Selfsufficientish.com

No. There are loads of people like this trying to sell us something for nothing. The only viable way I've seen to run a car on water is the one that most 13 year old students come up with in their early chemistry lessons (the site calls this "suppressed technology") - you split the water m...

The manufacturer's site is usually a good place to start. They will often supply drivers and updates for their machines. Try this link - providing you are running Win2000 or newer, it looks like they still support it. While I applaud your desire to use a printer that someone else doesn't want, my ex...

Stoney's got it exactly right - these sort of claims are not establishing cause and effect, but association. In the same way that doing a rain dance will sometimes make it rain. Actually, you just associate two unrelated events and conclude that one causes the other. Of course there is a whole lot t...

Flippin' 'eck, Martin, you get back here soon. There's no one else to have a decent argument with.

Happy Christmas everyone.

Blimey, is that the time? Better sort out my Christmas card list...

One of the advantages of a thermal store is that the hot water which comes out of the tap is linked directly to the water mains, and is at mains water pressure. In this case, the small header tank is there just to keep the circuit that goes to the boiler/etc topped up and vented - like a central hea...

Jack's got it - one soil pipe is an inlet. t'other is the (liquid) outlet that should lead to some sort of outfall or soakaway. There are chambers inside the tank to separate soilids from liquid. If properly installed, the soilpipes leading to it should have some sort of rodding access point (eg a m...

As it happens, I too am currently accessing the internet via a 'live CD' (actually, the OS is cached to RAM, so the whole thing is completely virtual, requiring neither CD nor HDD). The reason for this is that 6 months ago I suffered a disaster which required a complete reformat and reinstallation o...

At the moment, solar water heating is a more efficient way of capturing the sun's energy (photovoltaics may improve in the foreseeable future), and is generally easier to store and use, too. Conveniently, water requires a lot of energy to heat up, so using the sun to do it will make comparatively la...

Don't know anything about these guys , but I just found them on Google, and they may give you a few ideas. Conventionally, in UK newbuild, the cavity would be filled with rockwool or glassfibre batts. I guess this would be fairly inert stuff environmentally, though it is made by a heat process, so w...

As Martin says, with a conventional cylinder, stratification is the issue. You can put a conventional cylinder on it's side, but it's really not designed for it. Most HW cylinders have the hot water draw-off at the top, because that's where the hottest water will be. You could fit a flange on the si...

You're using terms I'm not familiar with in the UK; CEB - is that what we would call cob? Or rammed earth? Or adobe, possibly? Bond beam, also; the only thing I've heard of is a patent steel post and tie system, which doesn't sound like what you mean. The type of foundations you use is always going ...

...the genetic modification that has gone on for thousands of years... Sorry, but I gotta take you to task on that - that is a piece of mischief put about by the pro-GMers to make it appear that they aren't doing anything unusual. We have not been genetically modifying anything; we have been geneti...

This is the shape that our local organic co-op takes. It began by someone hiring a local community hall for a couple of hours for few pounds and publicising a meeting. I don't suppose it was a very formal meeting - just a gathering of people who wanted to find out how they could organise a co-op tog...

I'm sure he was very fond of his mum, but you can honour someone's memory more discreetly and appropriately than this. And, after all, maybe the farmer/fisherman chap wants to honour his dad by keeping the farm going.

Anyway, three hearty cheers so far.