Jeremy Harris

Sod all to do with the BCO in my case. Having a wheelchair user around means using common sense to provide access, funnily enough. Maybe you would rather wheelchair users were banned from houses? This is what Part M states very clearly, and very sensibly:

Building regs compliance. All new builds normally need wheelchair access from the point where someone gets out of a car in to the entrance floor, at least as far as the entrance floor WC (in England and Wales). There are slightly different access requirements in Scotland, and, I believe, NI. My solution was to run the ramp around the side of the house to the back door, and have that as the wheelchair accessible entrance, as I didn't like the look of having a ramp to the front door.

Welcome. I think a lot depends on whether the wall he wishes to fix things to is wholly yours, or a shared/party wall. It looks as if the wall is probably 100% yours if it's an extension to your house, in which case he needs an agreement from you to do this. I'd guess that this needs a Party Wall Agreement: https://www.gov.uk/party-walls-building-works

The vendor had bought the land about 8 years earlier, and hadn't spotted that it didn't match the title plan, until we pointed it out (I only discovered it when I went over there to do a rough survey with a tape to see how we could run access to the plot). Another neighbour thought that the shift of the boundary and footpath had happened about 12 years earlier, when a new vegetable garden was dug on the "borrowed" land, but there was no hard evidence that this was an accurate date. The enforcement and rights of way officers were of the view that there were now two public footpaths across the land, one in the original position (which would run through the large vegetable garden) and one in the new position that had acquired rights just because it had been in use for years.

I strongly suspect that the law around this may be a bit of a minefield. I very briefly got involved with the law of adverse possession a few years ago, when a plot we were looking to buy turned out to be a lot smaller on the ground than it was on the title plan. It turned out that the neighbour had moved his fence over the years, and taken around a 30m wide strip from the side of the plot, without anyone noticing. The chap had also re-routed a public footpath as he'd done this. After a few weeks of discussions with the vendors, the neighbour, the enforcement officer and our solicitors, we pulled out of the purchase, as it seemed probable that the neighbour had acquired the land through adverse possession, and without that strip of land access to the plot was going to be really restricted.

I believe that the general access rules that apply to common land are that you can legally cross it on foot or horseback, but not with any motorised vehicle. Actually driving across it may be the sticking point, rather than creating a means to do so, as it may need a change in the designation of the land to make vehicular access lawful. Not sure if there's an easy way around this, but there may be a way to establish a right of vehicular access by just doing it, without any objections being lodged, for a period of time. It's probably a complicated bit of law, though, so might be well worth trying to get some advice as to whether this may work or not.

Perhaps a bit of low expansion squirty foam in the gaps, trimmed off when cured and then sealed with something like CT1?

I live about 500 metres from the same road, but up here it carries very little traffic!

Definitely protect the cables, as the PVC insulation will go very brittle if it's touching EPS. Non-PVC tape would do at a pinch, but better to just use a bit of flexible conduit over those bits. You can get split flexible conduit that can be fitted around cables that are already in place that might fix those areas.

Mine's connected to a PIC microcontroller, that reads the serial data, does a bit of simple processing on it, and sends the modified data stream to the house data logging system.

That's the same sensor I'm using for air quality monitoring. Nice and easy to use, and not too expensive.

The most reliable sensors I've found are the fine particulate ones, like these: https://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=m570.l1313&_nkw=plantower&_sacat=0 They bin the number of particles in each size range, and seem to be able to detect smoke particulates OK.

I thought that backdrops were now a thing of the past, and that they were no longer needed in Part H, as some further research had shown that there is no maximum slope for a foul drain? I'd be inclined to just run a run of pipe down to the treatment plant, unless there's a good reason not too, like having to dig a really deep trench in places. Got to be less hassle having just a straight pipe run, I'd have thought. Our's drops pretty steeply, about 1.5m over a distance of around 15m, and just goes straight in the side of the treatment plant.

All scanned files get dumped on a small Linux file server that's on 24/7, really so we can securely access files, photos, music etc from any device on the LAN. That's locked down pretty tightly, with only my TeslaCam and TeslaMusic directories set as public (has to be, as the Tesla will only talk to public directories on the LAN for dash cam, sentry cam and music file sync).

