Jeremy Harris

I just fitted an angled adapter to mine to allow me to use more readily available flexible hoses. As long as the bore is 19mm or so it should be fine.

They look OK, perhaps a bit longer than needed, but they will do the job alright. I insulated mine with the thickest Armaflex insulation I could find, then wrapped that with the flexible reflective stuff, just to prevent damage to it really.

Have you looked at doing this with GRP, rather than EPDM? I think it may well be easier to construct with a GRP covering, and may also be longer lasting, especially given some of the shapes around the hidden gutter. Worth investigating I think.

+1 @Barney12, I fitted the wires when I did the floor in our old bathroom. Much easier to get them where you want them. My only regret is not thinking of fitting them for comfort heating in our shower room, just to take the chill of the travertine.

Does the water company have to manage the 3 day road closure? I managed our partial road closures and we dug right across two roads and laid ducts, pipes and cables in less than one day, in two trenches. I agreed with the council highways people to maintain one lane for traffic using steel plates and they agreed I didn't need a closure order, just traffic management. We did the latter with one lad holding a stop/go board. The utility company involved (the DNO) weren't even on site, they turned up a day or so later to pull their cables through. The only official presence on site was the highways guy who turned up late afternoon to sign off on the road surface having been restored to their standards.

I believe so. I've not seen a definitive list of products that contain plastic granules, but have heard that they are used in a lot of facial and skin scrubs etc. Pretty much anything where a very mild abrasive might be beneficial.

One environmental caution. I believe that some of the granulated hand wash stuff uses plastic granules, and as these end up being washed down the drains they may well contribute to the build up of micro plastics in waterways and the sea. Probably worth checking the labels to b sure, as this seems to be a growing problem, and one that's quite topical at the moment, after the David Attenborough programme about plastics in the sea.

Steel is a far better heat conductor than concrete, so best avoided. Better than concrete would be the type of piles that @recoveringacademic used, a vibro compacted column of stone, as that would have a lower λ than concrete, I'm sure, because of the air spaces between the stone. The only difficulty I can see is how to sheath the top metre or so with insulation, but that's probably not an insurmountable problem. Frankly, for the sake of an additional floor heat loss that's off the order of 6 to 10 Watts in total for 30 piles 'm not sure it's worth worrying about too much, though.

I suppose the simple way to try and get your head around it is to think of the pile as being insulated all around, so heat can only effectively travel downwards through the insulated part, then work out the U value for that section of pile and see what you get. For example, say you have a 150mm diameter pile, that is peripherally insulated for the first 1000mm down. The area of the pile is 0.0177m². Concrete has a λ of around 1.2 W/m.K, so a 1m depth would have an R value of about 1.2 m².K/W, which gives a U value of about 0.833 W/m².K. Sounds grim, doesn't it? However, the pile cross sectional area is only 0.0177m², so with the floor at, say, 22 deg C (assuming low temperature UFH) and the ground at about 8 deg C (typical UK soil temperature at depth) then the actual heat loss per pile comes out at 0.0177 x (22 - 8 = 14) x 0.833 = 0.2058 W per pile. Not a lot, is it?

I still use washing up liquid and sand. I make up a 5 litre container filled with a mixture of the cheapest washing up liquid I can find in bulk, plus some clean white play sand. A pot of this sits by the sink, as it's the best hand cleanser I've found. It will literally get damned near anything off dirty hands. Also, as another chemistry tip, no need to buy Swarfega, you can easily make it using cheap washing up liquid and naptha. If you choose green coloured washing up liquid the resulting gel even looks like Swarfega, but is a bit more runny. I prefer the sand and washing up liquid mix though, the sand really grinds the engrained dirt out well.

I did a load of heat loss calculations for a pile supported passive slab for an Ebuild member, as he was concerned. If the pile diameter to insulated length ratio is high (i.e. a long length of the pile is externally insulated) then the heat loss comes down to just 2D, in effect, and is surprisingly small. I probably have the calcs I did for this a few years ago, and might be able to dig them out from my old PC, but I do remember having a long phone conversation with the chap whilst he was driving back from Italy and being surprised at how small the additional heat loss through the piles was. If you have all the dimensions and number of piles I could do the same for this arrangement if you like.

