Jeremy Harris

Looks like a push fit connection to me, rather like a Wago. You just push the wires in the holes and they lock in tightly with a spring contact.

IIRC, we paid ~£800 back in 2012. Used a local firm of solicitors that knew the area, not that I suspect that helped much.

I did exactly as @Conor has described. I built a fence to hold a meter box, and did not ask SSE for a temporary supply, I asked them for a normal 100 A supply. The only thing different between the two is that whilst the supply is being used as a temporary building supply it must be connected using a TT earthing system (i.e. an earth electrode and 100mA RCD) and when the house is built the supply can then be reconfigured to be (most probably) TN-C-S. Not a problem at all, just a matter of moving the earth wire over and connecting it to the PE terminal in the cut out housing.

Our boiling water tap came with a phosphate dosing softener cartridge filter. Very expensive, around £40 a time to replace it, and it needed replacement every 6 months. Like @joth, I made enquiries, then removed the filter and have been running our boiling water tap on softened water. It seems that the makers of boiling water taps often charge a pretty high price for replacement filters. The filter that came with ours had a pretty unique bayonet fitting, that I couldn't find anywhere else. I'm pretty sure it had been designed like this to force you to buy their expensive replacement cartridges. Reminded me a bit of the sales model for inkjet printers.

Yes! It's why checking with all the utilities is pretty critical. We were OK, as I did the checks with the utilities before we exchanged contracts, and when we found out that mains water and sewage were going to cost a lot, we negotiated the price of the plot down. The vendor knew full well about these utility costs, I'm sure, and I believe this is why he hadn't built on the plot himself. I'm pretty sure he got caught out by not checking with the utilities before he bought the plot, and when he found out the cost he just left the plot to get overgrown for years.

Welcome. Check, and double check, that the utilities will actually be able to provide services at a reasonable price. When we first saw our plot, it was advertised as having outline PP and "services available". Electricity and a telephone connection weren't too much of a problem, around £3.5k. However, a water connection was going to be ~£24k and a mains sewerage connection was going to be another ~£14k, plus the cost of the pump and pump chamber. The fact that our neighbours all have mains water and sewerage, and none have a pumped system, was neither here nor there. The vagaries of the way the water company work meant that we were going to be faced with a massive bill if we wanted their services. In the end we had a borehole drilled for water and installed a treatment plant for sewage, at a total cost of ~ 1/3rd of that for getting connections from the water company. Did I mention checking with the utilities? ?

We have a secure delivery box, one of these: https://www.brizebox.com/ I bolted it to the wall by our back door, with a sign on the external letter-only box by the front door pointing to it. Seems to work very well.

Thanks @Ed Davies, I've now fixed all the call outs above to other members with a similar username.

I've done this, scattered a friends ashes from the air. It's far, far harder than it seems. I made up a length of plastic soil pipe, with a lanyard to stop it falling out of the aeroplane, and poked this out through the partially opened door. When you get the ashes from the crem they are usually inside a plastic bag that's inside the pot they give you. Luckily I decided to do a practice run, using some ash from a bonfire, first. I rigged up an elastic band tied to a bit of cord as a way of sealing the end of the plastic bag, and arranged it so the plastic bag of ashes was inside the bit of pipe, with the open end (sealed with the rubber band) facing downwards. We flew over the practice area, I pulled the string, and the inside of the aircraft filled with ash... When we landed we were both covered from head to foot in ash, and had to spend an hour cleaning the stuff out of the inside of the aeroplane. We did two more practice runs, and found that we needed a really long bit of pipe to get the ash to fall away, and not get blown back. The other problem was that the ash tended to come out as a massive "bomb" in one big lump, rather than as the gentle scatter we'd envisaged. The final version of the ash dispenser used a smaller pipe (a bit of drain pipe) and had holes about 12mm in diameter drilled around the lower edge. We also transferred the ashes into a narrower bag, and added a taped restriction just before the neck of the bag, to limit the flow rate. This worked OK, although the reports we had from our friends gathered on the hill to see our friend scattered to the wind were that they didn't really see the ashes come out at all. I should add that what we did was an offence - it's against the Air Navigation Order to drop stuff from a civilian aircraft. We may also have been in breach of the 500ft rule, too, as we wanted to get as close as we could to the mourners.

I'm pretty sure that Irish citizenship cannot be arbitrarily revoked, it's a birthright, so remains even if someone chooses not to use it.

The curious thing is that, at the time I did it, I had no idea that the EU referendum was in the offing. I just realised that the restriction I'd had imposed on me all the time I was working, which prohibited me being a dual national, had gone when I retired. I'd also noticed that people travelling on an Irish passport usually seemed to get treated more hospitably by immigration, especially when entering the US.

