Arrived home, today to find not only had the chimney stack had been complete, but also the pots were on capped off, and completed.
Archive for the ‘DIY’ Category
Chimney Stack Upgrade Complete Day 3
Friday, October 19th, 2012
Chimney Stack Upgrade Day 2
Wednesday, October 17th, 2012At the End of day 2, there was no electricity today, because Northern PowerGrid was conducting scheduled maintenance, so it caused a few issues with the electric cement mixer!
Chimney Stack Upgrade End of Day 1
Wednesday, October 17th, 2012End of Day 1, to my surprise the old chimney stack has gone, and been reduced to rubble in a trailer, only one good square chimney pot remains, so we will have to purchase six replacements.
and the builders have started to brick up the new stack up to the scalfolding.
the builders mentioned the first courses of bricks they could just remove by hand, as well as the pots, they did not know what was holding the stack together!
Chimney Stack Upgrade Day 1
Tuesday, October 16th, 2012
Chim chim-in-ey, chim chim-in-ey Chim chim cher-ee!
Monday, October 15th, 2012A sweep is as lucky, as lucky can be Chim chim-in-ey, chim chim-in-ey Chim chim cher-oo!
By the time you have read this, our builder will have started to disassemble our chimney stack! After many months of negotiations with my neighbour, and reviewing quotations for the rebuild of the chimney stack, work starts today!
The chimney stack has reached the end of it’s life, and is very weathered, and the pots have started to crumble/crack on the stack, so it’s being pulled down, and rebuilt from the ridge line, in the same style and brick as existing stack, eventually in the future funds permitting we will have one of the flues lined, and a wood burning stove installed.
The last pictures of the old stack, with scafolding
Andysworld! Advent Calendar – Dec 11 – Fix the 44 year old Pifco Christmas Tree Lights AGAIN!
Sunday, December 11th, 2011A few minutes repairing and testing the 44 year old Christmas Tree lights, it’s a yearly event, after bringing the Christmas Decorations down from the attic.
It did not take me as long to fix this year, only four bulbs needed replacing to get them working again!
Andysworld! Advent Calendar – Dec 4 – Is your Broadband Slow and unreliable?
Sunday, December 4th, 2011If your telephone master socket, looks like this example, it could be the problem!
UK BT Master Telephone Socket with many extensions
try removing a few extensions, and just connect your Broadband Modem or Router!
(this example provided by a friend, it did have more extensions, that have since been removed! The ADSL Broadband Router light did not light )
My BT Master Socket - New ADSL faceplate
If you fancy some DIY, you can change the BT Master NTE5/5A faceplate, for a modern NTE2005, (ADSL faceplate) which has a connection for telephone and Broadband USB Modem or Router, and then there is no need to use an additional broadband filter. NTE2005 (ADSL faceplate) are readily available on eBay and Online.
Happy Halloween!
Monday, October 31st, 2011Happy Halloween folks, and in usual Andysworld! tradition, Carved pumpkins this year!
Carved Pumpkins for Oct 31 2011
I’m in the middle of stripping the Fish House door!
Carved Pumpkins for Oct 31 2011
An exciting Saturday…. No Electricity or internet for 11 hours and worst of all No Strictly Come Dancing!
Sunday, October 9th, 2011I’ll set the scene, at the beginning of September (September 5th 2011)
- one of the power supplies on a computers workstation, went bang and failed – reported here on Andysworld!,
- another power supply on another workstation, failed – OCZ power supply.
- Humax Fox-SAT STB power supply failed – reported here on Andysworld!.
- An electronic X10 switch failed which operates the backyard lamp.
Diagnosing the fault with the backyard lamp, I noticed and reported to Boot Ferrule Man, (a qualified Electrician) and my neighbour, the mains voltage coming into the house was 256v AC! (which I suspect had blown and damaged the electronic X10 switch). Boot Ferrule Man stated that was far too high, and out of tolerence, but when I checked on the internet, I was confused by the reported tolerences of AC voltage supply in the UK. At this time, I had not associated this “possible fault” with the other items 1-3 above.
Saturday 8th October 2011, a neighbour in the shire, knocked on the door at 11.00am, asking if we had, had any damage the previous night (7th October 2011) at 9.00, because a few properties in the shire, had items which had stopped working, lightbulbs, Freeview STB, Washing Machines, Central heating pumps, Sky Boxes, television mast head amplifiers etc
We had not noticed any, issues that evening. they reported the fault to YEDL, later Saturday afternoon (3.15pm), a YEDL Engineer visited our house, and disconnected us, because they found the electrical impedance to the property was at 1.3 ohms, the maximum impedance allowable is 0.35 ohms, and stated that they had tested that day 280V AC, at a few properties, the fault lay in the common neutral to all the houses, and their was a fault outside of the property, possibly due to water ingress into the underground cabling. I asked the YEDL engineers, what time did they think service would resume, and they stated, the Digging Team was scheduled to arrive at 6.15pm, and they could not do any work, until thy arrived, so they tidied their YEDL VANs! They gave me a time of 10.00pm! I noticed that the YEDL, are going through a re-branding to CE Electric UK. These were some of the labels on the VANs, although they still had YEDL uniforms!
So I decided to power-up the petrol generator for the fish house.
Coincidence you may think, because in April 2010, they were fixing a joint underground, see here.
The YEDL engineers arrived on site, to fix the fault, but had to wait for the “digging team” before they could start work, the digging team eventually arrived at approx 7.30pm, because I just come back from the Chinese with our dinner, to eat in the dark with our headtorches, and my NEW ZEBRALIGHT!, which of course I purchased from my friendly Boot Ferrule Man. ZEBRALIGHT! Review coming soon!
Our electricity was not re-connected and tested until approx 2.30am, so with hindsight, it was a good job, I connected the petrol generator for the fish house, and this is the longest runtime, I’ve had it running 11 hours@3000Watts.
New Impedance tested to house is 0.29 ohms.
A few photos of the event!
Frozen Ballcocks!
Wednesday, December 22nd, 2010What a morning and afternoon, Lindsey woke me up this morning at silly o’clock, complaining she couldn’t have a shower because there was no cold water!
If you look back in the archives, here, if you examine the photographs carefully and look towards the rear of the photographs, you can see some “loft insulation” that’s been used as lagging around the copper hot and cold water pipes, and also the hot and cold water header tanks.
It would appear that the temperature dropped overnight to something ridiculous which froze the ball cock in the cold water header tank, and also froze one of the pipes.
So, after taking off the cold water feed to the shower unit, and there was no water, putting a 3kWatt fan heater in the attic/loft to warm the loft up, which thawed out the frozen ball cock, eventually combination of fan heater and sun shine on the roof thawed out the pipework.
The only difficulty was connecting the pipe back up, with water coming out of it under pressure from the header tank, and no way to stop it, so I had to let the tank drain, before re-connecting, so I got a bit wet!
So it looks like loft insulation isn’t up to the job of insulating pipes!
That’s another DIY job sometime!
Merry #@!? Chrimbo!
![[Valid RSS]](http://andysworld.org.uk/images/valid-rss.png "Validate my RSS feed")