Radian

I wouldn't expect such a big change in dimension based on those variables but it does indeed seem as if a space has opened up between the chipboard and XPS sheet overnight.

Our house has a measly 50mm thick sheet of XPS laid on block and beam, topped with flooring chipboard. It's been down for the best part of 25 years now. Every morning when I come downstairs I can hear/feel the chipboard settling. It's only first thing, once walked on it's fine. It's almost as if the chipboard lifts up slightly overnight. Can't figure it out, or think if its always been like this or not.

Just how common a practice was this - and why the (expletive deleted) did they do it? Was it some kind of shortcut to hold the joists in place while they infilled with bricks? It just boggles my mind.

You've got quite a challenge on there. Yes you can use insulation with lower thermal conductivity but unlike glass fibre or mineral wool, PIR sheets aren't vapor permeable. So you would need to start by putting down a vapor barrier and that's difficult to get right unless you are boarding the ceiling. Even then all penetrations (pipes, cables, downlights etc.) must be vapor tight. You might think you could just lay a vapor barrier over the attic joists but that's asking for condensation to form around the timbers when moist air finds its way up under the barrier and condenses. Without airflow it will be a 'hot mess' between the barrier and ceiling. This is all assuming you have a ventilated loft. If the airspace in the loft was conditioned, i.e. a room-in-roof then I doubt you'd be asking about alternative insulation.

Could it be condensation? This is a kitchen and while the room may feel toasty, there'll be high humidity levels just waiting to condense out on a window. It's a mistake to think double glazed windows don't get condensation. If, say, your room was at 22oC and RH was 75% (this is how my kitchen was while we cooked supper just now - lots of pasta boiling on the hob!) then the dew point would be 17.4oC This isn't so low and could well be in range of the window glass. The giveaway would be some streaks at the bottom of the reveal.

You know there's been a great deal of improvement in A2A - especially domestic units. We often hear similar reports of experiences with office type A/C but it would be a shame if it put people of unnecessarily. With good insulation and airtightness, the sort of air velocities from the indoor units is going to be barely noticeable. And many systems now use thermal imagers to direct the airflow away from people. Getting heating and cooling with SCOP of 5 beats any other heating system I know of, not to mention the relatively low cost of the kit.

Lift an inspection cover in a rainstorm or put a hosepipe into an accessible gutter? But I wouldn't bother. Houses of your vintage nearly always combine both drainage systems. If you can't trace the pipe to find out why there's a vacuum, you could just 'T' in a small AAV under the sink. Better to relocate the sink waste onto a proper stack though.

Do you actually have combined rain and foul water drainage from your property?

You'll have to trace its path then. Definitely sounds like a vacuum is being created. Apart from unpleasant odours finding their way up from the sink, the general sewage discharge may being adversely affected.

Is that vertical joint an expansion gap filled with some sort of sealant? More of that if so to fill the gap?

Sorry to quiz you but do you really mean the tap itself or the waste as the water in the sink drains away? Assuming the latter @dpmiller is possibly thinking the rainwater flow is creating a low pressure that empties your trap. There should either be a vent stack to prevent suction if the waste discharges directly into the sewer pipe or an airgap (pipe sits above an outside drain gully).

I'd expect there to be no shortage of taker's.

Walls yes, but what about doors? I'm not trying to be deliberately awkward because I've been through this myself with 6m long patio sliding doors. These follow convention and sit on a DPC with blockwork below coming off the foundation. So the blockwork below is in no need of splash protection - it's already effectively saturated. The doorsill, frame and sliding units are all water resistant and drained (onto the face of the blockwork). So what height does the door need to be above a path or patio? If there was a patio with level threshold (like I have elsewhere) then yes, an Aco type linear drain is called for. But if it's raised above FFL what need is there for it to be 150mm above?

Start by working out what you actually want as the end result then we may be able to advise on how to achieve it.

Those silver plated jobbies fetch a pretty penny!

The reason for 150mm below DPC is to prevent rain splashing up above DPC and soaking masonry. But doors aren't masonry - they're weatherproof so it always gets me how this rule seems to be applied unnecessarily. If BC insist on treating the brick piers either side despite being under cover, perhaps a 150. flashing upstand could be cut in to give them protection?

