Carrerahill

The irritating thing is, if you were known to them, that price would probably fall to about £2! Over the years of DIY I have built up relationships with merchants and the prices I get are the same as trade but the issue is if you go in and the guy behind the counter is not your usual guy you are back to square one. There is a wholesale motor factors I go to for oil and wipers and things, if I go in and it's not the guy I know I tend to just look about and then leave. I needed an alternator one Saturday in a hurry, it packed in on a Friday night and I needed to go somewhere on the Saturday night, garage said they couldn't do it till the following week, went in and luckily my chap was on, I got a genuine 160A Bosch alternator for less than £100 - when he rang up the part at first he said, "Right so, £268, but we can do better for you, £85 (I think it was) to you" I would have been happy if he said £200! I do think however that merchants are better than they were say 10 years ago, I think with the likes of Screwfix and Toolstation (mind you, a lot of the TS stuff is cheap for a reason) they have realised they need to be more competitive even for the average walk in. I went into a Jewsons about 10 years ago for 2400x600x22mm T&G caberfloor, chap said £33.00 a sheet and looked at me with a serious face when he said it, I just laughed and said, I assume there is a mistake, he looked again and said no £33, I said for both I assume, no no each! I said we both know that is a £7-8 sheet at best, what can you do it for - £11 - not great but for 2 sheets not bad either! I have since been in after about a decade of boycotting them for that ridiculous price and this time they were much more sensible prices.

This makes me laugh, I was out in our garden at about 22:00 last night with the secateurs cutting some pine and cedar for the wreath, however I then noticed how overgrown a section of the garden had become, what was meant to be 4-5 clippings to make up a wreath ended in me filling the recycling wheelie-bin! Looking out there this morning amazingly my pitch black gardening looks quite good! The issue was I could not see the branch to cut, so it sometimes took a few goes to actually cut something! I like what you have done, it looks very smart and a nice little extra!

It's bad now isn't it! That is quite tempting, but it would fall to me to source the components and repair it and to be honest in this instance it is easier just to let him get a replacement. I will ask him for the old one with a view to repairing it.

Thanks, however, I should have said, I had my friend check all the basics including putting a new fuse in the spur etc. checking MCB/RCD. Anyway, it transpired the power circuit for the controller was knackered, to get him up and running again I replaced a blown capacitor and some resistors and he has heat again, it is only a temp fix as I didn't have any SMD components so to replace the knackered ones with, so the new ones are soldered in but it meant the cover could not be put back on properly so we have used about 4 x 1G faceplate spacers to get it all back in! He will order one from Myson tomorrow - his wife had to have warm feet tomorrow morning, I suggested a bucket of warm water but that wasn't acceptable.

I am about to head over to a friends house where they say their Myson EUFH has stopped working, no illumination from the LCD display and bathroom freezing. I suggested it will just be the controller and it will be as simple as getting another but I will pop over with a meter and do some checking. So the primary question I have, assuming the in-floor temperature sensor is of type X and in the say 1Kohm-1.5Kohm range, just figures plucked for discussion sake, will another manufacturers controller also use a sensor within the 1-1.5Kohm range? In which case generally they are interchangeable? That would let them pick one up from screwfix or similar today, if not I will need to get them to order a Myson replacement. Any advise would be great. I have only ever installed EUFH once and didn't really need to think about it as it all just worked!

Did our extension and garage, hired a JCB for 3-4 days and got to work. Good fun and a good saving. Just be accurate.

It didn't arrive.

Buy a LED bulkhead like this: https://asdlighting.com/products/centro-range/centro-circo/ or https://asdlighting.com/products/clarity-range/clarity-portrait-plain/ Get the model with built in presence detection, they consume less than 16/8W depending on model - walk into garage this product comes on, probably bright enough for simple tasks or getting something out of garage, set it to run for a minute or something or even less when no motion is detected - job done.

That is how I would do it. Assuming there is no way for them to get the cable across your property other than to walk across your property I would just do this. I would probably serve Openreach with a a writ (£20-30 in court) simply telling them you do not permit any access to your land. If you then find they do enter your land sneakily to put up the cable you then have more ground to stand on as you implicitly told them. Even a very well written letter denying all access would work but may be ignored. This is actually a big problem at the moment in the UK - all the Openreach cables are going in for fibre broadband, you will note on telegraph poles fibre junction boxes and new poles going up left right and centre and pavements being dug up all in the aid of some faster internet. I noticed Openreach contractors going in and out our neighbours garden a month ago, I text her and warned her what they would be up to and not to accept the pole in her garden - they duly turned up with their offer, £150. She said no and that was that. So they tried to put a pole into a little patch of land behind hers, but she said they were not allowed into her garden (they were literally about to carry a telegraph pole through her garden) she stopped them from coming in and that was the end of that. This whole Openreach network upgrade is a disgrace and a waste of time, money, resources and a lot of dug up roads and mess.

