Ferdinand

In those circs I would 1 - put one row of tiles along the worktop back, 2 - have the boxes immediately above that, leaving 3 - sockets in plaster, no need to make the plaster good (assuming you use the appropriate double-socket-box cutter) since there are no exposed chasings into plaster, and 4 - no need to cut all those tiles. (Just changed my Avatar from Little Miss Ditzy to Mr Lazy) (Mr Brave is also available, i you need one 🙂) F

What's a fir octopus? I prefer a mimic octopus:

OK @richo106, my comments and suggestions. 1 - Your De Longhi Pinguino dehumidifier Having read the manual for your device and watched the review at the bottom. The Pinguino is a combined Air Conditioner / Dehumidifier which generally afaics runs both modes to achieve what it decides is an appropriate balance, managed together. It normally gets rid of it's collected water I think via the aircon air outlet. I *think* that means that it cannot run as a pure dehumidifier, which means that you are unlikely to get the same levels of efficiency in terms of energy used per amount of water extracted. HOWEVER, you have it to hand - try it and see if it does the job - a bit of extra power costing a few £10s is nothing if it gets you working again 2-3 days more quickly, or manages a risk. Note that it seems to have a pipe outlet that you should be able to connect to a bucket by putting it on a chair or similar. 2 - Standard Dehumidifiers A classic dehumidifier has no external window-outlet, because the water goes into the drip tray / tank, or to an outlet where you connect a piece of hose pipe or similar. It will be controlled via a switch, timer, perhaps thermostat or humidistat. It may also include a small heater to help boost the air temperature to increase the water in the air, so that it can get more out. Drying out of the air encourages more to evaporate from the walls, which is the process until the plaster is dry. My domestic £149 (a few years ago) 10/ day domestic dehumidifier from B&Q has a 3 litre jug, lots of controls (timer, thermostat, humidistat) but no pipe outlet. Normal process is either to empty the tray/jug umpteen times, or to elevate the dehumidifier and run the pipe into a bucket or soft-bucket or shower tray etc, so you can leave it alone. Big commercial dehumidifiers come with an elevating pump that lets you put the dh on the floor (it may weigh 50kg to 100kg so you have little choice) and run the pipe to eg a sink. 3 - Practicalities Heating the place to 25C makes a hell of a difference, but afaik it is mainly the AIR that you want to heat - so suggest a fan heater is perhaps better than central heating. When you are there opening lots of windows and turning them all off may be more effective. If you can move it (or them) around spread-out places helps. It will work to do one room only with the door closed if you need to work there. For a dehumidifier to be working at high efficiency, the space needs to feel like walking into a swimming pool. (Check the specs on the DH in the manual as to conditions when the magical "X litres per day" 5x more than you are getting was measured - usually 30C / 80% RH.) That will then go off as you dry it out. Often the amount of water to be extracted is underestimated. Each 25kg bag of plaster used requires about 11 litres of water (2.5 gallons), so add up how many you have used and that is roughly how much water has to come out. How many bags of plaster did you use - x10 is how much water you need out in litres (ish). You can dry out particular rooms by setting up polythene curtains in doorways with gaffer tape and DPM. Plus at the end make sure that all the poor circulation nooks and corners are done properly. 4 - My suggestions. a - Do what you are doing to see how well it works. b - Get 2-3 of £10 hygrometer-thermometers to monitor. Your humidity will start at 80-90% and you need it down to about 50-55%. Do this anyway - you will always find these useful, even with drying washing. You will slowly get through them over time, as they don't bounce. https://www.amazon.co.uk/ThermoPro-TP50-Digital-Thermometer-Temperature/dp/B01H1R0K68/ c - To enhance, get a couple of £10 fan thermostat heaters from Screwfix, Toolstation or Argos in addition to your heating. Whack em in and set them to medium-high. Probably do this anyway - always useful to have eg https://www.toolstation.com/upright-fan-heater/p62624 d - If that isn't doing it enough, then look at a commercial dehumidifier or two, which will cost say £300-500 and you can get most of it back at the end, like scaffolding and other bits. I'd say these or similar are OK and decent value (plus the one I mentioned above): Watch availability dates - if it was me I'd snap up the refurbished version of the first one - looks like a steal at £300-380. Sell it on and you should get 80-90% back. Buy, don't hire. https://www.appliancesdirect.co.uk/p/ecd30/electriq-ecd30-dehumidifier https://www.appliancesdirect.co.uk/p/ecd50/electriq-ecd50-dehumidifier My thoughts and all the best. Not a time to pussyfoot too much, but also to act thoughtfully. Ferdinand

Need to think about this. Normal dehumidifier you don't need the hose, but this looks unusual. If in doubt, follow the manual !

