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And you lot are the reason I have to go to the bloody post office sometimes. Phone up, moan and make a point about it. But to advise someone to become a deceitful theif is not the way I would go about it. I shake my head at you all

Well it's a year and you're right. It kind of fizzled out without incident. I did apply to a separate part of the council (partly as a joke) for permission to remove the relevant trees which was granted. I suppose this would have undermined their insistence on root protection but either way nothing came of it. One of the stresses with self build is that you don't know until afterwards which bits are very important and which seem like they might be, but turn out not to. A bit like life, I suppose...

The forum needs a good definitive reference thread on blocks. When I was starting out in self build I wasted hours online trying to comprehend the scope of blocks available and their pro's and con's.

going to need a photo here as can’t envisage the gaps etc to help you

Whilst not quite real time (updates every 5 minutes but could be made to be shorter), I log various temperatures with a Raspberry Pi: It's to monitor my MVHR but, as you can probably tell by the figures, the sensors aren't installed yet! The graphing can be configurable on-demand too but at the moment it's a fixed 'past two days' x-scale. Getting realtime figures 'on demand' could also be done. Happy to share my code when I'm back home (freezing my nuts off in Finland at the moment!)

If it’s a mid position valve (y plan) if there is a heating demand, you should get 230v on the white wire. However If the pump is constantly running but the boiler isn’t firing, you might have an issue with the boiler as the pump runs with a demand.

Soudal Low Expansion Foam

Are you able to work from inside . This is what I did. Safer and easier. The tile nails often protruded from inside the sarking boards so by hammering from inside this caused the nail to protrude from outside the tile and was just a case of pulling them out or using the tile itself as a lever. The slate ripper I bought was useless I used a combination of crowbars and levers. Initially lost/broke about 30% of the tiles but by the end I was losing almost none as I developed the best technique. I had some lawn nearby and just threw them onto it. Don’t bin the broken tiles sell them on Facebook people use them for garden borders if you don’t need them for that. I found the last couple of rows at the bottom most difficult to get out. Easy job (in the summer). If you have limited time don’t waste ten mins trying to get out a single difficult tile. Use the time to get the easy wins the ones that come out easiest. I really enjoyed doing it tbh. Nice clean job.

You should have tied him to one of the trees, and thrown rotten apples at him. Jumped up twat. (Him not you)

You phone up and ask where is your delivery. They say it's been delivered already and you go well it wasn't too my front door so you need it send it out again and this time request that a signature is required when it's handed over. You then put the first delivery to use or eBay which ever suits the most.

We did that in our last house. I took them off, put them in a metal bin and let them down on a rope to Wendy who cleaned and stacked them. Around 6000 IIRC and I have a lovely picture of Wendy sitting on a crate surrounded by them all cleaning them.

I have run 7 sensors on a 10 metre cable. I may have changed the resistor, can't remember which way though. As a RPI Zero W is only a tenner, may be easier to use a few more. Or use some ESP8266, pretty sure they can take a DS18B20's, can certainly take the DHTs. There is also the BME280's, they do temp, RH and pressure. What would be nice is a simple chart, one that can show all records, monthly, weekly, daily and hourly at the touch of a button, or a swipe of the screen. One problem with charts of a phone is that they are so small that they are hard to read. So may need stacked y-axis to show different sensors. Not sure how easy that is to do.

A helpful thread like this deserves a mention of SPONS: https://www.designingbuildings.co.uk/wiki/Spon's_Price_Book. My own view on QS's based on my experience preparing my current project was that, as I was using a somewhat unconventional building approach (timber frame and near-passivehaus, etc.) that the output from the QS may not resemble reality. The world of building is dominated by larger projects. QSs are part of the suite of consultants who attend them and that suite is what the entire industry is geared around. As I researched my project, I learnt that this suite was pretty well ill-suited to a single one-off bespoke house run by a self-builder. The usual fragmentation of the project into architect, QS, contract administrator, project manager, and the various engineers, etc., means that each individual parts becomes too small for each profession. It is barely worth their effort. And there are really no generalists who cover all the roles for self-builders. I also support the idea that an QS creates the mother-of-all shopping lists but are only helpful in terms of budget by setting a tentative ceiling. For tendering, I plan to work hard on producing tender with my architect's help packs for each chunk of my build. I believe a good tender pack leads to a smooth tendering process and can help achieve lower prices by reducing the need for the bidder to pad the bid because of the risk generated by vagueness and a lack of precision. For my budget, I tendered for many of the big items early on in my project (some a year before I obtained planning), and so increased the chance that my evolving budget will be born out in reality but I am still constantly re-iterating my budget as new information becomes available to me. I mark each line item with my level of confidence for it. Its like flying a plane under a bridge. Hands firmly on the controls!

It doesn't need to be that complicated. E.g., when I was thinking of nearer vertical panels I did consider putting a pond immediately south of the house to pick up a bit of reflection. Not sure how much difference that would make but it'd provide some extra light, I'm sure.

Makes you a proper "Draadtrekker"! ? (Literal translation wire puller in Afrikaans).

Ignore my lack of H+s but it's almost as if I thought someone would ask one day

I have LED strips and they run off a rechargeable Makita 18V battery stepped down to 12V via a buck converter. Lovely and bright.

The timber framed bungalow, that I dismantled last year, was built in 1920s as a temporary house for homes for heroes after WW1. It was stick built on site and made of 4" x 2". It was still standing and the only localised rot was due to later 1950s modifications.

I'm Scotland...there is always a DPO (duty planning officer) available during office hours. That's their job during their allocated time period and they rotate it half a day each. They answers queries and provide advice to people like us...they have been extremely helpful with me in the past. I dont believe planning officers are big scary people.. I do believe people who apply for planning sometimes just dont read the guidelines or have been unable to communicate their vision well enough. Call your DPO..have a chat. They are just normal people who like building :-)

How about a solar power one where the panel and lamp are separate? This sort of thing. Mount panel outside and light inside: https://www.wish.com/m/c/5d79c1b6c6c19574ffe28255?

Buy a LED bulkhead like this: https://asdlighting.com/products/centro-range/centro-circo/ or https://asdlighting.com/products/clarity-range/clarity-portrait-plain/ Get the model with built in presence detection, they consume less than 16/8W depending on model - walk into garage this product comes on, probably bright enough for simple tasks or getting something out of garage, set it to run for a minute or something or even less when no motion is detected - job done.

Tell ya wot. Re-visit this thread in a year. And tell me then that you care about anything other than a valid, direct, well-written instruction with dates for compliance. Welcome to self-building.

I'm a monkey with a hammer. It looked close enough to me ?

as above but delete this post

Stranded?! You're not using jacks and panels then!?