LA3222

Yes mate, my render is all done now. Total cost worked out at £50/m2. I paid for the materials direct and deducted that from the renderers bill so I can VAT back - so if take VAT out it is around £47/m2. There were some sections originally to be clad in render board etc. Renderer said he works his price on £50/m2 - the sections of render carrier made no difference. Where abouts are you?

Well, from reading this it seems that SunAmp has had its day on this forum. I've seen enough to put me on the 'well trodden' path of ASHP & UVC for DHW ?‍♂️

That's some super tidy work there @joth, good effort bud - wish I kew what to do and where to start with that kind of stuff.

I'd be interested to k ow how much you saved and where? Suggesting an alternate route is an obvious point that everyone getting a connection should check. I moved my connection point 30m closer to the boundary to save a few quid. Duct and draw cord - this sounds pretty standard? 40m of duct and drawcord was laid by my DNO for my connection. Grant - unique to SSE? So not many can benefit from that. Using your own contractor is a hit and miss tactic. If road openings are involved you won't save much if anything and a lot of the work can only be done by the DNO. For my connection, the amount of work I could subcontract out was so small that no one was interested in taking it on. It was only worth me doing 30m that went over my land/shared driveway. From your posts I would suggest your biggest lever over the DNO was the fact that their pole sat on your land. For context, my connection is 3ph and involved laying a new cable down 70m of unadopted Lane for which I had the pleasure of handing over a check for 11% of the total job cost. It is what it is, some you win and some you lose?‍♂️ Note. If you can use your own contractor to lay all your services at once through a road opening then you may make some good savings.

10 years and you still haven't done the gates, thats bloody slow going. We can laugh and joke about it but in all seriousness shouldn't the priority be in getting stuff done in the quickest and easiest way that works rather than mess around doing it in a way that no one else other than you is going to care about? There's no prizes for coring through the footings - its a ball ache for the sake of it. Surely the easiest way to 'hide' it would be to dig a small trench outside, drill though about 100mm below ground level into garage, breaker the floor a bit so you hit where you drilled through to. The garage floor can be reconcreted, the pipe outside at 100mm deep can be backfilled and no one will be any the wiser its there? Just my two cents?‍♂️

I would suggest that badgering utility suppliers does nothing, an individual householder is small potatoes - this however gives you all the aces and is probably the reason why the DNO decided to play ball. Leverage is king in this situation.

Ha, I'm with everyone else here - get the fence moved and deal with the fallout when she notices. If she then tries to move 'your' fence from its correct position, kindly ring the police and report criminal damage against your fence. In theory she will get told to get back in her box and take you to court, at which point the burden lies with her to prove/disprove etc. I suspect she won't bother.

I have the invisiweep, not sure if I'd go with that type again - the hole is very square and bigger than you'd think, ill take some pics later to show you what I mean

@redtopgood effort bud, its good to see you are making progress!

Its 300, just checked.

Not sure about the 100 centres - off the top of my head I seem to recall it being 300 centres?

Nope, just white cement with a little bit of sharp sand in the mix and a 'bagged off' finish is what they call it I believe.

The counterbattens have to be screwed in - if you go to the Kingspan Tek site there are a raft of standard details available including the roof and what fixings to use. It states Ejot screws. I had a discussion with their technical department to see what they recommend and it seems they have conducted tests on the pull out strength of fixings into SIP. I was informed that fixings need to be long enough to penetrate 20mm into the actual insulation. I believe I gave the roofers a load of 70mm TKE stainless steel fixings from Ejot. I would not recommend those though. Having used them they are a PITA as the bits chew the head up if you aren't careful which happened a lot. I would suggest using an equivalent Spax type fixing - no doubt more costly but easier to use. @SuperJohnG - for your info aswell as I know you're going the SIP route too?

I used JB Reds at 25x50 for both the batten/counter batten on my SIP roof. L

Every day is a school day! What's the purpose of a twin fuse head?

Hambleton. I reckon I have about 220 and likely a few corner ones - not been keeping track to be honest.

@MortarThePoint I have a load of plinth bricks left over from the house. Not sure if they would match yours - they were from York Handmade. I do intend to use them for the garage and garden room but won't building them for a year so can get more at a later date.

I'm no expert - I would hazard its two phase? Three phase cable but only two of the phases have been connected up?

Wow.....I paid just under £3500 iirc. Ill check later. Thats for 12wks, 9% per wk after that. I've a SIP build - think I reach week 12 in another week or so. I got the scaffolders to zero rate the labour though, so I know that out of that 3.5k it's around 2k for the scaff which leaves me paying around £200 for each week overrun. I expect the overrun will be about 3/4 wks. My scaff is for a 170m2 footprint. Two lifts around house. Two hop up lifts on gable. Another hop up lift on the side extension.

Have you read the mortgages sub forum? All the info is in there. Ecology?

without knowing anything other than what you cover in your post these are the things that stand out to me. Agreement made in the 80s....fence been there since then? If so, the land isikely theirs now so you have no bargaining chip there - they hold all the aces. Beneficial situation - yep. If their solicitor is any good they will rightly advise their client to milk every penny they can out of you for this. "Until the build is done" - this suggests you may attempt to address the boundary issue at some point. It will be a costly exercise trying to sort that out and you may not win.

I'm not sure. The biggest issue seems to be maximising PV use, without rereading everything I can't recall if the PV charging was optimal early on or just better than it currently is? I think SunAmp is good, but I'm starting to think that it is slightly one dimensional for its cost. The solar battle went the way of PV over thermal. I suspect energy storage will go to Battery rather than phase change. PV seems to be going down in price, I suspect battery storage will follow suit.

This is exactly what I was thinking whilst catching up on this thread. I think SunAmp has had its moment in the sun on this forum and newer members are looking at them qith a whole different set of glasses on. The early adopters amongst the forum members were very enthusiastic and positive about SunAmp, which bleeds into and alters newer members thinking (not a bad thing as such). But I think the honeymoon period seems to now be over and the real experiences that members such as @Barney12 for one, have had has been somewhat deflating from what people hoped they would be. Its been an interesting journey, but I think the argument for SunAmp is slowly being lost.

@Mike_scotland they gave me a costings spreadsheet which tells you how much they could potentially lend you. Then its 3 months of wage slips, a costings spreadsheet you can do yourself and not a lot else to be honest. You have a phone interview to go through everything, pay the fee, the valuer does their bit, solicitor does theirs and then job done. They are very easy to deal with.

I was thinking along the lines of 2 x Uniq12 for my DHW to be charged via off peak electric/solar PV. The heating would have been an ASHP connected to UFH system. All of the niggles with SunAmp are starting to put me off. I was hoping it would all have been ironed out by now but that doesn't seem to be the case. I'm now wavering towards UVC setup, but I need to put some research in to all this. Up till now it was a vague plan bubbling away in the background, I'm reaching the point where I need to start going firm on what the plan is going to be.