As long as one grandparent was/is an Irish citizen, then that qualifies. Just have to be entered on the register in Dublin, which is pretty painless. I did it in person some years ago, after going to Longford to get proof of my grandmother's birth in Ballymacormick. I found the process pretty easy, TBH.

One thing to watch is how the trap is arranged on any rarely used floor drain. We have to remember to run a tap in the bath once every few weeks, just to keep the trap topped up. If we forget the smell coming up from the foul drain soon reminds us... A dry type one-way valve might work, but I'm not sure how these respond to high flow rates, or whether they will withstand long periods without use.

They are still used down here. Went to a new development about a year or so ago, and they were all looped, with, believe it or not, 40 A fuses...

It's physically impossible to "over soften" water. Once all the calcium ions have been exchanged for sodium ions nothing else is going to change.

Yes, normally a looped service comes from the cut out of the first house, and is then fed to the other houses in line. Connecting into the feed to one house and splitting it out may or may not be possible. It depends very much on the layout and size of the cable. For example, we have a 95mm² 3 phase Wavecon cable running along our boundary, a few feet from our meter box. That only feeds one other house, so we had loads of spare capacity just a few feet away, and there would have been no problem in running a couple of additional runs of 35mm² concentric out to supply a couple of adjacent houses. At the opposite extreme, our last house had an underground run of 35mm² concentric running from a pole a fair distance away, so there wouldn't have been much spare capacity available to supply any more houses from that, they would have needed cables run back to the 95mm² ABC at the pole.

We've found that we've had to adapt to using a lot less soap and shampoo, just a fraction of the amount we used to use. It's quite surprising just how little you need with softened water. I can't work out why this should affect the loos like this, though. We have found that it takes a couple of weeks or so for the line of black mould to appear, so a weekly squirt of diluted bleach and a quick wipe keeps it under control.

We have a Harvey softener too, and similarly the water does feel a lot more slippery. At least we've found one possible common factor, just need to know whether anyone else with a softener see the same black mould forming in their loos.

It will be interesting to find out if anyone else has the same problem, if only to narrow down the cause. In our case, I first thought it was because I'd tested the plumbing before we sorted out the borehole problems, so wondered if some contaminated water had got trapped inside the cisterns, so I flushed the whole house through with a lot of chlorine shock (which wasn't drained to the treatment plant) in the hope that it would be cured. I've had our water tested (twice) so know there's nothing in it that could cause this, so I've been wondering if it may be related to the water softener. Do you have a softener, by any chance?

We have exactly the same issue, on all three loos, all get a black line around the water level, plus a bit of black staining towards the rear face. I assumed it was because of our borehole water, or perhaps something to do with the softener, as I've never seen this before, either. I've been reluctant to use bleach, because of the treatment plant, but have discovered that a small amount of dilute bleach is apparently safe to use, so I now keep a spray bottle filled with a bit of diluted bleach to deal with it.

Yes, a looped service is possible, and used to be pretty common in semis and terraced houses. There are some downsides, in that the maximum load will be limited to all the houses on a looped service. I've seen some older looped services with incoming fuses rated at just 30 A, although 60 A might be more common. This current limitation may impact on what can be installed in each house. For example, it may not be possible to install an electric shower, or an electric vehicle charge point, in a house with a looped service (depends very much on the total load).

He's old school, doesn't use a PC for anything, all his work is hand drawn and hand written (these are the drawings: 20130228093748130.pdf ). He gets the lady in the office to scan his hand written stuff and email it out to customers. Very well known in this area, though, with a good reputation.

Yes, ours was just included with the structural calcs for our retaining wall, last page of this attachment: 20717.pdf

That doesn't surprise me. Self-build for me was as much about learning new stuff as it was about building a house. It was an interesting challenge, and one that paid off in terms of the performance of the end product. The fact that we saved many, many thousands of pounds in fees was really a bonus. Others may have a different view, and just want to pay several people lots of money to do all this stuff, which is fine, but the chances are they may then spend more money on the build than the house will be worth.

We looked at using it. The cheaper stuff has a bit of a dubious reputation, but the expensive stuff can be very good indeed. The stuff probably gets a bit of a poor reputation from the cowboys who have been offering to do drives with the stuff, and who haven't bothered to prepare the sub-base properly. There's some useful info on the Paving Expert site (which is a very good resource for all things related to paving and drainage, IMHO): http://www.pavingexpert.com/resin.htm (site index is here: http://www.pavingexpert.com/pavindex.htm )