Combi Boilers Suck, My Plumbing Pipe Dream - EMF 2026

lovely. Um, just a bit of ad. Hi, Mom. She's watching at home. Only had two power cuts, one less than we've had today. So, that's better than um we're doing better than uh SSEN, I think. Um, so I'm going to give you a long story about my house. Um, get a house. It's fun until it's not fun is essentially the the story here. So, just a bit of background. Um I'm a research physicist is my day job. My night job, I'm a power technician and my in between those two jobs, I'm trying to make my house suck less. Um I'm currently here as power. So, if you have a power problem, please don't call me because I'm here and the rest of power people are also here. So, you're just not going to get any service. Um a bit of admin as well. Um, I'm aware Steve Mold is on directly afterwards and the intersection between us and his audience is probably a circle with me inside as well. So, I'll if the stage could delay him for some unspecified technical reason, that would be appreciated. Um, and I'll be taking questions in and around there afterwards. Um, a last bit of admin. I'm going to be showing you plumbing and electrics and stuff. These are governed by various bits of law and you need professional certifications. Yes, there are lots of asterits and special bypasses and ways around it, but that's far too technically complicated to get into. So, generally, I would say consult a professional before doing any of messing around yourself. And in all the case you're seeing, that has been done. Um, so we'll start with my sad boiler times. So, I was waking up on a February the 8th last year, got into the shower, turned the shower on, and it was ice cold. So, this is inside the boiler. Um, you can see here what looks like a griddle. This is what burns the gas. Um, in the bottom you see two electrodes getting close to each other. That forms a spark and the bigger long ones detect yes there is a flame. The boiler is working. Lovely. So I turn it on. It goes for about 10 seconds and then stops. I look at the lights of sadness on the front and it says it's not lighting. I look at the little hole on the front. There's a flame there. This sensor is no workie. uh on scoping it. You can see um about halfway through you can see this line starts to go down. The sensor is picking something up that uh so the sensor is working. So the boiler control board is shot. This is a part that's about £300. I'm disincclined to pay £300. Um even more so when you consider that this boiler is about a month away from being replaced. I was very annoyed because when you when you go through and you buy a house, you talk to the estate agent, they say various things and one of the things they will always say, "It's a new boiler." Oh, here we go. Here's actually it's more than £300. £342. Um, so it's a new boiler. This is the inside of the boiler. Notice the date. The date is 2007. This is not a new boiler. Estate agents are liars. Um, I always assume when this is a new boiler, it definitely is not. This boiler is basically the end of its serviceable lifetime. So anyway, um, just a brief bit. I'm going to dox myself. This is my old house. Um, and some of my old housemates are here. Um, I have only told a couple of them that I was going to do this. This is my old house. Notice there are solar panels on the roof. That will become important later. Oh, there we go. Um, I lived in Southampton. I still do. Um, we had uh some water problems that may have may may or may not have made the national news. So, there's this one, southern water customers face water supply issues for 48 hours. In reality, it was more like 3 or 4 days. Um, and it this article was the 21st of December. Some of our neighbors on the road didn't get water back before Christmas. Um, we got quite a hefty amount of compensation. So, remember, if you get water cut off, you are entitled to to some level of statutory compensation. It happened again two months later. This time, somebody connected the output of the water treatment works and the input of the water treatment works together. So, unfiltered water was about to go out and it was caught by the fail safe sensor at the end that locked the entire system down and they had to completely clean the entire thing over course of about 3 or 4 days. Oh, four days as it happens. And our MP got very upset. The problem with this is you get bottled water. You can see in the in the photo you get lots of bottled water. Um, this bottle of water came from Turkey of all places. Um, and we had a huge stack of it for about four or five months in our hall. You can drink that. That's fine. It's very hard to use a toilet with bottles of water. You got to sit there and open the top and fill it up with this specially imported Turkish mineral water to fill your toilet up. And you need about 5 liters. So, and they only give you what half liter bottles. So, you you know, you're using most of a case to flush the toilet once. Um, and that's the main thing I really enjoyed. I can deal with drinking water, but the flushing the toilet is quite a priority here. So, I now have a list of requirements for my house. I want water storage and resilience. I want to be able to flush the toilet when the water company messes up, which they're going to again, of