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Jeremy Harris

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Everything posted by Jeremy Harris

  1. Jeremy Harris
    The problem of poor quality new houses has been rampant for years, now, and isn't something new. The obvious defects are not really the problem, it's the fact that so many new houses don't meet build regs standards, as they are never inspected. A walk around any new development by one of the big housebuilders will show just how big a problem this is. We have around half a dozen big developments around the Salisbury area, and all of them showed indications of missing and poorly fitted insulation, failure to close off cavities properly, thermal bridges in the structure etc, and that was just what I could see when walking past. The builders know that building regs won't be enforced, and that all these defects will be hidden by the time the house is sold, so they really don't give a stuff. Sadly, our local MP doesn't seem the slightest bit interested in lobbying to tighten up the enforcement of building regs, but takes the view that companies should be deregulated further..............
  2. Jeremy Harris
    That's exactly how ours was done. Our roofers also fitted the fascias, so got the overhang right on the slates. The only slight problem we have is that our in-roof PV panels are fitted with the lower edges flush with the edges of the slates, but are about 20 to 30mm higher. In very heavy rain this causes water to overshoot the gutter in two places. I'm thinking about fitting wider gutters to try and alleviate the problem.
  3. Jeremy Harris
    Not sure if it's just the angle of the photo or not, but that tile adhesive dob looks pretty thick, almost as thick as the tiles. I'm no expert at tiling, but I've always used a toothed spreader to lay a complete covering of adhesive, to a fairly constant thickness, with the grooves allowing the tiles to be pushed down to the right depth to be flush with each other. Not sure of the right way to work, but I've tended to cover enough for a row and a bit of tiles at a time, rather than just dob stuff on for each tile.
  4. Jeremy Harris
    The chances are it's a standard bearing, so with luck you may be able to get one from someone like Bearing Boys: https://www.bearingboys.co.uk/ (no affiliation, but they've always provided great service when I've used them). Usually the bearing will have the size code marked on it, together with the code for the type of shield/seal. For example, sat on my desk in front of me I have a box of 6000-2Z bearings, which are 26mm OD, 10mm ID, 8mm thick, with double shields. If you can read a number like this on the bearing face, then with luck you may be able to find a replacement fairly easily.
  5. Jeremy Harris
    Another vote for it being a problem caused by fixings. I think there is a very good reason that our resident expert plumber/bathroom fitter/heating engineer gets a bit focussed on using lots and lots of fixings! My experience with slight movement in our house has been that there is a small (perhaps 0.5mm) shrinkage of the skim plaster away from most of the windows, and a dozen or so pops in the skim where screws are, plus a very fine crack that appeared in a joint between two bits of plasterboard high up in the entrance gable (since filled and repainted and now seems fine). The main area where there was shrinkage was the additional MDF covered thin "stud" wall I added to build our walk-in wardrobe. That stayed in one ~4m long, ~2.2m high piece, but shrank away from the ceiling and wall joints on either side by around 1mm. My guess is that it's because I didn't leave enough time for the timber to stabilise inside the house before I built the wall. Since filling and re-painting it it's not moved at all. It's hard to see how shrinkage in the structure could force the board to bow out that much if it was secured well to the walls.
  6. Jeremy Harris
    Yes, I can, but it'll have to be next week, as I don't have it over here at the moment. It looks as if the Spraytech brand name has now morphed into Titan, as far as I can tell, although it's a bit confusing trying to work out who makes what. The Titan 400 looks very similar to the Spraytech I have, from looking at stuff on the web, and the guns and hose look identical.
  7. Jeremy Harris
    I just dressed the DPM down over the exposed EPS insulation, then put expanded metal mesh against it for rodent protection. The upper part of this (the bit above ground level) I covered with a 200mm wide black uPVC fascia board, the lower part is covered with crushed stone, either as a narrow strip where we have paths or the patio up to the house (three sides) or decorative stone at the front. This would work with either cladding (we have larch cladding all around) or with render board. Others have used aluminium flashing, which is available in a wider range of powder coated colours.
