Central Heating Update 3

Time for an update methinks. Firstly, the dreaded quotation landed on our door step last week. Oh my gawd! It was big... very big. The plumber has quoted an eye watering £4164 to do the job. Slightly higher than what I was hoping for but there you go.

A few things have added to the cost such as; combi-condensing boliers are now the law as of April last year but cost more than a normal combi (but are more efficient). This had a knock on affect to the venting required to the outside world (they give off some vapour and so need to vent away from walls) which will now have to go up into the roof space above the single story extension and out as far away from the main house as possible.

Also, because of the extensions to the house, some of the walls he'll have to go through are full scale external walls. The existing electric storage heaters will be ripped out and disposed of (they are very heavy due to the bricks inside) and of course the hot water tank will also be removed as it'll be obsolete. We're tentatively booked in for April 24th for work to start.

Next up I've contacted Fulcrum (new name for Transco) who will handle gas delivery from the street to my house. That should be done and dusted within six weeks. I've also got to chase for an update on getting somebody out to quote for the cavity wall and loft insulation.

Final bill for all this will be in excess of £5000 :-( and that's before we switch on and start getting gas bills... *sigh*.

Category:

• Personal
• Home
• Heating
• Insulation

Central Heating Update 2

Hmmm... as ever the Great British tradesman goes missing without leave.

We asked a local plumber (with recommendations from friends) to come around to look at the house and measure up for a quote based on gas fired central heating. So far so good. He arrived at the time arranged on the correct day, had a look, measured up, talked sense about the choice of boiler, location, venting, number and placement of radiators and promised to have a quote in the post the following day. No quote has (as yet) arrived.

Next up the insulation expert was supposed to be here this morning to quote on the Cavity Wall and Loft Insulation. Never showed up and not a word of explanation. Good start, eh?

This one will run and run.

Update: Lesley phoned the plumber who was full of apologies for not having the quote completed yet due to being very busy last week. I suppose it's a good sign that he's in demand. I just want to know the damage as soon as possible so I can decide how many kidneys to sell.

Category:

• Personal
• Home
• Heating
• Insulation

Logitech MX1000 Laser Cordless Mouse

I've invested some of my hard earned cash in a new mouse for the home-office. It's the ubiquitous Logitech MX1000 Laser Cordless Mouse which regularly wins the plaudits for the best mouse ever.

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Certainly it's the best mouse I've ever used. Fast, very accurate, smooth, comfortable, fits-like-a-glove yadayadaya. Any review you'll see will say the same and I agree, very nice. So instead of repeating everything you've ever read about it I thought I'd focus on a couple of the negatives (yes, I'm hard to please).

Now these negatives are subjective and may not apply to you but may be of some use if you're thinking of buying one.

Firstly, the charger cradle (the mouse has an inbuilt Li-Ion battery) requires an AC power connection for recharging the mouse. The problem with this is that, long ago, I filled every available power socket in the home-office and another plug required for recharging a mouse is just overkill. Surely they could charge over a powered USB connection like my iPod. Yes, I know a single charge will last for a good while but it's just an irritation I could do without (plugging it into the mains to recharge).

Secondly, the left mouse button took me a while to get used to. It's not a very big area where my finger naturally lies to operate the LMB. Occasionally I still miss the button and find my self pressing on the edge of the casing. Hopefully, over time, my hand will adjust itself but it's something I've noticed.

Thirdly, my hand position on the mouse is affected by the Gel pad on the mouse pad. I think the mouse is best designed for users who's wrist is flat against the table but I prefer a raised wrist supported by a gel pad, much more comfortable for "power" PC users.

These minor gripes aside, it's by far the best mouse I've ever owned... yadayadaya. Next up is to get one for my work.

Category:

• Logitech
• Mouse

Err? Boss, can I have a word?...

...I'm going to be needing a few days off.

The BBC have published the television schedules for the up and coming Football World Cup 2006 in Germany. Oh yes, let joy be unconfined an entire month of wall to wall fitba, woof!

Now you and I know England aren't going to win it but as usual nobody has told them that (the public, press, telly pundits, celebs etc). The fact that they'll get quite far will only add to the disappointment when they're finally sent packing. I canny wait.

Category:

• Sport
• Football
• World+Cup

Central Heating Update 1

Now that we've decided to install central heating my thoughts turned to insulation. We don't want to be spending a fortune heating the outside world with the shiny new system thanks to massive heat loss through the walls and roof.

