All Activity

+1. Lots and lots of small gentle taps with a claw hammer, to turn the plaster to dust, and let it fall away as you gently follow the cable. Don't use a chisel, as that can damage the cable if it turns or isn't at the same depth etc.

Glad it was saved at some stage. I have tweaked many an architect's final design, countless times, and they often don't care much for my input as principal consultant / pro-rata consultant, as they feel they are far better qualified and I should essentially go mind my own business. Unfortunately for them, they soon realise I don't just go away. A good architect accepts challenges or interjection, a poor one barks and bites, but all of it goes towards getting the client the best possible home, built without compromise, and that should be any professionals focus when they have been paid good money by said client for this 'privilege'. FWIW, that architect, who was too far up her own arse to come to site, would have been binned at the start line. In terms of pain; before you abandon a standing seam roof, check with several membrane installers for issues caused by heat and cool (stretching and quilting) as the roof is a long run and that's not without it's own issues. None of us want to see you back here because that went tits up.

Agree - take the hit on making good and just knock out a bit more plaster/wall - then you'll be able to carefully feed the cable back as you tease the old box out. If its just a 40mm move, there'll be a sizeable bit of filling around the new box anyway.

So just to recap, no taping for cold roof but better to tape for warm roof?

Multitool with metal blade and cut each side of the cable into the grommet holes on either top or bottom whichever is easiest one cable out then the box will come out and the other cable will feed out. Or cut away more plaster and slowly tease and feed the cable backward into a U shape on the outer side of the box and pull slowly and gently try not to snag the cable and hope the rubber grommet protects against the sharp edges. There will be some making good required but that’s par for the course I’m afraid!

Probably lots more to come, scuttlebut on the street is that complex system coding with LLMs is not as effective a professional team almost no matter how much compute you apply the directional control takes vast amounts of work, the smells are far greater, the code is much more complex - longer and much harder to maintain and it looks like you are finding similar challenges.

That's all very true and we had all the best intentions out the outset of the project. It was never our intention to end up in this much pain. We instructed Architect #1 in December of 2021, by the February we had already become concerned about a difficult working relationship. Something there was really no way we could have spotted earlier. She was a handful, very opinionated but oddly never wanted to come to site. It's a tricky site, with level changes and lots of trees, which was all documented in the Topo, but what we didn't think to consider and neither did she (because she never came here) was the magnitude of trees in the neighbouring gardens that would be impactful on the design. When it dawned on me, I called it out and she played it down. I ended up having to fudge a "topo addendum" of sorts, plotting estimated tree positions and approximate heights from our garden. It was clear at this point that we weren't getting the service befitting of the fee we had agreed (£16,000 for Riba Stage 4a). We plodded on through the difficult relationship, with all concerns and queries getting played down and brushed aside. After a massive mistake in ground levels on the plans (the building was drawn 700mm too high out of the ground), we really were getting annoyed. Long story short, we had to call it. The attitude was unbearable, it was pushed myself and SWMBO into tension and that's something we will not tolerate. So, with planning permission in hand, we broke lose and initially felt liberated. However, it soon because obvious that we needed further details/drawings and I think we can all understand just how reluctant any professional is to take on someone else's work, and so began the turbulent journey of trying to get our remaining detailing done. We "interviewed" 5 Architects in choosing the one we went with, she had us thoroughly convinced, she truly seemed to get it, us and the site. How wrong we were. That was just the start of our problems, but I think most of it stems back to that. Having an Architect who is not truly on your team is, I think, the most fundamental "clunk" in a self-build journey. The guy this post is about was technically Architect #3. Architect #2 turned out to be almost as bad as Architect #1, but now we are back with the firm of Architect #2, but with Architect #4, a really good guy and he's been worth his weight in gold.

So I need to move an electrical box about 40mm to the right - see photo. The box is loose but how do I get it out without damaging the cables ?

Primary current client and I have been detailing all of these things intensively, for just over a year before the concrete went down; from the orientation of the new house, grounds / founds / superstructure, and everything from the interior architecture to the roof. Night and day difference in how other projects are run to this, with near zero stress or surprises; doing things in the 11th hour sucks, yields poor results, and causes stress / expense / delays. In this additional slack I have come up with many other ‘new’ ideas which would likely have never had a chance to materialise if issues were popping up weekly / monthly which consumed us all. The aforementioned roofers have brought all sorts of value to the project, including innovative (proven and approved) methods for bespoke flashings, how to detail gutters and facias, and more, including providing examples. They’ve also helped the client to detail the DIY roof prep-work ahead of their arrival. There’s plenty of good (and very good) people out there, but too many people leave this vetting and selection process until it’s too late to book these busy / good trades, and the low-hanging fruit as it’s often bad. Use the time you have before planning wisely folks!!!

Found it and ordered one.

Hmm. Is this not an (expensive) solution looking for a problem?

