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I see @Onoff expressed some excitement about Perovskite a couple of years ago (here). Here is some more exciting news: https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/perovskite-solar-cell-power-world-record-b2196762.html Sounds good but what’s the catch? Or am I cynic?

That looks very nice, but I don’t think it’s any different in terms of construction to the shelves I found online which are rated to a maximum of 50 kilos.

Was just thinking about this further, and I wondered whether you have override switches that are easily accessible if you want to do the opposite of what is being done automatically. For example, but we never use the towel rails in our bathrooms in summer (or autumn, so far) and so it would be good to be able to interrupt the automatic control. At present, my electrician’s suggestion for how to control the zone valve that sends water to the two towel rails we have in the house is to have a smart wifi plug powering the zone valve (this is in addition to the local mechanical (dumb) TRVs on each towel rail, which could be left on at whatever temp you want). But the smart wifi plug would still need an input, which in a worst case scenario can be a flick of a digital switch on my phone, but as @joth points out, there have to be better ways to automate this. I could set it up to run off a schedule in the cloud, but we aren’t that regular in our routine. Curious how you did it @joth so it doesn’t bother you in summer.

how would you know what that smells like?

Ah. But 20mbps upload is still very decent. There is loaded and unloaded latency, with loaded being more indicative of real world usage. run a speed test on www.fast.com to see both figures (you need to click on "show more info" then wait for the second part of the test to complete to see those figures.)

I've been looking online at some bespoke floating shelves. I need some which are 258cm wide and 36cm deep. Found a few options, but they are all limited to 35kg to 50kg load bearing per shelf. For such a wide span, that doesn't seem very much. A children's encyclopaedia britannica for example (a relic of the past, i know) weighs 58kg and but for its weight would fit on a 258cm shelf with plenty of room to spare. I have both a children's encyclopaedia and the "adult" version (sorry @pocster, not that kind of "adult"). Are floating shelves this wide simply inappropriate for this kind of book display?

45 upload is VERY fast, and for many things it is arguable that upload and reliability is much more important than download. What is your latency like? I pay crazy money for Virgin Media and get 500mb download but only 34mb upload. Reliability is terrible. Last month i complained and they promised to discount my bill. Of course, when the bill came through yesterday, they hadn't. Shame CFWN is only available in the Highlands.

I got my water bill today and on the face of the bill was a warning that said: "Your water use is high. This could mean you have a leak – we suggest you check as soon as you can, as unfixed leaks can damage your home." There was also a bar chart provided as follows: The fact that there has been a jump in the last 6 months is expected, as we did not move in until 11 May, so prior to that would just have been the builders' requirements. But the usage still seems a bit high. From 3 April to 1 October we used 69,000 litres in 6 months, or 379 Litres a day. We probably bath the kids about 5 times a week. That is a 1700 by 750 bath which has a maximum capacity of 123 litres. I doubt we fill it to more than 80 litres, although there is usually some 5 minutes of showering at the end. Say it uses 15 litres a minute = 75 litres, so that's 155 litres 5 times a week = 775 litres a week. My wife and I shower daily, although twice a week we shower at the gym. We probably take 12 minute showers each, so that's 360 litres a day x 5 = 1800 litres a week. So in showering and bathing we are averaging 2575 litres a week, which averages at 368 litres a day. Easily make up the additional 11 litres in washing up, hand washing, tooth brushing and, to use Thames Water favourite unit of volume, cups of tea (and coffee). Both my wife and i work from home two days a week. When the hose pipe ban wasn't in place we were also doing quite a bit of garden watering, it having been neglected for the entirity of the build. So is Thames Water's message just been triggered by the sudden increase in usage, or is 379 litres a day objectively very high for a family of four (with young kids)?

