Jeremy Harris

When we were looking around for a builder we went to look at a small development of five houses that were being built by one of the frame companies we'd shortlisted. Whilst were were being shown around one of the most complete houses by their sales guy, he was called away to make a call from the site office. We stood chatting to a guy who was sticking airtightness tape around, and I asked what sort of result they were expecting. He replied that it had failed the air test twice and he was adding more tape in an attempt to get it to pass. He was clearly a bit pissed off at having to do this and remarked that he was thankful he didn't have to "do all this crap" on the other houses, as they were only going to test one of the five... When builders are failing to even meet the pretty crappy airtightness requirements in Part L1A you know things are bad.

Sometimes there are accidents; fake iPhone chargers catching fire spring to mind, and I'm sure more than one person has had an electric shock from one of the many illegal lights that are around - the one I took back to a well-know DIY store had a 50/50 chance that the metal ring on the front would be at line potential. Thanks to other safety provisions we have in modern houses, like RCDs and sensible fusing, I suspect that many of the faults could well just result in a non-lethal outcome, with many, perhaps, putting the purchase down as a bad experience. If you want other evidence of how dangerous some of this imported stuff with fake marks may be, then it's worth looking at Big Clive's YouTube channel. Here are a few examples of some of the dangerous stuff he's bought from eBay, etc, and taken apart to illustrate how lethal some of it may be: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifTI0GfoAFg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbt2ojkXPuo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNoGCdX1IdQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OW9ijW8Dkm0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cNKGrvD1ro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRNYDLp4zdM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tMuXuIYkco https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0iFNKvkT6I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvOTiQKkQMo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNjA0aee07k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nB1DlBpyS9w I've posted these as links to save filling up the post with video, but this is just a sample that I grabbed in 5 minutes - there are dozens more.

We were advised that our timber frame was OK to stand outside without cladding for around 6 months or so. It came with the wall and roof membrane on, and the latter kept heavy rain out for around 8 weeks whilst our roofer and in-roof PV people worked around some extremely bad weather.

I suspect this is the tip of a very large iceberg. I've mentioned before that a fair bit of electrical stuff, in particular, sold on eBay, Amazon and the like, is not properly inspected or approved, as I've had lots of examples of demonstrably unsafe stuff, including a car battery charger that had the mains line directly connected to one of the battery charge terminals, a earthed metal case power supply that had the line and neutral swapped internally, with the internal fuse in the neutral, several metal cased mains LED outdoor lights with the earth wire not connected internally and LED power supplies that didn't comply with the EMC directive and emitted lots of interference. All were marked as if they had met the required approvals, including an LED light purchased from a well-known DIY store (which they took back and immediately removed all their stock from their shelves). I now work on the view that anything purchased online will be inherently dangerous, and do my own safety checks before assessing whether or not to use it. At a guess, I'd say around 70% of mains-powered kit doesn't comply with approval requirements without some modification, often this is simple stuff like an illegal plug, cable or missing earth.

The plan sounds right to me. Fit the filters and UV disinfection unit as close to the house as possible, and somewhere where you can access them easily. UV does not provide sterilisation, or long term disinfection, hence the reason for putting is as close to where the water will be used as possible. Our UV unit sits on the wall of our service room, right next to the hot and cold water distribution system. With the tanks about 20m above the house the pressure won't be great, but should just about be OK. I'd suggest keeping the pipe from the tanks to the house around 32mm MDPE or above, to avoid pressure drop. With luck you may end up with about 1.5 bar at the house, after accounting for losses, which is just about OK. Again, to reduce pressure losses I'd opt to use Jumbo filters, rather than the 4 1/2" ones, Ideally two 20" long jumbos, one for a 20 to 25µ pre-filer and one for the mandatory 5µ filter immediately in front of the UV unit. The biggest cost will be the tanks, I think, as the rest of the stuff isn't massively expensive. When looking for a UV disinfection unit not only choose one that meets your demand, but select one for which there are readily available replacement UV tubes. This latter point is important, as there is a wide variation in tube sizes and some are a lot cheaper and easy to but than others. There's also a variation in UV power, so worth looking around to find a unit that will meet your needs with the lowest power, as it's on all the time.

