Spinny

Our smoke in the hall used to go off whenever someone did a fry up and with a high ceiling you couldn’t reach we could be found opening the front door and madly flapping a tea towel at it. ok new kitchen should be different I suppose with a powerful extractor etc. But there are times people might end up with some smoke in the house - even if just the 437 candles on my birthday cake :0) so my experience all alarms have proven to be false and a real PITA when someone’s house or car alarm kicks off at 4am. Ok unlikely to be burning the divorce papers in the waste bin at 4am. lots of stuff in today’s world is unnecessary, we used to live just fine without mobile phones or Amazon deliveries or cars that tell us where they are parked. But people can’t help fiddling with stuff ‘just because you can’. Work in an engineering company and you’ll find they are all messing with their cars and stuff at home. Some nutter called Musk seems to think cars need to drive themselves and we should put life on Mars. Each to their own madness.

However what you also want is the ability to silence the alarm remotely.

Don't forget that when the doors are stacked you have the full weight of all doors in one place. We gave the door weights to our SE to confirm all would be ok.

I have put in 47mm back boxes everywhere for the light switches, and a number with backboxes twice the size of the cover plate to provide plenty of room for switch/dimmer modules. Despite this my sparky seems to belong to the abstract spaghetti school of smart module wiring. I find it frustrating how the manufacturers are so focussed on the retrofit market, there seems to be a big gap to be filled with products for people doing new builds and total renovations. Having smart things on show is all very well, but I do think the ideal smart home would have the devices hidden from view. Nobody seems to have worked out how and where to integrate in presence/motion detectors etc. Lots of things in white plastic boxes only. I like things like the Sensative strips that are invisible when installed. Have you integrated smoke and heat alarms into HA ? Because the England regs require wired detectors which is a PITA and seems to preclude all the smart home solutions that are almost universally retrofit battery powered and don't meet regs. Also are you using anything for smart control to turn the water mains supply or gas supply on/off - such as the robots that will turn a lever arm valve ? Are you using LED strips under your kitchen counter tops, and if so what type, and are they surface mounted or in routed channels ? (It is amazing just how many lights you can end up with. I have 8 dining spots+9 sitting spots+3 entry spots+10 kitchen spots+5 pendants + 7 led strips + 3 under cabinet pucks + 3 accent spots + 3 picture lights + 1 wall light = 52 individual lights in one open plan room, with another 11 external lights (6 soffit, 4 wall, 1 step). I guess I am as mad as mad jack mcmadman from madsville.)

Aluminium Bifolds 3.5m wide and 2.4m tall, top hung, stack can be positioned to either side of opening when open. Fixed to timber and steel beam above. (The timber was added because we changed the choice of doors and the height of the opening had to be reduced to suit.) Best to have professionally fitted by careful, conscientious and experienced fitters. Getting the threshold position correct is critical if you want something close to a level threshold, so knowing where the finished floor level will be. PROCESS: Prepare opening, survey measurement of opening and marking of reference level markings around the area, detailed drawings with tight opening size, bifold manufacturing size etc, carefully check drawings and amend as necessary then sign off drawings, send to manufacture, professional delivery and installation, test and acceptance. Beware the limited accuracy of laser levels. The company claimed floor level had been changed between survey and fit but this was nonsense. Their lasered levels differed by 11mm over 9m from survey to fit because laser levels clearly not reliable/calibrated. My water levels showed they were wrong. So buy a water level and mark careful reference levels. Make sure the fixing methods and positions are defined and there is going to be solid material in the right positions and alignment for the frame to be fixed to. Insist on careful preparation, inspection and checking of the opening - builders lie and cover up - thus in our case the first fitting visit was abortive.

Is that Artex or similar on the ceiling, and do you have a plan for dealing with the ceiling ? Are you planning on putting in some extractor ventilation ? In the ceiling ? Or is the block wall an outside wall ? Is there somewhere to duct it out ? Downlights to go in the ceiling ?

Yes, another sharp practice in the black arts of the tradesman. I thought I was getting a landscaper with 15 years experience - what I actually got was a 20 year old with negligble experience and a mobile phone.

Looks good. What wall switches are you using with your smart lighting ? I have still to buy some retractive ones and am interested in what others are using. Are you automating any electric roller blinds ? I will be starting to move to Home Assistant soon as I find different manufacturers are still implementing certain features in incompatible ways. For example I am using some sonoff relays, but they have implemented the detached mode in a way that hides switch presses from non sonoff ecosystems. I have implemented a work around but HA seems like it should be the bees knees and avoid such things. What are you using for presence sensing and do you have eny experience of the extent to which it may be usable through plaster board ?

