TerryE

This is really a bit of a rant and lessons learnt. First of all our 04 Volvo S50 Estate's clutch is going. Lovely car; bodywork and comfort excellent, but the engine has done 150K miles and is getting clapped out. So we needed a hire care at short notice and choose Budget, and paid online. An hour later the "Oh shit" moment: we'd sent our licences off to the DVLA to get the address changed when we moved in to the new house. They hadn't arrived back yet. So Jan decided to try a photocopy of her DL and passport as they often do an online check of the licence anyway. No good: a hour later she returns. A quick check of the "Booking Terms and Conditions: Please see the Booking Conditions for more details on cancelling your booking, the associated charges and how to claim any refund you may be entitled to" and also through the booking dialogue; this was the only T&Cs that had agreed to. This only states that the renter must hold a current DL, and doesn't state that she or he must present the original. A call the customer service number: Can we have a refund or part refund? No. Can you explain where in the agreement that entered into online that my wife had to present her original DL? No, it's in our General T&Cs. OK, you asked me to confirm the Booking Conditions, but can you tell me where on the website or booking process you make them available for inspection? No. You get them when you pick up the car. So you are using a document that you haven't given me and can refer me to as a reason to refuse a rental and them you are with-holding refund for reasons that lie outside the agreement that we entered into? You wont get you money back. This is a non-refundable booking. Will you please confirm this in writing? No OK if the DL arrives in the post later today or tomorrow say, can we at least have the car from the remainder of the term? Unlikely, but you need to check with the local office. If the customer doesn't pick up the car at the agreed time then it is normally reassign for hire. I managed to remain polite and rational through all this, but I was steaming by the time I put down the phone. 15 mins later the post arrives with Jan and my DLs. Another call this time to the hiring desk: We were refused pick of a car this morning because not having possession of an original valid licence. It's now turned up, will we still be able to pick up the car? (This is at 13:30 when the scheduled pick up was at 11:00) Yes; cars are normally held on the same day. But you say that you've just changed your address? Is your address on the DL the same as on the Electoral Register? No, we've only just moved in. In that case you will also need to bring two bank statements official letters proving that the driver resides at the address. Where does it say this? .... As it happened the lady at the desk didn't ask for the proofs that Jan took with her just in case. So we now have the car. Two lessons from this: Be aware of the pitfalls of changing address. Yes you need to do it, but stagger things like changing DLs, just in case you get stuck in a denial of service. If a company has preconditions for the sale of a service then it should be upfront and clear about these -- say as a simple checklist before you buy the service. Any company whose position is that they can sell a a non-refundable service under T&Cs that they don't make available to the buyer before or during the sale are dishonest and possibly acting illegally. IMO, Avis / Budget fall into the category, and I would never use them again.

Well we drove up to Manchester and stayed overnight then went to the English Sofa Company factory / showroom the following morning. Jan and I were far from impressed with styles and even more so with the (lack of) quality: the leather seaming was crude and untidy; leather on the display items was sometimes pulled / strained and the designs were uncomfortable to sit in. So after 30 mins in the showroom, we took our leave and headed south. On the way back I had a look on Google maps at where the sofa shops were in Birmingham and Coventry, but we decided that they were just too dispersed to make a "shotgun in the dark" stop-overs worthwhile. I then checked MK and discovered that all of the main sofa shops are in one mall square. So back to MK, and after a few tries we ended up in a shop in the square that isn't even listed on Google: Natuzzi: Italian and extremely high quality in terms of comfort, style and attention to detail in the finishing -- albeit expensive. However after the ESC and the other showrooms, both Jan and I felt that the Natuzzi stuff was just in a different league so we decided to bite the bullet and pay for the quality.

Yup, we'd never buy a bed or a sofa without making sure that we like the style and comfort "in the flesh". It's just that N'ton <-> Manchester is a bit of a shopping trip!

We are looking for some nice furniture for our new living room and are struggling to find suitable suppliers of comfortable and functional furniture. We've looked at the usual chain suppliers such as DFS and Furniture Village, and in my view their ranges (or at least the ones we looked at) just aren't to our taste. We like the sofas from the the English Sofa Company, but I am interested if anyone can recommend alternatives. We live near Northampton and the ESC is in Salford which is about a 6 hr round trip if we want to try any out.

