Jeremy Harris

All they are saying is that their solicitor found a restrictive covenant and that he has advised them that there is no way around it for what they wish to do. I suppose I should add that the charitable trust that was buying the house is a part of the Plymouth Brethren, a group I have nothing against at all, but which may have some bearing on why they've pulled out.

I'll try this, but I already have a copy of the Land Regstry Title from when we bought the place (or more accurately, I have it in a pack of papers handed back to me by the bank when we paid of the mortgage in 2010).

I'm going to spend this morning trying to find out what the covenant is. I have no record of any covenants at all - the searches from our purchase in 2000 came out clear as far as I can see, and there's nothing on the Land Registry documents I have from that time. Not sure where the damned thing can be, TBH, if it doesn't show on the Land Registry papers. The buyer was a religious charitable trust, and they have stated to the agent that the covenant restricts what they intend to do with the house. Not sure what that means, but it may indicate that they wanted to do something other than use it as a domestic dwelling, perhaps. Anyone know for sure how to get hold of covenants? AFAICS, just paying the fee and getting another copy of the Land Registry stuff probably won't reveal them, as it didn't when we bought the house, it seems.

Bad news. The purchaser has just pulled out of the deal this morning, citing some restrictive covenant of which we were wholly unaware. I'm trying to find out what on earth is in the covenant, as it doesn't show on our copy of the searches etc that were done when we bought the place in 2000. Bit of a bugger, as we're back to square one now, but have incurred a fair bit of cost in wasted conveyancing costs accrued to date.

Best bet initially is to NOT turn off the supply, as turning it off almost guarantees that effluent will enter the pipe via the leak, as the downstream pressure drops. The risk is that the leak will get so bad that it may draw in effluent during momentary pressure drops on the downstream side, and there's a very high risk that the effluent may be infected with some nasty bugs, especially if the leach field is more than around 8 to 10 years old and has started to go anaerobic. From your description of black water it sounds as if the leach field failed a while ago, so has been anaerobic and potentially toxic for a fair time (the primary sign of a failed leach field is black soil around the land drains). Dig around the leak area until you find the pipe and then try and clear the area around the leak. With luck, given the good soil drainage you probably have around there, the hole you dig won't completely fill with water. Do you know what sort of pipe it is? I'm guessing it's an old iron pipe if it's prone to developing regular leaks. Fixing the pipe is the neighbours problem, provided it isn't contaminating your fresh water supply. The leach field will recover around that area once the leak is fixed and will be safer than it was before within a few days, as aerobic soil bacteria clean up the upper surface around that area. Worth warning the neighbour that there is a risk that toxic effluent may be drawn into her water supply, and not to use showers and to boil all drinking water until it's fixed. I'm assuming here that nothing you have done could have caused the leak. As an aside, one has to question why a potable water supply pipe is running across a leach field - that's against the regs, I'm sure.

I'm running a fair bit of stuff off direct LVDC PoE, rather than "proper" PoE. This works fine for things like powering Pi Zero's over Ethernet, as well as powering our 12V VDSL2 modem, 5V Switch etc. I have a stack of batteries charged from a switched mode supply, then use a few switched mode DC-DC converters to provide LVDC at either 12V or 5V to directly run devices using PoE. The Pi-Hole is currently running here at the old house on a 5V power supply, but it already has a hacked USB to Ethernet adapter that will allow me to just connect it so it runs from 5V PoE in the new house, from the battery supply. The big advantage is that if we get a power cut the LAN stays up, including the internet connection and wireless router, switch, and network storage (which is another RPi3 with a 1Tb HDD). The Pi-Hole really is impressive at cutting out loads of crap from websites. The more I've used it today the more impressed I am with the way it speeds up page loads by just cutting out all the ads before they even reach the target device. Absolutely brilliant.

Feel free to pick the brains of any here - quite a few of us have built passive houses, and learned a lot of hard-won knowledge and experience in the process!

