ProDave

As a new Makita user can I ask how the chargers work, i.e. how they sense "fully charged"? Mu old drill sensed "fully charged" when the batteries started to warm up. The Issue with that, was charge a battery, then give it some hard use, put it back in the charger when flat and the charger would not charge and say "full" because it was still hot and had not yet cooled down. More than once I put my batteries in the customers freezer to force them to cool down and take some charge. I do hope the Makita do not use that same insane system?

If you had gone for the pink one, for your money you would have got 3 drills, 3 batteries and 3 chargers, plus 3 sets of goggles and some drill bits. Just saying. Do let us know the reaction when you turn up on site with a pink drill......

As an electrician, I cringed at all the times I removed a perfectly good (if ugly) 54W flourescent light from a kitchen and replaced it with 300W or more of halogen downlighters. That was even before you considered the need to make holes in any insulation that was there so they did not cook and catch fire. the Halogen downlighter promoted by all the trendy tv make over programs has probably been responsible for a huge increase in lighting energy usage over the last 20 years. Only now, with LED lamps, and in a warm roof house so there is no ceiling level insulation or air tightness to worry about will I have downlighters in my own house.

I work in a mixture of owner occupied and private rental properties. What is apparent over the time I have been self employed is how much loft insulation levels have increased. There seems to be a lot of various grant schemes floating about, although I have never been offered one so I don't know who dishes them out. That is the low hanging fruit. An easy and cheap way to "insulate" a house. But it does nothing to address heat loss through the walls, floor, windows and draughts. All these houses with their lovely loft insulation still blow an icy cold draught out of the wall when you remove a switch or socket from the wall.

"for women" I should take that to the high court on sex discrimination because as a man I cannot buy that so they are discriminating.

But Makita should have replaced them if under 3 years?

I get to go in a lot of lofts and it is rare to find one that is wanting for amount of insulation. I do regularly find lofts that have had more added, and them previous trades who have been up there have moved some of it and not put it back so often gaps left in the insulation. I went in one last week that had about 2" of insulation, not even reaching the top of the 3" trusses. Oh it was a delight to work in, for once you could easily move around and actually find what you were up there to locate.

Not when I did my machining, you ran the spindle the same way, just mechanically reversed the feed shaft. Agree on internal boring being a good idea to run the spindle backwards.

So nobody will fit a new meter to a new supply at the moment? Sounds like you need to speak to the ombudsman?. That situation can't be allowed to last for long.

Since you will be replacing the contactor, does it matter that the old one had 2 coils? I don't think I have ever seen a lathe that can run in reverse. Why?

After my as built EPC was completed and registered, I spent a few minutes searching properties on the register and looking in particular at what I know to be new builds, and did not find another A rated EPC.

Scotland requires a discharge permit to discharge a treatment plant into a watercourse, that held up my building warrant a few weeks to get the paperwork in place. It has been illegal for well over a year for a septic tank to discharge to a watercourse but I still know 2 that do, including my neighbour.

Shame they lump A and B together in that chart. I would love to see just how tiny percentage EPC A is, especially amongst new builds now.

Who is your DNO? Most, not all do have their own supplier but are not supposed to promote them above others. e.g. here the DNO is SSE and SSE are a supplier trading here as Scottish Hydro. Whichever you choose I think it has to be one of the big 6 to install a first meter.

I used my standard circular saw with a coarse blade. It was very prone to blocking with dust, until I removed one side of the guard around the blade and took extra care.

Get your DNO's supplier to fit the meter, then switch to your chosen supplier, if anyone is accepting a switch at the moment. The system is in turmoil so it boils down to who is actually willing to fit a meter for you.

If that is meant to be sharing pictures for us to see it is not working, it takes me to a page asking me to sign in to google drive.

Stop trying to beat yourself up understanding how it works. Tell them you accept their offer of a replacement on the understanding the unit will not be excessively noisy in use, and when off at night, it will remain silent all night. If they proceed on that understanding, you can get them to address it, if it is not so.

Do you not know their names? If the company has folded, they would likely be happy co finish off privately for you?

I bought the £150 offer Makita, just one drill but two 5AH batteries. My gripe with previous tools is running out of battery charge and time to recharge so 2 5AH batteries was more important to me than the impact driver. That offer is only £135 if you buy it before midnight tonight.

I would love to see the details of just HOW they are going to make the huge proportion of old buildings up to an EPC C and WHO is going to pay for it? A heat pump is ONLY "carbon neutral" if 100% of the electricity grid is carbon neutral. We are a long way from that. But if the greens want to pretend a HP is carbon neutral just like they claim burning wood is, then that is fine to make it easier to "tick boxes" Just WHEN are the house buying public (and more importantly they surveyors) going to wake up to the fact a house with a poor EPC SHOULD be valued lower than a house with a good EPC, to reflect the money it is going to cost someone sooner or later to upgrade it. Like we continually get, a lot of bluster about well meaning intentions, with no idea of just HOW to achieve any of this. It does make me glad the 2 houses we own are EPC C and A and the poorer one should be sold within a few years anyway. But even my new build is not quite carbon neutral. to truly achieve that would require a house even better than the one we have just built, and I just cannot see the mass house builders ever achieving that. Has anyone calculated just how many boilers need to be replaced by heat pumps each year to achieve these targets? Then care to guess what percentage of these "upgrades" will fail as being inadequate or too expensive to use?

I used to program Siemens S7 which is a bit different to LOGO. Have you done any PLC programming? it is quite a different beast to most HA systems. Lots of help, tutorials and a forum on PLCS.NET

A heat pump is more like a system boiler than a combi. You need a hot water tank with a heat pump. Most of them will only run heating or hot water at any one time and switch between them, and most allow you to set different temperatures for each. Mine is set to run hot water heating for 30 minutes at a time when the HW tank says it needs some heat, but you can adjust the parameters to either give priority to hot water or to heating. And most of us run the hot water at about 50 degrees or slightly less which plays much better with the way heat pumps work.

There are places where you would really really really rather the bolt stayed in thanks to gravity and at least the 2 parts were still held together in some form.

In my book the washer goes under whichever one you intend to turn with the spanner to tighten it. Or whichever side has an oversized hole that the bolt or nut might pull through without.