ProDave

The homepad is powered by USB C. If it won't work from a standard USB C socket, take that up with the manufacturer of the homepad. Apple have history of being non standard.

I would do nothing and say nothing, see if they spot it. Can you make a more obvious fault somewhere else? they are happier if they find something wrong.

Yes that would work, I didn't know such a thing existed.

You don't just want to turn the immersion on or off with a remote switch like that. That will only be any use then there is 3kW of power spare from the PV. Most of the time there will be very much less than 3kW spare. Install an ordinary solar PV dump controller, that usually burst fires the immersion heater so the power sent to the heater matches the surplus from the PV. There are a few different ones to choose from, and a few of us have built our own. They operate completely on their own, they just monitor current flow and as soon as they detect power being exported start turning on the immersion heater.

Automatic air bleed valve. Unscrew the little cap on the top and any air that has accumulated will hiss out.

There are laid down rules on where and what size you can drill or notch a joist. Working in mostly older houses I encounter all sorts of drilling and notching in all sorts of places. Most trades don't even know you are supposed to stick to certain rules and drill whatever hole they need where they need it. I have never seen a joist failing due to holes in wrong place.

^^^^ Yes a random answer generator. I know FTTC is not available here, there is no cabinet and the only junctions are (usually flooded) underground pits with supposedly waterproof junction pots. And I had been enquiring if / when FTTC would be available here, only to be told there are no plans, so I find this checker somewhat insulting as it is clearly giving wrong results. What are they hoping to achieve? Keep customers hanging on in the hope they are going to get fast broadband? Or just waste peoples time?

This is truly an act of fiction, or a random number generator? I really want to click the "register an interest" button but don't want to accidentally commit to anything. but just out of curiosity I tried a few other addresses in our group of houses. Strange for ours it says superfast broadband up to 80MBPS is available, but for all our neighbouring properties, it says superfast at a speed of 0-1 MBPS is available. Before I dumped BT and went for the wireless service I had been told there were no plans for FTTC here.

That's a work of fiction. It says standard broadband up to 24MBPS, we used to get 3. It says standard fibre broadband up to 80MPBS available. Oh no it is not.

This was a council or housing association property not a tin pot private landlord. You would hope they inspect them. And the tenant did constantly report the problem. But my point is just what does the landlord do in this case? It is just yet another symptom of the lousy state of much of the UK's old housing stock. I am keen to stop being a landlord and I most certainly would not want to be responsible for most of the housing stock in this country.

Cuddling anything connected to a power source is not recommended in a shower. It's a form of smart speaker so should be no need to actually cuddle it. Other countries manage with washing machines and hairdryers in their bathrooms without killing themselves, we are obviously a bit delicate as we have to be protected from such lethal dangers.

Well if you will cuddle your homepod in the shower.

the basic interface looks like this:

Hi and welcome. There's probably not much you don't know. Well done on your portfolio of builds, and look forward to the next one taking shape.

Not the interface that you log into a 192.168.1.1 That just gives you basic information and basic settings, when you log in as "admin" Is there another login user name that gives you more options? Within that basic user interface there is a link to "UNMS" which opens a new tab and takes you to https://10.20.9.17/nms/login but I don't have a user name or password to log in there and no idea what it would allow me to do.

Devils advocate time. If THIS house was defective and mould was rampant, how come ALL the houses of this type are not condemned? I very much doubt this one particular house has a big fault in it's construction that the houses adjacent don't? Could just a little of the blame be put on the tenant for not understanding how typical old UK houses, in a damp UK climate work, and how they need to be heated and ventilated properly? And could just a little bit of the blame be put on the fact English is not their first language and no matter how much you try and explain things to them, they just don't understand? Two examples. We used to have a 1980's build flat as a buy to let, typical construction for the area, timber framed, electric storage heaters, wooden double glazed windows. We had one tenant complaining of damp. Inspection showed all the heating off. All the windows shut and all trickle vents closed, the bathroom fan turned off at the fan isolator switch (that was when I learned NEVER have a fan isolator switch in a rental) and wet clothing hung in every room. It was unheated and unventilated with very high humidity. Just what do you expect to happen? No tenant before or after had a problem with damp. And the language thing, yesterday I had to go to a rental with the reported fault "heaters not working". They were storage heaters, and they were turned off at the wall switch. I tried to explain to the tenant, who did not speak much English that you turn them on and leave them on and they will heat up over night. I gathered from what little I could understand, she turned them on, the light did not come on (in the daytime) so she assumed they were faulty and turned them off. Now someone will come and label me racist because I struggle to communicate with someone who does not have a reasonable command of the English language, and heaven forbid I expect a tenant to do their best to work with the property they have warts and all., The alternative is we knock down most of the UK's housing stock and replace it with idiot proof passive houses so the tenant does not have to think. But better not fit an off switch to the MVHR.