I remember your first build, read about it on the Navitron years ago before I was kicked off by a lunatic moderator for trying to offer advice on some batteries that I had around 20 years experience of using (said moderator didn't know his arse from his elbow about them - cost Navitron a lot of money, as because of him I refused to buy any of their kit for our new build - their loss was around £10k at a guess). Glad to hear you sold the old house OK, it looked to be in a really lovely spot with great views. IIRC, you had some airtightness issues, and my experience has been that airtightness is probably more important than insulation level for many domestic sized low energy buildings. Having the UFH pipes in the passive slab is a real cost and time saver. At a guess, it adds around £400 to £500 tops to the cost of the slab, which makes it a pretty cheap heating/cooling system. We use our UFH pipes to cool the slab in summer, by just reversing the ASHP. Works very well indeed, and gives cooling at no cost, as in hot weather there is always enough excess power from the PV system to run the ASHP in cooling mode.

As @Nickfromwales says, you shouldn't have too many pipes in the same outside wall service void. In our build only two H & C pipe runs came down external walls, and it's easy to run one pipe one side of a counter batten and the other pipe the other side of the same counter batten. I had to cut slots in a few counter battens to run pipe horizontally in one location, where it made sense to run the pipes down the side of a window, then across to where the pipes came out to feed the kitchen sink, dishwasher and boiling water tap. In the downstairs WC I managed to run the two pipes down either side of a batten to come out right behind the basin, and then ran these pipes on the surface of the plasterboard, behind the fitted units in the WC, through the stud wall to the adjacent utility room, where the pipes run behind the washing machine, then behind the utility room fitted units to the sink. Most of the long pipe runs are on the underside of the floors, rather than the external walls, and with these I took care to take photos and mark where they were on the floor surface above.

Welcome. I fixed all our pipes and cables to the sides of the counter battens to avoid penetrating the VCL board, but in places where this wasn't practical, like fixing electrical backboxes, I used 45mm back boxes and a piece of 6mm plywood glued and screwed to the VCL board (I used ordinary PU foam glue). Back box screws were sealed with a tiny drop of the same glue before tightened fully home, as they went through the ply and into the VCL board. This also had the advantage of spacing the back boxes out so they were around half way through the depth of the plasterboard, which makes it easier for those fitting the plasterboard to cut out (they just put the board in place, tap it where the box is and the edge of the box marks the board). I found using PU expanding glue was a lot easier and quicker than taping over screws, but 90% of our pipes and cables are fixed to the sides of the counter battens anyway.

That's what I had been using until today, but there are problems with them, as some sites have started putting up flags saying "we've noticed you're using an ad blocker and this may affect some of the functionality of this site" and one or two sites just refuse to work unless the ad blocker is turned off, I've found. Pi-Hole is massively faster, and web sites don't seem to know that you're blocking ads - one site that always puts the "we've noticed you're using an ad blocker..." no longer puts the banner up now (although I had to disable the ad blocker first). The big bonus is that site loads times are massively faster. Some of the really heavily ad-infested websites load in around 1/4 of the time that they used to take with the ad blocker installed.

Recently I stumbled across a neat little project called Pi-Hole (https://pi-hole.net/ ). In essence, this uses a Raspberry Pi (any variant) to send all ad requests on your home LAN to a blackhole. Websites you visit won't know you're blocking ads, either, so won't throw a wobbly. I decided to install it on a spare Raspberry Pi Zero this morning, the very cheapest Raspberry Pi you can get (currently less than £5). Pi-Hole doesn't need anything other than a very minimal operating system, so I loaded Diet Pi, (https://dietpi.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=9#p9 ). In addition to a Pi Zero a µSD card is needed (I used a spare 8Gb one I had, but 4Gb would be more than enough), plus a 5V power supply with a µUSB lead and a cheap USB to Ethernet adapter. The Pi Zero connects to a spare router port with an Ethernet cable, via the USB to Ethernet adapter. Speed doesn't matter, as all the Pi-Hole does is deal with DNS requests. Getting Pi-Hole up and running was easy, just run the script and let it do it's thing, then change the default login password and note down the IP address that the Pi Zero is using. You then just log in to your network router and change the default DNS IP address to the IP address of the Pi Zero. You can have a safe back up by setting the secondary DNS IP address in the router to something like 8.8.8.8 (the Google DNS), so that you can still connect to the internet OK if the Pi Zero is powered off. I'm pretty amazed by the effect this cheap little add-on has. Every device in the house now loads web pages a great deal faster, with no adverts. The page load speed increase is really significant on a lot of websites, and as a bonus your data usage probably drops a fair bit too, as you will no longer be downloading all the ad-related stuff.

