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If that was mine I would get the local bloke with his tractor flail, we pay £42 per hour and that shouldn’t take more than an hour.

It seems that I have a ‘little mind’ because this ‘little thing’ pleased me no end! I’ve been itching for it to rain since I put the silt trap in, surely there are better things for me to be getting on with! C1C99E6F-B98A-45DF-9887-6046077BD851.MOV

“Telebeam” is what @PeterW mentioned above ?

I paid just under £200 for some temporary stairs and butchered them to suit my needs. They will be there for a couple of years so I consider it to be value for money - sod using a ladder for that long and trying to wrestle materials upstairs, it's a false economy. I had enough timber to make my own but why bother. It's not a lot of cash wheras it would take me a fair bit of time to do - time which could be better spent elsewhere. Just shy of 2.9m floor to floor. The timber framers installed a crash deck for their safety, I cut a hole through it and then knocked a hand rail up.

With this stair void, are you suggesting this will be exposed all the way up to the underside of the rafters? If so, you can still achieve this same look and feel with the new stair over the existing. Imagine the current stair from ground to first... just take that up from first to second, which will provide you with an additional room or access to two rooms. Do you have a section through the building? Spiral staircases are ok in certain situations but where they’re really more exposed and made a feature. They’re a pain to move furniture up and down and in some instances, actually take up more space than a traditionally designed staircase. The one you showed is 600mm wide, which is really tight and is something you’d normally see and use for a wine cellar. You’d want a width of at least 800mm to make it flow and work better.

There are rules in Part H on what can join a stack at the same level. Typically you can't have a 110mm pipe from a WC join a stack opposite a smaller pipe from a basin or similar. I believe the thing you are referring to is a "Soil manifold" intended to prevent "cross flow" from one branch to another. Thereby allowing multiple branches to connect at same height.

Well after an "interlude" caused by Covid-19, 8 weeks after ordering it, my sheets of multipanel arrived and I could resume working on this. It's nearing completion now. A few photo's Which brings me on to the next question. I need to find a glass shower screen. It will go just about where the multipanel joint is in that last photograph to protect the stuff on or under the wall unit from getting wet when showering. It needs to hinge to the left when not showering to give proper access to the unit. And it is under a sloping ceiling so an absolute maximum height of 1800mm I have not found one yet. I have found 1500mm high hinged shower screens but they are really meant for going on top of a bath, and I don't think 1500mm is high enough. I have found fixed 1800mm high panels, but that is no good it must hinge. I have found 1800mm high pivot doors but that needs a frame above and below which I don't want. All I want is an 1800mm high by about 800 or 900mm glass panel that fixes to the wall with a couple of hinges and will swing side to side. Am I really into the realms of buying the hinges and getting the local glass supplier to supply the sheet of glass with appropriate holes in it?

I standardised on Makita power tools 18 months ago when my Metabo tools had finally become too old. So I have about 4 batteries, and no need to buy any more than a bare tool here. Also, I don't exactly have a lot of hedges - more shrubs and informal borders - so I do not need the power of a petrol one, and would rather avoid the weight. Previously I had a Metabo cordless hedge trimmer that was vintage 2000, used at my parents' house which *did* have a lot of hedge - both sides of a 60m drive. And I would need to get 2 stroke oil in again, and maintain a supply of unleaded with nothing else to use it for (car is diesel). Ferdinand

I can tell you that percolation test holes half full of water are not things to go and inspect just to see how it is doing if you are dressed up to go out on the posh.

You can use a 3 port 2 position valve, but I preferred to use two 2 port valves instead,. Do NOT use a 3 port mid position valve. Yes there is a bit of an anomoly in the control system for mine. The time clock activates the UFH manifold controller and that controls the UFH circulating pump and calls for heat from the ASHP. But because the ASHP decides for itself when to switch between space heating and DHW heating, the ASHP controls the motorised valves. This leaves the UFH circulating pump circulating ever cooling water while the ASHP is heating DHW. Not ideal but it does no harm and I could see no easy way to stop it doing that.

@Andrew @JulianB Some additional reading for you both in respect of ASHP feeding UFH, and a 300 litre UVC using a preplumbed Mitsubishi Ecodan:

yep. I agree for the road side of the hedge but I still have to do the garden side!

There are a few fast drying screeds out there = we used Cemfloor and are very happy with it.

Bit the bullet, now we're replacing the entire ground floor with concrete as was suggested by you guys way earlier. Sometimes you just have to come to things in your own time ?? Just trying to figure out the ufh screed situation so we're not waiting months for it to dry but that's another thread!

It would be best to leave til after August to save destroying nesting birds.

I don't see why you can't treat it in situ. What fixings? If screws then you could remove it, if ring shanks then definitely leave in place

Get a farmer to run a flail over it for the first pass. That photo - to me - shows it's too much of a job for a normal hedge trimmer. Much too high. Unless you've got the shoulders and biceps of a gorilla. Then any of the serious tool companies do sensibly priced hedge whizzers. My preference is for Stihl, but there are plenty of good alternatives . Keep on top of that thing... hedges run away with you if left even one season.

