Btuckey

Hi Clair, Thanks for the suggestion, but Conrad too is a mail order emporium.  As Pierre remarked their mail charges aren’t cheap either! Ernie, I am looking for a ‘Reflective Object Sensor’ for my CNC Mill.  This is only about €3 hence my desire to walk into a store and buy it over the counter.  Rather than wait until my next consolidated order from Farnell I am going to ask my brother-in-law to visit Maplin and post it to me. Thanks to everybody for their responses! Cheers, Brian

Are there any 'chains' of electronic component suppliers like Maplins in France?  I usually use Farnell but need something quickly without paying more for the postage than the component! Cheers ps. Thought this would be a better place to post than 'Shopping'...

[quote user="Sprogster"] The one thing that has always worried me about a flu pandemic in France, are the very lax food hygene handling laws, as compared to other countries like the UK, where the Health and Safety police run riot! The amount of times I have been into a French shop and the assistant has handled uncovered ready to eat foods with their bare hands and then taken your money, although tongs are provided, makes this seem common practice in France. Whereas plastic gloves, head coverings,cling film wrapped ready to eat foods and a seperate assistant working the till, seem to be more the norm in the UK. One person handling money and uncovered ready to eat food is one of the best ways to pass on infection and partly I am sure why France has such a bad food poisoning record compared to countries like the UK.  [/quote] Check your facts!!!  In the last reportable year, the UK had 2 million cases (3,400 cases for 100,000 inhabitants) and France 750,000 cases (1,210 cases for 100,000 inhabitants).  The truth is that if you handle infected crap with tongs it is still infected crap... Brian

[quote user="teapot"] Why when people post does it take sooo long to get back? [/quote] 'cause some of us have a life!![:P] Thanks for the suggestions, they will be utilised. Cheers. Brian 

Well firstly, many thanks for all of the responses.  Greatly appreciated, even those suggesting a marital trade-in! (Having said that, I have invested a lot of time and training over the last 30 years and couldn't face starting from scratch again..[;-)]) [quote user="teapot"] The 6mm bed of tile cement is probably because they had a 6mm toothed tile trowel, a very standard size. Tiling a bathroom, it is normal practice not to form full depth notches in the cement, in a 6mm depth of cement only form the notches 4 or 5mm deep. That is to prevent water getting to the face of the plaster board. It should be easy to maintain the 6mm depth if you have the right size trowel or speader, likewise with the right size tile spacers.  [/quote] If you have 6mm notches I can understand how to get 6mm thick cement.  How do you only get 4mm notches in 6mm thick cement as you have to ‘guess’ the 2mm depth? Quote from "Richard & Tracy".  (Sorry, your postings wont ‘quote’ as you get; “Non matching quote blocks in post"). 1. You must use a cement based (bagged) tile adhesive with a large tile. This cures by chemical reaction whereas a ready-mixed adhesive(bucket) is air drying and therefore with large tiles, the adhesive in the middle will never set. 4. What are the tiles made from. Ceramic? Porcelain? Stone? Different materials require different adhesives. Unquote. The tiles are ceramic 250mm x 400mm x 8mm.  Do I need to use a cement based adhesive?  When you first start off, how do you ensure that the faces of the tiles are parallel to the plasterboard thereby preventing a sea-wave effect on the finished wall? Cheers.   Brian  

Thanks for that Gluestick.  Being a new house, the tiles are being laid on plasterboard.  (The green HH stuff.)  I have no idea why the builders used a 6mm thickness of cement! Cheers.

My wife is trying to tile our bathroom and is having tremendous trouble.  The tiles are big and when she places them on the wall they just slide around and fall off.  The pre-mixed tile cement/glue (from Brico Depot) doesn't seem to have any initial 'grab'.  Some tiling was done by the builders (who want €40/m2 to do the bits outside the contract) who used a very thick layer of cement between the wall and the tile.  She is trying to maintain this thickness but the tiling to date has tiles with uneven inter-tile spacing and vary in distance from the wall.  Is this a contributory cause? Any help very gratefully received as it is causing severe domestic in-harmony! Cheers.