Having been up in the roof space recently, installing the wiring for the home cinema, I noticed that there's completely inadequate loft insulation up there. Access to lay rolls of insulation between the joists isn't great as I've large dormers to the front and back with minimal clearance for getting in to install a roll. We'll probably need a mixture of traditional rolls of insulation for the accessible parts and blown fibre insulation for above the dormers.

Next, we'll be needing cavity wall insulation. Our house was built in 1969 and therefore is a prime candidate for this. Most houses prior to the 1930s have solid walls while houses post 1990s have by law required cavity wall insulation during the build. We noticed a couple of people on our road had this done last year (wrinklies, so they get it for free in Scotland). The only thing I'm not sure about are the two extensions to our house which were added sometime in the 1990s as they may already have cavity wall insulation in built.

Luckily my Dad got this done last year and he recommends the mineral wool as opposed to the polystyrene beads (he knows a lot about building materials and regulations etc) as the beads give off fumes which can be nasty. Another advantage of the cavity wall insulation is that while it keeps your heat in during the winter it keeps the heat out during the summer leaving the house cooler during the hot spells.

There seems to be a lot of grants or subsidised installations available so check here first. I'll be phoning our energy supplier for a survey and quote tomorrow but I'm probably looking at a bill of about £500 for the cavity walls and loft combined.

Update: Got an insulation "expert" coming round on Monday 20th for a survey and quote.

Category:

• Personal
• Home
• Heating
• Insulation

Best of Luck

It's that time of year again. Time to rally round the team with support from both countries (Republic and Norn Iron). Thankfully we're not favourites this year which will suit us down to the ground. O'Driscoll is back from the nightmare that was the British Lions tour and playing very well by all accounts. A difficult opening tie against Italy but with France in top form a Triple Crown is probably the most we can hope for. Come on Ireland!

Update: A very unconvincing (read lucky) win over a much improved Italy. We'll get humped by England and France unless we buck our ideas up.

Category:

• Sport
• Rugby
• Ireland

Central Heating

Right, that's it, I can't take the cold anymore. It's been below freezing here for the last 5 days and I'm not talking about the outside world, our house is fecking chuffing. Reason being, we don't have any central heating apart from Electric Storage Heaters which are pish when the real cold hits as they're so uncontrollable. Nope, it's time to bite the bullet and pony up a wad of cash to invest in a modern central heating system.

That decision is the easy part over and done with, come next autumn we'll be basking in our pants in front of shiny new radiators pumping out a glorious warm glow. Plumbers though, oh dear, plumbers, not looking forward to all that teeth sucking, shaking of the head, stroking the chin before the presentation of a quotation which would break most small countries' national budget.

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Before I jump into the jaws of doom and actually speak to a plumber (if I can get hold of one) I want to clue myself up on what we actually require.

First decision is gas or oil fired. There's gas in our street but strangely not to our house so Transco have quoted a figure of £519 (standard charge) to connect us to the gas main. Oil however seems quite popular in the area as well but the cost of a decent sized oil tank isn't far off what Transco are charging for a gas supply and you've got the installation cost of the tank along with the visual downside. Currently, for simplicity's sake we're leaning towards gas.

I've more or less decided that the boiler will be placed in either the shower room (to be ripped out and converted into a utility room in the future) or the cupboard in the bathroom. Access to the outside is good from both rooms for ventilation and gas or oil input. But what type of boiler? There's only 2 of us in the house so large amounts of hot water is not really a concern. This would lead me to look at a Combi boiler or maybe a condensing-combi boiler. Need to research it a bit more for advantages/disadvantages, costs, maintenance etc.

We will need 10 radiators to cover all the rooms and I'll do a first pass of sizing and placing them before speaking to an "expert". I think I used to have a spreadsheet (from Uni) for calculating the heatloss of a room to help in sizing radiators and ultimately the boiler to feed them. Maybe have a search on the net for something similar.

So, the journey to warmth and poverty starts here, as usual I'll give update posts as it progresses.

Category:

• Personal
• Home
• Heating

Freecom DVB-T USB TV Receiver

Use the search box in the top right corner to see what else may be of interest to you on my blog, or browse through the archives from the front page in the side-bar.

I've wanted to investigate a PVR (Personal Video Recorder) solution for a while as we never use the video due to the crap quality of the aerial it's connected to and the pain of programming it. SKY+ doesn't appeal due to the extra cost and the fact that anything on SKY is generally repeated 10 times a day anyway.

Having seen Lewis' mightily impressive Media Centre set-up with a 42" plasma in his livingroom I realised my requirements were a lot more modest. So, to help with a buying decision, I had to figure out exactly how I planned to use a PVR device and to what ends.