Move your laundry upstairs! I think your situation is fairly typical of a family house.

You are trying to transpose the logic too linearly, you accused me of not comparing similar tech and now we are comparing Tesla batteries to computers & cars, but you, in your discussion found that it was a comparison worth making so at some level you believe that the principle of tech pricing is the same and it is. We could compare mobile phones to Tesla batteries, or central heating boilers or cordless power tools. There is a minimum price point of any product, that true price is often only known by a producer/manufacturer who controls the whole production/manufacturing process which is rare. For example, just how much is a barrel of crude oil, really, and I don't mean daily barrel price - about $55-60 today. We know that is just an average price, some oil, North Sea, is more expensive to extract that the Texas land oil fields using nodding donkeys. Gold extraction, again only really the operators who actually run that operation on their claim/lease will know what it actually costs them per oz. they will always suggest more. So all these manufacturers need "x" for their commodity or product and each has a minimum margin they need to make, so something like a car will never cost $10 - what Gate's would have been better providing is the % cost reduction and applying that to a car and actually it may be comparable given that in today's money the first car cost $95K. You probably couldn't cast the engine block for $10 - so there will always be a minimum price. A brick probably does only cost about a penny, a common is about 17p from my local merchant, but how much of that is profit margin and transport? You load them onto a wagon at the factory and they go to a depot, then another wagon takes them to a merchant, or B&Q and each time that brick moves, due to size and weight, it accrues more cost and transport for that type of load is expensive. How many people had a TV in their living room in say 1960? How many people have a TV in each lounge, bedroom and maybe kitchen and a few spare disused ones in the loft in 2019? The same will go for the Tesla battery, once every street in the UK has at least 1 Tesla battery, the price will fall. So the price will fall, and then it will be affordable and ROI's will be acceptable.

It is for a similar application I am looking to deploy this battery.

It is just the principle, I think all will agree, tech is tech - the costs always do the same thing. Pick anything from TV's, a TV was over a years average salary, or mobile "car" phones, SSD drives. I am not going to defend a product I was only mentioning and posting on the forum for discussions sake, I didn't make it, I didn't buy one and I think at the price point it is not going to be a particularly good investment or money saving device. Regarding the inverter I will ask the rep when I email him for the PDF literature, although I sure it will be in the tech spec. I am looking at this battery for a commercial project of ours where if it all adds up it will save our customer about £3K system costs for his needs.

All his beds seem to be against or very close to walls, I assumed they were just for indicative purposes and not necessarily final furniture layouts. I'd put the bed in the middle, headboard opposite the window so the bed was facing the window.

It does, but prices have to fall and the story will sound sweet again. Look at USB sticks, I remember it was over £100 for 64Mb. Now they give away 2Gb sticks for free and a good quality 64Gb stick is £15.00

Latest iteration I think - I wasn't fussed on what it was in all honesty, just how it worked, what was inside etc. I know, it doesn't really stack up does it! I think where it would be useful was for storing renewables and potentially allowing us to go off-grid. I think that is coming, centralised power generation is not going to be the norm going forward. More localised generation and storage will be the way forward, transmission is very expensive. My ROI would be terrible, I pay about 9p per kWh! I told him if he could do it for about £3K I would buy it!

Good point and one question I sadly neglected to ask at the time. I simply asked the Tesla rep about longevity - he just said the battery was guaranteed for 10 years and unlimited cycles, it was a bit of a machine-gun fire Q&A I threw as much at him as I could, including asking for a free sample battery! I have his details and I am to email him for full literature and electrical details, I will ask then. I also asked about bolting a huge firework to the side of a building, he remarked that only batteries in transportation situations had suffered from the infamous "Tesla battery fires".

Yes, typo! I will edit my post to save others the confusion! Fancy a job as my editor?

