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I wouldn't expect any of that lot to be fitted for investigatory works. When we had our borehole drilled they started by digging a chuffing great hole (about the size of a small car) as a holding tank for the drilling water; then they drilled until they hit water; gave it a trial pump at the desired flowrate; then a little further etc until the desired flowrate was acheived. The final test involved dropping a temporary pump down the hole; running it at a set rate for an hour or so (hence the chuffing great hole that they can fill up during the test); and noting the "dynamic level" at your desired hourly duty flowrate. In our case they hit an overtly clean sand layer (under a clay cap) at 35 metres so added 5 metres more and called it almost certainly good. Writeup then says: Geological data: 0-21m: clay 21 to 35m: sandy clay 35 to 40m: sand Borehole diameter: 125 mm Borehole depth: 40m Static water level: 21m Dynamic level: 37m to 3,000 litres/hour Recommended pump lowering level: 38m "Borehole performance" 2400 litres/hour "Filter level" from 35m to 38m (rated capacity is 2400 litres/hour) None of the "gubbins" are installed until quite a bit later. Borehole can still be in the wrong place but at this point it's just underground pipe/cable between it and the house. It would have to be very wrong (e.g wrong end of a 5 acre plot) to matter which doesn't sound like the case on an existing barn conversion? If you need water during the build you drop a pump down the hole with an open-pipe on the end of it and an on-off switch. Usually a cheapo Chinese one that you don't mind abusing. e.g. https://online.depo-diy.lt/products/6937#23391 You could build a shed full of gubbins but it'd only freeze / get driven over / pinched etc. Once the build is near complete do you trench the supply pipe into the side of the borehole, sink the pump on a permanent pipe/cable, and place all your gubbins inside the house.

Agreed there, this looks like someone just doing what they want with little skill or thought. If they had the money to build this they had some to pay a designer to break up the bulk, sort the windows out, pick a nicer brick. (And get them planning permission!) I hope they make them take it down, and I usually think that’s harsh, but this is a big scaley monster.

Today a Government Minster claims... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58620167 About as reassuring as that other haggard 10 Downing Street phrase "the Prime Minister has every confidence in the Minister of". Is it time to start a thread on candle prices?

I have access to a supplier's online costing guide, and so entered a 254 x 146 x 35 I beam for a price, for a full length of 8m £430 each. So coming out at £1,700/ton from that stockholder. That is for full lengths, and excludes delivery, so add for waste, cutting, priming ( but you can diy), and delivery. Of course there is no fabrication in there either. So your 3.6t is costing £6k at the gate. Add £15,000 for transport, some welding and a small new car!!! The supplier is nowhere near you , but someone else is.

I’ll have a quick browse for a product capable of taking up the amount of slack that’s expected with you ?. May need something industrial ?

This sounds like an RHI, not FIT

'S German innit.... wadja expect ? Vorsprung durch Schnellerarbeit (High speed work)

@Gone West thanks for GBF reference. I read Owlman's posts and he seem to use a ducted AC system in part of house. He also has other heating mechanism in the house. If we go to AC direction then it will be our only heating option. We can do ducted atleast in part of house, but we are concerned about not being able to control individual rooms and temperatures

With the size of house you have, be cheaper to not bring them back.

My point is that if you can't even be bothered firing up Uswitch (other energy comparison sites are available) then you probably don't really care about energy efficiency either. If I left my family to their own devices they would, for example, leave the heating on whilst we are on holiday for two weeks so that it is warm when they get home. At the recent price of around 4p/kWh that could be around £80 a week at the height of winter.

I am no expert either but that looks a very decent job. I imagine the others can be cleaned up with a bit of acid but be careful of the window frames.

Life’s a gamble, I would T off the seller, instal a meter at your boundary and get a legal contract written in case seller moved on. At a previous house I had a neighbours drain connected to mine at the boundary and deeds included clause regarding maintenance. My parents lived in a Victorian terrace for 50 years with a shared supply (no meters) and had no problems (apart from shared stop cock but vary rarely an issue.)

I think people on here are at the extreme end of being energy efficient. Most people have no idea, almost a quarter of people have never changed supplier which could save you an enormous amount for almost no effort. I took my dad to get his ingrowing toenails taken off the other day. There was a car sitting idling the engine outside when I went in and still sitting idling when I came out over half an hour later. It was about 19C outside, so neither cold enough to need heating nor warm enough to need AC. It is also illegal.

I should have checked, just assumed MWh was the same format as kWh.

Wasn't there some dodgy, inter-state trading going on as well. And who can forget Enron. Ramping up RE capacity is the way to go, maybe we will start to build large turbines on land again, that would get the installation cost down. And more storage. Thermal storage is by far the cheapest, so back to cylinders and night heater. Though if 30 million houses each stored 10 kWh/day, that is only 0.3 TWh, or 109 TWh/year. Not much greater than our current wind generation. That would sort it, £2.5bn/kWh.

