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Embrace the infrastructure - power is a useful thing - don't hide sockets they are what they are and really no different from a fireplace 'heat' or your telly/gamesystem 'entertainment' or light fittings etc. Houses are for humans - put the things in them, and proudly present those, that make human habitation enjoyable.

Safety first here for me. Now winter is coming can you smell any flue gasses. I would make a hole in the plaster where there is a void behind and put a CO detector there and monitor. You could also get a Gas Engineer to investigate with their gas analyser but the nighbour's fire would need to be on. Or you could ask your neighbour when they last had the fire serviced ect in passing. Remember that burnt gas contains water vapour that can condense if not properly controlled. If all the roof leaks have been fixed it could take a good few months for things to dry out.. but I would want to know more about the gas fire on the other side. Is the neighbour's old chimney lined with a flexible duct for example. Is the duct installed the right way up? Next would be to open up the wall more and look inside, then lift the floor locally and look under. Have a go at this and report back on BH and folk will give you ideas on what and where to look next to help diagnose the problem.

The tiles are called 'Myspace Cinnamon', they cost circa £50/m2 including VAT after discount, way back in 2021 when the world was only mildly mad. They are very hard wearing, our steel staircase was dropped and dragged a short way across the lightly protected tiles on its way to being installed. With trepidation I removed the protective cardboard to see a big black mark on one of the tiles which transpired to be powder coat abraded from the staircase, once cleaned off the tile was pristine.

We went with textured wood effect porcelain tiles. We live at the end of a lane which for about 6 months of the year is a muddy lane. So far the porcelain tiles have proved indestructible especially when it comes to mud and stone being walked in. The dog is the worst offender, he refuses to wipe his feet. After a quick wipe over with a steam mop the tiles are like new again. Repeated patterns would drive me nuts which I made the tiler aware of. I think he’s done a brilliant job. Most visitors think the floor is timber so I guess it’s ticking that box, the same tile continues outside onto the patio, they are twice the width and thickness.

Ok so you have something legacy that could be deemed as part of the building and your regs issue isn’t an issue, neither is planning if it’s been there for more than 10 years. As soon as you start messing around with major elements such as the stairs or roof space insulation you will trip into building regs approvals. What that means is you need to do it all to current regs and that can be onerous and also costly. I would potentially look at a piecemeal delivery of changing the various bits - start with the big disruption which is the staircase and then work back from that. You can insulate as you go, and then ensure that it’s done properly and makes the room above usable. That allows you to remove the old stairs and tidy up the currently unusable room. One question is does the upstairs have proper means of escape for fire regs ..? That is key to making this a usable space that has value as currently its just a storage space until you get the MoE in place.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/electricity-supply-emergency-code matrix for planned outages. last updated 2019. you just need to check your electricity bill to see what letter you are. it’s adjacent to your name and address letter of the alphabet in a square is what you are looking for

They need to do both: incentivise reductions in peak demand, and invest in storage. And retain a minimum set of peakers. It's so easy to create false dichotomies and make perfect be the enemy of good when it comes to "green" issues.

Fire sealing around cables is very common, there are different versions but the most common, is fire rated expanding foam. Yes, it will de-rate the cable locally and yes, it could cause problems, however, the chances are, that realistically it wont. Having recently bought some standard expanding foam, I can also state, that according to the can, it can be used on PVC cables. The old plasticiser leaching issues is pretty much a thing of the past unless working with old materials. Give me an example of a couple of the cables you are talking about and I will let you know. Cable type, cross section, MCB/RCBO rating and connected load or typical loads. If it was me, I would put in pieces of 25mm uPVC conduit, foam that in, then run cable(s) though the conduit(s) - you can then use a cable sealing silicone at each end, that means it is also easier to change things around in the future without digging through the foam.

Very few good machines at the right price at the moment. Shortage anyway and weak £ meaning loads of plant being snapped up and going abroad. if buying ‘cheap’ be aware of potential repair costs, track motors and drives are like rocking horse Pooh and a slew block will cost a fortune.

Just completed our first full calendar month since the Zappi was installed and one of the major bonuses for me is the rather excellent reporting in the app. The following image is fairly self-explanatory but feel free to ask if anything is unclear.

