MikeSharp01

Brilliant news - enjoy your new home.

No - some are just nuts.

Still a pain in the posterior though - hope this sorts it.

Welcome to THE Forum, do we take it that you did all that while getting and being pregnant - if so, heaps of respect are due along with the baby!

Blowy here in Kent - exactly what I need when trying to put down the EPS for the passive slab.

Sorry for rhe confusion. The accuracy is 0.5mm (half a mm) but the range the reciever can read either side of the rotating laser line is 50mm so the digger bucket has to be within 50mm of the line to get a reading it does tell you if the last reading was above or below the line if it can't any longer see it so you know which way to go. I found it worked OK once you got the hang of it. The 0.5mm measurement is great for everyday work. And getting a reading either side I'd fine. Our foundations has to be +/- 10mm. You can of course measure any height by skinning the reciever up the staff and adding the staff reading to the scanner reading.

Thanks @SteamyTea, @billt and @jack. For my part I would be happy to back nuclear if we could just build them more quickly and handle the waste better. I read somewhere that we used to build our early stations in 5 years from start to finish and they had 30 year lives. Maybe we should build more of those older types rather than push the envelope with newer types. Nuclear, plus wind & Solar, with some sort of storage would get rid of all the fossil fuel stations although you do have to run nuclear all the time to make them efficient.

Pretty comprehensive list but you can also use it to set up your string lines for brick / block work and such. I fitted my reciever to the digger arm for grading the site it was fine providedicated the digger was always facing the laser device and you only get +/- 50mm on the reciever. I have one of these and it has been well worth it - I didn't get it from this supplier though.

Welcome to THE forum.

So another consultation day is here for the CLEEVE Hill solar development. I long ago decided this was, on balance, a good idea and have been a local proponent of it but I get the sense that the groundswell of opposition localy is growing very strong. I guess the developers will know this but their public utterances are doing very little to push back - they seem only to be reiterating their original points and highlighting the alterations they made on the basis of the first round of consultations. It seems to me that they need to make the bigger picture response much stronger. Firstly by being clear what we all get back for allowing this development on our marshes. EG less gas usage, the coal fired power stations all shut down and returned to natural habitats for wildlife in exchange for the habitat lost here, cleaner air for our children and children's children to breath. One thing I would like to work out but don't have time before I go to the town meeting later is just what percentage of the country would we need to cover to replace all our fissile fuelled power stations with the equivalent in solar producers. @SteamyTea do you fancy working that out? Let's assume normal UK sun shine and get the equivalent energy generation from that alone - I appreciate that the lights will go off at dusk in this model and we will have too much during daylight hours but it would give us in impression.

Then go for the two dishwasher solution mentioned elsewhere here. That way you get the pans out of the way, if you have MVHR you won't get any smells and anyway it is probably just you. Just provide a door into the dining room from the kitchen. You can still gather your dinner party guests in the drawing room, it has beem so long since one has had a drawing room, for the canepes and aperatifes and then frog March them through the cavernous hall to the dinning room and food etc can be brought in, as and when, via the servants route from the kitchen. How cool is that.

Yes at least one fixed point is vital. I am now finding I need several as the total station (TS) cannot see everything from one place so I have created a couple more fixed points and associated back sights over which I can set up the TS and know where it is in X/Y and use the back sites to get the Z and angles to the grid. There is no ridge height fixed, by planning, our build but the eaves line is fixed and so determines all else.

What general feel are you trying to achieve, do you want to stand out on the street but be broadly in keeping with the vernacular or are you trying for very much more 'out there' look to the outside? Was the downstairs layout done by the erstwhile architect, it seems to me to have too many routes and not enough synergy, you have loads of 'spaces' which would be great if you have about 20 people living there all of whom need a separate space to do their thing. If you have young children in that layout you will be well out of touch with them in the playroom while you are cooking, if not then why have a playroom, I would swap the snug / playroom - study over and make a connection with the dining room direct from the kitchen, you could use a Narnia door, great fun.

looking great Dave, love the double door colour, what RAL is that?

Sigh.

Come on now don't leave is in suspense and don't try the the three steps trick on us, this needs to be good.

Does that actually mean you have three properties running of one stop cock? I think I would duct it and that way you could always push / pull a new pipe through if it were ever needed.

That's about my 583Kg (5.7Kn) / m2, I do seem to recall you saying that passive slabs were overkill.

The irony oh the irony.

I have spent the best part of the last two weeks putting down the type 1 for our slab, 150mm thickness in three layers, 59T in total over 127m2. It's done now but just walking on it you get a good impression of how solid it is. It set me wondering. I weight about 100kg, I am 6'4", my site boots have a ground area of 0.0225m2. Our building will weigh in at around 70T so across the whole slab that's about 583kg/m2 while I put much more that down on the area of my foot, about 4000kg/m2. This slab is not going to move anywhere. Is that overkill or what.

These people must be doing some work so they must be submitting quotes somewhere or are they all ticking along with emergency work or other work that does not require the quote overhead I wonder.

Yes its all very low voltage / low current stuff, provided you get the correct cores connected up. You may have an anti tamper connection which means that once you break the wires the alarm will go off, and you will have to silence it, but if not its straight forward to extend it.

Don't you mean 'over thinking this' cos thinking is what we all do best, in other places it might be call procrastination.

Sorry, its rainwater I want to harvest isn't it not the grey water as I have already paid for that on the input side and will get charged for it on the output side anyway so only advantage is the re-use bit and you only get one shot. I need to reduce input side so rain water sounds like a good idea. Anyway a tank will cost around £1500 and assuming install costs another £500, pipework, muckaway etc we into the game for around £2000 (plus labour). Looking at our diversity, toilet flushing / showing / washing / Washing up / Dishwasher / Baths only the toilet flushing bit is recoverable from the input side through straight rainwater harvesting. Our overall demand is a 60000l/pa of which toilet flushing will be 32000l/pa (32m3) we pay £1.7166 m3 for water and £2.39m3 for sewerage at the rate of 92.5% of delivered water. So toilets cost us £(32x1.7166)+((.925x32)x2.39) = £125.6752. Given this the simple, no allowance for NPV or such, payback time will be, wait for it £2000/£125.6752 = 15.9 years (or there abouts). So I think I can forget it on those grounds at least and given your comments above I think I will. Thanks all. 32

The very final decision we need to make before we pour the slab, and so fix the rainwater water drainage, is whether to go for a grey water installation or not. Experts of our acquaintance have said don't bother as they are more trouble than they are worth. However I noticed something on our water bill for the build this week, I don't usually look at it cos it's my other half's role and we don't have a water meter here at millstone manor. She showed me the bill and blew her top at the cost, it appeared to show that we had used 100m3 of water in the last 6 months! Anyway a quick look showed that it was an estimated reading, perhaps as they had shown up when the site was closed so could not access the meter, and in fact when I read the meter we had used 7m3 in the last 6 months. (Gives you an impression of how much coffee I drink) Anyway long story short I noticed that we pay sewage costs on 92.6% of the water through the meter and it struck me that we could reduce costs dramatically if we used grey water in the toilets etc. So what is the thinking out there, do I did a big hole and direct the rainwater to it or carry on and send it all to waste, anyone done the economics?