Great Western Coffee Shop

I suppose the well-heeled locals will soon be demanding a better rail service.................... ;) ;)

(https://i.postimg.cc/g2xgHmG2/Taunton.jpg) (https://postimg.cc/G41Pc0BW)

Telegraph

The average price is proberbly being distorted by a lower than normal number of propertys on the market. Then somebody building things like this.
https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/114320060#/?channel=RES_NEW (https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/114320060#/?channel=RES_NEW)
Looks like a development of 5 new builds at more than 1 Million each.

BBC were reporting LIVE from Taunton City centre on Thursdays breakfast news about the above item.

Off topic....apart from being in Taunton.
Not really enough for a new thread but worth a mention due to some quick thinking almost certainly saving a life at Taunton Station.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/dec/30/trainspotter-son-nine-save-man-taunton-station

Taunton is hardly rural.

It's a large town with a terrible traffic problem, pockets of abject poverty, and a town centre that is dying on its arse.

I love the place!

And if it starts getting gentrificated, due to incomers with more money and metropolitan ideas of what to spend it on?

"City" Centre?  :)

As is well known, Taunton has one railway station, on the main line to the West.

Did Taunton ever have TWO stations ? I note that the WSR tend to refer to the present station as "Taunton Castleway" which might imply that there was once another Taunton station.

Vivary Park station? - http://www.tauntonme.org.uk/vivarypark.html
Firepool station? - http://offthebeatentrackinsomerset.blogspot.com/2016/05/pumping-station-firepool-taunton.html
I think there used to be a bus station too ...

And for a bonus point, does anyone know what new regulation was introduced following the fairly recent tragic death of a young child in or near Taunton ? Not railway related.

One from the Broadgage new year quiz - light hearted edition!   ;)

Changes to the building regulations relating to hot water supply and systems, specifically a requirement that hot water storage systems must include a feature which  prevents the temperature of the stored water exceeding 100 degrees C and that any discharge safety devices must be to a location where it is visible but not cause danger to people in the building.

Indeed, new electric immersion heaters must now have a limit stat in addition to the normal adjustable control stat. To prevent the water boiling if one thermostat fails.

In the tragedy to which I referred, the water in the hot water cylinder boiled and the resulting steam and boiling water were vented into the plastic cold water cistern. This was only intended for cold water and split when filled with boiling water.

The deluge of very hot water poured through a bedroom ceiling and scalded a young child who later died as a result.

Similar accidents had occurred previously but without loss of life.

Existing immersion heaters without the limit thermostat may continue in service, but many would consider it best practice to replace them. Especially if the feed and expansion tank is plastic.

Indeed there was an additional change that required the proper support of the header tank so that it would not fall off its sup[port if the plastic softened. Those changes to the requirement G3 and associated guidance were not just confined to electric immersion heaters (they were the easy ones as immersion heaters were already available that had overheat cutouts) changes had to be made to gas, oil and solid fuel systems as well.

Changes also took into account the risk of explosion when restarting a frozen system.  That followed an incident in Devizes (IIRC) when a couple returning from a winter holiday lit their solid fuel boiler and fortunately then went shopping.  They came back with their shopping to find the house had blown up (the roof had lifted off and dropped back on). 

I worked on the team that advised government on the changes. 

I had an encounter with this in 1998. Early one Sunday morning I heard an unfamiliar rushing water sound, and found that the hot tank was very hot and water was "pumping over" - up the vent pipe into the header cistern, pushing slightly less hot water down into the tank. The water had not reached boiling point, and the cistern was over a stairwell, but it was still very worrying given that the cistern is made of PVC.

I'd replaced a failed immersion heater the year before, and the whole system was replaced by the end of the year. I think the replacement still had no safety cut-out, and I replaced it a few years later with one that did. I rarely used the immersion in the new system, but was now primed to spot news on the subject.

In 2003, CIPHE* put out a guidance note that started "On 30th May 2003, two occupants of a house in Penzance were scalded by a large quantity of high temperature water that poured through their bedroom ceiling. One later died from the injuries received." There was a public campaign to change the regulations from then, though that does not mean work in committees only started then (though such events usually do impact the work).

It identified two factors in this accident:
1. the immersion thermostat failed "on" (unsafe)
2. "The standard for the cold water cistern in the roofspace required that it be tested to withstand up to 500 hours without deforming, if fully supported across its entire base area." In this case the platform for a cistern 600 mm wide was only 400 mm.

That heat tolerance of PVC cisterns is a bit surprising, though you can never be sure that older ones would meet the current BS (which was probably not compulsory anyway). The requirement for full-width support was already in force but in the Water Regulations, for which there is even less enforcement than for the building regulations.

At that time thermostats with a cut-out (RDT type) existed but were not very common. In 2007 my local building control department put out a news item that started "Following the tragic death of a baby in Somerset", which I guess is the one in Taunton. This was based on advice from HSE, who don't have any direct role in safety in homes, to fit replacements of the new type.

