Radian

110mm underground drainage pipes make excellent rollers...

Recently had quotes to supply & connect boiler to gas only for a bog standard Glowworm ~ £1900 best. Plus no guarantee that it would get sign-off due to sharing gas with another boiler in the house. Hence currently scanning round for a small ASHP to heat workshop.

Our Magnifica must be getting on for 10 years old now. Lots of spares still available. Fitted a new O ring kit while ago and got a replacement steam control valve assembly. Still runs fine although the coffee strength dial (grind timeout) has a worn spot on the potentiometer track and if used at a particular position on the dial can grind for so long that the hopper overtops! If anyone finds lots of dry coffee grounds in the base of the unit, take a look at the spent pucks and see how thick they are. Someday I'll change the pot but in the meantime I've just sharpied the no-go zone above the pointer.

Pardon me. Recently I've got my head too full of DC actuators, it's a synchronous motor so only goes one way without extra effort. Can't recall if the spring return makes it NO or NC?

Perhaps just stick it in a biscuit box and buy a £15 alarm?

Are you just assumng the motor isn't energised in both valve positions? The several different ones I've used over the years have all run the motor to stall in both positions, with the microswitch switching in a current limiting resistor to prevent the motor winding burning out. Overall roughly the same power is dissipated 24/7. This is what gives rise to their inherent unreliability.

Class F motor insulation is supposed to be good for 155 Degrees C so that's something to its credit. But I'm going to keep banging on about how much of the heat they generate is down to their electrical power consumption. Funny how that figure is seldom advertised.

At the very least, put in a pair of isolators either side. They'll come in handy in a few years time.

I would love to find a decent off-the-shelf product , but concluded long ago that there is no such thing. My lowly opinion is largely based on the fact that they all appear to be copies of an ancient, bodged-together, low-tech design that gobbles electrical power like it was too cheap to bill for (a dream that never actually materialised in the nuclear age). Don't let me put you off though. @Onoff's favourite Honeywell is at the more expensive end of the market so you would certainly deserve to get a better lifespan out of it but I wouldn't count on it. Just keep an eye on their vampire power... when you find they're too hot to touch you might assume it's because of the temperature of the water flowing through them. It isn't.

Those things often leak at the motor shaft seals. Almost guaranteed. I was replacing mine every 5 years on average until I fitted a Stuart Turner pump (about 6 years ago ?) so hard to recommend. Easy enough if the tails end up in roughly the same place. What I would strongly advise is placing the new one in a suitably deep tray (I used a plastic cheese biscuit box) and putting a leak detector alarm in with it. Don't just put it in a tray without the alarm - otherwise it will fill up until the electrics trip!

OK, 0.022 W/mK for Celotex GA4060 = 0.06/0.022 = 2.727 compared with 2.75 above - you're absolutely right! U-value = 0.366, over 25m2 = about 10W per delta K, e.g. 300W loss for just about the worse case scenario here by the south coast. (freezing ground, 30 deg. UFH) Could I live with that I wonder.

Not quite beaten yet. Agreed the chipboard floor will be almost as good an insulator as what's underneath so how about Mapei Topcem screed on top and Spacetherm A2 aerogel below? R-value for 10mm = 0.5 plus 2.25 for 50mm celotex taking up the remaining space giving a total 2.75m2K/W or U-value of around 0.3 The reason I can't really just give up is that our main living room has little in the way of wall space for the larger radiators that would be required to switch from gas boiler to ASHP. Not without flanking a stone fireplace with a couple of rads. Just silly.

Just thinking about feasibility of replacing our ground floor radiators with UFH. Floor construction is concrete beam and block, 50mm XPS, 18mm Caberfloor. Would it be practical to chase out 50mm PIR to take pipes or is there a better option? Obviously precious little insulation but no way are we going to raise the floor levels. Somewhat ironic that a suspended timber floor could be much more successfully adapted.

I deliberately leave a desktop PC, NAS, several Raspberry Pi's and a 300W dehumidifier on 24/7 to help maintain 15° in my electronics workshop. I wish there were a few more loads I could move over there from the house as the remainder of the heating demand is currently made-up with a 2kW digitally controlled panel heater. The more useful work I can get done for the same power input the better during the heating season. Pity it's too far away from the kitchen.

