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I got the same type of response from a the builders of some flats in Lancaster: right on the riverside by a main road to Morecambe. I told them that, if the builder hadn't got the issue sorted within the week, I'd have an advertising-type banner made up so that all the commuters passing by could see what sh1te service the company was giving. Monday morning the banner was up for thousands of people to see: the local press were due to come round later that day. Lunchtime Monday work started on the repair. Banner cost me £50. The best £50 I ever spent.

A lot on here (including me) have gone with an architectural technician. For what most self builders need, they seem to offer a better service. In my case I had a plot with OPP and a pretty good idea of what I wanted. The AT took that design to something actually buildable that would pass building regs, produced all the drawings and in conjunction with a structural engineer all the details and calculations required for building control. That gave me a building warrant and a COMPLETE set of drawings to build the house all for a reasonable fee that seemed to be based on the amount of actual work done not some notional value of what the house was worth. That set of drawings was given to the builder to build it. As I said in my first reply, it was the simple inability to get that package of work at a sensible cost from an architect that put me right off them. Perhaps they don't want "simple" tasks like that? Perhaps all they are interested in is managing a complete project, putting the build out to tender and delivering a turn key solution to the client. But I suspect that is not what a lot of self builders want?

Got one, it works fine and RH in the property runs at about 52-62 with it. Quite a lot of others have them too.

Quite simply: yes, and easy! Ours was a retrofit so a lot more work, so putting it in a new build would be so much easier and so much easier to achieve the benefits. A no brainer I'd say.

my thoughts exactly give them nothing especially at 1/4 1/5th the price we can buy at!

OK for @Conor, @Marvin and anyone one else that happens to trip over this searching for info on the CE-iVT heatpumps. The function of the un-noted inputs is: ID2- "emergency stop" input , used when the controller is in a commercial fridge or similar ID4- cooling mode hard setting ID4- heating mode hard setting both ID4 and 6 override the mode chosen in User Mask Also... even tho the modes in User Mask are heat+DHW and cool+DHW, the unit can actually auto switch between these modes using the settings in page U10 of the user mask "AmbTemp switch". I'd wrongly presumed this was for bivalent boiler control...

The fundamental challenge you have here is two controllers trying to drive the same lighting fixture. DALI (and DMX) are really a 1:N relationship of controller (bus master) to actuators. You'll need to decide whether the rotary knob or the RaspberryPi is the master, and have the other controller redirect commands to that master and hence to the lighting. You didn't mention if this is the ONLY DALI device in the house, but I'm assuming it is, in which case it seems a bit overkill (and adding KNX even more so). Personally I'd fine a simply constant voltage LED strip driver that takes some kind of digital input (Wifi HTTP, and bluetooth are common, but there's lots of alternatives), drive that from the PhPi (or ESP32) and have a big rotary dial as an input to the microcontroller. If you do want to keep with DALI, getting one of these HTTP driven controllers may be a good place to start https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B081TNRGMN/ from

Welcome, take your budget and divide by £2000 or £2500 to be conservative (and to allow for contingency) this is for a decent spec, you can maybe come in less if you do a lot of work yourself and are very focused on value engineering / design and aggressive searching for materials. Does not allow for any professional services (architect, SE etc..). That is your approx square meterage (all floors) gives you best case 100m2, 60m2 worst case. While PV is affordable, storage batteries etc are still quite expensive. Best to get a power quote also from your local DNO.

These kind of planet killing (expletive deleted)ers should be charged £5/kWh, and £100/day meter rental. Do they have a BEV 'because they are green'?

I don't agree. The alternative is no ventilation and trust to natural leaks in the building which is usually poor and unreliable. Or mechanical extraction that draws COLD air in to replace the heat you are expelling from the building and in 99% of cases allows cold air to blow IN when the fan is not on. Of course mvhr works better in an air tight building but I bet it would still be of benefit in a less than perfect building.

Smart homes are great, until you misplace your phone. What happens when the provider stops updating the service, or removes the service. Have our lives become so busy that we cannot switch a light on at night, or we have become so weak and pampered that the house must be at the right temperature just in case 'we get a chill'. Don't was time, effort or money. Just get your house as airtight and as well insulated as you can. It will be cheaper.

Not sure why this thread is now 5 pages long other than stubbornness. Get an industrial dehumidifier and spend 2 or 3 weeks drying the house. It will cost 60 quid and give you a baseline. Next, turn that off and observe. If the humidity goes right back up again then you have proven the issue lies elsewhere. At the minute it's all finger in the air speculation of it might be this or that. I am baffled at the determination to ignore all suggestions relating to getting a dehumidifier in. It's only 60 quid?‍♂️

If the survey is inconclusive then the survey may be at fault. But they have stopped testing when the ground becomes hard enough for a pile. Of course it could be different lower down! But a local SE will know what to expect.

