TerryE

Not really, it took less than a day to make and fit the stair. I am sure that it took some time to fit the metal stair. I don't cost my time at anything like £600 a day.

Nice ladder Almost as good as my approach at a price of £0.00 (+ £0.00 VAT of course)!

Ian, dusk is the best time to use a laser measure outside, IMO. Just enough light to see comfortably but low enough so that you get good S/N on your ranging and you can see the dot. I have a simple pistol grip with back aperture site and stick with a front sight and that I can register my Bosch into. A bit like aiming a rifle. The laser dot is just above the front sight from the back, so I know exactly where to look. You can see it once you've registered it. It's finding the bloody thing in the first place that's a problem.

I was reading one analysis of this and the commentator said that the generators have no accurate means of collecting stats on solar or wind input so the reported "demand" is just the sum of the major non-renewable sources that they get realtime data on: gas, nuclear, coal, hydro. You can see this because the individual component curves simply don't add up to the demand; and the demand paralles the largest variable on-demand supply: ccgt (gas and pellets). What the midday solar peak does is to drop the otherwise midday peak below the early evening peak.

Incidentally, I don't understand the rationale for putting the strip in the liner and not the door. But focusing on this core issue, we're talking about a single family dwelling here with a third floor -- just like the millions of homes in this country with loft conversions -- and not a multiple occupancy flat or public building. The regulators have given up on having automatic door closing hinges as the statistics showed that too many house occupiers were simply propping doors open semi-permanently, and this is worse. IMO, this decision is quite incompatible with the requirement to fit strip linings, as doors will often be ajar and you want to have confidence that you can close them easily as an immediate action. Doors in an MVHR-fitted house already have a ventilation gap at the bottom; the each room has at least one MVHR duct, so the room sealing is already compromised. IMO, a well fitted lining + door will give the required 30 min protection, and you can have confidence that you can close the door. You don't have this confidence with a strip liner fitted. I see this view as a pragmatic balance of risks to reach a realistic optimum, and not recklessness. My BCO hasn't asked for intumescent strips. but I will be fitting my doors accurately and I have backfilled the gaps between the liners and the timber frame with fire-rated foam.

Talk to your BInsp. Ours was very relaxed about the linings so long as we had well fitted FD30 doors.

And I see Kytun edging strips as well. All very neat. Looking good ?

In our case it was because there was some Saxon finds at the other end of the village. I did point out that there were five other applications in progress (including a major primary school extension quite close to the find) that were breaking up unmade ground between us and the find, none of which had a watching brief requirement; moreover of these five + our site, all the others had been fields or pasture up to WW2 whereas ours had been in continuous use as farm yards since the 1600s so that it was extremely unlikely that any earlier remains wouldn't have been undisturbed. The Local Archaeology Officer's response was that she could only make recommendations where the application had been referred to her and the others hadn't. So it was a case of writing off 1½ grand in Archaeology fees, or "going to war" with the LPA and delaying the start of build for months. We chose the former, because at best the former would be a Pyrrhic win. FWIW, a watching brief is the cheapest of the options that the LPA can impose upon you. You basically agree with the Archaeology consultants where you are going to disturb the site below modern made-up surface, and they have to watch as your builder strips down either to the final depth or to unmade ground (in our case the virgin clay). If you coordinate with with your builder and he has a suitable caterpillar or digger, then you shouldn't have them on-site for more than 1½ - 2 person days for a typical dwelling. If you muck them about or keep them waiting, then you pay. Ours just stood and watched and got excited about some 16-17c cattle pen post holes. but that was it. They then write a report saying that they found nothing -- and one which no one reads. That is unless they do find something of genuine archaeological merit and then you have to pay ££s

Dee, look at the link that Peter gave you. The cross-section of the valley is a shallow V at the centre but near the top are valley walls maybe 25mm height that are vertical. This jutty-out bit is what I meant by a "hip" The concrete tiles overhang this wall.

Doesn't matter. You still need a hipped channel profile. Also don't cut the tiles in situ. Mark them, move them, cut them; then replace and fix them. If you try to do this in situ, then you will invariably cut through the lead / alu / GRP (whatever you use for your valley) and have leaks as a result.

It is important that you have the right profile, and it particular the side hips -- normally the slaters will just run some battening parallel to the valley centre. This hip both provides side support for the tile edge and gap closer to stop cross winds getting under the slates, but also act as valley sides to contain any run-off in the valley centre.

There's a fundamental catch-22 with this logic. If you want a reasonably well ventilated house in winter, the heat losses from air exchange without HR are about half your total heating bill -- or you half your heating bill by having heat recovery. Of course, the alternative is have a pretty airtight house without mechanical ventilation, and just put up with the stuffy air, humidity, mildew, etc.

Bloody heated towel rails -- you trying to get me into trouble with the boss?

They look like UK plugs to me, but whether or not it is legal, sticking them in the splash zone where you step out of the shower onto the floor is still stupid, IMO.

With the sockets there, it's a case of illegal and suicidal as opposed to illegal on a technicality!!!

Clive that's what the little pressure gauge is for. If you go onto the updated version in a later post you will see that I've added the second pressure guage. Just pump it to 7 bar or whatever. Isolate it, and come back later to see if the pressure it the same. If it isn't then you have a leak and you'll need to find where the litre of so of water has come out. ? I had one small weap on a BSP thread, and one on a compression fitting onto my UFH fill / expansion vessel that I hadn't tightened enough.

