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Just thought I’d share this As it may help others on here I run a medium sized render company and was asked to quote for a friend of a friend A self build in the lake district About 50 miles away I said sure send me a drawing Most of our framing plastering jobs are off plan to allow the builders to use our quote within there quote Anyway The self builder has asked me to re quote from six months ago As two Sole traders have quoted more than 50% higher than ours Stating 4 weeks work There’s only 225m2 5 days tops I’d allowed 8 rise in materials on the initial quote and charged a bit extra on labour with it being a small job We give a three year no quibble guarantee If there is a problem and it’s a manufacturer based problem We sort it out and Pursue the manufacture At the moment individual trades are taking the mick I hear about tilers charging nearly £50 m2 for floor tiling I pay ours around 18-22 and they make a dam good living out of that Private builders and trades are giving everyone a bad name Shop around for an experienced company You will have to wait But it’s worth the wait

We started our first build in November so made building the two garages for storage was a priority Starting in dry weather this time has made this less of a priority But really should have been done first But great to get the garage workshop covered in Myself and my wife started at 6am yesterday with storms forecast later that day Luckily they failed to materialize Which allowed us to get it watertight

We had several lots of £300 compensation over the incompetence of BT and Openreach. The first thing that happened, when I asked BT to connect the new property up with a line, was that they cut off our existing house line. This was just days after husband's cancer diagnosis leaving us completely incommunicado as the mobile signal is cr*p. After frantic rushing around waving said mobile in the air in pouring rain I managed to get a manager on the phone. This, I believe was due to us having fibre to the premises and that department being properly staffed. From then on it took a year of frequent phone calls and messages to get the new build connected. I found Facebook messaging them to be very effective. Not only do you get a human to plead with, but you have an easily readable dialogue for the next operator to read! In our case it was like a Greek tragedy and they were all truly horrified at what we had been through! Good Luck! Oh, and don't let them "cancel the complaint" when they make you a promise of action.

The whole lot I built two at our last house and they ended up full of building C**p So she has a point

Yes I built my workshop first, under permitted development, so had somewhere to store stuff and keeps tools during the build, a container came next but hopefully that will go soon(ish, if I clear the crap out of it).

Report a "no dialing tone" fault. They will check from the exchange and find there is a "connection problem" and send someone to fix it.

I had a very bad line, couldn’t get past the new router bit so I called from my mobile and told them a neighbour had cut the line while digging his garden. Engineer straight out (day after) saw it was an overhead line, asked what the problem was and quickly put a new cable in.

So for my next unfinished project I picked up these bits tonight. Removed working. My mate was convinced by some snake oil salesman his kit needed "upgrading": Along with 3 of these batteries: Haven't got a Scooby Doo what it all is or what I can do with it but I've got all the manuals. Best I get reading and learn. Then maybe some surplus panels...

Usually the tops of the piles are broken back to reveal the rebar rods, these are then integrated into the ring beam cages before poring

When he arrives he will probably want to plug into your master socket to test it regardless of what you say so best let him. While he's doing that you can tell him you called BT for an update and they said your line had been installed ok but wasn't working when they tested it. Say you're wondering if they had really finished it. You can say you saw someone working at xyz (where you know the missing bit is). In our case I knew it wasn't connected at the top of the pole because the coil of wire we left at the bottom was still there. When I tried to explain he didn't want to listen so I let him plug in his test box to my master socket. Only when he realised it wasn't connected somewhere would he let me explain what I knew.

Maybe I got lucky but yes for me it has been easy to fit (DIY) and easy to use. Do I enjoy messing with Modbus - a protocol from the 1970s? Hell no. Does it work? Yeah, does exactly what I want it to. I have full local stats access. If you don't need that then you don't even need to mess with Modbus.

Well there is a line…and I am paying for it already you know, I don’t want to be a bore but I just wanted a human to come and look so I can explain. These faceless corporations, openreach are still blaming covid for their poor service!

Do let us know how he gets on and when he finds the "fault"? At least you will get it to the attention of OR and explain BT think you have a line, but you are still waiting for it to be connected.

And a layer of dpm under the insulation. And a slip membrane above the insulation.

