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This is more reassuring. The driveway faces East, and it’s not at all in the shade. So other than very early morning starts, it shouldn’t really get too icy hopefully. And yes, London… quite polluted but of London as well.

I guess we could relay it significantly higher and forego 50cm of daylight into our front room. The windows are about 1.5m high, so would still see some sky when the car is parked. Will look awfully weird, but I guess it will stop the arguments and the kids falling (until they learn how not to) and make it easier to use in winter. We would still have a slope, but I estimate it would be about 6 or 7 degrees rather than 13.

I agree with @ProDave’s most recent comment, but I’m really not sure how we could have avoided this without a massive infill of land right in front our front window, obscuring most daylight into our front room. I don’t mind the hill starts/stops, I actually quite enjoy them. I don’t like the slipping risk of people or the issue of ice, but we are in London where we get ice at most about one or two weeks a year. I do think people will get used to it the rest of the year, she just needs to give it a chance. I think the only options are hope she also gets used to it, or relay it, ruin the aesthetic slightly, and make the slope 1.5 degrees or so shallower. Just worry that 11.5 is not much better than 13.

Unfortunately the entire driveway is the length of our front yard: 5.7m on the hypotenuse, so no room for any zigzagging.

A lot of effort went into designing our driveway, planters either side, lighting and steps. A lot of money as well. Unlike some other features of the build, SWMBO was consulted on every aspect. She was also home when they were laying it, because we moved in before it was done. Well she hates it. She says it's too steep. In part she is right, but it is within the manufacturer's tolerances for steepness (we laid Marshall's drivesys pavers). The rise/run is about 17/75 which works out at slightly less than 13 degrees. We knew this would be the case but didn't think much of it as our direct neighbour has a driveway on a slope and we imagined it would look like theirs. But i now realise that our house is lower down than theirs and the pavement/street by our house is marginally higher than where it is by their house, and so our gradient is worse than theirs probably by about 2 degrees. There are basically three issues that SWMBO complains about: she has to do a hill start / hill stop every time she uses the driveway the kids slip on it because it is so slippery (this has only happened once to each kid in the last month) the kids could get crushed by swinging doors The solution to issue 1 is practice. The solution to issue 2 is patience or scrubbing it with something like Lithofin wax off. This is because the instructions for the pavers say: "The surface has a protective seal which can remain slippery for a period of time the length of which will be dependent on weather conditions and use. Extra care must be taken during this period especially on steep incline." I did specifically bring this to SWMBO's attention, as well as the supplier's suggestion that we clean off the protective wax if we were concerned. We haven't had a chance to apply the Lithofin wax off, but I guess this is easily done. The solution to option 3 is to park downhill, which is easy coming into the drive, but more challenging reversing out of it. I still think this is a non-issue though. The kids are not so fragile that they will be crushed. At worst it's a minor bruise. The arguments with SWMBO are really starting to drive me crazy and we haven't even got to winter, when I suspect ice will actually make the driveway harder/impossible to use. She parks the car on the street and leaves our ridiculously expensive driveway unused. It's maddening. Why did i spend all that time, money and effort. It was one of the things that needed a lot of time and had some supplier problems that I had to sort out. And the Council was an absolute PITA to deal with, to organise the dropped kerb. Although 13 degrees is quite a lot, it is well within tolerance for the product. The instructions state: "For driveways on an incline of 15 degrees or more or that has specific installation and design requirements, please contact Marshalls Technical Advisory Services". So the options are: divorce lift up the pavers, relay the sub-base at a different angle, and then create a trench for our house. This seems mad. It will ruin the look of the front, make the bike shed a little inaccessible and possibly look very weird. At most it would reduce the gradient by about 1.5 degrees, to about 11.5. This just seems like a very expensive option for not that much benefit. I reckon it's at least £2000 worth of work, and that's assuming the pavers come up easily, though hopefully they will as there is just the jointing compound laid on top which is holding them down. i.e. no adhesive underneath. ignore wife's parking, let her park in the road and make her pay the fines when she gets fined.