They bring the right lengths of piles to site, and chop off any sticking up once it has reached a set. They are banged in until the correct resistance is reached, which is encouraging.....unless they keep going down.

I am suggesting them specifically because they do the precast edge and cross beams at the same time, and that recovers some cost relative to dug foundations. The others may offer something similar, I don't know. No, There is a big lump for turning up, perhaps £10k. take that off, pro-rata what is left, and add it back. Doesn't make sense, as that is what piles are for. Anything more than 3m and piling is the answer. I have one other suggestion but will PM you if you don't mind.

Bullivant are one piling specialist, but there are numerous others, such as Arsleff, Foundation piling, Van Elle and so on. What I would say, is that if you have a problematic site, then using a seriously decent outfit is the only way to go. From my own brief experience with piling contractors, many seem to suggest "solutions" that arguably suit themselves and their own gear more than they do to suit your actual ground conditions. Ask many Questions and double check everything. The variation in methods and pricing can be startling. From a brief read of your ground, it doesn't look straightforward. Good luck with whatever you do.

Yes, and 20mm thick boards.

Got vertical cladding on complete house, that's a lot of cladding! We used roof battons, the blue ones. 25 x 50mm. Batton and counterbatton then fit cladding. Cant see any reason to use anything else, the price for the Roofing battons are enough without going bigger!

25mm thick sounds quite thin. I would have considered 38x50mm as a minimum but maybe I’m too conservative. Then again if the battens were broader than 38x 50mm and had two faces planed / regularised down to 25mm and the battens selected for their structural quality ie with minimum notts, shakes parallel grain etc they would likely be fine. A good joiner should select these

I did on my sun room.

Someone who picks up the phone when I call

In terms of living with it. Almost nothing to do. Just enjoy the fresh air and lack of condensation. Ours has a manual boost to speed it up for showering or cooking so we just press a button. Some systems boost automatically based on humidity. Routine servicing is simply inspect the filters and clean or replace as necessary.

Intumescent in the middle? Ouch. I have heard of that but thought it was for very special circumstances. Explains how a panelled FD30 is £150 and a half glazed one is £700.

https://www.dualflo.co.uk/products/ interesting, thanks @jack

Veissman do a very nice storage combi that might give you the best of both worlds as it's a combi with an integrated storage tank that has something like 100L capacity. See if that meets your needs. If not, definitely get an unvented hot water cylinder. For a big house like this, you might also want to think about a secondary loop?

If you want to maximise generation but stick within the 16amp DNO limit, some/many inverters allow connection of a much higher output array than the inverters rating. As an example a solaredge SE3680H is clamped at a max 16amp AC output but can have up to 5.7kw of panels connected to it. Although therell be some wasteage of potential generation on sunny summer days, the system will produce more when condition/season isnt so favourable.

Ignore panel efficiency. Nobody has yet invented a PV panel much above 20% efficient. It only affects the space they take up. Concentrate on minimum price per kW of panel unless you are really restricted for space.

In my considered opinion, which may be out of date, screw piles are suitable for huts and decks where loading is low, and deflection isn't a great loss, and short term use eg site cabins or injection stations. Also I can see they are ideal for pylons, masts etc where access is difficult. For 'proper' buildings, they are too near the surface, don't carry enough load, and then there is corrosion. I did look into this seriously as the reps were saying what they could do...but they couldn't really. For a house I would first look at a precast driven pile system where they also install the edge and cross beams, and I would be immediately out of the ground. Can be to odd shapes easily enough. Bullivant is one, and the project we did with this system went very well.

Stick with 4kWp and a 3.68kW inverter grid tied so no DNO problems and self use as much as you can. anything else gets expensive with obstacles in your way. You can buy all the parts and DIY install that pretty cheap or pay an electrician. To claim the insulting 5p export payment requires an MCS install which we all know adds ££££ to the bill and you will never reclaim the MCS surcharge with the export payments. I export about 100kWh per year that I am unable to self use for which I would get paid about £5 were I able to claim the payment. Simply NOT worth paying the extra than an MCS contractor would charge. If you want even more than 4kWp them make that off grid for battery charging to be used in the evenings for example?

This is where a little EV would be good to consume the energy. Issue is my EV would be away from home during the main sunshine hours 3 days a week. I worked out I could get a little VW EUp on lease for the same money I spend on diesel a month, I considered it, but was put off when I realised I would not get rid of my diesel car, so I would end up paying out more albeit some of my motoring miles would be much cheaper.