That's interesting. I'm using Corston dimmers, which, as you can see from the link aren't cheap and also use digital dimming technology - whatever that is! I'm not sure I can just swap dimmers because of the bronze finish on the knob which matches the switch plate. Also, I'm using Corston digital dimmers in various other locations in the house (maybe 12 in all) and only have problems with two. One circuit the lights buzz, i mentioned it to the sparky and he said "replace with better bulbs". The other issue is another light fitting which is an ilumos LED, we can't switch it off completely. It dims down to about 2% which isn't noticeable in the day, but is at night and as it's in our master bedroom, that's annoying. The electrician thinks it might be an incompatibility between the digital dimmer and the ilumos LED, so he suggested switchng that dimmer for a simple on off switch. Not ideal but if it fixes the issue we'll accept it. Are there brands of lightbulbs that are just known for being better quality?

Can anybody recommend a E14 dimmable bulb with frosted glass that does not buzz. I only need 350 lumens or so. Ideally with a high CRI. Fed up of the "will it buzz" lottery.

Thanks. Do you mean the drill bit should have 7mm diameter, or the depth of the hole should be 7mm deep? If the latter, that seems very shallow. If the former, that seems very wide.

We have a feature wall made of bejmat tiles (which are unglazed zellige tiles, which are hand made clay tiles). Although they are fired in an oven, they do chip relatively easily. Having said that, our tiler did a fantastic job of putting up some 30m2 and they look great. I now want to put up some paintings and need to drill into the wall to install screws etc. If I damage the tile it probably won't matter as the painting will cover that bit of the wall anyway, but I still want to try to avoid damage as the wall is sound proofed, so I rather make my penetrations as small as possible. The tiles are about 14mm to 17mm thick (they are all irregular) and the grout lines are about 2mm thick. I'm thinking that the best option would be to drill into the grout where four corners meet. What drill bit size and raw plug should I be using and what depth hole and screw should I be using? Behind the tile there is plasterboard (this is not a bathroom or kitchen, just a feature wall in a lounge) and then 10mm of a honeycomb board filled with sand (for soundproofing) and then a void filled with mineral wool sound proofing. The paintings we want to hang are about A1 in size and probably weigh around 5kg. I'm hoping one sturdy screw will be enough per painting.

There is a solution to the light issue. Invest in 5 or 6 very high CRI light bulbs for that room. They are not that expensive these days, even at a CRI of 94. I think 95 might also be available.

One question on your en-suite: the shower cubicle (if that is what is drawn in the top right hand corner of the bathroom) looks small. Does the gym need to be that big, or could it be smaller? Do you need a separate shower cubicle, or could you make your bath bigger and combine it with the shower. Do you need a bath? Sometimes, less is more.

I have an idea, but I think it would only work if you can move your windows. Hear me out: In my experience using the bathroom is noisier than the wardrobe, particularly if you can pick out tomorrow’s outfit when your partner is still awake. So I would place the walk in wardrobe in between the bathroom and the bedroom, to give the bathroom some extra noise insulation. I’m not sure you need a sliding pocket door for the walk in wardrobe. Just make it one communal walk in area with one regular (but fairly narrow) door. The two options I can think of to achieve this are. Option 1 Problem with Option 1 is that the location of the bed is really sub optimal. Walking into a bedroom and hitting the bed like that is just awkward. And it’s a bad use of space as the top right hand corner is wasted and the bed area is cramped. So Option 2 fixes these issues, but you would need to move the windows:

Wow @joth, that is very impressive. If I had the time and money, I would love to have done something like that. But my build was complicated enough as it was and we were on a tight timescale having wasted so much time on planning, that I thought I could just do all the smart stuff later, apart from some PIR sensors that I did manage to all the electrician to wire in all the right places. To some extent that is true, and this week I will hopefully be fitting some Shelly kit to automate our hot water recirculating pump so that it only comes on when certain PIR switches are triggered. I also bought into the Phillips hue system but haven’t had time to set it up properly. And I also bought into the Ring system but that isn’t working properly yet as we need to upgrade to the Ethernet version. And I need to buy a Velux hub (I forget their names now) so that we can automate our Veluxes. And I need to fix an Alexa Echo issue that has recently plagued our main source of music and radio in the kitchen. And I think one of my 13 Tado thermostats might have been broken on installation. So I do get the amazing things that can be done with automation, but it is a lot of hard work to get it running well and to keep it bug free. On the plus side, after accepting lots of advice from those here (including you @joth ) I’m pleased to report that my Ubiquiti DM and three APs is working very well.

