With a smaller internal space this meant that (perhaps aside from a coffee or side table) every piece of furniture would be placed against a wall. I also had a large sliding patio door. With wall-space being at a premium, I wasn’t prepared to “waste” any on a radiator or heater. This meant looking into underfloor heating; pros, cons and DIY-ability.

I would be specifically looking at the electric under-floor heating kits, commonly used for en-suites and bathrooms.

Considerations for underfloor heating in a garden studio

• Underfloor heating can limit your floor finishing options
• The sub-floor must be considered when selecting your kit
• It’s more difficult to install than an electric wall heater
• It’s slower to heat a room (but we’ll cover why that’s not a big deal)
• No rugs or zero-clearance furniture on top of the heating elements
• Upfront costs vs long-term costs

Electric under-floor heating floor finish considerations

You may need a different type of under-floor heating kit depending on what you intend on your finished floor covering to be.

Laminate and wood flooring, along with carpet and vinyl require a foil mat system. A tiled floor will utilise a mesh mat or loose wire system embedded in a screed.

Think about thermal conductivity too. Tile and stone will conduct heat best. Timber and laminates are less conductive and performance will vary based on wood type, thickness and composition (for the laminates). The better your floor can conduct heat, the more efficient it will be to run.

There are a lot of laminates and carpets not suitable for under-floor heating so if you’re going to go that route be sure to check with the manufacturer.

The thicker your floor covering the more likely you’ll be trapping the heat under it. A thick carpet with a rubber back will essentially just insulate your heating system and you’d barely feel it. It could also cause the heating system to overheat and fail.

The floor covering also affects the maximum temperature you can heat your floor to. Tile and stone can be heated to in excess of 29 degrees, whereas wood and laminate can start deforming if they get too hot.

While laminates and carpets are particularly hit and miss, it’d be good practice to check with the manufacturer whatever flooring type you’re looking to install. Imagine picking out the only floor tile in the shop unsuitable for under-floor heating systems and having them all crack or explode the first time you turn up the thermostat!

Avoid a huge disaster and wasting money and materials, have your flooring manufacturer confirm it’s good for under-floor heating.

Electric under floor heating sub-floor restrictions

A concrete floor utilises a different heating mat system to a timber floor. As suspended timber floors mounted to ground screws are becoming popular for garden rooms, check that you’re ordering the right kit for your sub-floor type.

If you have a concrete floor but really want a carpet or laminate finished surface, you may need to glue and screw down ply boards. In this case you’ve essentially converted your concrete floor to a timber floor and would need to look into timber floor kits.

For concrete floors with a tiled finish, look into “tile backer insulation boards.” These are adhered to your concrete floor with the heating element installed on top. The boards help reflect the heat into the room rather than having it sucked down into your concrete. They’re not magic, they shouldn’t cost a fortune. They’re basically a sheet of fine polystyrene coated in textured cement-like layers. They are “dimensionally stable” meaning they’re far better to tile on than ply, and they’re waterproof too.

It all varies depending on what combination of sub-floor and finishing flooring you want, and there may be compromises to make if you’re dead-set on some thick squishy carpet.

Installing under-floor heating in a garden studio

There’s no getting around it, installing under-floor heating is a lot more faffing about than fixing a heater to a wall. However, I certainly thought was worth it for what I’d gained over a wall heater.

Given my studio base and intended floor finish, it was only really a couple of extra steps in the process of laying the floor, a little consideration for first-fix electrical and the end result is excellent.

If you’re handy and a meticulous DIYer, you should find the whole process a piece of cake. The main mistake I think a DIYer would make is ordering the wrong system for their sub-floor and intended floor covering, which this post aims to help you with. Just bear in mind I’m only sharing my own experience, I’m no expert.

The process will vary a little depending on your sub and finished floor choices but essentially you stick a heating element down to the floor. You connect the heating element to a thermostat powering it from a switched fused spur. You’ll also install a temperature sensor into the floor and run the cable for this up to the thermostat too.

Pull out a multimeter and perform a continuity test to check there are no breaks in the element before installing your finished floor. Test again after the floor is down to make sure you didn’t damage it during the floor fitting.

That’s about all there is to it. Maybe some thermostat calibration (depends on the thermostat) but aside from that, you turn on the heating and your floor starts heating up.

Allow for some expansion under your skirting, particularly for wood and laminate floors. As these heat they will expand and it’s far better they expand under a skirting board that’s hidden, that hitting the wall and bowing your floor up in random places.

Electric under-floor heating time (radiant vs convection)

Mini science lesson: Contrary to their name a, “radiator” is convection heating. Underfloor heating is radiant.

Convection heating (from a radiator) heats the air around it, moving it up as its heated and circulating back down when it cools. Radiant under-floor heating directly heats the floor and objects touching it (including you).

There’s little point in trying to give you figures for this. There are a lot of variables that will affect the heating time of an under-floor system in your studio and how you experience this heat. Everything including ventilation, insulation, size of room, furniture in the room, floor covering, there’s lots that influences it.

With under-floor heating you can worry a little less about heat escaping out of windows or when someone opens a door. While the air temp will increase, the fact you’re heating the floor (and not the air) means that floor stays warm whether someone opens a window or lingers around an open door too long.

It can take some time for your floor to get up to temperature though. From cold, I think I’m waiting around 30 mins to really feel my floor warm under-foot. But when it’s there it’s lovely and the heat really lasts. My tiles do a great job of holding on to that heat long after the room gets up to temp and the system is turned off.

A wall heater is up to temp in 5/10 minutes or so and you can feel it almost immediately, providing you’re near it. I don’t need to explain to you how radiators work, but you can bet if you’re on the opposite side of the room it will take quite a while to heat up all the air and for you to notice it.

I didn’t choose under-floor heating for the speed it gets up to temperature. It solved other issues that I saw as more of a priority but certainly in my case and given my options for where a radiator could be placed, I’d say it’s up to temp at a comparable speed to a convection wall heater and personally I think radiant under-floor heating is a nicer heat (though I appreciate this sounds weird).

Don’t forget price too. It’s an important consideration. An electric under-floor heating kit is pretty much universally more expensive than the electric wall radiator options. Especially when you consider backer-boards, thermostat, you may need a more expensive floor finish to get the look you want that’s safe to use with under-floor heating.

Under-floor heating could very well come out on top in terms of cost-effectiveness over time though. Air is like a toddler and is constantly looking to ways to escape, which isn’t great if you’ve spent money heating it up. When your warm air does escape, your radiator will flick back on to replace it. Whereas, a heated floor can stay warm pretty much all day long after initially heating up in the morning. The heat is very slow to dissipate and doesn’t get sucked out of window vents.

Furniture considerations for electric under-floor heating

No rugs. Sorry.

Furniture really needs to be on legs too, around 100mm legs to be on the safe side. I’ve not found this to be all that difficult to accomodate. You’re basically avoiding things like bean bags or foot stools, maybe some coffee tables; anything that doesn’t provide an air gap between the floor and the furniture piece.

I wanted a floor mat at my entrance door so made sure to avoid putting any heat mat down in this spot. I left a 500mm gap around the whole perimeter of the room to ensure I could put book cases up against walls if I ever needed to.

The air gap is important in order to prevent the heating element from overheating and failing. The floor temp sensor only records the temperature in one location and will turn off the heat if the temperature is getting above 28/29°C. If you were to throw some big bean bags down, with the heating on they could cause the element in those locations to exceed a safe temperature and ruin your whole floor. Expensive.

Furniture with legs = Good.

Zero clearance furniture = Bad.

Bean bags = Always bad.

My garden studio under-floor heating system

So what did I do personally? Well my studio is on built on a concrete base, and I wanted large porcelain tiled finish.

For a first ever concrete slab, mine was pretty good but not perfect so I filled some low-spots with concrete floor filler and ground off any high-spots with a masonry grinding disc on an angle grinder. With everything looking pretty good against a spirit level I re-sealed the slab with concrete sealant/primer.

Having measured my floor, I ordered enough Prowarm “Backer Pro” 12.5mm tile backer insulation boards to cover the area. These had to be glued down with a flexible tile adhesive. I was recommended 6x 20kg packs of Ultra Proflex SP (though I’m sure I ended up with some left to do the tiles too). I installed them like large format tiles with a 10mm notched trowel. I didn’t bother back-buttering them, each sheet was still had full adhesive coverage when pressed into place.