I would read myself and @pocster 's post over here: Got some info that pertains to your question. I would give the grid nothing! In the grand scheme of things every solar panel generating electricity and adding it to the grid is a good thing, if we all gave 200W across the whole nation think how good even that would be, however, the system is a sham, the system, is designed, and this needs to be dealt with soon, that they are actively discouraging people from generating their own. My aunt in law gets 45p kWh from a historical tarriff, I would get 3p. My attitude it that why should I give them it!

You can get a device which some manufacturers call a export limitation system, it is basically a module which sits in before your DB and stops export, you buy it and wire it in and program in a dead stop, i.e. nothing. Each panel is made up of a quantity of PV cells, like a battery, the more you add the higher the output voltage and the more current they can generate, so in a panel you might already have say 80 PV's - when you connect 2 of this same panel together you have actually just linked 160PV cells together. Now if you block the light to 1 cell that cell then might fall below the threshold of incident light at which it generates, it becomes, like a battery, a dead cell and takes the whole connected string of cells with it down to it's level, which in a large string could mean 5 or 6 panels worth. There are options, optimisers and microinverters, optimisers take in each panels output, optimises the generation and adds it to the string, then the single inverter then does it's business as usual. If a panel stops generating due to a shadow or a dirty great crow sitting on it then the optimiser essentially ignores the panel and excludes it from the string. Then there are micro inverters, a box about the size of a VHS tape, maybe a bit smaller, and it has a + and - connection, panel goes directly into it and it has a AC output, you just wire them to a main AC bus or wire them all back to a terminal board etc. at that you can then have your solar monitoring module. The micro inverter is my preference because it makes each panel and MI become it's own little generation plant. A fault on one panel or inverter only takes out one panel. The ROI is getting closer now, my thinking is that we do ROI calcs using the present energy costs, we should be doing them with costs 1-2 years from now, had we all put in solar 2-3 years ago we might be laughing now, but then of course it was more expensive then. I think we might be at the tipping point.

Probably more like 77A as PF would not be 1. You are now beginning to see the issues that the network operators are having to contend with. There is a document called ESDD-02-012 which gives the SPEN ratings for supplies for various house types, for clarity this is not fuse size but supply rating, in other words how they work out how many supplies they can give from a given substation. A 5 bed property with gas heating is given as 2kVA - that is about 8.7A at 230V - that is what they are allowing. They used to give you 18kVA - but they realised that at that figure they didn't have enough capacity on the grid, so they just decided to drop the rating. This 2kVA is known as the After Diversity Max Demand. ADMD. They apply this city wide and sort of hope everyone is not charging EV's in the evening when they get home or making dinner... no wait... they are... why is no one talking about this? Oh, I remember because they are banning gas and petrol and diesel and the facts don't suit their narrative. Electric future... maybe in 2060 but not the next decade. They will start to make U-turns soon. Gas prices are only high because they want to use gas for electric generation as coal is too dirty, that is even before we all ditch petrol and diesel and gas domestically.

Yes but by April it might be 30p! - starts to make a bit more sense. Our Washing machine runs 4 loads a week so that is £1:20 PW or £62 PA sounds like not much but anything cut by 20% is a 20% saving, its just a scale thing in the end. If we all used 20% less the demand would decrease and so would the price - economics 101, although 102, or some such, says if you are a monopoly supplier then you don't have to obey 101!

I develop this for doing my roof in Colorcoat Urban, but ended up doing the same thing in Aluminium, formed on site. I used a drip feature on the verge to move the water away, rather than a clinch on the vertical panel

That’s easy to solve. Buy FD30 with clear glass, then after you get your certificate from BC, add some opaque film to one side of the glass.

Not sure of the legal side, but I would send in writing (email) stating that unless they get someone out in the next 48 hrs, you will appoint a 3rd party roofing specialist to rectify the issue and this will be back charged to the builder. But first put a drip tray to catch the water water.

1920 house should be leaky enough to have sufficient background ventilation. Please make sure you have not blocked any air brick vent for the suspended floor. Forget heat recovery ventilation for a leaky house, no point and no payback. A simple WC extract fan would help your wetroom. Timer setting would be helpful. If using humidity sensor control type, make sure to tune down the set point otherwise you would have the fan running most of the time during cold winter (when RH is high indoor). Open up trickle vent (windows vent strips). Also please let us which wall you have condensation issue. Cavity insulation, if not installed properly, could mean bridging the DPC and cause damp at wall low level.

Please be safe. You are building two storeys so odd / unexpected / bad things can start to happen and you have higher loads than say single storey. If you need to ask about the block strength then you don't have sufficient experience in structural design to make sure what you are doing is safe.. and be able to prove it now / later if you need to sell. Sorry to be blunt. What about running this by say an SE, they may be able to say.. hey you can save money here as you are over designing, but here you need to up your game. Ideally an SE / experienced designer should be able to save you more than their fee in the round?

