Jeremy Harris

It's anyone's guess really, but often the run of pipes being put in by a developer seems to run to the shallowest entry point to the main sewer, presumably because it's cheaper/easier to just have relatively shallow trenches, plus there is also a problem with pipe gradients - foul drains/sewers cannot run down steep slopes, as they will get blockages, so a back drop chamber has to be added to reduce the gradient to an acceptable level. The problem relates to the flow rate and separation of solids from liquids, I believe. If the gradient is too steep the liquids flow faster and leave the solids behind, and they then build up until the block the pipe.

I may be wrong, but aren't all underground waste pipes supposed to be push fit, to allow for a small degree of movement? I think I remember reading this somewhere, and mention being made of things like slight settlement and the compressive effect of concrete as it cured. The O ring in the push fit fittings allows for this very small amount of movement, IIRC. Do you know how far down the soil pipe joint is? I faced the problem of having to delicately chisel out around ours to just ease it inwards slightly by a few mm, and I knew that the push fit joint to the rest bend was below the level of the stone under the slab, so I was paranoid about accidentally lifting it out of the fitting and having stone fall into the open end..............

Sounds great, except for the price...................

How are you going to control the pump? The normal way to do this if you're running the water to a tap is to use a pressure set. The pump is fed from the bottom of the IBCs and has a small accumulator and pressure switch. When a tap opens the pressure drops, turning the pump on. When the tap closes the pressure rises turning the pump off. It makes things pretty simple to use. If you don't want to tap off the bottom of the IBCs, then these pumps will usually draw up from a few metres once primed (some are self priming), so you can use a drop pipe with a crud filter on the end into one of the linked IBCs. This is the sort of pressure set that would do the job: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/IBO-1-WZI250-BOOSTER-SET-WATER-PUMP-small-trailer-PORTABLE-2Ltr-pressure-VESSEL/172665736876?hash=item2833ae0eac:g:D3YAAOSwJ7RYTqZv

I doubt that you'll get a few months off! They backdated our council tax by around 4 months, and agreed (after a bit of debate) to use our completion date as the date from which the tax became due.

VOA use the council address list, I think, not the Royal Mail one, which may explain why it's not on their list. Apparently (according to our council) the sequence is that you ask the council for the address to be listed (and pay them a fat fee!), and they then get the address on both their list (which is used for things like emergency services access, amongst other things) and also they inform the Royal Mail. You can apply to the Royal Mail directly (I did, it's quicker than waiting for the council), but that may not mean your house gets on to the council address database. The whole thing is a bit of a shambles, and varies a great deal from one area to another.

The problem is you may well have two different companies involved, one for the ground works and one for the slab. A small, but critical, 5mm error as we had just isn't easily spotted. With hindsight, I think your idea of adding a 5", or even 6" sleeve is a damned good one. It would have no impact on the structural integrity of the slab, yet would allow some adjustment of the pipe position. Backfilling with foam would be more than good enough, I'm sure. I wish I'd though about it when we our ground works guys were putting the pipes and ducts in, as it would have saved me the best part of a day faffing about to try and chisel out enough of the slab around the pipe to move it just 5mm in.

To get the address listed you may have to apply to the council street naming team and pay a fee. We had no choice but to do this, but others here have managed to avoid paying the fee and applied to get their address entered on the Royal Mail database. If you are receiving mail OK, then I'd see what happens, rather than pay the fee to the council!

Someone has to ask the VOA to make a valuation and place the house on the council tax register. Building control won't do this when they issue a completion certificate, as they are semi-independent from the council. Often the council tax people at the council will be regularly checking for new properties and keen to get them paying the tax as possible, but it seems that in your case they haven't. I would make an application the the VOA for your house to be valued and put on the register ASAP. The council are bound to backdate the tax payable to when they think the house was habitable, and that may well be a date a fair bit earlier than the completion date. You can make a case for the band you think the house should be in, and I think it's worth doing. I applied to the VOA in this way and sent them evidence, in the form of drawings, showing that our house had very thick walls (the point that @Stones has made above, they reduce the internal floor area) and that the first floor was significantly smaller than the ground floor, as those rooms are in the roof. I also highlighted that the house only had heating on the ground floor (part of the original rating valuation process included noting whether a house had full central heating or not!). There's also a suggestion box on the form for you to say what band you think the house should be in. I put in a band one lower than the one I thought it should be, they put it in the band I really thought it should be in, and wrote to me saying that they had noted my recommendation for the band but they assessment was that it should be in the band above. Worth trying it on, though!

The direction arrows should be the direction of flow. My experience with Wessex Water was that they didn't really know where some of their pipes were, as a large part of the network predates the formation of the water companies and may even predate the old water boards that preceded them. In our case the village had it's own small water corporation, set up in the late Victorian era, and as well as the records of positions being in error or lost, there are pipes that the water company own that they don't even know of! What was fairly common practice was to run a private sewer along a row of houses and then have that connect to a main sewer at one point. From your plan, and the approximate date of construction of the nearby houses, do you think it's possible that there is what would have been a private sewer that runs along under the front gardens of the houses in the rough direction of your arrow? Our last house had this arrangement, it was in a row of four built at the same time and there was an 8" (I think) sewer running across the front gardens of all four, then connecting to the main sewer in the lane at one end. In the past these private sewers were the responsibility of each householder, but relatively recently the law changed and made them the responsibility of the water companies. As above, though, my experience has been that the water companies have no knowledge of these old private sewers; they add them to their drawings as and when they come across one.