I've covered some of this on here, but wanted to treat you all to my story so far... Rewind to August 20th 2022 (shortened for convenience). One of my friends owns a Groundworks company. He subcontracts to the large developers. He offered to dig our foundations, which after lots of debate with SWMBO we decided to politely decline and go with the security of paying a company for this very important step. Then, at the final hour, matey steps in and tells us how silly we are paying for the work when he is very willing to do it for nothing. How could we refuse? So, on August 20th, he stuck the bucket of a hired 5 tonne Kubota into the ground and away we went. Over the course of the weekend, I watched in awe as he beavered away at our trenches. Digging to hard chalk, without a defined depth, as per BCO instructions. He went away on the Sunday, instructing me to 'grub the trenches out' and get Building Control in ASAP so that concrete could be put in without delay. However, on the Monday, in the cold light of day and under my own steam, I started to become suspicious. The trenches just didn't look right. They all merged into one another from a depth stand-point, but we have 2 internal level changes, 600mm and 400mm, so how were these accounted for? Truth is, they weren't. My trenches were wildly wrong. So, for the next 4 weeks, I had no choice but to master the 5T digger, climbing over trenches and all sorts of shenanigans in order to reach impossible-to-reach trenches in order to correct the depth errors. The worst corner to get to was 500mm too shallow, I had to have one track either side of a trench and the front bar propped up on Heras blocks, with the cab turned 90° digging through hard chalk and flints. But we got there, the relief of seeing the concrete going in was immeasurable. In went 43m2 of concrete. Well, 41m2 and 2 cube onto the floor, but that was a small price to pay. I'll continue the story below...

Stuffy room.. You light the stove.. big flames.. warm the room up.. then you turn it down to ticking over. After a while you'll notice that the air in the room does not "smell fresh".. very difficult to desrcibe but you just know that the air in the room has changed since you lit the stove. Your nose is very sensitive so trust it. Another way is to think of this. If you are a parent with a young child and you go into their bedroom.. instinctively you know if the air is bad.. "just not right". You open a window for example. That is the test.. it's in our genes as parents. Yes MHVR is great but I have Clients that send their kids to "outdoor schools" see my point? And no amount of technology is going to over ride a mother's instinct in terms of air quality. That is a diffucult question. For me having grown up in the country and abroad (Africa) I'm not that keen on relying on the gas / electric company / modern interconnected electronics to save the day in the short term when the shops are shut for a few days. At least with a stove you could keep one room warm for your kids, boil a kettle and cook a meal on the top in the short term. I'm not a "survivalist" say like in the US but have lived in the borders of Scotland where the power used to go off for days. I admire what you are trying to achieve and hope this helps you to reach a conclusion that works for you.

Plenty here will advise against a WBS. It is a very marmite subject. In use, our stove draws very well, I don't personally believe there is any risk or particulates getting into the room. The flue draws so well I am sure the pressure inside the stove is less than room pressure.

As above! If this isn’t an outside wall then extra caution is needed

Time for an update. I settled with working within a 450J window and it's not too much of a hassle. The diverter has been in constant operation for 3 months now and has only let 6% of what it has diverted out to the grid. However, last week I installed a new UPS for some computer kit and immediately noticed a problem. The switching supply in the UPS puts a tragic amount of wideband noise on the mains when charging the battery and this was swamping my X10 like 120kHz signalling. I was using this as a low latency signal to "burn" cycles remotely around the house. But as elegant as it was, it's no good if it can't be relied on. Back to the drawing board (I always suspected this might be an issue). I then revisited the use of MQTT but nothing I did could get latency down below a max. of 160ms. At 3kW this is about 500J so the buffer could easily over/underflow and hence possibly cost me unnecessary import. UDP was still too slow with a max. latency of 80ms. Something else was needed. This is when I started looking at RF modules like the Nordic Semis NRF devices. But when researching I found comparisons with a thing called ESP-NOW. Turns out I don't need another RF module as Expressif have implemented a low-latency peer-to-peer communication protocol that can run concurrently with the WiFi stack on the ESP8266 and ESP32. It works by allowing small packets to fly between devices point-to-point. They're not passed through access points or switches and have a latency of a couple of milliseconds as a consequence. Perfect! It also has a broadcast capability so my goal of being able to distribute dump loads around the place is nicely catered for. The packets are only 250 bytes but that's plenty to have a 'burn' flagbit and a frame count (to spot missing packets for a QOS check) as well as a cycle-by-cycle voltage and power measurement to keep the immersion unit updated with the bigger picture. Being point-to-point also means the entire network, along with MQTT etc. can go down but the measurement unit and distributed dump load switches will all stay working. The range isn't great though and I've swapped the ESP32's with ones that can have an external antenna to improve the range. However, even with 5% packet loss, with packets sent at the end of every cycle it would be unlikey for 5 out of 100 to go missing in a row and lose 100ms (300J). Also, it's easy to rebroadcast the packets with a repeater that can extend the range. Somehow ESP-NOW manages to step in and answer all my prayers for the sake of a tiny extra code overhead.