With the backer boards down and adhesive dry, I taped up all the seams with Tyvek tape for a continuous moisture barrier (probably not necessary, but I had some spare). And for good measure used alu foil tape over this in an effort to reflect heat away from the joins and into the room (potentially pointless, but again, I had the tape spare so thought it couldn’t hurt).

Then it was time to lay out my heating mat. This was a 200w ProWarm mat. For a tiled floor this needed to be the mesh mat type. I worked out the floor area, subtracted a perimeter border (to allow for any fixed, zero-clearance furniture) and then subtracted 10% again. If you order too much, you’re in trouble as it can’t be cut down.

I rolled it out to find the mat was quite sticky. This was useful for installation but annoying to figure out where I was going to position it. The powered end has to run to where your thermostat and fused spur are located.

You roll out a length, then when you need to change direction you cut the mesh mat (NOT THE HEATED ELEMENT) bending/flipping over the element to continue in the new direction.

I cut some little channels in the backer board to run the temp sensor and power cable up the wall. The sensor was pushed into a piece of tube and that went into some conduit. The conduit allows me access to the sensor cable without needing to cut out any skirting in future. The tubing means I can remove the sensor from the floor and replace it. No tube and it would be stuck in the screed forever.

The temp sensor and power wires were secured in place with some duct tape. I also used duct-tape to secure the mat down in any places it was lifting. Although the mesh mat is sticky, the adhesive isn’t great especially after repositioning it a couple of times.

With the mat down it was time to screed the floor, fixing it in place forever. The screed should be as thin as possible, but still completely cover all the heating elements. I’d allowed for around 3/4mm coverage. The heating elements and mesh will affect the flow and self-levelling properties of the screed. As the screed runs between and over the elements It will work as a guide to show you how evenly you’re pouring the screed down.

Pouring the screed was pretty easy. Nothing to be scared of but definitely an opportunity to make a big mess if you’re not careful. My screed was two-part; each bag came with a matching liquid to mix it so there was zero chance of getting the ratio wrong like you could with “just add water” products. I mixed in a silicone bucket using just a hand drill and mixing paddle attachment, then poured it down. There are spiked rollers you can use to help level it but I was very wary of these with the heating elements and chose not to. If the spikes are soft, maybe it would have been fine but I didn’t know and I didn’t want to buy a tool just to use it one time.

One other down-side of not using a spiked roller was I ended up with more surface air bubbles. These would have usually been popped by a roller helping to create that smooth, perfect finish. Still perfectly within tolerance for tiling though…

After the screed was dry, the vast majority of the bubbles had popped and pretty much levelled out. I think not using a spiked roller was the right choice. It was kind of weird to think that my whole heating system has now hidden under the floor.

Next was tiles. I’ll spare you the details of the tiling for another post, we’re here for under-floor heating. It was stressful but it turned out great. I went for a 600mm high-gloss, black porcelain tile and black grout, laid in a diamond pattern (for increased installation stress).

When it came to wiring it in, this wasn’t much different from a basic lighting circuit, with the thermostat in place of a switch.

I can’t show you any of the ProWarm thermostat wiring, or talk you through the process because I never used it. I actually didn’t use an under-floor heating thermostat at all. My floor temperature sensor isn’t even connected up.

Here’s where I don’t recommend you copy me. I’ve already said numerous times underfloor heating systems (specifically the thermostats) measure the floor temperature and not the air temperature but ever the rule breaker, I wanted a smart, wifi thermostat. I specifically wanted something that was going to connect seamlessly to the Google Home “ecosystem.” The smart under-floor heating thermostat options at the time were abysmal; insanely expensive coupled with poor connectivity and/or features. I decided I’d investigate the possibility of using a Nest thermostat, like I already had in my house. *audible gasps*

After weighing up some pros and cons, I arrived at the conclusion that it was quite unlikely anything catastrophic would occur from ignoring the various manufacturer guidelines. If it ended up being useless or performed poorly I’d just swap the Nest thermostat for the proper ProWarm one (a 2 minute job).

So here’s a section about what you probably shouldn’t attempt, but is what I did anyway…

Nest Thermostat with Electric Under-floor Heating System

Electric under-floor heating kits don’t work with current Nest smart thermostats. Or at least they’re not intended to. Nest measures air temperature and an underfloor heating thermostats measure the floor temperature, but I wasn’t going to let a little detail like that stop me. Nest is also only able to switch upto 3 amps. I went to a great deal of effort finding a work around to get Nest to switch a potentially much higher amp circuit, only for my electrician to tell me that my heating mat wouldn’t exceed what Nest can switch anyway.

As a rough guide, take the total m² (area) of the heating mat and multiply it by the power rating of the mat. The resulting figure provides you with the heating output in watts. For the amps (loading), divide the heating output figure by the volts.

For example, 10m² of heating mat, multiplied by 200w = 2000(watts). Divide by 235(volts) = 8.5 amps. A Nest thermostat isn’t rated high enough to switch this on and off.

If you have a large heating mat that would exceed 3 amps, you need to use a solid state relay. The circuit will look something like this…

Essentially what you’re looking at is some 240v flex on the left providing the power supply (in reality this would be the 2.5mm twin and earth cable from your switched fused spur). Then you have the Nest Heatlink device, the Nest thermostat itself, a solid state relay (mounted to a heat sink) and on the right some more flex feeding the heat mat (in this bench test the flex only powered a lamp).

When the thermostat reads below the set temperature it sends a request for heat to the Heatlink. The Heatlink would typically then power on your boiler, but we’re having it power on the under-floor heating.

Instead of the Heatlink directly powering on the heat mat (which may draw way more amps than the Heatlink is designed to handle), it turns on the relay and the relay turns on the heat mat instead. This particular relay is rated upto 25 amps.

My intention was to install the relay inside a junction box, which my electrician confirmed would have worked perfectly (and was reasonably impressed with my handy-work) until he did some basic maths and realised the relay was pointless for my application. My heat mat was too small, even at 200w to overload the Nest Heatlink. Fortunately my electrician is incredibly patient and accommodating, qualities which coincidently do not come cheap. Worth it though.

For context, I wired the entire studio myself. My electrician came over after first fix to check my work (I did good). I continued with second fix and then he came back to connect to the house supply, install consumer units and test everything. The testing is essential. It also means even though I DIY’d it, I have all the documentation to show it meets building regulations. As well as peace of mind that it’s all safe.

If you have a basic understanding of domestic wiring, the bench test photo should be fairly self-explanatory. If it isn’t, it’s probably best to forget you saw any of this and to call an electrician. If you ask them to install a Nest thermostat on an electric under-floor heating system, be prepared they will likely tell you it’s a dumb idea and even worse, they’ll be correct.

I feel like I gained a lot more than I have lost from using a Nest thermostat instead of an under-floor specific thermostat. I can’t say I regret it in the slightest, it’s really, really cool. Three winters later and it is all still working flawlessly.

In Summary

My sensible, non-rule-breaking installation (excluding the tiles) was:

• ProWarm Insulated Tile Backer Boards 12.5mm
• ProWarm 200w mesh heat mat
• 3-4mm two-part self-level screed
• Ultra Proflex flexible tile adhesive
• ProWarm under-floor heating thermostat (not used)

Totalling around £600.

Electrician costs for the whole studio inc.:

• New consumer unit in garage
• Consumer unit in studio
• Armoured cable from garage CU to studio CU (~25m)
• Testing/fault finding

This totalled around £500. And numerous cups of tea.

Bad boy, rule-breaking installation extras:

• Nest Smart thermostat

An extra (somewhat unnecessary) £180.

Electric under-floor heating seems to me like a great option for garden studios. I cannot fault my installation, it suits my needs perfectly.

I’m by no means an electrician, a floor fitter or a tiler. I’m simply sharing my own experience and documenting my DIY garden studio project. This is entertainment, not education.

Thanks for reading! I really appreciate it.

What heating system are you putting in your garden studio? Why? Let me know in the comments…

// Matt

Note: Suedwind have now updated their product range and my exact model may no longer be available. The installation will be very similar across all their new models.