The existing easements with other neighbours should not preclude a technology upgrade, hopefully their Deeds define the septic tank in general terms and would allow the landowner to swap out the installation with a replacement providing it provides the same service to the other properties. Although easements are not shared across properties they can be written with clauses that cascade down a chain of land splits as say a developer sells of each property and retains the remaining land briefly until the next house sells. Deeds and easements can last for 100's of years hence a highly prescriptive maintenance schedule in the Deeds would be problematic. You could try to separately bind the named householders into a maintenance contract for a fixed term. There is also the concept of an "easement by contract" which effectually creates the benefit of an easement defined in Deeds by proxy though a contract. This is a niche subject and cannot arise from a contract that defines a shared benefit because an easement is a specific grant from one property to another. I reckon you need pro guidance on this one and in my experience the cost of sorting out a dispute arising from neighbours interpreting infrastructure rights differently will be more expensive than legal clarity from the outset.

My water supply is connected via my neighbour and is sub metred. Never caused any issues.

and when temp gets to -10c for a few days --all those small tanks could be frozen --as there is no flow and stagnant as there would be a with a stream to stop freezing good luck with that in scotland would not be my choice no good at all if you intended do any b+b, or glamping as they would fail the annual inspection by council.

This is a temporary situation which is painful for energy suppliers and customers but will resolve itself. Wind speeds are picking up considerably which should reduce gas demand. I will be feeling the pain soon, my current fix has gas at 2.1p/kWh. It looks like I will have to pay 4p ish when it runs out. Funnily enough increased use of renewables will be the way out of this in the long run as they will likely have more stable prices. The cost of renewables is majorly driven by the depreciation of the installed equipment and less impacted by fluctuating commodity prices. Spot electricity prices will always be volatile and indeed could get more volatile with less reliable renewable capacity, but contracted baseload capacity should fall in price as the price of renewable equipment fails. Recently there has been a lack of wind, leading to higher gas use. Currently 60% of wind capacity is onshore, but most new capacity is offshore which is more reliable. I did a lot of research into hydrogen power pros and cons recently and found that one of the main assumptions for increased use of hydrogen in the future is massive drops in electricity prices as more renewables are installed and they get cheaper. I was very surprised at this and it seemed an overly optimistic assumption to me, but it bodes well for prices being reasonable in the long run. It certainly makes he maths much better for installing PV. You shouldn't need a subsidy. A 4kw system installed at around £4000 would generate around 3000kWh a year of electricity. That is almost £600 of electricity or a 15% ROI at current prices.This calculation shows why high prices will not continue, the return on adding new capacity will be very tempting. It also starts to make the calculations on installing Powerwalls and such look a lot better.

I just get the feeling of De ja vu with all this Didn't the poets that be push is all towards diesel cars with promises of cheaper prices Well at least cheaper till we had all swapped from petrol to diesel powered cars On our previous build the installation of solar panels had a Sap productive saving of 2-300 pounds per year While it may of helped to save the planet From a financial point it was and is for our next ones A no brainier Switching between the larger suppliers seems one of the better options at the moment

Usually your hardwood sill is put in as part of the door frame. Traditionally the jams fit into the sill as tenons. The galvanised weatherstrip extends into the jams. Like this. Why not fold up a bit of aluminium sheet to go over the softwood "sill" that's there, then add a modern, all singing threshold strip on top of that?

On a greenfield new build in Cambs (to a high spec - mvhr etc) I am looking at topping out at £110psf. My time has been for free mind you - forkie, site manager, handyman etc. The final costs depend on what you are hiring in - best of luck with it mate if you press the button.

Well you have been busy...

Ok so has the architect give you a budgetary figure, or did you give them one..? Next off, use one of the online estimator services, pay the £120 and see what you get back. That’s what a lot of the contractors use so you’ll be playing the same game. Lastly … you need to get started. Even if it is just digging the hole for checking the foundation depth and getting Building Control to agree to it, you can issue a commencement notice. That locks in your planning for ever and you can then carry on at whatever pace you want.

I think we are almost identical to @Bramco. On the Octopus app I can see the usage per half hour and it's not drawing power from the grid when it's working. We can see from the lights on our Solic 200 exactly what is happening. So now for instance, we have surplus power and it is being offered to the immersion as well as other things (washing machine likely). If I was to turn the washing machine off the sensor light would flash red/green as we'd have all excess going to the immersion. Out DHW is only at 34 degrees as we both had baths last night (water was at 52 degrees last night after a sunny day). I'd expect if we continue with the mixed cloud/blue skies the temp will be high 40s by the end of the day from the solar alone (as has been the case for the past few months).

Sounds like your in the same spot as me. I wanted a dusk to dawn light come on at 10% and then PIR activated to 100%, there are stand alone units but when it comes to the linked set HUE appeared to be the only/simplest solution.

DO NOT CAP THEM OFF !!!! You will create a bomb if you cap that off and then heat it up.

My advice is to nail down the spec with the Mrs before you begin or asap. I build spec houses all the time and it is fine - my house has been a total nightmare. I have double power points installed which are going to be behind larder units in the utility (endless changes there ffs!), don't know what vanities and sinks we are getting (tiling starts tomorrow) - the list is endless. Perhaps I should just stfu and not ask? I can see why builders penalise variations - they are horrible. It has made me hate the place tbh. Either that or I just need a break (now booked thankfully).

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What film is he in ?

That is seriously (expletive deleted)ing loads, who is your supplier? Does that cost include erection? Drop me a PM to see if I can help out.

It's still got his goat...

Yes, then Oxfordshire. Works here.

@craig should know the answer, he had broken more windows than Microsoft.