There's no harm imo, as long as it has something firm to stand on, perhaps as a quick hit. If there is no source of moisture up there, then drying it out and closing the hatch should keep it that way. But if the loft is not draughty and the hatch is open reducing the humidity in the house should suck it out quickly. I would recommend a couple of the inexpensive £10 min/max thermometer-humidity meters to let you monitor. Like this one: https://www.amazon.co.uk/ThermoPro-TP50-Digital-Thermometer-Temperature/ F

Dehumidifier Tips and Recommendations. 1 - Remember DHs are specced at about 30C, so you need to heat it up as well. Good job we are all building well-insulated airtight houses. 2 - Buying, using and selling is a good plan, as so often. Either new or ebay. I have about 5 DHs, as I am an LL and need industrial ones to dry out houses being restored or if Ts ever flood it (only once). My biggest one weighs 60kg and does 60l/day, but my favourite is a Broughton CR 40, which is portable and compact, and in my experience shifts a lot of water: https://www.broughtoneap.co.uk/products/dehumidifiers/cr40/ (Still available secondhand or refurbished for about £200-400.) 3 - Also, what about using one of the Reversible Heat/Cool/Dehumidifier incorporating a heat pump that we were all talking about? a - Plug it in as a heater to boost the temperature for a half day using the heat pump heater - with the duct through the window in a baffle you create. Mine puts out 3.2kw for 1.3kw input - ish. b - Close window, and switch to dehumidifier mode. I have this one, Airflex 15 - there are others, which is domestic enough to keep to dry washing. £370 new. £300 refurbished. https://www.appliancesdirect.co.uk/p/airflex15/electriq-airflex15 You will also need an insulated ventilation duct.

It sounds very difficult. At least the floor area of the house would give you an estimate of the maximum multiplied by your 0.5m height. Here is a price suggesting ~£50 per cubic m for polybeads - which feels about right. May save for buying more, but will have fitting costs: https://ecclestons.com/product/10-cu-ft-expanded-polystyrene-bead-bags/ At £25 per sqm, that is the same material cost as a posh carpet, or decent tiles or laminate. The way full fill works is it can come in a tanker and is pumped in, usually after you have lined the space with polythene to keep moisture out (!) If you are not able to line, you need to pay a lot of attention to moisture and ground conditions. Also I think to keeping Roland out when he considers visiting; polybeads are probably toasty for rodents in winter. It has also been done with a material called LECA, which is Light Expanded Clay Aggregate - a clay version of an Aero Chocolate Bar, in granules. It is more resilient to moisture. Here are some "LECA insulation fill" prices in bags - looks pricey! https://www.specialistaggregates.com/advanced_search_result.php?search_in_description=1&keywords=Leca Insulation Fill Price&delivery=pallet That LECA is around £130 per sqm at 500mm thick, at which price you might be better off using Aerogel Spacetherm on top in a subfloor. I think you need to map your void - do you have access? If you can see it can you map it with a torch and an estate agent laser measure, a protractor and graph paper? Plan B: Can you do it on top as a raised insulated floor, instead? Plan C might be perimeter 'skirt' insulation in a trench round the house, and letting the ground heat up underneath. I do not know how an underfloor void affects that. Either way, it will need some careful staff work first. HTH Ferdinand

I'd consider moving the garage to the other side of the plot, and put it facing the road - where your site plan says "turning and parking". Or even moving it forward to be level with the house, so that you get all your S-facing back garden back, which is the plot's best feature. What is the status of the electric kit, the wayleave and the wording of the agreement? Can you just give them notice to move it off your land, as is often the case? It all depends on the detail of the agreement - I was able to tell an elec company to remove a medium voltage line (can link to the thread on BH if you like) supplying many thousands of people just by going through the notice process in the agreement. I'll stay off the layout as I think that is going to change majorly and others are all over it, except to say: 1 - Make your stairs a shallow angle 34-35 degrees not 40-42 if you can. Really helps when you become a little more frail. 2 - Provision for handrails, grabrails and things you will need now in your design (panels of ply in the walls to drill them to etc.) 3 - Generous walk in showers. 4 - Everything wheelchair useable. 5 - Provision for a lift. 6 - Plan your garden to need less maintenance as you get older. And I might on that plot think about a bungalow facing towards the back of the plot with some thought about what I want at either side depending on what I like to do in the sun morning and evening. ATB Ferdinand

Mine was expensive enough that I don't want to lose it. Albeit I did not pay +10k for the corresponding, less practical, VW or +20k for the corresponding, less practical, Audi which also comes with a reputation for driven-by-hoons.

