MikeSharp01

Well done, one down - one up. I got a load more at the weekend and have spent the last two days putting it up.

No @Oz07you must build it up in thin layers unless you have industrial equipment the ride in compactors- the knobbly wheeled things you see building roads, and similar sized rollers. On a self build 50mm layers is about a you can be sure of with a self propelled vibrating roller.

The drains should be laid in Pea single, We had exactly the same situation and I used the sub base to create channels along the pipe runs then filled these with pea shingle and once I had 50mm pea above the pipe I could cover again with type 1. So there were places across the slab where the pipe was buried below 100mm Type 1 and 50mm pea single and one the other side the pipe was above the sub base level with visible pea shingle and, in our passive slab case, I had to shape the EPS 50mm. The SE said the concrete of the slab and its reinforcement would bridge there bare pipe portion and type 1 actually compacts very little below 50mm down provided it is compacted in 50mm layers.

It seems to men that several things are fundamental and at the moment some of them contradict one another. So 1. It cannot be an internet of things if no things are connected to it. (Intranets are of course possible and likely if not connected to the internet.) 2. Things connected to an internet of things must be securely connected. 3. There are millions of things that are already connected to the internet with varying levels of security and so it mist be feasible. EG Servers, routers, switches ....... 3. There is a chance that IOT is just a fad and so might be overtaken by other systems. 4. Simply put the objective of the technology is communications (between things and things, people and things, people and people etc), the enabling technology is electronics and the controlling technology is software- mostly written by humans. 5. Once you add and idea to existing ways of doing things you add infinite new possibilities for this new combination of ideas. So while you add a device you also add opportunities for ne'er-do-wells as well as improving the general lot. It will come. When I got my first mobile phone in 1986 people told me it would never catch on!

We saw these in UTAH earlier in the year and purchased one, can't imagine it will generate much electricity but it does generate a lot of interest

Welcome to THE forum - there will be people who understand in depth along shortly. Sorry @PeterW this post crossed with yours and was not intended to insult.

Not if you are building a studio flat 20 square meters only 60k.

Yes some one I know who ran a software business would always double the figure he was given by his software engineering team before send out the tender - needless to say he retired happy and rich!

Thanks, that is very clear and a bit frightening. I think that is £4K on our windows, makes you think! So far I have managed +/- 2mm (X/Y/Z) on the build against the drawings so in theory I should get the window openings about there from the drawings so its just a case of deciding what to do. 83 days to get them ordered and delivered, lets see what the suppliers say?

I do not wish to discuss BREXIT and this is not an opportunity to do so and I appreciate that we may or may not have tariffs. We are close to ordering our windows and I was wondering what the WTO tariff was on windows so I could work out the cost risk of buying before the frame is finished or waiting until it is. I looked on the WTO site but was confused by much of it but I think the sector code 441810 anybody got any insights on this narrow focus?

I think there is a blocky version you can use. Bingo - that is the base case you create the GUI as you have to be able start / stop the app but once started you can leave it running on the phone or suspend it when the window is not visible - close it and it stops.

You need the android SDK, you can then work in JAVA, it is simple once you get your head around the way Android wants things done - page based is simplest but you can write background apps if you want. Where exactly are you stuck?

Welcome to THE forum. Do you have pic of the space above the door, I am struggling to be sure I have a clear picture of what you are trying to do!

Welcome to THE forum for self builders. Sounds like you might be underestimating your own capabilities if you read here carefully you will find that the challenge is most often not the building skills but the emotional / psychological / financial stresses and strains that crop up along the way. Mike

Welcome to THE forum for self builders.

Welcome to the forum.

Yep - no need to worry about mains stuff provided you have proper leakage protection back at your fuse board, are respectful of the potential (pardon the pun) dangers and as long as you don't buy clone copies of SSRs (or if you do you know what you are doing) you have more than adequate protection and those ULN's will drive 8 SSRs all day but if you want really fast switching you may have trouble I think its a few nano seconds on / off.

Makes perfect sense but might not be an analog for open communications and I fully appreciate the challenges - but I cannot help thinking that there must be an answer.

I must have about a 1000 of them in my chips box! really useful little bugger. True / agree but there is something odd about an IOT that is really just an island of a few things. I guess its just about squeezing the security down into the things - but for another day.

Are you being allowed to run from the local main into the water meter yourself, this is usually a utility type job?

Can't help thinking that something like MQTT will be the core of IOT but will need to much more sophisticated and massively more secure, which I notice is already being addressed, but robust it isn't yet if you want 'things' on a global scale. We need to standardise, that much I know - Arduino is a standard and ridiculously cheap for what it is, the advent of Blocky for creating and modifying code (5 year olds can use it) means we can confidently develop stuff that won't require our eternal presence to keep it running. There are still some nuts to crack though and, you will have heard me banging on about meshes, these things still need work. On the controlling front I have a board, I made years ago, that allows me to opto isolate TTL inputs and outputs, 12 per board, using Darlington drivers on the outputs so I think I could get 200mA per channel at 24V - which was the control voltage I chose because we use it on all our commercial work but I like the little TTL driver chip and given you do get, from responsible manufacturers real products (unlike the ones shown in the video you posted @TerryE - even though very amusing), good isolation you can have your expensive PC / Tablet connected and not worry about it getting the full 240V, or worse, up its chuff! And that is just from one of them running the Immersion / Willis or whatever. I do have a concern about the heat output of SSR's for two reasons, and I had occasion to be somewhat upset by them the week before last as I have one on our pressurisation set in the loft here at millstone manor which, when the loft temperature reached 40+ the Δt took the thermal trip on the heatsink over its limit and we lost water pressure - 'Mike why is there no water coming out of my bath tap', trip needs a reset which I madly left in the loft! I have now copied it down into the main control panel and up-rated the trip from 55DegC to 65degC that should give me few years even with global warming as it is. Anyway my reasons..... Firstly is that the heat is energy consumption I don't want and the second is that the heat is also unwanted. Perhaps we should put the SSR's outside the thermal envelope but either way it is waste. Traditional relays are much less power hungry but cannot be switched in PWM type situations so its horses for courses. I suppose we could imagine, making any required adjustments to internals of the SSR so it could cope, a hybrid system of an SSR with a relay contact across it so you turn on the SSR, pull in the relay and turn off the SSR if you want PWM don't energise the relay if you only want continuous just use the relay. (Perhaps I have had too much beer!)

Hmmmm looks to me like the advice you are getting from the installers has conflated efficiency with complexity and although you can do most anything with the setup the things you really need to do are being compromised by having the bells and whistles plus, as you point out, the e versions don't use hot water to charge them so what's the point of the HT. It seems to me that you would best, as you say, to just use the ASHP for the UFH, you have a great mass of concrete, with a Willis or two in there if the ASHP goes down and then charge the sunamps on E7 / PV ( if allowed by their controllers) although I am not sure you need two of them.

Welcome to THE forum for self builders.

3.8T is a biggie- 1.5T is all you are going to need if that is too small then you probably need a 6 or 8T machine. You cannot move it yourself and the market for such size machines is largely commercial and not self builders.

How thick and what is the area of the concrete the UFH is heating up? As this will also need to be part of the bigger picture because of the decriment delay it introduces against the various energy inputs and outputs. Also have you factored in the potential ability of the ASHP to cool the slab in summer which might add value to it as an option.