Jeremy Harris

I agree. I think we paid 30% with the order and the remainder on delivery for our supply-only kitchen. Just as well as we had a lot of missing/damaged parts because the idiot lorry driver hadn't secured the load inside and it had slid around all over the back of his truck. Not only that, but the same idiot lorry driver ripped up the freshly laid pavers on our drive, smashed the kerb stones when he drove over them and dented the alloy dry verge on our gable when he threw open the truck door, not realising it would hit the roof............. I think we had around £1500 or so in compensation from them, all told, plus loads of replacement bits of kitchen. Not a supplier I'd use again, or recommend to anyone. The kitchen was fine, very good value in fact, but they screwed up the VAT, as well as the delivery.

The council should have a point of contact for whoever looks after those properties, so a dig around on their website and a few phone calls is probably the best way forward. They can refuse permission, but it can't hurt to ask, as it doesn't look from the plan as if it would be very disruptive. If you can ask the resident of the property if you can look in the garden of that house, to locate the stop cock marked, and take a few photos and measurements then you'd be better armed if you end up talking to a council jobsworth, perhaps. The council should be well-acquainted with way leaves and should understand that the water co will have responsibility for the pipe, anyway, so I can't see any major problems, other than the council wanting to charge you a disproportionate fee, perhaps.

Yes, we have the same Harvey softener, but ours is badged TwinTec (identical inside to yours, though, I've since found out). We had those same 11mm bore pipes, and I fitted stainless braided proper large bore hoses to mine (IIRC around 19mm bore) then hooked it up to 22mm copper that has the three full flow ball valves needed to bypass it or shut it off for servicing. IIRC, I bought the large bore flexis from somewhere like Pipestock in Romsey (I've had very good service from them, BTW). I bought a spare complete Harvey softener on Ebay for £80, that was described as "new, not working" and found that it was indeed brand new, not even wet inside from testing, with a manufacturing date on the parts that was only a couple of months old. The suspicious thing to me was that the seller was in Woking, which, coincidentally, where Harvey softeners are made................ I tested it and found that there was a fault with the water meter on top, fixed in about half an hour because the only problem was one of the gear trains inside had been wrongly assembled. I keep it next to the one we have in service, so if there is ever a problem I can just swap them over.

You can usually use a phone as a hotspot, or failing that a mifi type device. I have an old 3G one here if you want it and want to put a SIM in it. We used it so my wife could use her wifi only iPad when away, but now I just use my Android tablet as a hotspot instead.

What they seem to be saying is that although they already have way leaves in place for the properties under which that other pipe runs, they would rather not negotiate one with the owner of "number 1" in your plan. There's nothing to stop you doing this though. If the owner of "number 1" is agreeable, then you can get a way leave agreement drawn up and connect to that main. As the connection to your plot would then be a communication pipe, it would become the responsibility of the water co once in service, and they would need to make the connections at either end. Well worth having a chat to the owner of "number 1" and seeing if they are agreeable. The water company seem to be implying that they would be unwilling to use their statutory powers to cross that land, but there's nothing at all to stop you coming to an agreement with the land owner. The way leave would need to be granted to the water co, but I can't see a major issue there, they do this all the time. It's usual under these circumstances to offer a one-off inconvenience payment to the owner of the land you want to dig up, but frankly I can't see that being massive, unless that neighbour is particularly opposed to your development.

Thanks for that, Terry. Having acquired my first RPi (a RPi3) in December, I have to say I found the learning curve, in terms of setting up the LAMP stack, installing Wordpress and then setting up automatic backups from our web site was remarkably straightforward, my hat goes off to the RPi developers for making this stuff work so seamlessly. When I tried to do the same in Windows 7 last year it was a bit of a nightmare by comparison. Getting back to logging, I have now set up a logger to record the slab centre surface temperature, so together with the data I already log from the house built-in sensors I should be able to post a reasonable data set in a couple of weeks. I think it needs a fair time to be sure we get enough outside temperature variation to be able to test a model over as wide a range of conditions as possible. As an aside, the portable logger that I've just moved indoors has been sat in our water treatment plant "shed", a timber building at the rear of the house, outside the house thermal envelope, that houses two 300 litre accumulators, the ozone generator and contact tank and the main filtration system tank. I fitted a frost protection heater in there, with a stat set to come on at 4 deg C, and wanted to see how it dealt with the sub-zero temperatures we had during a few nights over the monitoring period. The data's interesting, as the coldest the inside of this shed got was 4.3 deg C, and then only on one night. It sat at around 8 to 9 deg C pretty much all the time. The other interesting thing is that when the filtration system backwashes, the shed temperature increases very rapidly to 9 deg C - so rapidly that there are big spikes every 4 days when the data is plotted. That's just from the accumulators being completely emptied and refilled with warmer borehole water, that must still be coming in at around 9 deg C, even in mid-winter. It seems that I probably didn't need to fit the tubular heater and frost stat in there at all, as the incoming "warm" water will be more than enough to keep the shed warm enough to prevent freezing. It also means that my calcs for the DHW capacity need revising, to allow for having a warmer cold supply than I had thought.

