TerryE

Mike, I can't recall. Are you using HomeAssistant and do you have Zigbee? I have a dozen Aqara temperature sensors around the house with a couple stuck on the undersides of external lintels front and back. I do use the Metoffice day ahead forecast for my weather comp, but the Aqara sensors are easier to use for trending actuals. As to DD, this is driven by the external S.H per m2 and U-value. In our case our DD is well over a day but that is largely down to the ~125mm external stone skin acting as a huge heat capacitor. This does nothing for the U values but this plus the cellulosic filler gives a long DD. If we'd had PUR insulation and a render or brick-slip cover then we could still have fantastic U-values but short DD. Have a look at my ~2016 blog posts on this. Yes theoretical models, but 9 years later and that how the house behaves in real life. Having a high DD makes using a ToD tariff more effective.

I have just posted a new scoping issue on GitHub: Rework to Support the New VPS Environment . My thanks to @Sparrowhawk for his input and advice. After some discussion, we've decided to stick with Docker for now. There is just too much else to be done to try to fit this in the Migration time line.

@Sparrowhawk, no CDN at the moment though the ICforum app does support using CDN. This would drop our Apache requests and network traffic by maybe 4× though not our processing load as this is 90% PHP-FPM and D/B load. As we talked about offline, I agree that it makes sense to stay with docker / compose for now. I currently use Alpine for my docker images but having looked at the CLIB vs MUSL performance issues, it makes sense to switch to bullseye-slim. I will ping you on the Github issue when I raise it.

@MikeSharp01, podman in essence has two modes full native podman and docker compatibility mode where docker compose projects are configured the same but the execution is in a user mode account. There are niggle and bumps as you can hide the fact that you are running rootless entirely in the host environment, but I have the stack up and running, first cut. The performance hit for using a container approach is a couple of % at most and having the entire stack under git just has SO many pluses. As far as working with AIs. I actually prefer Deepseek, because its chain of reasoning approach gives a more systematic approach and analysis, but its a bit overloaded ATM. However, Genimi is a standard on a Chromebook and it's fast. The issue is that by default its a bit patronising and treats the user as an idiot, but to be fair to Google probably 95% of its interactions are with idiots. It's definitely a knack getting the AI to kick into expert mode. The risk is that these AI are sincere and convincing but maybe 10% of the time the advice is flawed, so you always need to check -- trust but verify.

You have to reconfirm that you want to stay on Agile before the end of the 12 month term. Just raise a polite case with the helpdesk mail address ASAP saying that you missed the fine detail on the end of contract email and that you do want to stay on the (current) Agile tariff. I say current because they tweak the T&Cs every year and you can stay on an old Agile tariff. You have to accept the current T&Cs or leave Agile. PS. the error message is because some context cookie has expired. Signing out and relogging in will fix this.

By way of background, I am the very aged IT geek that has done all of the SysAdmin since we first set up BuildHub about 9 years ago. I am no longer involved in Forum Management or politics; I just in keep the forum up and smoothly running, pro bono. i have also administered and run a number of community forums and wikis over the last few decades, mostly using open source forum packages such as phpBB and MediaWiki. However when the founding members set this forum up, we decided to use a commercial Forum package (there was a one-time purchase, plus an annual maintenance fee), because this customer funded business model offers us a better feature set and continuous through life improvement. We chose the forum app from the company now called Invision Community. This a PHP application that runs on a LAMP stack on a hosted Virtual Private Server (VPS). The VPS has grown in cores / RAM / storage over the years as the size of the forum and its user population have also grown. Three years ago, I moved the LAMP stack into a Docker Compose project, and the VPS runs this single dedicated Docker Project which is on open Github. If you want to know more then read the README at Github: TerryE/docker-buildhub which explains the setup. Our Hosting Provider is currently doing an infrastructure refresh so we have to migrate to a new VPS and at the same time I am retiring the use of Docker and switching to the open-source equivalent, podman. See this issue, if you want to know more: A Gemini Conversation about Migrating VPs and switching to podman. Warning: it's a bit long (17 pages) and technical, but it lays out the issues and context. This topic is just to keep interested members informed. Any technical discussion / comment is welcomed. I have opened a companion topic in Forum News and Site Issues: Rehosting the Forum Virtual Server to discuss the more general / policy aspect to allow this thread to focus on the nerdy stuff. 🙂 Can I ask you all to keep to the technical discussions here and use the companion topic for general / policy stuff. @TerryE is my user account but I also have the Godlike @Admin account to hide / delete off-topic posts if the mods don't move them to the general topic. 🤣😱

I know that the Geberits are designed to be fully maintainable through the panel opening that is accessible behind the flush plate, though it is a bit like open heart surgery. Small nimble hands help, so in our case this will be a job for Jan.

You shouldn't use a typical smart plug. Some might be nominally rated at 3kW at 240VAC they can rapidly heat up especially when powered up for a few hours. I control my 3×immersions (2 in the UVC and one in a Willis heating my UFH) by decent din-mounted contactors in the MCU. These are rated at 20A at 240VAC for a straight resistive load. These have a design life of 50,000 cycles. Their coils are driven at 24 VDC (at 10s mA) by an IoT relay board controlled by my HomeAssistant system. I've done posts on this if you want know more. My TL;DR is that it can be done but you need to know what you are doing to avoid the fire risks.

BRegs for new builds state that it shouldn't go to the drain, but I think you can be pragmatic when tweaking an existing patio area. You need to do one of the two: feed to soakaway or to the drain. My inclination would be to do whatever is the simplest / least disruptive. Your "usual builder" seems to be suggesting what we did.

