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@TonyT do you own a Netatmo doorbell? If so, are you happy with it?

I think both with the Netatmo automation you can control both opening and closing of the roller shutter and of the window. So if I've understood it correctly (and that's a big IF right now): at night we could go to bed with the roller shutter open (as there is no solar gain after 1pm on that side of the house) and the window open as it would be desirable to have ventilation over night we could set it to close the roller shutter and close the window at sunrise. What would be particularly good if there is sufficiently detailed control to allow the roller shutter to close at sunrise, but the window to remain slightly open, so ventilation continues until the outside temperature reaches a certain level. For that, I need someone who owns this setup to volunteer their experience.

@JohnMo you make me laugh. That's not automation. That's do it yourself. We like to have the ventilation from the velux at night and I'm not getting up at the crack of dawn to close the roller shutters and close the window. Will research how reliable Netatmo for Velux is. We have good wifi so I'd be surprised if there was an issue, but you never know.

Thanks @Russdl. Yes, I currently try and do this and have external temperature data from our Brink Flair 400 MVHR machine which I use for deciding when to do that. The issue I will have is how to integrate that temperature data for automating this. Velux smart kit Netatmo can apparently speak to Apple Homekit so that may be one option (although I don't currently use Apple Homekit, I could given I'm an iphone user and have other mac devices as well). Another possibility is to rely on the Netatmo's ability to consult local weather forecasts, though I do wonder whether those are accurate enough. Anyone have any experience with automation of these windows/blinds through Velux Netatmo?

Hi @Omnibuswoman, also wondering whether you ever made this decision? My understanding is that the advantages of the roller blind is it excludes 90% to 95% of the solar gain, whereas the awning only does about 75%, but the disadvantage of the roller blind is that when the roller blind is closed to block out the heat the amount you can open it for ventilation is severely restricted. You can still get a little ventilation, but not much. Both my velux roof windows are east facing, so solar gain is mainly an issue from an hour or so after sunrise until about noon or 1pm. So maybe I should go for the roller shutter, and automate it with the Netatmo thingy to shut out the sun completely from sunrise to 1pm, then open up completely to provide ventilation. But it's quite a big decision, so curious to know whether you made it and how you've found it.

But isn’t the regular HEx good for keeping the house damp free in regular conditions, ie when not using air con.Or with the enthalpy HEx, can you set the target RH% ?

But I wasn’t planning on using the Air Comfort to cool the air - that’s why I’m confused. I’m just using it to add moisture. You are right though, that the marketing docs don’t appear to say anything about moisture addition

I'm a little confused by the reference to ASHP and the temperature of the water connected to the Air Comfort unit. We don't have ASHP. We heat our home with a gas boiler. That said, I did plumb in the larger diameter pipes for our underfloor heating system with the idea that eventually, when hopefully ASHP is more affordable and less bulky we could install that, but I still have 9 year warranty left on my boiler, so aren't exploring those options at the moment. The change I'm proposing is to simultaneously install two things: A split AC unit such as a 2.5kW Daikin Stylish in our bedroom; and A Brink Air Comfort unit simply to add moisture to the air when the air con unit is running, because otherwise my understanding is that combination of AC and MVHR is air that is too dry to be comfortable for those with sensitivities to these things. So my question was whether installing a Brink Air Comfort unit is feasible when installed on just one duct in a house, as opposed to the whole system. It should in theory be possible to just add moisture to the room with AC, given that room has its own dedicated duct from the MVHR, but the Brink Air Comfort will add resistance and that will surely impact the pressure and noise of the air supply. But maybe there are simple workarounds. Alternatively, we could add the Brink Air Comfort to the whole MVHR system, as this would add moisture to the air in the whole house. That is not terrible I suppose as we won't run the air con all the time. Probably just for 90 minutes before we go to bed to get the room to temp and then through the night to keep it at temperature.