The same stuff, Leyland from Screwfix mainly, plus two rooms where the walls were done with the Dulux Durable stuff. I can recommend the latter, it really does do what it says on the tin, and seems a heck of a lot tougher and easier to wipe marks off than normal emulsion, even the vinyl bathroom and kitchen stuff, plus it has a matt finish. The Dulux Durable sprayed just the same as the Leyland stuff, no change to any settings on the pump and I used the same nozzle.

Mainly because I'd need to then register the borehole as a supply to more than one dwelling and certify the water as being potable, plus have to pay for regular testing on it. Overall it would probably cost more than it's worth. I did run a garden tap point to my neighbours vegetable patch, so she can water that without having to run a long hose from her supply, something that used to drop the water pressure for both houses when she used it. To stay legal the tap is just (by 50mm) on our side of the boundary, and she has her hose hooked up to it all the time, so only needs to reach over the hedge and turn the tap on and off.

No thanks, I probably have all the knowledge needed now, having used the thing a lot. It wasn't hard to learn how to use, really just a bit of trial and error, together with a look at a few US Youtube videos. It probably took me around an hour to get adept at seeing the effect of different nozzles and pressures, and working out the settings to use for each, and after that it was pretty much plain sailing. I did have a fair bit of conventional and LVHP spraying experience, from painting cars and aeroplanes, so at least the gun technique was familiar. It might take someone with no previous spraying experience a bit longer to learn, but I doubt it, as it's really pretty simple once you understand the basics, I found. I painted the interior of a friends house with it recently, and have to say it did a better job than the very good decorators that did our self-build using rollers and a brush. I did the whole interior of a 3 bedroom house in a day, with virtually no mess and just some assistance with the messy stuff, like cleaning out the pump, hose, filters and gun, and ensuring the paint was mixed up really, really well. I think once these things catch on here, as they seem to have in the USA, then they will become the standard way of decorating walls. I was going to sell my airless kit after I'd used it last year, but think I'll hang on to it and just keep it full of ethylene glycol/sodium nitrite inhibitor in case I need it again, or someone else wants to borrow it.

In the old days building inspectors used to witness perc tests. I've seen them do it twice, once back in the mid-1960's, once in the mid-1970's when rebuilding a derelict farmhouse in Cornwall with a friend.

I used Leyland OK in my airless sprayer. Only snag I found was that the stuff I had from Screwfix had been standing around a long time and took a fair bit more mixing, as it had settled a lot at the bottom of the can. Not really a problem, just meant more time mixing. As for storing the gun etc without washing it out, I found that leaving the gun dunked in a bucket of water overnight worked, but that I still had to take the nozzle off, the nozzle holder and the curved seal thing behind it off and clean them all carefully before re-use. Cleanliness is next to Godliness with these things. Keep them very clean, lubricate them every time you use them and store them filled with a mix of 60% ethylene glycol, 1% sodium nitrite and 39% water, pumped through the unit several times via a bucket, then the system will stay free from corrosion etc and remain ready to use after a good rinse out with water when you next use it. The sodium nitrite is the main corrosion inhibitor, Using this mixture is the same as the "pump armor" stuff, that's sold at hefty premium by the likes of Graco.

The fiddling of perc tests has been going on for decades. I remember when I was a small boy, and we were having a large extension and granny flat built on to the side of the house, that the builder fiddled the test (same builder that taught me how to lay bricks and gave me the bit of bent galvanised bucket handle I still have for pointing). He showed me how to do it, dig a deeper hole than needed, bury a large biscuit tin with nail holes in the bottom and no lid upside down in the bottom of the hole, and carefully cover it up so the hole looks like a standard perc test one. When the building inspector comes along with his stopwatch, pour the required amount of water in, which drains into the biscuit tin beneath allowing the level to drop within the required time limit. If it was going on in the 1960's, then I doubt much has changed since, especially as building control now seems generally a great deal more relaxed than it was back then.