I scraped the corner of my car on my front wall. I have left the scratches there in the hope of deterring anyone tempted to steal it by making them do a bit more work before passing it on.

I hope it has sufficiently strong bollards in it, unlike the one outside the Primary School in Wimbledon. Or the kind of rock that features in Rock Cam (personally I'd go for a bigger one). I'm a huge fan of the World Bollard Association, bith for its corporate objective of making BMWs extinct one at a time, and also for the Dogs and Bollards theme.

For a comparison, these are how my usage has worked out recently. Factors are: - It is Gas for heating, nearly all hot water (one electric shower), and cooking. - The A2A heat pump as described. CoP about 2->2.5, so puts out 2.5->3kw for 1>1.5kW of input. - I have a new air-fryer cooker which I have been using quite extensively -> transfer from some wok cookery on the gas, but also from the Electric Oven. - I have a solar array put in in 2016 which reduced my annual electricity consumption by something like 30-35% like for like (finger in the air estimate). If I go for more electrical heating that will work the other way. - Living on my own in a largish 4 bed house (200 sqm approx). Usage numbers. - During the summer I was using about 4-5kWh of imported electricity per day. Figure from smart meter. - When I got the air fryer in, and started dabbling with the ASHP in heating mode during Oct, that went up to around 7-8kWh per day. - During the current cols snap that has jumped to around 10kWh per day. I hope to keep it at that level as a max. - Gas use during the summer was cooking / water, so very little. - Since early Nov I have been running a bathroom radiator a couple of hours AM and PM. Put usage up to about 1-1.5 cubic m per day (which I make ~15 kWh). - My downstairs heating controller was replaced in mid-Nov, and I have that on driving the UFH over the downstairs to provide some baseload heating. That has put usage to about 4 cubic m per day, which I make around 44 kwh. - For an early morning boost I have occasionally been using the wok ring for 15 minutes whilst cooking breakfast, which is not quite optimal efficiency or C02 wise, but a good instant boost. - Bills for 4 Nov -> 3 Dec were £60 gas and £70 elec. I think I need to get to grips with the the new GFCH controller to use gas more efficiently by setting up daily timings rather than default, judging by the weekly gas usage where 45% of the last 4 weeks was in the last week, or it could run away with me like last year. - TBF, my current regime is a little hair-shirty, back to the old "warm certain rooms" method (baths + kitchen-diner), and the rest running .. er .. 'cool' ! House is OK-good, rather than near-passive. Graphs Reflections - Last year I was caught out a little by the amount of gas I used for heating, which having done a retrospective audit of bills recently was more than I thought it was. But I was incapacitated by illness. - This year my stretch goal is to keep bills below £100 per month except for Nov / Dec / Jan / Feb (say £800-£1000 total for 12 months), and to break even when solar exports and FIT are added in. That is a bit of a stretch goal TBH, especially on the heating side. - Further improvement will depend on the supply side and a switch to electric heating, so likely more solar / solar export and a house battery. Not much scope for improving fabric performance since it was all done just before we bought it around 2008 - except perhaps draughts and drylining as I need to redecorate certain areas. A detailed heat model analysis may help.

It's notable to me how much difference each progressive step makes, since I developed it slowly due to my serious illness. I'd suggest making a point of doing all three: 1 - Insulated duct *not* uninsulated duct (leaving it uninsulated creates a duct-surface-area-inside-the-room radiator working against your heating or cooling goal). My 3m one cost about £35. 2 - As good a baffle in the window opening as you can make. The one that came with my unit was suitable for windows with an obtangular opening (eg sashes), but sized for an uninsulated pipe. I started with cardboard and eventually made one from plywood. The gap around the edge is less of a hit than might be expected - at an average 3mm gap around a 150mm pipe with 25mm insulation it would be leaking area/inlet area = (2*PI*100mm*3mm)/(PI*75mm*75mm) as a fraction, which I make 0.05. Not zero, but fairly marginal. (That calc ignores edge leakage around the baffle and temperature variability effects between where the baffle is located and where the end of the pipe is located.) For cutting the leakage I would use a bit of rockwool or material round the pipe, and probably sticky foam strip around the window frame. 3 - Sort out your water drainage outlet - I use a watering can and a piece of beer-making-type hose with the end cut at an angle to concentrate any flow, which was easier to manage/cut tidily than hose pipe. HTH F