Are you serious? I think you will tire yourself out of the theme very quickly. It’s like Disney land, or a themed restaurant. Great for a short period of time, but you wouldn’t want to spend all your holidays in Disneyland or have all your meals in the same themed restaurant.

Why?

That does look clever, but I wonder whether all the extra smart features are bound to lead to eventual failure/bugs/incapatability. It would be handy to let delivery men in occasionally, and the remote access is perfect for that, but still, I’m occasionally suspicious of technology.

Looking at having a steel gate made up for our side passage. Ideally, I would like a good quality combination lock fitted to it, but this gives rise to two questions: 1) how is this opened from the other side? will it have a combination keypad on both sides? 2) If not, because it will be possible to put your hand through the gaps in the steel bars and access the back of the combination lock, will this just be a complete security fail, as anybody could open it from the other side. Any reason I can’t use this: https://metalines.com/gate-locks/601-601002-gatemaster-superlock-digital-double-sided-bdg.html?gclid=CjwKCAjw7eSZBhB8EiwA60kCWyPA1NQHRxcTdvvp8eZgWurr_viO4mL7sfRvJuZnjWY8RR3lhTxgBRoCpiQQAvD_BwE#/289-Frame_Size-40mm_-_60mm

Based on my experience, i would avoid a recirculating fan. We initially installed a very expensive one made by Novy, and it was very loud and not very effective at getting rid of smells, in spite of having expensive carbon filters in it. We eventually drilled a hole through the wall and vented directly outside. This has made the same Novy unit much quieter. Because we have MVHR and an airtight house, for it to work well, the MVHR company recommended we crack open a window, literally just a 3mm - 4mm gap is enough on a medium sized window. I've been monitoring to see whether the temperature in the kitchen drops when we do this, and haven't noticed any drops, although at the times i've checked the delta between indoors (20C) and outdoors (9C) was only 11C. Maybe it is more noticeable when the external temperature is lower, it will be rare that delta would be more than 15C or 16C.

Very nice and considerate design. I like it. Not sure if this has already been covered but: How small are your kids? If small, I'd consider moving the playroom somewhere else, where they can play in sight of adults. Where is your hot water tank going? It's important to place this close to the taps you want near-instant hot water for. A secondary loop is another option. Do you need a playroom, an open plan lounge and another lounge? Could you make these spaces more adaptable so that their use changes as the kids grow older? E.g. any benefit in making the wall between the lounge and playroom collapsible? I agree you should link the utility room to the kitchen. Why does the study need to be where it is. If you're staring at a PC screen, it surely doesn't matter what the view is like out the window. Switch it with the utility room.

Yes, Avro Energy being a good example of this appalling behaviour. I had an £800 credit balance with them, after months of trying to get it back, I cancelled and transferred to Octopus. A week or two later Avro went bust. I’m not kidding, it took a further 6 months to get that money back. Outrageous.

Welcome, and good luck!

I agree with this. But as an aside, your architect is just as liable as your builder. They both (expletive deleted)ed up, although I think your builder has the excuse that he is not the designer, and the architect okayed it at the time. Your architect should not have said it would be okay to use 200mm of mineral wool, because by answering that question he took on a duty of care to you to get it right. If he would have said “I don’t know, I would need to run a new set of calculations and that will cost you £x” and you decided not to pay that, and proceed without the u value calculations, then it is on you, but unless that’s how it happened, your architect is liable.