Owning your own home

People of the time might dispute that it's upside down and tell you our maps are. :)

Yeah, well, you know, I just linked to one. :)

They've come up before, and I think a forumenger works there, too.

Ah yes, it's @cheesedisease:

https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/245420/

D'oh. Not paying attention to the links. I use it a lot, love it.

@Oliver Schick Yep, still in library up here, still putting old maps online. Mainly been earlier Scottish collections recently. Actually hoping to digitise rest of our collections of large scale OS Town Plans this year and get online, hopefully georeference too. Be the equivalent plans for other English cities and major towns of what you’ve seen for London already https://maps.nls.uk/os/london-1890s/index.html.
Be amazing resource if able to get done and make all available.

...which means the house I used to rent on Church Road is right around here - what a coincidence!

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"Five feet to the mile" - my favourite scale - so much detail :)

This is amazing. Great work.

surveyors/architectural designers/Resi etc who offer services cheaper

Sounds like you might not know exactly what you want so > architect (or someone) to help figure out options.

Late to the party, I like Maria Hatling's stuff: https://www.mariahatling.com/

Well, whoever did that map wasn't too consistent in their spelling--'feilde'/'field', 'Peniston'/'Penniston'.

No autocorrect back then you see.

avto-correcte

Leak in our flat roof has unveiled itself. After we nicely painted the kitchen of course.
Discovery after a hard day at work was not great.

Back at the nicotine stained window in the smokers bedroom. About 80% done, just some fiddly bits inside the mechanism and the outside to do.

New handles and wedges make a big difference.

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It's such a shit window, but no budget to replace it after the roof and the other 11 sash windows. The mechanism on the right hand opener is totally different to the one on the left (the right hand one can be pivoted around to clean the outside but the left one cannot). Was either bodged together from the cheapest stock at the time of install or one side was replaced at some point.

Jesus Christ that's grim.

Tado: a cautionary tale.

I, like others, picked up a thermostat and some rad valves a while ago. They went in fine and were doing what I expected them to do. I always had an issue here with the Hot Water though. For some reason, it was always on, even though the old controller was set to it being off. I had hoped that it was a duff controller and that adding the Tado extension kit would fix this as it brings the Hot Water controls under the Tado set up. I was wrong.

At first, I installed the extension kit and nothing was working. Turns out it takes a while for the firmware to update. Then when it did come up to speed, I found that

A) I had lost the ability for the individual TRVs to call for heat (as they were doing pre-extension kit). Instead, the Tado wall thermostat needed to be calling for heat for any of the rads to heat, even though the app showed them as calling for heat themselves and each room was set with the extension kit as their zone controller.

B) Now I needed the Hot Water to be set to ON in the app for anything to fire (as a result of this and the pre-exisitng HW issue, he HW has been permanently ON since we moved in).

I contacted Tado support about a week ago, nothing. I started finding all the ways possible to contact them and tried everything, multiple times. Nothing.

Last night I got desparate and starting hunting down anyone on Linkedin at Tado that looked like they had something to do with support or customer success. The only person to respond was the Head of Customer Success. I wrote them a very polite and apologetic message (raising a consumer support issue individually through Linkedin felt like a dick move) and they responded in minutes. They apologised and said they would get one of their managers onto it this morning.

A flurry of emails arrived at 8am this morning (they are a German company so I assume it was the first thing they did in their office hours) saying they had fixed the problem.

A) the thermostat needed to have a relay disabled from their side so that the individual TRVs could speak to the extension kit.

B) the extension kit needed to be changed to GRAVITY FED in order to separate the HW and CH controls (I remember at install time there was an option in the settings to replicate how the old controller was configured. In hindsight, this was likely wrong on the old controller which is why this never worked and why it persisted after the new install).

Fingers crossed but it does not seem to be working properly (or, as expected anyway). But, for the time being, don't rely on their support, without being prepared to be an annoying dick.

I have now also replaced all the old dumb TRVs with the Tado smart versions so can actually turn rads off in rooms we are not in (the smoker's bedroom rad was constantly on as the TRV there as fuckoed). That and not having the HW on permanently and also getting new double glazed windows in most of the house in a few weeks will hopefully bring our energy bill below the £300 I've just been quoted for our first month.....

oh no ta do no go no no no

I suspect consumers retrofitting this stuff to existing (and probably poorly thought out / installed) systems is a bit of a nightmare for the smart heating people.

The extension kit is a serious installation job IIRC - not something I'd relish the thought of DIYing although I'd probably do it if I had to...

While we're on the smart heating, a pro tip for anyone moving out of their smart home:
make sure you put the heating on frost protection/low set point before you pack up all your wifi gubbins and cancel your internet. We currently have an empty house being warmed to a perfectly acceptable temperature for who knows how long and there's nothing I can do about it besides turn the boiler off or go over there to physically implement a two-hour override.

anyone moving out

mistake 1

getting away from you was the best thing I ever did.

mistake 2

I wonder if you're the fist person that has said that?

existing (and probably poorly thought out / installed)

That's the main thing I reckon. The job itself was a piece of piss and the instructions were fairly idiot proof. "What are you replacing? Label this wire with this sticker and put it here" kind of thing. The problem is it assumes everything was working properly in the first place. I'm not a (total) moron, but I assumed my issues were due to the controller being old and knackered but correctly installed. There could have been more information about what and why I was configuring, but I suppose once you start to lift the lid on that you potentially can cause more problems. In hindsight, the gravity fed setting depended on how a series of switches on the back of my controller were set. The graphic in the instructions had the switches in a different orientation than on my controller (despite it being the exact model - Sunvic Select 207 XLS) and it was actually hard to tell from the graphic which position the switch was in.

Hopefully it is all resolved as if it works as I'm expecting, it will make things a fuck of a lot easier (and cheaper). Being able to bump the HW on half an hour before mini_com's bath time will no doubt be cheaper than having it on 24/7. We don't need it for most other things. The dishwasher and electric shower help there (will be changing that up in future, however).