This reinforces the need for anyone doing the ground works to get the drains and ducts coming up in the right place. My ground works guy thought I was bonkers when I said I wanted pipes coming up at very precise points, simply because he didn't realise how critical it is when a slab is going down with them coming up 10mm inside the plastered wall internally. Even after all the checks and cross checks I did on site, I had one pipe that was about 5mm too tight to a wall. Not hard to sort, but it reinforced the point that I hadn't checked the position of that pipe accurately enough before the guys came to lay the slab (not their fault at all, all the pipes and ducts were already in and poking up where I thought they should be).

I bought this one as NOS from Ebay, as they were around £70 at the time, I think. IIRC I think I paid around a tenner for it!

20m should be OK. Put a drip of food dye in the water to make it easier to see the level.

They don't, they leak like sieves usually. One of ours here in Salisbury that I fairly regularly use always has big puddles on the lower floors from leaks, plus it is now growing what look like stalactites from every joint in the concrete, where the water is dissolving carbonates from the concrete and redepositing them as stalactites.

The fitting looks very much like a Plasson to me : https://www.pipestock.com/plasson/mechanical-fittings so to be absolutely confident of getting a match for the thread it's probably best to get Plasson fittings. They are also, IMHO, the best made MDPE fittings, so are, I think, a good choice.

I fear you may be right..........

It's rated at over 18 tonnes/m², so a 2 tonne four wheel vehicle with a tyre contact area of around 0.05m² per wheel, and a roughly 60/40 split between front and rear axles would exert a pressure from the highest loaded tyres of around 12 tonnes/m² (if I've done the sums right........). So it looks fine to me, with a margin of around 150% without even into account the load spreading effect of the top covering, which will have a significant impact on reducing the point loads seen by the insulation.

That looks pretty much ideal, as the encapsulating PIR protects the vacuum panel, making it a lot easier to use. Not ideal, as the water will then bypass the insulation, and ideally you don't want the insulation to allow cold water to flow down to the warm concrete below, through the inevitable gaps at the joints.

The snag is this roof has the reinforced concrete on the warm side, with the insulation on top, so adding an integral upstand would be a massive thermal bridge around the edge.

Vacuum panels are great, they are what keeps the heat in so well on the Sunamp, but they cannot be cut, so have to be made to the size you need. They also need very careful handling so that they don't get punctured, as they lose most of they insulating qualities if they do, so you would need some means of blinding the top of the reinforced concrete roof in order to provide a dead flat and smooth surface.

Sorry, I think I may have caused some undue concern! Our MVHR has an internal air to air heat pump, so can warm the incoming cold air a bit. As a consequence, the exhaust air can be down around zero deg C, perhaps even a bit lower at times, so that significantly increases the condensation risk around the outside of that duct. This isn't a problem if you just have a passive MVHR, with no internal heat pump.

How about this as a way to get things started and weathertight: - Follow the architects spec from the ceiling level to the top of the specified insulation layer. - Add a double thickness GRP roof in the centre, standard thickness at the sides, laid on to OSB or ply, and following the CFS guidance, with the pre-moulded gutters, upstands etc around the edges and skylight aperture. - You then have a strong and watertight roof, and you can stop and have a think about the next stage, making the centre section into a parking space. This plan can get you going without closing off any future options, really, and gives you time to work through some ideas for the parking area. I can think of a handful of ways you could do this, and all would work OK on top of that roof make up, I'm sure.

We had a great advantage when using the Total Station as we found one of the Ordnance Survey spot height nails at the side of the lane adjacent to where our drive was going. The position and exact height AOD for this was on the DXF file I downloaded from the Ordnance Survey when creating our site plan, and by pure chance you could see almost every point on the site from that nail. Every time we wanted to check anything really accurately we could just set the TS up exactly over the nail and measure from there. To save having to go out in the lane for the day to day measurements, we set up another fixed reference point right in the corner of the plot, where it wouldn't get disturbed, using the TS to fix that. That nail in the road has been a godsend, in several ways. The last was when a neighbour complained to the planners about our roof being too high, when ten minutes standing in the lane with the planning officer and the TS proved that the roof was really a bit lower than we'd stipulated in the plans (probably because I added 100mm to the ridge height in the planning application, just as a precaution.........)

My experience was very like @ragg987 I'm afraid. I insulated the exhaust duct from our MVHR using foil backed rockwool and had the same problem with condensation making it get very soggy, even though I taped it up pretty well. It's now got amaflex over it, with the foil backed wrap stuff over that, as a bit of extra insulation and it seems fine. Mind you, my problem was caused primarily because the MVHR exhaust from our unit can be below zero when the internal heat pump is warming the incoming air up a bit.

Presumably you only need the added strength over the actual area where you plan to park cars, is that right? I am pretty sure you could get a steel fabricator with experience of making things like vehicle trailers or the like to come up with parking area fabrication that would be thin and spread the load. It's dead easy to do the bearing load calcs, literally a few minutes work, so it may well be worth looking at to reduce the thickness. I'm not convinced that concrete as a basically non-structural deck is the best choice, given that it needs to be thick in order to provide the necessary thickness and provide the minimum cover over the reinforcement fabric, which in this case isn't adding any significant strength (it's in the middle, so doesn't see any bending loads at all) but seems to be there as an anti-crack measure.