The golden rule is ALWAYS pee over the leeward side! That way you're guaranteed the wind will always take it away from you. Easy enough on a yacht, as she'll be heeled over that way, so the traditional position with arms wrapped around the leeward shrouds holds you reasonably safely in position. As @ProDave rightly says, though, it's bloody dangerous and a lot of men have fallen overboard doing it over the years.

The coxswain of the local lifeboat had an acronym for bodies picked up after this type of accident, MOFU, Man Overboard Flies Undone... Yes, it can be dangerous, but I've lost count of the number of times I've done it, back when I was young enough to believe I was immortal. I've even done it sailing solo on a long channel crossing (Mylor to L’Aberwrac’h, pretty much exactly 100nm) a few times, on a yacht with no self-steering. Bloody stupid looking back, but I used to lash the helm and hope that I'd have time to run forward, have a pee and get back to the tiller before she luffed up...

Years ago, when I was doing my yachtmasters practical at Fowey, I saw something similar. There were four candidates on the boat doing the week long exam, three blokes, one lady, plus the (male) RYA examiner, and we spent one evening not at sea but moored in Fowey, so we all had a run ashore to a pub for dinner. On returning to the boat all the blokes made a bee line along the decks to hang off the leeward shrouds and "pump ballast". One mentioned to the lady that this was a major advantage that men had, in being able to just pee over the side. To our surprise the lady, loosened her jeans, leaned back and demonstrated that women were perfectly capable of peeing over the side too. There was a moment of bemused silence amongst the male members of the crew, as none of us quite knew what to say. It was one of the most memorable things about the whole exam, though.

I borrowed a neighbour's Bosch cordless hedge cutter a few weeks ago and it's light enough to use with one hand, but not easy, as the safety interlock on the trigger makes it hard to use with one hand, although I think you could probably manage it with practice. I was surprised how well it worked, TBH, better than I expected for a lightweight bit of kit. The hedge I was trimming was our side of the neighbours beech hedge, which included some pretty thick stuff, which I was surprised it managed to cut. Best bet might be to go into a local tool shop with your dad and see if he can handle a cordless hedge cutter OK. I reckon there's a chance he could. The alternative is to weigh up the cost of new hedge trimmer against the cost of getting someone in to cut the hedge. It sounds a bit insensitive, but, realistically, even if he could manage a cordless hedge trimmer now, how long is that likely to last? Might make more sense to just bite the bullet now and find a local chap to come in and do the hedges a couple of times a year. There's chap in our village who does gardening work like this for about £15/hr, which may well be cheaper than buying new tools to do the job in the long run.

Another vote for the Makita. I bought one primarily as I already have a load of Makita tools, so have lots of battery packs and a couple of chargers. I've been surprised at just how good the strimmer is. I bought a bare machine (no battery pack or charger) and the first time I used it wasn't expecting much, as there was a load of heavy growth that should have been too much for it, plus I was running it on a 4 or 5 year old battery pack that's seen a lot of hard use. It did all I needed to do, is well balanced, has loads of adjustment, both for angle and length and isn't very heavy.

Your water is similar to mine, @HerbJ. Ours is around 280 mg/l total hardness before the softener. Be nice if we can find someone with water over around 300mg/l.

I already have data from our medium hard water before and after the softener, so perhaps someone who has really hard water, perhaps from the South East where much of the water comes from chalk aquifers.

I can do both, the meter reads TDS, the reagent test measures hardness in whatever units you wish - there's a translation table.

