Jeremy Harris

I fitted Vitra basins and toilets throughout, found them to be surprisingly good quality for the price. Well worth a look, IMHO (not that £1600 jobbie, obviously...)

They work fine with just an open hose on the end, it's only if you fitted a tap to it that you'd have a problem. If you only turn it on and off with the pump, then it'll work a treat. Pressure might be a bit high, though, so it might be worth looking at one of the smaller pumps that Ibo stock. Our one of those pumps was put in as a temporary replacement, after we wore out the original Grundfos during all the sediment problems with our borehole, so has been supplying all the water to our house for maybe three or four years. The borehole people gave me a free replacement Grundfos pump as a part of the settlement, and I keep meaning to get around to changing it over, but as the Ibo pump just seems to work OK I've not got around to it. At a guess it's pumping around 300 to 400 litres per day, everyday.

Yes, pre-"options for change" which closed loads of places, including the establishment where I worked (I ended up moving from Cornwall to SW Scotland). Looking back through my logbook it seems most of the Nimrod test flight stuff was in the early to mid 1980's, mostly associated with the acceptance to service of Stingray I think. Somewhere I've still got one or two of the car stickers that someone at St Mawgan made up to poke a bit fun at the anti-nuclear protesters who had a semi-permanent camp outside the old nuclear bomb dump there. They mimicked a design used by CND, and had an orange mushroom cloud in the centre, with "Nuke 'em till they glow" as the text around the outside...

They work fine on their side. The only thing to watch is that they are a positive displacement pump, so they need to be turned off before a tap is fully closed, or have a pressure vessel and switch to turn the pump on and off. Might be an idea to just fit a cheap pressure relief valve in the outlet as a safety device. If the outlet is turned off or completely blocked the pressure rises to a very high level. I've accidentally done this and had a 15 bar pressure gauge pegged at the end stop. IIRC, 15 bar is way over the maximum pressure for normal MDPE pipe.

SAMPSON is primarily an AEW and missile defence radar, capable of tracking multiple fast-moving targets, using what was (at the time) a really innovative multiple, independently steerable, beam-forming capability. The facility on the hill is now mainly a training facility, as the old ASWE establishment was demolished a few years ago (it was my parent establishment when I did a tour as OiC Funtington and OiC Fraser in the late1990s).

Any borehole type submersible pump will do the job. A cheap Polish one can be had for around £100, that will generate around 8 to 10 bar. We run our house at a water pressure of between 2.5 bar and 3.5 bar, and that's plenty for a powerful hose or sprinkler. I've used (in fact am still using at the moment, as I still haven't got around for swapping it for the new Grundfos that's sat here) one of these Polish pumps: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/IBO-3-SQIBO-0-75-Borehole-Deep-Well-Submersible-Water-PUMP-House-Garden-cable14m/172266241359?hash=item281bde3d4f%3Ag%3AVDIAAOSwm3ldZ89L&LH_BIN=1

We never did really have a capability for tracking surface ships in UK waters, on a 24/7 basis, though. The radar on Nimrod was very good, but wasn't an all around surveillance radar for tracking surface ships at range, it was primarily an ASW radar. IIRC, there was only ever one Nimrod kept on SAR standby out of the whole fleet, the main difference being that it wouldn't have a weapons load, just the SAR gear (air-dropped dinghy and survival packs, inherited from the Shackeleton). During the time I was flying trials in Nimrods, we always had weapons loaded, and often had a "600lb Special Weapon" (a.k.a. "The Bucket of Sunshine") mounted on the aft station in the bomb bay (unless I was using the Special Weapon wiring harness for instrumentation and camera control cabling)..

Yes, the Shacks were used in the SAR role a fair bit, had been one of their key roles before ASW took over. The Nimrod (a.k.a. "The Mighty Hunter") was designed from the ground up to be an ASW aircraft in the main, with the ability to maintain patrols for around 10 to 12 hours or so at a time. There were also a few Nimrods built purely as "intelligence gathering" aircraft, and these had no SAR capability, other than being able to act as a radio relay. The Searchwater radar on the Nimrod was a fantastically able bit of kit, capable of detecting a submarine snorkel or periscope from many miles away. This ability to detect small objects in the ocean also made it a great bit of kit for SAR, although that wasn't really what it was designed for. Like a lot of aircraft, the Nimrod was designed mainly to do one job, but ended up being very good at a few others, that hadn't really been thought of during the design stage. Being able to stay airborne for a long time without AAR, and then being given an AAR capability for the Falklands, that meant it could stay airborne for days if need be, was a useful attribute. Comfortable, too, with a dozen or so comfy seats down the back, a good galley and a constant supply of pots of tea going up and down the aircraft. I've got around 400 hours on Nimrods, almost all in MR2s flying from St Mawgan, with 42 Squadron.

SAR was only ever a secondary role, though, their primary role was sub-hunting up near the Arctic, tracking Soviet boats coming out on patrol from their Northern bases. The idea was that if the bombers could be picked up as they came through the fairly narrow area between Iceland and the Faroes, either by SOSUS or by the Nimrod patrols, there would be a reasonable chance of being able to keep tabs on them as they went out into the open Atlantic. Knowing where the bombers were was a key part of maintaining the balance of power, as they would know that we knew where they were (often because they got actively pinged) and that then rendered them less useful as a part of the deterrent.

