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Well my “ Discount offer of the week” has been my best score yet, as some of you will know I am doing my build on a rock bottom, empty barrel budget, it’s just the way things are and I’m ok with it, but it has made me develop lots of contacts for getting materials as cheap as possible and recycling / up-cycling wherever I can. One of my local builders merchants has undergone a radical management and staff changeover and cutting a long story short after introducing myself and showing them photos of my project the new management have offered me a substantial amount of materials for my project for free.... today I have started the long job of collecting pallets of paving bricks, they have just gifted me a minimum of 15 full pallets of brand new but old stock pavers in a variety of colours. It’s an unbelievably generous offer and I am over the moon, though I am not ready just yet to go crazy with my paving it will in the future make my property look totally amazing. Really overjoyed that there are still some incredibly friendly and generous people out there who are happy to help out a stranger doing a budget build. Living in my remote location with a small ferry ride and two miles of steep dirt track and restricted to only being able to carry 2.5 tons means I am going to be very busy next week hauling all my plunder back !

Yes, pre-"options for change" which closed loads of places, including the establishment where I worked (I ended up moving from Cornwall to SW Scotland). Looking back through my logbook it seems most of the Nimrod test flight stuff was in the early to mid 1980's, mostly associated with the acceptance to service of Stingray I think. Somewhere I've still got one or two of the car stickers that someone at St Mawgan made up to poke a bit fun at the anti-nuclear protesters who had a semi-permanent camp outside the old nuclear bomb dump there. They mimicked a design used by CND, and had an orange mushroom cloud in the centre, with "Nuke 'em till they glow" as the text around the outside...

Really not an issue.

I fitted Vitra basins and toilets throughout, found them to be surprisingly good quality for the price. Well worth a look, IMHO (not that £1600 jobbie, obviously...)

The mistake you are making is buying as a package ..! have a look for Vitra porcelain. And rimless are not all they are cracked up to be.

We had a similar situation - rented out the old house when we bough the new as market was flat and then managed to sell it to fund the build. From memory, the CGT is calculated from when it ceases to be your primary residence to when it is sold - so if you have it valued now prior to marketing for sale it's the gain over that period that is relevant.

SAMPSON is primarily an AEW and missile defence radar, capable of tracking multiple fast-moving targets, using what was (at the time) a really innovative multiple, independently steerable, beam-forming capability. The facility on the hill is now mainly a training facility, as the old ASWE establishment was demolished a few years ago (it was my parent establishment when I did a tour as OiC Funtington and OiC Fraser in the late1990s).

Any borehole type submersible pump will do the job. A cheap Polish one can be had for around £100, that will generate around 8 to 10 bar. We run our house at a water pressure of between 2.5 bar and 3.5 bar, and that's plenty for a powerful hose or sprinkler. I've used (in fact am still using at the moment, as I still haven't got around for swapping it for the new Grundfos that's sat here) one of these Polish pumps: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/IBO-3-SQIBO-0-75-Borehole-Deep-Well-Submersible-Water-PUMP-House-Garden-cable14m/172266241359?hash=item281bde3d4f%3Ag%3AVDIAAOSwm3ldZ89L&LH_BIN=1

Aaah tell thee lad, aahve sin sum stooof up at 'is place as 'd mek yer ears droop wi' jealousy. Sum on it, well ..... it'd tek thee breath. (tr. kill you)

I'm knackered enough to wince at the word barrow, & now the quack tells me I have an arthritic shoulder : but thanks for the thought. A couple of years ago, I bumped into a local who makes concrete like this .... one of the most interesting guys I have ever talked to: cheerful as a Lottery Winner. Top bloke - for a self builder. I can feel a little visit coming on. If you've driven past Lancaster on the M6, you driven past his 'yard' 50 meters from it in fact.

What about an old concrete panel led shed/garage, that could be put back together in ground?

Here they are. Important lesson (for me anyway): cheap IBCs need an expensive boudoire in which to keep them. And that's a shame. The idea of waterharvesting attracts. Time to hunt for some cheap (how to put this? ) surplus concrete: a bin end if you like.

Cacti or Manchester ?

I believe they can although I haven’t tried it, but I also understood that a Tradfri item needs to be set up on Tradfri hub first. The reason for the two hubs is that the connection between the Hue hub and lamps on one floor and lamps on the floor above was intermittent at best, with nowhere to put an intermediate device to daisy chain it all together, hence a Hue zone and a Tradfri zone pulled together using HomeKit.

A family acquaintance who made a packet selling his business has spent several million on a massive house for him and his wife. It's turned out to be an utter nightmare, including him ending up in court with the builders. Money doesn't necessarily obviate the need for the traits @AnonymousBosch listed imo.

Have a word with @pocster about walk on glazing.

So if it's just 2 story, putting in a new wall fan is no different to an upstairs bathroom in a normal house, so perfectly doable and that is probably your easiest option.

I wonder if this could work, could you have heating in the entire slab but add additional insulation under units to keep the heat from rising up under the units. Silly idea. What you think peeps.

I'm nearly ready for starting this job, Bit of an odd situation in that the timber I ordered doesnt match what I ordered I ordered 900 lm of 30mm siberian larch 154 lengths at 3m 90 lengths at 5m What was delivered was 154 at (minimum) 3.2m 90 lengths at 6m all approx 33-34mm - so I've ended up with a lot more wood that I bargained for Real heavy, thick wood - going to be great for the decking, but very chunky for Cladding which is either gonna look great/unique or ridiculous. Planer to be built tonight,

I remember my first mortgage. The bank said you can borrow 50k but in 25 years you will have repaid 150k. Holy S*+t I thought. Every penny went into paying it off early..

