jack

Hi Giuseppe. Welcome to the forum! That's a healthy attitude and approach. Bear in mind that two years will FLY by!

Welcome, and no apologies required! Most of the people who are able to help you will have been helped by others along the way. What goes around comes around, etc.

"The designer is saying they did not allow for X, Y & Z in the price and so on" What does your contract with them say? Presumably by the time you got to sending off a deposit the price was fixed? It would be a strange contract for this sort of thing where they're allowed to come back and arbitrarily add stuff they decided not to include in their quote (unless it's clear that the quote didn't cover everything).

To help those who might be reading this in the future (and me, if I'm honest) and trying to figure out what's important, is this about the formal definition of particular terminology rather than whether there's an issue with Jeremy's installation? Eg, in the absence of a rod but being really close to the substation, is the issue that it doesn't meet the formal definition of PME rather than there being a potential functional problem? Apologies if I sound like I don't know what I'm talking about (possibly because I don't!), but I'm mindful that that the thread is drifting away from the original question and into an area that might not be of practical concern for future readers. Pardon me if my ignorance isn't helping!

@TerryE, you can buy a Schrader valve for a car wheel. It's designed to be pulled through the hole in the rim and form an air-tight seal: http://www.tyre-equipment.co.uk/acatalog/TR413-Bag--10--Rubber-Snap-In-Tubeless-Tyre-Valve-TR413_10.html Drop past a tyre fitting place and see whether they'll give you one. Drill a hole in a 22mm end stop, pull through and Bob's your auntie's live-in lover.

You need to fill in a form letting the council know that you your going to demolish. From memory, you aren't asking permission, but you do need to let them know. That can take some time (weeks?), so worth getting onto.

You're in trouble if it does! We had an old oil boiler in the kitchen of the bungalow we knocked down. It wasn't boxed in and made a hell of a racket when it started up.

ASHP noise, at least on decent models, is very inoffensive to my ears.

I blame Apple for most things that are wrong with the tech world.

Double-checked and confirmed. This time.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Nope. Was about to fix it when I saw Ferdinand's reply, so I had to leave it so Ferdinand's reply would make some sense! No worries. If I see something that looks like it could be fixed with a couple of moments' work, I do it as I read. Makes the place look tidy. Your most common sin is making the first two letters of some sentences capitals. @ProDave likes to add lots of blank space at the end of his posts. Some people don't/won't/can't use punctuation, or spell really badly. I never change content, just typos and obvious spelling mistakes. No-one seems to have noticed, which I guess means it's working(?) Back to doors and floors...

If you had any idea how many of your typos I quietly sort out on a daily basis...

Lots of research going into these over the last few years, although they're very old tech - think of them as the Edison battery rather than the Tesla Powerwall! They're best known for copping loads of abuse, happily suffering through deep discharge, being long-lived and cheap to maintain (just top up the water), and having relative benign chemistry. I think one problem is that they don't have great power density, so there's been no interest in them for powering portable appliances and cars, for example. I looked into this a couple of years ago when I was naive enough to think that offgrid could be made to work in a suburban setting with a wife and kids who can't/won't ever turn off a light in the house! Very interesting tech, although perhaps the economics of NiMH now makes it a non-starter.

Yes, definitely needs some looking at the numbers, and only makes sense if you can attend in person. Some looked they were going cheaply even considering the fees, but I didn't look to closely since it's nowhere near me. And hey, surely you're the king of saving a few percent here and there!

Looks like the contents of Alltools (tools shop) in Sheffield are up for auction here: https://www.bidspotter.co.uk/en-gb/auction-catalogues/timed/charterfields/catalogue-id-charte10023 There are loads of Bosch, Makita and other branded tools for sale (240V, 110V and cordless), along with lots of sundries (bits, discs, general tools and hardware). The auction is under way now, with items finishing over the next few hours, so you'll need to get your skates on if interested.

This has been a pretty consistent approach from you. Is it a point of principle, or are there financial implications as well?

The other theory is that induction hobs don't produce all the hot gases that burning gas does. There's therefore apparently less of a hot, upwardly moving column to push cooking steam/smells etc upwards, so you have a better chance of catching it at hob level than you would if cooking with gas. Whether that's true in practice I can't say.

Sorry, I missed the word "condition" in your original post! Unless they said that subsequent approval was needed for design/materials of the gate, I can't see how they can come back asking about it now. @Temp and/or @Sensus might be better sources of info than me though! I do find it bizarre that anyone in a planning department has any inclination to be getting involved in this years after the fact.

Weird. Is any of this related to conditions associated with the planning approval?

If you're okay with sexism, they do "one-man" boards: see page 4

I could be wrong, but I don't think the wet-spray approach is used in the UK. Dry cellulose is generally pumped into a hole at the top of each cavity under pressure. No issue with corrosion that way I'd have thought. It does hold water, no doubt (we had a roof leak into ours, so I'm more than familiar with its characteristics when sodden!) I don't know that it's any worse than other porous products in this regard though. Have a look at Fermacell. More expensive than OSB + plasterboard, and harder to install due to its weight, but its very dense and strong. Excellent for weight bearing (from memory, over 30kg point load per screw, and that's not into a stud) and due to its density has better acoustic properties than plasterboard. We have a mix of that and double-layer plasterboard.

I didn't love the way the house looked from the outside, but the interior of that arch was awe-inspiring. I did briefly look into whether we could do something interesting inside our house like this but it was just too impractical (for which read expensive). I went to a talk by the architect/owner of that house two or three years ago. What I found really interesting is that he only decided to go for Passivhaus certification very late - certainly after construction was well under way, if not after it was finished. Fascinating guy.

Fixed that for you!