course. Um, I want to have upgradability for a heat pump in the future because that's becoming the duour thing. Um, there are various reasons why I'm not having a heat pump, which I can get into if you get me into the bar later. Um, I want to have backup electric heating, um, which I'll get on to in a bit more about that later. I want to have solar hot water heating. So back to the solar panels, we were able to take turn off the boiler which was doing our central heating and hot water in the previous house. We could turn it off in about March and turn it back on in about late September, October. In fact, it was so we we never turned it on to the point where the gas meter started to run backwards because the thermal expansion of the gas in the that was in the house slowly getting warm over summer pushed it into back into the gas man in the road. Um, of course, if you report this number to the gasport, they don't they don't care. They just look at the differential. So they they mod the difference. So you actually start paying for gas you're exporting back to them. So if you ever if you ever find your Mac meter going backwards, just let just wait use a bit of gas so it goes forwards again and then report that number. Um wood burner. I quite like I like quite like fires. Um and well you could heat the water from the fire. This is something my my dad was looking into and of course he ordered the wood burner thing about what oh 20 years ago and it's sat in the garage ever since. Um, so I want to put one in. Also to wind my mama up that I've got one before. She has. Um, I want a good toilet flush. I don't know how many of you have used a toilet that doesn't flush very well. Um, I've used ones where you have to, you know, do two or three flushes cuz it's so inadequate. It just doesn't do anything. I want, so I want a good toilet flush. Um, I also want the bath to fill reasonably fast. So last week we were staying in an Airbnb while we're doing buildup and that bath took like a like a quart of an hour to fill and by that point the water started to go quite cold. Um so I want I want to be able to address that too. And the last thing is I want heating selectivity. I want to be able to heat certain parts of the house and not other parts of the house. So how can we do that? Oh, and I want set and forget control. So this is the most controversial thing and I'm aware that if I say this here I might get handed out of EMF camp. I don't do smart heating controls. I don't do smart home anything. I I want like dumb 1990s, 1980s controls. I want to be able to set it, press go, and then I want to be able to come back like, yeah, it's working. Lovely. Job done. I don't want to touch it again. I don't want to I don't want to change batteries everywhere again. So anyway, let's look at central heating. A good thing to look at if this 10 Amazon thing it worked is this. So if you haven't, please watch Tim Huckkins Secret Life of Machines to Central Heating System because he explains it with nice visual props and all sorts of bits and bobs which I can't really do here on this budget on this time in this space. Um the only problem is is this particular screen grab from the show is quite blurry. So I'll get a slightly nicer diagram. So the standard UK layout for a non combi boiler system, you have a boiler. It produces hot water and then that gets pumped around a loop in your house. And then you can have a valve that can open and close based on a thermostat which is connected to your cylinder that heats up the cylinder and that gives you hot water for taps and baths and showers and jacuzzi's and things. You also have the cold water that gets heated that comes from the street and that gets tapped off and that can go to provide your cold water taps and and that also feeds a tank in your roof. And this provides a local buffer of cold water to fill the hot water cylinder underneath. So this is where my hot my water resilience is coming in. I'm going to try and put one of these tanks in. Um, and then you also have another valve which sends the hot water loop around the house and heats the radiators up. And that's also open and closed on a thermostat. So you can see here there's quite a lot of gubbins and you see there's where it says 1 2 3 4 and whatnot. These are plumbing controls for if the loop gets too pressured, you can release the pressure. If it get if it starts to expand, you've got an expansion vessel that's like a big balloon that gets bigger and smaller to take up the expanding water until it expands too much and then it over pressures through the pressure release. It's got a filling point so you can put more water in because if you've lost some, you want to put it back in at some point and you've got what's called a dosing point which is where you can put anti-corrosion stuff in. So you've got all these valves and other stuff in there. And this is quite expensive to do. So in all the in the UK current climate when you're building houses, you want to shave the money off. So um we don't want to do any of that. We want we want to make this as simple as possible. So we want to get rid of all of that and go to this. So this is what combi boiler does. It puts all of that plumbing goubbins in one box. You have your basically your entire plumbing in a box. So