This is a list of the work that needs to be done to install a Sunamp, assuming that there is switched power and water pipes available at the installation position: Unload Sunamp from vehicle and move to the installation location. Unpack it, check for damage and prepare the pipe connections (parallel up the two sets of 22mm heat exchanger pipes) - perhaps 1 hour's work at the most Electrical works - fix controller box to wall adjacent to Sunamp, connect the Sunamp power and sensor cables, and the incoming power cables - perhaps 30 minutes work Plumbing works - connect Sunamp inlet pipe to cold supply pipe and connect Sunamp hot water outlet pipe to hot water pipe. Perhaps install a thermostatic mixer valve. - perhaps 1 hours work at most Perform electrical safety testing and water leak testing, turn power on to the unit and check that the controller initialises and that the heating element is powered. Wait for ~30 minutes to allow Sunamp to partially charge and test to ensure warm water is being supplied - perhaps 1 hours work The total time taken to install and commission a Sunamp should be around 3 1/2, perhaps 4, hours, and although two people are needed to lift and manhandle the unit into place, everything else is a single person job. The cost of that depends very much on how far the installer has to travel. £600 sounds a bit steep to me, I'd have thought maybe half that might be more reasonable, but if the installers (assuming it's two of them) have to drive for half a day to get to you and back, then £600 might not be too far off the mark. Is there any reason why your plumber and electrician can't plumb and wire the the thing up? It's no harder to install than a normal hot water cylinder with an immersion heater, if anything it's a bit easier to work on, as all the pipe connections are easy to get at in the top of the unit.

My guess is similar, that they are looking to leverage the extensive Chinese knowledge and experience with direct heat exchanger heat pump water tanks (the Ecocent is an example of the very common Chinese direct heat exchanger heat pump water heaters). There are literally dozens of manufacturers of this sort of integrated heat pump/hot water tank combination on sale in China, so my guess is that the idea here may be to do something similar and integrate a direct heat exchange heat pump into a Sunamp PCM store. Seems like a good idea in principle, and the chances are that using a direct heat exchanger might just be enough to get up to the ~60° to 65°C needed.

I agree wholeheartedly. The kWh is a bastardised unit that shouldn't exist, in my view, as it constantly seems to cause confusion. Far better to just stick to SI units, not that I suspect we'll ever get the energy companies to agree.

Depending on the electrical and wet connections being all complete, commissioning ( eg switching it on ) is down to flicking a switch. The unit will have to have been ordered according to the intended application, ergo the control unit will come pre-selected to the correct 'setting', so it's very much plug and play. Sizing, and selecting the correct 'model' is where the attention needs to be, as many have fallen foul of licking their finger and waving it in the air in the days ( now gone, thankfully ) where Sunamp would sell direct to the public........ 20 minutes is actually more like an hour, per size increment, where you'd need to stay with the unit until it heated fully for the first time. eg a size 6 unit would require babysitting for the first 2 or so hours ( 3kW required for ~2 hours = 6kW input = fully charged from 'empty' ) so you know it runs the heating cycle and 'knocks off' as it should. Plumbing connections should be checked after the unit has fully heated up, as sometimes weeps start after the pipes heat up and expand a little. There are 2 heat exchangers in each UniQ heat battery, so 2x pairs of 22mm connections. If you are using an UniQ for hot water only, you need to parallel the heat exchangers so water flows through both. This not only maintains the 2 HeX's in a wet environment ( copper would corrode a lot faster if left dry as it would suffer from condensation if open to atmosphere, and it would also ebb heat away wastefully ) but then, if paralleled, you'd benefit from a far greater flow rate for DHW too.

I've installed two of these, a Sunamp PV (essentially the same as far as connections go) and a Sunamp Uniq eHW 9. The hardest part by far is transporting the UniQ to its final resting place. Our 9 kWh model weighs around 155kg, so although it's not that big it should be a multi-person handling job (I struggled a lot, but got it upstairs and installed on my own - never again). Plumbing is dead easy for the electrically heated models, just a mains cold water pipe in and a hot water pipe out (both 22mm). The indirectly heated models (heated by a boiler) need four pipes connecting, a flow and return to the boiler indirect circuit and the same cold water in and hot water out as the electric units. Electrically, there is a control box that has a sensor cable that runs from the UniQ to screw terminals in the box. There are two basic versions of the control box (with some variations) and the electrically heated models need an always on low power mains power feed to the box, a high power feed (if using a PV diverter to heat water from excess PV generation this comes from the PV diverter unit, Immersun, Apollo or whatever) and a cable out to the electric heating element in the unit. For the non-electrically heated models then the control box only has low power mains, plus control connections to call for heat from the boiler, etc. Commissioning is really just turning on the water (plus filling the boiler loop for boiler heated models) and checking for leaks. Turning the power on and checking that the control box internal status indicators are OK, then letting the unit charge up for a time and checking that it's delivering hot water. Maybe half an hour of work plus another hour or two waiting for the unit to charge to test the hot water. Doesn't take any special skills, I'm not a plumber and found the things dead easy to connect up, commission and test.

I can't believe that Sunamp weren't aware of Fischer's long history of misleading advertising. They've been pretty well known for this for years, and continue to play the same game year after year, seemingly without anyone doing anything to stop them. 2014: 9 issues raised with the Advertising Standards Agency, 8 upheld 2015: 5 issues raised with the Advertising Standards Agency, 5 upheld 2016: 3 issues raised with the Advertising Standards Agency, 2 upheld 2018: 3 issues raised with the Advertising Standards Agency, 3 upheld Reading through the ASA complaints, they are all much of a muchness, relating to misleading claims/content.