Carrerahill

Throw them off the job and fine some pro's.

You are the customer, I think you should set the spec as per discussed and the paving expert site. Geo is only really going to do anything where there is a loose covering like gravel or bark. Once a fully bed of paving mortar is laid no weed will come up through that! Unfortunately there are a lot of trades who think they know things and don't really. Some of them don't really think, they just, try and copy and make up their own minds on things and carry on oblivious to what is going on or how things work. I saw a push-fit coupler installed by a plumber, with PTFE tape last week! I do not joke! I fixed it, the neighbour wanted to get the plumber in to check it... I pointed out the plumber was totally incompetent and that I did know what I was doing and had replumbed my whole house in soldered copper when I built the extension (I was so proud of my under sink work etc. I posted it on this site to receive many comments of how good it looked) and that although I am no plumber, I probably carry out better work than at least 60% of professional plumbers because I care and I take my time and I want it to look like a work of art. Sorry, I digress, but you get the point.

This is website is considered as the authority on all things paving: https://www.pavingexpert.com/layflag1 - note how they do it. Sub then bed i.e. the sand/cement.

I don't see the point of the Geo and the sand, I would go direct to a FULL cement/sand bed. Do that and no Geo is needed and will be quicker and save a little without any detriment to the install. The sand blinding is done for certain things but in this instance I cannot be sure why they want to do it. If they do insist on the sharp sand, ask for it to be bound up 1:7 or 1:8 ish (min) with cement so that it becomes a ridged base. The sand layer in there could, wash out and cause issues depending on how it is installed. I shall caveat the above by saying that without full view on this we may not know things for sure.

4-1/2" grinder, cut the top, break out the section that will be going, then grinder body will go into pipe and you can cut base and remainder of the sides. 4 minute job.

You should vent it, particularly in your case to keep the structure flowing with some air driving off moisture coming from the exposed wall. As it is boarded/bricked up, I would probably just core it and fit a nice vent grille. Far less effort than trying to fit a brick. I'd also maybe initially opt for a smaller vent, like a 75mm core, you just want some air movement but don't want a huge open escape route for all your warm air. I personally have not ventilated one of our sealed chimneys but it is, internal to the house until roof level and is directly adjacent to 2 active chimneys. It is fitted with a vent cap. My feeling is that the warmth in the chimney structure will help keep the capped one dry. Think washed out milk carton sitting in the sun it does dry out.

Dichloromethane?

Can, I hate the stuff and try not to use it so the idea of cleaning a gun out just is not for me, in fairness my long-reacha-extanda-tube (patented) gave me all the control I needed, it just decided to be naughty and go up. I had a look 15 minutes ago, with expansion it's looking a little better!

See when it comes to reports like this, the statistics are not based on certainty's because they don't take into consideration mental health, desperation, drug and alcohol abuse all which are certainly going to be part of the cause and effect of a break in. Statistically lets say I would not nudge/push another car on the road to get past, however, change my situation and I may. Ill child on board, trying to get to hospital, life or death, you bet I would not be driving like I was going for Sunday lunch. That statistic has not taken into consideration desperation. Many people will break in for the same reason. So depending on the mental state of the criminal will depend if an alarm is going to put them off or not. I don't like crime stats, I also don't agree with many of them because police forces alter the conditions to make them look better. Police Scotland several years ago made a statement that, "Reported crime had fallen" and how great they were and how well they had done. All I read was that reports of crime had fallen not the actual crimes! I bought an alarm on Wednesday for a friend of mine to install in their garage, £107 delivered for a Texecom control panel, remote keypad, PIR, door contacts, battery and premium bell box. I said I would sort it for them as I know how and have installed several alarms for myself over the years. Maintenance is only a way of alarm companies making money and they are in cahoots with the insurance companies that technically an insurance company may only accept a professionally installed & maintained alarm, we all know that alarms don't need maintained. Maybe change the battery every 6-8 years or when it warns you the battery is low. If you don't want a proper alarm even a bellbox with a flashing LED (decoy ones look too fake).