I can't remember where I got mine from. Just Google magnifying headset with light. Theother thing that I would recommend is a temperature controlled iron. You can get a cheapy from Bangood or AliExpress for around £30-50 if I recall. They are size compatible with the Pro ones that cost ten times as much, which means that the cheap tips also fit them.The temperature is usually way off calibration, but you just work out the setting that works for you by trial and error. A lot better than any uncontrolled iron, and good enough for doing the odd through hole board. Big Clive did a review of one on YouTube, which is what made me buy one.

I had IOLs ten years ago as well, but I still can't focus at 15cm unaided. Even at 0.1" pitch, these made doing fine solder work just so much easier. And to NickfW's point there is 4 different strengths plus compounds.

But have you got some of these. Absolutely essential for old farts when soldering!

Nick, when you want move from breadboarding to something more permanent, then you will either need the prototyping hat or mount the Wemos as a daughter board on a through-hole board, and UPS hat. Just shout if you want more details.

Don't know about Windows. I suppose that someone might find a way of screwing you, but the entire stack is FLOSS. I just plug my Wemos into my RPis and Ubuntu laptops and they work.

@MikeSharp01, Mike, If you are comfortable in C and the Arduino IDE, then the ESP is one of the targets. I've used Python, but not the embedded uPython on the ESP8266. The Lua RTS that I work on is more as Javascript is to Java then Lua is to Fortran. It's another late binding language like Python, Javascript and Perl, though the RTL is event driven -- more like node.js. The nice thine about the Wemos is like the Arduino, you just plug the module into a USB port and away you go. I've a a couple doing all of the I/O on my heating system.

Nick, why not with one of the developers of the Lua firmware for the chipset -- me? For a start don't use the bare ESP-02 or even the the ESP-12E modules as you will need UART, and 5V to 3.3V drop-down. Use the Wemos D1 mini. This can be powered and programmed over USB serial port. Wemos do a range of shields as well. The price is about £6 from the UK or £2 from China -- if you can bare the 3 week delay. Give me a ring if you want to chat about options. //Terry Counting the flashes on the meter is easy, even with Lua -- though if you can't get power to the box (yea, yea, I know, but ours is outside) then an always-on Wemos burns through battery. You need a low power I2C counter timer; you can then put your ESP8266 into deep sleep and wake up every 30 mins or so to send the reading to your RPi or whatever; this will run for months on a LiPO. (And Wemos do a cheap charging shield for the D1 mini as well.)

@tilpol, if you are doing a newbuild and can get your wall U values under 0.15, windows & doors under 1.0 and avoid the "acres of glass" that so many architects love, with a decent insulated slab, good airtightness and MVHR then you should get your space heating needs down under 2 kW even for typical Jan / Feb. The problem with a wood fire is that you will have a great deal of difficulty keeping the power output under 6 kW if you want it to run efficiently, and the burning efficiency of stacked wood isn't good; anything less than 2 years drying, terrible. A bit of a dilemma, really. In principle the RMH approach solves this by burning at a high output for shortish period, once every few days and dumping the heat into a thermal store (typically cob) which you can then draw down as needed into the house fabric through UFH or whatever. A quick search gave this interesting thread. As this thread points out there are a lot of issues such as no commercially available appliances with HETAS certification. A difficult one.

That podcast is well worth listening to, BTW.

Nick, Costing the Earth did a really good podcast on Eigg's energy solution, and one of the major goals was to provide at residents with a guaranteed supply so long as they stuck to the <5 kW cap, and one of the aims was to get rid of all the noise polluting Diesel generators. All houses have a 20A trip on the supply. Basically its such a PITA losing your supply that most islanders just learn to shape their demand to avoid getting tripped. I can't see anyone needing 120 kWh a day, so the issue isn't the overall capacity but how you proactively manage your demand to avoid the 5kW trip.

