User:John Stumbles

I am a practicing plumbing & heating engineer. I do mostly domestic work - anything from changing a tap washer to installing a central heating system or bathroom (although I mostly concentrate on the smaller jobs). I live and work in Reading.

For most of my career I worked in electronics, computer networking and lately hardware/software testing. I have always been a DIY-er, from messing around with electrics (including mains!) as a child, through to renewing the plumbing, electrics etc on the first house I bought in 1978. When I was made redundant from my IT job in 2002 I started doing small plumbing, electrical and general house maintenance jobs for friends and neighbours. I did a short training course at the local Technical College to acquire my NVQ in plumbing (actually called "Domestic Heating") followed by training for and taking my ACS and becoming CORGI registered. However I am still interested in IT and have converted to running Linux on all my home PCs, which are almost entirely Microsoft-free.

Having been a DIY-er in my now professional field I am keen to share my knowledge with other DIY-ers through the uk.d-i-y newsgroup and this wiki. I also find that many of my clients are interested in how their plumbing and heating systems work and what choices are available for them in extending or replacing them etc., and I hope that the articles I write and contribute to here may be uesful to them. I sometimes work alongside clients DIY-ing parts of jobs for themselves e.g. installing boilers for clients who install other parts of a CH system for themselves.

I am also particularly interested in energy conservation and efficiency as I consider that climate change is a real threat to our planet.

--John Stumbles 13:08, 16 December 2006 (GMT)