Thanks @dpmiller, don’t suppose you could post a link to such products?

We’ve decided to cut a gaping 6” hole in a wall to vent out our cooker hood. I will post a video when I next cook steak, but basically the way we designed our recirculating was a f&@king disaster which anyone with any basic physics knowledge would have known wasn’t going to work. so that we don’t completely ruin our very effective airtightness, can anybody recommend an external vent to cover the hole which pretty much self seals when not in use? It didn’t doesn’t have to fully seal, but something that prevents a noticeable draught would be good.

I have a brink as well, probably the same machine, and never understood the logic of this. E.g. on the first row, isn’t the third bullet rendered redundant by the first one?

No, Telford Tempest. It is insulated, but I was surprised the energy rating was only something like a C. Apparently a C is plenty good enough, but it is still acting like a giant radiator that is making my pump room a couple of degrees too warm. Our MVHR machine and ducting is in there, so I need to insulate it better. Should have done more research before I bought it. Oh well.

Because a lot of kit has recommended installation requirements. Eg my hot water cylinder had a note in the manual that says it will only meet the advertised performance if all external pipe work is insulated, if the room it is installed in its within the thermal envelope and if the cylinder itself is insulated with a jacket. I thought this last point really took the piss, given I’ve not been able to find a jacket big enough to insulate a 300L cylinder and even if I did, I don’ti have space to fit it, as the cylinder is installed right up close to an internal stud wall.

Sure, but get two very well insulated cool boxes. Fill both with equal amounts of ice. Leave one closed for 8 hrs. Open the other one for 1 minute every hour. I bet the amount of thawing vs ice will be quite different across the two boxes. A pocket of cool air is a good insulator. Displace that with warmer air every time you open a fridge/freezer, and you will quickly see heat gains.

If that is true, there would be a massive mis-selling claim against the manufacturers. Viessmann advertise their boilers as having 95% plus efficiency. But maybe this doesn’t account for external pipe work, long runs to the Hot water tank etc.

Ok, that makes sense. Except for one point: why is your boiler only 80% efficient?

Do you have a gas boiler? If so, I find this Really surprising. I always thought electricity was more expensive for heating water than gas. But I guess times have changed.

Sure, but you open your fridge a third as much as most households, I suspect. it is when You open a fridge that it loses its coolth and the electrics have to fire to cool it. That’s why I’ma power cut, as long as you don’t open your fridge and freezer, your food should remain safe for many hours.

If you don't have boost switches, I would recommend installing a couple. Maybe one in the kitchen and one in each toilet. Also check the spaces underneath each internal door. When the door is closed, you should have 7600mm2 of space between the door and the threshold. If you don't, then airflow will be impeded. For example, a 760mm wide door would need a 10mm gap to give you 7600mm2 of space. Wider doors need proportionately less.

I have some terrazzo tiles 600 x 600 that were laid in February this year onto sand and cement screed (I had a whole saga that last about a year, which you can read about here). The tiles are quite thick, I think around 18mm. Most of the grout lines are fine. However there are a few tiles where the grout joins have cracked. This is mostly, but not exclusively, in a patch of floor that was tiled later, around June, because we were waiting for an external door to be fitted. We also have some external patio tiles, similar dimensions but made of porcelain, that were tiled in July. They are also mostly fine, with the exception of one or two tiles where the grout has cracked and now there are bits of grout missing (we had a thunderstorm the other night, so maybe the chips were blown off by the wind?). I'm just wondering what the remedy is here. Should my tiler come back, remove the grout that is broken and re-grout? What if the problem is not the grout but the way the tile was installed (i.e. not enough adhesive)? Both grouts are grey, but I can't remember the colour. The internal one was Fugabella and the external was a Maipei.