This is the first of my posts on a specific component of my DIY garden studio build. In this case, the heat recovery extractor vent installation, where I’ll cover the basic install and some of the unique problems you have to overcome with a timber studio install vs a traditional home installation.

The installation process will vary depending on what stage of your build you are at. A retrofit in an already built studio might be more difficult or not as tidy but it all depends on your construction.

My wall construction is as follows, from outside, in:

• 12.5mm Fireproof board
• 25mm treated battens
• Tyvek breathable membrane
• 12mm marine ply
• 70mm treated timber studs
• 70mm PIR foam (between studs)
• 25mm battens
• 25mm PIR foam (over studs, between battens)
  – with channels for wiring
• 18mm plasterboard
• Fully skimmed/plastered (3-5mm)

Total Wall thickness: ~167mm

I started my extractor install during first fix electrical. My timber frame was up, roof on, doors in and weather tight. I paused when appropriate to handle external cladding, plaster-boarding, decorating and finished the install during second fix.

Your wall thickness is very important as you need enough depth to accommodate the heat exchanger and filter. Sudewind cite 250mm as a minimum but it’s more if you also want to fit a silencer (additional foam insert).

250mm is quite thick, even for clad and insulated timber stud framed walls, but don’t worry, I have a solution for that.

I covered why I decided I wanted a heat recovery extractor for my garden studio and how I chose the Suedwind Ambientika in this previous post…

I’ll start at the end. This is my finished garden studio and Ambientika vent installation (the garden paving is a job for the Spring).

Keeping your garden studio’s temperature comfortable while allowing ventilation to prevent it getting damp is an interesting problem that in my case I’ve found the Suedwind Ambientika extractor vent solves very well.

What’s in the box?

There’s the main fan unit with internal vent cover, 50cm of ducting containing the ceramic heat exchanger and filter, the mounting plates and the external vent cover, plus instructions. “Advanced” models come with a remote.

Here’s how my installation went…

The very first step was to choose an appropriate location. I wanted it on the back wall, so the external vent wouldn’t be easily seen from the garden.

The Ambientika instructions can be a little weird to understand (while there is an English section, the translation isn’t great). I think they request that once installed the fan blades should be around 2.3m from the ground. For garden studios with sometimes limited roof heights this may not be possible, but you ought to be able to get close.

My aim was to place it as close to 2.3m as possible, while not cramming it right up to the ceiling or against the wall. I chose to leave 25-30cm between the fan edge and the wall/ceiling allowing room for airflow around the top and side.

Time to drill the biggest hole I had ever drilled. 160mm diameter through the entire wall thickness!

I hadn’t yet put up my plasterboard, so I cut directly into the 70mm PIR insulation.

The hole needs to drop down between 1 and 2 degrees to ensure any condensation or moisture drips to the exterior and not into your expensive new fan and interior.

My cheap hole saw only had a cutting depth of around 35mm so it would take me a few passes to get all the way through.

I had not yet done my external cladding and my expected total wall thickness was only going be be around 167mm. The instructions list a minimum wall thickness of 250mm plus I had a silencer that added/required another 50-70mm, so I had to build myself a little extension.

Knowing this extension would essentially be housing my ceramic heat exchanger, I wanted it to be insulated to keep my precious heat protected. So some PIR off-cuts were held together with foil tape and then masking taped temporarily into place so I could continue drilling my hole from inside at the same slight decline.

With the hole cut, I built a frame from spare timber battens and clad with Enviroboard ready for paint. Even gave it a little timber roof (with a decline for rain run-off).

A spare piece of DPC (damp proof course) was stapled on for extra weather protection, and a flap cut in the membrane wrap Tyvek taped to the DPC to⁶ help guide any moisture away.

I’d leave the little timber roof off until after I’d painted.

After paint, it was actually time for more paint because the Ambientika external vent was white plastic and that wasn’t going to match my anthracite paint, not one bit.

Some light sanding, grey plastic primer, more light sanding and a can of satin black later, my exterior vent was looking the part and ready to be installed.

Once I was happy with the plate fitment, I went back inside, worked out my finished wall thickness, added a bit to be safe, marked the ducting tube, slid it out and cut it down to almost final size and pushed it back home (I’d trim it flush with an oscillating multi-tool after the plastering was done).

With the mounting plate installed, I decided to paint all the exterior cladding before clipping the vent cover into place and finally screwing the little timber roof down, finishing the exterior part of the installation.

Pretty smart end result, especially considering no one will ever actually see this from the garden.

Back inside it was time to do a little wiring.

Garden Studio Extractor Vent Wiring

If electrics aren’t your thing, this is probably going to look a bit scary but this was first fix for all the sockets in that corner as well as an outside socket and Ethernet cable.

The extractor can spur off either your lighting circuit or your socket circuit. The important thing is that it’s fused. I ran 1.5mm twin and earth cable from the bottom left corner of the vent mounting plate, straight down to where I would fit a switched fused spur fitted with a 3AMP fuse.

Why 3AMP? Well because I asked the electrician and he told me 3AMP.

The Ambientika is entirely plastic and has no terminal to connect an Earth wire. I ran twin and earth because although it wouldn’t be needed now, maybe a future extractor would have an earth and it’d save future me fishing a new cable behind the wall (which I don’t find very fun).

So what to do with your spare Earth wire? Well, don’t leave it exposed and floating around in the wall. I sleeved mine, folded it over and tucked it into the space next to the terminal block.

The vent is also designed to accomodate a piece of flex cable which would run on top of your wall from a nearby fused spur.

I won’t get into the full details of my first fix electrics and all that trunking in this post, I’ll save that for another day.

In short, my thinking was the trunking made for a tidy install. It could be stuck into place with double sided tape, which meant less perforations in my foil vapor barrier. And it would allow for easier fishing of cables if anything needed adding in future. My electrician was impressed but mostly at how OCD and over the top it was. He said it wasn’t necessary and clipping cables to the wall studs would have been sufficient. (I prefer OCD to just “sufficient” anyway).

I was able to pause my installation to do the rest of my first fix and have the electrician check it over before plaster-boarding.

If you’ve already got finished walls, you’ll be either fishing a cable behind your plasterboard or just using some trunking on the outside of your finished wall. I have even seen people run cables externally to keep their interior looking as tidy as possible.

Before plastering I still test fit everything up, which is why some of my photos look out of sync.

Once the walls were plastered, I could fit my back boxes (also called dry lining boxes). In my fan corner I had two single boxes and a double. These were for my CAT6 ethernet connection, the switched fused spur for the extractor and a standard double socket.

Because I put my extractor spur on my socket ring, you can see three cables in that middle box. That’s the 2.5mm twin and earth coming in from the previous socket, another 2.5mm twin and earth looping just next door to the double socket, and 1.5mm twin and earth that runs up to the extractor.

I wouldn’t fit the face plates until after the decorating had been done.

And only then, was it time for second fix electrics and to finally connect up the sockets and the spur. Which all fit snug to the wallpaper with no gaps at all.

You’ll need wire cutters to trim your wires back to length and wire strippers to expose the conductive wire core. A small flathead screwdriver is used to screw the wires down into the appropriate terminals.

Wiring up the fused spur is really straight forward. They’re usually labelled up so you can see which wire connects to each terminal. Terminals labelled “Load” are what you connect your extractor wires to. The blue wire is “neutral” (N), brown wire is “line” (L).

“Neu’ is blue” rhymes and helped me remember when I first started working with electrics back when I was only comfortable changing a plug.

The mounting plate is screwed to the wall with appropriate fixings. Regular plasterboard wall plugs in my case. Your ceramic heat exchanger and filter is slid into your ducting tube, then the rest of the unit clicks into place.

And that’s it. The heat exchanger vent in installed. I’m writing this 2 years after I actually completed this install and it’s been working flawlessly.

Every month or so the light on the front turns red to signal that it’s time to clean, inspect and potentially replace the filter. My ceramic core has only ever needed a bit of vacuuming and I sometimes give the filter a rinse under a tap but that’s all the maintenance that’s required.

The air in the studio feels noticeably fresh, the fan runs almost silently. It’s only audible on the rare occasion it kicks into its higher speed. And most importantly, YES, it keeps the heat in!

I can heat the studio in the morning and it tends to stay warm all day without the thermostat kicking the heating back on unless it’s particularly cold.

