Cooling

So I now have one day less than a month to get the heat pump installed, the hot water and buffer tanks set up and at least one of the fan coil heaters working so the new heating system can be commissioned before November 17th, which is when the BUS certificate expires and I’ll become liable for paying back the government grant.

I have a plan and some critical path activities which need to be completed. One of them is getting the floor in the utility room prepared and tiled so the hot water tank can be installed in that room. Although, if we’re going to talk real minimum viable, I suppose it could just be set up in there and then I can remove it afterward, once it’s commissioned, and set up the floor afterwards so I could just put it on some wood or something similar that mocks up where the floor surface is going to be and then the room could be finished afterwards. That’s an interesting thought actually.

In the morning I got up and I did some work around the house and specifically stabilising the material I have used to fill the two holes. I did a bit of consultation with ChatGPT which explained that concrete really needs to have a minimum depth and that the substrate underneath the concrete needs to be as stable as possible to avoid it settling over time. If the substrate shifts then the concrete can shift and then the self-levelling moves and then your tiles crack.

So, wanting to do a good job, there are a couple of things I’m going to do, to avoid this happening to me. First, I’m going to use large format tiles which will be 60 x 60 cm. This isn’t gigantic, but it means also that when you step on a tile, the weight is distributed across a larger floor surface, so smaller inconsistencies will matter less and shocks are transmitted to more of the floor.

I also dug out the two holes to a depth of about 3 to 4 inches, maybe 8 to 10 centimetres, tamped the material down and then applied a stabilising solution, pouring it like water over the material and then using a spray gun to apply it quite heavily to the top layer as well. The intention here is to fix down the dust and grit and other other particles into something a bit closer to packed dirt. That’s now done and I’ve allowed it half a day to dry, which means tomorrow I will want to mix up the concrete and get it poured so it has time to go off before I’m then pouring the self-levelling mix to level and prepare the floor for tiles.

The afternoon was a bit of a write off. I would put it down as emotional recovery and rest time. I played some games. I scrolled. Foolishly on social media and. I would say that it wasn’t my most productive Sunday in history, which is ironic given that, uh, it’s then gonna be Monday morning and I’ve got a class, so I could have spent some of that time studying and yada yada yada. We go around the loop forever, right?

In the evening I drove up to London to play games with P, M, and new person S. We played Ark Nova. Which is a game where you are running a modern zoo. There’s a big deck of animal cards from all around the world and you have a terrain card which shows how your zoo is going to be built. And you try and populate that with enclosures and then put animals in the enclosures. It’s a really quite engaging game and to my surprise, taking it relatively casually and playing my turns fairly quickly without worrying about them too much I managed to win scoring 14 points.

Ark Nova has this interesting scoring mechanic where you score on 2 tracks and then you calculate the difference and my difference was +14. Second place was +13. Then +6 and then -30 something. But that’s because P is brand new to the game and so wasn’t really familiar with what he was doing. His other criticism, which has merit, is that the game is a sort of group solitaire, where your actions have little to do with the other players.

We finished a little after 11pm and so I drove back to my house (still not quite used to saying that!). Getting back a little after midnight and diving straight into bed. Which means yes, this is a Monday morning entry.