I like it, only comments for me would be, however you did touch on this, to make the garage a little longer and make it a usable garage, with the space you have for a utility room and a sneak pantry I'd think you could turn over more space to the garage, for me a garage is more important, but then I have a classic car and work on it and have tools and whatnot that need a home. Why don't you put a small toilet into your office? Common thing to have a little private office loo, I know when I am working late, or sitting on this forum a little loo I could get to without going into the main body of the house would be advantageous, it also means if you are working from home etc. and your family are about the main house you can take yourself away to your own little empire. Make sure the wall between play and office areas are well soundproofed. Happy children is a great noise, but when happy children become happy screeching children it does distract from work! I like the master bedroom "suite" you have created. Well done - I like the presentation style too, your narration makes it all very easy to digest.

Watching it now, been away almost every night for last week and a half.

I was at a building and asset maintenance conference yesterday where Tesla had a stand with a Tesla battery, looks like a giant iPhone, fairly sleek white case about 1200mm tall, 1000mm wide and 200mm deep, this was a 13kWh battery complete with charger/inverter. Weighs about 120Kg and has a 10 year warranty with unlimited charge cycles. Cost currently was £7K however my discussion with the Tesla chap was that clearly this cost would fall within the next 3-5 years. Idea is to use on-site renewable to charge I assumed but this is not necessarily the only option and one that is foreign to me, having never had dual tariff electricity, is to use the battery to store electricity from low peak tariff then discharge during high peak tariff. Not sure how good the ROI would be on that to be honest but a local authority talking to me said she was getting 10K per battery to install them to save energy. Tesla's end game is actually using it as a means to attenuate power consumption on the network from EV charging. There is a gateway which hooks the battery up to the network and controls how it works depending on how it is commissioned, this gateway could allow for a lower current charge into the battery all day, then when you get home you can fast charge your car from the battery or it will supplement the grid power to ease loading.

Yes - the way to look at it is to think of the LED source on the small profile and the whole ceiling area as a luminaire in its own right. So work out the delivered lumens from the ceiling, which in this situation is the reflector. Reflectance of a smooth gypsum plaster painted matt white has a Rho (surface reflectance factor) of 80% - also reflectances are dependent on angle, a direct 0° light source will not reflect light directly back well, but as my ceiling is pitched I gain the benefit of a 30° pitch and therefore enter the better reflectance zone. If there was concern of delivered lumens then I would just increase the lumen package but I am fairly confident that I know what I need to throw at the ceiling to gain the necessary light level. I have several lighting details throughout the kitchen to provide a higher level of illuminance to task areas, and indeed to be independently switched to provide a low level evening ambient light. I'll maybe do a whole post all about how it was designed and calculated when I actually get it installed.

Well I shall certainly post it on the forum when it's all done. Still at plasterboard stage so a bit to go and I intend on having Christmas off. Got it all designed and ready to hit the go button, wiring is in, so I guess the lighting will be staged some before, some after the kitchen fit out (don't think the suspended element is a good idea to have in when the joinery is being done!).

To be fair, lighting calculations will be done using software - however, I don't think calcs are necessary here - it is a domestic setting. If I was to offer a lighting design service for a client, I would produce a full set of CAD drawings, with all the details, such as suspension heights or wall mounting heights, it would come with a full luminaire schedule outlining all the product, precise spec, colour temperatures etc. I would also provide some 3D renders and a concept board with imagery and sketches etc. it would be a proper lighting package. I would not probably run any calcs for a domestic property, only maybe to check we could achieve a decent illuminance in areas like a kitchen and to check the combination of lighting specified would work well to deliver a good ambient light level - it also then lets me show a client what it would loosely look like. I would not throw a set of lighting level calculations at you and expect you think you are sorted. Those are there for building design, to ensure lighting complies with the regs - what do they expect you to be able to tell, as an end user, from those calcs? It probably, with all due respect, means very little to most people. What a joke. In my kitchen I am having no down-lights, I am going to use recessed linear details hidden into sections of wall and bulkheads to largely have the lighting almost invisible, the kitchen will just glow with light. There will be a single suspended continuous linear LED product, very low profile, circa 30x7mm - but I will need to mock it up to get the size right in proportion to the rest of the space - and about 4m long, I want it powder-coated burgundy or royal blue or something so it standing out as an object, but not as a light, it will be indirect light only (i.e. uplight only) - this will wash the vaulted ceiling section with light which will provide reflected light and the general lighting to the space.

Nailed it - see my post above...