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@AshleyFae "The issue is that it's some kind of old set up they're not allowed to provision anymore, so they'd have to upgrade a ton of stuff." They always seem to say that. It's just an excuse to get you to pay for the line to be upgraded, even if it doesn't really need it. I saw an episode of Grand Designs recently where they did that to someone who had knocked down their old place to rebuild on site. They still got hit with something like £75k for the leccy upgrade.

I have a black bin bag, folded back on itself to make like a bin. That plus lots of bog roll. Have the bog roll ready and torn into two sheet pieces. When you see a lot building up on the Cramer tool, stop, remove from the tool with bog roll and drop straight into the bag.

Whatever happened to a licked finger?

The building looks home brew to me with those blocks on the left added to the cast wall. If you have any kids with Lego, then suggest you make some walls in the approximate scale of your building, the roof in cardboard and then see how you feel about the structure. The struts make some strongish triangles which will tend to keep their shape, but without the hypotenuse, the other two sides of the triangle become properly ‘flappy’ as you said. Flappy isn’t a great state for a building - it only takes a big bad wolf with a strong huff & puff… An SE maybe?

Your bead is too big before you hit it with the Cramer tool. I bet you’re picking up a lot of wastage on the tool. smaller bead push firmer with the tool lots of wet wipes.

Well zero planning and no PPE were the first clues and then ~a dozen other things, some big, some small … probably warrants a separate thread.

I watched a professional silicone guy last summer doing windows and chatted to him a bit. He used a steady hand, sometimes bent the nozzle a bit, good quality mastic (Soudal, I think) and occasionally some little curvy wooden tools. And, I’m guessing, lots of practice. The tools looked a bit like this, but I think he made his own: https://www.dortechdirect.co.uk/catalog/product/view/id/2010.html

I’ve must have one of the few 3P flats in the UK. I’ve had it for ~30 years. Not a problem - but no real advantage either. Took 4 visits to get a smart meter ‘cos nobody at the DNOs handling residential can compute 3P. The whole idea of the modern self-build is to keep the energy consumption down. 3P allows 2x energy consumption of 1P (usually 3 X 63A vs. 1 X 100A). Great for lumpy use of leccy and 3X the export. Also for bigger machine tools :). But you can use VFDs to solve that problem. We have some friends with a Baufritz house with 3P ovens. Lovely. But in the real world… p.s. if you do the calcs you’ll find you will be using on average only a few amps out of your 100A supply, less if you have a bunch of self-use PV.

Been a slog. Up'd opus 5 to max (no idea if that truly benefitted tbh). Perseverance pays off with these things though. Near photo realistic landscapes now - eclipses previous effort by some margin. But nothing to show yet until we beat my personal PITA ..... WATER. Such a difficult thing to get right; always a compromise on visuals against performance. Usually looks cheap or just too "gamey". So like the terrain we are going for realism. To achieve that I decided we need to model how/why/where volumes of water form. My logic being if its physically correct then we are half way to it looking correct. Usually these things are cheats like most 'effects'. So we use what we have plenty of... ram. For shadows for example to save a few computes per pixel the entire landscape shadow map is pre computed (around 8gb) - it can be optimised later size wise. Doing just this knocked 5% of render time. I can think of similar such tricks for water.

You could minimise the staining by masking with tape but set the tape a tad wider than where the bead will finish. Do not plan to peel the tape off to give you as clean edge. That will lift the bead edge slightly and allow muck in to go mouldy. I used the Cramer kit. Cleaned the area first with Multisolve. https://flic.kr/p/2dDDn5o https://flic.kr/p/2dHvhmN

Rank amateur idjiot here... I am pretty poor at this, and whenever I have to reseal the bath I always have to use masking tape down both sides of the joint. If doing it that way the 2 things I have to watch are 1/ make sure the sealant is as thin as possible at the point it squidges out onto the masking tape to minimise the small edge step you get when the masking tape is removed and 2/ Remove the masking tape before the sealant goes hard with a steady continuous pull with the tape angled away from the join. To get it off I would guess that it may be best to use something to cut the silicon film along each edge of the joint so that when the film is removed it doesn't pull on the main seal line. I would suggest maybe using a test piece to replicate the issue and then experimenting to find a removal approach that works best. (a) Suggest SWMBO has a girls weekend away and then use the opportunity to catch up on a few DIY jobs involving silicon, so to speak. (b) Accidentally damage the seal line with your screwdriver whilst doing another job, ask to be punished and promise to make the perfect sealant good again. (c) Explain where it went wrong and then leave the country.

I've had a closer look and those two perpendicular girders on the left don't actually join onto the brick wall there so I suppose the two struts I want to remove can be explained as stopping the end gable wall above the brick work from flapping about. But I don't see why those two struts can't be removed and maybe I can attach the end gable wall to the brick work to stop any flapping about. Also the four other roof struts as seen in the pics don't appear to me to have much purpose although I don't need to remove them so will leave them in place.

You might be right as I was hoping a non cylinder system would also handle a bath but that cunning plan was worthy of Baldrick. Short of upgrading, a single phase 12Kw heater won't cut it so might end up with a cylinder, maybe helped by a heat pump which if suitable would be nearby. Still investigating so keeping options open. Thanks for your comment. Does anyone have experience of non electric hot water taps without a reservoir? I read a 20yr old comment saying a 9.5Kw electric hot tap was only just good enough for their kitchen sink. I guess with a reservoir that's better, but would prefer to avoid a 24x7 10w overhead. I'm learning so much, which is another way of admitting I know so little Thanks to everyone commenting.

You’d just install a 3ph CU, and install a 1ph conversion kit? Same I’ve done a load of times, and just balance loads / phases in anticipation. 3ph is borderline luxury though for most UK domestic residences, and you can pull a heck of a lot of juice down a 60a/80a fuse, with 100a giving you bags of headroom in most instances; even if this is an all electric home. EV chargers will modulate to help so can be managed easily, plus @AshleyFae you can go for a hybrid inverter so the DNO only see’s the single combined output vs two AC coupled inverters (if PV + battery). Export limitation can further support, plus it’s always best to plan to self consume as much as possible over each 24hr ‘solar day’. All quite easily doable with some sensible advice!

Charlie DIYte has a good video all about applying Silicone [link] and makes some good points. A Cramer Fugi kit is being used. The issue we are getting is a shiny film being left on the tiles after tooling. Hopefully the photo below shows this OK. That raises to questions: How do we stop that from happening How do we remove it when it does happen I'm having some high stakes conversations with the person on this job (SWMBO), so a tactful solution would go a long way.

Just make sure you get a full 23KVA / 100A single phase supply. It might be worth discussing with the electrician to do the wiring as though it were going to be 3 phase, i.e. split between 3 separate consumer units, initially fed from the single phase but would then be easy to swap to 3 phase should it ever become available.

Its a solid steel frame construction built in the early 80s everything is sound as far as I'm aware. The wall on the right is just a 'temporary' sheet metal partition add on. The wall on the left is a solid block wall its strong as an ox. But those struts I'm referring to obviously connect to the steel super structure, I only need/ want to remove the two that protrude down low as seen in the first pic.

I need to do 1st fix of the above onto the 12mm ply/vcl which forms the airtight outer skin of the 50mm service cavity in the walls. Is there some kind of stapler which would help rather than large quantities of clips?

We were quite keen to get three-phase because it gives us more options for AC installs and solar/battery set ups. We just got our 3-phase quote back and it came in at ~£150k lol. 🤦‍♀️ Annoyingly, three-phase is actually very near to our plot. The issue is that it's some kind of old set up they're not allowed to provision anymore, so they'd have to upgrade a ton of stuff. And since we don't "need" 3-phase we'd have to foot the bill for all those works. Anyway, moving on!

Is the door insulated? I see little point if not.

So we have been going around the houses, but I think we are coming back to where we started ! Young fitter laid the central strip 4 tiles wide on Tuesday and was happy to transpose tiles I had loose laid first. Has done a good job I think. Just one place where you can see a curved line reflecting the light and running fingers over it shows there is a small ridge running across the planks - he has agreed those tiles will need to be taken up and relaid. Seems unclear why the ridge (about 50mm wide) is there - whether it is the floor finish or some excess adhesive. Seems to follow a curve like a trowel would. He has loose laid another central strip 4 tiles wide alongside for me to rearrange as I see fit. Overall the current layout looks better than the first go, but still has a tendency to look marbled as much as planked when viewed over a distance. Not that keen on that, and so we took a rain check on laying more to go around the Amtico range again to see if there might be something better. Only found 2 alternatives, both Spacia, somewhat lighter in tone, and a 1 week wait to get even 2 boxes to lay out - Amtico completely control distribution and pricing, nobody except them holds stock. Only signature has a larger image area. Twice the price and we cannot find one we like. No featured oak in Signature, and generally speaking the designs/colours are a little more artificial and processed looking for our taste. Going with the fashionable parquet or herringbone layouts would hide the limited image size more, but we always wanted to emphasis the straight through line and feel these layouts may perhaps go out of fashion again. As time has ticked by I have grown more accustomed to the Spacia featured oak, and as it is more mid tone than our alternative of Alverton Oak or Westmere Oak, will probably hide dirt/marks better. So likely to continue with that this week now. I attach some photos and welcome any more comments though. I have some wider 184mm plank featured oak - interestingly in a box of 9 planks there are only 5 unique planks (or 1.2 sqm). So even less scope to manage repeats. I see no reason why Amtico should use such small image sizes in 2026 in the digital age. I can only suspect they have done it the same way for 25 years and have lost zeal for continuos improvement. Large open plan rooms is a long standing trend now. Digital image handling is now trivial. By not having any large floors on show they conceal their weakness, but ultimately evasion is never a good business plan. I have used ChatGPT to investigate other LVT makes and Moduleo seems to have the biggest pattern repeat, but have seen some mixed reviews. Yes I have become like a mum's net poster here, fussing over detail that may soon be forgotten if we ever finish. But in posting at length maybe someone else will find the factors in our deliberations might influence their own decision making. I would certainly encourage people to buy 2 or 3 boxes of an Amtico wood design and lay it out on their floor before making a final decision.

Good luck. That seems an awful lot for one person to get done in a single day, but I hope you get there.

Had an ASHP survey last week and engineer tested the pressure and flow from the mains. incoming pressure is 5.5bar so he noted a PRV should be installed. I'm happy to install one straight after the mains stop cock, however should I install a strainer before the PRV?

We’ve had an awful lot of success over the years by building relationships by using the same peeps repeatedly and once we feel we can trust said dudes we get a feel from them of the scale of the job but then go with day/hourly rates. We’ve found that if one always insists on fixed priced arrangements unless as mentioned above, it’s bog standard stuff then to be safe the person quoting needs to allow for the possible googlies awaiting them. If you look at it from the other end of the contract they may well think ‘I don’t know you or how much of a pain in the bum/slow payer you are so I’m gonna build in contingency’. Kerr-ching. Might be worth an hourly rate discussion with both. I’d certainly investigate further as the £1.6k sounds a bit too good to be true. Oh, and might be worth ensuring that both quotes include necessary disbursements.

I would guess those struts stop the wall falling in or out. It looks like a single block wall with no visible pillars, and I think of such as being very weak. The sort of gable truss that forms the top half of that wall is just sat on top. There is no strength in the wall to stop it bulging in or out and that would result in the gable wall failing. I think. No doubt a grown up will be along soon to clarify.