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We have a Freeview box in our bedroom and was loathe to replace it with a Freeview PVR box with hard drive. Dual tuners didn't appeal as we have quite enough TVs in the house to negate any need to watch a programme while recording another. All I needed was a device to record the odd film off the freeview channels, burn them to DVD and fire up the home cinema (I love my home cinema :-) There's usually some great classics on Channel 4 after lunch (while I'm at work), just my type of film. The BBC and ITV channels also show some gems I'd like to record and watch at leisure when I'm in my bed

Ideally I wanted to utilise the existing computer power I have stacked in my Home Office. I'd investigated PCI cards like the Hauppage TV Tuner/Capture devices but had been overwhelmed by the range on offer. I wanted something small, easily fitted with Freeview and well reviewed. After some digging around various forums and websites I settled on the Freecom DVB-T USB Stick Freeview Receiver, a bargain at under £40.

We had a new aerial installed to service the TV in our bedroom and sun lounge, and as my home office shares a wall with the bedroom, splitting the co-ax and feeding into the new device for maximum signal strength wasn't an issue. The only other negative comments usually mentioned about the Freecom concern the crap software bundled with the device. While this software does indeed look like crap (some cheap shareware, homebrew type thing) it does do the job. If all you want to do is watch some TV on your computer with minimum hassle I'd say stick with it. But I was more interested in using the device to record TV and then burn to DVD therefore a more friendlier EPG (Electronic Programme Guide) and recording set-up was required (though once again the supplied software does do the job albeit in an ugly way).

Researching, installing, configuring and then using alternative software turned out to be the biggest headache by far. Research showed that to use any other 3rd party software I needed to install BDA drivers for the device. This required some quite detailed steps to uninstall the Freecom software and drivers before installing compatible BDA drivers. Full instructions and the required drivers can be found by reading this forum thread. The viewer software which can be downloaded as well is slightly better than the Freecom deal but not much. Once you've got your device up and running with the BDA drivers you're able to select from a huge range of software (both free and commercial) to better manage the recording, time-shifting, scheduling etc.

First up was Showshifter which regularly wins magazine plaudits as the best alternative to Microsoft's Windows Media Centre. I downloaded the trial and after a tortuous install and configuration I was up and running. It offers the same features found in MCE which personally I didn't want (DVD, slideshows, radio, music as well as TV) but it did work well. Unfortunately after my trial expired it was announced that the company that owns Showshifter had gone bust. While they are trading under the administrators I'd advise you to give them a wide berth. Development and support are non-existant currently. Save your money, avoid.

Next up I tried the open source Media Portal confident I could overcome the patchy documentation associated with open source. Sadly, it crashed too much even during configuration so I deleted it before I had it fully set up. Buggy as hell it may be a contender in a while but avoid for now.

I really wanted software which focused on a neat EPG, easy set-up and configuration of scheduled recording without all the superfluous media centre bloat. This led me to try Webscheduler. Bingo, this looked ideal, donationware as well :)

DVB Web Scheduler is a Television capture and scheduling tool for scheduling unattended recordings of free to air Television programs using one or more DVB-T tuner devices.

Install was quick and painless but I had to update my java install to the latest version before it would work. Everything is controlled through a web browser and looks good for it. It found my Freecom automatically and a channel scan brought up all the available Freeview channels in the UK. A quick test of a 3 minute recording and everything worked well. I configured the software to record using DVR-MS (Microsoft Media Centre TV format) but you can select or install other MUX's as you require.

To configure the EPG you must provide Webscheduler with a .xml file containing the programme information. To create this file I used xmltv and configured it to grab the data from the Radio Times server (warning: DOS program, happy days). Webscheduler can be configured to grab and compile this information automatically once you know what you're doing. If you regularly work late you can even schedule a recording over the net to your home computer, neat eh?

Remember though, that Websheduler will only handle the capture of TV data you will need a separate programme to view live TV (I use the software downloaded from the site containing the BDA drivers) and I'm investigating other alternatives available for this as well but that's for another post along with software to convert the video for DVD burning, ripping out the advert breaks etc.

So, there you have it, a lovely little PVR for under £40. Any questions or if you need help setting up your Freecom DVB-T stick for the UK then leave a comment.

Use the search box in the top right corner to see what else may be of interest to you on my blog, or browse through the archives from the front page in the side-bar.

Category:

• DVB-T
• TV
• Gadget
• Freeview
• PVR