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Dibs well insulated flat

How much money will you spend on petrol driving your Volvo to your parents' and back to pick up logs? How much is your time worth fetching them? How does that compare with getting them delivered?

I spend about £300 a year on gas to heat my 2 bed flat. Mind you it is very well insulated.

Believe it or not I tend to go and see them anyway- so filling the boot with logs would be "free" essentially.

You paid £300 last year- that'll be £800 this year and £2,000 the year after that as you pay for all those useless solar panels that were installed over the past couple of years with subsidies that are now coming home to roost.

I do want to sell it actually.

ftfy.

Mold (in Flintshire) smells of chocolate puddings because that's where they make them. Also has some great canal infrastructure. It's awesome! Or it used to be, I haven't been there since the 80s.

I don't really understand this. Keep the thermostat at 22 degrees and it will always be the perfect temperature, summer or winter. That is what thermostats do.

Such hedonism. Ours is on 17, 18 if it gets really cold.

Believe it or not I tend to go and see them anyway- so filling the boot with logs would be "free" essentially.

You haven't factored in the reduction in fuel economy caused by the weight of the logs, but this could well be because your Volvo estate has no fuel economy in the first place?

You know logs are heavy, are you sure you want logs?

Or is that why you want to burn them?

stovesstovesstoves

Thanks for all this.

tired face

Last night another previously encountered DiY problem reared up and kept me awake from 1-5am. We're we're on the ground floor of a 5 storey 1960s block. For some reason all the 5 levels of windowsill directly above ours are flush with the face of the building and don't prodrude from the window recess; but our ground floor bedroom windowsill prodtrudes about 3 inches. The result is that when it rains 5 storey's worth of accumulated drips from the all the above windowsills slap onto out hollow uPVC windowsill from a great height. It sounds like someone dropping fistfulls of marbles into an empty plastic bucket and maddenly irregular intervals. Right next to our bed. It's really loud. And delightfully, last night, just when I was looking forward to my first good night's sleep in ages...it went on ALL NIGHT.

In my head i'm imagining some sort of prodtruding lip, a triangular prism (toblerone box) of painted pine attached to the cladding above the window to deflect the drops away from the resonant windowsill. A window-brow. Think that'll work?

You'd need your "rain-brow" to be solid, otherwise you'll simply be moving the sound-box from it's current location below the window, to a new position above it.

Although a sharp angle might convert the vertical path to a horizontal trajectory with minimum "splat", as it were.

Easy enough to trial this with two brackets and a simple length of wood- I have plenty of wood that could be used for this experiment if you wanted to pop over the road.

You'd need your "rain-brow" to be solid, otherwise you'll simply be moving the sound-box from it's current location below the window, to a new position above it.

Although a sharp angle might convert the vertical path to a horizontal trajectory with minimum "splat", as it were.

Easy enough to trial this with two brackets and a simple length of wood- I have plenty of wood that could be used for this experiment if you wanted to pop over the road.

Cheers Dammit. That's kind of you. I may well take you up on it when i've roughed out a "design". I was thinking a solid piece of wood but now I come to think of it perhaps brackets and a flat plank will be easier to rig up and will certainly be much lighter (given that it's going to have to attach to some 45 year old decorative wooden cladding probably not a bad thing. I could probably even repurpose some bits from the blown-down fence panels for a trial run. I think anything not hollow will be a huge improvement. I'll be in touch. Thanks man.

The result is that when it rains 5 storey's worth of accumulated drips from the all the above windowsills slap onto outr hollow uPVC windowsill from a great height. It sounds like someone dropping fistfulls of marbles into an empty plastic bucket and maddenly irregular intervals.

Great inspiration for you to soon make music like the Fucktones.

a flat plank will be easier to rig up and will certainly be much lighter (given that it's going to have to attach to some 45 year old decorative wooden cladding probably not a bad thing.

The lighter it is, the more each drip will make it reverberate.

True. But I think a solid 2.4m plank of 18mm x144mm pine attached at 45 degrees or more (relative to the elevation) is going to be better than the current hollow plastic sill at 90 degrees. I can work out how much angle I can afford based on the available width of wood and how far I need it to protrude.