If the Drayton LP111Si programmer I have is any use to anyone I'll gladly stick it the post to them, for free. It's no use to me as it is, as I replaced it with the plain LP111 that doesn't have the Service Interval feature.

Yes, it may have, or it may not have been that simple, as the building insurer may have wanted evidence that the standard of the installation was fit for purpose. At the time I wasn't in a position to ask around future house insurers, as the frame had just gone up, and we were a fair way away from switching from self-build insurance to normal building insurance. It just seemed easier to make sure that whoever I used gave a reasonably long warranty, so we had some confidence that the work was done to a good standard. There's also my experience to throw into this equation. At the time I was getting quotes for the roof and in-roof PV I was still going up a fairly steep learning curve, and didn't have as much understanding or confidence as I do now. I think I might now be prepared to DIY an in-roof PV fit, but that's largely based on having closely watched our own installation.

No, no stipulation from anyone other than ourselves. We just wanted the whole roof to have a decent warranty for peace of mind. I'm generally not to bothered by warranties on stuff that I'm going to DIY, or that's relatively easy to get at, but if we had a failure with the roofing then the cost to put it right could be pretty high, what with the cost of scaffolding etc.

In essence, as it was a new build, I wanted the whole roof to have a warranty for more than just the statutory year. This meant that I had to select an in-roof PV supplier that offered a decent warranty, which in turn meant using an MCS accredited firm, as I couldn't find any non-MCS installers who offered both an in-roof option and a decent warranty. My main concern was making sure the in-roof PV kept the water out for many years to come. No reason why a DIY install wouldn't have been as good, it was really just for my own peace of mind.

Pictures, please..... ?

There's an old saying that has the ring of truth about it: "Good fences make good neighbours" They set boundaries, not just physical ones, but territorial ones, that people, even awkward people, tend to respect.

Unfortunately it doesn't use a code, it has to be unlocked via an IR link from the resetting tool. I think the tool is around £80 to £100 to buy, so not worth it for a single unit. I replaced it with the non-Si version, which wasn't that expensive. Ebay seems awash with cheap Si versions, perhaps because people buy them then realise that they brick themselves after a year.

Our whole run from the bottom of the borehole up and around to the pump house at the rear of the house is in 25mm MDPE. I measured the flow rate when we were testing it and it was maxing out the pump at over 1000 litres per hour and I don't think the pipe was limiting it much, if at all. When testing I had it running through a whole 100m coil of 25mm MDPE, just because I wasn't sure what length to cut it to, and again it was maxing the pump out, with little or no pipe restriction. 25mm MDPE seems well up to the job of feeding most houses I think, especially if the mains pressure is reasonable.

There's definitely a big advantage is going from foundations to weathertight in a week, it takes loads of uncertainty out of the build and allows firm slots to be booked for first fix trades well in advance, which itself is a significant benefit now that people are getting stretched and so harder to get hold of at short notice.

My late Mother's stone farmhouse has an Aga (well, actually a Rayburn, but they are broadly similar). That keeps the house nice and cosy, but that's a house on top of an exposed moor, surrounded by open farmland, and the house has no insulation at all, and only single glazed windows. It's also as drafty as a very drafty thing, with gaps around doors that you can almost get your finger in. I had a stab at working out the EPC for it a few years ago, and it was something like a Band F. A new build, even built to just meet the requirements of Part L1A of the building regs, will need perhaps 1/10th, or less, of the heat, and should have an EPC of band B, or perhaps C, at the very worst. I strongly suspect that the Aga may be a massive overkill, unless you can find a way to dramatically reduce it's room heat output. As an illustration of how little heat a reasonably well-insulated and airtight house needs, when we have guests around in very cold weather, the body heat from two extra people in the house is quite enough to cause the heating to turn off, if it's on. An Aga is probably about the same as twenty or thirty people in the house, perhaps more. As another illustration, when I was still working on the interior of the house, I had an old Vax vacuum cleaner, for cleaning up after work. If I ran that for ten minutes or so the house would quickly get uncomfortably warm, as it has a motor that chucks out around 1200 to 1400 watts. We ended up buying two Dyson cordless cleaners, one lives upstairs the other downstairs. We chose those because they don't put out so much heat.