I've been doing internal master taps on tenanted houses for a number of years. I find Ts usually like that an an external double socket, especially if they like gardening. Ts who like gardening are worth their weight in tomatoes. In one memorable case I have no idea where the pipe goes when it vanishes underground, it is so old. That was my own cottage which my gran and grandad owned from 1926. So when it froze originally we had to dig a hole around it to give space for the plumber to work. On that one it has a stop tap at the base of the outside pipe, and a normal two-headed tap at the end (one for hose plus one for buckets - T uses it a lot). My call would be leave external tap open, and cloe the inside master tap, for the freezing period. And insulate a box with some rockwool just for a bit of extra resilience if it is away from the house or an outbuilding. F

Ha ! Why is everyone suggesting technical solutions here, when the issue is clearly that you can't blow (or suck) hard enough? You have a need for that versatile buildhub practitioner known as an elephant. There are two methods: 1 - Attach the elephant to the inside pipe, and then make it sneeze. Requires pepper and a tolerant elephant. 2 - Attach the elephant to the outside of the tap, put a clothes peg on it's trunk and take it off when it is desperate for a breath. At that point there will be a sharp intake of breath by the elephant and the water will be extracted from your piece of pipe. It is wise to have your running shoes with studs on at the time. Elephants can do 40kph. I believe we discussed this in the past when we were talking about getting ropes through ducts, as an alternative to using moles or pigs. An alternative is to have grown up playing the trombone, or as an apprentice town-crier. I did the former with the trumpet and I have a routine asthma test in 45 minutes, for which I am stood in good stead thereby. (More seriously, it sounds as if you should be OK.) Useful content: There are some styles of tap that have the turn handle on the outside and the valve deeper in the wall to keep it warmer. There are also things like this one which have a built in drain: https://www.arleymosssupplies.co.uk/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=2711 If you go for a pump, is it suitable to use one that does your car tyres, or bicycle? I don't see why not. Ferdinand

Here's a piccie of my temporary setup using the AirFlex15. The insulated duct is quite chunky. t the extent that a more perma-solution is not imo acceptable looking like that in my kitchen. I would either want it done as a real outlet hidden behind the unit going through the wall. In that case I think I am better with a real A2A one (inside or outside unit) and a 70mm connector.

It would have to be done in an insulated duct.

Remember you can get fine jigsaw blades that cut on the downstroke.

I'd point you to the manual, but of course one of the two (inlet or outlet) is in the room, and the other exits through a window or a hole in the wall. I have to think about it again every half year when I reverse the unit to change it from heating to cooling by plugging it in the other way round, to keep my brain straight.

I would not put one in a bedroom, and want it to work whilst I was asleep. But you can arrange it so that the unit is outside eg on a balcony. The thread I linked has a copy of the manual linked, which tells you a lot more. I am not sure that it would be able to drive the flow up the height of a chimney. My view is that I would probably not make one a permanent installation but would go for a minisplit, or one of those where there is a single unit inside the room and a 70mm hole carry the connections. If eg I had a summer office it would be useful as tactical heating. / cooling. For me, it is also a spare powerful dehumidifier which I might ultimately use as another lend-to-tenants or dry-the-washing device.

Heh. I have a conservatory with double glazed "external" doors to inside and outside, since the previous house-adaptor ran out of getting his money back and did not built it. So he turned it into a patio and put external doors on the kitchen and lounge. We finished it. I'd say it's a useful buffer for a boost for the kitchen in the morning, but that is about the extent of it. I also get solar in the morning as it is mainly East Facing, so that helps boost the CoP. Conservatory: 12 sqm. Kitchen: 30sqm ish. As I sit here in my blogging pants in my kitchen-diner dispensing my wisdom (don't get excited - I am talking about Yankee-Doodle blogging 'pants') the temperature is about 15-16C, which is a little below my comfort zone, so I hope my Trombe-Conservatory will give me a couple of degrees extra over an hour or so. F

I wonder how much having the external air feed from a conservatory (with an external conservatory window) helps? AFAICS the warmer-than-outside air initially in the conservatory should provide a short-term performance buffer until the conservatory has been cooled down. That will afaics help the initial boost, but has benefit only for an initial period, and then needs the conservatory to heat up again as outside air hopefully heats up. So potentially helpful on eg a cold morning where it heats up to a degree later.

Went for one of these, which is now here. Looks very good for £50. Two batteries, two chains, oiling facility, 6" edge.

I did a thread starting in summer 2022 about this, with some background (including a rude joke about Boris Johnson.) I will add a few more recent notes on this thread. TL:DR - at under £400 it's imo a bit of a steal, even if you just use it as a portable dehumidifier / heater / cooler. Remember that there is a Wi-Fi controllable version. If you install it with a direct external outlet, you are looking at a 200mm hole in your wall - which is BIG. Here:

My current one is a portable thing I'm experimenting with, which can be installed in all sorts of ways. One of these: https://www.appliancesdirect.co.uk/p/airflex15/electriq-airflex15