Hi Tony, Our base is the 'Dalle de Compression' consisting of the now standard concrete beams with polystyrene in-fill.  Above this the electricity gaines and water pipes are laid which were encased in a 4cm chape.  When this was dry the Sofath contractor laid a covering of 2.5cm thick high density polyurethane sheet.  The heating pipes were then clipped to the poly sheeting.  I asked about the 'egg crates' but he didn't reckon on them at all.  Ok for DIY was his response!  The pipes were then encased in a further chape 6cm deep to a specification of 350kg/m3.  When all of this was dry the contractor returned and laid a self-levelling liquid chape 5cm deep.  On this final layer was laid the carrelage utilising a special heat conducting glue/cement (Parex 556 http://www.atoca.com/produits/cache/parexlanko/556_PROLIFLUIDE_ANHYDRITE.htm ). Cheers. Brian 

Ceejay, >However I am not sure why Tempo is a problem in lighting Only that electricity on Red days, like the last three, is very expensive so you don't want filament lamps burning away. >and could you please let me know what WAF is? WAF = Wife Acceptance Factor [:-))]  i.e. no strip lighting. Cheers.

Hi Ceejay, I have just finished our new kitchen and spent ages looking at suitable (and not so suitable!) lighting with an architect friend.  We have Tempo so normal incandescent and halogen lamps were out.  The florescent downlighters all seemed to fit in with hotel rooms rather than homes.  I finally found a range of directional lighting from ‘Paulmann’.  I am very pleased with the result as I hate poor lighting when I am cooking and the fittings have full WAF rating!  I found the lights, strangely enough, in Mr.Bricolage.  Previously, I must have visited over a dozen specialist lighting shops without success.     Hope this helps. Brian

[quote user="tonyv"]Brian, the pics are really impressive. Did you manage/perform the geothermie installation yourself, or did you get professional advice? I want to install geothermal in my renovation, and am looking for all the advice I can get. [/quote] Hi Tony, We did a lot of research before we set out to build our house and the only organisation that readily answered our questions was Sofath.  The only down side was that we had to go to their approved installer.  Having said that, he liaised with the house builder and suggested two organisations to lay the all-important Chape.  (The building company was happy to work around our contractors but made it plain that the heating was outside of their contract/commitment.)  A very important part of the installation service was the planning stage.  Sofath produced data from a French geological organisation which gave the month by month average soil temperature for our part of the Aude.  When combined with our house plans giving the floor space and relative temperatures of each room, it enabled Sofath to provide a detailed document showing the pitch of the under-floor heating pipes in each room and the area and depth of the heat capture pipes in the garden.  This information is so core to a successful implementation that I would not have wanted to 'wing' it with a DIY installation. If you take the cost of hiring your own planner and sourcing the 'bits', it might be cheaper to take a package from a manufacturer rather than doing it yourself.  YMMV of course! Cheers. Brian

[quote user="sid"] I was interested in the answer to the OP's question. There's plenty of opinion and theory here but only one person has posted actual home experience! That particular person appears to be getting great results! So who is right? Sid [/quote] Well Sid.  We have built a new house with under floor heating and geothermal generation and couldn't be more pleased with it.  After a period of settling down the temperature is constant throughout the house, unlike the wood and radiator system in our previous abode in the same village!  Like ams' it is reversible in summer and we have been able to get onto the Tempo scheme.  (EDF's call centre said that we couldn't have it but the nice lady in the Carcassonne office said "no problem"!) Devon:  We are also on rock but were able to excavate a suitably deep pit.  There are some pictures at  http://briantuckey.fotopic.net/  Cheers. Brian 

Have sent you a PM. Brian

Can anybody please tell me where I can buy Foamboard as used by artists?  Mail order ok, but somewhere near Carcassonne prefered. Cheers! 

Go to http://www.viamichelin.com/ .   Under 'Driving directions' enter Montlucon and Calais under 'Departure' and 'Destination' respectively.  Then click on 'Options' and open the 'Show/Hide Stopovers' tab.  Enter 'Rouen' as Stopover A and click on 'Search'.  Do a second run with Reims as the Stopover and select your preferred route. Cheers, Brian