BTW, there is an entire sub-forum here dedicated to this MHVR, perhaps one of mods could move this topic to it?

1. Yes 2. 🫣 3. Probably As @JohnMo says you should have been given a commissioning certificate and report which details how their installation meets BRegs. We have an energy efficient new build with an ACH around 0.5. We did a lot of the internals ourselves where we had suitable knowledge / experience to save costs and guarantee quality. This included the MVHR design, commissioning and installation. That was over 8 years ago and we've had no problems at all with the MVHR including the bathrooms. Yes, we do get a little condensation on the mirrors in the en-suites after a shower, but this clears after a few mins. However, (mainly because evaporating off condensation dumps heat due to the latent heat of evaporation) I do wipe off glass and tiled surfaces with a flannel and wring this water into the waste outlet, so in my case the en-suite is bone dry within 5 mins. My wife doesn't bother, so it takes another 5-10 mins in her case. The extreme case is that after we take a bath I leave the hot water in for 30 mins or so to dump most of its heat into the house rather than losing it down the plughole, and this does steam up the bathroom. This is me being anal, but even doing this, the bathroom is still totally dry within 15 minutes. TBH, I am shocked at their reply on (2). If this is the case, then their installation almost certainly doesn't meet BRegs. Doing the design calcs and commission certification requires you or someone you trust (such as a competent professional) reading and understanding the relevant Regs then doing the proper calculations based on them. You can do the commissioning yourself, you just need a flow anemometer. We used to have a couple available for members to borrow, and there are threads on how to do this going back 8 years or so if you want to browse and review. OK we have an airtight house, but the general design principle is that fresh air goes into living spaces which people occupy. Extraction is done from wet rooms such as bathrooms, utilities, cooking areas. In / Out placement should allow clean flows between them. The system should be properly sized and balanced so that the as-designed and as-installed system should meed BRegs. There are dozens, maybe hundreds of members here that have done this successfully themselves, so IMO any company that claims to offer a professional design and installation service here should be capable of meeting the regulations.

Mine is a 0.8 × 1.4 m cupboard off the downstairs loo. 🤣 The electrical panel and OSO UVC (a later SunAmp replacement) are in the utility. The MVHR is in the loft floor drying / storage room.

We had a big plot in the centre of the village where we'd lived in an old stone farmhouse for 30 years. We then put in an application to split the plot, so we could build a modern low-maintenance, low-energy house on the bottom half and sell off the farmhouse to free up some tied up capital. The planning process took over 3 years. We had 7 neighbours whose properties shared a boundary with use. 5 didn't care, or supported our application. 2 complained like buggery, but the real nub of their complaint was "I used to overlook a pretty cottage garden at the bottom of my garden; it's now going to be a house." These objections were worrying, but carried no weight in the planning assessment. One of the neighbours kept complaining to Planning Enforcement about all sorts of issues. One of the complaints was that we had built the house ½m too close to their boundary fence. PE came out, measured up and agreed that the house was ½m closer to the boundary than the plans indicated and asked us "as a formality" to put in an MMA to "rectify" the situation. I declined to do this, pointing out that the foundation was the correct distance from our front road and that since the neighbours house hadn't suddenly moved ½m closer to our road, it the position of the house relative to theirs was as per plans. The problem was that the neighbours or the previous owners had moved the boundary fence ½m behind what used to be a 1½ m deep laurel hedge to pinch a corner of our garden. This was a boundary issue between me and my neighbour and not relevant to the planning process. The PE officer withdrew the request in the end but got pissed with us and ran interference during the build. 8 years later and all is forgotten, 3 of the neighbouring properties have been sold. None of the new neighbours seem concerned that there is a a handsome stone clad new-build at the bottom of their garden. Moral: Try to keep the neighbours onside during the process, but accept that you might piss some off whatever you do. (E.g. I didn't make a big issue of this ½m corner-cut when I noticed it, as we were building a new house at the bottom of their garden, but it still came back to bite us.)

One point that hasn't been discussed here is ventilation of the void under the insulation. You will have air bricks in the peripheral walls to allow free ventilation of the void. It is absolutely essential that these are not blocked by the added insulation so you will need to provide a clear ducted path to the void so that the added insulation does not impede ventilating air flow. You might also need to upgrade the wall ventilation. If you don't do this then you could get a humidity / moisture buildup in the joists leading to dry-rot.

These are a feature not an issue. Sorry. Excess rain. typically in winter, has to go somewhere, and where it goes depends on your subsoil profile, e.g. a high chalk content will be free draining; a clay layer will tend to keep water near the surface. Without adequate drainage the upper lawn area could saturate and become fluid, leading to your retention walls collapsing. The water coming out of the drains simply means that they are doing their job. You need to get the water away before it floods the patio. Once on the patio where it gathers depends on the fall-away design. Having truly level patios is a mistake. They should really have a few % gradient to allow drainage We have a similar raised area with wall retention, but I put in a soak-away for the upper area linked to our main soak-away, so I didn't need extra in-wall drainage. Where our patio meets the house, I have a 75×75 drainage gutter filled with 5mm pea shingle and linked to the rainwater down-pipe traps. We have one small area where the gradients run counter leading to rainwater pooling, but because our patio was laid on 50mm MOT 1 over 300mm MOT3 drainage that is again linked to main soak-away, it was again simple to use a 110mm circular cutter to cut a hole in the patio at the low point, dig out the sand and MOT1, them insert a but of 110mm downpipe as a sub-layer retainer with a slot in cover to create an instant drain point. You and your builder need to discuss similar remediation if you find the pooling runoff unacceptable, but also realise that the builder won;t regard this as a free-remediation, so you will need to do this work yourself or pay to have it done.