I don't have the time just now, but search for posts by me within the last year I think it would be, I posted a huge screed about asbestos and all the issues and concerns and limitations etc. etc. I know where you are coming from, just relax and read my post, I am certain it will help you.

I just needed to vent to some like minded individuals, it is not a big issue. I had a bit of a draught from under a skirting, I am going to paint the wall the skirting is on anyway and working from home means maximum procrastination. So I think to myself, remove the still unpainted skirting, drill 2 holes between each stud and blow in some foam, wall is a TF with 100mm PIR and a 50mm gap, the draught is coming up through where the TF meets the floor makeup, not bad, but enough I could feel a cold draught during the high winds. So, I pull the skirting, and drill 18 odd holes or whatever, missing a hole where I know the 2.5mm T&E cables are clipped to a stud - I'll live with a little draught there to ensure my cables are not covered in foam. I pull some sleeve off clear piece of SY cable to make myself a piece of tube about 300mm long that I attach to the foam can tube to extend it a bit. From expanding foam experience I figure that in this situation there is no harm is just blasting a shot into each hole and it will fill up the void at the bottom of the wall, and will fill up all the cracks and my insulation properties will increase. I even masked along the year old Amtico so if any snotters drop I am not onto the floor. So, I empty a can into the wall. Great. I wait a bit and using a torch peek through the gap between the floor and the wall, I can see the foil on the PIR, has all the blinking foam not gone UP the way!!! So I now have a nice insulation band about 60mm and up along my wall! Looks like I will be going to Screwfix later! Typical, blinking typical, that stuff goes everywhere, when you want it to pretty much just fill a void, it goes up!

We insulated a party wall, our reasons were different, we lived in a semi-detached, when we moved in we had 2 elderly neighbours, I knew what was going to happen and knew their house would end up on the market soon enough, then we could have got noisy neighbours or quiet neighbours. 50/50. So I said well, lets soundproof now, because it's not a gamble worth taking when the whole room was about to get a full overboard/flooring/wiring/decoration. We got a lovely, helpful, quiet couple who could not parent a young boy. A little towrag who apparently went to bed at the same time as his parents every night and was the most misbehaved little twit I have ever had the misfortune of knowing. The little darling would thump about well past 21:00 (at 2-3 years old) right up to 23:45ish, throw tantrums and slammed doors. We could hear aspects of this and that was with soundproofing! We often would comment how bad it would have been had we not, although I always said I missed out on the satisfaction of ordering loads of soundproofing and making it clear to everyone on the street we were having soundproofing installed to not so subtly show what we thought of the towrag's noise. I used that silicon isolation adhesive stuff and set new studs about 10mm off the existing brick wall, I isolated, as best I could the top and bottom from the house by trimming the floorboards back from the wall removing the physical connection to the wall where they had been mortared in. I then stuffed it with an sound insulation rockwool type thing. I then boarded it and had it skimmed. It works well. The isolation and hefty wad of rockwool stuff I think did the trick. Nothing too fancy to be honest, just using basic techniques to isolate. It works well, if I was doing it all again I would have probably done an OSB sheet then plasterboard, reason being we experimented with this in the build and have some really good sound properties by just using thick studs, OSB and PB. It more or less looked like a timber frame version of what Nod posted above. Maybe even used soundboard then normal PB but at the time I had 100's of sheets of PB so it suit to use that. I didn't go in for proprietary systems because they all seemed like solutions to problems that could be solved by being clever with fixings and insulation. I did contemplate resilient bar but decided I didn't like the way the wall would be supported.

It looks like a simple pin arrangement sitting through the door hinges with a spacer bar in the middle. The pins look to be threaded, but technically only the bottom pin is fastened to anything, according to the illustration, the top pin just sits there held in by gravity. It even suggests a make shift "puller" buy using a washer to help drive it up. I think I would get the top nut off, washer on, and carefully drive the nut down hard until it lifts the pin. If it was me, I would even try and induce some veg oil (to keep burning oily smells to frying pan only and not like that of burning crude oil) to help ease the pin up. It does mention cutting the tube if the pin has ever been hit down - has the pin been smacked at some point?