instead of having a water tank and a cylinder, we just heat on demand. So the boiler can whack out loads of heat all at once and it heats the water as it passes through. Um and then all of these valves and things are inside the boiler itself. So let's have a look at the anatomy of a combi boiler. So on the bottom you have this box that will probably be in a kitchen which is usually where they end up being put in the UK. So you have a gas um pipe that comes in. So this is the stuff we burn to actually make things hot. We have a heating loop flow. So this is where the hot water comes out the boiler to heat your radiators up. And we have the return where it comes back colder going back in. Um, and if you want some more information, there's a talk two years ago at EMF about how to set how to set your temperatures up properly so it works. Um, we then also have the mains cold in. So all that hot water you want to make for using in taps, it needs to be cold first. It needs to come from somewhere. So that's where that comes from. Um, we then have our domestic hot out. So this is where the hot water that goes into the house comes from, goes to, and whatnot. Um, and then we have this filling loop, which as you can see here is connected. This is actually against regulations. You shouldn't actually leave it connected because it can fill with Legionella and all sorts. Um, no one ever does that. So, this is used for topping up the heating loop when it loses pressure. And we'll come to why it loses pressure in a moment. Uh, there's also the condensate pipe. So, this is where some water that forms in the output gases cuz you when you burn gas, you get bit of moisture eventually comes out of this pipe and this pipe then goes down to a drain or something. So, let's have a look at the other mcguffins on it. So, we have a dial for hotness. How hot do I want my heating water and the sort of water I'm using in the sinks? We have a dial for sport mode. This is what I would just got. Um it's like are we having heating? Are we having hot water? Are we having both? Are we having nothing? We also have the lights of doom which tell you what the boiler is doing. In my case, they were telling me very bad things. We have our ticking cactus which is the horrible funny way of setting the time clock. Goodness knows why these are still fitted on things cuz they're just hideous. And we have the juice squirtiness um indicator. So this is the pressure val the pressure dial. Um so let's have a look inside this box. So inside the box is all of our plumbing bits which before were around the house where a plumber could touch them. We now place all these bits inside a nice cabinet where only a gas certified engineer can touch them. So it's more expensive. So inside this is this boiler is a particularly sort of Victorian make it out of stone churches sort of stuff because it's inside the boiler in the flame box. It's got all these big refractory bricks. It It was a very heavy boiler to to to remove. So, we have our guff pumper. So, this sucks all the exhaust gases and squirts it out the house. Um, and as as as I found out, it was squirting technically illegally close to my neighbor's house. Um, we have the spoilers. So, this is the heat exchanger, which takes the hot gas that coming out and converts it into hot water. Um, we have our verest chamber, which is where the fire lives. And we have our hydrocordune behind. So, this is the expansion vessel on on this design. They put it at the very back of the boiler. So, it's almost impossible to change. And because it's inside the boiler, it is tiny. It can it has an expansion range of about half a liter, which means that it cycles a lot. And what happens if you cycle this rubber a lot with really hot stuff cuz it's right next to the boiler? It fails, gives up, and it and it just it just fills with water, so it doesn't do its job anymore. So, what happens when your water expands? It just overresses. It squirts out the thing. So, then you have to refill the comp the um water loop up almost weekly. So this is why this is one of the main reasons why they sucker because they're basically designed for failure. They're the sort of iPhone of the domestic appliance world. Um you have all the pipy bits at the bottom. So this is where all those bits were and they you what we're going to do now instead of having them in a nice airing cupboard where you can get to them, we're going to put them in like four cubic inches at the bottom underneath all the hot bits and the leaky bits of the boiler. So they're definitely going to get trashed. Um and in fact the first thing to do that was that that we when when the boiler didn't work was well there's a gas valve in there. Usually they stick. So the the thing the the usual fix is get a scooter, get a hammer, bang it, and it should just unstick itself. Uh, alas, not the problem that we had was in the box of wires at the bottom where the expensive board lives. There's also a pump in there um because let's put something in that you need to get to the back of to remove. So we'll put it right at the side of the case. You have to pull the boiler off the wall to change it. So if you have anything wrong with this, it's usually and what most people do is they just change a whole lot because it's so fiddly