recoveringbuilder

Thanks @Declan52 this confirms what we were suspecting, we just discovered this last night, I suspect it was going to be too much bother to gain access into the chamber to attach it to the stove, I am also of the opinion that he well knows that it’s still not going to heat the house as it should, I believe he’s unaware that Hetas are coming back out for a look at the work, he has sent them pictures of the work he’s done and I suspect he thinks this will suffice,

So as an update to this saga, after seeking legal advice I was told since I’d gone through the arbitration process I had to allow the installer to come back and sort out his non conformancies and only then would I be able to do anything more about it if it still didn’t heat the house. he came back 10 days ago and “installed “ the air intake duct. I am writing this in inverted commas because he tried to say when he accessed the loft the duct was sitting waiting to be put through the soffit, I did ask him how he had expected it to make its way out as by the time he “left “ it there no work was taking place in the area and no one was ever going to find it, he also hadn’t brought it down anywhere near the stove, I know he is once again lying about this as I had someone working outside that day who saw him bringing the ducting out of his van , no matter we know the man is a compulsive liar so weren’t expecting anything else. So the duct is attached to a vent tile on the roof, comes down through the loft area and enters the chamber that the stove is built into, enters as in we can see it in the ceiling of the chamber, it doesn’t come down and attach to the stove, we don’t think this is correct! when hetas were out originally they were looking for it to be attached to the stove!, we expected it would be probably late November before we could really see if this had made a difference to the heat supply from the boiler ( arbitrator stated that only if after the work was done it still didn’t heat the house we would be due a refund) but we didn’t need to wait that long, we turned on the ufh downstairs and just let it gently heat up for a few days, it wasn’t cold outside but the slab obviously hadn’t been heated for a while so we started at 16degrees and gradually turned the stats up to 18 in bedrooms downstairs and 19 in public rooms. We got up on Sunday morning to find a few zones calling for heat , the stove nearly out of pellets and the tank sitting at 29 degrees top and bottom, not warm enough for a shower, looking at my app for electricity usage it appears that the boiler kicked in at around 5 am and it burned continuously until 1pm, this was the time it took to get the downstairs rooms up to 18 and 19 degrees ( and they weren’t that far below this to start with)and get the tank up to its required temperature, AND this was without even trying to put on the radiators upstairs or take a shower! Hetas are due to visit next week to check out the work done but surely the air intake duct should have been attached to the boiler??

We have a procom system, 6 cameras around the house, recording box in the loft and I view it from an app on my phone.two of the cameras have tripwires and I’m alerted if anyone crosses that area, I also have an alarm that I can set to go off if anyone enters into the area covered by the tripwire . Very interesting viewing when you pay a pet sitter to stay with your pets while you have a few days away, I told myself that I wasn’t going to look at it, she had been advised that it was there but when you come home to the chaos that I did ( cat that ended up having to spend 3 days in the vets because he hadn’t been given his medication, washing machine broken, cupboards raided of everything edible as well as items hidden away for Xmas time) you just have to have a look and then you discover she wasn’t here when she was supposed to be and you also played host( in your absence) to someone else, you discover how handy these little cameras are!

If I remember correctly when we built in 2008 we had to get permission from sepa for the septic tank but the details of the soak away went to building control-all plans of how it would be constructed

We are in our third self build house all of which have been timber frame, the first one built in 1992 and now on its 4th owner with no problems. The acoustics in this one are so much better than the two previous ones which is to be expected as things have moved on a lot in the ensuing years, you can’t hear anyone moving around in other rooms or upstairs and if you leave a room you can’t hear any conversation in the room you’ve left. In Scotland the majority of houses built are timber frame.

Well that’s my fixed tariff with octopus ended, I resisted signing up for their 2 year deal as it was 24.87 per unit so they’ve moved me onto flexible octopus which is currently 18.53 per unit with 24.84 per day standing charge, I have their app on my phone so easy to check on a daily basis what they’re offering, it’s a game of poker!