This picture was taken after the concrete pour on the 20th September, a month after my 'mate' had arrived on site full of promise. I definitely 'levelled up' in that time. This photo shows the 600mm level change and also the £300 puddle that I had to break up with the digger a few days later and remove in 4 loads on my little flatbed.

No not mad as asking good questions. I would try and insulate as best you / seal up drafty areas for the winter at least cost. Keep it all (stair) in place for now until you make up your mind if you want to convert the attic or not. You could spend £1000+ mucking about.. that could go towards the extra heating cost anyway.. pragmatically look at in the round? What Peter says can be really important, you could indavertantly blow it and regret later. Take plenty photographs and record.

The cavity wall EPS bead installers have not closed the cavity properly before pumping it. Under the corner of that pile you'll find a hole into the cavity. EPS beads can degrade the plasticiser in electrical cables so check to see if any are buried underneath. This may be more of a theoretical problem than a real one. Assuming there's not any in contact if just take a rake or stick and level them out over the attic insulation. Every bit of insulation helps.

Now that is a dilemma. Here are two facets. In the past lenders would release funding at certain stages. Underbuilding out of the ground, wind and water tight, first fix, completion say. Their idea of wind and water tight was that the windows / doors had to be in and the roof weather tight but no tiles say. But for self builders windows and doors are a big ticket item so you wanted to buy them as late as you can in terms of the cost curve / interest paid on the loan. Also windows and doors can get damaged so best left until you have stopped using Sthill saws etc in close proximity. Structurally wise the windows are often fitted to the timber frame which moves up and down and thus so does the window with it and the finishes on the inside. To accommodate this movement we put a compressible material under the cill where it extends over the outside leaf of masonry which for all intents and purposes stays still. Over the head we allow a gap between the top of the window and the timber frame lintel (to account for deflection from roof loads.. tiles etc) and a flexible mastic joint between the outside of the window frame and the outer leaf of masonry. In Scotland we have been doing this for decades so know that it works ok if the drawings are followed... that is what we strive for! Remember that a timber framed house is very much a "living" structure. Yes when the frame is first built it will shrink a fair bit but in autumn after the heating has been off over the summer it will swell a bit. It is always moving. The problem is that if you fix your windows to the outer leaf of masonry is that it is much harder to create the aesthetic movement joints between the timber frame / attached finishes and the inside face of the window frame. The window frame then be still as it is fixed to the masonry, the window cill, wall paper ect will then be moving up and down. Best to keep the big flexible mastic joints outside than on the inside? Would I fix a window to the outer skin of masonry on a standard structural timber frame if it was my own house.. no.

Over priced Pricing per tile to help fool diyers There sales approach is similar to one of the fast fit tyre and exhaust centres Most of there tiles are end of line Al Murad tend to be end of line But at least they are upfront about it The trade side of top's is fine 60% off Same with there overpriced adhesives £10 for 20 kg of rapid set should be fine

I read that Instagram was also down today. Perhaps an AWS outage was affecting a wider range of services. Denshi Blocks! Cool. I wanted to get my son one of those in the late 90's but couldn't find one. Settled for a Radio Shack Science Fair 200-IN-1 Electronic Project Lab instead. Not that he took much interest in it. To be fair, it was pretty lame.

Our recommendation, which we followed, was roof on first (or at least loaded-out) to 'settle' the frame, then brickwork, then windows. The windows are set about 40mm back from the face of the brickwork and span the cavity and are fitted using compriband.

Ask your tiler to get you a discount I pay between 40 and 60 % of the shop price Stay clear of topps

I wonder what ne'er-do-wells can do with all this internet connected fluff? It never fails to amaze me how vulnerable WiFi is. 802.11 packets are freely broadcast and with a few quids worth of ESP8266 magic, packets can be injected to de-authorise any chosen devices. The layer on which this works is above all the encryption so the attacker doesn't need a password. From there it's possible to monitor the reconnection process as the ejected device tries to recover at which point... your WiFi creds can be revealed (MIM, eviltwin AP, Wifiphisher etc.) Great sport for teens with nothing better to do and a smattering of arduino & Github.

Safe as houses https://time.com/5922897/us-nuclear-weapons-energy-hacked/ Liz Truss has had to hand her phone back. It is in a box with Donald Trump's.

I have a display on my Luxpower so if I can't access the web based monitoring I can simply look at the front of the inverter.

I hate cloud based stuff with a passion . There’s been plenty of examples with Tesla cars / ring doorbell’s - if the cloud infrastructure has an issue YOU have an issue and there isn’t a lot you can do about it .

The PW battery does have a nice light. It was a good solid green is good. Gateway also has nice lights; they were all good too. Agree though a simple coloured light is very reassuring except when it says "all working" and it isn't.

