TerryE

You've been watching too much Breaking Bad!

I gave some away to a friend to put under his garage slab, and used a bit myself. I've still got a couple of pieces left that we're hanging on to for the time being, just in case. We've had to dump very little.

I've got one of these: Adjustable Angle Sliding T-Bevel Square. Far more practical IMO.

Sarah, how about using a smoke glass door and hinging it on the other side? You will use the loo and basin far more frequently than the shower, and having the door open onto the basin and toilet will be a real PITA in use. Were' building a small ensuite in my son's room in the new house with a similar footprint to this, but a little shallower. We've got a full width rectangular shower tray with the shower head on the partition wall and the open door forms the shower screen. That's allowed us to centre the toilet and put the basin in what would be the under-the-window position on your plan. If you don't like the idea of someone walking into the utility when you are having a shower, simply put a bathroom lock on the utility door. Also as Nick says, working out the position of the foul water piping should be one of the first things that you finalise, so pick your preferred shower tray and decide the orientation. You can then position the studwall so that the tray is an exact fit, allowing for fitting / green plasterbooard tolerances.

My electrician has just wired up my 240V side of off my dual SunAmp config, so I will be doing the commissioning testing next week. Once I've done this, I will write it all up as a post. I did the plumbing myself. None of the certification / notifiable constraints of a UVC. You can self-certify yourself as competent for your own DIY plumbing install, but you still need a sparky with the right tickets to do the 240V side. SSRs, microcontroller, etc. cost me about £300 in total, but that includes my UFH control as well.

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.