4K in one pop sounds an awful lot based on your demands. A boiler for your house will be about £800-1200 - allow a day to fit plus materials, maybe £250-350 - Total cost best: £1050 - worst £1550. https://www.screwfix.com/p/worcester-bosch-greenstar-28cdi-gas-compact-combi-boiler/446KP?kpid=446KP&ds_kid=92700055281954502&ds_rl=1249404&gclid=CjwKCAjw_L6LBhBbEiwA4c46uot8sKvS-1z55CQdbyDHMPm-Uzw9UyHz90IdPmFU3kQs6oXGSEQOehoC4RsQAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds Anyone who tries to sell you new pipework, new radiators, new everything, is at it and needs to be removed from your list of potential installers. Get onto some local plumbers with some good reviews and talk to them, tell them you want a boiler out and a boiler in, that is what you want nothing else, when they start to tell you what else you will need politely decline and move on. If you get the nonsense about gas line size them do your own research, even phone the manufacturer and ask for the spec to be confirmed. Often 22-28mm pipes are talked about these days, however a short run of say 15mm with radiused bends, not 90° elbows, may be suitable. I cannot remember the figures but for every bend they say add a metre or something like that, gentle radiused bends can be ignored. Apparently I needed a 22mm gas pipe, I did the calc and needed a 15mm! A good number of my neighbours have had new C/H systems installed over the past 5-6 years. The majority of the jobs start with piles of copper pipe going in and lots coming out. When I speak to them and ask about the new pipework most of them have said, "Oh well the company told me I needed it as the piping was over 20 years old and it will be clogged and they cannot guarantee the new boiler because Viessmann or Bosch etc. won't allow a new boiler on an old system." At that I am usually left angry they have been ripped off. I realise there are sometimes times where new rads and pipework are needed. I was at a building industry seminar/fair type thing for housing associations a number of years ago, I was there giving a talk but the rest of the time I was just wandering about, looking at the stands, and mainly asking businesses like Tesla and Wylex and Vent-Axia about products with an eye for my own build. I went to the Worcester Bosch stand and asked them about replacing boilers, explained the whole new systems being installed thing and they looked at me blankly and said, nope, nothing we spec, they just recommend a flush IF the system shows signs of dirty water/sediment and then a filter is retrofitted. Viessmann were the same. They agreed it was just greedy contractors pulling the wool. Boilers are funny things, people get very serious about them, it's like the big bad monster in the room no one dares to question and people just blindly go with what they are told. The fact is they are just a gas burner, heat exchanger a pump and some pipework with some controls. They are simple beasts. I think you will regret electric heating in the longer run. Have you also taken into consideration the cost of the 6-12kW (depending on model) supplies you will need run in around your house for the instantaneous hot water heaters? You say you live in a flat, is there good easy access to run the potentially 10mm^2 cables about your house and does your consumer unit have spare ways for 2 No. additional high current circuits? Also note your electricity is not only from renewable sources, your supplier only buys from renewable sources so they are buying renewable, but you will still use Nuclear, Coal, Gas, Oil etc. it all comes from the same cable, please be under no illusion you are getting solar or wind or tidal generated electricity coming into your house because you have signed up to a renewables only supplier. It is like buying eggs, the egg suppliers go and buys eggs from farms, some are organic, some are organic freerange, some are battery, some are organic battery, some from ultra happy hens living in a small holding with 4 other hens and get to run about the warm kitchen in the winter. Then everyone buys 10 eggs from the egg suppliers, however, everyone just then goes to the skip and takes out 10 eggs at random... You did ask if anyone saw holes in your logic so I hope this is not seen as being too critical!

Get another combi boiler.

Watch the prices rise £5K now. I remember the grants for insulation came out, insulations prices about quadrupled overnight, it never recovered. Make these things cheap, don't give out grants and subsidies. Just drive the prices down. No tax on green tech etc. etc. Grants just line the pockets of contractors and manufacturers.

Find a small independent SE and talk to him about dropping in metal between the existing and underslinging them from steels across the house (which can be put in in sections and bolted up).

Scotland.