  8. Jeremy Harris
    Trying to unravel the OEM for these things seems a bit of a minefield, with many of the lower price units seemingly being badged units that are really made by someone else. It looks very much as if the market leaders kit has just been cloned some time in the past, as there looks to be a lot of interchangeability between units. For example, the gun for the unit I have looks absolutely identical to at least four others with different brand names. The piston pump unit on mine looks to be pretty near-identical to several others, too. Having run it up to give it a quick test, just spraying water to make sure it was OK, the things I noticed were that the pump makes a fair bit of noise (about the same as a direct drive air compressor) and that the hose gets pretty stiff when the system is pressurised - I don't think it would be easy to use without the swivel fitting at the gun. The way the pump turns on and off as you pull the trigger takes a bit of getting used to, as well. The nozzle on mine is a 515, so a 10" spray pattern, 15 thou orifice. Looking at it it seems to be identical to the nozzles used on several different makes of gun, which also makes me suspect that there's a bit of badge engineering going on.
  9. Jeremy Harris
    My approach to maintainability was a bit of a mix. For some things in the house, I have just bought a fairly large stock of spares, perhaps the best example being the UV water disinfection unit, as the lamps are hard to source for a reasonable price now, two years after I fitted the thing. I've got a ten year stock and have accepted that the whole unit will almost certainly need to be replaced by then, as I doubt the right size lamps will still be available. For the heating/cooling/DHW system I took the view that it needed to be able to be repaired or maintained by any reasonably competent heating engineer or plumber, in the future. To that end the thermostats could be pretty much any dry contact thermostat, and the relays are a very common standard DIN rail component that should be around for decades. I've documented things with detailed wiring and layout drawings, plus a bit of text describing how it works. My main worry with the microcontroller system I spent many, many hours developing, was that it was very unlikely that any heating engineer would ever be able to figure out how to diagnose a fault, let alone fix it.
  10. Jeremy Harris
    I have two Computherm Q3RF 'stats on the wall in the hall, one above the other. The top one is set up as the cooling 'stat, the lower one as the heating 'stat. Generally they both are within about 0.1 deg C of each other, and both seem to be very close to the temperature indicated by an NPL calibrated mercury lab thermometer I've got, so I think they are fairly well calibrated as standard. It's a pity that Computherm don't make a remote sensor version of this 'stat, as that would then mean you could have a fairly common set up for both air and fluid temperature control.
  11. Jeremy Harris
    It is, and my thinking was similar to yours, instrument the house and collate a fair bit of data, then look at how to best control things. The only problem I had was trying not to get sucked down into the sort of "continuing complexity vortex", just because it seemed like a fun thing to do. The system I've ended up with wasn't fun or challenging to put together, but does have the advantage of only using three, off-the-shelf thermostats, plus four plug-in DIN rail relays, all of which can be replaced pretty easily. Despite the simplicity of just using a room temperature thermostat to control the whole house temperature, in practice it does seem to do a very good job.
  12. Jeremy Harris
    Sounds good to me, hard to tell from a photo what the finished construction is going to look like.
  13. Jeremy Harris
    Out of interest, how is the potentially massive thermal bridge at that wall/floor junction mitigated? Is there going to be insulation on the outer face to stop that long stretch of floor edge getting cold in winter?
  14. Jeremy Harris
    FWIW, I have a couple of the DTC-100 units and they have 0.1 deg C hysteresis, but 0.5 deg C accuracy. They would make pretty good pipe or tank stats, I think, as you can adjust both the on and off set points.
  15. Jeremy Harris
    I had a look at the prices of the Graco and that model seems to sell for around £700 to £800. FWIW, I paid around a tenth of that for the second hand (but only used once, as far as I can tell) Spraytech, which is an entry-level model similar in capacity. There seems to be a massive variation in price between the same machine from different suppliers. I wasn't looking to buy one of these when I was offered the one I've just bought, it was an impulse buy. Since then I've had a look around and found many identical machines sold under different names, so I'm guessing that a lot of them are made in the far East and just badged for different markets.
  16. Jeremy Harris
    I've just had a look around, and it seems that fwbackups gets good reviews, is open source and works on different platforms. It's also in the main Linux repositories, so easy to install. It has a pretty straightforward GUI interface, so should be easy to use for those that don't want to write scripts or delve into the command line. There are more details here: http://www.diffingo.com/oss/fwbackups
  17. Jeremy Harris
    Brilliant! I just knew that those old rolls of cable I've been hoarding would come in handy one day. I like the way they've done a Microsoft, and skipped a version number..........................
