jack

I've had and periodically abused a Makita DTD129Z brushless for about five years (possibly a precursor to the brushless model you mention above, but it's so hard to tell with Makita's bewildering array of overlapping products). It's probably my favourite tool.

My parents bought a house with a built in Miele. Despite drinking a reasonable amount of coffee, they ended up getting rid of it due to the amount of cleaning and maintenance required.

I just turn ours on by hitting the "mode" button on the standard controller. Normally at this time of the year it just does hot water, but by cycling through modes I put it into hot water/cooling mode during hot weather. I leave it on during the daylight hours so it mostly runs off PV, and turn it off in the evening. Downstairs in our house is very pleasant at the moment. Probably about 20 deg C. Upstairs is getting a little uncomfortable - I had to get up and open a window at 3 o'clock this morning because it was too warm even with no sheet over me (my wife was sleeping soundly under a duvet!) It's time to start paying more attention to purge cooling in the early evening and mornings again.

If I could drink just three a day I'd be a happy man. No such luck...

Exactly the same as me. One coffee early in the day. Definitely nothing past lunchtime or I'll be staring at the ceiling for an hour when I go to bed.

Try having both!

In the nicest possible way, do you have enough fingertips remaining for them to be reliable advisors?

Despite having my own grinder and a decent espresso machine, I'm slowly winding back the amount of caffeinated coffee I drink. I'm at about 50/50 caffeinated/decaf and expect to be caffeine free within a week or two. I'll see how it goes - I do love good coffee, but if I can adjust to just drinking decaf, I think I'll be better off given how sensitive I am to caffeine's effects. My missus seems completely immune to caffeine, so she'll continue to inhale it for both of us.

Bear in mind that larch is a high-silicate timber. Although it may not seem particularly hard, it will wear blades out pretty quickly. I have no idea what "quickly" means relative to the job you have planned, but it's something to keep an eye out for.

... vs remortgaging with another lender after completion.

12? Ye gods that's a lot! I'm very caffeine sensitive. More than one decent coffee a day and my sleep quality drops, and I'm more prone to becoming anxious in stressful situations.

PV is great if you can afford it. In addition, have a look at shower waste water recovery units. They're possibly one of the cheapest ways of getting a few SAP points.

Same with me. 3.5 years of leaving it on the low setting, and zero issues with moisture. Bathrooms are always completely dry within hours. I only use the boost if I'm cooking something likely to set off the fire alarm (eg, steak cooked on a hot griddle).

Can you install a tank somewhere and fill that up slowly or in bursts, then water the garden from that? You wouldn't need much storage if you're able to replenish fairly consistently.

No, I haven't checked. It's definitely a relatively low priority task for me at the moment! Checking it would involve undoing some screws to take off a panel at the back of a cupboard in our utility room, then accessing a rodding point with a light (and possibly a camera if it's too hard to get my head up into the space).

Listed? Or listing?

The music is a nice touch. I was wondering whether you might go with this.

I wanted to include some second had stuff in our house, but: - You need to be organised and very patient - the right stuff comes up rarely. - You must be flexible - the perfect stuff practically never comes up! - Whoever is installing it needs to be willing to work with second hand stuff. It just didn't work out for us in the end. I'll build another house one day, maybe when I retire, and I'll definitely be taking a very different approach compared to the current one.

Parents in law were burgled last year in spite of an alarm being installed. They went in from a first floor balcony, alarm immediately went off, they went through all the upstairs drawers and cupboards at high speed looking for jewellery and watches, then checked the study for valuables. Interestingly, they left two decent laptops in the study and a credit card that was sitting in clear view in a desk drawer that they opened. According to the police, this is the current MO. At least around our way, they don't want electrical goods, because they're too hard to flog without risk.

I don't know what your wireless setup is, but if you have Ubiquiti, they do an interesting line of wireless cameras that work well with their wireless access points and switches. I want to stay away from proprietary solutions, but will still be doing some more digging into this.

We're finished (ish) but happy to show you around and have a chat about the pitfalls we encountered. We're near Farnborough.

From memory, the window is wired to the mains and has a zwave module in it. I have a remote control that should be able to control the window via zwave. I seem to recall that we did have that working when the window was first wired up. There's then a mains-connected wall-mounted module (see pic above) that can be controlled manually (buttons on the wall-mounted module) and via a home automation system (internal dry contacts). From memory, it was transitioning from the working handheld remote to the wall-mounted module that caused the problem. There are four channels in the wall-mounted module, and you need to teach each channel which remote control it will be copying when you push a button or close a dry contact. I can't remember any more detail than this, but I do believe we wondered whether we'd somehow upset the relationship between the handheld remote and the window, and hence the wall-mounted module wasn't able to learn the correct code.

I need to book my electrician back in for this, as he's the one who wired it all up and spoke to Fakro about how it would (/should!) work. Can't see that happening in the next few weeks as I have some other things I need to get ready for him so he can do it all in one visit. That said, it could well be something I or my electrician did back during setup that's causing the problem. I know there was some sort of "learning" mode you needed to access via the remote, which may not have been done properly at the time, despite us having Fakro's tech department walk him through it. If I'd had more time when this all happened I'd have pushed harder to get it sorted then, but too much time has passed for me to go back with a straight face and demand they fix it!

Bear in mind it's the surrounding mounting area that's easier to keep clean, as much as the taps themselves. You don't get pooled water below the taps from wet hands turning them off, for example.

Ha. We ordered 30 packs the first time and that was plenty enough to find space for - lasted us over 2.5 years I seem to recall!