Nick, I am planning to just use something like N × £3.26 Wemos D1 board £0.81 Wemos Proto Board £1.11 BMS280 module Plugged into a USB plug charger, say another £5, or £10 per room. I could mount these in a small project box but it isn't worth it The other option is to use an ESP-01 chip 3.3 drop down and male USB packed in a length of 25m overflow pipe for under £5 which plugs directly the the USB plug charger female USB. Neater. They all talk back to my RPi using Wifi, which is the simplest inter-room-cabling system for me. I just don't see the point of running data cables into every room.

IMO, you show take the hose into a pressure test set up (thanks Nick et al), very much as per my post, with an isolation valve between it and the hose. This silly up-leg is there for a reason. It is effectively a tiny expansion vessel so when you pump air into the system to pressurise it, then it ends up in the expansion arm and not in your pipework. You still use the hose to fill the system, then isolate it and then pump it up to 7 bar or whatever you want for your soak test. The bleed nipples are also very necessary so that you can drop the pressure back down in a controlled manner and vent the water into a bowl. The Momument test only goes up to 4 bar and I ended up bending the needle when I went up to 7, so in the end I just used it as an expensive Schrader valve adapter and used a separate 0-10 bar meter. IIRC, @jack suggested butchering an inner tube and CT1'ing it internally in a 22mm end-cap which would have saved £5 or so.

Nick how about talking about what you are trying to do? How many and how far separated do you want your sensors?

Nick, an RPi model A costs what? £25? or thereabouts. IMO, it is a big mistake trying to overload a single board and be miserly about keeping GPIOs free. SPI is point-to point and buffered so you can drive it at high clock rates so is good for high bandwidth connections like to Flash 3pins for one SPI connection, 4pins for two. I2C is a bus with a bus protocol. The complexity of all this his handled by the I2C drivers both on the RPi (and on the ESP chips that I use), so don't let this put you off. Even if you want 10 of the buggers at 2 per I2C bus, this is still only 20 IO pins. I guess I am a bit more relaxed because I only use an PRI3 ModB for my main server and the Wemos ESP8266 boards for everything else at under £3 per board ( I don't connect any physical devices directly to my RPi). OK the project box, grommets, cabling, vero board, etc., bumps the price per unit to maybe £15 but this is still pin money. As for as addressing OW by meaningful names is concerned, this is what high level languages like Python and Lua are for: you can have keyed lookup into arrays.

Nick, the BMP supports both I2C and SPI 3 and 4 wire. SPI is fast and point to point I2C is a proper bus so you can run your RTC and your BMP280s on it (two per bus). I am not sure what the issue is. The RPI GPIOs and the BMP280s will all coexist on an I2C bus with a 3.3V pullup. Section 5 of the DS describes the electrical configs. You can have two devices per I2C bus at addresses 0x76 or 0x77 depending on whether pin SDO (not used on I2C bus) is pulled high or low. The other pins used are SCK used as SCL and SDI used as SDA. SDI needs a 4.7K pullup which is what tells the chip it is talking I2C. PS. Just looked at the module in zoom. I can't understand the layout since it also has a reverse side which isn't shown. This seems to the the same part except both sides are shown and a description of the pinouts are given and this module diagram: Hope this helps It looks as if it is wired for I2C but you will need to remove R4 and pull up SDO if you want to use 0x76 address.

Peter, I've just spent the most of the last three years building my bloody house, so the last thing that I want to do is to plan for selling the bloody thing. Preparing for that eventuality is very much a quite separate phase for me. In a way, I think that you are 100% wrong here. If you need to replace any control component these days, then what is a realistic spares and replacement life? 2 years? 5? If some bit of kit goes wrong in 3 years time then I suspect that you might have to do (major) work to replace it. Forward buying is a expensive game if you are only have one of each and they cost a few hundred £. Jeremy and I have both work with the armed forces and understand their logistics models. They easiest way to guarantee a service life is to buy a sufficient spares holding at the point of commissioning / procurement that you have a set of plug-in replacements for any sub-components likely to fail. So in my case my basic IoT compute module currently costs £2.61. It plugs into a 2 × 8-pin header on a passive board, so is a quick swap out. I think that I can afford 10 spares; just in case since I use the same module in all of my IoT sensors and controllers.

Jeremy what I didn't want to get into is trying to out and find OTS (off-the-shelf) control components, put them in and then find that I needed to rejig everything and by more bits. OK, I am also a software geek which helps. Hence my two phase approach: Gather lots of data. Have some basic on-off control output, and do the algos in SW until I've fully characterised the system and have confidence that it works as I anticipated. Once I know how my house behaves and how to control it, then do a second phase productionising / procurement of an OTS solution. To be honest, watching / tracking your learning curve was one of the reasons that I decided to go down this route. The main advantage of this split, IMO, is that (2) isn't time critical as the house will be running happily. I can take my time over finding the right kit for my needs.

I am getting better than a repeatable 0.03°C accuracy out of my calibrated ds18B20s. It's just a lot easier when you are working to a known accuracy, IMO.

My general issue is that I have to control of house where the winter losses are of the order of 1kW or less and the number of net heating days maybe 90 or so and the number of net cooling days is possibly greater. Doing this is actually going to be fairly easy, but the reality is that this is such a niche market that there aren't any off-the-shelf control systems to do this. Jan was asking me why I am proposing to use so many thermometers; did I need them all? My response is that I think that I actually only need three for the control, but that the rest are logging only to validate that the control is working effectively and in some sense near optimum. By going custom, I can quickly and cheaply build a system that does what I want and I can also tweak it post go live in software rather than having to reconfigure hardware and buy new bits and pieces. Once the system is stable and working, I've then got a few years to let the off-the-shelf market catch up and I will know exactly what I am looking for. In the meantime, so long as I have a complete stock of LRUs (line replaceable units. -- pluggable spares) and my son-in-law understands the system, then there isn't a maintenance risk for Jan.