Monthly Archives: March 2022

DIY

Making a Lawn Lute

Leave a comment
Lawn Lute

I’ve not done anything to my front lawns, other than mow the grass. This year (2022), I thought I would invest some time in trying to get them looking better without the weeds and moss, by the way, I’m certainly no lawn expert!

After treating the lawn with a moss and weed solution and after scarifying and aerating, I needed to level out the surface of the lawn by using a Top Dressing comprising of a sand and soil mix in a 70:30 ratio.

Their are a number of tools which can be used to spread and level the lawn, these are a Drag Mat (or variant), and a Lawn Lute.

Manufactured Lawn Lute, the one pictured is made from Stainless Steel and costs £130

The cost of a manufactured Lawn Lute can be well over £100, so I decided to make my own.

Dimensioned cutting plan of my lawn lute.

The tools needed were:

  • Welder
  • 3.2mm 6013 Welding Rods
  • Angle Grinder – Metal Cutting Disc
  • Tape Measure
  • 5.3m of 25mm x 25mm x 3mm Mild Steel Angle Iron
  • 2.2m 25mm Galvanized Conduit
  • 25mm Galvanized Threaded Coupling
Hinge assembly

The construction was fairly straightforward, once the angle iron was cut to length, the outer frame was welded and then the internal cross pieces were added.

The cross pieces are welded so that the ‘V’ is on the inside, meaning the ‘sharp’ edge is in contact with the ground when in use.

‘Old Faithful’ – Weldmate 140 Stick Welder.

The hinge was made by using a small length of angle iron with the ends cut to allow a flap to be formed, this was then bent over and welded, 6.5mm hole was drilled in each end to the hinge and this was then lined up the two other lengths of angle iron which sit on-top of the cross pieces.

Once all ‘square’ everything was welded into place, the last step was to weld a 25mm coupling onto the hinge, as these are galvanized I needed to grind off this coating due to the fumes when welding.

The handle is a 2.2m length of 25mm galvanized electrical conduit which screws into the coupling when needed, but unscrews for easy storage.

The cost of construction was £44

  • Welding rods (I did buy a big box for other projects) – £22
  • Angle Iron – £12
  • Cutting discs – £10
  • Coupling and conduit already had

If you do zoom in, please don’t crucify me for my poor welding 🙂

Plumbing & Heating

Solving Mixer Shower Problem

4 Comments

The content of this blog was done in 2017

I have always struggled with water temperature control on my Trevi CTV thermostatic shower valve, typically it was always too cold and we ended up running the cold sink tap at the same time as having a shower, in order to reduce the cold water pressure, this then allowed warm water flow.

My first thought was that the problem was within the mixer tap, I downloaded the manual and disassembled the mixer to check that the hot water strainer was clear and nothing obvious was wrong, what I did notice was the temperature limiting plastic ‘stops’ were missing.

IS_Trevi_Multiproduct_IGuide_EN_A3085Download

These ‘stops’ are a means of maximum temperature regulation and also act as an ‘anti scold’ devices, so the removal of them meant the installer knew of a problem 🙁

I went on the UK Plumbers Forum to ask advise about this and the answer came back almost immediately.

In order to explain, I need to show how my domestic hot water is plumbed:

Looking at the diagram above, the high pressure mains water supply enters from the right into a balancing valve, this valve performs three functions:

  1. Reduces the incoming cold water pressure to 3.5 bar to feed the unvented cylinder
  2. Provides a cold water connection at the same water pressure as the unvented cylinder
  3. Contains a Pressure Relief Valve which will discharge to drain if the pressure exceeds 6 bar.

Monoblock/Balancing valve.

My unvented cylinders reducing valve doesn’t have a cold water take off, so instead of fitting one, the original installer simply took the cold fee to the mixer shower valve directly from the incoming supply, which is at a greater pressure than the pressure reduced hot water, so it would never have worked properly from day one.

The person who fitted it must have known this, so removed any overtemperature controls, what an idiot!

In order to fix this, I needed to either fit a balancing valve and re-pipe the shower to the cold take off, or, fit a 3.5bar pressure reducing valve (PRV) near the shower, this is what I did.

The plastic pipes from the shower mixer run under the landing floor, so I used a multitool and cut an access hatch in the floor to locate the pipes, turning on the shower for hot water whilst holding the pipes, soon identified the hot one.

The PRV needed to be fitted to the cold water, so the stopcock wat turned off and water drained by turning on the kitchen taps, once drained the plastic pipe was cut and inserts fitted.

I used a short length of 15mm copper pipe tails from the PRV inlet and outlet compression fittings and made the connection to copper/plastic pipe with ‘push fit’ sockets.

The hatch cover was then screwed down and marked up, so anyone lifting the carpet back will know what’s under the hatch.

It was not an expensive fix, and its made a huge difference, don’t know why I put it off for so long.

General

Replacement Roof Tile

Leave a comment

On the 18th February 2022, Storm Eunice arrived bringing disruption to many parts of the country and a record number of Red weather warnings being issued by the Met Office.

