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I've always used Fischer chemical fixings - recently used some to hold a C-section steel joist against a very wet Victorian cellar wall. If using resin fixings in a wet &/or crumbly wall, you must torque the bolts correctly. If over-tightened they'll just break up the brick more and weaken the...

Just come back to this, a year later and looking at this again - how thick should I cut the pieces? Obvious answer would be "as thick as you need", but I'm not sure yet what I'll use it for but I definitely don't want it living outside my workshop for much longer else it'll just rot...

As a lifelong beekeeper in Kent, we've had an astonishing year for bees of all types. The last two years have been pretty grim, but this year and any one time we've had many 100s of bumbles of different types on our lavender and flower beds. Just loads. The honey crop this year has been...

We've had a 3-phase GSHP here for 17 years and it's never missed a beat. It's been serviced once in that time with only minor tweaks needed. Post in thread 'Suggestions for future heating system' Suggestions for future heating system We installed it at the same time as doing our self-build...

We have a large Victorian "Vine Wall" - South-facing with inbuilt chimneys to keep the frost off (very cunning, those Victorians!). Probably 15' high and 30' long... Parts of it needed repointing as over the years it had had many 100s of iron nails & other iron bits hammered in that had since...

Just realised that that's a really early model - the one I hired had hydraulic support legs with pressure alarms - if a pad started to become unweighted it prevented you from moving the cage further out. You could move the wheels out for road use and then in again for moving around through...

So 15 years ago we installed a Shaker-style solid oak kitchen - the doors/draw fronts are all Danish Oiled... About 7 years ago i cleaned the doors etc and re-oiled lightly. They are always wiped down anyway as part of general cleaning... But now I've noticed that they are getting a bit...

Snap! I used the same Cherry Picker, a NiftyLift 120, to do all the windows, guttering & weatherboarding in our house... great machine! Post in thread '50 window frames to sand .. in situ.' 50 window frames to sand .. in situ. Cherry picker was a game changer compared with the tower I used to...

Seems to be remarkably similar to the Jet PM 2244. Perhaps start there...

Hi. Another electronic engineer here. Designing and building a safe 50HP / 40kw single -to-threephase digital converter is a hugely specialised job that, personally, I wouldn't touch with a barge pole. Unless you are a design engineer specialising in serious power electronics, there are just so...

Indeed there was nowhere inside the building or outside. The fuel (diesel) is stored as part of the genset container which was craned onto the roof (which was built to take it). The main problems are that we then had to build a sunshade for it as in summer we hit 45C, plus the fuel has to be...

I redid a small data centre in Dubai where we had a 400KVA 3-phase Volvo generator on the roof and 7 floors below, the ATS, UPSs and machine room... The armoured cables between the ATS and genset were humungous, not least because of having to travel 7 floors with minimum loss. The cable was one...

Was there on various rugby tours. Some of the roughest trade in the West Country, even with the help of a dark night/sun behind. Like a sack full of rabbits... scary... Being fair, I believe that they've cleaned up their act since then as the true residents were getting fed up with the...

I don't think so - in winter, the GSHP has to work much harder to get the required temperature rise to the property so lower CoP; in summer, the ground is already warmer so the GSHP has less work to do, so higher CoP. The critical figure is the required "uplift" - the lower it is, the better...

Joking aside, there is now a a technique called "inter-seasonal heat transfer" (IHT) for use with GSHPs that warms up the ground even more during the summer so it can be released over winter and cools it over winter for use during the summer - because of the huge storage capacity of the ground...

Exactly. The "First Law of Thermodynamics" is upheld - energy cannot be created or destroyed. With a GSHP, the sun heats the ground. Electricity is used to drive the GSHP compressor and circulation pumps; the electrical energy input plus the thermal energy extracted from the ground equals the...

I apologize if it came over that way - that certainly wasn't my intention. You asked me a direct question, which in itself could be taken various ways (if I was that thin skinned); I answered it. By "you" in my reply I'm not referring to you personally, but to anyone reading the post - a figure...

No. Everything I said about UK consumer units is valid - if you're not confident then get a qualified professional to do the work. If you do know a bit, then you'll see that what I've done is actually nothing very complex or special - a bit left-field, but no more than that.

Actually there are at least three sizes. A large 200A one for your utility feed, a standard 50A one for the circuits to be monitored, and a larger "wide mouthed" 50A one if you want to monitor tails in a meter cupboard (which I do). So I'm using all three types - the Vue2 has a maximum of 16 x...

Probably better to say that a number of standards are adopted either in part of full by other standards bodies. e.g. BSI (UK), DIN (Germany), ANSI (USA), IEC (Swiss), ISO (world), ITU (world) etc. all collaborate. It's a horrible business. I once sat on a BSI standards body and nearly lost the...