drawn off. I measured the performance of our old thermal store, and the reality was that it lost over 3 kWh per 24 hours when charged by excess PV and an immersion heater. I added an extra 50mm of PIR foam all around it and got the losses down to a bit over 2 kWh per 24 hours. The official loss figure from the manufacturer was 1.6 kWh per 24 hours, so very, very optimistic in terms of real-world operation.