I definitely see the Ambietika install as a complete success and can absolutely recommend them for this purpose, even if it isn’t quite the application Sudewind intended.

I hope you found this useful.

// Matt

(Scroll to the end for your 10% discount on all Keychron orders)

Apple’s desktop Magic keyboard is not quite as bad as the built-in monstrosity in the Macbook Pro but it’s still far from good. Using my Macbook mostly in a desktop setup with an additional screen, I’d also been tempted by the Logitech Craft but was put off by the multi-platform keys (I don’t want windows keys playing any part in my Mac setup, which ultimately ruled out all the Logitech options).

For almost 6 months I had settled on the Editorskeys Black backlit keyboard and it’s a perfectly nice keyboard but its membrane keys still left me a little unsatisfied. It would do but I was still searching for something else and I wasn’t even quite sure what that was.

I had liked the idea of a mechanical keyboard but there didn’t seem to be any Mac-specific ones out there and certainly none that were backlit, a feature of my Macbook Pro and my Editorskeys board that I wasn’t prepared to lose. I’d noticed various gaming peripheral brands bringing out RGB mechanical keyboards, even some “low-profile” ones that looked great but didn’t offer Mac layouts.

Then as if the keyboard gods had been monitoring my search history, it looked like my dream keyboard might actually exist. As an avid subscriber to Unbox Therapy’s YouTube channel, It certainly piqued my interest to see that Lew had got hold a pre-production version of a keyboard from “Keychron.”

This was a review of their K1 keyboard which when recorded was I believe still a yet unfunded Kickstarter campaign. Their proposed K1 was a low profile, Mac layout, wireless, mechanical keyboard! And it would even be available RGB backlit…. Sign. Me. Up!!!

It’s not an especially glowing review as Lew is clearly a fan of traditional chunky key mechanical keyboards but it was enough for me, it was exactly what I was looking for.

By the time I’d found the Kickstarter campaign it had already ended and was successfully funded. All was not lost, as Keychron was also selling pre-orders from their own website.

I did some more research, watched some other pre-production unit reviews and although not without its faults I still felt I had to get my hands on one. Pre-order placed for an 87 key, Mac layout, RGB unit in space grey.

I’d actually wanted RGB backlit in an all black chassis but this wasn’t available when I ordered and actually this wouldn’t matter. Some time later Keychron notified me they’d make some changes to the spec and space grey would no longer be available. There was to be a new K1 “version 2,” with updated firmware, come with both Mac AND spare Windows key caps, a key puller tool and an all black chassis, just like I wanted.

Months passed. They had some supply issues with their low profile switches but eventually having been shipped from their factory in Shenzhen, China to my front door in the UK (and miraculously avoiding any additional customs or handling fees) it arrived! And, oh boy was it pretty…

I mostly switch between solid red and solid purple but it has various effects and patterns covering the full RGB spectrum, including effects that respond to your keypresses; all very fancy but not really my thing.

Having not used a mechanical keyboard for about 20 years, it was a welcome reminder of how good a keyboard can feel. I fell in love with the “clicky, click, clack” as I aimlessly typed nonsense just to test it out.

Actually using it took a little adjustment as it’s currently only available in US layout which actually isn’t that far away from a UK Mac layout and now I’ve lived with it a week or so, it’s not causing me any problems at all.

In my excitement I hadn’t actually realised the layout would be US when I placed my order but honestly I don’t think it would have affected my decision to buy one and now I’ve got it and am using it to write this, I know it was a good decision. “#NoRagrets”

As I mentioned, it’s not entirely faultless. It is actually possible to trigger a keypress without actuating the mechanical key, this has been widely reported in the private Keychron owners Facebook group with mixed responses; some claim they absolutely cannot live with it, others (myself included) don’t really find it that big of a deal but would obviously rather it wasn’t an issue at all. I have to really try and intentionally get it to behave like this by lightly wiggling keys. In normal day-to-day use it very rarely occurs.

People have also reported issues with bluetooth connectivity. I’ve only used it wired (USB-C) so this has not affected me. However, if disconnects when your machine goes to sleep would be an issue for you, then this may not be your keyboard. To be entirely fair, there have not been many reports of this so could just be a few unfortunate cases.

Ultimately I’m really pleased with the K1. The guys running Keychron are possibly victims of their own success in that they’re struggling to deal with customer service issues as promptly as their huge corporate competitors but they really seem to be doing their best to assist everyone and keep people updated. I’d give them a chance and cut them some slack if you are unfortunate enough to have a problem.

They’ve made a great product and there are lots of very happy customers out there, including me.

// Matt

Check out Keychron here: https://www.keychron.com/

(Use my link and get 10% off: http://keychronwireless.refr.cc/matteasom)

I will do a more in-depth article on my garden studio at a later date once it’s completely decorated and I’ve finished the landscaping around it. For now here’s some useful information on vapour control I’ve picked up during the build process.

My garden studio construction

For a quick overview, my garden studio is made from 70x47mm C16 treated timber on a 120mm concrete slab. The roof joists and above door openings are 120x47mm C24 treated timber, all sheathed in 12mm marine ply and wrapped with DuPont Tyvek house wrap. It is a cold roof construction covered with EPDM. The external walls are clad with a 12.5mm fire-proof board. Doors are uPVC with toughened, gas filled double glazing.

All framing was done at 400mm centres and I’ve insulated with 70mm PIR foam boards between studs/joists, overlapped with 25mm PIR and another 25mm PIR between the ceiling plasterboard battens (spur of the moment decision). This gives me 120mm of insulation at its thickest in the roof, 95mm in the walls and 25mm at its thinest where studs are covered. All joins are foil taped.

The studio is heated by 5m2 of 200watt electric underfloor heating mat, installed over 12.5mm tile backer insulation boards and finished with tile.

There’s a full post on under-floor heating in garden studios covering exactly what I did, here: https://matteasom.com/garden-studio/2022/under-floor-heating-in-garden-studios/

Letting the building breathe

This is where in my research I’d found the most contradictory information. On the one side it was fairly well accepted that an air-tight, draft-free building would be an efficient building, retaining the most heat. On the other side it was considered essential to allow airflow through the building to avoid condensation and mould. No where really explained how it was possible to achieve both without compromising another.

While I was insulating my studio I began noticing the space feeling damp and musty. I have only doors so lack the usual vents found above uPVC windows, and I had been taping up literally every single gap to seal the building up tight. I’d essentially constructed an air-tight box somewhat overlooking that humans require oxygen to breathe and that there was no way for water vapour to escape.

While the Tyvek wrap allowed the cold side of the building to vent moisture, inside I was trapping everything in – both the heat I wanted to retain but also the air and water vapour within it. I needed a ventilation solution that wouldn’t compromise the insulation.

Evidence of Condensation

Condensation will occur when air containing water vapour meets a colder surface. This isn’t necessarily “warm” air it just has to be warmer than the surface for it to condensate on it.

I first noticed evidence of this during the installation of the second layer of 25mm PIR foam. One wall, awaiting its 25mm layer but already foil taped from the 70mm (between stud) insulation had a small amount of condensation on the top-plate which despite the insulated roof was still bridging cold through from outside.

Everywhere that already had this area covered with 25mm PIR showed no sign of condensation at. If you can stop humid air coming into contact with a cold surface by insulating it, you will stop condensation forming there. I was confident my insulation was more than sufficient but I could still “feel” damp in the air.

It’s quite likely that I contributed to this problem by introducing excess water into the room myself. I’d decided to bring some cladding off-cuts that had been rained on inside the studio to dry. They did dry but they released all the water they contained into the sealed room.

With all my walls fully insulated the only surface I was seeing condensation on was my door windows but the air was still musty and damp. I still needed a ventilation solution that wasn’t going to also vent all my heating I’d gone to great length and much expense to retain.

Heat recovery ventilation solutions

For a coupe of years I lived with a mate of mine who had an absolutely amazing “eco-house” designed and built as a case-study by Velux. It had every bit of eco-tech going and was incredibly energy efficient. One of its eco-toys was a mechanical heat exchange ventilation system. This device expelled the internal “damp” air, retaining the heat it contained while bringing in fresh air from outside.