Not really. When the Nimrod fleet was still active they didn't really provide any significant maritime surveillance coverage around UK waters. 99% of the time patrols were either up around the Iceland-Faroes gap or in the North Atlantic. We still have all the shore stations, with some giving coverage across the most congested areas, but a great deal of reliance is now placed on secondary surveillance, using AIS. Not much use if AIS is tampered with, but the picture AIS gives is pretty good, and anyone can use it: https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:-12.0/centery:25.0/zoom:4 If you want a UK-centric view then this site may be better: http://www.shipais.co.uk/ I was thinking of buying a Tesla recently, and joined a UK Tesla forum, and one section was pretty much dedicated to purchasers tracking "their" car as it came across the Atlantic to one of the ports where it would be shipped to a distribution centre. Tesla had a tie up with the ship ident data, so you could go onto the Tesla website and track the VIN of your new car as it made it's way around the globe, in near-real time.

Everything that connects to the internet, except for three things that connect using wifi, a laptop, an iPad and a portable internet radio. Wherever possible I avoid using wifi, just because wired connections are more reliable, faster and don't need faffing around setting up passwords etc. Ethernet is really the ultimate in "plug and play", in that no setting up at all is needed, just plug something in and it connects.

Just screwing up ordinary cheap chicken wire into a ball seems to work OK, and makes the gaps a lot smaller.

The very rough rule of thumb for good, wet, soil, that doesn't have big rocks in it, is that a trench about 1.2m wide, 10m long and 1.2m deep, with a slinky laid horizontally in the bottom and covered with sand, will yield about 1 kW of heat. So for a 10 kW output GSHP you need very roughly 100m of trench 1.2m wide and 1.2m deep. If that folds back on itself then it has to be spaced so that the centres of any parallel slinky trenches are not closer than 5m. Collector trenches can be no closer than about 2.5m to the house foundations or the boundary. For example, a 10 kW collector run as four folded trenches, would need an area roughly 25m long by 25m wide. The amount of soil excavated, not allowing for the trenches for the pipes to and from the collector, would be about 144m², or around 250 tonnes.

If you pump from the rainwater tank to a small open header tank, and use a float switch in the header tank to control the rainwater tank pump, you can then either use gravity to supply water from the header to the toilets etc, or another small pump. You'll need something to stop the rainwater tank pump from dry running and killing itself, so that means some sort of float switch in the main tank to detect when it's empty and turn the pump off. You can then arrange a float valve in the header tank to fill that with mains water when the level drops, as the level should only drop a lot in that tank when the rainwater tank is empty. All told it's a bit of a faff, IMHO, for the modest mains water savings that might be achieved. @Bitpipe probably has the simplest system, just a collection of IBCs piped together and gravity fed with rainwater. There are some photos here somewhere showing his system, I think.

Once over 3m from the main fuse to the consumer unit, then an additional fuse is needed (it's usual to fit a fused isolator switch) at the cabinet end. Any length of cable can then be run from there to the consumer unit in the house. Minimum size would be 25mm², usually 3 core SWA, but if the cable run is really long then that may need to be increased, depends on the voltage drop. 25mm² is fine for a 22m run (in fact it's OK for up to 60m for a 5% voltage drop at 100 A).

You'll need some form of level sensor in the tank to signal that it's empty, plus a change over valve system to switch to mains. This will need some thought, as the regs require that the mains water side be kept isolated at all times from the rainwater side. Might need an additional buffer tank and pump, so that an air gap can be maintained for separation.

I'm not sure I'd use rainwater with a washing machine, TBH, given that they tend to run pretty cool nowadays. The cheapest option is to use IBCs, they normally hold 1000 litres each and can be obtained fairly cheaply as surplus. They need care if being buried, though, as they may not tolerate soil pressure that well without some reinforcement. Easy enough to just drop a submersible pump in a tank and connect it up to a pressure vessel and pressure switch so that the pump runs when the pressure drops. This is essentially how our borehole supply works.

Depends almost entirely on the heat output that's needed, together with the type of soil, and, to some degree, the acceptable soil recharge time (which is location dependent). It's not hard to calculate, but without at least some basic data it's impossible to guess, I'm afraid.

From the text associated with that video from Rentokil:

Balls of rolled up chicken wire should do the job. Alternatively you could just let mice get in and out, as there's nothing under there that they can damage.

Just to be clear, my main point from my first post in this thread was this: There's no doubt at all that for us, using the current rates for RHI, it still wouldn't be worth paying the premium for an MCS approved installation, as we'd still only receive about £100 per year for 7 years. Those who have a higher heating and hot water requirement will get more, as it's an incentive that encourages people to use more energy...

Just found a price for the Recoup unit: https://www.cityplumbing.co.uk/Recoup-Pipe%2B-He-Waste-Water-Heat-Recovery-System/p/967757?isCustomerOnStop=false&siteName=City+Plumbing+Supplies&googleTagManagerTrackingId=GTM-NCL66X ~£641 inc VAT.

What size are the holes? The general rule of thumb is that a mouse can get through any hole that it can get it's head through, and that's about the diameter of a normal pencil. I once watched a mouse squeeze through the gap under a door, a gap that I didn't think it would have been possible for a mouse to get through if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes.

That fits, as I've just put our heating figures through the calculator and it's given an RHI of £100 per year, rather than the £84 a year that it gave when I first looked at it.