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Interesting, thankyou. My experience of using oils in autumn - mainly Sikkens AZ gloss, and I'm going back ten years here - is that they take forever to dry. Days. I never tried adding terebene driers. Last Friday I applied some Bedec waterbase as I mentioned, and it dried overnight. I wasn't...

A local craft group is making a large mosaic using bits of tiles on three sheets of 6x2 ext ply. Using PVA to stick the tesserae. I think the ply should be primed with PVA or the mosaic will eventually fall off. What do you think?

If you don't like the wallpaper, strip it and repaper with something you do like. Walls don't have to be painted.

A small cutting fitch

It's quite usual in a Period house to have polished/stained banister rails & newel posts, and painted spindles. So I would not be trying to stain them, even if it were possible to stain over paint.

Bedec MSP would do the job, no primer needed. I used some of their Barn Black outside today, but min temp is 50F/10C so it won't dry as fast as usual. If you have horizontal surfaces you would need to keep the dew off. Worse if north facing. Forget oil paint at this time of year.

We have exactly the same situation, although with proper leaded lights not plastic windows.... The mould is there because the stone is cold and moisture condenses on it, rather than the glass as it would have done with the original single glazing. Clean it off occasionally with a small amount...

The kickspace heater is a Myson KSU500E, with fan of course, 2kw but I disabled the second element and run it at 1kw because the time switch is not rated for 2kw. The stat was NOS, so new but not as we know it. I guess 60s from the design. It might be faulty of course. Sometimes stuff is NOS...

OK, thanks, I'll try that. There should be no wear in the stat as it was new, but perhaps it needs some lubrication. I'll take it off and have a look. Yesterday I bought an even older one on eBay so I have that as a reserve....

Not sure if this should be in the Electricals board, anyway... So, being a fan of electrical antiquities, two years ago I installed this NOS Ekco room stat to run a 1kw kick heater. Probably 1960s. Used it with a clockwork Horstmann time switch. The wiring options for the stat were with and...

OK. I mainly wanted to check that it didn't need an upwards expansion pipe. Thankyou for the tip re Denmans, if ever I need parts.

Oooh, that shows up better in the pic than it does in the cupbd... it's Steeple. Is that a make?

Oh! So that's why I've had problems with pics in another forum. Thankyou. Well, I am a bit of a techno-nitwit. Should be able to see it now. Thanks regarding the piping.

Our electric water heater is mains fed by a pipe that comes down from the attic. I want to get rid of it as it trails across the walls of two bedrooms (very old house). There is a mains pipe in the cellar I can use. Any problem feeding from below rather than above? This is the heater. The...

I found a Pur..... something... water filter in the 15mm mains feed to our mixer tap in the kitchen. Can only see part of one end at the moment, hence the Pur.... At least ten years old, could be a lot more. It's completely inaccessible behind a cupbd so there was no thought of changing the...

So I removed the battery from the control panel, then turned the power off... and the external siren starts up. Arrrgh. After 16 years the d..d battery is still good. Took off the cover, did what I needed to the wall, put it back. Was tempted to start pulling the wires, next time I'll make a...

Here's the box. Dates from 2005.

I need to remove the external alarm box/siren for maintenance of the wall to which its attached. Presumably if I use the engineer code, switch off the mains to the panel and remove the control panel battery I will be OK? The battery in the siren box, if any, is fifteen years old and hopefully...

I left it a week to do the second coat. No hollow spots when I tap it. Seems OK. Second coat 5:1 as I said, but 4:1 for lime.

It will be OK if there's rain, it's under the overhang of the thatch. Do you think two days is too soon for the top coat? Don't want to pull it off the wall when the top coat dries.