What diameter are the branches at the height it would be cut down to? Mine grows 2-3 feet a year and I cut down quite low - just above waist height. A few of the branches can be thick enough to need manual cutting with long handled branch loppers. If it's not been cut for a few years it might need mostly hand cutting. Otherwise I use a petrol powered multi tool. Started out as a Ryobi Expand-it, but like the old joke about a broom it's had the power head and the hedge cutter replaced by Stihl that are much better. I must have broken three Ryobi hedge cutter attachments over the years on my hedge. I use a multi tool because I needed a petrol strimmer and pole saw as well for other things. I dare say the dedicated hedge trimmers are better/stronger and less awkward. You can't beat Stihl for quality overall. Expensive but I got fed up breaking the Ryobi. The attachments are compatible with a a bit of fettling. I normally cut mine in January after the leaves have gone so there is less material to burn. I have 60m of hedge and usually takes me about 4 hours (2 hours one day and 2 the next).

@H F reviewed his a while back:

I have a 3m high hedge along 2 long borders (photo below). We currently have an electric hedge trimmer but i’m not sure it’s up to the job so I’m following this thread with interest!

Gumtree?

Hire a petrol one?

Hi, Just completed a lockdown project. We have a downstairs bedroom for when we get too old for the stairs, but for the moment it is the gym. If I had known it would be a gym it may have been a little larger. There is a lot of space given over to an en suite and a wardrobe. One thing we are finding, if anyone plans a gym, is that the French doors make a massive difference. You can open them to cool down and take stuff outside to work out there. Also we have a path all the way round the house, so can run laps, it is about 120 metres. It wasn't used much until the lockdown. My wife and daughter go to a Crossfit gym and they roped me in about 18 months ago to do it too.Must admit I feel a lot better for it, although no lighter. As we cannot go to the gym, the trainer now does Zoom classes with us. We were finding the wooden floor was too slippery and prone to being scratched by the weights. After a bit of research I reckoned the best combination of cost and function was to get a roll of rubber flooring and cut it up. I got 12sq metres of 8mm rubber for £175 delivered. Rubber tiles would have been at least twice the price and foam seemed like it would not last. We already had 2 ticker rubber tiles under the big machine. Anyway, three hours later here is our new gym. It was hard going, the floor weighs around 8kg a square metre. I have double sided tape to fix it in place, but I am going to let it settle for a bit first.

Jeepers! makes our build seem like a cake walk. Good to see you making so much progress. Getting all that concrete onto site is going to be a challenge. Looks like the rebar caging is in good shape. All Pat and I can say is "hats off" well done.

Nas/nvr working really well ! Reconfigured 4 drives as shr-2 Cpu load hardly ever above 10% , ram use 7% 2 cameras recording at 6fps res 3000x2000 ( roughly ) . Set mobile stream to be a lot less obviously. Set home mode ; so when on-site I don’t trigger movement events . Had some issues with Catilina permissions ( who doesn’t ! ) . Now sorted so Mac squeezebox streams from nas MP3’s . Intend to add Mame Roms etc. to nas ( a little side project ) Currently trying to figure out how to use fibaro universal sensor ( my electronics / electrical skills limited ) Want doorbell to trigger z wave action Also want door integrated lights to be triggered by z wave . These little sensors confuse me as inputs seem to be dry ; so no current in . Erm - fiddling required .

If it's solvent weld pipe then it's no big deal tbh. Expose the pipe, clean it and solvent weld a curved sliver of the same pipe onto it.

To update this. I contacted our BCO and explained that I thought our architect had made an error in calculating our soakaway requirements. He had drawn two, one north of the building for a roof area of 110m2 (4m3 of soakaway crates) and one south of the building for a roof area of 80m2 (2.8m3 of soakaway crates). The initial response from the BCO was mild confusion as to why there were two soakaways to which I had no answer. The second response was "...Can’t see why the design for the 100m2 soak away is not ok..." in other words, he was pretty vague about the whole thing. So I responded by telling him I'll put 3m3 of soakaway south of the building and he's happy with that. What I've learned is that calculating soakaway size is really straightforward if you use the 'rules of thumb' and a real dark art if you try and include percolation results in the calculation. It would also seem to be a dark art for my BCO (either that or he couldn't be arsed to enter all the data he had into his spread sheet?). I've also learnt that watching water drain away for the percolation test is therapeutic but otherwise a complete waste of time.

Yep. AIUI, that's how they work in practice anyway. Each time the primary water flows through the heat pump it only rises a few degrees so, assuming the return temperature is pretty much the tank temperature the flow will be UVC +5 °C so you'll get the better CoP anyhow.

Garden redesign required to put a track in . No pussyfooting for me this time. It will be one of these which is an 18V trimmer. https://www.powertoolworld.co.uk/makita-duh523z-lxt-52cm-20-5-hedge-trimmer-body-only There is a 36V version at double, but I don't think I need that.

F##k me never going to live that down am I.