I have a Brink Flair 400 MVHR system. We've had it for about 2.5 years and been happy with it. No issues really. We have lots of solar gain problems in the house. Despite specifying SN70/30 glass for most windows, this has not been enough. We have a fair amount of glazing and the house overheats from about May to September. Whilst we are looking to retrofit other options including external shutters on some veluxes and perhaps on some west facing windows, an appealling fix for our master bedroom is to install air con so that we can at least bring the temp to below 20C at night. A downside of this however is that it will dry our bedroom, given that MVHR already brings the RH down to 40% to 49% (and usually closer to the bottom of that range). One solution is to install the Brink Air Comfort module. According to ChatGPT: What Brink Air Comfort Does Adds moisture (via cold water evaporation) to the supply air of your MVHR system. This humidified air is then delivered to every room with a supply vent, not just the bedroom. The system runs based on: Indoor humidity sensors Outdoor air humidity User-set targets (e.g. 40–45% RH) It works with an inline unit which oridinarily is placed into the incoming inlet for the whole house. I'm considering doing it just for the bedroom duct. Anyone see an issue with this? It would impact pressure which is not ideal. Need to think how to resolve that and whether it will add noise, also not ideal.

Just tell the window surveyor that you have super powers enabling you to see through the door.

I don’t think this can be right. MVHR will not cool your house.

It’s possible that this problem has been happening for a while, and I’ve only just realised. That said, I have now unplugged everything that was plugged into that homeplug (there was actually an extension lead plugged into it, and two low draw things were plugged into the extension lead: a zone valve and the TP-Link switch powering the two ring cameras). if this doesn’t fix it, I will try @LiamJones’s suggestion.

thanks. Yes that's a good idea. Doesn't make sense for it to be the rings. The switch and the homeplug is in a boiler cupboard, so maybe they've overheated? That said, most of the stuff in there is insulated and I can't imagine the temperature rises to much above 40C. I will do that tonight. Just paranoid as I'm not home now and these cameras are covering the side of the house where our house was broken into from (which prompted me to purchase the cameras in the first place).

So having raved about this a couple of weeks ago, I am now having some problems with two of my three ring PoE cameras. It appears to be dropping the connection, despite these being hard wired via PoE. I rebooted the Ubiquiti router and that fixed the issue, but the fix only lasted 10 minutes. Now the issues is happening again. My third Ring PoE is not affected by this issue. The only difference between the one that is working and the two that are not is that the one that is working is wired directly into the ubquiti router, whereas the two that are not working are wired into a switch which is wired into a homeplug that is plugged into the wall. Whilst that may not sound optimal, it's worked without problem since I installed it some 3 months ago. Both the homeplug and the switch are made by TP-Link which is usually a reliable brand, so I'm not sure what's happening.

To clarify, we lowered the height by about 29cm or 30cm in the front of the ground floor (ie where our hallway, front reception room and WC are) whereas we lowered the height of the back half by about 45cm, so although all the ground floor benefits from higher room heights, the effect is more pronounced in the kitchen, back reception and dining area as well as in the utility room. This does mean we have a step down from our hallway, but the architect did a really good job and so it ends up zoning the different areas of the ground floor really well. Another advantage is our lower ground floor is at exactly the same height as our rear patio/garden which makes for a really good transition when the sliding doors to the patio are open, as there is effectively no change in floor height between inside and outside.

Rather than raising the roof height, have you considered dropping the floor? Wet did this and gained about 45cm in height. We also replaced the timber floor with a cement slab onto which we added insulation and then UFH within screed and then finished the screed with microcement. It was a big job, but has transformed our ground floor. We now have very high ceilings for a 1930s semi.

That’s how I have my Ubiquiti Swiss Army knife set up. Works very well. Managed to send a WiFi signal down a 20m side passage between two houses. I do have the external antennae on it though, in sure they help. We haven’t had much rain since I installed this a couple of months ago, but it works fine.

