epsilonGreedy

Looking for some long lasting covers for various duties onsite e.g. keep brick stacks dry through the winter, something to throw over a large pile of logs or cement bags and then there will be a couple of bikes kept between the static caravan and hedge. I am loath to buy the usual B&Q sheets constructed from course weave flat threads with a token layer of crinkly plastic laminate, these start to self destruct as soon as any wind gets under them. Instead I am hoping to find something like the ground sheet supplied with my first ridge tend 50 years ago i.e. a normal woven fabric laminated within a thick coating of a plastic close to rubber in handling.

That would have been in a previous life that I cannot recall.

Yup already baked into the plan following advice from @JSHarrisin a thread a few weeks ago. The cable will be buried about 500mm deep along my presently open blockwork footing trenches. In 9 months time once the meter box is relocated into the wall and the house is weather tight, I will call in the original pro electrician to decommission the temp supply CU in this box and route the incoming supply downstream of the meter into the main house permanent CU. At this point the armoured cable supply to caravan will be left dangling externally without a live connection and reconnecting this cable somewhere is the current quandary that I have 9 months to solve. The garage will be water tight and powered up by this stage leaving a 4m gap to the static caravan. My current plan is to install a general purpose workshop style socket in the garage to be used long term for things like hoovering the car and power the caravan for the final few build months from this point.

Precisely my plan.

Pleased to note you are still alive and posting following your supply relocation. It seems my plan is sound although I am now contemplating how to the keep the static caravan connected as the supply is switched from the temp CU inside the box on stilts to the permanent internal house consumer unit. I have been lucky to get advice from wise old builders early on in my selfbuild, they consider building a house to be simple and instead their creative effort is put into saving a few hundred £ pounds here and there such as the consumer meter box relocation without incurring a bill from a pro electrician ( sorry @ProDave). Another great tip I got last week during the foul drain laying is that my index finger placed under one end of my leveled spirit resting on the drain pipe equates to a 1 in 60 fall.

I am contemplating digging some service trenching by hand and would like to hear estimates on a realistic daily dig rate through soil comprised of 150mm of fluffy top soil and then sandy silt sub soil below. This is my scenario. My part time building adviser has connected my foul drain up to the north wall block footings of my house and I now need to link this to my static caravan which arrived onsite yesterday and is situated south of the house. The route for the foul drain extension is: 4.5m under future block & beam suspend floor through the annex wing of the house. 6m under future patio to an inspection chamber. The foul drain route to the inspection chamber will become a fixed element of the permanent drainage plan for the house. The last 4m stretch to the caravan will be a temporary (1 year) fixture and as shallow as possible but below ground so as not to interfere with general site building activity. The total dig effort is: 4.5m at 300mm deep through b&b oversite. 6m at 500mm deep through future patio area. 4m as shallow as possible to the underbelly of the static caravan.

I will formulate a subtle questions to sound him out on this subject. Think I have struck lucky on this matter. I mentioned to the new supply team I hoped to lift the temp supply box straight into the cavity wall later in the build at which point one guy went back to the local depot and returned with a different slimline meter box. The current plan is to dig out the surplus cable below the supply box, detach the temp box from its wooden legs and lift the whole gubbins into the wall without disrupting the live supply. How many health & safety regs would this contravene?

This summarizes each day onsite for me, I arrive onsite feeling 20 years younger and return home limping like an oap. One benefit of my relatively slow build start is that my body has had time to become conditioned for the task ahead. Those 19kg blocks feel lighter after 3 months.

This is interesting, do you recall the weight of these blocks?

Last week Western Power installed a mains cable to a temporary supply box onsite. My next step is to select a supplier. Reading through previous BuildHub supplier threads I have come to the following conclusions: I will need to chose one of the long established big name power suppliers capable of fitting a meter to a new build and ignore the cut price minnows for a few months. Some of the big names charge for fitting a meter. Fitting should be possible within 2 weeks of signing up. I will then need a follow on visit from a conventional qualified electrician of my choosing to fit a 2 or 4 circuit consumer unit within the temp supply box. Suppliers offering too good to believe deals tend to go out of business. While living onsite in a static caravan and building through the winter my consumption could be significant. At this stage there is no point in trying to match tariff deals to the predicted energy demands of my future house because the whole market is volatile and flexible. Have I assessed things correctly? If so I think I will choose a supplier who can fit the meter asap because we are moving into the static in 5 weeks. p.s. I have my MPAN number which is called a "supply number" in the Western Power job completion letter.

In a country where medical care is free at the point of delivery I have developed a great deal of respect for medical practitioners who can make a living charging for their services.

