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Nearing completion of our main bathroom. Just one more item to buy before I can complete the plumbing. A concealed lavatory cistern to fit inside a vanity unit (with a back to wall toilet) You would think this would be straightforward. Not if "the ladies" are involved. You see the most important part of selecting the right cistern, is nothing to do with it's technical merits, choosing a reliable brand that can be serviced easily,, choosing on price, or any other such requirement. No, the ONLY criteria is choosing a flush plate that both of the ladies like. Nothing more, nothing less. So starts many hours of internet time. The first thing you find, is most suppliers treat the flush plate as an insignificant (but essential) sub purchase. IF you are lucky you will find a small poor picture of it. You have to be really really lucky to find a decent picture of it, and if you actually find someone that tells you the size of it then you have done really really well indeed. Then add in the complication, that daughter has chosen a large rectangular flush plate for "her" bathroom (I think it's grossly over size but my opinion does not matter) and SWMBO has chosen a smaller square flush plate for the en-suite. At least both flush plates are the same make. So now we know what we want, we just have to buy it. That's when you find some suppliers (a lot actually) only stock one of the flush plates. Then when you eventually find one that does supply both types and are a keen price, you start on the long journey through "checkout" only to find they want to charge £99 for delivery to our "remote" location. We finally got them from these people, https://www.bathroomsupastore.com/ being the only ones we could find with both flush plates, not quite the cheapest prices but at least they only charged £9.99 delivery. So please, nobody tell me that Tavistock cisterns are rubbish, because as already stated that is not a "selection criteria"

My personal view is that the idea of using massive loops of buried pipe for cooling is barking mad. It would cost more than a cheap air-to-air cooler, would cost a small fortune in ecologically approved antifreeze/inhibitor and overall there would be little, if any, saving over the whole life cost. If someone already had UFH plus an ASHP then it's a doddle to just switch it to cooling mode, accepting that almost all units sold in the UK will have this mode well-hidden, because if MCS approved for RHI they are supposed not to allow cooling.

Bought a new screen for my boys iPhone. 6 days later I enquire "what's that bright green rectangular thing banging around in the washing machine?" Yup.

I think you probably need to think of something like PV with the same mind set as when choosing a kitchen or bathroom. Do you invest in a more expensive kitchen because you know it will add value to the house and give you added pleasure when living there, or do you go for a budget kitchen, accepting that by the time you come to sell it may well look a bit tired and need replacing, or a bit knocked off the sale price to compensate? In my view a fair bit of the value of PV comes from self-consumption, a little bit comes from the FIT and generation payment, and an unknown bit comes from the "feel-good" factor of doing something to reduce your carbon emissions. There's also the rapid drop in the price of battery storage - that's now down to around 8p/kWh lifetime cost, and dropping. When it gets down to around 5 or 6p/kWh then it makes sense to fit it to increase self consumption from PV, I think. I reckon that with about 6 kWh of battery storage at 6p/ kWh life cycle cost we would knock our electricity consumption from the grid, even in winter, down to virtually zero, nd would easily use no grid electricity at all for around 8 months of the year.

Griselinia purchased from the garden centre. Never heard of it before but they had 3 types! I have bought one variegated and one not and will see how they do. The guy who advised me said that the variegated one which is a bit larger had been growing there outside for a year and had done well, and the green one was less of a known quantity as it was a new arrival. Thanks @PeterStarck and @Cpd I will be planting them tomorrow.

This is a short update and precursor to the updates that will soon follow once the ground works begin in April. Having now finally sold our house in Milton Keynes, we have made the move north to the Scottish Borders. We are renting a small flat, few miles from our building plot. At £320 per month, I was never going to win the caravan argument! We lost 7 weeks due to the initial sale /purchase of our house collapsing at the last minute. Fortunately it was sold very soon after being put back on the market. On reflection, that was not such a bad thing as the weather in the Borders was awful during February and early March, so any planned works would have just been put off anyway. So, with less than 4 weeks until the ground works start, we have set about making the necessary preparations and will also use the time to visit various contractors, suppliers and utility companies to confirm arrangements. Such as – BT Openreach, Scottish Water and SP Energy. I have to say, my experiences with the utility companies thus far continue to be good – meetings arranged and kept, very informative and happy to help. All approaches were via the internet and their respective websites. Connection costs for all 3 will amount to less than £2k, as BT Openreach appear to be indicating that the connection costs will be covered by their allowances. We have paid a visit to the window manufacturer, based just outside Newcastle, to discuss lead times - All seems good. We will also be popping over to the stone merchants to ensure they are aware of the time frames we are now working to. To help cement in our mind that the choice of stone we are going for is correct, we will visit a couple of buildings in the Kinross area of Scotland to see it for ourselves. It’s OK seeing various stone options on a sample board but you really do need to see it on a larger expanse. It’s not like wallpaper, once the stone is up, you can’t take it down again!! We have met with the Timber frame supplier and our builder who will undertake the majority of the work alongside his various tradesmen colleagues. We lost our plumber two weeks ago due to unforeseen circumstances but thankfully we have another on board. The builder confirmed all systems are go for the 16th April - We will be travelling slightly further north to Dalkeith, just south of Edinburgh, to have a cup of tea with the guy responsible for making and erecting our oak framed car port, log store and man shed! His surname is quite apt – Mallet – I kid you not! I have also secured a site toilet on a long term hire - £25 per week was the best price I could find. This includes a weekly service. Just need to sort out the scaffolding company and plant hire for the TF as and when it arrives. Hopefully come mid April I will have some construction photos to post, so until then take care and thanks for reading. PW.