Yes, the mounts I used were Mini rubber exhaust mounts, fitted upside down:

I think it depends very much on whether or not there is a planning condition imposed, as if there is, then it would seem to be potentially risky to ignore it. For example, we had a 5 planning conditions imposed, with a total of 6 of them relating specifically to the drive and access. Amongst those conditions was this one: I had this discharged by sending a drawing to the planning officer, and the highways officer came out later to check that what we had constructed matched what was on the drawing.

Yes, I think you could, with a bit of care. The trick would be to get just enough ozone to neutralise the smoke. As mentioned before, we have a small ozone generator in the fridge, that works really well at neutralising smells. It's a small battery operated device, that works in a similar way to the ozone generators used in some public toilets, and emits a burst of ozone periodically (think it may be light triggered, when the door opens). Not sure how many MVHR units have that as an option. Ours has a pretty comprehensive control panel, but extract-only doesn't seem to be an option. For a pretty airtight house, it's hard to see how this would work, as there would only be a very tiny amount of air filtering in through leaks. We turn our MVHR off whenever we get a "smoke event", and that works OK. It takes a few hours before we start to notice the air quality getting a bit stuffy, but when we accidentally left it off overnight the stuffy air was very noticeable in the morning.

I agree, but I can't see that happening any time soon, more the pity. One thing I've noticed is that we can smell smoke coming in through the MVHR when we can't smell it standing on the path beneath the MVHR intake. When I get around to adding an extension duct on ours, I plan to bring the intake lower, so that it's around chest height when standing at ground level. As well as, I hope, reducing the probability of smoke getting drawn in, doing this will also make getting at the pre-filter I'm planning to fit. Being able to just stand and change/clean a filter that will, I hope, catch most of the crud, should be easier than changing the filters in the MVHR unit itself. I'm hoping that a large area pre-filter will make the MVHR F7 filter last a great deal longer between changes.

I agree. In practice I always reverse into our drive from the lane, as it's less faff, but I'm supposed to drive in forwards and do a 3 point turn, according to highways, and had to use up a lot of the plot area in making enough space to do this. The daft thing is that the lane we live on is single track and sees maybe 3 or 4 cars a day, at less than 20mph because of the narrow width.

Our experience with the "cars must always enter an leave in forward gear" planning condition was that it was checked, in addition to us having to pay the fee and get it discharged. The highways officer paid us a visit to check the access after we'd built it, although he was mainly concerned that we'd put the access in the right place. Not sure what would happen if you had this as a planning condition, as we did, and didn't discharge it. I suspect it might cause some problems if it ever came up when trying to sell the house, assuming that it ever came to light.

Potentially insecure would be a more accurate description. If run on a wired LAN, with no internet browser or email programme, then the risk is miniscule, especially if, as most have, the router has a reasonably good firewall. In my case the XP machine gets booted up when I want to use the scanner, then gets shut down again, so the risk is vanishingly small, and significantly lower than some other users of XP I suspect (like Waitrose - all their self-service checkouts still seem to be running embedded XP - I spotted one that had crashed a few weeks ago).

I very much doubt there will be the slightest risk of exhaust air being sucked into the intake with them that far apart. Diffusion will be so rapid in any sort of a breeze that the exhaust air plume will be very diluted over a couple of metres or so. Got to be worth a try, as it's probably a fairly easy change to make.

Looks good, but it might be very well worth fitting some short lengths of flexible duct from the MVHR to the rigid duct runs, to act as a vibration/noise absorber. The vibration from the fan motors does tend to be easy to pass into the structure, so anything that can isolate that a bit is a good thing. I installed our MVHR unit on soft rubber mounts for the same reason, to decouple the vibration from the house structure.

Just fit an LCD screen inside the thing and pretend it's working . . . (actually not such a daft idea, some friends have done this to a small log burner and it looks surprisingly good, almost as good as my car when it's in "Romance Mode").

We installed a perimeter 100mm perforated pipe land drain under the Type 3 sub-base, and later plumbed it to the Aquacell soakaway that we later installed under the drive (when we'd spent hours trying to locate where the ends were buried). IIRC, this was in the SE's spec for the sub-base, although that may have been because we're on very hard and impermeable gault clay here.