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What a difference a week makes in the world of self build – Half the roof has been slated, the additional insulation has arrived on site and the liquid screed has been poured. The guys who did the pour travelled from Perth, some 95 miles away – very few firms seem to do this work north of the Border it seems. The ground floor was prepared by the guy doing the UFH and our builder. The company doing the screed dispatched a surveyor the day before in order to measure the various heights and lay out what they called “spiders” but are in fact tripods. Each tripod was marked with a height and a spot so that if they were knocked over they could be re-positioned correctly. The pour was completed within an hour and should be ready for “light” traffic on Monday. Talking of which, we should see the Joiner, roofer and builder on site to start the internals, finish the back section of the roof and start building the external chimney respectively. Enjoy the weekend.

We're really impressed with our very first generation, pre-production, SunampPV. It's performance is really very good indeed, and most impressively the heat losses from it are negligible - the case doesn't even feel warm when it's fully charged. It's made a tremendous difference to the temperature in our services room. When we had a thermal store in there it used to get exceptionally hot, hot enough to damage the oak door, and that was with loads of additional insulation around the store to try and stop it wasting heat. Now the services room is barely warmer than the rest of the house, and that's all down to the very low heat losses from the SunampPV. Bearing in mind that our SunampPV is "old technology" compared to the current versions; we were most definitely early adopters (I think the first on here to get one). I have no doubt that the performance has improved a great deal since our unit was made, which bodes well for anyone thinking of getting one now.

Sunamp PCM34 is now back on and I am advised that Andrew Bissell will be releasing a letter as a follow up to the previous letter later in July once he returns from his holiday. This is all I know for now. Kind regards For and on behalf of Sunamp Ltd. AndyT.

That's a rather nasty threat to make. I'm not sure I would feel comfortable about dealing with someone threatening to walk off a job just because you don't agree to them ripping you off on another piece of work. He's not the only one who can review a working relationship.

@JSHarris our resident chemist will tell you how to get some, or make some and if your lucky how to not make an explosion while making some.

Only if your whole house can be heated in the depths of winter with less than 8KW and at low temprature (UFH or low temperature rads) I suspect in the middle of winter your oil boiler is working a lot harder than that.

Gary, if you are out of step, then there's no hope for the rest of us mate.

Yes, the panel wires are always live in daylight, and as they are wired in series in each string you can get quite high voltages at the ends of the strings. However, the inter-panel connectors are designed to be hard to accidentally touch the live part, and a fault may well be physically obvious. The most common faults are pulled apart connectors, where something has physically dislodged them, and burned out connectors, usually where the internal crimp to the cable wasn't made properly. The latter usually shows as heat damage to the outside of the plastic part of the connector. Less common faults can be an interconnect ribbon within a panel failing, which usually means replacing the panel. Take a meter up with you, capable of reading several hundred volts DC, and check the panel voltages at the connectors as you go. That way you should be able to trace where the fault is in the string. Because your working on live DC, albeit isolated from earth, a pair of insulated gloves would be a good idea.

They remove them then 'tamp' the liquid down with a piece of tube with some handles. It has to be tamped a bit - nothing self levels except for water!

As are rubble / aggregate bags!

I try to make trips worthwhile. When we make a trip "down south" I scour ebay to see what I might be able to buy while we are down that way

I lined the large planter that I've put some trees in with heavy duty DPM. It seems to work pretty well. I left it open at the bottom, with plenty of drainage.

It's cheap enough to buy, and a bit of a pain to prep, as it involves growing a culture and then purifying it. I prefer simple bucket chemistry where you can just make stuff without the complication of growing cultures of stuff like aspergillus. The ebay above links look reasonable to me.

Thanks. I just wanted a low maintenance able to withstand high winds in a coastal area garden. Never dreamt that I would need to add drought tolerant to the list as it's generally the excess rainfall we have to worry about here ...... Thankfully it's clouded over here a bit this afternoon. Never thought I would be happy to see cloudy skys!

Thank you....yes still builders lurking - or disappearing without finishing jobs - but nicer aspects beginning to come in and I am going to enjoy them after the hell of the build.

Good luck @newhome I tried it once in hanging baskets but didn't notice any real benefit. Ive had a typical English garden and a tropical garden this one is going to be mediterranean...drought tolerant, wind tolerant and able to withstand baking sun which is more than can be said for me I am melting here!

Not quite the same thing but since you mention heat tolerant ... It's never been heard of up in Scotland but we are now at the stage where it's almost a mini drought here. Like 8 weeks without any rainfall pretty much other than a little overnight on a couple of occasions and it's been unseasonably hot and sunny. I was wondering how to mitigate against the plants drying out in the planters without constantly watering them. The established plants in the main garden don't seem to suffer from this, or not yet at least. I read a few articles where it said that if the compost was mixed with the hydrogel contained in babies nappies it would 'store' water for a time and release it slowly as the rest of the soil dried out. Other articles said that the opposite happened as the hydrogel didn't like to give up its water so it had the opposite effect. So I did half the pots using hydrogel and half without. Will see what ones fare best lol. I bet @JSHarris already knows the answer to this

what about some cheap pond liner. It would probably need some holes along the bottom unless you're planning on growing bog plants.