and timeconuming to work on, you might as well just replace the boiler. Um and so we've ended up in this the situation where with instead of replacing a single part, we have to replace the whole blooming box every time. And this is why when anyone has anything going wrong with the boiler, they go oh no, that's at least a grand and a half because the boiler is about £800. So you can see here this is a housing a new new build housing thing in Eastley and you can see if you look very closely you see next to the downpipes on the wall on every floor there is a black blob and that's the exhaust port for the combi boiler in this in these flats. Um and the problem with this is that you'll usually see on ones that aren't white a nice brown going down the side of the building from all the rust and guns and stuff that get squirted out of the pressure relief valve after the first two years of operation. Um, and you know, we're fitting these in new build things. And this is a problem when we want to put heat pumps in. So, what we're now going to do is play a nice game. What's that pipe? This is the audience interaction part. So, we're now going to show you a selection of pipes from the house, and you have to guess what they what's in them. Do I need to stand this close? Ah, I think this is acting as a ground screen. So, what's pipe number one? Josh on the front row. Go. A what? No, this is nothing. This was an empty pipe. It was a gas pipe. And the difference between an empty pipe and a gas pipe is an empty pipe is a gas pipe once you've punched it. Um, let's try number two. What's this pipe here? No, this is gas. This the big pipe is a live gas pipe. And the bottom one is the other end of the pipe number one. And look, if you look closely, you'll see it's not actually connected because let's cap the pipe off and make it look like it's connected, then just leave it in place. Also, you can see the archaeology of all the different types of wallpaper they left on the wall in the kitchen under the cooker. Um, it's bananas. Um, let's go to number three. What's this pipe? And we're looking at the big gray one in the middle over here. You >> Exactly. lead water pipe. So, I thought, wow, that's disconnected. Lovely. I've got I've can go to the scrap merch and get bit cash for that one. Um let's go with number number four. The black pipe in the bottom in through the through the wall. Any takers? You on the front row. Go on. >> No, that's electric. They put all the electric in in rolled iron pipe work in the walls. Um Oh, hello. There we go. Uh we want number five. What's this pipe work? on that's that is gas. That's the old gas that was running the electric not the electric running the gas fire of course. Um what's this pipe number six? This white one. >> No, this one was a pipe that sky rammed through the under floor of the house to put a sky cable in. Um and then number seven. What's number seven? >> It's not This is cold water. This is a lead pipe. That's the one that's feeding the house. That's problematic. I got I I ran the water company up and they have they are legally required not to use lead pipes for this job. So they send a person around and measure it. And look, there we go. There's the lead if you find it 2.36 micrograms per liter unflushed, which not above not not exceeding the it's illegal to do this and we'll we'll get fined. But they went we'll send some people around to swap it. And swap it they did. So the you can see in the bottom right of this is the new water pipe coming in. And then this is connected to at this point a temporary back feed arrangement that I shan go into because that's too uh much for this talk. So we have there's a nice new tap and this is them on the outside popping in through the wall. So unbeknownst to me they mle them in. So they dig a hole at the front of the drive, one at the back of the drive and they use a mold to dig through. of course trying to avoid the gas pipe, the previous water pipe and the electric pipe that electric cable that were all in the very tight driveway of my house. But don't worry, the electric board are going to have to do that as well soon. Um, that will be a talk probably next time. Cylinders, they're cylindrical. And for my crazy plan of being able to have hot water from some boiling appliance, from a back boiler, and from solar, I need three coils. And you can buy these. And this is what looks inside. It looks like a coil mangerie. You've got two sets at the top that go down to about one/ird from the bottom and then a small coil at the bottom. So, this is designed for two solar systems to be connected at the same time. I'm going to send solar and the boiler at the top and the back boiler at the bottom because it's going to be unregulated. So, this is the why have I put this diagram in again? I can't remember. Oh, this is showing you where the cylinder is. So, we got the cylinder. This is the main sort of heart of the system. Um, and then I also need to put in a coffin. So, water tanks you can buy in various shapes and sizes, but these are very nice attractive tanks cuz they're quite low profile long and you can fit them through um loft hatches easier and they're completely sealed. You have a couple of uh hatches you put on the top and this prevents stuff falling in. So, we don't