Early Risers.

[polybear]

1 hour ago, Coombe Barton said:

It puts me to shame.

 

Bear resembles that remark....

 

44 minutes ago, tigerburnie said:

I have about given up with part of this forum, the provider platform is clearly not fit for purpose, cannot get on for hours. I can get on the less popular threads instantly, pity it can't be sorted out.

 

As it's not a "system problem" 😉 I guess there's nothing to sort.....

[Ozexpatriate]

24 minutes ago, New Haven Neil said:

I get it on TNM too. 

I see that TNM has 53.9k replies (2,158 pages) and ERs 336.9k replies (13,475 pages).

 

Both are substantially larger than the average thread. I don't think this is coincidental.

 

[Barry O]

N8ce to see @Debs. calling in.. yes she is a very good muddler!

 

Nice walk today.. not too cold, no rain.. excellent.

 

BUT the NTneed to getvto know areas a lot better.. some of the attendees knew a lot more about some aspect of the village than our guides did...

 

Nice place to stay in,off to show her indoors the best cathedral in Britain tomorrow. 

 

Centralised heating.. well Billingham had it (using a system incinerating non recyclable waste yonks ago, there is a similar system in East Leeds (about to be expanded)  and that's in the behind the funding curve North of England. No need in pit villages (colliers got "free" coal) and not really viable in some communities.. one solution does not fit all!

 

Time to grab some sleep!

 

Baz

Edited 3 hours ago by Barry O

[jamie92208]

Getting onto the prototype discussions forum can of ten n take some time. 

 

Jamie 

[iL Dottore]

Most Swiss towns and cities have an inner medieval to 17th century core with newer properties radiating out in circles (well not exactly in circles, but you do have newer buildings the further away you go from the centre). Having said that, the Swiss were not immune to the "tear it down and put up something in concrete" architectural trends of the 50s 60s and early 70s. Although not quite as bad as in the UK. 
 

What I find interesting about urban planning, is how arrogant and dismissive of peoples concerns the town planters and the architects were during that period (50s - 70s). Definitely more than a whiff of paternalistic "we know better than you little people"  Governmental interference.

 

I can generally find something to admire in all schools of architecture, the one exception is with brutalism – that concrete loving trend so prized by architects from 1950 to about 1970. I can't find anything redeeming in 99% of what the brutalist architects and town planners erected. I, for one, shed no tears when they started tearing them down from about 1995 onwards. 
 

The South Bank Centre and The Barbican are perhaps the only examples of brutalist architecture that have reasonably endured - at least aesthetically.

[BoD]

9 minutes ago, Barry O said:

ff to show her indoors the best cathedral in Britain tomorrow. 

Don’t forget to walk down the South Bailey to Prebends bridge and along the river to Framwellgate bridge. One of the best views in the World.

 

Special kudos if any one can quote Sr Walter Scott’s inscription. 

[New Haven Neil]

On the subject of rescuing those in peril on the sea - 203 Vietnamese....IIRC, might have been Cambodian, boat people the ship NHN was serving on rescued in the Gulf of Thailand - 1980.

 

 

Quite a day that was.  Trying to stop them lighting fires on deck to cook on.....vessel was a 75,000m3  LPG tanker....was fun. Not.

[BoD]

13 minutes ago, jamie92208 said:

Getting onto the prototype discussions forum can of ten n take some time. 

 

Jamie 

Just like the err… prototype then.

[jjb1970]

1 hour ago, New Haven Neil said:

 

Air conditioned trains won't help cool the 'tube', as the heat extracted from the trains will be discharged into....the air in the tube.  Unless they have some form of heat exchange storage I'm unaware of. Which I doubt, sorry.

 

The tube air itself need to be cooled, and the heat exchanged with the outside world.

 

When I moved darn'sarf to old London town one of my priority projects was working on a proposal to supply loads of chilled water to pump along the tube to contain the heat rise. Even pumping huge amounts of energy of chilled water was only going to stop the ground around the tube increasing, not cool it. The temperature rise went several meters beyond the tunnels, representing huge amounts of thermal energy. In the end it never went anywhere because of funding.

[PhilJ W]

7 minutes ago, Barry O said:

N8ce to see @Debs. calling in.. yes she is a very good muddler!

 

Nice walk today.. not too cold, no rain.. excellent.

 

BUT the NTneed to getvto know areas a lot better.. some of the attendees knew a lot more about some aspect of the village than our guides did...

 

Nice place to stay in,off to show her indoors the best cathedral in Britain tomorrow. 

