Jeremy Harris

Was it done with flexible plasterboard? The flexible stuff bends on one axis enough to get a curve, as long as the radius isn't too tight.

But isn't the legislation just to provide something like coverage to 95% of the population? Doesn't really help the 5% who happen to live in valleys that have no coverage.

I agree, and know from how long it took me to collate all our receipts and fill in and check their paperwork, plus answer their questions afterwards, that they probably spent several man-hours of work on just processing our claim, which was for around £10k. I doubt all their checking was at all cost-effective to the tax-payer; logically it would have made more sense to just pay the claim without checking it. I doubt they ever recover the cost of all this checking from withholding incorrectly reclaimed VAT, TBH.

The problem is that there isn't enough profit to be made by installing even small cellular masts in rural areas. Large areas of Wiltshire have either no signal or a pretty poor signal, because the network is focussed on providing coverage in larger towns and along main roads. As many of the villages here are in deep valleys cut into the plain, and most of the major roads run along the plain, the coverage in many of the villages is pretty grim. The same goes for terrestrial TV (many villages here just lost terrestrial TV with the digital switch-over) and DAB radio. We can just about get VHF FM radio, but even with a roof mounted DAB aerial we can't get a signal at all.

The separate fan ones were what gave me the idea to plumb the pan to the MVHR, as they've been around for some time. The idea originated with a Malaysian company, GBH Group, and they still manufacture the original "Odourbuster" (that a couple of chancers on Dragon's Den claimed was their own product!). The brochure on that system is here: http://gbhgroup.com.my/images/product/bathroom/latest-products/odourbuster/odourbuster.pdf It's a bit complex for what it is, and there are other systems that just connect direct to the cistern, but with a fan and a carbon filter to remove the odour.

Sadly I can't even get a decent voice mobile signal at the new house, much less data! I did fit a repeater and a high gain yagi mounted on a pole above the roof, pointing at the nearest mast, but even then I can only "just" get a weak signal within around 10ft of the internal repeater antenna. Not good enough for a data connection and illegal to use, anyway, so now the landline is fitted I've turned the thing off. I've left it installed, so if we lost the landline phone we could at least have an emergency mobile, but frankly it was never that reliable when I was using it every day during the build.

My friend up in Yorkshire binned the Italian actuators, that sat in a chamber under and adjacent to the gate posts, and made new ones up with beefy geared motors and a massive chain drive to the new actuating arm. It helps that he runs a steel fabrication company, making mezzanine floors (http://www.factory-fit.com/) so has access to just about any machine tool etc he needed. Somewhere I have a photo of the new actuators he made up; they were a work of art compared with the originals.

It is open to abuse, to a limited extent. Say, as a hypothetical case, you are self-building a new house, but still own an old house that needs work doing on it before you sell it. You could, if you were dishonest, buy the materials to do up your old house and add them to the VAT reclaim for the new build. The problem is that if anyone does this and gets caught then the penalty can be pretty severe. From the tone of the correspondence I had with HMRC, which was full of warnings about being prosecuted for various offences, and from the very thorough way they went through all the receipts, I don't think anyone could get away with much without getting caught. They seem to do all the obvious things, like compare the number of sinks, washbasins, WCs etc with those on the plans, and I got the distinct feeling that they wouldn't hesitate to investigate, with a view to prosecution, if they found something that looked awry.

From the experience two friends of mine have had with electric gates I think "repairable" is the number one priority! One of them, up in East Yorkshire, ended up removing the actuators and linkage stuff within a year and designing his own, as he was fed up with the thing failing, usually in high winds. IIRC he had around 4 or 5 warranty repairs and when the warranty was up he decided to just re-engineer the whole electromechanical side of the thing to make it reliable. The other has had similar reliability problems, but in his case it's the control system that isn't very reliable. He has an intercom from the gate to the house (the house is around 100m away) together with remote operation from the house, and the major problem has been that the external electronics just weren't very weather proof. He's also very fussy about the way it looks, so wasn't happy when I suggested just relocating all the controls into a properly sealed enclosure.

It would, but it doesn't bond well to PVC, whereas stuff like neutral cure silicone does (most acetoxy cure silicones don't bond that well, I've found). Some neutral cure silicones, and modified silicone polymers (like CT1) will bond well to almost anything. I've been impressed with the way Dow Corning 799 bonds to PVC in particular, as it's a fairly cheap and readily available sealant/adhesive that seems to be a good all-rounder, despite being primarily intended as a glazing sealant.

The Cat6 may not be running as Ethernet cable, though, it could be a proprietary protocol for the gate controls. The only gate control system I worked on, for a friend, used phone cable as the link, with something a bit like RS485 as the signalling protocol.

Being careful is what it's all about, as it's not always easy to see things like the assumptions they use when publishing tariffs! For us, EDF are a fair bit more expensive than SSE, but then there are pretty big variations from one post code region to another.