Ok. There must be something specific to your site that tilts your requirement towards longer term dependency on a generator. I think most builders view the arrival of mains power onsite as one of those events that represent a significant step forward. My pro self build neighbour experienced delays getting mains power on site and his heavy weight brickie team did not take their 2kw framed generator home each evening, it was left onsite hidden under a cover.

My 13kg 900W Honda feels heavy at the end of a day onsite. Have you considered getting mains power onsite earlier. Mine arrived last week before I got to Damp.

Indeed. Multi hour running for battery charging is a strange usage profile. Also think about weight, that second example weighs 49kgs which is a lot store away each evening.

I want to upgrade the approved structure to a nice dry outbuilding as the main house is a bit small with limited loft space for storage plus planning covenants ban a garden shed, so this garage has to be perfect.

My BC drawings are covered with technical notes most of which look like standard cut & paste industry prose relevant to my chosen build route. If you are confident about your design & building skills there is always the "as built" BC option. My pro self build neighbour is doing this.

My detached garage is comprised of a single story main block 7.2m x 5.6m plus a store appendage 3.3m x 2.3m externally attached to the shorter 5.6m wall. The store is an architectural feature under a catslide roof. I intend to build the main garage as a double skinned 100mm cavity wall but now I am wondering if I can squeeze a useful extra percentage of internal floor space for the store by dropping down to a 50mm cavity we are talking about an extra 4" or 100mm along the longer 2700mm internal wall. If I, as a beginner brick layer, build this garage above dpc (already doing so below dpc) is there a significant extra risk of wall tie mortar bridges with a 50mm cavity?

The report doubts (though not tested) the effectiveness of recirculating cooker hoods and adds they are unsuitable for gas cookers. With this in mind is there a product that effectively seals a genuine exhausting cooker hood when the fan is off?

I am in a similar situation to you and have got by as follows: A friendly semi retired local builder loaned me his £500 caliber rotary laser. Really easy to use but would have been better with a graduated staff and a mini spirit level built in. Not sure hiring is an economic option because if like me you are learning on the job you will work at a slow rate and keep rechecking everything over days or weeks. Now that the rotating laser has been returned I am using a £140 DeWalt line laser outdoors late in the evening. With a bit of cloud cover I can pick up the red line on a staff 12m away an hour before sun set. You need to be careful about dazzling people offsite when using this technique, keep it low or use obstructions to sector the beam to keep it onsite.

This is a bit Orwellian. For years the industry chanted, "Shallow foul drain good, steep fall bad". Then one day we wake up to "Shallow is good and err because there is no mention of steep it must be ok".

This is odd. A building standard accepted as received wisdom for years has been over turned and yet no reference can can found.

Naive question from me. Are you registering a property or the land on which the property sits? Also is this a transfer of ownership, a split of an existing plot (known as a "part" in legal speak) or are you one of those exceptionally lucky people who stumbled on a parcel of land with no owner. When buying my self build plot the estate agency refused to proceed with the sale unless I appointed a solicitor and explained this was a new policy arising from a recent bad experience for them.

The proponents of thin-joint concede that with a stop watch running their system does not quite match the remarkable onsite erection times of TF, however it is claimed that once TF design and manufacturing production scheduling at the factory is factored in thin-joint can be faster. I have not read the thin-joint material for a few weeks but I think the mortar is structurally sound within hours. The drilled in wall ties overcome one item in the list but I cannot judge the significance of the other gotchas except to say that with an expensive band saw on site the blocks are easy to shape. The uber free market capitalist lurking in me believes the market is right and there is a good reason the system has not taken off in the UK but I am still searching for the killer point.

I remain puzzled and doubt you will get a balanced opinion from a British based forum because for some reason thin-joint never reached a critical mass of adoption here to take off and then generate real-world pro's and con's based on experience. I would value the opinion of German builders where it has been accepted as a viable build method. The manufacturer's promotion of thin-joint is reasonable and logical but I sense they have lost interest from a sales effort/reward perspective. A large segment of self builders like to think different and should be a natural constituency for thin-joint, perhaps the most valuable feedback would be from those who selected ICF or Durisol and might have considered thin-joint during their early self build journey. Two specific unresolved technical points for me arise from that H+H celcon thin-joint video showing an innerskin only-build raising up to gutter height and then the roof being installed. H+H do not clarify if this is based on 100mm, 140mm or wider blocks, the same video also shows something like internal temporary pillar supports being used as the single skin reaches first floor joist height.

https://www.honda.co.uk/industrial/products/generators/inverter/specifications.html#eu10i The start up behaviour under load is best described with the sound made by my electric lawn mower when I cut the grass on plot. There is a strange phased wind up to full mower speed as the two devices try to match supply and demand.