have the aonomous faulty towers. Oh, we've got a dead bird in the tank. And I also realized I'm going to run out of time very quickly. Um, so anyway, this is the plumbing work going in. We got these nice swept bends coming down. Um, and all looks very fine and dandy. Um, and this is the inside. Here's here's it filling up for the first time. I lie. This is it filling up the second time because the first time we'll cut to you in a moment. When I get to the plumbing nexus. So, this is what we would describe as the airing cupboard. So, this is where all the pipes are. So, you can see on the bottom left picture, we you can see three motor valves, which is these sort of boxy things with the voltage sticker on. And they are valves that open and close if we apply voltage. And they also have a couple of electrical contacts that tell the plumbing system that the valve has opened or closed. And we can we use that to turn so once once the valve has opened we then use that signal to say okay the pump can now start because there is a free circuit and you can also now turn the boiler on because the pump is working and so you're not going to just cook the boiler. In my previous house, they bypassed a number of these steps and the boiler would just overtemp and turn off by itself. Um, making various horrible ticking, boiling noises in the process. Um, you also have a pump which is black thing. So, that pumps the water through the system. And beside that, there is a cylindrical dudet. Um, which is a magnetic filter which you now need to put on as well. And people tend to put these right above the boiler where you if you unscrew it, you now can't actually take the filter out because they put that in before the boiler. But my picture, you can see a bit more space. And we've got all the plumbing. And you can see it's quite a tight space to work in. Um, at this point I should thank my dad who is watching and say that I have no idea how you could fit yourself in and contort yourself in to do all of that. And then above all of this is the expansion vessel and the filling loop and the pressure gauge. Um, so it's quite a compact arrangement in a airing cupboard. Compact enough I can still put shelves in for laundry. And so and a bit of advice if you ever do this, buy the IKEA wooden ones that you can remove. So if you ever need to get to this, you don't have to spend half a day dismantling your errand cupboard. You can just pull it out and then walk in and fiddle with all the bits and bobs. In the top right, you can see a black cylinder poking out the top of the heating cylinder. And that is the immersion heater. So that's a 3 kW electric heater. And we went for the longest one possible. Um on this on these cylinders, they have a sticker that tells you the maximum permitted length. Um ours was below that, but because of the number of coils in there, the company hadn't quite calculated that length properly, and it hits them. So, we had to take it, we had to take it out and bend it multiple times to try and get it in and screw it in. So, it didn't actually foul on the inside. Goodness knows how I'm going to need to replace it because the way we did that was by looking through the top port of the um cylinder and eyeballing how much bend we needed. I presume I'll have to disassemble it if I need to do that. So, we shan talk about that any further. And this is one of the ways you solder in such a confined space. So, this is a sheet of aluminium that is kind of held up by a pair of G-clamps and bits of wood to stop my wall being singed by a blowtorrched up whilst completing the solder joints. Um, radiators. We need radiators in a house. Most of the radiators in the house are of this awful kind which are a very small, so they have very small surface area. They're single walled, so they have very small surface area. And they're single finned, so they have very small surface area. apart from inexplicably two tiny ones in the hall and the kitchen. So anyway, we're going to we sack them off. They're all knackered or or one of them was in one of the spare bedrooms that was painted like Minecraft with black brown up to there, green, and then blue above which was also painted brown. Um we've got three of these nice ones for upstairs. So, this is the advantage of having a plumber as as a dad in that they go to the the merchants enough and they know what stocks on sale and they can they can arrange and find things. So, part sourcing was incredibly easy. Um, so we got three nice matching radiators upstairs, nice big massive ones, double wall, double panel. Um, and then I'm a sucker for cast iron ones, so I got some of those from the living room. Um, so these came from a reclamation place. Um, they need work doing, which is what one of the reasons why they're cheap. Um, in fact, this gray one actually had that's the original factory primer. So, somebody bought it and never fitted it. I then got this gigantic one, another double double double um fin one that goes behind the front door. And that one is basically thermally coupled to upstairs a bit. So, that one can basically most of the house by itself. Um, and in the and in bathroom got a nice towel rail. And in the kitchen, I thought, why don't I put a towel rail in the kitchen to keep the kitchen towels dry as well? That