 

Centralised heating.. well Billingham had it (using a system incinerating non recyclable waste yonks ago, there is a similar system in East Leeds (about to be expanded)  and that's in the behind the funding curve North of England. No need in pit villages (colliers got "free" coal) and not really viable in some communities.. one solution does not fit all!

 

Time to grab some sleep!

 

Baz

The London Borough of Barking and Dagenham had a housing estate with district heating in operation from the mid fifties up until about 2000. It was fueled by burning household refuse but the incinerator was getting increasingly more expensive to maintain and created too much pollution, caused by the increasing amount of plastics in the refuse being burnt.

[Ozexpatriate]

4 hours ago, rockershovel said:

Why AC in UK? Not so many years ago I would have agreed that it had little application but No 1 Son's house is unpleasantly warm and stuffy from late spring to early autumn. It is SO insulated and has so little effective ventilation ..

Holistic comfort / energy management is problematic with modern construction. (It's quite 'doable' but will add cost.)

 

My eight year old home is similar to your son's. It has AC + central heat and is well insulated. It is so airtight that I need two extraction fans running permanently - to not accumulate any problematic gases - including water vapour, which could lead to mould.

 

Being airtight is great in the winter when the house is closed up and you want to retain heat. It's OK when it is really hot and the AC needs to run.

 

The problem is that the interior circulation is a closed system - either in heating or cooling, the same air is recirculated.  We usually have relatively cooler nights here in the summer. I can turn the AC off and open windows, but there's no way to passively shift the  internal thermal mass even when ambient air would do it.

 

I asked the builder to include a 'whole house fan' - which can evacuate hot air in summer and pull in cooler outside ambient air. He point blank refused to do this. He was being scored as a builder on how airtight his buildings were.  The main fan (furnace and AC could do this if a port were plumbed into the HVAC to bring in external air with some sort of baffle.) I didn't think to insist on this.

 

Edited 2 hours ago by Ozexpatriate

[Tony_S]

9 minutes ago, BoD said:

Special kudos if any one can quote Sr Walter Scott’s inscription. 

Rob Roy woz ‘ere?

[jjb1970]

5 minutes ago, PhilJ W said:

The London Borough of Barking and Dagenham had a housing estate with district heating in operation from the mid fifties up until about 2000. It was fueled by burning household refuse but the incinerator was getting increasingly more expensive to maintain and created too much pollution, caused by the increasing amount of plastics in the refuse being burnt.

 

There's actually quite a lot of district heating in London. There's a very large district heating and cooling system for the City of London, another big one in Pimlico with a huge hot water tank which regulates the system. There's a lot of smaller schemes.

[PhilJ W]

3 minutes ago, jjb1970 said:

 

When I moved darn'sarf to old London town one of my priority projects was working on a proposal to supply loads of chilled water to pump along the tube to contain the heat rise. Even pumping huge amounts of energy of chilled water was only going to stop the ground around the tube increasing, not cool it. The temperature rise went several meters beyond the tunnels, representing huge amounts of thermal energy. In the end it never went anywhere because of funding.

The original tube stations had lifts in shafts of a very large diameter each carrying two lifts. Most of these were replaced by escalators and the empty shafts used for ventilation.

[PhilJ W]

Goodnight all.

[BoD]

7 minutes ago, Tony_S said:

Rob Roy woz ‘ere?

That gave me a huge chuckle.

Cheered me up no end.

Thanks

[Tony_S]

14 minutes ago, Ozexpatriate said:

I asked the builder to include a 'whole house fan' - which can evacuate hot air in summer and pull in cooler outside ambient air. He point blank refused to do this. He was being scored as a builder on how airtight his buildings were

The man who came round to assess our energy efficiency told us about new build house construction to comply with energy regulations. Airtight was one of them. Things like big windows or bay windows reduce energy efficiency too it would seem. We have tried to implement sensible changes to our typical 1990 built house but haven’t made it airtight or installed triple glazing. We must have done something right as it had got an A rating. 

[tigerburnie]

1 hour ago, polybear said:

 

Bear resembles that remark....

 

 

As it's not a "system problem" 😉 I guess there's nothing to sort.....

It is a system problem, lack of capacity to handle the amount of folk waffling on ER's. I have randomly tried any of the other titles and have gained access, but access to ER's is disrupted, that is fixable, the maximum traffic on this site was in 2021, I don't recall constantly being unable to get on the thread back then. So it's not increased traffic to the site as a whole, but to part of the site.