The system consisted of a traditional looking air-con unit that lived outside in addition to the actual heat exchanger that was plumbed into the ventilation throughout the house. That same sort of system wouldn’t be unsuitable for my garden studio but knowing they existed and that technology had probably come on a bit gave me hope something similar and more appropriate was probably now available, and there is!

Single room heat recovery ventilation!

“Single room heat recovery ventilation.” This is exactly what I needed. It seems they were originally developed for bathrooms and public toilets but modern insulation techniques have made them perfect for maintaining good air quality, low humidity and without a huge loss of heat for normal domestic applications too, including garden studios.

I also found that there are “passive” vents that don’t require power. They’re a little smaller and much cheaper but none I found provided the heat recovery that was an absolute “must-have” for me. I felt with these you’d be paying more in the long run in heating bills that a heat recovery solution would have saved.

Most of the devices required only a simple DIY installation (providing you have a BIG hole saw) and contained a “humidistat” that would monitor the humidity (amount of water vapour in the air) and vent only when necessary.

After browsing through the options I eventually settled on a product called the “Suedwind “Ambientika” Solo. Sudewind have variations with wired and wireless remotes but for a garden room the solo version (which works autonomously) would be fine. The Ambientika also had the most low-profile and attractive design so wouldn’t be too imposing in the room.

Suedwind list a minimum wall thickness of 25cm, and my studio walls, even with cladding and plasterboard were still shy of this. They request this for good reason as the ceramic heat exchanger and filters sit within vent tube, they’re not part of the internal unit.

I also wanted to use a “vent silencer” to reduce noise from outside. This little foam device would take up another ~6cm of the tube thickness so I’d need even deeper walls. Fortunately this was barely an issue. I decided to just build a little insulated box onto the rear, external wall of the studio providing me with plenty of girth to accommodate the heat exchanger and silencer. It worked perfectly and isn’t anywhere near as unsightly as I had feared.

Aside from having to build myself this vent box it was a standard installation and it all went without any problems at all. Wiring was easy, you hook it up to a switched, fused spur from a socket and you’re done.

Only time will tell if this has completely solved my garden studio ventilation issues but so far it seems excellent. When it is on it’s very quiet and goes completely unnoticed.

I’ll post an update in a few months time and report how I’ve found it, pros and cons, etc. but “so far, so good!”

The Suedwind Ambientika is available directly from the Suedwind website but I found it selling cheaper on amazon and eBay, links provided below.

Suedwind Ambientika Solo on eBay…
Suedwind Ambientika Solo on Amazon…

Ambientika Advanced on eBay (comes with remote for setting functions manually)
Ambientika Wireless on eBay (remote + can wirelessly connect to additional control panel)

I’m so impressed with this thing that I might even be tempted to upgrade to the Advanced or Wireless model later on. They’re not THAT much more expensive and swapping would be easy. We’ll see.

Hopefully this helps out anyone struggling with condensation issues in their garden studio, insulated summer house, shed, or anyone planning a garden studio build of their own by filling in a gap of information I was unable to find anywhere else online.

Good luck with your project!

// Matt

“WorldPay Business for WooCommerce” is an old plugin, last updated in 2016 but WorldPay seems to have not updated anything either and it still works perfectly, if configured correctly.

It’s still available from the WordPress plugin directory here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/business-worldpay-gateway-for-woocommerce/

The original documentation was published here: http://www.mdsdev.eu/mds-worldpay-woocommerce/ but the site has since disappeared and the original dev is not answering support queries on wordpress.org.

A couple of months back I had a WorldPay WooCommerce integration and rediscovered this plugin as I’d used it before. However, like you, I couldn’t find the documentation. With a shear stroke of luck I found an old note I’d saved on my Mac with all the documentation kept purely for safe keeping. It finally turned out to be useful!

Hopefully this helps you like it did me. And remember, the plugin has a donation button on the settings page so you can thank the dev if his plugin saved you purchasing an expensive annual plugin license.

WorldPay Business Gateway for WooCommerce

V1.0.0 March 2016
Author: MDSDev
Email: info@mdsdev.eu

WorldPay Business Gateway for Woocommerce

For the payment to be registered in your wordpress/woocommerce installation your urls have to be accessible, it won’t work in localhost installations or on any installation that has a plugin for “under construction” that blocks public access to the website and to routes.

To be able to accept payments trough WorldPay Business you must register an account here

WorldPay Business Gateway for Woocommerce is a WordPress plugin which allows you to accept payments on your Woocommerce store. Shoppers are redirected to WorldPay payment pages, and their payments are processed by WorldPay. Shoppers can pay with their credit/debit card. Available payment methods: Amex, Diners, ELV, JCB, Laser, Mastercard, Mastercard Debit, Maestro, Visa Card, Visa Delta, Visa Electron, Visa Purchasing, V.me by Visa.

The package contains:

• The plugin files.
• The required “Payment Pages” files (redirects the shopper back to the website when payment has been made or canceled).
• The optional custom design for “Payment Pages”.

This plugin will:

• Send to WorldPay the order payments in HTML
• Redirect a shopper from your website to the WorldPay payment pages
• Test your integration with WorldPay
• Customise your integration – by giving the payment pages a modern look
• Redirect a shopper back to your website if the payment is canceled or successful
• Make sure your integration is safe and secure

This plugin gives you control over all features supported by WorldPay:

• Logging: save plugin events into a file
• Test mode: to test your payment method before going live
• Payment Response Password: add the worldpay payment response password on the shop for an extra layer of security to prevent hacking.
• MD5 Secret: add the worldpay MD5 secret for hash encryption on the shop to prevent hacking.
• Signature Fields: build your custom ordered signature fields used in the MD5 encryption.
• Merchant Codes: add up to 3 merchant codes you would like payments to go through.
• Payment Page Billing Info: display the shopper billing information on payment page.
• Payment Page Delivery Info: display the shopper delivery information on payment page if shop shipping is enabled.
• Payment Page Fix Info: allow shopper to edit the billing and delivery information on payment page.
• Payment Page Hide Language Menu: allow shopper to change the language on payment page.
• Payment Page Language: select the payment pages default language
• Payment Page Hide Currency: allow shopper to change the payment currency on payment pages.

Plugin Installation

WorldPay Business Gateway for Woocommerce requires Woocommerce 2.1 or higher to be installed and activated.

This plugin installation doesn’t differ from any other WordPress plugin installation, so you might be familiar with this process already.

If you are not familiar with the process please fallow this instructions:

• Login into the admin area of your website
• Go to “Plugins” -> “Add New”
• Click “Upload Plugin” link at the top of the page
• Click “Browse” and navigate to the plugin’s zip file and choose that file.
• Click “Install Now” button
• Wait while plugin is uploaded to your server
• Click “Activate Plugin” button

Congratulations, the plugin was successfully installed!

WorldPay Account Installation Settings

To be able to accept payment trough your Business WorldPay account you will need edit the installation.

To edit the settings:

• Login into your WorldPay Business Manager account
• Go to “Setup” -> “Installations” -> Press the edit icons from “Integration Setup : TEST” and “Integration Setup : PRODUCTION”. You will need to edit both to be able to test first and after that to accept live payments. If you don’t want to test the payment edit only the “Production”.

Edit the Installation:

1. Copy: <wpdisplay item=CM_payment_response_url> in the “Payment Response URL” field.

2. Check the “Payment Response enabled?” box.

3. Check the “Enable Recurring Payment Response” box.

4. Check the “Enable the Shopper Response” box.

5. Add an email in “Payment Response failure email address” field to receive emails in case of failure.

6. Check the “Attach HTTP(s) Payment Message to the failure email?” box.

7. Optional: Add a Payment Response Password for an extra layert of security. This password will be know only by you and Worldpay and the plugin will check this password.Remember this password you will have to copy it into plugin settings!

8. Add the MD5 secret in the “MD5 secret for transactions” field and confirm it in the field next to him. Remember this secret you will have to copy it into plugin settings!

9. Copy your plugin generated signature fields (default: instId:amount:currency:cartId) into “SignatureFields” field.

10. Press “Save Changes” to finish setting up the Installation.

WorldPay Account Required Payment Pages

To be able to redirect the shopper back to your website 2 payment pages have to be installed into WorldPay account. The “resultY.html” -> the ‘Successful’ payment Result page and “resultC.html” -> the ‘Cancelled’ payment Result page.

