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I tried turning it. It only turned in one direction, and only a quarter turn. So it basically has only two options: on or off. Neither do anything for me. We have a water softener salt based system. Could that be the culprit? I checked and it still has a few shards of a block of salt left, so I doubt it. Just so strange to be without water like this. I paid something like £4k to have our connection to Thames Water upgraded which was done about 6 months ago. Feels very much like a downgrade right now!

There was a very very tiny amount of drizzle, hardly noticeable. Why do you ask?

Anyone know what this is? Found it on the public pavement outside my house.

Well I’m not entirely sure where the stop tap is (I know, I know, … I’m a fool), but we haven’t touched anything in the house or had any workmen or even our cleaner as everyone has been away in August. Only person who has been here is a guy to fit a new fence, but he didn’t have access inside and I can’t think how he could have damaged anything from work he did in the rear garden. That’s a good idea about walking around outside. Just tried that, but no joy.

We ended up £50k over our £40k contingency on a £400k budget (so 490k in total - although house still isn’t finished, so will only get further into the red from here). That was/remains bloody stressful and was only salvaged through a combo of a very inventive mortgage broker and a £20k loan from my mum. If this guy managed to Magic up £1m, he/she must live in a very different reality to the one I live in.

Got home to discover very low water pressure. On testing the taps, each one just had a few litres in them, probably what was in the pipes. Have checked with two neighbours and they don’t have a problem. Our garden tap is also out of water. Cannot think what could be causing this, as we have had no building works for the entirety of August and water was working fine since we moved in May. Have called the plumber who installed the whole plumbing system since scratch and he’s away on holiday. Have called Thames Water and can’t get through because their voice recognition software is so f&£king atrocious! Very strange. Any ideas?

So only £1m over budget. Makes me feel so much better about our overspend.

The bespoke joinery market is a complete jungle in this country. Our architect designed quite a lot of bespoke joinery for us. A few wardrobes, a large bookcase with a concealed desk, a very long credenza, some wall cladding, the drawer fronts and cupboard doors to a dIY kitchens kitchen and a wraparound bed bedside table thingy. It was mainly made of oak veneered birch ply with some solid oak pieces. The quotes we got varied from £40k to £200k. We went with joiners towards the bottom end of that range and have been let down massively. We are now going back to one of the more expensive outfits and paying quite a lot just for one piece. It shouldn’t be so expensive, but unfortunately it is, particularly as most birch ply came from Russia. I wouldn’t accept chipboard or even MDF for bespoke pieces that cost this much, so surprised Hammond’s is charging so much for what appears to be made from man made materials, but I may be wrong.

Just to clarify, something I’m trying to achieve is this: Good lighting draws attention to what it is lighting, not the lighting itself.

We have had a large bookcase/set of cabinets designed for us that doubles up as a home office, as one of the cabinets opens up to make a desk that houses our computer. We were about to press the button and pay a deposit, when we realised that it might be a good idea to have the shelves illuminated by LEDs. The designer has pointed out that to conceal the LED strips so that only light is seen, not the actual LEDs, is quite tricky and requires a C lot of the bookcase design to be re-thought. He isn’t trying to create more design fees; I think he has a good point as we don’t want to see the LEDs, we just want the contents of the shelves to be illuminated. Has anybody achieved this, and if so, how? Best Option I’ve seen so far is to build a pelmet onto the uprights of each bookcase, have the LEDs each side of that, with a strip of wood that acts as a diffuser, sending the light backwards and into the bookcase, whilst preventing the light from shining directly into the room. But this doesn’t work with other aspects of our bookcase, so looking for alternatives.

I used a company in Enfield, North London. It works very well but was ££££. PM me if you want details.

I think soot would work. In the end, the builder pointed out that the sealant he uses usually darkens the mortar a touch. So he sealed the mortar, and it does look fractionally better now. I only really dislike the colour in very very bright sunlight. In all other light I like the look of the colours. So maybe it’s the sealant or maybe I just got used to it.

True, but my understanding is that all manufacturers recommend the ducting and the machine are installed within the thermal envelope, so if you follow the manufacturer’s recommendation, you should be achieving the maximum efficiency.

Where did you get this 80% figure from. Most modern MVHRs achieve 90% plus. E.g. The Brink Flair is marketed as “a highly efficient heat recovery unit with a thermal efficiency of more than 95%”. I think most Zehnder machines are similar.

Yes, but that isn’t going to address my concerns that there is some structural mistake. Surely the point of a BCO isn’t just to get the certification, but also to ensure the house is actually built correctly. Surely the BCO should have checked the calcs BEFORE all the structural works were done, but a year later!

I didn’t like the look of such big gaps, so went with the widest doors I could fit and went down to 7mm or 8mm. On the 7mm gaps, I’m probably a bit short of the 7600mm2 sq requirement but my MVHR designer said it wouldn’t matter, and he was right.

Not sure that is quite right. It depends on the width of door. Required area of under-door opening is 7600mm2. So 10mm works for a 760mm wide doorway, but you can get away with a shorter gap if you have a wider door.

