ProDave

Solar PV is definitely worth it. Over a year the PV generates more than it takes to heat the house, but of course not when you need it. But we self use almost all we generate and it makes a big reduction in the electricity bill. Many of us find for much of the summer. you get much of your hot water for free from surplus PV.

That's my flue just being installed showing the roof flashing and the rain deflector immediately above it, and the twin wall China Man's hat. (what is wrong with calling it that?) Note this was BEFORE i found the gap between the actual top of the flue and the hat was large enough for a stupid bird to enter so it is now covered with steel mesh.

Flue pipes (in the UK at least) join with the upper section going down inside the lower section. the reasoning is any condensation or tar will run down the inside of the flue. There will be plenty of convection or draught to stop any theoretical combustion gas leak. The cowl, as in the top cap or "China man's hat" on the top is made especially for the particular twin wall flue you have bought. It joins in just the same way as any other twin wall joint ensuring the top of the twin wall is covered so water cannot get down into the insulation. TIP add some wire mesh or at least chicken wire around the gap between the top of the flue and the actual cowl. It is worth the effort getting up onto the roof after TWICE dismantling the top of the stove to retreive the stupid bird that went down the flue. The roof flashing fits differently. It slides over the flue. It does not clamp in the same way as a twin wall joint, it will probably have it's own joint clamp supplied with it. Ours is 2 parts, a lead flashing that gets tiled into the roof, and then a stainless steel cover that clamps to the flue pipe immediately above the lead flashing as a second layer of protection to stop water running down the pipe.

You don't say what size house but our 150 square metre nearly passive house uses 1400kWh heating the house each year and 1000kWh heating the hot water. We are in the Highlands so probably a colder climate than you so expect your figures to be lower.

Yes and only £1897 plus VAT for the 5kW that i have. You end up with it ex VAT on a new build.

With the rear option, watch out for the "distance to combustible materials" particularly for the single wall flue. That could push the whole lot out into the room. I really don't get much heat loss from the single wall section of flue. I think the crucial thing is ducted air into the stove in my case from under the suspended floor, means cold air top and bottom of the flue so little convection. IF the stove was taking warm air in from the room, you could get more convection and heat loss.

Option 2 is what i did. The single wall flue does not seem "cold" when the stove is not in use, certainly not cold enough to cause concern at heat loss. I bought from flue-pipes.com and their black single wall and twin wall all matched in colour and were a pretty good match to the matt black of my stove. For the roof penetration, they sold an insulated sleeve. This is a hard insulating tube that is a snug fit around the twin wall and can be made a snug fit and sealed in a hole in the roof. It was obviously designed to be in direct contact with the twin wall flue so was a neat solution. It is not at all "wobbly" P.S that overhanging kitchen worktop was temporary

I did once had a cylinder where the cylinder was leaking at the point the handle was welded on. I pointed it out to the Calor dealer who seemed completely disinterested.

To be absolutely sure, turn off the valve on the top of each cylinder, it could be the hoses or their connection leaking so just turning off the outside isolating valve won't stop the leak. If you want to have a look for the leak yourself mix up some soapy water (washing up liquid) and squirt that over all the joints and the regulator etc and you will see it blowing bubbles where it is leaking. Agreed you need a competent LPG gas safe man not the previous incompetent one who obviously never did a drop test on it.

That would make it a sh1t burn. (at times it can smell that way)

So you still have the plasterboard on the wall then? From your original description I thought someone had ripped the plasterboard off and you were left looking at the open cardboard honeycomb structure. Strip off all that wallpaper and get as best you can back to bare plasterboard and glue your tile backer board on

Thanks. That's all very well but to do that hack I would be trying to find and work on a resolderable version of the even smaller C type plug. I think that's the final nail in the coffin of this project. It just shows the STUPIDITY of making devices with just one USB connector used for data and charging. In the good old days, power cables were a separate connector to data cables. This is what we call "progress"

Ordinary toilet cleaners seem not to cause issues. As above we don't normally use bleach. And something like JIF (or whatever they call it these days) for cleaning worktops. Some people prefer the supposedly eco friendly products like Ecover.

That's an interesting read. But it just adds confusion rather than settles anything. But it probably indicates that USB OTG is the issue I am having. The red herring here of course is my hacked USB A to C cable was tested with a computer at one end, so would not need the USB OTG capability to work, and thus the fact it did work is not a surprise. So the issue I probably have is the USB C plug and cable I am trying does not have the extra pin for USB OTG connected as that was outside the scope of it's intended use from the doner cable it came from. A quick test with a multimeter shows no pull up or down resistors anywhere but that is only testing on the USB A and B plugs, the pins of a USB C are simply too small to probe directly. I think my next trial, will be to buy another identical cable to the USB B to C that I previously bought and works, and then carefully cut into that and splice in just the power connection from the USB A lead. At least I will be starting with a working cable with all the necessary extra pins and connection for USB OTG. So much for USB being "universal"

If you have access from above, sharpen the end of a length of 15mm copper pipe and force that down.

Okay I decided to have another go. Having previously got a "cut and shut" type A to type C cable working (without introducing the power feed) I decided to go back to basics and try just a cut and shut type B to type C cable. So I just joined all 4 cores and the cable screen in individual soldered and sleeved joints. And it did not work. Well I know the C type cable I was using was good, so almost out of desperation I butchered another type B cable and tried that. And that does not work either. What am I doing wrong? If I can't get a straight through cable working there is no hope of adding the power feed to it. It would be unbelievable to have a second dud type B cable. Any ideas? EDIT to add, I have googled the pinout for a type B USB plug and can confirm the cable I am trying is connected to the correct colour code.