Cat6 has a minimum allowable bend radius of 26mm, Cat5 is 20mm (IIRC). 26mm radius is too tight, IMHO, and I'd not go tighter than 50mm bend radius with Cat6. If all your bends are over 30mm bend radius you should be OK, but the general rule is to have as few bends as possible, and keep them as gentle as you can.

I mentioned in another thread recently about the challenges in actually finding really reliable and accurate tariff information, in order to make an accurate comparison, using the standing charge and the unit price. It was far from easy, as the price comparison websites don't have good information, and don't even seem to give the best deals going. Even getting accurate information from a shortlist of suppliers meant several phone calls, as the tariff rates on the websites didn't seem to tally with what they were actually offering. The biggest single problem I had was finding out where the discounts for paperless billing, direct debits etc were actually taken from. Two suppliers just refused to tell me, and one felt that I didn't really need to know, and when I insisted (because it makes a difference if you are a low user as to whether the discount comes off the standing charge or the unit price) they were incredibly reluctant to let me know, I had to remind them that they had an obligation to tell me what they were going to charge me.................

If that's the case then I suspect the cable's on the small side. I was wondering a bit why a gate needed 16mm2............... We needed 25mm2 SWA for the underground run from our external meter box to the house CU, as the voltage drop was marginal with 16mm2. I used three core 25mm2 with standard the right colour cores (not essential, but is saves taping/sleeving the wrong colour cores at the ends). I also did as Dave suggested earlier, and fitted an 80A fuse in the isolator, for the same reason. As for the spacing, the Openreach guy was pretty hot on making sure we maintained 300mm separation between their duct and the DNO's duct with a diverted supply that was in the same trench, to the extent of checking before we backfilled (this was one of their 20 pair cables that was being relocated from overhead, along with the power cable). As Onoff says, induction is the thing they are bothered about.

Welcome. No, I'm afraid you can't claim VAT back on anything after completion, nor can any VAT registered contractor do work without charging you VAT. There's a current thread about VAT reclaim that's got some further info that you may find useful, including a link to the VAT guidance from HMRC in a later post there:

First off, if the pressure on the manifold side of the softener is even a tiny bit higher than that on the inlet side I think there is a risk that the situation we had may occur. Once this happens, it doesn't self-correct when the pressure differential is sorted out, water continues to flow slowly into the brine tank until the softener is isolated and then the pressure released, using the valves and an open outlet on the house-side. When the valves are then operated in the correct sequence (outlet valve closed, inlet valve and main supply stop cock opened, bypass valve closed, outlet valve opened) the softener resumes as normal, but the brine tank needs to be emptied of excess brine and there is a chance that there will be brine in the water supply, too (we had pipes full of salty water that had to be flushed). Having experienced this, I think I would be extremely reluctant to fit an accumulator on the manifold side of the softener, attractive as it may seem in terms of buffering the pressure loss in the softener itself. I guess you could fit a 2 bar PRedV in place of the bypass, but they are usually also NRVs, so I'd be concerned about the pressure differential issue. I keep meaning to call Harvey's about this, as it's not clear from anything I've read from them that this reverse-pressure problem can occur. It may well be that it's not something that happens except under a very rare set of circumstances, as we only had it happen once. In our case the higher pressure on the outlet side was because of the small pressure vessel on the old thermal store; it was enough to retain a 3.5 bar head on the outlet side with the valve closed, and I'd released the pressure on the inlet side deliberately to alter the upstream pipe work. I just didn't think it mattered whether I opened the inlet side or outlet side valves in any particular order when I turned everything back on, and the outlet side valve was nearest..............

By preference I prefer using 3 core SWA, but have installed one run of 1.5mm two core where I've used the armour as the earth conductor. If you do use 3 core you still have to bond the armour banjo/piranha to the internal earth conductor, so it is a bit "belt and braces". The equivalent copper cross sectional area of the steel armour is usually greater than the core CSA for most domestic size range SWA cables, so using the armour is overkill in terms of conductivity. My preference for using 3 core, with the right colour codes, is that you have a continuous earth conductor, that doesn't have any joints, whereas with two core using the armour the integrity of the armour-to-gland connection is critical, long-term. Having witnessed a supposedly competent and ticket-holding electrician leave off the collet ring on an IP66 gland, and then tell me when I pointed it out (I was walking by and saw the brass ring sitting on the ground next to the "finished" termination) that "oh, those aren't really needed, the nut will do the job", together with poorly fitted banjos (pretty common to have them fitted in the wrong place), I've never been that comfortable with using two core. Having said that, piranha nuts have eliminated the banjo issue and made it easy to make a reliable earth connection to the gland, so as long as the steel is properly secured there's no reason to think there should be a problem.

Same as mine. 100mm of EPS outboard of the door threshold instead of the 200mm everywhere else, because of the rebate cut into the EPS upstand to support the door frame. Not a biggie in terms of being a thermal bridge, as all around the frame of the door is a hell of a lot worse!