You should have no problem with the things already on your list. I would add drainage as it's mostly common sense + digging. There's also plenty that can be done with a DIY grade cement mixer and a few cheap masonry tools. I got a real taste for laying patio slabs and low stone walls. If you're not already accomplished, just take your time and don't hesitate to knock down and rebuild. Be critical - mortar is still quite soft the following day so if you see something that bothers you, redo it. The trick seems to be in just having the confidence and not over-thinking what your limitations might be. Roofing was out of my scope though as I'd had a stroke the previous year and while I credit doing all the grunt work at ground level as being instrumental in my physical recovery, my balance was still a bit too shaky. Your mileage may differ and I was itching to get on the battens as hanging slates is one of those simple, repetitive but time consuming tasks that can otherwise soak up expensive man-hours.

Even if it was a Walnut?

About 5m long, just above skirting. looks lovely. ? All in the name of safety of course, but the muppet didn't think there'd be an issue running it over the top a barbeque Wish I'd taken a photo before I demolished it.

Nice big fat 28mm pipe looping up over windows & doorways. That seems to be what Gas Safe thinks is the bees knees these days. I have a rental property where they insisted on switching out 15mm from the meter to 22mm when fitting a new boiler. Only way was round the side of the house but that was a shared corridor so they poked it right through a ground floor room and out the back wall. Then they ran it over the top of a brick barbecue I'd built against the back wall ?

Good point. Regular overflights to check for unregistered installations - oh wait, google already has that covered.

I know what you you mean about finding the time. Trouble is, when you're poorly, you're not always feeling like doing the sort of stuff you've put off doing. BME280 temperature and humidity are handy but need calibrating. They're incidental to the corrections needed for the barometer so not fabulously accurate. I also got caught out by self heating. I thought the fact that VINDRIKTNING pulls air through with a small fan would improve the sampling but the ESP32 is drawing around 0.25W and this still bumps the temperature up a few degrees. Fortunately it's a pretty constant offset so easy to subtract.

Must have dropped them into post by mistake. Here they are. XIAOMI Thermometer next to a couple of IKEA VINDRIKTNING ESP32-CAM wired to IKEA VINDRIKTNING PCB CO2 sensor at the bottom left of the enclosure

While there are plenty of wireless temperature/humidity displays to choose from, getting the data out of them for our own home integrations is always a challenge. And while they're not always too expensive, things soon add up if you want them in every room. Throw in slightly more sophisticated sensing like PM2.5 or CO2 and the price skyrockets. I have mentioned before how I use low-cost BTLE thermo-hygrometers with custom firmware to expose their data as BTLE beacons. Gathering the data from these beacons and dumping it onto the local network as MQTT is a perfect task for an ESP32. So while I was thinking about 3D printing an enclosure for the ESP I came across this nifty little IKEA gadget that provides a PM2.5 air quality indicator in a rather nice looking desktop case: XIAOMI Thermometer next to a couple of IKEA VINDRIKTNING The VINDRIKTNING (or 'wind direction' translated) has a USBC port round the back and three LEDs giving a crude 'traffic light' readout of air quality. People have already hacked these to extract the sensor data and relay it over WiFi as MQTT for integration into Home Assistant or whatever. This struck me as an ideal 'base station' for my XIAOMIs while at the same time providing air quality data and anything else I could squeeze inside the box along with the ESP32. ESP32-CAM wired to IKEA VINDRIKTNING PCB ESP32 dev. boards tend to be a little bit bigger than ESP8266 so I had a job finding one that would fit. Oddly enough, the cheapest proved to be the ESP32-CAM which actually comes with a camera! As for getting more value out of the modification I also mounted a BME280 module on the ESP32 to provide temperature/humidity/barometric pressure as well as PM2.5 data from within the base station. Oh, and there's a light sensor that VINDRIKTNING uses to dim the LEDs so I fed that into an analogue input. There's also enough room in the box for a CO2 sensor but I've yet to wire that in. Unfortunately these additional sensor use some of the camera connections so a sneaky CCTV from this device wouldn't be possible when fully loaded with sensors. CO2 sensor at the bottom left of the enclosure The end result is a base station providing air quality measurements costing <£20 that can host numerous ~£6 thermometers. So today we lightly browned some toast mid-morning and accidentally burnt flatbreads while making supper: This base station is currently in the garden room, off the kitchen, next to a sliding patio door so the temperature swings quite a bit. However, In this position it picks up a thermometer about 20m away in the back garden, one inside the fridge and another in the kitchen. Those show up in different plots. Here is the barometric pressure and light level:

I found siliconised acrylic sealant to be far better than either acrylic or silicone in this kind of application. Supposed to have +/-12.5% flexibility. Overpaintable and cheap too.

You mean - - - Bunnies?

From the datasheet 5~6kW, with a COP around thee or so, therefore around 16kW of heat output for 5kW input. With insulation you could bring that 1800000btu down to something closer to 60000. However, it might even be overkill in a partitioned off area,.