The three dead easy tests I can do with meters are total hardness, pH and conductivity, plus I can also do a reagent hardness test as well, as confirmation of the hardness level. There's a limit to the number of reagent tests I can do, and it's important that the samples all be in proper sample bottles, so that there's no contamination. Taking the samples is essentially the same as taking a mid-stream urine sample, with the exception that the water outlet needs to be cleaned first, ideally wiped around with a lint-free cloth and some IPA. The outlet then needs to be turned on to a slow, steady, flow, allowed to run for a minute or so to expel any water that's been sat in the pipes, then the sample bottle filled whilst the tap is still running. The bottle needs to be capped as soon as possible and labelled with whatever labelling system we choose to use. I'd suggest a practical limit for testing would be about 6 different samples, otherwise we'll be there forever both testing and cleaning the meters etc after each test. On the topic of the polymorph of CaCO3 that forms as scale, it's worth noting that scale does not form unless certain conditions are met - so you cannot change metal salts that are fully in solution into different polymorphs, the changes happen when the CaCO3 comes out of solution as crystals. That happens on things like windows when the water evaporates, the various metal salts in the water reach saturation point and then start to crystallise out. It's at that point where the CaCO3 can form calcite or araganite.

Interestingly, it seems that the online conveyancers work on a Saturday, as I've just had three documents appear on the system, one of which is the mortgage redemption chit from the building society, who only seem to have posted it yesterday, so someone must be working to have opened the mail and scanned it in. Interestingly, this redemption chit has highlighted a significant brain fart I must have had way back when we were rushing around to get a mortgage on our old house to partially fund the new build. I had it in my head that we'd borrowed up to the max LtV at the time, which was 50%. Back in 2013 our old house was valued at £260k, so all my financial calculations had assumed that our mortgage was for £130k. It seems I was wrong, and that we only borrowed £110k. This has several interesting impacts: 1. It seems that the new house cost £20k less to build than I thought, as I'd made the assumption that we'd spent all of the £130k mortgage I thought we had on it. 2. We will get back £20k more to help top up our depleted savings than I thought we were going to get. 3. Our post-build, post-house move, holiday looks like it's now going to be even more expensive. I noticed that SWMBO has this morning been looking at booking a suite at our favourite hotel (Burgh Island) for a couple of weeks - that'll make a BIG dent in the £20k, I'm sure, plus it means I'll have to buy more expensive new clothes to replace all the ones I've ruined (see this post in this thread:

IIRC, gravel extraction started at Russell's site sometime around the 1950's, and was a massive operation, with lots of heavy equipment. The legacy today is a massive area of lakes and some very nice scenery. We've had holidays in the cabins around the lake adjacent to Russell's a couple of times, plus our disorganised group of boaters semi-organised a weekend on the next but one lake, where we camped on the shore and sailed around the lake during the day. As a consequence I'm reasonably familiar with the general area, but haven't actually seen Russells's site, although I must have driven by the entrance to it loads of times, usually on the way to the pub...

One thing I noticed was that when the DNO ran the new underground cable through the duct we'd laid across to our neighbour's house, so that the old overhead cable could be taken down, they added another intermediate earth from the joint and didn't bother to replace the old intermediate earth on the new pole (there had been one on the old pole). That was just a length of copper strap laid in the trench, and as the cable and joint was below the water table their new intermediate earth was sat in water. No doubt that worked a bit better than the old dry earth plate we dug out of the ground after the old pole had been pulled out. I doubt that earth plate was doing much at all, given that it wasn't buried deep enough (it was only about 200mm below the surface).

I used the "four rod method" to test mine, really just as an exercise in refreshing my memory as to how to do it. In our case the ground is very definitely wetter under the workshop slab than adjacent to it, because that slab sits over a spring that runs down to the stream. Also, the ground next to it which is the only place I could put an external rod is a steep bank, which is bound to be dry for the top half a metre or so in summer. I went for two rods screwed together just as belt and braces, really, but it does make sure that most of the rod is in contact with damp soil.