I think a solid chunk of timber cut into a prism wide enough to protrude 3" or more and the full width of the window is going to be prohibitively heavy. It's also going to be a ball-ache to source and harder to fit.

I could be wrong but the more I think about it, the more two right-angled brackets with triangles of wood to set the angle attached to them, with a plank screwed to that is the best solution. All you'd have to do is cut the inside edge at an angle corresponding to that of the mounting to make it flush with the facia.

*gets out pencils.

Dammit just bare in mind that the flue will be the most expensive part by a country mile. I have no idea how they would install in a flat mind you.

Other options may be a free standing burner exhausted out of an external wall. Popular for houses with no chimney.

I'd rather use the existing chimney and drop a liner down it.

Much neater, and won't require getting permission to cut a hole in the wall.

That could work out v.v. expensive depending on how close you are to the roof.

We're still toying with the idea of a wood burner. In the long run they are fantastic. So long as you don't mind chopping wood (in a flat where would you do that?) and have a good source of wood/coal. Also think about storage.

My parents 4 bedroom house is easily heated (apart from the far reaches) by the wood burner in the living room. I think we could easily achieve the same with a 3 bed semi detatched and have our gas C/H to complement.

By the way heat from a wood burner/ open fire is completely different to that of C/H and much, much better imo.

Two floors above us, so the flue-liner would need to be ~6 metres.

I'm happy to install it myself but it looks to be less hassle to get a qualified fitter to do it.

Ah that's not too bad then.

Yeah I'd leave it up to them - they'll be HETA's qualified and sign all the work off.

By the way heat from a wood burner/ open fire is completely different to that of C/H and much, much better imo.

Been thinking about this phenomenon and I suppose an open fire or properly vented woodburner must draw moist air from the house and away up the chimney presubambly circulating air and essentially dehumidifying the house as well as providing heat. I guess the flipside is that it must be drawing in cold air from somewhere so might it make further reaches of the house draftier.

re musical window sill

Unless you ft it flush to the facia anything you mount to the sill should 'float' otherwise you're going to end up with water trapped between the fins and the sill.
I wonder if there would be any acoustic benefit to filling the existing sill with expanding foam?

re musical window sill

Unless you ft it flush to the facia anything you mount to the sill should 'float' otherwise you're going to end up with water trapped between the fins and the sill.
I wonder if there would be any acoustic benefit to filling the existing sill with expanding foam?

Sorry I should have been clearer, the rain-brow will go above the window, attached to brick or cladding to deflect drops away from the sill below. Not planning on attaching anything to the sill itself.

Heh, foam might help in the meantime. Certainly worth considering for any stray drops anyway.

cheers

Think I've just acheived practcal masculinity. Yep, ordered a drill.

http://www.screwfix.com/p/dewalt-dc100ka-gb-18v-1-3ah-ni-cd-cordless-combi-drill/73596?kpid=73596&cmmmc=Google--Product%20Listing%20Ads--Sales%20Tracking--sales%20tracking%20url&gclid=CJ_ricjRzboCFYbJtAoddjMA_g#

anyone know the best way to affix a shelf to a dry wall without it (the shelf) sagging? Have tried plastic rawl plugs but they don't seem to have sufficient grip and the metal ones are just far too wide for the holes on the shelf brackett. Help me internets!

nomorenails.jpg

Been thinking about this phenomenon and I suppose an open fire or properly vented woodburner must draw moist air from the house and away up the chimney presubambly circulating air and essentially dehumidifying the house as well as providing heat. I guess the flipside is that it must be drawing in cold air from somewhere so might it make further reaches of the house draftier.

I tend to find C/H makes you feel really dry whereas heat from fires is much nicer.

Plus you can leave sauce pan on wood burner to heat up mulled wine!

anyone know the best way to affix a shelf to a dry wall without it (the shelf) sagging? Have tried plastic rawl plugs but they don't seem to have sufficient grip and the metal ones are just far too wide for the holes on the shelf brackett. Help me internets!

What do you mean by metal ones. If you mean the screw-in like this:

They're not meant to go through the bracket, just the wall. In fact, most anchors only go into the wall, so the size of hole on the bracket is unlikely to be a factor