I recorded wind speeds of 52mph and this was enough to dislodge a roof tile which slide off the roof and smashed,

We are lucky in this town to have a distributor for the make of tiles I have, and they ordered a replacement for me.

The type and description of the tile I needed :

Sandtoft concrete double pantile right hand cloaked verge tile Rustic

UK_MKT_DOC_TEC_ROF_SAN_Install_Guide_Cloaked_Verge_en_001Download

The tile cost £11.50 and the roofer is due any day to fit it.

Update

15 March 22

I got let down by a roofer from Sommersham who promised they could do the job and in the end just didn’t bother coming or contacting me.

So I called the company I bought the tile from on the off chance they knew a roofer they could recommend, they gave me Matts number, and by 4pm on the same day, the new tile has been fitted.

While he was there I noticed a gap where the ridge tile meets the roof tiles, Matt said the plastic infill is missing so he nipped up and mortared this up, so we are watertight again 🙂

Matt did a great job and charged a very reasonable fee.

Very pleased with the job, the tile I lost was due to it not being secured with a nail, as nailing the replacement would mean removing all the preceding tiles as they overlap each other, so the workaround was to use an adhesive to bond the tile down.

IT & Networks

Hiding reCaptcha v3 badge on WordPress

Leave a comment

I saw this article on hiding the reCaptcha v3 badge which automatically displays on the bottom right hand corner of the screen if reCaptcha is enabled in your Contact Forms.

I needed to hide the v3 badge was as it clashed with the location of a ‘Scroll to Top’ button, the implementation of the code to hide the badge was very simple:

Locate Appearance on Dashboard
Select – Customise
Click on – Additional CSS
Add the text in the box and save, then check you can send mail.

Google does allow the badge to be hidden, but their are conditions which the linked article above refers which need to be implemented.

In my case I added the statement – ‘This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply’, to my left hand sidebar, directly under the Contact Form using the Wiget menu.

I hope this helps.

DIY

Block Paving Path

4 Comments
Table Of Contents
show

I laid my first block paving path over 20 years ago at a different property, so I knew the basics when we needed to give my existing path a makeover.

Broken flags due to delivery lorries delivering materials.

We knew it was going to be paving blocks, but the colour and pattern needed to be worked through. We did know that only pedestrian traffic would use the path, so the block thickness only needed to be 50mm.

Looking online. the colour of block which is in sympathy with the house brick is Buff, Wickes turned out to be the most competitive at the time of purchase.

Block Setout Plan

Drawing a plan, gave the overall number of blocks required and we went for a very simply laying pattern to reduce block wastage to an absolute minimum after comparing laying options, (my previous attempt used a ‘Heringbone’ pattern which looks really nice but is very cut intensive and generates a lot of waste).

Materials

After ordering the pave block, I needed the following:

  • Concrete edgings
  • Metal edgings
  • MOT1 hardcore
  • Sharp sand
  • Kiln Dried sand
  • Skip

It was time to get the shovel out and get rid of the old path!

Yellow arrow indicate lighting cable duct.
We decided to widen the path to allow for a bench as this is a sun trap in the afternoon.

Once all the path was dug up, it was time to run a string line out for my straight edge, the width of the path isn’t that critical at this point, as I can take space from the lawn to add width.

Concrete edging cemented into place, taking time to follow the string line for both height and straightness.

Getting the sand level correct

Once the edgings had set, we laid MOT1 and used a friends ‘Wacker Plate’ to compact this, before applying a 50mm layer of sharp sand.

My spirt levels height was the same as a pave block (50mm), the base sand was compacted and I used two lengths of 25mm galvanised electrical conduit as runners which were embedded in the sand.

The level was then used to scrape the sand using the conduit as rails, adjusting the depth until the sprit levels top edge was 10mm proud of the edgings top, this was to allow for the bricks compaction at the end of the laying process so they lay flush with the edges.

Where the blocks butt up to the lawn, I used Corten steel edgings, as these are very thin, strong and will last for decades.

With the blocks laid, the ‘Wacker Plate’ was again used, after a liberal layer of kiln dried sand was added, to vibrate the sand into the gaps and effectively ‘lock’ the blocks in place.

The lawn was then reseeded, hence the mesh.

One good thing to come out of this apart from a path, is that the house builders had simply filled an air brick hole up with gravel which was below the paths grade, so hidden.

This was sorted very quickly with a new air brick installed, but the builders should have known better, but the quality of construction in certain areas is questionable!

Conclusion

The weather was very kind to us when we were doing this project and their was no rush, so it turned out to be a pleasant job to do, still physically hard work, but it does look good for an amateur job, (although I do say so myself :-))

Electrical & Security

Pyronix Euro 46 Home Alarm Installation

2 Comments
Front of property showing external sounder and CCTV cameras with infra-red illuminators on.
Table Of Contents
show

Background

I installed my original alarm system in 2006 which was monitored by Custodian Alarm Receiving Centre with a police response. The Control & Indicating Equipment was Scantronic 9851 with two remote keypads, all detection devices throughout the property were hardwired and both front and rear sounders were live.