He will if they put in new engineered or metal joists in between and just slightly higher than the existing. It can probably be done, there is just not enough thinking happening. Another consideration is replacing the ridge with a smaller steel - can be done from the inside. Not my original ideas but a very clever structural engineer friend of mine who gets things working in tight spaces!

Where are they intending to use more than 150mm? Even allowing for a makeup of insulation and PB I cannot see it needing to be greater than 150mm especially if you can make up for it in thicker insulation in other parts of the build. Even allow a worst case of 25mm for the floor makeup. If they are clever with their insulation calcs they can increase it on the sloped sections etc. letting them reduce it on the flat section, also you have your rafter thickness, even allowing for a 25mm air gap you should still have space for a decent wedge of insulation in there.

What in particular is it you need/want to prove? Insulation levels in enclosed walls and ceilings or something similar? How old is the house? Do you know who the house builder is? They might help you.

There is an industry standard (read average) given for every kW generated. I believe it is 0.223Kg per kWh, it falls every couple of years as more green energy comes online (another joke). Therefore it is based on this, and therefore it will be inaccurate. Like these firms who tell their customers their electricity is 100% green, that is very misleading because that is not true, all they are saying is they only buy energy from the renewable generation producers. What comes out your socket may very well be coal or nuclear generated power. So many of the facts and figures we are given are terribly inaccurate. I used to do a fair bit of electrical energy analysis and CO2 calculations and what not and I came to the conclusion that so many of these things are just a big circus. If I wanted to advise on energy reduction with savings and payback calculations I needed several key pieces of information, the first I always asked for was known cost per kWh, then I would review actual survey data of loads, from that I could certainly make a good start, but where it all fell down was when you would ask an estate manager for office hours or for lighting, burning hours etc and to get the reply, oh just call it 09:00-17:00, now unless you are a government entity no office only runs from 09:00-17:00 bang on. So by the time you threw in all these assumptions and "just make it" parameters you had a document that was largely a work of fiction. What I used to say to people was if you take a 100W lamp out, and fit it with a 6W lamp you will save 94W - that is a given. The cost will be the cost and you cannot put a cost on environmental benefits - you will save energy end of. Where it becomes screwed up, particularly in government & local authority buildings is the disgusting figures that the DLO's (direct labour organisations) or approved contractors will charge to fit a new LED downlight in a school corridor. Something that should save over 50% on energy consumption becomes financially unfeasible because the fit price will end up being £100 quid, so... 32W fitting = 31.25hours lit for every kWh - call that 23p. Or 0.8p per hour Replace with: 15W fitting = 66.66hours lit for every kWh - also at 23p. Or 0.345p per hour Immediate saving: 0.455p per hour of burn time. Cost of fitting and labour - £100 - Say £45 for a downlight and £55 a fitting install. So length of time to save £100 would be 21978hours at 12 hours a day is 1831 days, or 5.017 years that is assuming, 12 hours every single day - not likley. Product warranty will be up within 5 years for a good fitting, so the whole thing falls on its face as bean counters cannot allow for payback after warranty period. Having said all that, they will still come out with some totally inaccurate, often unfounded line about low energy this and environmental this. All total rubbish the lot of it. So much like your original question of how can it know, well it can't it's all just tripe, pure and simple, tripe! Where I saw a success story was on a building with 16,000 luminaires, £17.50 a point installed cost + various costs for the different luminaires - payback was about 2.5 years and product warranty was 5 years with a sort of further 5 year support package.

Sounds like parasitic loads, 2.5kWh is a little over 100W at any given time - if you assume every electrical appliance i.e. the boiler, oven, alarm system, fire alarms, TV's & receiver boxes etc each use a couple of watts you will very quickly find 40W in a modern home, so the next 60W is not going to be difficult to track down really. What do you leave on, do you have any lighting loads, external lighting, garage door opener etc...

Not to sound cheeky, but, is it older and or a more budget model? Maybe not, maybe it is just noisy. I would say most fridges/freezers now are more or less silent... Linear compressor models are usually quiet.

Which was why you could not be an electrician if colour blind. I believe the HSE still says you cannot be a electrician if colour-blind however I think you can still actually train as an electrician but you are meant to be aware of your limitations and take steps.