Jeremy Harris

I'd guess it'll be around that, yes. We're paying just over £48/month for electricity, for a house that's all-electric (electric heating, water heating, cooling, water pump, etc) and that includes charging my car. Much of that is having designed the house to need very little energy, but a significant part of it comes from the excess electricity we generate from the PV installation, over and above the household usage. By reducing the household energy requirement to a pretty low level, the amount of excess generation from PV, that can be used to charge the car when needed, is a fair bit greater.

No that great, around 6,000 miles per year, mostly local trips that are around 20 to 40 miles round trip distance. Energy consumption is currently running at about 245 Wh/mile

In England and Wales (not sure about Scotland) you get free prescriptions from the age of 60, rather than 65. You get free eye tests from the age of 60 too, but not free dental check ups. I think that whether or not a GP will prescribe dietary supplements is probably as variable as other prescribing practices. Certainly our new GP has a markedly more open approach to prescribing than our old one. Got to be worth seeing if the GP will issue a prescription, though, I'd have thought.

The embodied energy of cars is coming down all the time, plus the recyclable content is increasing, and EVs are not really much different in this respect to any other form of motive power used to move a vehicle. There's also a fair bit less through life resource expenditure with EVs, no oil to change, brakes that wear at a very much reduced rate, servicing intervals that are much longer (once every 2 years for mine), etc. An EV charged solely from the grid will have a significantly lower carbon footprint than an ICE vehicle. Much of the time the grid is pretty low carbon, and even when we are using a lot of gas generation the efficiency of this is massively better than the very best internal combustion engine. For those who have PV installations on their homes, owning an EV also opens up the possibility of zero carbon charging. Last night was the first time I've charged my car from the grid is several months, since around May it's been charged pretty much exclusively from self-generated electricity. I suspect there will be a few more "free" charges before the year is out, all it takes is a clear day when the car needs a charge.

I paid for a hydrogeological survey, which gave lots of useful information, and cost £250 plus VAT. The chap I used was Tim Baker, at BA Hydro Solutions http://bahsltd.com/index.htm I'd not hesitate to recommend him, as his report was really helpful. Here's a copy of it so you can see what you get for the money: Passivhaus Mill Lane Hydrogeological Assessment V3.1.pdf

10,000 gallons per hour is massive, the most you are allowed to extract without needing an abstraction licence is 20,000 litres per day, so that has around 54 times the maximum abstraction capacity of a private borehole with no licence. It's also a big borehole, around three times the normal diameter. A normal domestic borehole would be drilled at around 200mm/8" and then be fitted with a 112mm/4" PVC liner, with a slotted section at the base to allow water in. Our borehole is 53m deep (174 ft), has a standing water level that's about 4.5m below the top, and which dropped to 11m below the top when test pumped at 1,500 litres per hour for 2 days. We use around 400 litres per day, for just the two of us. Our borehole cost (after correcting for the cock-ups) around £9,000, including the cost of the pump, filtration, pressure vessels etc.

Keen to know the answer to this, too! Modern, low flush volume, toilets do seem to be far less effective at dealing with buoyant stuff. Having to flush two or three times rather defeats the point of having a low volume flush, IMHO.

Neighbours tend to complain some time after they've see the notices or get the letters, which can be pretty random. Other statutory consultees, like the EA, Highways, Fire Officer etc can also be very variable and often seem to reply near the end (I'd guess it depends on workload at the time). Given that if an application goes to committee some views either supporting or opposing the application won't be heard until each speaker gets their allotted 3 minutes at the committee meeting I'd guess there's no really hard and fast rule.

We went to view a house, years ago, that had a large mirror above the bed, on the ceiling in the main bedroom. The bed was covered in black satin sheets. Even the estate agent showing us around was giggling a bit.

The CVC ones we have are pretty discreet, probably the closest to a flush terminal as it's realistically possible to get and still have radial airflow. I've just measured how far ours project from the ceiling and the surround is about 6mm thick and them the centre bit is another 12mm down from that, so about 18mm projection in total. These are non-adjustable, though, so the flow adjustment has to be done either with restrictors or valves elsewhere in the system. We used the HB+ ducting system and fitted their flow restrictors inside the distribution manifolds.

The bottom line is that any free-draining, non-woven, geotextile will work for both wrapping crates and acting as an anti-fines migration barrier under a granular sub-base. Until the advent of geotextiles, most soakaways were just holes in the ground filled with rocks. Some of the houses we've lived in have had soakaways like this that have been working for a long time. In the case of the second house we bought, the soakaways were probably as old as the house, which was late 17th c.

Worth going back to basics and asking the question "What is the purpose of the membrane?" In both the case of terram and any other membrane used to wrap around crates it's to reduce the migration of sediment. Terram has been used for doing this for decades, albeit in reducing the migration of fines into a sub-base to stabilise this layer. The only stipulation seems to be that any geotextile used to wrap crates should be non-woven and free draining (and terram is both non-woven and free draining). Looking at the spec for something like Draintex (one product sold for wrapping crates), it seems near-identical to terram to me, and the spec even says it can also be used for any job where terram can be used.

