Installing a new rim lock
One of the oldest period features we have in our house is a barn door that goes to the 19th century. When we viewed the house, there was an elegant,…
One of the oldest period features we have in our house is a barn door that goes to the 19th century. When we viewed the house, there was an elegant,…
It’s been a few years since we last did any maintenance work on our garden furniture, so it’s time to take advantage of the good weather and sand everything down,…
Our garden has been teeming with butterflies, but we’ve discovered that butterflies and kale (all brassicas in fact) are not a perfect match because the butterflies have laid larvae on our kale and the caterpillars that have emerged are having an all you can eat kale buffet, which we’re not hugely pleased about.
Six months ago we replaced all 12 of our conventional TRVs on our radiators with Eve Thermo smart TRVs. We found it crazy that we had to run from room to room during the cold winter months turning radiator valves on and off, which was an inefficient and ineffective way of heating our property. This is our Eve Thermo review.
Our first year of growing our own vegetables has been a mixed bag. The kale is still going strong as is the celery, and the lettuce is finally starting to fade. Our Isobel onions are now also ready and they’ve been fantastic. We grew them from seed, and only planted about a dozen as an experiment to see what grows well. We’ll definitely be planting a stack of these next year.
Our TV room and downstairs guest bedroom are the two coldest rooms in the house as they are north facing and get very little sunlight during the day. They are also located a long distance from our utility room where our central heating control panel is located, which posed an issue for us to get them communicating with our air source heat pump and to call for heat. After some deliberation, our installers suggested that we install Salus digital thermostats.
We’ve been making a lot of trips to the garden centre and hardware store and the car has taken a battering, so it’s time to give it a power wash and restore it to its former glory.
Today we’re going to make a delicious homemade parsley sauce to go with our plaice fillets, which is a great summer meal and very easy to make. On the side, we’re going to have long stem broccoli, buttery parsley potatoes and asparagus, but you can use any other vegetables that you like to have with fish.
We removed some weeds and unwanted climbers outside the kitchen window in the back garden and turned it into a more attractive plant and flower bed. In order to get some vibrant summer colour, we opted for a mix of ‘Zeal Tan’ and ‘Severn Sunrise’ crocosmia plants, with Luzula Sylvatica grasses in front.
It’s been four months since our panels went up, and it’s a fitting time to review their performance and do a solar PV and inverter review of our system. We get technical and specific about the efficiency of our new solar panels.
Being in the UK, people are sometimes skeptical about the effectiveness and performance of solar energy, so we wanted to give an unbiased report, based on real life experiences, illustrating power output on overcast, rainy and sunny days.