  18. Jeremy Harris
    I've just tried it from a Windows machine and get the same error on both links. Not sure what it means, but there are a few here that can probably make sense of it. I'll try it from a Linux machine in a minute, to see if there's a difference. Edited to add: It's just the same on this laptop that's running Linux Mint 18.1, so it looks like it may be a server-related problem.
  19. Jeremy Harris
    I back up to a 1Tb USB 3 external disk every evening. Under Linux you can set up a chron task to do this using rsync, but it does mean getting to grips with the command line (nowhere near as daunting as it first seems). Under Windows you can use Synctoy (free from Microsoft) and then set up a scheduled task using the task scheduler that's included with Windows. Synctoy has to be set up with folder pairs, so a folder on your main PC is synced to a folder on the backup disk. I had mine set up to "contribute", which meant that the sync was one-way, from the PC to the external drive. Once folder pairs are set up, you can then set up a task in the task scheduler to run Synctoy at a specific periodicity. The PC needs to be on or in standby for the task scheduler to work (it will wake up a PC from standby OK). There may well be similar tools available for Linux, I didn't really look as I wanted to get to grips with the command line and some of the built in features in Linux.
  20. Jeremy Harris
    The garage walls are OSB, so I can use those for practice, perhaps starting on a bit that will be hidden by racking. Mine hasn't got an extension, but I've been looking at them this morning, as they don't seem to be expensive.
  21. Jeremy Harris
    Good news about it being better with cheap emulsion, as I've just bought loads of cheap trade white, as it's only a garage! I can't quite understand why the hire price is so high, as a reasonably good unit can be bought new for around £300. It may be because they have to factor in the cost of nozzles and servicing the pump. The pump not only needs cleaning out, but also needs lubricating every time it's used, with a special (and expensive) lubricant. Nozzles are reported to last for somewhere between 100 to 400 litres of paint, depending on the type of paint (exterior stuff apparently wears the nozzle faster then something like emulsion). The lubricant is around £15 to £20 for a small bottle, nozzles are around £6 each, and the hire people may just replace nozzles before each hire, so with the labour cost of servicing between hires I can see that it could cost them £20 to £30 or so, perhaps more. I'll give some feedback on how I get on with this unit, probably later next week (if I get the garage cleared out so I can paint it.........).
  22. Jeremy Harris
    I turn the buffer off when cooling, as I use the buffer to pre-heat the DHW, so need to keep it warm in summer. Also, the ASHP doesn't seem to need the buffer in cooling mode, perhaps because the temperature differential between the outside air temperature and the flow temperature is a fair bit lower. I have mine set to deliver 40 deg C flow temp in heating mode and 12 deg C flow temp in cooling mode, which seems to be just about right, with the floor surface temperature not getting below about 18 deg C in cooling mode and above about 22.5 to 23 deg C in heating mode.
  23. Jeremy Harris
    The reason I decided that fine control was necessary has a great deal to do with the thermal response time of the whole house. I've found that putting even a couple of degrees more heat in, as a result of a high hysteresis room thermostat, means that the house room temperature overshoots, just from residual heat in the slab continuing to heat the house for several hours after the heating has turned off. Being able to shut the heating system off at precisely 20.5 deg C, means the room temperature only overshoots by less than 1 deg C, so stays below about 22 deg C during the overshoot period. Even in the coldest weather our heating only fires up once in the morning, and never comes on after mid-morning, as the residual heat in the slab just keeps heating the house until the next morning, a bit like a storage heater. The Computherm Q3RF room stat is about as simple as these things can get, with just a temperature setting and a small slide switch to select normal or set back temperature (both temperatures can be adjusted) .
  24. Jeremy Harris
    Thanks for all the positive comments, I shall probably have a go at painting the garage next week. Getting used to using the thing in the garage seems a good idea, as I'm not really fussed about the finish, I just want to brighten it up with a couple of coats of white emulsion.
  25. Jeremy Harris
    Yes, I used Computherm room stats, one for heating, one for cooling. The ones I used had a 1 deg C hysteresis as standard, that was adjustable to 0.1 deg C by moving a link on the back. They were these ones: https://thermostats4u.co.uk/products/computherm-q3rf For the buffer tank stat I used a standard mechanical remote probe thermostat, a Drayton I think, that has around 5 deg C hysteresis. That seems to work well on the buffer, as it cuts out at 40 deg C and back in at about 35 deg C.
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