The Payment Pages can be found in the plugin folder under “payment-pages” folder. Go to your wordpress installation folder -> wp-content -> plugins -> mds-worldpay-woocommerce -> payment-pages or download the plugin from wordpress.org extract the files and look for the folder “payment-pages”

To edit the settings:

• Login into your WorldPay Business Manager account
• Go to “Setup” -> “Installations” -> Press “Edit Payment Pages”
• Select the installation you want to edit the pages for and press “Edit Payment Pages”

Upload all the files from the “payment-pages” -> “required” folder located in the plugin folder:

• Press “File Management”
• Press “Choose file” and select one of the pages
• Press “Upload”
• Repeat with the other files

WorldPay Account Optional Design Payment Pages

Includes a custom design for the Payment Pages.

To edit the settings:

• Login into your WorldPay Business Manager account
• Go to “Setup” -> “Installations” -> Press “Edit Payment Pages”
• Select the installation you want to edit the pages for and press “Edit Payment Pages”

Upload all the files from the “payment-pages” -> “optional-design-pages” folder and it’s sub-folders(icons and logos). In the logos folder replace the “logo.png” file with your logo (rename your logo to “logo.png”) to brand the payment pages:

• Press “File Management”
• Press “Choose file” and select one file at a time
• Press “Upload”
• Repeat with the other files untill all have been uploaded
• When all files uploaded press “Button Images” and add the links to the new uploaded icons
• In “Continue & Select Language” field add “~/proceed.png”
• In “Cancel” field add “~/cancel.png”
• In “Start Again” field add “~/startagain.png”
• In “Help” field add “~/help.png”
• In “Make Payment” field add “~/makepayment.png”
• When all the above changes have been made press “Set Images” to save

The final result

Plugin Settings

To be able to accept payment trough your Business WorldPay account you will need the “Installation Id” from your Wordplay Account.

To edit the settings of the plugin:

• Login into the admin area of your website
• Go to “Woocommerce” -> “Settings” -> “Checkout” tab -> “WorldPay Business”

Available Settings:

1. Check the box to enable the plugin for use and shoppers to be able to make the payment trough WorldPay gateway.

2. Add the title that the shoppers will see on the checkout page when selecting the payment method.

3. Add the description that the shoppers will see on the checkout page when selecting the payment method.

4. Add the “Installation Id” from your WorldPay account. Without the id you won’t be able to get payments trough the gateway. You can find the “Installation Id” going to “Setup” -> “Installations” in your WorldPay account.

5 Check the box to enable the test mode for WorldPay gateway. After you install the plugin it’s recommended to test the payment before going live.

6. Check the box to enable logging. Every action made by users it will be saved into a file on your WordPress installation. You will find the path to the file under the checkbox.

7. Add the Payment Response Password you set up in your WorldPay account. This add an extra layer of security for your transactions.

8. Add the MD5 secret you set up in your WorldPay account. This secures the payment method and won’t allow hackers to hijack the value before sending them to WorldPay payment page

9. Select the signature fields and the order you want to use to generate the md5 hash

10. Copy the text into your WorldPay account if you are using the MD5 security. Go to “Setup” -> “Installations” -> Press edit “Installation Setup” icon -> Copy the text into “SignatureFields” at the bottom of page

11. Add your merchant codes. This parameters will enable you to select which merchant code you would like payments to go through. You can add a total of three different ones.

12. Check the box to hide the shopper billing information on payment page

13. Check the box to display the shopper delivery information on payment page if shop shipping is enabled

14. Check the box to not allow the shopper to edit the billing and delivery information on payment page

15. Check the box to not allow shopper to change the language on payment page

16. Select the default language the payment pages will be in when the shopper gets redirects to them

17. Check the box to not allow shopper to change the payment currency.

[ This post is mostly complete – just some additional images to follow ]

Most of this information will also be relevant to other VAG (VW/Audi Group) cars so if you want 18z’ees on your Golf then this will probably help you too but might not cover the specifics or unique issues presented by your particular model.

You will need:

• A pair of Brembo 18Z calipers
• Mercedes ML500 v8 discs (with modified centre bore)
• Brembo 17Z brake pads
• Brembo 17z/18z pad fitting kit
• Audi Q5 (8R) front brake pad wear sensors
• Custom 17Z/18Z bolts with sleeves (bolts may need cutting down to size)
• Audi RS4 (B7) front brake lines (I went for HEL braided lines)
• Cable ties (to secure wear sensor cables)

(Main items linked to where I found them cheapest on ebay – you’re welcome!)

Parts in detail

Brembo 18z Calipers

The 18z caliper is a big, modern, and proven caliper designed and manufactured by the braking system Gods themselves, Brembo. It’s an excellent upgrade from most stock brake setups (and the fact they look really cool also helps).

The 18Z caliper for the Q7, Touareg and Cayenne applications all sit forward of the wheel hub. On the A4 they will sit behind and so we need to change some things when sourcing calipers from these vehicles. Each caliper has 6 pistons (“6-pot calipers”), 2 of which are much smaller. This smaller pair of pistons is designed to aid even pad wear and should be the first pair to meet the disc as it turns into the caliper. When mounted forward of the hub this smaller pair are at the top, rearward of the hub they should be at the bottom.

In order for the bleed nipples to remain at the top of the caliper and for the smaller pistons to meet the disc first we need to flip over the caliper link pipes and bleed nipples. This is really straight forward so don’t be scared to do it yourself. If you’re having your calipers refurb’d or powder coated, let them know you want the pipes flipped over before-hand and they’ll do it for you. In all cases I’ve seen the powder coater has coated the calipers with the link pipes in place and you don’t want to damage the finish swapping things afterwards. When tightening bleed screws and link-pipe nuts be careful not to over-tighten, they need only a light nip up (this the professional torque term).

Each calliper is marked “18ZR” and “18ZL” to denote which side it should be mounted. Putting the 18ZR off a Q7 straight onto on the left side of a A4 would technically fit, and the nipples would be at the top but the smaller pistons would be the top pair and the last to meet the disc as it rotates into the caliper, which is wrong. Just be mindful of this and check the markings, pistons and link-pipes for correct orientation before installation.

ML500 345mm x 32mm Discs

After a lot of research I chose to use the Mercedes ML500 V8 discs because they were the perfect width, offset and reasonably affordable. They are not quite as big as the 18z calipers can accommodate (350mm potential) but still comparatively massive against the standard audi discs. The only issue is the Audi hub is 1mm larger than the Mercedes and so an extra 0.5mm is needed to be machined off the disc centre bore, making it a total of 1mm larger.

I ordered my discs from Mtec and they modified the bore for me. I also had them drilled and grooved and added the optional black protective coating. Obviously this coating wears off the actual braking surface but protects everywhere else from rust and other road crud. All-in with the modification and optional additions I was looking at around £120 for the pair. Given that my B5 RS4 brake discs cost £150 EACH this seemed like a total bargain. For what you get and not having to worry about modifying the centre bore yourself, it is a bargain!

17z Pads

We’re putting 17z pads in our 18z calipers because the ML500 345mm discs are a little smaller diameter that what the 350mm’s 18z’s would usually use. The 17z pads give us a great contact area with the ML500 disc and none of the over-hang we would have got if using 18z pads, plus they’re cheaper too.

17z and 18z pads fit exactly the same so the fitting kit is the same too. I bought a Porsche Cayenne (2002>2010) brake fitting kit specific to Brembo 6-pots.

Pad Wear Sensors

This took a little trial and error to get right. In the end Audi Q5 sensors are what worked. They have the correct male connector, they’re long enough with enough wire connecting the two sensors that they can plug into both pads with no tension on the cable.

Don’t be tricked (like I was) into thinking Touareg 17z wear sensors will work. While they’re long enough and fit the calipers nicely the connector is female so won’t plug into the A4’s loom which is also female. Go for the Q5 (8R chassis) sensors and you’ll be fine.

Upon first installation I was getting a pad wear error. I believe this may have been caused by dirty connector pins or a pinched wire. Disconnected, sprayed the connectors with WD40 and re-routed the wire; all good. No errors.