No you can't. The phase change cells are only heated by electricity and have internal plate heat exchangers to exchange heat with the potable water flowing through the device. so if the PCM is between 60-65 °C then the input water at 10°C, is heated to a similar temperature but this is then mixed down using an internal TMV to the preset temperature between 40-55°C, say. We have two SunAmp in parallel heated solely by E7 low tariff supply. We preheat our direct mains for HW though a PHE exchanging heat from the slab, which raises the temp at the riser from ~8°C to 20°C. This is then heated to ~56°C by the SunAmps and then blended down with more cold at 20°C to 46°C in our Manifold TRV. Hence the SunAmps raise our DHW by roughly 26°C. Jeremy has a single SunAmp which he feeds via a PHE from a buffer tank which is preheated to ~35°C using his ASHP. The SunAmp again raises this to ~56°C and this is then blended down to his set point probably around the same 46°C but in his case this is with borehole water at ~10°C. Do the maths to work out the overall heat delta per litre delivered, but this is a lot better than mine but maybe 2× rather than 2.5 × because of his mix down using 10°C water. But that's why he can get away with one SunAmp whilst I need 2. But the take-home message is that using a preheat buffer tank heated by the ASHP can effectively double the SunAmp capacity but you still need to heat them with electricity.

I've got twin SunAmps and I am delighted with them, but they definitely have a sweet spot -- that is where you need a high thermal capacity density with low heat losses. If you are looking at onsite wind, some form of solid fuel heater such a an RMH, or infill kW from your 5kW allowance (120 kWh is a lot of energy to use) then I would have though some some of high capacity buffer (either water or solid) at ~30°C also acting as a DHW preheat might prove more effective or at least cost-effective.

Yup this system might be 30 years old and never routinely maintained or it might be a modern design. Different probable failure modes.

Another typical problem is that any the thermostatic values are sticking. Also have you got a sludge filter in your system. If so when did you last clean it out? if the back boiler is new enough to have one. Do you know the make, model and approximate age of the fire and backboiler? Do you know what your topology is? If you have multiple loops in parallel, then you might have balance or backflow issues, especially if you have non return valves missing in some of the loops. Another potential issues is airlocks in any swan-necks on feeds etc., or in the boiler itself. If you have multiple loops then an airlock in the boiler path might just result in the pump circulating the water down one loop and backwards down another without circulating through the boiler at all. A diagram might help.

As a PS, I see that your total wall profile is ~300mm. If you want an energy efficient TF then you are really looking at a total of 400mm minimum and probably 50 -100 more than that.

The 5kW limit is quite workable for a new build if you are willing either to do manual scheduling or some from of home automation scheduling of high load devices. Most kettles peak at around 3kW, so a kettle + a cold fill washing machine at the same time will be enough to "punish" you by tripping the 5kW breaker. So some things are obvious: hot+cold fill for your washing machine, dishwasher, etc. LPG for cooking. But the main challenge is how to get the bulk kWh for your space and DHW heating. Bulk LPG is a no-no, I guess. And there is almost no coppice supply for renewal timber stove heating. Clearly as others have said, a near zero energy build will make a big difference on the demand side, but you will still need to have 10s kW input per day for space and water heating. And you will need an economic source for this, especially given the 3 km rough track access. There are ~50 other households on the island and these must include some good working examples. We have an MBC warm slab (search the forum; there are lots of debates about the advantages of this technique), but this includes ~10tonne of concrete inside the thermal envelope of the house which acts as a thermal store. Have you explored some like a rocket mass heater (RMH) option? RMH systems often use cob rather than concrete as the thermal mass, and cob would be a more practical material in your case so long you are not relying on structural characteristics. I have seen example (but I can't remember where, sorry) where someone effectively put a keel in their floor slab (surrounded by EPS) and heated this with an RMH to around 30°C. By having one UFH "zone" running through the keel, this heat could be redistributed on demand to the rest of the slab, allowing the short burn RMH to provide a day-round steady space heating supply as well as working as a DHW pre-heat. Sorry, as this is a really a Boffin's Corner topic and not something to consider lightly, but what I am saying is that there are energy-efficient options that you could consider. @JSHarris, @SteamyTea et al, perhaps if you want to discuss this point, then we should move this discussion to the BC sub-forum as @tilpol has enough to consider at the moment.

Our private BCO defined three inspection points: When the MBC warm-slab formwork was complete before the concrete pour When the stone skin was up to 1st floor level to inspect the TF, foulwater plumbing, stonework and cavities. Completion. We've swapped emails and pics on a few design points and provided the list of docs that he wanted. Just as built SAP docs and completion inspection to go.

Now you're onto discharge of conditions! But still, congrats

The major flaw with the lot20 approach is confusing a sub-component with a system. My house uses a 3kW heating coil to heat the house. It takes 3kW electricity and turns it into heat. Yet my house as a whole is well within the top 1% of UK housing stock, in terms of its overall efficiency.

How about this: