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I've been called a lot of things, clueless yes, rimless never!

I think you're right, as I remember the old chap at the sawmill telling me they didn't much like milling larch, because it wore the blades out pretty quickly.

No sorry, posting and working ? Fit them vertically and just buy enough spares to remove the bath footprint worth of u/s panels and then fit the tray and wrap in the spare panels.

- at a reasonable 50% efficiency you've probably got about 250W - assumes 10l/s flow, 5m head - formula, .............flow(l/s) * head(m) * 9.81 (gravity) * 0.5 (efficiency of generator) = Output (Watts)

http://www.renewablesfirst.co.uk/hydropower/hydropower-learning-centre/how-much-power-could-i-generate-from-a-hydro-turbine/

Don't ever lose a hamster in the house mate, it'll be years before it resurfaces

I’ve bought all my stuff (4 bathrooms, 2 WCs) from both, had no issues.

Yep they are one that really should be questioned ...! Ripped off Victoria Plum(b) and at one point there was a legal challenge on names but I think Victoria Plum(b) lost ... After-sales is borderline non-existent as @Lesgrandepotato has found out ...

I bought a shower tray from them that turned out to be utter shite. Other than that I have no other experiences. The T&C’s were neatly written to say that anything fitted could not be warranteed. So we have a uphill shower tray for the garden shower now.

Pizza on the menu tonight. Deb's job for today: gap-filling with foam. Decided to make us both a cup of coffee, came into the kitchen to find this working away quietly in preparation for tonight's pizza base. Took me a second or two to believe it was yeast and not Soudal. She's a bit of a practical joker..... Ian

I swear there must be some secret rule that if you know the difference between a pozi and a philips, you're not allowed to become a 'proper' tradesman.

The day I laid off my builder (nearly 2 years ago now and thankfully amicably, he knew the situation) when re realised it was the only way to stop the project bankrupting us was a sad day. There has been a lot of soul searching, agonising, hatred for the financial "situation", hatred for the people that made it so, despair that the house might never get finished, anger at the sheer number of problems that lie ahead to be solved. You WILL find a way. We have. Our build will be completed, 99% by me and SWMBO by our sheer grit and determination. It will take longer, a lot longer. There are ways to find the finance, sometimes from unexpected places, but we are resolute, we will NOT borrow, I would not wish to give any bank the pleasure of collecting interest payments from us, I still hold them in too much contempt to add to their profit. When it is all done, and the old house eventually sold, we will have our nice low energy comfortable house. It will have cost us less than we expected but the payback for that is I will have done a lot more of the work myself. Your end game remains the same. It's just how and when you get there that has changed. Take your time, don't make decisions in a hurry, you will find a way. Like most problems that have been thrown at you, one day you will thank the banks for the fact they saved you so much in interest charges by declining your business. They are the ones that will be poorer in the end as a result of their choices.

Further to the above, I've been digging out prices if anyone wants to mix their own pump corrosion inhibitor. It seems that the Graco Pump Armour is a bit pricey, at around £16 per litre, so it's worth looking at a cheaper option. For those that want to make their own "pump armour", then here's a recipe, using stuff from ebay. Bear in mind that this will produce the same concentrate as the Graco product, so needs to be diluted in the same way before use. This is actually a 60% ethylene glycol, ~1% sodium nitrite corrosion inhibitor mix, so near-identical to pump armour, and at least well within their production tolerance, right at the upper end, so it will, if anything, be slightly more effective. Buy 5 litres of 100% ethylene glycol (around £20 from ebay) and 250g of sodium nitrite (also from ebay) for around £5 (this is more sodium nitrite than needed, but it's cheaper to buy 250g). Mix 50g of sodium nitrite to the 5 litres of ethylene glycol and then add 3.3 litres of water and stir well. You now have 8.3 litres of "pump armour" concentrate, for the princely sum of about £25 (with enough sodium nitrite left over for four more batches). Dilute and use in the same way as pump armour. The only differences between pump armour and the above mixture is that pump armour costs over five times more, and this home made version doesn't have the blue dye and bittering agent that's added to stop people drinking the stuff. Chemically it will do the same thing, and provide the same, or better, level of corrosion protection. If you don't want to bother making the stuff, then buy blue antifreeze concentrate (not the red or purple stuff) and use that. Any decent brand of blue antifreeze concentrate will be around 40% to 50% ethylene glycol, and will have sodium nitrite as the corrosion inhibitor. The red or purple antifreeze is not ethylene glycol, and may contain silicates and be based on OATs, so is not suitable for this purpose. Decent quality blue antifreeze is about half the price of pump armour, so still a significant saving.

The snag is, that inflating the profit will just end up creating disillusionment for budding self-builders. They will get enthused by the idea of saving a couple of hundred thousand pounds from watching this programme, come to a forum like this and then realise that it doesn't work like that for most people, and that unless you're lucky enough to get a cheap (or free) plot you're unlikely to save a worthwhile amount of money at all by self-building. We decided to self-build to get exactly the sort of house we wanted, not to save money. I suspect the same applies to the majority of self-builders, they do it to get what they want, not to make a big profit.