Time for an update. I settled with working within a 450J window and it's not too much of a hassle. The diverter has been in constant operation for 3 months now and has only let 6% of what it has diverted out to the grid. However, last week I installed a new UPS for some computer kit and immediately noticed a problem. The switching supply in the UPS puts a tragic amount of wideband noise on the mains when charging the battery and this was swamping my X10 like 120kHz signalling. I was using this as a low latency signal to "burn" cycles remotely around the house. But as elegant as it was, it's no good if it can't be relied on. Back to the drawing board (I always suspected this might be an issue). I then revisited the use of MQTT but nothing I did could get latency down below a max. of 160ms. At 3kW this is about 500J so the buffer could easily over/underflow and hence possibly cost me unnecessary import. UDP was still too slow with a max. latency of 80ms. Something else was needed. This is when I started looking at RF modules like the Nordic Semis NRF devices. But when researching I found comparisons with a thing called ESP-NOW. Turns out I don't need another RF module as Expressif have implemented a low-latency peer-to-peer communication protocol that can run concurrently with the WiFi stack on the ESP8266 and ESP32. It works by allowing small packets to fly between devices point-to-point. They're not passed through access points or switches and have a latency of a couple of milliseconds as a consequence. Perfect! It also has a broadcast capability so my goal of being able to distribute dump loads around the place is nicely catered for. The packets are only 250 bytes but that's plenty to have a 'burn' flagbit and a frame count (to spot missing packets for a QOS check) as well as a cycle-by-cycle voltage and power measurement to keep the immersion unit updated with the bigger picture. Being point-to-point also means the entire network, along with MQTT etc. can go down but the measurement unit and distributed dump load switches will all stay working. The range isn't great though and I've swapped the ESP32's with ones that can have an external antenna to improve the range. However, even with 5% packet loss, with packets sent at the end of every cycle it would be unlikey for 5 out of 100 to go missing in a row and lose 100ms (300J). Also, it's easy to rebroadcast the packets with a repeater that can extend the range. Somehow ESP-NOW manages to step in and answer all my prayers for the sake of a tiny extra code overhead.

Judging by the overhanging chunks, they look to have some binder so I'd agree with others that it was blown in like this when the cavities were filled. A wind driven pile would be much flatter and smoother. And every bead would be loose.

You must find some of the topics here quite amusing. Energy is a hot topic. 🤣

I read that Instagram was also down today. Perhaps an AWS outage was affecting a wider range of services. Denshi Blocks! Cool. I wanted to get my son one of those in the late 90's but couldn't find one. Settled for a Radio Shack Science Fair 200-IN-1 Electronic Project Lab instead. Not that he took much interest in it. To be fair, it was pretty lame.

And you know how mental Amazon delivery drivers can be as they rush from place to place!

Plenty of advantages.

I wonder what ne'er-do-wells can do with all this internet connected fluff? It never fails to amaze me how vulnerable WiFi is. 802.11 packets are freely broadcast and with a few quids worth of ESP8266 magic, packets can be injected to de-authorise any chosen devices. The layer on which this works is above all the encryption so the attacker doesn't need a password. From there it's possible to monitor the reconnection process as the ejected device tries to recover at which point... your WiFi creds can be revealed (MIM, eviltwin AP, Wifiphisher etc.) Great sport for teens with nothing better to do and a smattering of arduino & Github.

I'm going to pinch that idea! For doors that aren't used much in the winter, an easy to remove cover sounds ideal. Cut an nice shape out of some black double-sided velcro with some black fabric on top. That's my plan now anyway. But there is a 21st century solution - replace with a digital door lock. Holes through our houses to the outside world are so primitive. We've had central locking routinely fitted on cars for over 30 years now yet houses, worth an order of magnitude more, still have locks with keys.

😇 I'm not that daft brave. No, I was just wondering what the chances were of having a nice DNO man come and put in the isolator for free. I suspect the answer is no (especially given the meters have a built-in isolator).