We have a Quooker Nordic - been going strong for 18 months and only had to descale it for the first time this weekend. Customer service is pretty good, they send you a free descale kit on request.

Don't know about paper blinds, but we are setting up cardboard doors.

Welcome to the Borders! I’m out on the coast, but also originally from the south of England. We used J Thorburn for crane hire. Very good and very reliable even changing the day at short notice when the TF company said they weren’t ready to deliver with pretty much no notice. We opened an account with Jewson and got the rest of the hire from them, or the builders hired it in themselves as you can’t claim the vat back for plant hire anyway. We just used the farm behind us if we needed a forklift and they sent a tractor down for peanuts so worth getting to know if there is someone who will do similar where you are. Scaffolding company was terrible so I won’t recommend the one we used. We also opened an account with Dove and used to mix and match depending on who was cheaper. Both Jewson and Dove have branches in Berwick. If you get some time to get out and about there are some great coastal places; St Abbs, Coldingham Bay and Eyemouth in the Borders, Dunbar, North Berwick and Gullane in East Lothian, Bamburgh Castle and Lindisfarne in Northumberland. Mackays in Eyemouth is supposed to have the best fish n chips for miles.

Eye mask? Had the issue myself a few years ago. Was an easterly facing window too.

I know it's shot vertically (I forgot) & the wind makes it a little hard to hear, but this is an update as regards the windows etc. Meantime, our lovely warranty people are being difficult again,asking for photographic evidence of *things they've already inspected* which are now buried or behind walls! ..... they *really* do not like SIPS!

Thanks. I will go and cost it up. This might have to be well and truly hidden and not mentioned for BC sign off.

@ProDave, take a look at this, obviously not WRAS compliant in any way, but frankly if it's only feeding the cold supply to a thermostatic mixer shower I don't think that would bother me much. :

Found just the thing: https://www.epluse.com/en/products/co2-measurement/co2-carbon-dioxide-switches/ Just need to find the price - probably expensive, as NDIR CO2 sensors themselves are a bit pricey.

It's easy enough to do, but not sure if there's an off-the-shelf product that will do it. You can either sense relative humidity (not great as an indicator in my experience - too much seasonal variation) or sense CO2. The latter is far better and a lot more reliable. Just set the MVHR to come on if the CO2 concentration exceeds a set limit, say 500ppm or so, then stay on unless the CO2 concentration drops below about 450ppm. It will normally sit at around 400 to 450 ppm with either the MVHR on or the house empty. I'm not sure if you can buy a controller to do this, but I had thought of building one, as my house monitoring system already monitors CO2 level anyway, so it would be pretty simply to just pull that data out and use it to control the MVHR. Not a practical solution for you, though, unfortunately.................

You should be able to run a startup script that does everything you want, with the question mark over the lid switch/sensor and whether or not there is a way to disable that from software (may be, take a look in settings and see if there is a way to disable it - probably a "do nothing" option when closing the lid). Sadly writing Linux scripts is not my forte, I've done a few, including one recently to force my new Linux box to default to 1280 x 1024 graphics on power on (before this res wasn't even a settings option), but @TerryE know a millions times more than me about it. One issue is where to put the script so it executes at power on, and that varies from one Linux variant to another. For example Mint 18.3 needs my resolution changing script in a different location to Lubuntu, even though both are forks from Ubuntu. Best place to get an answer might be to ask on Reddit (accepting that there are some socially dysfunctional individuals there). There's a sub-reddit for Zorin OS here: https://www.reddit.com/r/zorinos/

Yes, should be. AFAICS, the main issues are sourcing them at a fair price (the Heatrae Sadia price is just very silly, and the Greentherm price isn't much better) and the fact that they do need annual cleaning. The latter seems easy - they recommend a standard bathroom cleaner like Mr Muscle plus the long narrow brush they can supply.

The idea is you pre heat the cold water feed to the shower with the wast recovery, and the thermostatic mixed adjusts to use less hot and more of the pre heated cold to maintain the same temperature.

I'd say it definitely needs a thermostatic shower to work, as it's going to take a few minutes to heat up and during that time the "cold" water feed to the mixer will change in temperature a fair bit. A thermostatic shower should compensate for that change with no adjustment needed to the shower temperature. You can buy them from Ireland for €243 from here, not sure of the shipping cost: https://www.greentherm.ie/product-category/energy_efficiency_upgrades/waste-heat-recovery/ Or HeatraeSadia stockists sell the same unit here for about £800: https://www.heatraesadia.com/products/renewables/waste-water-heat-recovery/megaflo-horizontal-izi-shower-heat-recovery-unit (yes, rip-off UK is seemingly alive and well...................)