That's a good description of what happens with PVC plasticisers, pretty clearly explained, too. It also highlights the health concerns with pthalate plasticisers, something I think was first raised around 30 or so years ago in the context of PVC food and water containers and most probably the reason ST's mate was concerned about the stuff evaporating out of his dash.

That paper was really looking at the way plasticisers migrate from PVC over long time periods in air, specifically in the context of long-term reliability for use in nuclear plants, where access may not be possible for 50 years. It supports the evidence from elsewhere that plasticisers so evaporate out over time, particularly at elevated temperatures. This is the car dash problem, where the windscreen gets a coat of plasticiser and the dash plastic ends up brittle. With PVC cables the effect happens at normal temperatures when they are touching polystyrene, especially EPS, but chemically XPS is practically the same, so I'd expect it to have the same effect. It doesn't take long for this to happen, either. When we bought our old house the previous owner had done a lot of DIY (renovating it to sell I'm sure, as everything looked new). One thing he'd done was lay some chipboard flooring in the loft, for storage space. When we had cable run in, I had to lift some of that flooring to get a cable feed to my study, where the cable modem was going to be. What I found was that there was EPS laid under the chipboard flooring and wherever it had been touching a cable it had a brown streak across it, not from heat, but from the plasticiser in the cables. At best that insulation had been down for two years, probably less, so it doesn't take long for adverse effects to appear.

It is, yes. The LD50 is a measure of acute response, not long-term, low level exposure. The question in the case of the car dash stuff is really about what the exposure level would be and how long someone would be exposed to it. Cars are pretty well ventilated, especially in hot weather when the problem arises. I'm pretty sure it's also a problem that's gone away now, too. The last car where I can recall getting that nasty film build up on the inside of the windscreen was a mid-80's Peugeot 205. I can't say I've seen it at all for many years now. Mind you, the dash in the Prius is made from a vegetable based plastic, and it's lack of toxicity was one of the original selling points pack when the car first came out.

I agree. The SIM that's in my tablet is a Phonecoop one and that allows (I think) up to 5 devices to be tethered if I use it as a hotspot. I rarely do, as it only gets used for mobile data when out of the house, and only gets used as a mobile hotspot when we're away somewhere, but I can't see why the networks should be bothered. They are just selling you a service and data package, and arguably you pay more if you use more data, so they make more money, and tethering increases the likelihood that you will use more data. Seems daft to impose a restriction to me.

The story is pretty accurate. The nasty film that built up inside windscreens was condensed out plasticiser, the question would be whether it was sufficiently carcinogenic to cause a health risk. Pretty much everything around us is toxic to some degree, it depends where you want to start worrying about it! The LD50 of dihydrogen monoxide (roughly the dose that will kill 50% of those who ingest it) is around 90ml/kg body weight, so for me at 80kg that's a dose of around 7.2 litres.

Our problem is no mobile signal and only a slow'ish FTTC VDSL2 service, as our cable run from the cabinet is pretty long. The map for the Wessex Internet service has a "hole" right where we are, too!

If you have a source it's be useful. Looking at the chemistry, LSF seems to be very similar to unmodified PVC in terms of the way the plasticiser is bound with the polymer. LSF is PVC based, whereas LSHF isn't PVC based. Someone needs to do some more testing to get another Installation Method in table 4A2, now that many new builds will have cables running pretty much embedded in rockwool, rather than in contact with a surface. In my ceilings the cables are clipped to the posijoists, but have 150mm of rockwool in close contact with them all around, and I suspect that sort of installation is now pretty common in new builds.

PIR is OK generally, as it's usually covered with foil, and PU insulation isn't at all common, in my limited experience. Sheet insulation seems to be either polystyrene-based (EPS or XPS) or isocyanate based, like PIR. Although PUR is available, it has always been expensive whenever I've looked around. LSF is just a low smoke and fume formulation of PVC, AFAIK, so to be safe it should be treated as if it were PVC and not used in contact with EPS or one of the very few sealants or expanding foams that attack PVC. LSHF is a different formulation and is not based on modified PVC, so should be OK, but I've seen no test evidence to support that view, it's solely from looking at the chemistry of the stuff. As such I'd treat LSHF as being susceptible to plasticiser leaching if in contact with EPS until proved otherwise.