Audi/VW 17z/18z mounting bolts & locking nuts

The carriers for the standard A4 calipers are threaded themselves and the standard bolts screw into this tread, the 18z calipers do things a bit differently. The Brembos have smooth, unthreaded mounting holes, like the hub itself. This means two things, firstly the new bolts will need to be longer as you’ll be using a locking nut to secure them and secondly, shims are required to reduce the size of the caliper mounting holes and prevent any movement of the caliper on the new bolts. You can buy a bolt kit which includes everything you need for around £35. There were some cheaper kits around but for a good quality set that will last, £35 was reasonable.

I experimented a lot mounting everything up to the hub in various orders and could not get everything together with the bolt heads facing outwards, which would give the most clearance. In my case I found I had to mount everything up with the bolt heads facing inwards on the hub and screwing the 55mm bolts in they ended up fouling the disc. I shortened each bolt by about 4mm with the angle grinder and filed it smooth to get the clearance I needed.

Tools required for Brembo 18z installation on B6/B7 Audi A4/S4/RS4

Assuming you’ve read the post “Removing B6/B7 Audi A4/S4 front brakes” and already have your calipers unbolted and hanging up out of the way, knock off those tiny original discs and congratulations! It’s time to fit your new brakes!

Here’s the tools you need:

• 21mm socket (1/2 inch drive)
• ratchet (1/2 inch drive)
• adjustable spanner
• 11mm open-end spanner
• 14mm open-end spanner (depending on your new brake lines – HEL braided lines required 14mm)

Not essential but highly recommended:

• 11mm brake line spanner
• paper towels/rags
• brake/parts cleaner
• wire brush (to clean hub)

Brembo 18z installation guide

Before you start you might want to spray the nuts on your old brake lines with some penetrating fluid where they couple to the car’s hard lines so that can start working its magic while you’re fitting up the new calipers. Reapply throughout the process as you see fit. These cars are old, things are rusty and seized, that just how it is. Penetrating fluid is your friend.

Time to build up your new brakes!

The pads will slot into the rear of the caliper. Take the metal clip from your fitting kit, apply pressure and slide the retaining pin through. This won’t be easy, you might need to place the caliper down on some card to really apply pressure without scratching the caliper paint.

The retaining pin goes through the hole in caliper, over the top of the clip and back out through the caliper. The pin head has flat faces which seat against corresponding flat spots on the caliper, make sure you insert it the correct way around. Tighten the supplied bolt into the end of the pin to secure it in place. Your pads are now installed.

Fit your pad wear sensors. These will only fit into the pads one way around and simply slot into place. Route the sensor cable securely in place with the retainer built into the pad clip and the channel built into the caliper.

Lastly for the caliper build, screw your brake line into the caliper body. Be careful not to cross-thread; it should not feel tight until it is almost all the way in. There’s no need to really force this down tight and doing so could damage the threads and cause the line to not seal correctly. Secure it but don’t over-do it. With my HEL lines tightened all the way down I am still left with around 4mm thread exposed.

This probably a good time to check your bleed nipples are tightened down too. Just nip them tight enough to ensure they’re not open – leaky nipples are bad (ask you mum).

Here’s where you get to learn from my mistakes as at this point I wanted to fit up the caliper and see if the dust shields required any modification or if some spare B5 RS4 shields I had would work. What I actually found was that none of the sheilds fit correctly, even with some modification and that it was impossible to mount the disc with the caliper already in place.

So with your caliper ready to go, place it to the side and prepare the hub for the new disc. Clean up your hub of any surface rust and grime (parts cleaner and a wire brush are great for this), now position your big new brake disc into place on the hub. If you find that it fouls your dust shield you can try and modify it to fit or just remove it – I removed it.

The disc will probably fall off if you don’t keep a hand on it, so throw a wheel bolt back in to keep it in place. I actually made myself an impressively ugly wooden spacer to hold the disc flush to the hub while I worked with the caliper.

Here you see the Mtec disc, an 8mm wheel spacer and my pallet wood “stop the disc from wobbling about” spacer. Now we install the caliper!

Forewarning: This can be a little awkward.

You’ll want to hold the caliper in place on the hub with one hand and try and push a bolt through one of the mounting holes from the inside, out with your free hand. You mustn’t push the bolt all the way though as you need to get the locking nut in place the opposite side. As long as you have pushed the bolt though the caliper and most of the way into the hub the caliper will hang on the bolt and you’ll have two hands free to continue the installation.

I found the easiest way to hold the nut was with an adjustable spanner gripped down tightly on the nut – this lets you hold the spanner upside down without the nut falling out like it would with a standard spanner.

Holding the nut in place, screw the bolt in with your 21mm socket and 1/2 inch drive ratchet. It will look something like this:

I believe the torque-spec on these caliper mounting bolts is “really f-ing tight.” You don’t want them to come off so summon the power of “Greyskull” and tighten them down like you’re He-Man. (Come back and check them in a couple of days just be be sure they’re good and tight).

You can either jump right into connecting up the brake lines at this point or mount up the opposite side and do both brake lines together. I decided to mount up the opposite side as at this point my old calipers were still connected and tucked out of the way and if anything didn’t go to plan I could still go back to little standard brakes without having to bleed anything. My recommendation is to mount up the other side.

So hopefully you now have both calipers fitted securely onto the hubs, over your new discs. It’s probably about time to hook the lines up then!

Before you disconnect the old lines, throw a wheel back on and check your clearances. Even with an 8mm spacer it’s pretty tight with these RS6 rep wheels.

When you disconnect a brake line you will want to work quickly but you don’t need to panic, without pedal pressure the fluid will only drip out very slowly leaving you plenty of time to reconnect your new line without making too much of a mess.

Wrap the lines in paper towel to catch the drips as the fluid is corrosive and will wreck the paint on your calipers and wheels if left to sit.

Make sure you have plenty of brake fluid in your reservoir, you do not want this to drop bellow the minimum level as you could introduce too much air into the system. Top it up and check the level after reconnecting each new line.

An 11mm brake line spanner is the perfect tool to disconnect the old rubber line from the car. A brake line spanner has a small opening to fit over the line but can then be turned to grip onto every face of the nut. A standard open ended 11m spanner can work but it has no ratchet action so it more difficult and doesn’t grip the nut as well.

I was doing this quickly so didn’t stop to take photos but I’ll go back and mock-up everything next time I have a wheel off to show you what you’ll be dealing with. For now, you’ll have to read and use your imagination.

Undo the brake line nut. I gripped the rubber line with some mole-grips to stop it turning with the nut. With the old rubber line disconnected, place the old caliper and line out of the way (fluid will leak from the line if you leave it upside down).

Flip around the 11mm brake line spanner and ratchet up the nut to the new braided line, you’ll have to hold the new line by hand to get it started. To tighten, grip the new line with an open ended spanner (14mm was required for my HEL lines).

Clean up and brake fluid spills and check the reservoir level. Top up if necessary any repeat the line installation for the opposite side.

Finally, secure any excess wear sensor cable with “cable” ties, it’s almost like they were made for this exact purpose!? The original wear sensor retaining bracket was part of the old caliper you just removed. I have heard the B7 RS4 bracket can be used but cannot confirm. Pretty confident cable ties are 100000% cheaper though.

If you leave the cables to flap around unsecured they WIL rub on your wheels and WILL fray and fail. Don’t risk it.

That’s the installation done, all that’s left is the bleed them. I’ll think I’ll do a separate post on brake bleeding, there are numerous ways it can be done but I like my cheap DIY method best – it deserves it’s own article.

Thanks for reading. If it helped you out, let me know in the comments, cheers.

// Matt

Got questions? Leave a comment. I only know the details of doing this on an A4/S4/RS4 but I’ll do my best.

Updates:

Andy Le wanted to know the spec of the bleed screws. I know my heads are 11mm but other than that I needed to measure one with my gauge from Pro-Bolt…

It had a touch excess wiggle room in the M10 hole but I think that’s because the M10 gauge is for 1.5 and 1.25 pitch threads and this was only 1mm. I’ve never in my life seen an M9 bleed screw so M10 seems most likely. Look at the photo and make your own mind up…

Hope that helps you out, Andy.

I’ll keep this short. All the top Google results didn’t work, even the nasty ones that involved adding lines to wp-config and my theme’s functions.php, nothing. File upload limit was suck on 2MB (tiny!!).