You might need to rebuild that wall. the only stuff i know with honeycomb cardboard comes as a "complete" wall with the cardboard structure down the middle and plasterboard on both sides. the "stud" is used to join 2 sheets together. It sounds like someone has ripped the plasterboard off one side exposing the honeycomb core. I don't know a way to re attach it. I would probably cut vertical strips out of the honeycombe at 400mm centres to insert a new studwork frame.

Okay I did some more experimenting. Just using 2 of my cables, the C type and the USB A type I joined them together to make one cable, and that worked as a single cable to connect my phone to my laptop and it worked for data and power. I then added in the third cable, the B type, connecting just the cable screen and the data pair. leaving the power pair disconnected. My cable then would not communicate between the laptop and the phone. I have concluded what I am up against is transmission line effects with the branch probably causing an impedance mismatch and reflections and the USB protocol just not working. I assumed the D+ and D- cable colours are wired to a standard and I did not fancy trying to reverse them to see. The cables that work for power and not data usually only have one pair, the first C cable i chopped in half hoping to use turned out to only contain the red and black pair. I do wish such a cable was somehow labelled to say power only.

Okay getting nowhere with this. Most of the various Y / splitter cables say only one side can be used for data the other side is only for charging. So I don't want to be buying something that does not work. So I got to thinking, Make my own. I rummaged through my box of USB cables and found 3 cables, each of which had one of the plugs i wanted on one end. Cut off the other unwanted end and stripped the bare end. Now a typical USB cable is a 4 core cable, a data pair (white and green) and a power pair (red and black) Attempt 1. I connected the power pair of the tablet cable to the power pair of the USB charger cable, and connected the data pair of the tablet cable to the data pair of the piano cable. No, that did not work, the tablet did not recognise when the pano was plugged in. Attempt 2. Connected them all together, power pair and data pair. No, that won't even work as a straight through cable piano to tablet, it just does not recognise it being plugged in. So what am I doing wrong?

Possibly. More typically you see a Pelton Wheel used in an enclosure as a low velocity turbine from a piped water supply (from a higher heater pond) but that article suggests it is an efficient way to extract power from moving water as a better alternative to an undershot wheel. So it looks like a good contender.

We have an electric piano / keyboard that has a USB (midi) connection connected to a tablet. It's a type B on one end (that's the original type B not one of the mini B variants) and a type C on the other end. This one, bought from ebay Now this works and the tablet communicates with the piano and it all works. BUT neither end supplies power, so you have to unplug the tablet and plug that into a charger from time to time to charge it. So what I would like is the same cable but with a branch off to a full size USB A plug that can plug into a USB charger and keep the tablet charged while in use. But the only Y or branch USB cables I can find are two USB type A plugs which does not solve the problem. Any ideas?

I considered a more conventional capture and into a turbine, but end to end on the plot there is barely 1 metre fall. Creating a headstock to capture water, then piping it the length of the burn would be a lot of work and a lot of pipe to bury and then technically you need permission to extract water (even if all of it goes back) and there are the issues of not restricting the flow in spate and not wanting the headstock to silt up etc it would be far too complicated. Hence the waterwheel idea which I know will not produce much power.

My only comment is by choosing a completely different tile to next door, you have forced the roofer to fit that row of ridge tiles to join your new tiles to next doors old tiles. If you are going to get any problems or leaks, that will be where. And later, should next door choose to renew their roof, they will have to remove those joining ridge tiles and replace with something else. Personally for peace of mind, i would be wanting to keep a good few spare tiles so that in the event of any issues going forward or for when next door does work, you know you have some spare tiles and you won't suddenly find what you have is no longer available.

This is going to be a long / slow thread as it's not an imminent project but one that is on the "to do" list but I have been encouraged to start the thread anyway to get some thoughts and ideas. As many of you know a small burn runs through our garden. The plan is to experiment with small scale hydro power generation. This is more of a project / fun thing as it won't be generating significant power to make any real impact on our energy use. 2 pictures: the first has been posted before, the more or less straight run the burn takes through the garden. And the second one that has not been posted before, where the burn enters our garden As the burn enters our garden from next door, it makes a rapid S bend, briefly forming the boundary between us and next door. The fence line in the middle of the picture is the boundary, left of the fence is our garden, right of the fence is next door. Initial thoughts are to experiment with an undershot water wheel in this section of the burn for the following reasons: This is probably the fastest flowing section of the burn as it runs down a slope. The rocks in the foreground under normal flow create a constriction concentrating the flow in a narrow space. So a waterwheel just a little narrower than that gap between the rocks and the right hand bank would get the best flow. It is close to the shed for power connection for batteries / inverters or whatever stuff needed to make it work (solar PV inverter is already in that shed) It is upstream of next doors septic tank discharge that you can just see as the burn turns left as the fence starts. This burn comes up drastically when in spate, so the plan would be to mount the waterwheel essentially on a float pivoted upstream, so as the water level rises the whole waterwheel would float up.

So this nitrate thing. Isn't this mainly an agricutural issue? too much / wrong type of fertiliser? So how does the average house connected to a mains sewage system ADD to the levels of nitrates running off the land? Genuine question as it sounds like a blanket ban to solve a problem not caused by housing?