[Ozexpatriate]

2 minutes ago, Tony_S said:

We have tried to implement sensible changes to our typical 1990 built house but haven’t made it airtight or installed triple glazing.

I don't have triple glazing - though the windows are all double-glazed. A window in the front stairwell is very large. It admits a lot of warmth through direct solar heating. Doubtless it loses heat at night.

 

It is now 'normal' to pressure test airtightness as one of the later stages in construction. (Before final trim work.) The house is pressurized with a fan and the pressure drop is measured over time. My home scored very high.

[Ozexpatriate]

5 minutes ago, tigerburnie said:

It is a system problem, lack of capacity to handle the amount of folk waffling on ER's.

In my opinion it's not even related to the number of people visiting ERs - though things like concurrent posting might be a factor. I think it is related to however the forum software indexes a thread. My guess is that this is some sort of file for each thread. This one would need 336.9k entries - so it's not small.

 

I see the most performance issues when posting from a penultimate page to last page. A special case of this is when a reply / new post goes to the top of a new page. (The duplicate page phenomenon is very suggestive of an indexing problem.)

 

Once on the last page, and staying there, it is quite reliable.

[Tony_S]

2 minutes ago, Ozexpatriate said:

I don't have triple glazing - though the windows are all double-glazed. A window in the front stairwell is very large. It admits a lot of warmth through direct solar heating. Doubtless it loses heat at night.

 

It is now 'normal' to pressure test airtightness as one of the later stages in construction. (Before final trim work.) The house is pressurized with a fan and the pressure drop is measured over time. My home scored very high.

Our house was one of the last built with single glazing. We upgraded to double glazing when the wooden window frames started to fail. The house was built with cavity wall insulation but the loft  insulation wasn’t very thick, it is now.  The old gas boiler (furnace in US) was so inefficient it was probably outside the present rating system. We immediately noticed the difference when we replaced it with a modern one. We didn’t just change it for that reason only. The original boilers fitted in all the other houses in the road were failing and we decided to replace before failure at a time when our installer was available. Also it wasn’t cold then. 

[tebee]

4 minutes ago, Ozexpatriate said:

....

 

I see the most performance issues when posting from a penultimate page to last page. A special case of this is when a reply / new post goes to the top of a new page. (The duplicate page phenomenon is very suggestive of an indexing problem.)

 

Once on the last page, and staying there, it is quite reliable.

If you are on the last page and add a new post the software can update the current page in the browser if it's clever enough. However if the new post needs to go on a different or new page it has to write a new page from scratch which will take longer. 

[Ozexpatriate]

2 minutes ago, tebee said:

If you are on the last page and add a new post the software can update the current page in the browser if it's clever enough.

It does and it is. When you add a post on the current page, none of the ratings are updated - the update is incremental. This is much faster than doing a page reload.

[Tony_S]

9 minutes ago, Ozexpatriate said:

think it is related to however the forum software indexes a thread.

Clearing the browser image cache helps too. I assume the “system” software must check to see if an image exists on the end users device before downloading it. So,I wonder if the time to check is in fact much longer than just downloading it. I don’t know how to disable caching images on Edge. Switching to another browser that hasn’t visited the page (So no cached image). usually loads it immediately. 

[jjb1970]

42 minutes ago, New Haven Neil said:

On the subject of rescuing those in peril on the sea - 203 Vietnamese....IIRC, might have been Cambodian, boat people the ship NHN was serving on rescued in the Gulf of Thailand - 1980.

 

 

Quite a day that was.  Trying to stop them lighting fires on deck to cook on.....vessel was a 75,000m3  LPG tanker....was fun. Not.

 

 

 

My experience of the such things was a SAR op to assist an Egyptian ferry which caught fire and a pair of stowaways.

 

The ferry was a horrible incident, we picked up a couple of hundred survivors, some of who had burns injuries. I always have a morbid fear of burning, it seems a horrible way to go, and over the years I've seen the results of burns in various incident investigations and those survivors and to be frank am left thinking there are worse things than dying in some circumstances.

 

The stoway thing was worse, we picked up two fellows in Bandar Abbas in Iran and carried them round a full rotation. No port would take them so they were still onboard when we returned to Bandar Abbas whereupon they were marched down the gangway and shot on the quayside.

 

I got much more involved in the migration issue after leaving the sea when it was a major headache for the industry and a regular subject for discussion with regulators and governments. The less said about that the better, if it wasn't such a humanitarian tragedy the clown show posturing of governments might almost be funny.