Solution!: add a new php.ini inside the wp-admin folder. (Not the WordPress installation root)

Chuck these lines into your new php.ini file:

upload_max_filesize = 10M
post_max_size = 10M

That’s it. Reload your dashboard and the limit should be increased.

Worked for me when nothing else did, maybe it’ll work for you. If nothing else I’ll refer back to this next time it happens.

Good luck!

// Matt

Get your front wheels off and preferably support the car on axle stands (cars are heavy, you don’t want one on top of you).

Removing your Audi A4 stock brakes – tools

To remove the stock brakes you’ll need these tools:

• 21mm socket (1/2 inch drive)
• ratchet (1/2 inch drive)
• breaker bar (1/2 inch drive)
• 11mm open-end spanner
• Penetrating spray/WD40
• wire (old wire coat hanger)
• paper towels/rags (to catch and clean up brake fluid spills)

Not essential but highly recommended:

• 1/2 inch drive, sliding tee
• your a4’s emergency 17mm wheel wrench (to use as a bar extender)
• lump hammer
• 11mm brake line spanner
• gloves (because brake fluid is hugely corrosive)

In an absolute emergency:

• Vice grips!

Space is tight behind your wheel hub where the caliper mounts and without a professional workshop lift it’s not as easy as just throwing the right socket onto a breaker bar and busting those nuts (so to speak). On a standard jack you can create some extra room to work by turning the steering around to full lock. This will allow you to get a breaker bar on one of the two bolts but the other will require some creativity.

I found the only tool that would fit into the space was a sliding tee bar with the emergency wheel wrench slid over it to create an angled extension. Sometimes this alone has worked but other times I’ve also had to bash on the extension with a lump hammer to free the bolt. Maybe you’ll have something more appropriate in your toolbox but I’ve helped swap the brakes on these A4s a bunch of times now and that janky wrench extension trick has worked every time. It’s just the perfect length to fit inside the arch.

I’ve specified half inch drive sockets as anything smaller and you’re almost certainly going to snap your tools. These cars are old, the bolts are old and unless you’re really lucky they’re seized on TIGHT!

Okay, let’s get stuck in!

Removing your Audi A4 stock brakes – guide

If you need your car for work on Monday don’t start this on a Sunday afternoon and expect to get it done by dinner. You WILL find a seized bolt or nut and it WILL take much longer than you would otherwise expect. Start on Friday night and set aside the weekend. If you’re lucky, the car Gods will admire your preparedness and bless you with no corrosion on your bolt threads (though I have never been so fortunate).

You will very likely need to spray up all your bolts with penetrating fluid (numerous times!) and leave it to soak in and do its job. Because of this chuck some cardboard down under your wheel hubs to catch all the nasty overspray and brake dust you’ll wash out, it’ll help prevent staining your driveway.

As mentioned earlier turn your steering to full lock and see if you can get a breaker bar on one of the bolts. Once you crack a bolt loose, throw the 21mm socket on the ratchet to finish it off. I only ever managed to get the breaker bar to reach the lower bolt (I think), which ever it was there was no room to get the breaker bar on the other and so the sliding tee bar came out.

Wrangle the tee bar into position around the suspension arms and find a way to slide the emergency wheel wrench onto it, experiment to find wherever gives you the most leverage. If brute force and swearing doesn’t budge it, hold everything in place with one hand and give the wrench extension some hefty whacks with the hammer. This has never failed to get these bolts moving even if I sometimes needed to revert to unlock spray or WD40 and come back to it later. That’s my method, it’s never let me down.

Once you get one caliper unbolted, get your wire ready to hang it from an upper suspension arm (you don’t want to leave it hanging from the brake line or wear sensor cable) then persuade it back off the disc. The hammer can sometimes come in handy for this too if your discs are old and have a bit of a lip on them.

When the caliper is free, tie it up out of the way with the wire and disconnect the wear sensor. Leave the brake line connected! If you lose the seized bolt battle with the other caliper you want to be able to put everything back together so you can drive to a garage and let them at it with their air tools. Plan for the worst!

Once you’ve tackled both sides, leave your old brakes hanging, they’re fine where they are. You’ll want to make sure your new brakes fit especially if you’re using non-standard parts. Until your new brakes are bolted in place there’s still room for you to screw this up and so we’re giving you a chance to put things back together if you hit a problem your toolkit or ingenuity can’t solve.

Assuming you’ve got your new brakes to bolt on and everything fits correctly, now we’ll disconnect those brake lines so you can connect up the new ones.

We’re going to leave the original brake lines connected to the caliper and disconnect them from the car. The flexible brake lines connect to the hard-lines with a spring clip and 11mm flare nut. If you don’t have any corrosion you might be able to get these undone with a standard 11mm open-end spanner. If they’re a bit rusty and seized a brake line spanner will grip better and reduce the chance of rounding the nut. Obviously spray on some penetrating fluid to help you beat the rust too.

If you’ve tried a brake line spanner and the nut is still rounding, I have had success with vice grips. They’re a last-resort as they will damage the nut, but if you’re at this stage you’re probably desperate and the nuts are already wrecked and need replacing anyway (a ball-ache job for another day – probably not a DIY).

Should luck and/or penetrating fluid prevail and you disconnect the old brake line, brake fluid is going to start dripping out. If you’re fitting new brakes immediately connect up the new line. If you’re not fitting new brakes I’d recommend plugging the line but you could just let all your fluid leak out if you’re a psychopath.

Do the same on the other side and you’re done; your original front brakes have been removed.

[ Photos to follow ]

// Matt

If you’ve managed to find this post, you probably understand my frustration, but let me quickly summarise…

You use the trackpad on your Macbook regularly, two finger scrolling up slides the content up/down with your gesture. Mac calls this “Natural Scrolling” and it’s cool. I like it, my brain makes sense of it; all is right with the world.

However! You sometimes use your mouse, it has a scroll wheel and when you attempt to use it, scrolling is reversed. I hate it, my brain can’t make sense of it and it feels like the world is ending.

What you might expect is that you simply turn off natural scrolling in the mouse settings. Nope! This turns off natural scrolling for the trackpad too and makes that even more weird. “Hey, Apple! This is total madness!!”

Reversing “Natural Scroll” on Mac for mouse only

What’s the solution? “Scroll Reverser for MacOS!”

Download Scroll Reverser. Open up the ZIP and drag the app into your Applications directory. Open up “Scroll Reverser” and you’ll be prompted that it is now running. Tweak the settings to get things working how you want, this depends whether you have natural scrolling on or off in your mouse and trackpad settings.

In my case I have natural scrolling off and my Scroll Reverser settings look like this:

Problem solved!

A big “thank you” to Nick Moore for making this app. Please consider donating if his app prevents you from throwing your expensive mouse at the wall.

//Matt

I really hope the TG decision makers can include non-shouty Chris more in the main show. He’s not the kind of guy to tolerate bullshit or play up to the camera for a pay-cheque so there’ll be no staged nonsense. Just put him in some cars and film what happens, that’s all it needs to be!

For an example of how anti-bullshit he is, here’s the article that got him banned from testing Ferraris and in my view earned him total “legend” status. It’s very good reading and an interesting insight into what car journalism was really like at the time and what it may even still be like… but not if Chris Harris has anything to do with it!

People have been unfairly hard on new TG, it really hasn’t been as terrible as some loud people on the internet have been making it out to be. In general I’ve enjoyed it and am glad to have a car show return to our screens. Chris (not the ginger one) actually brings the new show some credibility. He knows cars on a level so intricate it is frankly ridiculous and yet manages to convey these details in a way that doesn’t melt your brain and is actually super entertaining (way more entertaining than a 40mph top speed challenge at Blackpool seafront).

Matt and Chris (Evans) have been better than I expected, they both clearly love cars and have the kind of understanding I’d expect from rich people who have access to nice cars. Even if Chris (Harris) is totally loaded, his perspective brings something else. I’m not even sure I can pinpoint it, I just know it’s something I want to watch more than Evans shouting or Matt being cooler than me.

Do it for the viewers Top Gear, and do it before your budget gets sliced in half to match the viewing figures.

You can watch Chris Harris going fast and doing cool stuff on his YouTube channel: Chris Harris on Cars

How about that, I actually wrote a proper blog post for once!

// Matt