Those small ones are the watertight ones I have. They were used for holding various types of ammo, everything from 7.62 to shotgun cartidges.

The crates should work fine to attenuate the flow. If the surcharge load from the crates and backfilled area is kept a distance back from the edge of whatever is supporting that lower area then there probably won't be a problem. There's a critical angle back from the base that determines this, and IIRC it's buried in the depths of Eurocode 7 somewhere (I have a copy of that on another PC).

They look very similar to the boxes I have, just a different name stencilled on the side. Those boxes might be slight deeper, front to back, than mine, but have exactly the same lid clips/hinges and handles. The nice thing about them is that they are pretty tough, but not made of really heavy gauge steel, so they aren't that heavy. I have a few 7.62 ammo boxes, and they are heavy for their size, but do have the advantage of being totally watertight when the lid over-centre catch is down. These look absolutely identical to the boxes I have (except for the stencilling): https://www.surplusandoutdoors.com/shop/army-surplus-uk/military-hardware/large-brown-metal-ammo-box-british-1170049.html

The most useful "ammo" boxes I have are ones that were used to hold Destructors, Incendiary, No. 3 Mk1. These boxes are 500mm long, 200mm wide and 200mm deep, with a hinged lid and clips to hold the lid closed, with folding handles on both ends. Not sure where you can get them, but they have the name of the original contents stencilled on the side in yellow (the boxes are galvanised steel, painted the usual shit brow colour). I acquired a few of them years ago, and wish I'd managed to scrounge a few more.

Probably OK. Wrap the crates in terram before covering, so they don't end up filled with backwashed sediment. What's supporting that lower area, in terms of a retaining structure? Might be an issue with the increased surcharge from the increased height of the lower area imposing an unacceptably high load on whatever is retaining it. Not hard to do the calculations to see if it's OK, though.

In my experience, yes. Before we sold our old house we had a small flat roof section relaid, and the supplier provided a transferable 10 year warranty.

Yes, when I was at school we sat GCEs (O Level, S Level and A Level) and CSEs (Graded 1 to 7, IIRC). Acceptance of a Grade 1 CSE as a GCE O Level pass wasn't universal at that time, as they had only been introduced for the first time two or three years before, so we all sat both the GCE and CSE exams in the 5th Year (made for an awful lot of exams). One consequence of this is that some of us ended up with reams of certificates. I ended up with 7 CSE passes (6 Grade 1s and 1 Grade 2) and (after a resit of English) 8 O Levels, then when on to do A Levels in a compressed (single year) 6th form (when I resat my failed English O level, and did Domestic Science O Level as a fill-in subject). All completely pointless within a few years of leaving school, though, as by then work experience seemed to carry far more clout than any bit of ancient paper.

When we moved I found a folder full of old payslips. The earliest dated back to 1972, when I was earning the princely sum of £478 p.a, a bit under £40 per month before deductions.

The recovered heat isn't charging the Sunamp, though, it's just reducing the amount of sensible heat the Sunamp has to deliver.

Many years ago, my workshop compressor was a V twin, ex-cold store refrigeration compressor, driven by a scrap motor of unknown parentage, fitted to some angle iron that was welded on to an old Calor gas cylinder. The gas cylinder was just rinsed out with water a few times to remove any residual gas (still stank of the stuff though). The big problem was that, despite the fairly large reservoir, the compressor just couldn't keep up with something like a spray gun. It just meant keeping an eye on the unregulated pressure and pausing every few minutes to let the compressor catch up.

I haven't bothered, but if you want to be absolutely bomb-proof then just fit a pressure relief valve A 5 bar one should be about right, as that'll only pop off if there's a serious obstruction. Alternatively, just don't bother to fit a tap or pressure switch, and just have an open-ended Hozelock connector. You can then just turn the water on or off with a switch controlling the pump.

We've been using an optical pressure switch on our system since I first got it going, so around 5 years ago now. I wasn't sure about it, so bought a spare, and wired it up using garden extension lead connectors, so I could swap it out for the spare quickly if need be (I pre-wired the spare with the same connectors). So far it's been very reliable, and seems to have a decent quality relay inside it: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/151020-Automatic-Water-Pump-Pressure-Controller-Electronic-Adjustable-Switch/272751286212?epid=703592864&hash=item3f813e57c4%3Ag%3A4AwAAOSwaNlawMXN&LH_BIN=1

I haven't been up there for years, but we had the prototype T45 radome at Funtington for about a year, doing trials to assess various attributes of the composite structure (there are several different radar and comms systems inside that octagonal pyramid). Wouldn't surprise me to find that's now been relocated to the land test site on the hill. The day rooms in the mess at Southwick still had the Operation Overlord maps etc up on the walls last time I stayed there, which would have been on the Advanced Underwater Warfare Course, sometime in the early 1980's at a guess.