In what way? I have a layer of insulation between floor & screed. Don't most people?

It's like a very dangerous assault course in there!

Well! A little lie does go a long way, the kind lady tested it and said it’s crook so an engineer will come Wednesday! 👍🏼

If BT/Open reach think you have a phone line when you don't, call up and ask them to test it. They can do this while you are on the phone to them. It won't work and they will normally schedule an engineer to come out. When he arrives appologise and tell him the operator insisted your non-existent line was faulty. If he can't fix it ask him if he can get their database updated.

I believe the ones that run down to the sub zero temps have an integral electric blanket to keep the cells from getting that cold. Needs more reading tbh, as some descriptions are void of comprehensive details. The batteries own BMS probably takes the first chunk of charge to warm the cells, before allow the cells to recharge. Just picked up most of these scraps of info by scouring the net and some off-griddy forums. Plenty of gold out there, and here, just got to stop digging at some stage and plug this lot in.

Ah, I don't live there. A job we did a couple of years back: https://www.walesonline.co.uk/whats-on/travel/historic-railway-cottage-been-transformed-14536344

As above, don’t overthink, just do it. if you don’t have waterproofer already, don’t worry, bit of pva if you have it (also good to prime the hole for better stickage)

Yes, ring them up and say a truck pulled it down

FWIW I have usually bought my units on price, and the best value has been somewhere like FastLEC. They are a very generic boxed product so I would just buy on price subject to a reasonable expectation on reliability of supplier.

Not all phones do that and not all phones that claim to do that, work with all providers, and when you have a phone that claims to do it but it does not work with your provider they are not interested "buy a new phone" being the standard answer.

You have made the house into a Faraday cage. I like mineral wool insulation.

The people saying no heating is needed yet are talking entirely from their own perspectives. It's your house and you know if it needs to be a touch warmer. It's probable your heat pump is set to do Weather Compensation. This will reduce your maximum water flow temperature if it is warmer outside. It is possible that the high end settings are wrong so when it is relatively warm outside, as it is now, then the target flow temperature is not hot enough to give you 20 C. Perhaps the previous occupants were content with 19 C at this time of year? So check if Weather Compensation is on and what the settings are.

The Lo Carbon Ventaxia ( which I have one of) has a counterflow heat exchanger ( straws in a pipe type) and two fans for balanced air flows. So not the same as the flow reversal type. IMO the flow reversal types have very inefficient heat exchangers despite their claims due to the way they work. They simply cannot recover much heat since they don't have a counterflow heat exchanger.

Yep a double garage and two 20 foot shipping containers. You can ave too much storage! We're trying to empty them all, but its one box out of storage and two boxes back in. The garage is just a junk yard at the moment. I need to do some tip runs and about 6 trips to the scrap yard!

Ughhhh, too right. For us a shipping container became two, and then an additional strong-box and then..... And now I can't wait to get rid of them (I have to tell SWMBO) while secretly thinking over-my-dead-body-pal. Funny how I've had to build her a potting shed, a play house for the children and the greenhouse from heaven. "Without the containers sweetheart, where'm I going to store the tools to make your next summer-house?" Silence.

From the date openreach confirmed install you are entitled to I think £5.20 a day for each day late . I ended up with nearly £1600 😁

Book an engineer install of your broadband - don’t go with self install… then they will realise very quickly !!

But we already subsidise the massive cost of installing and maintaining copper wires to every single home in the UK. The incremental cost of pulling in and maintaining fiber instead of copper is low, and once complete probably has lower overall costs and higher ROI for the country as a whole. So IMHO the 100% coverage target is where we should be heading, but accept it's going to take a long time (generations) to get there. (I'm in a town where everyone has FTTP except for our street, as on our street our copper is underground rather than overhead they want to charge me £8k for fiber install, so I'm equally cheesed off yet resigned to the fact this is now just a waiting game)

I agree, and I live out in the sticks with a maximum of 10Mbps if I'm lucky, but I wouldn't change where I live just to have faster BT broadband.