Nice to see this clearly set down. I've lost count of the number of completely false tales I've heard about such and such a material attacks cables, when it doesn't at all. There seems to be a lot of confusion around about this, even in the trade. EPS is the real problem material, as the above highlights, as it can leach the plasticiser from some forms of PVC, but over the years most common sealants and expanding foams seem to have been made "cable safe" and usually say so. The issue of cables in insulation is now pretty significant in many new builds, I suspect. Building regs require acoustic insulation in ceilings and stud walls, and often dense rockwool is used. This is a pretty good thermal insulator, too. In our build around 80% or more of the cable runs were in the ceiling or stud walls, and so are effectively enclosed in insulation for much of their length, and needed to be de-rated in accordance with Appendix 4 of the regs, bearing in mind that there's no Installation Method for cables run in rockwool (at least none of the tables in my copy of BS7671 detail it - not sure if it's now in Amendment 3 or not), so some judgement needs to be applied. The closest is Installation Method 101/102 in table 4A2, but that assumes a cable in contact with the inside of a wall surface, and that may not be the case in a well-insulated build.

I've just dug out the information I collected when we were looking at adding an extra borehole to run a GSHP; sorry for the delay but I'd archived all the old correspondence and had to dig it out. We had a hydro-geological survey done and that contains information about both the water borehole and the GSHP borehole that we didn't end up drilling (BTW, I can recommend a very good chap for this sort of survey, and the price was very reasonable too, £250 plus VAT - PM me if you want contact details). We only needed around 4 kW maximum output from the system, and the borehole needed to deliver this would have been 80m deep for the geology where we are. Very roughly, and assuming that the £1k or so rig mobilisation cost is already paid by the needed ground survey boreholes (not so sure about that in reality, they probably need a much smaller rig) then you're looking at around £80 to £100/metre to drill, line and grout a borehole around our area, so around £6.4k to £8k plus mobilisation cost to just drill the hole, plus around £200 for the down-hole collector and another £250 for the antifreeze. Worth noting that the antifreeze needs to be accounted for when assessing performance, as both propylene glycol and ethylene glycol mixtures are around 20% worse than plain water (at 20% concentration) when it comes to heat transfer efficiency, as all glycols have both a significantly reduced heat capacity and reduced thermal conductivity when compared with water. I found that some manufacturers tested and specified their systems based on running pure water, rather than antifreeze mixtures in the primary loop, to enhance, on paper, their performance. A bit naughty, in my view, but you do need to read the small print carefully to see how they derived the performance data they quote. The same applies to ASHPs, as well, as they run the same antifreeze and inhibitor mixtures, but at very much smaller volume (I think there's about £20 worth of antifreeze in our ASHP system, compared with over £400 worth for an equivalent power output GSAP system). ASHPs are more critical in terms of making sure the primary antifreeze concentration is high enough, because their internal plate heat exchangers are more likely to experience very cold temperatures when the units are turned off, say when there's a power cut in winter. When it comes to cost, I was quoted £4k supply only for the smallest GSHP I could find, a little 4 kW Kensa unit (good firm, BTW, very helpful, and knowledgeable too). The total cost of a 4 kW max borehole based GSHP (2013 prices) was around £12500, with me doing the setting up and commissioning. In the end, I bought a 7 kW max ASHP (a decent one, with inverter control, badged Glowworm, but really made by Carrier, one of the biggest manufacturers of heat pumps around) for £1700 including delivery and installed it in a bit over half a day, plus a day of waiting time for the concrete foundation pad to cure. Total install cost, including antifreeze and inhibitor, was under £2k. Not a fair comparison in many ways, as the ASHP was very much more a DIY install than the GSHP could have been. I'll admit to it taking me a fair time to work out how best to set up and run the ASHP, probably a day or more of my time, spent over a couple of weeks, testing and adjusting settings. I learned by experiment that ASHPs do not like operating with a flow temperature that's much higher than about 40 deg C, especially in cool, damp, weather (the worst case is around 4 deg C with high humidity) because they start running defrosting cycles. They do this by reversing the cycle, pumping heat out, like an air con unit, to melt the ice on what is normally the evaporator, but which becomes the condenser when reversed like this. As I didn't want to use the heat pump to produce hot water, just act as a preheating system for a phase change material heat store instant heater (the Sunamp PV) I wasn't bothered about not being able to deliver more than about 40 deg C flow, as our UFH only runs at 24 deg C anyway. If you do want hot water at, say, 50 deg C, then there are now some very good hybrid heat pump/combi boilers available. They will run on LPG, if you don't have mains gas, but don't use much gas because the ASHP heats the water to about 40 deg C and then all the combi bit has to do is boost that by around 10 deg C. As before, if you want info on borehole drillers or the hydro-geological survey chap, feel free to PM me and I'll pass the details over. Given what we went through with our borehole I'd be happier keeping company names off the forum, out of politeness, nothing more.