Hello iMCann. Unfortunately there are at least a couple of other things to consider. Generally a wall of 7.0N (Newtons / mm^2 compressive unit strength i.e each individual block) can carry a surprising amount of vertical load if the wall is loaded about it's centreline and not subject to other sideways forces. But beam and block flooring can introduce quite high local stresses where the beams rest on the blocks, an over stress can lead to local crushing of the block. The walls may also be designed to resist horizontal wind loads which cause bending (flexure) in the wall. Even internal walls are subject to wind load! Imagine you have a big set of sliding doors open and a gust of wind blows in.. it can load the internal walls sideways. It's usually not a problem on domestic houses but on large industrial buildings or houses with two storeys and a vaulted ceiling this "internal wind loading" needs checked. The flexural stength of the wall is partly dictated by the unit strength of the blocks. The higher the block stength generally the stronger (up to a point) the wall in flexure. I would err on the safe side and check first with your SE. Seems odd though that an SE would spec 10N blocks when 7.3 would have done. At the same time ask your SE how to phrase the question (so they don't give you the run around) to the supplier so you can ascertain the strength of the block if 10N are indeed required with some evidence to back up any claim they may make, even though the blocks are stamped 7.3N.

If the garage is on your planning permission yes

Hi Bud, im looking at solar! i roughly worked out using 60% of the solar to my house and 40% to the grid at 4p - roughly it would take around 7 years to pay back based on 6k installation fee of a 5kw system producing 4400kwh a year (according to various solar calculator's i have used for my area thats the average) im unsure if im being too nice saying i would use 60% or being too harsh i just thought it would be a achievable number i thought.

The SAP software uses data from the Products Characteristics Database (PCDB) https://www.ncm-pcdb.org.uk/sap/searchpod.jsp?id=17

The energy use of cookers and appliances is not included in SAP Here is a decent overview, https://ggbec.co.uk/sap-an-overview/

To get rid of the visible crack I would: Dig out the grout. Half fill the bath. Redo with white C-Tec BT1 and tool it flush with the tile. https://www.toolstation.com/bt1-tribrid-ultimate-bathroom-sealant-adhesive/p74523? That's BT1 not CT1. Let it set.

They have no right of appeal.

That is not so bad. If they were in Chinglish it would be worse. Or IKEA could have written them.

An objector had the suggested the motivation for our application was pecuniary gain and we were using my wife's disability to further our cause rather building the dwelling for her particular needs. I strongly objected to the council and asked them to remove the offending and discriminatory comments which they ignored until my appeal was presented. Needless to say, I used the LPA's inaction to demonstrate their unreasonable behaviour to the planning inspector in our cost application, which no doubt help paint the picture of the journey we had with the counsel. It is referenced in our costs award decision, see attached, paras 6 and 12 PPG guidance states: Paragraph: 033 Reference ID: 16-033-20140306 “Can costs be claimed for the period during the determination of the planning application? No, but all parties are expected to behave reasonably throughout the planning process. Although costs can only be awarded in relation to unnecessary or wasted expense at the appeal or other proceeding, behaviour and actions at the time of the planning application can be taken into account in the Inspector’s consideration of whether or not costs should be awarded…” Costs Decision - 3198387[100338].pdf

Irrespective of whether the BCO requires them they're worth considering. It may be that your structure is designed a bit differently to ours and hence there's no need for them. The only reason for asking is that if you do need them, then solid timber is a useful way of doing the corners. In that case run a vertical batten down each corner to form the firestop. We used intumescent barriers elsewhere. I'd imagine they'll be fine, if I'd had a nail gun I'd probably have chosen to use it. Our roofing battens use 90mm gun nails as I got the joiners to do them. Off the top of my head: -Bevel the bottom of the cladding. Bevel joins if you have any. -Carefully plan the layout before you get going - you don't want to end up with strange widths of cladding either side of windows or doors. Might be harder with shiplap t+g (we had board on board so a bit easier to adjust the gap). -Think through the window reveal finishes and how the cladding meets them. -We found it easier to do any bottom cladding in one go, ping a chalk line then cut them all at once to get a good edge.

My suggestion is print out the VAT claim form NOW and as each invoice comes in, write it down (yes with a pen) on the claim form and file the invoice in a box file in the same order it goes on the form. That would save the boring job at the end of going through the stack of invoices and filling in the form all on one go,. I am not sure what purpose "scanning" the invoices has? Other than a backup in case the claim gets lost in the post, as you are supposed to sent the original invoices.