I’ve been surprised by the fact that our BCO wanted so much detail and he only asked for it very late in the day. I thought he had been inspecting at the build was progressing. Then a month ago just as we were moving in, BCo wrote an official letter detailing all the potential non-compliances and asking to see various bits of paper and certifications. One of the things he asked for was SE’s calculations, in addition to the many pages of SE drawings that had been provided to him at the very outset of the building project when we served notice. The house is very much finished now, so if he spots any issues with the calcs, what am I meant to do???

In short, yes. In longer form, read this:

That would be good except that it is wired in. I guess I could run an additional cable from the transformer inside.

Hmmm, this doesn’tbode well. Did you replace it with a different smart doorbell or just give up on the concept altogether.

Thanks @Dreadnaught. Yes, I think the foil membrane must be a major issue here. We had damp on the wall and this was part of the solution a RICS surveyor recommended. Seems to have worked well in that it is allowing the damp to dry out without affecting our plaster, but I just didn’t factor in the potential affects on wifi. Just didn’t even consider it. No, the only other items nearby with radio waves are some hue bulbs, but even with those switched off the problem persists. Incidentally the hue hub is right by the Dream Machine and although the external bulbs do connect to it, there was one that struggled, so maybe the fill in the wall is also contributing to that. in addition to the UDR I have two Ubiquiti in wall APs, but they are on the upper floors and checking the topology of my network on the Unifi app, I’m sure they are not the issue. So I guess it’s the foil. I think I have two options to fix this then: 1) Replace the doorbell with the much more expensive PoE version and then: (a) lay Ethernet internally to the location of the doorbell and drill through - this will require about 2m of wall chasing and replastering and repainting a bit of wall; or (b) instead of relying on Ethernet, use a power line plug to make use of a 13A socket that is conveniently located very close to the doorbell (on inside of the wall) so will save a lot of chasing, plastering and painting. I will still need to do some, but more like 40cm worth rather than 2m worth. 2) drill through near the router and install an external AP pointed at the doorbell. Seems like a stupid and expensive way of fixing this, but the problem with option 1(a) and 1(b) is that a ring PoE doorbell is stupidly expensive, so it may actually be cheaper to buy an external ubiquiti AP. They are pretty ugly though, and the front of my house looks so nice!

I’m impatient, I know, but wondered if somebody might be able to weigh in on this. Maybe a fellow ubiquiti user such as @Dan F, @Wil, @Rob99, @Dreadnaught, @Thorfun, @vala, @joth or @JonJump also owns a ring device that they have mounted outdoors?

We have a Bosch with one of these cutlery trays. I didn’t even realise that’s how it would be when I ordered it. It was a “Which Best Buy” and I read the reviews and none of them mentioned this. SWMBO absolutely hates it. I think it’s ok. On the whole, it is much more space efficient, and cleans the cutlery better, but it takes a while to get used to. SWMBO hates it because she says it takes much longer to fill and empty the dishwasher. Maybe she has a point, but if you plant the cutlery in zones (forks in one area, knives in another etc) is already sorted for you when you empty it. I find plates are fine, but it does limit the height of glassware on the top drawer. We bought some glasses and had to return them because they don’t fit. They weren’t very tall, just slightly tall.

The ubiquiti setup we have at home seems to be working very well for everything else, so I’m pretty sure the answer to my question is: the Ring wifi doorbell is absolute crap, but thought I’d share here in case anybody had similar experience. Below is a a floor plan showing the front of my ground floor. The “R” is the position of the Ubiquiti Dream Router. It is perched up on a windowsill which is about 1m or possibly 105cm up from the floor level. It isn’t touching the glass, but it’s fairly close. We have double glazed aluminium windows. Very thin aluminium profiles. The wall that window is in is a solid double thickness brick wall (no cavity) original from the 1930s. We’ve added about 40mm of EWI, with a Ceresit finish coat. Internally, we had to put in a breathable vapour membrane, which I recall looked a bit foil like, and there was also a metal frame built to create a gap before the plasterboard. So maybe it’s acting like a Faraday cage. In the bottom right hand corner of the drawing you can see part of our porch. The little purple mark, represents the location of our doorbell, which is about 1.2m from the ground. It is mounted on the corner/junction of where the wall meets our front door. Our front door is made of steel and double glazed panels. So maybe that too is acting as a faraday cage. Here, the wall is brand new; in addition to being a double brick cavity wall, it also has the EWI (though no internal foil membrane and no internal metalwork). The porch was a recent addition, hence why it’s built better. As you can see from the scale, the distance between the Router and the doorbell is no more than a mere 4m. Despite this, the doorbell consistently reports “very poor wifi signal”. Video stream is usually fine, but audio is pretty bad, particularly if using the app on 4G when away from the house. It is virtually impossible to speak to someone at the door on the app, when I’m away from the house. I’m running a separate 2.4ghz wifi network just for the doorbell, a firestick and a couple of other IoT devices. Here is the data my Unifi app is reporting for the wifi connection between the UDR and the Ring doorbell: Was hoping someone could give me some advice please.