The end station was installed out of the way in the loft:

I decided in March 2020 to ‘get back on the tools’ and install a new hybrid system with App functionality, the system also had to be remotely programmable, have flexible circuit input/output attributes to allow for third party integration and have a comprehensive range of detection and system devices.

Looking at the marketplace range of products, training packages offered by the manufactures and distribution availability, I opted to install a Pyronix Euro 46.

I must admit to not liking the old CastleCare range as they looked a bit too clunky for a domestic environment when compared to their competitors offerings, hence, I originally installed a Scantronic panel, however, after installing it, I really like the no nonsense, intuitive keypad and the area LEDS showing the set status is really handy as a quick visual verification that the system is armed.

euro-46-v10-datasheetDownload

System Topology

The wiring architecture is very straight forward with a data buss from the blind end station going to either or Zone Expansion Modules (ZEM8), Wireless Expansion Modules (ZEM-32WE), Output Modules (EURO- OEM8R8T) or Keypads or a mix and match of these to suit the systems design configuration.

016-Pyronix-Panels-System-TopograhyDownload

In my case I needed two 8 circuit zone expanders, 1 output module, 4 keypads, 1 wireless 32 zone expander and 2 remote key fobs, as this is my test system as well, one of the keypads is local to the panel acting as the engineers keypad.

The Scantronic system used resistors in each detector enabling a Fully Supervised Loop, this means that two wires can monitor the following circuit status:

  • Device Open
  • Device Closed
  • Tamper – Open Circuit
  • Tamper – Short Circuit
  • Detector Anti-Mask

Installation

I decided to bring the end station out of the loft, two main reasons for this, the first being access for servicing and the second is the elevated temperatures in the summer are not healthy for batteries and will shorten their life.

I have a small unused cupboard which is ideal so the cabling was re-routed from the loft, or new runs installed.

Cables ready for second fixing.

Access to zone expansion modules is less critical, so one ZEM8 is in the airing cupboard and others modules are in the loft, as below.

These pictures below show the installation of a ZEM8 –

The house was prewired for an alarm system during construction with the intention of the End Station going in the airing cupboard, as this was not the case when I first fitted the system, all cables were extended using junction boxes.
ZEM8 mounted on the wall with detection circuit cables entering via rear access slots.
Completed ZEM8 with circuit descriptors clearly visible to aid fault finding or servicing.

The control equipment is able to monitor all ZEM8 parameters, such as voltage, circuit status and circuit resistance for remote diagnostics or virtual servicing.

The end station was mounted on a stand off board, this board was also home for my external GJD lighting system which is integrated into the alarm system along with CCTV recording and notification.

Smoke detectors were incorporated into the alarm system after a modification to a interlink monitor, details are HERE.

Completed setup, comprising a 3A Power Supply Unit, Euro 46 end station, relay output expansion module, external lighting end station and Sonoff external lighting override module.

I’ve not gone into detail regarding the type and specific location of detection devices for obvious reasons, that said, adding devices to the system is incredibly easy and the programming using Pyronix InSite UDL software is a doddle once you have an understanding of their menus and command functions.

As I had not used Pyronix equipment before, I made a circuit test switch box and explored on the bench all the programming options of the euro 46 before I started my system swop over, this worked really well for me, so money well spent in making it.

Details of the circuit input test box : HERE.

Tricky Keypad Install

One aspect of the installation that was a bit tricky was the cabling to the rear door keypad.

I’m old school and prefer to home run cables wherever possible, plus the option to use the keypads onboard detection circuits was not possible as this allowance had been used elsewhere, this meant that the existing rear door contacts cable could not be converted to a data buss.

I could have opted for a wireless keypad, but where would be the fun in that!

Making sure I avoided any cables in the switches safe zone, I drill at a tight angle into the cavity void.
With the external fan guard and sleeve removed, the cable was fished out from the keypad location, the external lighting sensor was then removed and the cable fished to that, before going up into the loft, all completely hidden.
All done 🙂

Sounders

The external sounders are Delta Bell, one is configured as a Self Activating Bell whilst the other is configured as a Self Contained Bell, monitoring is via an Ethernet module to the Pyronix servers (this is an annually charged service).

deltabell-x-datasheetDownload

Conclusion

I’m very happy with the system, it is easy to use, responsive via the app and flexible, integration into Hikvision cameras is a bonus, really enjoyed this swop over, not like some I’ve been involved with in the past!

Updates

6th December 2022 – I noticed that on the furthest keypad (RKP0), that everything was fine when using the tag to set & unset, but if I were to enter the code to unset the system, the display would be very slow to respond and after a short while a Comms Error would be generated.

Although the supply voltage was within tolerance, it was in the lower band, I therefore installed a Euro-ZEM8-PSU, this now feeds the RKP directly and I also took the opportunity to remove two detection zones from the keypad and migrated them to the ZEM8, making for a more logical installation, also the ‘Area Set’ LED programmable output was also moved from ZEM address 02 to the new ZEM8.

The issue has now been resolved.

3rd January 2023 – Added automatic garage locking controlled via outputs from the Euro46 panel, blog on this can be found HERE.