They travel. I’m contacting them for 2 of my current clients projects. I’ll PM you.

Yes, the mono-mode physical fibre cable standard has been around since the 1980s when the computer industry started using it. Today’s cables are better at minimum bend radius, etc, but are still the same basic 9 micron cable - G.652 as @MikeSharp01 says, it’s what you put at either end which changes - emitters and receivers - and not the physical cable. people always confuse speed with bandwidth - throughput (xx mbs) is basically speed x bandwidth. you can’t improve (much) on the speed of light, but bandwidth technology goes on leaps and bounds with little end in sight !

So just to jump back on this thread. I read on line that the fibre is passively split (passive optical split) in the box up the pole so contention can be an issue but since I am the youngest in this area, and I am eligible for free prescriptions, I don't think it is an issue given that the fastest speed available for this area is 1600Mbps. But as it turns out I rang BT and spoke to a different call centre person who conceded that it was odd that my address was the only one without a fibre connection so he spoke to someone and came back and filled in a form to have the situation reviewed. It just takes speaking to someone who is prepared to think slightly rather than read from a script. So I await their response. I have also joined the Openreach developer portal but I think that might be a rather complicated and cumbersome route, with risks for such a simple change in a database column. (i.e. the column with the header "FullFibreAvailable" simply needs to be changed from False to True). It's so frustrating that there is no way of communicating that the reason is simply that the house didn't exist when they set up the infrastructure and there is no link between the Royal Mail's database where my address is registered and the Openreach system. I am a persistent fellow though. There is practically no 4G here, nor gas or sewage. It is in the sticks so it is a miracle that my stepfather was able to get fibre as the ADSL line was 2Mbps on a good day.

2 days of futility . yes Claude does it all Been fighting ! minstral in pi harness (expletive deleted) me slower than Daniel on a Friday behind bike shed . Swapped back to 120b and qwen next coder - another folly . Chat just picks apart its patch suggestions that no matter how we change the harness / structure prompts it ain’t happening . More chance of Stella saying yes . 3rd time she usually does but always wants a couple of quid extra . So ! I am back where I started ! Chat does prompt . 120b does scout / repo . Chat then does patch . Added a ledger ( think Claude does similar ) so what’s been done / what’s outstanding all recorded so I don’t get the dementia chat next day saying “ xxx needs doing “ when we’ve already done it . I’ve written more abuse at ChatGPT in the last 3 days than probably 3 yrs of posting on here . I *think* now we have a workable system . Local llm doing reasoning and or patch generation not good enough yet . So now finally rather than (expletive deleted)ing about on tools I’m back on the actual project . Sometimes you need a sore hand to learn not to touch it .

The download speed is often throttled by the server supplying the data so it can serve many clients at once and not your network speed.

Our equipment has just been upgraded by the provider so we now get 100mbps compared to 50mbps before. The higher speed is free for a year but after that an extra £5 per month, or you can revert to 50mbps to keep the same price. for normal browsing of streaming tv etc I really can't see any difference. the only time it might make a difference is if you have a big download to do. i suspect at the end of the year we will revert to 50mbps. Both are far better than the max 3mbps and unreliable connection with frequent drop puts with ADSL.

Cricky there is more - a group in Japan build a .125mm glass fibre with 8 cores enclosed in its diameter they managed to crack the Peta bits per second barrier.

I have been searching around the forum for details of the plug spec. I am sure i have seen it before but cannot find it today. I know the resistor within is 4k ohm. I need to source the plug. Does anyone know what to order please?

However such restrictions could be voided by the law, as has happened in Germany. I'd sit on my hands for now and see what happens.

The rise of the professional politician? https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/the-diversity-of-mps-elected-in-2015-pale-male-and-stale/

Yep, tackle 100% of the floor in 40, 40 and 20% tranches and you may have cracked it! But don't quote me! My justification for spending more than I probably have to on Bldg Notices is to avoid the situation on a subsequent sale where a buyer's solicitor queries BC approval for specific works. If the answer is, or suggests that, that you don't have it they express 'outrage', which can be instantly dispensed with if you drop the price by £x000. I will have in my hand a sheaf of BC approvals and stand my ground.

So if it is "50% or more", then you can raise 40% of the floor boards for access or repair and it does not apply !!!! With a single bound you will be free !!! (I think) Though you may have already gone past this.

It won't open for me. Anyway, between us we have found a few interpretations. Authorities can't make up their own rules so these are their interpretation and could be argued with. I haven't done the important thing of looking at the actual regulations. It's the sort of issue that tempts one to just do it, which is generally a bad premise. By which I mean that the OP intends to make sensible improvements but what if the bco refuses or demands something else? And yet, it would be possible to cause harm and that should be controlled.

PPPS Nope that looks like a PR error with the date - they published the news on 1st April - not a good look but the research was presented in March so 450 million times stands!