My experience was that the wall/ceiling prep was no different at all. Prepping the paint is a little more involved, as it has to be very, very thoroughly stirred, far more that most would bother to do when painting with a brush or roller, but really just a matter of using fresh cans of paint and a drill-driven mechanical paint stirrer well. Flat surface are dead easy, corners less so, but I found that swapping out the nozzle for a smaller pattern one and doing all the corners first, then fitting a wide nozzle to do the walls etc, worked fine. I used a large painters george as a hand held mask for edges, very quick and easy to do once you have the knack. Getting the pressure right for the paint and nozzle was a bit of a knack, too. Too much pressure and you get some bounce back that creates dust, so best to dial the pressure down so it's just enough to get an even pattern. By far the biggest issue if the clean up time required for the airless sprayer unit, hose, gun, nozzle and filters. I found it takes as long to clean the kit properly as it does to paint a whole room, so best to plan to do as much painting in the same colour as possible in one go, that way you only get the clean the system up once, rather than several times. I never found a reason to use a brush or roller, and managed to practice enough to be able to spray pretty precisely with a good surface finish. It would now be my first choice for a big emulsion painting job, for sure, but then I detest painting anyway...............

There are plenty of arrangements like this around that pre-date the changes to the Water Act. The two houses behind us share a single 25mm MDPE pipe that runs under a footpath to the water main. The developer told the water company he was only building one house, so they allowed the connection, then he built the second house and just tee'd off the supply. I only know about this because one option I asked Wessex Water about was for us to trench across a neighbours garden to pick up a supply, rather than dig up 140m of road. They told me I couldn't legally do it, as the pipe feeding the neighbour was a communication pipe that now belonged to them, and the Water Act prohibited new connections to a communication pipe. I subsequently learned that our neighbours had a problem, as when one ran a bath the other had no water. It got worse when one of them asked for a water meter and that was fitted adjacent to the main, so one of them was paying for the water for both houses. Not sure how they sorted that one out. Currently, Wessex Water have made it very clear that a connection for a new dwelling must be made either to a water main, or be part of an approved communication pipe system in the event of it being a development of more than one dwelling. Somewhere I have chapter and verse on all this, as I had lengthy discussions with Wessex Water, as the cost of the supply was going to be over £23k. In your case I'd look to try and both connect to the existing farm pipework, and, if possible, put in provision for a connection to the main at some future date, on your side of things. For example I know that the communication pipe that runs along the lane in front of our house was put there in 1934 and is in poor condition. I know that it's scheduled for replacement, and also know that Wessex Water were hoping that they could make me pay for that, by me paying for a new pipe up the same lane. I had a borehole drilled, but I have also run a duct down to the side of the lane that has a capped off length of 25mm MDPE in it, so when they do run the new pipe I can consider whether or not to ask for a mains connection. The cost should be close to the basic connection fee, as the pipe I've run is only about 1.5m away from their existing communication pipe.

The two cases plus the excerpt of the VOA guidance are in the post immediately before yours.

Our sole plate was held down with some clever hammer fixings. Neither I nor my building inspector had seen them before, but we were both impressed with them. Very quick to use, just drill a hole through the sole plate into the concrete ring beam, then hammer in the expanding fastener. IIRC, they looked like a bigger version of Timco Expressnails.

Yes, I did! I stupidly ignored the manufacturers installation instructions, as it was neater to fit 300mm full bore flexis. There was massive amount of noise transmission into the house, so I swapped them out for two 900mm full bore flexis arranged in a U shaped loop, as per the manufacturers instructions, and this completely removed the transmitted noise. I can't now tell when the ASHP is on unless I either go outside or look at the control panel.

Remember that you don't have to use the gap under the doors as transfer ducts, you can fit ducts in the walls to do this. If these ducts are arranged like periscope ducts they will tend to reduce noise transmission, plus you can add acoustic lining to any transfer duct to further reduce noise transmission.

This was the notice I put up removing the implied right to access to our site by the council: Notice removal of implied rights - blanked.pdf This is an excerpt from the VOA guidance that may be useful: Excerpt from Valuation Office Agency guidance.pdf And these are some examples of case law regarding when a building becomes a rateable hereditamant (which is has to be before it can go on the list): Porter vs Trustees of Gladman Sipps.pdf RGM vs Speight.pdf

If fitting grilles with mesh screens you just need to bear in mind the need to clean the intake one. I find ours regularly gets clogged up with cobwebs and the fluffy floating seed stuff (Old Man's Beard?) and so needs cleaning around once a month or so at the time of year when all these seeds are floating around. It's one reason I'm looking at repositioning it down to a more accessible location and fitting a bigger screen that I hope will be easier to clean and not need cleaning to often.