JohnRoss

"They said no under no circumstances, all used up" Does this mean that each property has a maximum habitable area allocated to it? Also do corridors/ bathrooms/shower rooms/utility rooms/vérandas count as habitable space?................................JR

I think I know the cause of the fire in the bottom of the flue. Some days before this happened I burnt a chemical log and some of the creosote further up the flue most have, due to the chemical action of the fumes from the log, become loose and dropped down to the bottom of the flue where it caught fire. This might be a problem peculiar to back entry and not top entry stoves. I cannot remember now just how long the destructions said one should wait after burning the log before sweeping the chimney. In view of what you good folk and others in another place have said I think next heating season I will pay for a sweep to get the certificate just in case!...............JR

We have one that looks very much like the one sid shows in the photo. The first one broke after a few months use and Bricomarché replaced it with no hassle at all. The replacement model was a more powerful version of the previous one bearing the label ZYWT. The part that broke was a cast iron section of the carriage and may of been due to one or two logs having angled end faces i.e. not at 90 degrees to the ram or it could just have been a weak casting........................JR   PS Ours is mounted on an old coffee table, no bending required.

I don't think that the colour indicates the class does it?...................JR "Cut wood in Bricomarché has a yellow stain and what is the significance of the yellow colour?"

Following further enquiries and information from a helpful source it turns out to be Class 2 treated with fungicide and insecticide.........................JR

I need to be clear about this. Only the rough cut timber at Bricomarché is stained yellow, the planned timber is not. This wood will be used in a roof space and will not be accessible after installation so if I need to treat it with evil insecticide paint then it has to be done now. I don't want to use insecticide unless really necessary. So what is the significance of the yellow colour?..........................JR

[quote user="pachapapa"]Classe 1.[/quote]  Defined as: Bois sec, humidité toujours inférieure à 20%. Bois d'intérieur (charpente, solivage, lambris, parquets). Risques : insectes, termites dans les régions infestées. So not protected against woodworm then?.......................JR

Does anybody know why the rough cut wood in Bricomarché has a yellow stain? Is it treated with something and if so is the treatment good against insect attack like woodworm?..............................................JR PS I did ask at the checkout but only got a "Je ne sais pas"!

My conversation was due to a little incident that happened late the night before last. There is a short stub that sticks down below the rear exit port of our Supra wood burning stove that connects to the vertical flue running up the chimney, well I think ours caught fire. That is to say that the little bit of soot that accumulates there over time must have ignited. My attention was drawn to a faint roaring noise coming from the stove and having checked outside that there were no flames or excessive smoke coming out of the top of the chimney which might indicate a chimney fire I noticed on my return indoors that there was a cherry red spot on the side of the stub just a little larger than an old half crown. I closed the flue vent and the air intake vent on the Supra and the glow faded. The bottom circular plate which you can remove to empty soot out of the stub was very hot and I discovered that whilst it could be cooled by holding against it a wet cloth it would heat up again very quickly after the removal of the cloth. I tried this several times with the same result. Realising that this could spread to the flue further up I offered up a bowl of water to the stub which because the joint between the plate and the flue is not that good water must have seeped into the bottom of the flue and put out the fire inside. Sweeping the flue the next day the usual amount of loose soot resulted however on examining the stub section I found a veritable hard cake of soot and tar which must have been what had been burning. Normally the stub would contain a couple of handfuls of loose soot. I sweep the flue twice a year, once at the beginning of the heating season and again in the new year. I have been removing the circular plate also about twice during the heating season to empty out any soot that has dropped down but now wonder if I should do it more often?...........JR

I was talking to a friend the other day who had this to say about sweeping the chimney. "Commencing 2012 one must have chimneys swept professionally at least once per year. The previous method of burning a "qualifying" log & getting a certificate from the manufacturer is no longer adequate. When we had ours cleaned a few months ago, I asked the sweep if this was true, and he confirmed it was the case." Does anybody know if this is now true? We sweep ours, flexible metal flue,  twice a year and do use chemical logs beforehand..............................JR

We are thinking of renting a house for a week in Switzerland next Summer through Interhome. Is there anything we should know re health insurance, holiday insurance, motor insurance. We would drive there from our home in France. We both have pre-existing helath conditions and are in the French health system with a mutuelle and also have EHIC cards from the UK. Any experiences or advice from others would be most welcome.................JR

Ok and thanks for the information folks. I will try to find a stronger bin bag as even one litter tray full weighs quite a bit and we have three cats here who use a fair amount in a week!............JR