It might just me my Raspbery Pi Music box that is not very good. On the previous (3 MBPS on a good day, frequently slower) ADSL broadband, the Pi would often stop and start it's streaming, very often around 5 to 6PM every day, and if someone started streaming tv or downloading then forget it. This is the first time the Pi has show any issues since getting the new broadband. Unlike the old BT router, this Air Cube shows you what devices are connected and what up and downloads they are using and the XBOX did indeed seem to be using all that was available. I was hoping there would have been some hidden / advanced settings to set limits or priorities but lots of searching has revealed a big fat no. Annoyingly, the Pi is connected by ethernet not wifi but that does not seem to give it any priority.

Presently terminal 5 only has a brown and a black into it. Remove the black AND disconnect the other end of the black, leaving anything the black was connected to, exactly where it was. Terminal 5 will now have the brown (to the UFH motorised valve) in it, you will then be adding the blue from the new flex into terminal 5 so it now has the brown and a blue. The brown of the new flex needs to connect to L, terminal 11 is a good place for that.

I am just too nice, I hate telling people off, as I hate being told off. The XBOX thing, he was not to know it was capable of hogging all the bandwidth of what is still a limited bandwidth service. It is plain stupid that with standard equipment and protocols there are no settings or limits that ensure all devices on the network get a fair slice of the bandwidth available. Setting on and off times to prevent that would pretty much be only allowing it to download when the rest of us are in bed or out of the house. What is needed is the XBOX or similar devices to have a setting to restrict their maximum download speed or the router to be able to do the same. I guess even at our new fast(er) 50MBPS broadband (the fastest we are ever likely to get here for a long time) that is by todays technology, FTTP or FTTC or even 5G a slow legacy service. But out in the sticks we are unlikely to get any of those faster services any time soon, so we continue to be "forgotten" The shower thing is just typical of someone that has no understanding of how things work, how much things cost and who has never had to pay for them. Words have been had. We will see if it happens again.

Is there a way you could mount it so the USB C cable passes through a wall into perhaps an adjacent cupboard or wardrobe where you can have a socket for a USB C charger?

Try instructing the person that has a total disregard for others. e.g the other day I timed him in the shower, he continued showering for a full 30 minutes and only stopped when he had emptied all 300L of hot water out of the tank.

There is the issue, the UFH valve only gets activated by that one thermostat. So to correct this, not far off the original suggestion. Disconnect that black link wire, leaving the grey from the thermostat where it is. Connect a new bit of 2 core flex brown to 11 and blue to 5. And connect the other end of that bit of 2 core flex to those currently unused terminal blocks bottom right of the manifold control box, brown to the left hand one, blue to the right hand one. This will then energise the UFH valve when either UFH thermostat calls for heat.

This experiment is the carrot, we will pay you if you use less than normal. Next will be the stick, we will charge you more to use electricity in those peak times. That is what smart meters are all about, and why a lot of us want to resist having one as long as possible. I guess the present price cap is the only thing stopping them using the stick at the moment?

Now follow the black also in 5 and tell me where that goes please? (this could take a while)

1.45Kw average heat output would not be enough for my low energy house for the coldest periods in winter, so how this is expected to work for an ordinary house beats me. A large individual storage heater is usually sized at 21kWh storage (3 kW input for 7 hours) so this box is essentially 2 of those. If it is using the same storage bricks then that is going to be a massive weight to hang on a wall. This is not a new idea, look up the Electricaire which was still available or if not was still available recently. They were fitted into a lot of houses around here, they are a massive central storage heater and the heat is distributed on demand by air by turning on a big fan to blow air through the core and then to the rooms. You can get larger capacity storage boilers based on a large water tank typically with 9kW of heat input. They can work reasonably well, particularly if used on E10 rather than E7 as you get more cheap rate and split into 3 chunks one all on one go. But nothing is going to change the fact that off peak is only half the cost of peak electricity (with the penalty that peak rate is higher than a single rate tariff) so is never going to match the cost benefit of a heat pump.