TBH, I very much doubt that screws do anything much to help once the adhesive has cured, so if you can pull the boards tight without screw and just use a good adhesive I would have though that would be fine. My experience with using Sikabond 95 (which is just a sticky and thick moisture-curing modified silicone polymer adhesive, like CT1, but developed especially for bonding flooring) was that the stuff worked a bit like a grab adhesive, but allowed some lateral movement when tapping the boards together tightly. The "suction" of the adhesive was enough to hold them down flat, I found. The technique was to lay two or three boards at a time, tapping them together tightly, then (making sure there;s no adhesive on you feet) walk over the newly laid boards to make sure they are laid down tight. I found that the boards didn't tend to move laterally when doing this, but they did settle down tight to the floor.

Excellent news, always good when someone gets common sense to prevail and saves themselves a load of money!

If it was anywhere nearby I could do it, if I can find a reasonably priced bottle of gas. I have a home made vacuum pump, set of digital scales and a UV leak test light, and have filled and refilled refrigerators and car aircon systems in the past. It's not hard to do, but I'd need to know the weight of gas the thing needs for a charge. The unit also has to be powered up to fill it, as you have to run the compressor to check for leaks. I could easily talk someone through pumping it out and filling it, as I was trained to fill lab refrigerators when I did a summer holiday job at Gallenkamp, the lab equipment manufacturers. My training in the test bay only took a couple of hours, tops, then I was let loose filling and testing production units.

One positive thing on the horizon is the lifting of the EU "anti-dumping" tariff on PV that should happen at the end of September. This should result in a price drop of around 10 to 15% for Chinese made panels, but whether that will materialise as a reduction in retail price I'm not so sure. It should do, if some of the better known companies that import stuff direct from China already (like Navitron, ESP etc) are prepared to buy in some stock at the lower price and then sell them directly. Not sure that I could bring myself to buy anything from Navitron, though, just because they were so very rude last time I had any dealings with them (more fool them, they lost a purchase of around £8k or so as a direct consequence).

I'm incredibly glad that I opted to bond down our T&G bamboo flooring with Sikabond, to the concrete ground floor and to the T&G OSB first floor. Best decision I made, I think, as it made the floor really solid, plus the slightly rubbery nature of Sikabond 95 seems to add to the acoustic damping, so the result is a much quieter floor to walk on. One other thing I did to the first floor OSB was go around and liberally apply PVA glue to every joint in the OSB, then gave it a coat of diluted PVA, worked well in with a soft broom, to not only seal the floor but also try to help get glue down into the OSB T&G joints. I detest creaking floors and staircases, and I spent ages adding additional glued on blocks under our stairs to stiffen them up and reduce the slight noise they made. I was lucky, in that the stairs were supplied with a box of extra triangular blocks, and I didn't box in under the stairs for a few months. Although the stairs were creak-free when installed, after a few months one or two treads started to creak, but gluing and screwing extra blocks on every tread fixed it.