What does everyone do with their old cat litter. Getting too old and creaky to go on digging big holes to bury it. Can you put it in the communual rubbish bin and would a black plastic bin bag do or are there special bags available?.......................JR

The light fitting has three 50W spot lamps in the ceiling fitting and the room is a dressing room and not a bathroom. However I thought classe 2 gear was ok in a salle d'eau. I have gorn off the idea of a junction box between the ceiling and floor above as to get at it to replace the switch would need some sort of trap door in the floor above but the lamp suspension unit mounted on the ceiling below is I think a better bet assuming the regs allow .............JR

What I am trying to do is find a simple solution to the problem and yet to stay within what French regs may or may not say. A pull cord switch would save a lot of work for sure. The Legrand switch is for mounting inside furniture like cupboards and I cannot see any difference in safety between that and between ceiling boards and floor boards in a plastic junction box but is it allowed? It would be switching 150W lamp load. It might be possible to mount it inside a ceiling lamp suspension unit, a bit like a ceiling rose, which would save having a junction box in the space between the ceiling and floor above...........JR

The only other options would be to use a surface mounted wall switch and plastic trunking on the wall or to carve a channel and bury the circular ribbed trunking in the wall neither of which for various reasons are desirable......JR

Having not been able to find a ceiling mounted pull cord switch, do the French really not have them, I have found a interrupteur a tirette unit made by Legrand. I am thinking of mounting this in a plastic junction box and mounting the box in the space between the ceiling lambri and the floor boards above with the cord hanging down through a small hole in the ceiling lambri. The recomendation on the packing says Cet appareil doit etre incorporé dans un meuble. Ne pas installer nu. Is there any reason why I should not do this folks?.........JR PS Legrand have this note on their product: Legrand 91164 Interrupteur à tirette Caractéristiques Uni-polaire 2 Ampères Pour appareil d&rsquo éclairage de Classe 2 Livré avec un fil en nylon la tirette

First youse gotta catch 'im an' no mistake guv!.........JR

The link I gave earlier says this about fouines: "The weasel kills everything that moves, so they make carnage in poultry houses. Indeed, the chickens are restless frightened in all directions, and the weasel will kill them until nothing moves." Whereas the loir, large grey edible dormouse brought to France by the Romans to eat, are eaters of fruits and nuts and is quite a different animal!........JR PS Caught about 16 in humane traps in the grenier this year and as usual each gets half an apple and a trip 7ks away and release into the wild.

Might be worth downloading and running free Ccleaner first. Gets rid of cookies, temporary files and cleans up registry. I assume you have defragged hard drive which you could do after deleting any unwanted files.....JR

2,384,812,884th

Ba אחיזת עיניים?

I would not be happy to have an appliance connected to the mains where the on/off switch on the appliance was connected to the neutral leaving wiring in the appliance live despite the appliance being switched off. This would have safety implications if some component failed in the appliance causing leakage to earth even though the appliance switch was at the off position. Not a problem I agree if double pole appliance switches are used but can we assume that any appliance purchased in France would have these? My main concern was that the switch on an extension board cut off the live feed regardless of which way the sockets on the board were wired and in the ones that I have this is certainly the case. Consider the situation if a trailing cable from such a board was still live when the computer/printer, TV, sat' box, CD/DVD player, HiFi system or whatever was switched off and was chewed by Fido or Meow Meow during the night, ours did when kittens, the result would be one dead dog/cat or even a fire! The boards I have on checking appear to have a double pole on/off switch with neon so not a problem but again can we assume all extension boards are the same?...............JR

Much has been said here about the wiring of sockets in French houses and like others I have found the odd socket with live and neutral reversed. However I had cause to check an extension board yesterday and found that all the sockets on it had live and neutral swapped over. I then checked another board that I have in the house and found the same thing. The switches with neon on these boards in both cases did cut off the live supply at least but on the left hand side and not the right, as you look at the face of the socket. A third board had two of its three sockets wired correctly and the third, at 180 degrees to the others, with live and neutral reversed. The socket into which the boards were plugged was tested and found to be correct! I also found a two socket adaptor with one socket correct and the other wrong. I assume that a bus bar construction is used and the manufacturer cannot be bothered to go to the expense of crossing over the connections where the sockets are at 180 degrees to each other. The extension boards and adaptor were of French manufacture so how do they get away with it or is it thought not to matter?.............JR

The French President declared on 13 October 2008 that "The government will not let any French bank fail" A figure of 70,000 euros was quoted as the maximum amount that an individual saver could have in a French bank account for 100% protection. Has anyone seen recent figures for La Poste bank and how good is the guarantee thought to be?...................JR