Thanks for the thread. so when I eventually get some form of battery storage thingy, a requirement high on the list is it WILL NOT need some server to connect to to make it work. It must work all by itself.

For the record ….. the glazing is the correct size ! 👏🏻

Looks and sounds like damp walls and could well be a chimney leak. If the skirts are wet then you might as well pull it off especially if plaster has detached. As the patch looks quite even I would guess at water falling down a cavity and splashing rather than seepage through the wall. What’s on the other side?

Have seen a van and checked the website, promoting spray-on plaster. It seems to be done with a heavy-duty paint sprayer, by Graco. The plaster is in readymixed sacks, looking like very thick paint. Anybody know of it or similar? This would be for plasterboard walls and ceilings...lots of it. Obv this would be quick. There are many mentions of speed, lack of dust, and avoidance of waste. But there is a studious avoidance of mentioning cost, or whether it is smooth.

Good idea. A lot of draught through that hole. If you can't drill for some reason, there will be a type you could glue on. I must do mine. Failing which... velcro.

This is all they do, and they work out a price based on estimated time. I expect them to be good at it and as quick as they say.

Back to my suggestion of the local councillor. Getting them interested is the first issue, but there are several neighbours involved so that helps. Once you have their support though, it is a short cut to all the council departments, as the councillor can summon them. This helps a lot when the planners etc would rather not deal with your issue (busy, don't like disputes). The council depts have up to date detailed maps of ownerships, land to be kept open etc. The other suggestions on doing your homework are important too. The more convincing your case, the better.

@Jon C What's the source of the map in the first post ? It isn't the land registry map, it looks like a Planning permission map, with the red boundaries. May also be worth asking for the Highways map as well from the local county, as it may be owned by them.

I'd generally take the specialist's opinion over that of your contractor, unless your contractor has a lot of experience working with polished concrete.

Appliances Direct: up to 40% discounts on a number of freezers, including upright Miele freezers down from £2000+ to around £1200. Refurbed, but look worthwhile. https://www.appliancesdirect.co.uk/ct/refurbished/refrigeration/freezers I got my Liebherr as an ex-display one from there for £1400 not £2400, and it has been great. F

One other thing, obvious but I’ll say it anyway. All penetrations through the tiles that are under the bath are surrounded by a little silicon wall so that any leaking water doesn’t get down the hole before it shows itself under the bath edge.

I bought one as I wanted it there to be used when I had time and as an when it was needed (and if its there you use it for alot of things other than digging) rather than be tied to a timeline as to when its on hire. Guess it depends on the size and state of your plot and how far forward you are with your build but i'd always buy and the way they hold there price chances are you will get back what you paid. (Or at least thats what I told the wife and am Hoping!)

Old Bakelite fuses can be cracked and/or brittle. Pull them and they can disintegrate.

Also on the subject of pulling the main fuse. ONLY consider it if it is a modern all plastic fuse carrier and base and in good condition. There are a lot of old damaged main fuses still in use and some really lethal metal cased main fuses that even the DNO don't like pulling I would never touch those.

It surprised me too. 🤣 Jan and I are retired. My son is only working a part week ATM, so we are in the house pretty much all of the time and my son effectively has his own bed-sit on the top floor. So we have 1 freezer (plus a small supplemental one brought on when needed); three fridges; 1 DW, 1 WM; our cooking is electric / induction; SunAmps for HW; MVHR and slab recirc; 1 gamer PC and 2 laptops on; tablets and mobiles of course, and 3RPis. All lighting is LED. The fridge/freezer in the utility is old, so it has a relatively poor energy rating, but it is not economically worth replacing. It seems quite easy to sustain 600-750W baseload for this lot, and that equates to 15-18 kWh /day. 😢

One here.

Yes . It’s ‘ checking ‘ the grid is there and adjusts to suit ; perfectly normal .

Just the polishing process? We had a two man team in (after their colleagues laid the concrete a few days before) and it didn't take them a full day. They did around 160 m2, although the studwork was in place, so there was a lot more faffing about than if it was just a single slab.

No government body dare talk about the elephant in the room. just what do do about all the lousy leaky houses in the UK, how to upgrade or replace them, and who will pay? Easier to bang on about wrong door colour.

Hello and welcome, I’m sure your input will be appreciated

Not your 'job' anymore I know, but it has been suggested, quite often, about easy links to the usual stuff i.e working out U-Values from multiple layer make ups. I suggested a simple HTML5 calculator, but got shot down as it 'is too difficult', but not by you. I am with @Ferdinand use Google to search the site.

Apologies. I will delve into the archive.