Looks a good price to me, too.

Is that all-inclusive, or labour only, Mike?

We did much the same around the edge of our plot, alongside the lane that turns into a stream in heavy rain. We had to dig a deep trench all along the two lane-facing sides, to relocate the electricity supply cables and telephone cables that used to run overhead. Instead of filling those trenches with the clay soil we'd dug out, we filled them almost completely with gravel, with just a thin layer of soil on top to hide it. It works pretty well, but we still have an area in the lane, right at the end of our drive, that turns into a shallow lake when it rains. I wanted to just re-tarmac that section of lane to remove the camber where our drive now joins it, so removing the dip, but the highways people wouldn't have it. Instead, we left the end of our drive a bit higher, so when they next resurface the lane, with a bit of luck, they may just correct the levels.

Way more than we ever had. When I shifted from flight test to management we'd got as far as the dizzy heights of a DEC VAX! Pretty much all our code was written in Fortran 77, though.

We put the crates in to comply with the SuDS regs, see here for more info: http://www.susdrain.org/ They are only under the drive, the rainwater from the house gutters etc is pipe down to them. We also had to make sure none of the run off from rainwater entered the stream on the other side of the lane, which is a joke given the way the lane itself turns into a stream in heavy rain!

I remember we had a teleprinter link to an ICL at Portland that ran George 3. It was a bit of a pain to use, as I recall, as I'd write some code in Fortran, transmit it using the teleprinter to Portland, where the ICL would compile it overnight. Next morning I'd get in to reams of paper that had been printed out, more often than not with loads of compilation errors....................... Thankfully we got our own PDP-11 pretty soon after the ICL link had been put in, so could at least write code and compile it on the same day! On the topic of calculators, I bought one of the early LED display Commodore scientific calculators, after having struggled for a short time with a Sinclair Scientific, and its reverse polish notation (bit like the HP calculators we first had at work). I still have that old calculator, I'll dig it out later and see if it still works. I remember is was very expensive, and cost most of a months pay to buy at the time.

We laid permeable pavers, on to the right sub-base (type 3, not type 1) and under the sub-base we fitted Aquacell crates wrapped in terram to form the surge capacity/soakaway underneath the drive. As these were well below the house foundation level we also ran all the rain water drainage to them. It seems to work well, although the sharp grit used with permeable pavers seems to need topping up, by brushing more into the gaps, every year or so, probably because the gaps are wider with permeable pavers.

We just used them originally to do lots of number-crunching, modelling 3D trajectories. Prior to that, trajectory calculations had been either done by hand (using mechanical "computers") or using analogue computers, that took ages to set up and would tend to drift a fair bit over time. Things progressed at a staggering rate in the 70's and 80's. I remember sitting next to the Tac Nav in a Nimrod MR2 and playing a game with him as to whether the tactical computer could predict the water entry point of a weapon faster than my little Psion3, running a spreadsheet to predict 3D trajectories from the same input data (A/C height, speed, heading, wind speed and direction, plus coriolis correction and the trajectory characteristics of the parachute retarded weapon). The little Psion3 beat the tactical computer hands down, every time, despite me having to manually key in the initial data, taken off the tac nav screen.

As Declan says, you're looking at a capital investment of between double and three times the cost for a GSHP, for an efficiency gain of maybe 10%, if that. Add in the high cost of things like antifreeze replacement and GSHPs start to look very uneconomical, and the additional cost over an ASHP would never be recovered by the tiny gain in efficiency over the life of the kit, I think. I was going to do the same as you originally (and we have a borehole for water - there's a lengthy tale about in our blog, here: http://www.mayfly.eu that you may want to have a look at first!) and then opted for an ASHP at a fraction of the cost of a GSHP, and I've found it performs very well. It's also a great deal quieter than I expected, and a heck of a lot quieter than the GSHP that was fitted to a holiday place we stayed in. I probably learned more about boreholes than is healthy to know during our adventure. We're probably not too far from you, either, we're East of Shaftesbury, just over the border into West Wiltshire by a mile or so. I'd not want to name companies here, but we did get a few borehole people around to quote, and had an "interesting" experience. Happy to chat offline about our experiences, but perhaps read the borehole and water bits of our blog first to get a flavour of things!