Just spotted this on Ebay: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Zypho-Shower-Waste-Water-Heat-Recovery-Unit-Ref-Z8DWPT3-/222784960687?clk_rvr_id=1477658349340&rmvSB=true I've checked out the manufacturer, Zypho, and although the efficiency isn't great, the units look like they are easy to fit and reasonably affordable. If retrofitting to an existing installation, then this unit looks a better bet, as it accepts a 40mm inlet and outlet pipe and is under 500mm long: https://www.zypho.eu/products/zypho-izi/ Payback periods look reasonable, too.

No, she agrees, no point in having an energy efficient house to save “ fuel” then spend it on running a tumble drier when we have other means to do the same job for free!

And ain’t that the truth!

Thanks Lizzie Ive seen them around it hadn’t realised there were so many variations My wife is quite sold on the planters also

I've got a similar conundrum. I'm happy enough to go for the PV, but can't quite decide whether mains supply needs to be on E7 or not. PowerNI's rates aren't bad- 15.56 day 7.92 night and a standing charge of 7.7 (that's before any discounts that I'd likely be under the threshold for) vs a best 24hr rate of 14.59 I'm thinking an early morning recharge of the TS- either by immersion or ASHP- would be pretty good value on the E7...

Two local builders where I grew up,Geoff & ‘Mole’-Geoff was the brains & decided if they had two jobs requiring a ladder,they’d go to Mole’s job (a re-roof),Mole would get up there with his tools & lunch & Geoff would then take the ladder to his job :))

I did..........I put pull out wire baskets in one of the base units and a pull out corner unit https://www.bullerltd.co.uk/blind-corner-optimiser.html The carcases are a standard size so I can't see a problem?

Mine too. Just something about getting the roof tiles and the colour of the render agreed by the planning department.

We had one. Was used for shelter / storage but not secure storage (wasn’t ever even locked ). It was a bit like Meccano putting it together but it wasn’t too bad until one particularly bad storm here (even for these parts) of the type that if you weren’t holding onto something you literally blew over. The whole thing ripped away like a sardine can (the bottom part was still attached to the base) and ended up like this! Get a proper storage container!

It is still a tough one. I maintain with today's low FIT you need to WANT PV and be happy to spend the capital as just another part of the build. Otherwise if you look at it purely as a money exercise, the big question is "what if we sell before 11.7 years?" It will by that measure have been a "bad" investment.

Around the 3min mark

I have materials sorted and deposits paid on gate and garage door ex vat. Our planning was very odd and and non specific as to materials other than roof covering. Nothing at all about garden.

Good (relating to the scope of the development) purchased before the sign-off date for the purposes of completing the development clearly fall within VAT reclaim category. My pint is that we were very much cash constrained towards the end of our build, so we deferred any non-essential expenditure until we had sold the old house and moved into the new one. That being said, the deferred stuff was not trivial: glass doors on en-suites, fitted cupboard doors, all of the external landscaping works. Delaying BCO sign-off after this has save us maybe £4K so far.

When I used to climb poles for the post office ( pre BT) I was always getting in trouble for, not tying the ladder to the pole, not wearing a belt( if the job was quick I just used to stand on one foot and wrap the other leg around the pole), the best one was my ladder was not long enough to reach a house facia once so I parked my commer van on the pavement and put the ladder up from the roof of the van ( it was safe because the ladder rested against the ladder rack) my boss came round the corner and just stood there with his mouth open?.

Do BCO have any say in muck away, that is your responsibility, I would perhaps have thought that all you have to do is prove to the carrier, of the muck away, what they are conveying.

I think the key word here might be "Alternatively". As I read it they are recommending further sampling or "Alternatively" send all the spoil to a licensed waste centre. That would probably be expensive so ideally you want to do what Declan proposed which is to dig some out, sample it and if no asbestos found send that lot for regular disposal. The question is can you write your own method statement that documents the process or will the BCO insist you get an expert to write it. I think it will need to include things like warnings to site workers for example.

I read that differently. Domestic purposes is what is reasonable for the enjoyment of the dwelling as a residence. It is reasonable to expect deliveries to a house and what I believe that clause is to stop is the use of the road for commercial purposes - for example you turning the house into a haulage yard. If that's not the case, how can you classify a "domestic vehicle" as the only way would be by the DVLA classification and I know that there is no "commercial" class in that data ...! I would suggest you ask the PC to support the view above, changing that clause is irrelevant as it's not enforceable as it cannot be defined in law.

I had to repair the roof on our former rental house. So I had a section of Kwikstage up and my roof ladder up on the roof. I left the roof ladder there overnight (though not the ladder to get up the scaffold) I cam back next day and pondered why the roof ladder was was not on the roof, but leaning against the scaffold.Surely it had not been that windy? Then I noticed the roof ladder was covered in paint. The cheeky blighters a few doors down were painting the outside of a house and decided it would be okay to borrow my roof ladder without asking to paint the bit of gable end where the terrace was staggered.

I once has the uneviable task or repairing a tv where the cat had sat on top (when tv's were big enough for a cat to sit on, and usually warm as well) and then peed down the back of it.