Thought I'd update this to say that in the end, the supplier was wrong. They weren't water stains - or if they were, the stains were polished out with some grinding. Only compromise is that the finish has come out with a slightly higher level of sheen than you would have from properly honed tiles, but it's not glossy and looks very good, so generally very happy with the outcome. Just an issue with some of the grouting...

I have to say that I’ma bit miffed that imist did not make this clear at the marketing stage. Had I known this, I’m not sure I would have opted for this system. I had a chat to my sparky about this, and he said he couldn’t disconnect it because he signed off on the electrical safety certification and he doesn’t want to get into any trouble. I’m sure I could persuade him, but I’m not sure what the actual workaround would be. Maybe some sort of battery power backup just for the priority isolation valve? It would only be worth doing if not too expensive, as we very rarely have power cuts in the area. In fact, I can’t remember having one since 2018 when I bought the house, other than some issue which was unique to my house, and which UKPN fixed very quickly because we have small kids so are on the priority register. Now that everything is brand new, we shouldn’t have any local problems, and would only be affected by street wide power cuts, of which I can’t remember there being any in the last 4 years.

I suggest you buy a laser gun thermometer, with which to take temperature readings of your floor. These cost about £15 from Amazon. Get one that has an emissivity setting so that you can set it for wood, given your floor is wood. I found this quite useful for making sure the floor was set to the maximum temperature that did not harm the oak engineered floor. We found that with UFH water set to 35C we got a floor temp of about 27C which was good as floor manufacturer didn’t want us to exceed 28C. @JohnMo is right about insulation, but that is hard to upgrade without spending lots of money and planning how to deal with various issues. It is much easier to fit draft excluders to make sure your doors and windows are fairly airtight. So do that, if you haven’t already.

I’d second this. In fact, why don’t you do away with the toilet, and just install a urinal, that way there is no confusion as to the rules of engagement.

How are your parents getting on with the PoE version?

So after messing around with a wifi scanner app and trying various things, only to discover that the best my doorbell can manage is a connection that varies between -68 dBm and -72dBm and latency that was 102ms, I have admitted defeat and accepted that to have a better doorbell connection I will have to spend some money on a PoE one. The decision was made a lot easier by the fact that my BRILLIANT electrician had chosen (without my knowledge) to use CAT5E cable to take power from the ring transformer in our fuse box to the doorbell, so happily there is already Ethernet cable imbedded in the wall, meaning no plasterwork and paintwork needed to be ruined. The challenge was getting some cable from the closest existing Ethernet point to the fuse box. But my sparky is a an actual magician. I simply do not know how he did it. He created a small hole in the wall 3m high up and managed to drop down some cable, connect that to the Ethernet port 2.2m below, then take the cable through the wall, under the stairs, over a under stair WC, and then pop it through another wall to come out in this tiny 9mm gap between the wall and some floor tiles, that we were fortunate not to have finished yet. So the ONLY visible bit of cable is from that point, 1.25m up to the fuse box, but that is all going to be covered up when the coats wardrobe gets built. Now to decide whether I ditch the ring system completely and go with a different PoE doorbell, or spend the fortune that Ring is asking for.

The problem with this approach is that I’m not willing to lose the benefits of the 5Ghz network for my high use devices such as phones and tablets.

I’ve identified the problem. By accident. I thought it would make sense to switch the boiler off, just in case the call for heat at 6am to heat water might cause some issue with no water. I was too lazy to switch the boiler off directly, so went to the fuse board to switch it off from there. There I see the fuse labelled “priority demand valve” has been tripped. This is a valve to give the internal imist system priority over every other tap in the house. I switch the fuse back to the on position, and everything is working again. i report this to SWMBO, who responds: “oh yeah I forgot to tell you, when the fence was being installed this afternoon, they kept tripping a fuse with their power tools.” Bloody hell! I know we are bad at communicating, but this!!! So rather than get a plumber out, I need to speak to my electrician. Luckily he is coming in the morning.