Shouldn't get into politics, just providing some information. NHS spending is through the roof with little to show for it. Admittedly it is early days for the largest increase which is this year. This chart is real terms spending. It seems that people don't actually believe NHS spending has gone up. It has increased by almost 40% in 10 years! Police spending has also increased above inflation for the last 5 years running, having fallen in real terms the 5 years before that. The fibre broadband target, however, has been scaled back. They have gone from 100% coverage for gigabit to 85%. IMO (sorry @ProDave) if you live in the middle of nowhere there is a limit to how much everyone else should subsidise the massive cost of getting broadband to your house. My parents' new house needs to be connected 40metres to the nearest storm drain, costing over £10k. The taxpayer isn't paying for that. Considering solutions like Starlink, I don't think spending thousands of pounds on bringing faster broadband to individual houses is a good use of funds. The promise should never have been made, and it is typical of politicians to say things that are not practical in reality and not to want to admit to harsh realities like the fact some houses are just too rural to economically be provided with fibre connections. I thought that this page was interesting. 97% of the UK can access 30Mbps or faster speeds. The average speed often quoted in worldwide tests is somewhat odd as it is based not on what is available, but on what people buy. It also often uses results from speed tests so includes WiFi issues and so on. Nevertheless it appears that UK average speeds have been motoring recently, almost doubling to 90Mbps per second in the last 2 years.However, the figure that probably better reflects the investment in the network is the average speed actually available to people which is 540Mbps. https://labs.thinkbroadband.com/local/

Updating on outcome here. I ended up using an Europlast EER125 single room heat recovery which I got on eBay for £110. Fitted today. Easy fit, like an extractor fan. Works by reversing directions of air flow every 70 seconds. There's a ceramic heat exchanger inside which presumably collects the heat on the exhaust cycle and reuses it when it pulls the air back in. Two modes of operation fast and slow. Slow is not too noisy at all. You wouldn't want fast in a bedroom but fine in a bathroom/kitchen. Only issues I can see. You have to in theory wash the filters every three months so that means unclipping the grille and pulling out the heat exchanger. How many people will be bothered to do that in reality I don't know. Second issue, you definitely need a 127mm hole not a 125mm one, and you need the hole to be dead straight. I had a bit of a small bend on the hole when it crossed the cavity (was reusing an existing hole) and it caused the plastic tube to bend slightly which meant that the fan caught on the edge and made a noise. Needed to remove and expand the hole slightly. Will wait for real world performance in the winter but so far so good and certainly a step up from putting in an extractor fan. Hope this helps somebody considering a similar option.

being really pedantic, they are, just smaller triangles. don't worry about being pedantic there are far worse on here 😂

They do look great. How much void do you need above the plasterboard for these?

We got there at last! "Just wait" is the solution. Looking forward to seeing a full battery on a few hours

If you are able To run a fan to keep the air circulating That will help Very few issues with modern plasters now

Sounds like you hate it... demolish it?!?

Hire a digger. Peel the caravan with the digger. Video your efforts - it works for Top Gear. Weigh in the scrap aluminium. Burn the useless timber. This is my plan for the site caravan. Except that I have a digger already.

I haven’t got the energy to write out my experiences so far getting connected with openreach (still not connected after 6 months) but it has been a kafkaesque nightmare.

Go 4G, £35 a month all the data and calls you want, you can even connect a landline with right hub, although you get a mobile number. Doing all via mail order, took a couple of days, and about 30mins walking about the house to find the best signal.

I would give my right arm for the water potential you have!, I have always wanted to generate lecky from a water source. I remember Dick Strawbridge years ago building a water wheel, gearbox and alternator.

You have a whole square metre? My god man, that’s enough for a small mill or shaper.

don't need to go looking for the para cord then........

Yes the workshop is 10 x 7.5 meters with an upstairs I’ve still to put two Velux windows in But Deborah has already said that once the build is finished there will be one key and it will be around her neck No building related items 😁

I did a small job this morning. The customers house was sweltering. 19 degrees outside so no need for any heating, BUT the heating was on, all the radiators were hot each with a single wet towel on it drying, and most of the windows were open. Some people do not have the faintest idea. P.S it was sunny and a light breeze, a line in the garden would have dried those towels nicely.