When Itho Daalderop were selling via UK retailers (which is how I bought our Itho Dolce) their service was very good indeed. We had an early version of the Dolce stainless tap originally, and after about a year it started to leak on the boiling water side. I removed the ceramic cassette and it was clear that there was a manufacturing defect; the inlet drilling was right on the edge of the silicone rubber seal area, so the ceramic cassette seal had just folded under slightly at that point, hence the leak. I sent photos to the supplier (Kitchens UK?, I think) and they sent them on to Itho in Holland. A chap from Itho contacted me very promptly, explained they had changed the design to fix this problem and they were sending me a new tap and fittings under warranty. The new Dolce tap that arrived is a slightly different design to the original, but is a better design internally and seems very well made and reliable so far. When I tried to find the same tap again I found that Itho seemed to have done a deal with Franke, as the Franke Minerva tap now looks identical to the Itho Dolce tap we now have, with the sole difference externally being that the Franke has their name on the base. Itho do sell direct in the UK, via an outlet called Ithouk, but their prices are just ridiculous, they want £672 just for the 5 litre boiler, for example, which is close to the amount we paid for the whole 3 way tap, boiler, water softener filter, pressure relief valve, flow adjuster, tundish etc as a kit. I have a feeling that Itho Daalderop make the boiler and Franke make the taps, as Itho seem mainly to be a boiler and water heater company. Looking around it seems that the original Franke Minerva, the version with the flat handle rather than the round handle, this one: is still being sold here, and this is the design that has the poor arrangement of inlet drilling on the boiling water side. The new Itho Dolce tap (the new design that has the drilling moved to the centre, away from the seal) looks different, and has a round bar handle, like this:

This is something I thought long and hard about, too, for much the same reasons. In my case, I already had to get a big three phase underground cable moved as a part of the initial site ground works, so I had it relocated so that it runs directly under the location of our external meter cabinet. In the end I decided not to have a three phase installation, but really only because it would be fairly simple to change it later - just a matter of digging a hole to where the current underground joint is, around 2m of new cable, a new meter and switching to a three phase tariff. One of the reasons I didn't fit three phase was that the price of fast charge EVSEs is very high, compared to a 32A single phase EVSE (the highest one can go with the standard J1772 / IEC 62196 cable and connectors), and few EVs seem to be able to use the three phase IEC 62196 capability in practice; many seem to just use a single phase when AC charging, or CHAdeMO (or Tesla Supercharger) for DC charging. It looks to me as if fast AC charging isn't going to be the way EVs develop; my guess is that they will go down the Tesla Supercharger / CHAdeMO route. So, I've got one 15A charge point and one 30A charge point, both single phase and in different parking locations. In reality, an overnight charge at 30A is around 25 range miles per hour, so easily a couple of hundred miles overnight, perhaps a fair bit more.

The simplest way to do this might be to use a cheap thermal switch bonded to the waste pipe and fed to the MVHR dry contact boost connection. Something like this: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/KSD-9700-Temperature-Switch-Thermostat-Thermal-Protectors-20-and-25-degrees-/281790336437?var=&hash=item419c034db5:m:mQq9kyBHVG4C7euaGe1_h1g They are out of stock of the normally open ones you would want, but a 25 deg C normally open thermal switch should do the job OK. Edited to add: Alternatively, if you don't mind running a 12V supply nearby and want adjustment, then the cheap thermostat units from China are pretty versatile, have dry contacts and are adjustable over a wide range: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Hot-DC-12V-Digital-LED-Thermostat-Temperature-Control-Switch-Module-XH-W1209-TC-/391659881408?hash=item5b30bf83c0:g:95sAAOSwA3dYXVNl

I did the same in the end, too. I got the best price I could for the "slates" (in our case Ikoslate, which are really plastic) and then found that a big local roofing company quoted a better price, and gave a reasonable guarantee on the whole roof, if they supplied and fitted the slates, so that's what I did. Had I bought the slates I'd not have had as good a guarantee, I'd have been out of pocket for the VAT for a fair time and I'd have paid a little bit more for the slates, too.

True, but they are all on the input side, and they still give a 1 bar variation in pressure between the pump cut-in and cut-out pressure, so as far as the input to the softener is concerned it sees between 2.5 bar and 3.5 bar incoming pressure, so it's just the same as a mains supply with that amount of normal variation.

No, the filter was a very expensive (for what it was) ion-exchange resin cartridge, which annoyed me a bit, although it was included in the kit price of around £700 for the whole thing, stainless tap, under-plinth 5 litre boiler, pressure relief valve etc. I tried to buy some replacement cartridges and found they were over £60 each! That's what prompted me to cut the supplied cartridge in half and find out what was in it. I was more than a little surprised to find it had around 50 pence worth of ion exchange resin in, the same as in an ion exchange water softener, but pre-charged. Sadly Itho Daalderop seem to have sold the UK marketing to others now, so the unit is marketed in the UK by Franke, as their Minerva (or if it's not, then the Minerva is an exact copy!), and the stainless Itho Dolce I bought can only be purchased (at a very inflated price) from their new Ithouk outlet, unless you want to import one from somewhere else in Europe.