Sorry for all your troubles but I’m afraid I would be sending them packing, do you really want to have to watch their every move and rectify their mistakes eating into your time. I suspect they wanted out because they haven’t a scooby what their doing and you’re going to end up paying top dollar for a crap job,

Yeah the heating engineer was here on Friday putting right his cockups, only time and bad weather will tell if the boiler is fit for purpose

It’s octopus I’m with, if I sign up for a new deal it’s 24 months and the unit price has gone up from 15.89 to 25.87 so 10p per unit of a rise, I have 5 days left to make my decision but if I don’t sign up they’ll have to put me on a flexible tariff which is the route I’m thinking I’ll take. Unfortunately because our heating wasn’t working we were having to use the immersion heater for hot water and this has made it look like we are using a lot more than what we really will now that the boiler is working again. I can only wait and see what happens

We went and bought two last week, still the same price they were last year

I would be very wary of letting them continue, as you have said it’s quite a complicated build and they didn’t have anything to loose being paid on an hourly basis, it was going to end up costing you whatever length of time it took which makes me wonder why they didn’t want to come back?! I hope you don’t live to regret your decision

When I first looked at my options with octopus they were showing 3 options for switching to, now it’s down to 2 and these are rising on a daily basis, monthly payment has gone from £101 and it’s now £131 , I was trying to sit it out but it appears that was the wrong thing to do. If I don’t sign up for any of their’deals’ what will I be charged?

Spoke to the greener energy company today and he said we would not benefit from solar panels, our south facing roof has two dormers as well as the middle part of the roof which changes direction, he reckoned we would not get the full benefits of the sunlight as these parts would overshadow the panels, he also mentioned there is no FIT now?! It actually made a nice change for someone to be honest with me and not try to sell me something that wouldn’t work as it should!

I supplied everything for our build, no charge from the builders they even allowed us to get something on their account from jewson when we couldn’t source it anywhere else at a decent price and just gave us the bill when they received it, electrician was the same he had an account with an electrical supplier which he allowed us to use . As for anything that needed handled their labourers attended to that, priced job which I expect they factored in any handling of materials.

You’re having a laugh!! They want to charge you an extra 10% on the things you’re supplying? I fear they’re at it and possibly think you’ll have to go with it due to the shortage of available tradesmen, do you have a contract with them? I think if they come off the job for the reasons given they’d be in breach of contract but I don’t know what you could do about it

I think it would be a tricky one to finance buying it as the prefab it currently is. There are quite a few of these post war prefabs around here and they are not mortgageable unless they have been bricked up,

My current fixed rate tariff ends on October 1st , using some of the comparison sites they won’t quote at all at the moment, if I choose to move to another tariff with my current provider my yearly bill will jump from£985 a year to £1300 a year on a two year fixed deal, this seems excessive, there’s only two of us in the house! wondering if it’s time to look into solar panels and if there are any government grants available?

The architect or the owner or both??

What annoys me in these programs is that they never tell you how things are overcome. The kit was prefabricated originally until they discovered it wasn’t fitting together as it should have so then they decide to build it as they go , surely it wasn’t as clear cut as that? not for me this one, clearly a status symbol, can’t imagine trying to get that through planning up here , we weren’t even allowed a bay window on our last build.

Firstly how very trusting of you to pay 50% upfront 6+ months before your work was done and I would argue that he could have bought the materials at that point as he had your deposit at his disposal, however he didn’t and it is what it is, materials have gone through the roof. As for the equipment he needed to do the job he should have known he would need this and charged accordingly at the time of the quote. I drew our builders up about a piece of machinery they tried to add onto their bill, something they couldn’t do the job without and they backed down and took that charge off.

Short answer-No

The problem with someone else signing it off is they have to certify work that they didn’t do , bit risky putting your name to something that you don’t know has been done correctly , I would expect you’d have to pay quite a bit if another electrician was willing to do it. As @nod says the free money has not given an incentive for people to work, my son in law who’s a qs said they were having trouble getting bricklayers as the furlough scheme has made it too easy for them to stay at home.

Neighbour may have been promised some cash back should anyone else ask for connection

We’ve been lucky so far getting what we need for garage and landscaping… until Saturday, went to get some cement from buildbase who have been good through all this, none! Delivery due sometime in August

I tried several other companies when we got an astronomical quote from SP energy, nobody would touch it as they said SP didn’t like other companies touching their lines