I know Ring gets a poor report on this forum because of the subscription, but I’m fairly happy now that I have improved my outdoor WiFi. we have: 1 doorbell cam (wired, but only for power) 3 outdoor PoE cams 1 outdoor battery cam plus with a solar panel battery booster 2 indoor cameras All seven cameras get 180 days rolling unlimited cloud storage which has always been reliable. If I want to keep something beyond the 180 day period, I need to download it. I pay £80 a year subscription, which is a lot, but for 7 devices I don’t think that’s so much. I can have as many devices as I want for that price, although I doubt we would ever get more than we have at the moment, possibly one more if we ever upgrade our shed into a man-cave.

You can get PoE Ring doorbell.

Is it really not advisable to use a pressure washer and just water? My contractor who installed the render has cleaned my render this way and it worked fine. I have ceresit render and appears very tough. I was trying to mark it once before drilling into it and even hitting it fairly hard with a screw driver didn’t do much damage. I ended marking my hole with a felt tip pen instead.

I have the same unit as you, and mine was also fitted about 3.5 years ago. Now I feel inadequate.

I’m a bit late to this discussion, but here are my thoughts on the ground floor: If you switch the boot room with the WC, you can install a side door that gives you direct access to the boot room. This will require making the study and/or snug a little smaller to accommodate the boot room, but I think it’s worth it as you can then avoid walking through your hallway with muddy boots. A benefit of MVHR is that having ventilation from windows for toilets is no longer required. Currently, there does not appear to be a doorway into your snug.

If 600mm goes in the ground, that leaves 2.1m above ground. If 45cm is taken by the gravel boards, and 150cm by the fence, that leaves 15cm for supporting trellis. Are you suggesting it doesn't matter whether I go for 30cm high trellis or 45cm high trellis as either way I join the trellis along the top with an extra batten, to give it additional support? Or is it still better to go for 30cm? Building trellis entirely from scratch seems unnecessarily laborious when the supplier can supply it so cheaply. The 30cm high stuff is about £11 a 6' wide board, and I only need 6 boards.

So after discussions with my neighbour it looks like we are closer to agreeing the replacement of the fence which the burglars broke through. That fence was 4.5 feet high wooden panels sitting on a concrete gravel board which is about 1.5 feet high, so a 6 foot fence in total. Sounds high, but the ground level is raised by about a foot on my side, the concrete gravel boards making up a sort of retaining wall. They didn’t climb over it, instead they managed to exploit a weakness in one of the panels and get through it. I’m now planning on replacing the 4.5 fence with this 5 foot one: https://www.eastcoastfencing.com/6ft-x-5ft-ultra-heavy-duty-closeboard-fence-panel-pressure-treated-brown?_gl=1*18b65mh*_up*MQ..*_gs*MQ..&gclid=Cj0KCQjw16O_BhDNARIsAC3i2GADgF_150ffj2f5cihPlYl8P3YmV7wN28jL8p60pK3VThN90tv0M-IaAgo3EALw_wcB The side without the horizontal pieces would be on my side, whereas the side the burglars came from would be just the vertical planks. This would sit on the concrete gravel boards, between new concrete posts. On top I will fit trellis and on top of the trellis, the scissor spikes (see previous link). my question is given the longest concrete posts I can find at a reasonable price are 2.7m, what is the maximum height of trellis I can fit: 45cm or 30cm? The fence plus the gravel board will already be 6’6”. If I add 45cm of trellis, that makes 8 feet. If only 30cm of the 45cm trellis is bounded by the concrete posts, and 15cm is sticking up above the posts, this would mean 7’6” of the post is above ground and leaves only 41cm of post below ground in the concrete foundations. That is not complying with the installation notes of the 2.7m posts which say a third of that, ie 90cm, should be underground. 90cm seems excessive, particularly because this fence is largely protected on one side by trees and on the other side it is only 10m away from a house, so shouldn’t really have much wind exposure. is 50cm foundation enough? That would allow 2.2m above ground, which would be 45cm gravel board, 150cm fence, then either 30cm or 45cm or trellis only 25cm of which would be supported by the fence posts. The other alternative is to fit 6 feet of fencing and no trellis, but police recommend trellis as it provides less support to an intruder wishing to climb over which apparently creates a psychological deterrent as the intruder runs the risk of the trellis snapping under his weight causing injury. Thoughts?