seems eminently sensible. Um, And then we f started filling the tank up with water. And I'm downstairs. I'm down in the upstairs of the house. My dad's in the loft. And he says, "Ollie, can you get me a bucket?" I'm like, "Uh, how urgently do you need it?" "Very." Um, so I go down without much urgency cuz he didn't say extremely urgent. Um, and then I come back up and I say, "What do you where do you want?" Okay. And he I see him leaning behind the tank, hold it with his hand over something because the uh one of the pipes into the tank wasn't properly inserted because we shifted the tank a bit and it popped out. Um and water just started spewing out of it. So put the bucket underneath. He told me to hold on and then he went down and opened all the valves that fell off the tank to try and get the water out of the tank as fast as possible. It takes a long time to empty a water tank as I've discovered, but I got some fantastic gurgling, gushing noises from the water cylinder underneath. I wish I'd recorded it. So, you can see in here, this is some of the damage to my freshly repainted and sort of crack plastered ceiling that I just done the week before. It's still like that now. And that's what 18 months later because I haven't been asked to fix it yet. Um, in case it happens again is my rationality for this. So, now have a look at conventional boilers. This is what I was intending to fit. They're like a combo boiler, but without all the gubbins in, it just boils the Well, it doesn't boil. It heats the water and that's it. You just have an input and an output, the gas and the um condensate air. Um that's it. You don't have all this complex switch gear, plumbing, switching, pumps, and whatnot inside of this. And in fact, the boiler I've got has two buttons, reset and chimney sweep mode with a guy with a little top hat on where it basically runs it with no gas usage and but just turns the blow on to max to basically blow all the soot next door. Here we go. So this is the condensate on this boiler. So previously they'd run it inside the house where it kind of connected to the kitchen drain. Problem with this is they tend to fill with slime and it buggers up fitting your kitchen because you now have this pipe which has to have a slight fall on it to get to the sink. But you now have to put a kitchen in the way and so it it just makes a mess. So instead we ran it outside and you can see here goes down. You notice that it's quite a wide pipe cuz we ran it inside pipe flagging inside a normal kitchen waste pipe to insulate it so it doesn't freeze because in winter cuz it's only a very slow drip of water. It has a tendency to freeze and once it freezes it backs your boiler up and your boiler gets flooded and it gets incredibly sad and incredibly expensive. Uh, and it terminates in the ground in a hole which is full of limestone shipping. This is on a concrete slab. My dad thought this would be a quick 20-minute adventure to drill a hole through with a 6-in hole saw on his SDS. It was not. This is a 1930s house with 1930s concrete that is 6 in thick. one trip to BNQ to get a very much bigger SDS drill and three hours later we have a condensate um hole in the ground. Ah here we go. So these are more appropriate names of the bits inside. So we have the we to continue on we have the spoilers the box of wires we have some Stevenson's kink which is basically the ubend that stops the um uh air going back into the boiler. So because the condensate is connected to the flu pipe, if that condensate trap empties, you can end up with monoxide going in places it shouldn't. So you need to make sure that's primed. And then we we have also the noise be gone. So we have a acoustic baffle in this boiler. So it runs whisper quiet. I couldn't tell it was on the first time I ran it. I was expecting some kind of like huge like almost supersonic jet to turn up. And then we have, you know, the the knob panel, which is in this case a heat, how hot do you want the water? And that's it. It hasn't got any other controls, no screen, no nothing. Um, we have a light that blinks on when it's on and it's off when it's not on. Um, we have a we have what what I call fart control, which is um what is what is even is that? Oh, it's a gas So, this controls how much gas goes in the thing. Eight. Number eight is redacted because you don't have that on this model. Um, we have a mess maker. So, that has a valve on the bottom that if you open it, it it drains the entirety of your boiler system onto your kitchen worktop. makes a giant mess cuz it's all full of gunge. And we have a breathing tube which is the air that comes into the boiler. And this is it fitted in the thing. And because I wasn't fitting it in a hurry, I could clean and replaster and paint behind the boiler unlike literally everyone else. Because with the combi boiler, because that's in your entire hot water system that's suddenly gone offline, you replace that same day. It's an incredible cost. So you don't have time to clear up. So when I took this off the wall, the previous boiler was sat on top of three layers of wallpaper from different eras that had gone brown and greasy because they never bothered to change it because who ch who who who says, you know what, I'm going to do without a boiler for 4 months. Um