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i think @canalsiderenovation may have used luxaflex on their renovation, so maybe he/she can chime in if they have experience of the Luxaflex Sirius 10% material.

My understanding is that those screen filters protect your eyes from glare from the computer. I want to protect the monitor from glare from the window.

My study has a west facing window and in the afternoon I get rather a lot of sunshine coming in. My computer screen is perpendicular to the west facing wall, so it does catch most of this sun/glare resulting in a rather suboptimal computer viewing experience. I'd like to filter out the glare, without having to use blackout blinds, as I would still like to work in daylight - otherwise what's the point of windows! Went to a blind shop who recommended Luxaflex Sirius 10% as being the only material they supplied which would do this. It's basically weaved from an opaque material, which would almost be blackout, save that the weave is loose enough that it leaves gaps in the weave amounting to about 10% of the area to let some light through, I assume about 10% of the light might get through, though I'm not waves travelling through holes work exactly light that. (You can see a picture of the weave on the link above.) I have ordered some samples, but my window is large and the sample is smaller than a postcard one hundredth the size of my window, so I'm not sure it will help me figure out whether it will work as I would like. Does anybody have experience of either Luxaflex Sirius 10% or of solving the computer glare issue in a similar room/orientation?

If the fuse spur fails, at the time of failure is it possible it allows an excess amount of power through to the bulb which then fails? I suppose the CU is the final failsafe point, so it must have detected something wasn’t right and did its job. Just my guesswork.

Flow monitoring looks like this: In addition to tracking flowrate supplied as per the above graph, it also tracks flow rate of the exhaust. The peaks shown here must be when we boost, although I'm not sure why it is showing three different flowrates: 225, 250 and 310 as i would have expected just two: our standard rate and our boost rate. Delving into this a bit deeper, I see that the unit is in "automatic mode" and that this seems to move the ventilation between three settings, 1, 2 and 3. The boost is definitely working because when we press the boost button, we hear the machine (whereas when it is not in boost mode it is virtually silent). The exhaust graph looks similar. As for pressure, i believe I can check the current pressure levels on the unit itself, but not as a graph of historic data. I'm afraid I don't know what you mean by this?

Sorry to hear that. Hang in there!

I have a Brink Flair 400 servings 5 bed house in a fairly highly polluted part of London. Although we are in suburbia we have several dual carriageways near us, and not far from a triple carriageway. When I inspect the filter, usually every 6 to 7 weeks, it is pretty dirty with the black stuff. I hoovered it for the first 8 inspections , and tried washing it with warm water once. I’ve just installed a new one, it being my third, meaning I had the first two for about 10 months each. How often should I: (a) clean; and (b) replace, the G7 filter though? What is best practice in a high pollution area?

I’m virtually certain it’s foxes as we caught one on camera a few months ago (at the front) and since then a family of foxes has made nextdoor’s garden their home. Next door put up their fence very badly, so large gaps under the gravel boards where it is easy for Foxes to get through. They used concrete gravel boards. Not sure of best way to block off the holes/gaps. I guess I could cut appropriately shaped wooden pieces from wooden gravel boards and wedge them in. Should work, but in some cases the gaps are triangular slithers as the ground has a very slight slope to it, but the fencing has been laid straight.

It’s definitely foxes. Spray jetted my patio to get rid of the mould that had built up over winter. Patio looked lovely and clean… the day after two defecations on the patio. The after that, a third! Desperately need a solution.

@Ferdinand did you have any success with an ultrasonic deterrent? If so, which model did you buy?

Thermodynamics is more complicated than just “heat rises”. Yes, heat rises, but there will be small pressure changes causing movements in other directions. E.g suction of air into the vent will also draw down air from above, when that air moves down, it will be replaced by other air. So you are all good.

Will look better once the tiny plinth of wooden floor between the door and the bathroom is stained black to match the framing of the walk on glazing, but this is low down on the “to-do” list…

We did this in our hallway and did half of this in our kids bathroom. Would have preferred not to have any skirting tiles, but with the kids throwing water around in here, felt like that was asking for trouble. You only notice the skirting when you look right down. I will try and post a pic of the hallway wall on the other side of this door, which has no skirting or architrave.

I would start at the bottom of the hill, so that first one laid provides some support to the next one and so on. Same for the brickwork. But other than that, I’m clueless.

“Interesting” indeed - that is if you want your kitchen to look like a takeaway shop.

Yeah. There is room for us to move it to the utility room, but SWMBO says the extra 2.5m walk from the fridge’s current location in the kitchen to the adjacent utility room is a real inconvenience. Yep, 2.5 metres!

The “frost free” feature is a bit of a joke. After 5 months’ use it was pretty frosty and as result making more noise than it should. As we have an almost entirely open pan ground floor, appliance noise was something we were trying to avoid. Made a claim on the Domestic and General policy. Their engineer attended and said it was all working fine and we just need to defrost it regularly. Bit of a joke really. Wish I’d spent £250 more for a liebherr that was on offer at the time.

Has anybody had any luck selling kitchen appliances after 18 months of use? We have an AEG under counter frost free integrated freezer, a zanussi combination oven/ microwave and a regular zanussi oven. They all just about do the job, but we are picky and now wish we had purchased better appliances. Are there second hand appliance merchants that might give us 40% to 50% of the purchase price or is this wishful thinking? What about part exchange?

If you are really bothered by grout lines, you order one giant format tile, I’ve seen them as big as 3.2m by 1.6m and have them cut at the factory so that they are supplied in strips, say 65cm by whatever length your wall is. In this way, you would have at most one grout line, and you could arrange the joints to be far away from your cooking area. marazzi grande is the range I had in mind. We used this for our shower area and it can put really well.

So use a darker grout colour and seal it properly. We have tiles and the grout still looks great, although it has only had 2 years of use. our grout is 3mm thick, made by Fugabella. More expensive than Mapei but better in my opinion.

GSHP does have a significant aesthetic and comfort advantage though: much of the ugly stuff is underground and there is less noise. Might not be an issue on a large plot where you can hide it away in the corder somewhere, but it’s a problem in densely populated areas with small plots.

I think tiles might be ok if you go smaller. The ones you laid were quite big. Alternatively, can you raise the floor level by 28mm? If so, you could lay a 24mm screed with steel mesh in it for reinforcement, then cover that with 3.5mm microcement, including the 0.5mm “upgraded” plastic mesh for additional reinforcement. Will look amazing, particularly if you pick one of the cement like greys or greens.

Wood planks or clay tiles. Or copper sheeting.

I used to think Tado was great. I now realise it’s not. It’s an ok product, but very overpriced and the marketing is misleading. Good as a basic smart thermostat. Good for logging data such as temperature and humidity and this can help teach you how and when a room loses or gains heat from weather. Good remote features. But all the other guff is nonsense. It doesn’t do proper weather compensation and it won’t play nicely with most sophisticated heating systems, even with Veissman boilers, despite the misleading advertising. There is a law suit there somewhere…

The sticky kind.