As I think has been said, it prioritises hot water over space heating. For the Combi LS it takes nine hours to heat the water tank fully from 15C to 55C when the outdoor temperature is 15C. So the time taken increases as the outdoor temperature decreases.

+1 With all this lovely weather we've been having snow seems like a distant memory but the photo below was taken in February this year on the Yorkshire moors. AWD Mondeo with winter tyres - the performance in snow is amazing.

Bloody jobsworths! Can't you apply directly to the VOA and ask them to remove it from the register alongside sending the council your evidence? They cant charge you council tax if it's not on the register.

I've heard of applying to the council for a demolition licence, but not this. I think the photos + invoice should be enough. If they really want to push it, cancel the direct debit and dare them to take you to court over it!

That makes sense. Thanks for that.

You will be painting it every 8-12 months to be honest. You can buy 20 litres of floor paint for about £40 from the guys that go round supplying business units on industrial estates etc. anyone who has a painted floor in a business premises knows that floor painting is about a 8-12 monthly maintenance program. For a domestic garage I could recommend the 2 part epoxy stuff, expensive for the good stuff but it should last you a really long time if it is just normal domestic traffic.

You could put it round the back where the store thing is and it would be sheltered. You would probably want an 8kw one just because of the size of that TS

Use a PCM34 UniQ fed from Genvex as a buffer for UFH and DHW pre heat, the cells take water at 45C. (This is what my ASHP does). The PCM58 cells do the hot water top up.

ASHP ..?? I’d consider it ..! Set it to 42 and put it into the bottom of the tank and then let the boiler just do the top up ...

That won't work..... You need a constant flow at 34-36c and I doubt a Genvex can do that

They are a refrigeration unit. Search for air conditioning engineers and you will find hundreds - a service is as simple as check the gas pressure, clean the evaporator and a general check over. I have 2 AC units serviced every year and they take less than an hour each - takes him longer to get the protective cages off !! A quick search on Yell gave me this list... https://www.yell.com/s/air+conditioning+services-northern+ireland.html

Sorry !! For those that don't need the eRp rating stuff, there are loads of brand new 5kw and 9kw Heat pumps on ebay at the moment for less than £1k delivered.

Might get some freebies! http://www.abacusmg.co.uk

I may be out of step but the prices don’t seem unually high to me Given how busy the building trade is at the moment Getting a fixed price quote can be very difficult and getting a builder to stick to them Even more so If possible I would get three more quotes for the whole job and see how they compare His labour and material costs will be going up on a monthly basis also Some of the material hikes have been hard to take Blocks in short supply in the run up to 2016 Christmas 40 % rise in Jan I bought my English oak one supplier wanted an extra 50% Blaming brexit I pointed out that it is grown here in the U.K. He said yeah it doesn’t work like that

Ok each of those toilets should take an hour to strip the flush mechanism and replace. If you can get spare seals for them then I would get a set for each and get the plumber to swap them as he goes - by the last one he should be done in 20 minutes..! Tower shower is an unknown until he gets it off really - best thing is buy a replacement that is bigger all round than the existing one then you know you won’t have an issue. That could take a day to strip and fit in reality. Last shower is just fitting to a wall and I’m sure is a like for like (standard pipe centres) so a couple of hours most. I’d say a couple of decent days at most - offer a bacon sandwich on day 1 and I reckon they will get it cracked !

I can see the need to not upset tenants but it seems to me that the quality of a job isn’t influenced by whether someone will invoice or not. Cock plumber invoiced.

This is what's going to happen... A quick Avery label on the pc saying "SATIN" gets stuck over where it says MATT. Then a bit of silver tape where it says "SCRUBBABLE MATT FINISH"...

10% lower than @JSHarris's numbers here. .....IF you can get anyone to work for you that is. On Tuesday, the owner of the largest local independent BM was asking me - perfectly straight-faced - if I knew anyone who needed a job

I DON'T want it shiny! Her first comment was she wanted to gloss the ceiling ffs. She reckons matt looks too dull....??? No shit! I get the feeling that as it looks new for longer, the Dulux Diamond Matt recommended here wilI look really good. Maybe it's her pikey genes coming through and the attraction to shiny things? Another gem on the horizon, she didn't want a lit mirror. Now realises you'll be in your own shadow at the sink! :) She tried turning it saying "I thought WE didn't want a lit mirror as they're expensive?". With the money spent so far it'll hardly break the bank! "No dear, you wanted a plain flat mirror hence my buying the f***ing demister pad to go on the back!" Selective memory the fairer sex! It's not like the cooking or the other is going to get any better here after 26 years so I reckon Diamond and be damned! Worst case she doesn't speak to me for a week. Best case two weeks / a month!

See reply above. Buy the unit yourself and just employ a plumber and an electrician who are capable of RTFM. The LAST place I would look for such a thing is a "renewables" company.

In the glorious land of the hotpress where John and I both hail from I have found it nigh on impossible to get someone that will fit a monobloc ASHP. All of the renewable companies 'specialising' in ASHP want to install split systems and were quoting £7k for the unit alone. Makes it very difficult to justify when pennies are tight during the build. Much in the same way as PV without grant incentive.

Go for matt on the ceiling. Why do you want it shiny?