How old is the sewer pipe, what is it made of, and has it been inspected ? I have watched my own neighbours build over their drains including their drain chamber and all rodding points. In my opinion a very stupid thing to do despite it being permissable. Just building over a pipe and providing all existing accessible chambers, rodding points etc remain fully accessible seems more reasonable. However as my neighbours discovered clay pipes that have not been disturbed for 80 years are not too robust, they had pipes that were found to be cracked, and multiple others that cracked during the building work. Clay pipes can have hairline cracks that can open up and parts of the pipe give way. So if you were going to build over I'd have thought you would want to be 110% certain that buried pipe was going to be good for at least another century. Therefore replacing the existing pipe seems adviseable, certainly I wouldn't want to build over a clay pipe.

Ta for comments. Steel is not boarded over yet. So yes will be insulating between it and the p/board. It supports an RSJ across the inner leaf above my bifold opening. So in theory it sits in the warm zone inside my wall insulation, and underneath my warm roof. But of course it has cold rising up the column from foundation level and nobody thought about insulating pads and stuff when it went in, so an unfortunate vertical thermal bridge I suppose. Have a light switch to go in too and will be using a 47mm box to accomodate a smart home relay module, probably got about 60mm between steel and back of P/B. Can you get surface pattress boxes with an adjustable lug ? (Just in case my spirit level isn't working that day.)

So I am looking to position a metal back box for a double socket just in front of a steel box column. Not sure of the thickness of the steel - I guess maybe 8mm or 6mm. As it is a steel column rising from foundation level it is or feels cold to the touch, so I plan to insert a layer of insulation e.g. 10mm XPS board between the back box and the steel to heat insulate the back box. What size Techscrew should I use to screw the back box into the steel column ? How do I insulate the screw to stop it cold bridging the XPS insulation to make the back box cold ?

I did ask chatGPT to produce a 2d diagram showing the lux distribution for a set of downlight positions based on their specs. It did the job, though how precisely accurate its' answers were I couldn't say. illuminance_map_60deg_beams (4).pdf

Just took some water pressures again. The mains supply is at 50 Psi, and downstream of the caleffi pressure reducing valve is at 50 Psi. Is it possible that if the plumber that cleaned it didn't reset the screw pressure adjustment properly, and the downstream side has been subject to some 6 bar back pressure, that the screw may have worked out more over time?? because immediately after that plumber had been 4 months ago my memory is that the PRV output pressure was more like 3.1/3.2bar rather than 3.5/50psi, having been about 2.8bar before he started. And in principle is there any reason the system can't be run at say 3.1bar, rather than the 2.8bar it was at before, because even this small change has a very noticeable effect on our shower flow.

Only the shower head and one set of basin taps post date the new system - there is a little on the shower head but nothing that impacts flow at shower head or basin tap. The water softener is a PITA because (as you can see) I defo need a proper fully competent, experienced, and conscientiuous plumber. The Water softener is to go in the understairs cupboard but needs to go tight back against the outside wall and tight on one side to a stud wall with the understair loo behind it - otherwise it prevents any meaningful access and use of the rest of the cupboard by blocking the cupboard doorway. The original builders plumber installed the valve/bypass valve too far over, and also decided to put a standpipe positioned right behind the water softener position and bossed into the u/stairs toilet soil pipe, also necessitating a waterless trap. This arrangement is crap and doesn't achieve what we need/asked for. The water softener itself was never actually plumbed in to bring it into use and the builder and his plumber long ago terminated. Ring another Plumber - Send details/arrange visit - quote promised - quote chased - no quote and availability ever obtainable - ring another plumber: repeat on an infinite basis for 2 years, dry wife's crying eyes, and say don't take the anti-depressants. A better idea would seem to be to drill straight out through the outside wall with holes for the drain pipe and the overflow pipe. There is no outside surface drain in that position at the moment but it is close to a drain chamber, and it has been suggested to me that a (good) drainage plumber could dig out the hardcore and put one in.

However I have had occasional tundish discharge before the plumber ever came to clean the caleffi PRV. So potentially him leaving the PRV set to a higher pressure has simply made the problem worse and more noticeable.