The words Zoe quoted from requirement G3 were already in place long before - tightened up slightly in 1992. They related to unvented systems (which don't have a header cistern) then, and were widened to include vented ones in 2010 (the first version or 2009 draft). At the same time the reference to full support was added - presumably this was the revision that ellendune was involved in. Subsequently a further tightening has required non-resetting cut-outs for direct (e.g. immersion) heating but not indirect (e.g. solar) heat sources.

So there are several sources for such safety rules, none of them retroactive. Even for replacement, something fairly easy to do, the most effective enforcement is for shops not to stock the out-of-date ones. That can come from product sale regulations, from retailers' policy choices, from the trade not buying them (so they are not worth selling), and all that is prompted by building and water regulations and standards.

Or at least that was the case - now with online "shops", stocking things rarely bought (and never by the trade), and meeting no standard, can be worth doing. If you can offer an out-of-date part with a number that matches the failed one, it's likely to pick up quite a few hits from those with less expert knowledge.

*Institute of Plumbers at the time

It is nearly 15 years since I first read all that as part of the update that was eventually introduced in the 2010 edition of the Building Regualtions

The other important change was the addition of a new requirement


Interestingly one of the comments early on in the work was that this requirement had to remain as G3 as it was so well known a requirement so we juggled the other new requirements round that fixed point so the old requirements G1 & G2 became G4 & G5!  The new requirements G1 and G2 introduced the requirement to actually have cold and hot running water for the first time!

Best to treat these things with respect… https://youtu.be/rGWmONHipVo

I was left with a few questions after all that. I didn't look online for sources before, but what is out there now? What did HSE actually say (and why them)? And what is the technical background to how we got here?

Google can still find press reports of both those fatal incidents: Mrs. Sharon Minster (30) in Penwith 29/30 May 2002, and Rhianna Hardie (10 months) in Taunton 18/19 November 2006. These came from national news media, not the local ones that would have more detailed early reports - maybe they were not on line yet? Or don't keep old pages? There are also forums that dealt with the subject, one being on the IET site. All of those are largely taken up with missing the point, of course!

A number of pages include links to the HSE guidance note, which at don't work; however it is still there, just moved. I still can't find any real explanation of why it's HSE's business - they do have a couple of other notes for local authorities about heating systems, but only that few. None is about gas heating, for which HSE do have some kind of residual government regulator role. This letter covers the two notes about older hot water systems: https://www.hse.gov.uk/services/localgovernment/letter.htm

The second note is about the explosion risk of bringing an open fire back into use with an old back boiler. It will almost always have been drained, and should never have been sealed but a few have been. Heating by a fire with no water in it (or worse, just a little) gives such high temperatures that it weakens the cast iron and also pressurises it, leading to a violent explosion.

One fatal case is referred to. This turns out to be Christine Goodall of Twyning (65), on 11 November 2007. Her housing association landlords had decommissioned the back boiler in 1999, saying the fire was still usable, and it was - unusually - possible to find the plumbers involved (company and individual).

There have been similar, if not fatal, incidents since; perhaps they are now as common as the related problem of frozen pipes. That killed Katherine Bates (84) on 20th December 2010 in Mansfield. That was too late to be behind ellendune's comment, but I imagine such events were (like back boilers) more common in the past. I think a reminder to the public on that might be timely - if gas prices do keep rising, the temptation to burn whatever is to hand in an old open fire may become more common.

Back boilers are relevant to the immersion heater issue, since indirect vented systems originally had back boilers as a heat source, and electricity for the summer. You can't control an open fire with a thermostat, nor even the water flow as it has to always cool the boiler. And of course the header tank was made of galvanised steel (which quickly became rusty, from my experience).

I checked with a plumbing text book (a basic one for apprentices), and it says the overflow pipe is present for two reasons: firstly to ensure the system is at atmospheric pressure (it should say "when the feed to the hot tank is closed", but does not), and to let air escape on filling; and "more rarely in the event of the water becoming overheated, allows it to discharge over the cistern". That overheating would be very rare with indirect heating, but pretty common with direct heating - it just needs a rather big fire to be set.

Changing to big gas boilers with gravity indirect water heating, then fully pumped systems, with thermostatic control removes the routine overheating and allows a plastic cistern to be used. But then practices (and standards, regulation etc.) have to catch up. The requirement for those plastic cisterns to hold boiling water indefinitely (well, 500 hours is three weeks, isn't it?) only came in in 1991. (Mine was a lot older!)

I can only find one similar HSE guidance note outside the "safety at work" field. That is about the carbon monoxide poisoning risk in stores for wood pellets (https://www.hse.gov.uk/safetybulletins/co-wood-pellets.htm). That is not at all obvious, is it? Yet the note said in 2012 that there had been at least nine deaths in Europe since 2002.

The point is that cutting wood exposes organic substances to the air, and some of those self-oxidise, and some those can do so partially and yield CO. Sawdust is worst, small wood particles next, and pellets made by compressing those will show also show the effect. All it needs then is a large enough quantity, and a nearly sealed store, kept closed until someone needs to go inside...