whereas I thought, you know what, I value having it painted behind the behind in a cupboard that I'm never going to look at instead of having water for 4 months. Snorkeling. So boilers can be snorkeled. So in the regulations for build in the building control regulations which propagate through to the man manufacturer's instructions you can and cannot put the the air inlet and exhaust output on your boiler anywhere you like. You have to put it in a number of ex specified locations and we were getting close to the closeness of the conservatory to the airport. It was too close and you could end up with monoxide seeping under the roof line. So they sell this, they call it a plume displacement kit, also known as a snorkel, where it takes the outlet of your boiler and you can basically run a pipe for however long you want. So it can you can you can point it into your neighbor's bedroom if you wish. Um I'm I like my neighbors. I'm not this isn't anything about them. Um and so you can see here the black pipe that's the snorkel. We also because we realized that we could end up after burning the kitchen extractor and sending that straight into the boiler which was probably not a good idea. We put a downwards facing pipe on the extractor for the kitchen hob at the same time. And that's what the other pipe is in the in the picture. And if you look very closely about two feet above all of this, you'll see a like a recently covered hole in the wall about in this. You'll never see it with the back projection cuz it's too bright. Uh in the wall, which is where the old kitchen extractor was, which we didn't realize cuz it didn't work because they they they gaffitated together and it all fell apart. Um anyway, so now we're going to talk about sundials. So, in the 1980s, uh, Honeywell came up with a whole load of like wiring. Oh, I've only got one minute left. Good lord. Um, they came up with a whole load of wiring. Uh, we have S, which is what I've got. They have Y, which is crazy. W, which is really odd. And C, which you should never use. Um, this is what the wiring looks like for Y. It makes no sense, which we'll call Y. Um, this is S, which is what I'm going to use. I want to actually use S+ for two sets of heating. Uh, uh, this is what the wiring diagram looks like if you want to add FOS protection. Uh, that's where the valve goes. Just there. that white box on the doodle. What's it? Um, this is the central heating wiring diagram showing all the bits and bobs. Uh, this is the thermostat. I've got a 1980 smart home thermostat. This is the central control box which controls all the timing and turning things on and off. Uh, this is a thing for the immersion heater so you don't leave it on, costing you a fortune like one of my old housemates used to do. Um, wiring centers, they look horrid. You can buy better ones, really nice ones that don't work very well. You can get modern ones that are too small, or you can make your own. This is my one. Um, the electrician wants to wants me to make some so I can I can sell them to him. Um, I want to put a back boiler in to make hot water. This is how you connect it up. Goes in. You get hot. It's gravity fed so there's no valve because you're not allowed to put valves on uncontrolled heat source. Heats hot water back in there. Lovely hot water radiator as well. You get free heating upstairs and it needs an air tube under the floor. Otherwise, you you you kind of suckle the the air out your house or monoxide yourself. Not very good. They might be illegal. People say they're very illegal. In Southampton, you're not allowed to put one in this area here. And yes, it is a handdrawn map and scanned. We have laws. They do all these things. We're going to look at one of them now. Document out. It says various things including you shouldn't replace a heating source with a less efficient one. My back boiler isn't replacing my heating source. It's supplementing. It doesn't doesn't mean doesn't apply. However, if you have a heat pump and you don't like it, you can't put a gas one in because it's not the same thing. You can't go from a three times efficient heat source to a point8% uh efficient heat source. That's illegal. Um there we go. Um involves a fuel switch. Uh you have to be the same primary engine has to matter. And uh if you're using renewable technology, you have to make if you're replacing a solar array, you have to put a bigger one in than the one you're replacing, which is fine until we hit the efficiency limit on solar panels. And you also have to put a connection for district heating in if you're building a new house. And then solar heating there, the water goes to the panel and into the cylinder back again. You can either have it pressurized or non-pressurized. Uh if anyone knows the difference and which which one is better, please tell me. I have no idea. I haven't bought it yet. Um please tell me in the bar and then we get to this at the end. So this is my bathroom when we took the bath out. I didn't have a working bathroom for until about 6 months ago. Um so buying a house is a stressful process, especially when you realize you're running out of time. Um, any questions? You can find me after Steve Mo's talk. Um, or in the bar or have an electrical emergency and I might turn up. There we go. [applause]