Back when the FIT was dreamt up, there was a well-meaning desire to support microgeneration from some quarters, and frankly it's hard to find a reason not to encourage it. The benefits are many; it reduces the overall grid load, decreases grid losses, in the case of PV generates energy during the day, when commercial demand tends to be highest and it decreases the nation's carbon footprint, which apart from being a good thing to do also help meet international targets. The problem is the usual one that faces government when it comes to supporting initiatives like this, it got well and truly high jacked by a few commercial interests that saw pound sounds in the form of subsidies, job creation schemes for new requirements (energy assessment, MCS accreditation, etc, etc) so the true cost was clearly going to be way higher than it needed to be from the off. When faced with any high expenditure, governments always, without fail, try to time shift that expenditure so that the bulk of it happens after the next General Election. That's an immutable law of government, that impacts procurement in every area and results in most of the crazy and costly programmes we have, everything from PFI through to FIT and RHI, all are offset schemes, intended to make the government of the day look good without having to pay too much money up front. At the time that FIT was introduced there were two problems. PV prices were starting to fall, and as a consequence Germany was starting to complain about the lower prices of Chinese made panels and inverters (Germany being the biggest EU producer of them). A punitive "anti-dumping" tariff was imposed on Chinese made panels, which only expires later this year. That artificially held the price of PV up, and the predictions at the time were that PV prices would not fall very quickly (those predictions were wrong, for a host of reason, perhaps the biggest being that no one foresaw the massive expansion of PV use in China itself, as they adopted renewable generation on a massive scale). The government were convinced that a subsidy was needed if the UK was going to kick-start distributed microgeneration, and so the FIT scheme was born. I think that, in the circumstances, the government were right to use a subsidy to kick start microgeneration, they were wrong to use the insane scheme they adopted, and they compounded that by being both slow to realise the rate at which PV costs were dropping (so slow to reduce the subsidy) and by being well and truly fooled by the lobbying from those with heavily vested interests in keeping the subsidy scheme as it was. Quite why governments feel the need to adopt complex and hard to manage subsidy schemes, when they know full well that they do not have the expertise in-house to either monitor or manage them, is beyond me. It was quite clear from the enquiries into why DECC so hopelessly mismanaged the FIT scheme, that all involved were clueless, and that the relatively new industry that had sprung up to provide microgeneration schemes had many times the knowledge and understanding that DECC did (although they used that to protect their businesses, rather than support the original government objective). We're seeing the same thing now with the government trying to encourage people to buy electric cars, but at least they are being a bit more sensible with that, and only offering an incentive, in the form of a grant, towards the initial purchase, and they aren't subsidising expensive, luxury electric cars now. Had they done the same with PV, offered a grant to reduce the initial capital expenditure, then I can't help but feel that would have both cost less money and resulted in an easier to manage scheme, with no long-term commitment to continuing any subsidy. Simply making PV systems affordable, and then agreeing that suppliers should buy excess generated electricity at a rate that is close to the mean wholesale price, would have worked, particularly if they had amended Part L1A to include a requirement for a minimum amount of renewable generation on every new home as well.

Years ago (at least 30) I bought a second hand Black and Decker plunge router from an advert in the local paper. I can't remember what I paid for it, but it can't have been much more than a fiver at the time. The first job I used it for was to cut kitchen worktop joints, using a cheap jig and the jointing kits that use a bolt-like device that sits in routed out slots underneath the surface. I can't say I've used the router a lot, but it did come out again when building our new house, when I went and bought a biscuit cutter bit and used it to make biscuit joints to end-join our oak skirting boards. After a bit of experimenting on some scrap wood I ended up with a home-made jig that held two long oak planks in exactly the right position, with a guide for the router to cut the rebates. It worked a treat, but only really because 30 years ago I spent some time learning how to mark out and set up a jig, and use the router safely and accurately.

Because it's strong and closes the joint tightly, especially at the front. It's not too hard to do, and learning to do it gives you other marking out tool skills that will be very useful on other jobs, so it's worth having a go. There are always people her who can answer any question, no matter how silly it may seem, as we've all been there once and sat with a puzzled look as to how to do something neatly.

The wall board is very tough and rigid. I reckon it could be just glued to the surface left after you've removed the tiles and cleaned it up and last a decade or two. We've had around the shower in the bathroom in our old house for several years (around 10 at a guess) and it loos as goo now as it did when I fitted it. It's just glued to the wall with adhesive.

Take a look at laminate wall board, mainly used for shower and bath surrounds. The laminate seems identical to that on worktops and the boards are around 10mm thick.