jack

Check out the Garden Law forum. Not sure about covenants, but they deal with boundaries, easements etc.

My wife's family has a plant hire business. They've had their best year, including a couple of their best months, in the 25+ years they've been operating. Amazing given building wasn't happening for some of that period.

Given your username, are you sure it's a golf club?

That's a very short loop compared to the others. I know you're running this all as one zone, but why not make the WC loop an extension of one of the shorter loops? And what about routing around your comms room so that it isn't heated (although if you plan on cooling the slab in summer, it might help there!) Re: the gym, I can't imagine working out in a well-insulated house. It's amazing how warm you get even just moving stuff around. I was in our bedroom yesterday installing some shelves and it was borderline unpleasant even though the room was probably only 21 or 22 degrees. I guess you can turn the heating off or down on that loop if needed.

1-wire sensors work best if you run them on a bus topology rather than star. One approach is bring each conduit up from the slab within a nearby internal wall or service void on an external wall, so that it finishes behind a small access plate (behind a door so it's out of sight). You then run a bus cable from Loxone, then access plate to access plate, terminating each 1-wire sensor cable to the bus behind its corresponding access plate. Having a few short stubs off a bus is far less problematic than having a full star topology, and the access panels allow replacement if necessary. Powering them independently rather than parasitically helps. All that said, if you're only running a small number of sensors, star layout might be fine. Mine is a combination of star and bus with stubs (only about 5 sensors in all) and it works fine. Unfortunately, one failed fairly early on and is in an inaccessible place, so I had to just cut it loose. Wish I'd had the foresight to use spare UFH conduit in the way you're proposing! I bought these in 2017 and they seem to work fine: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00CHEZ250/ (no guarantees you'll get the same stock several years later, of course).

I've got one sitting on top of the slab under my kitchen island, held in place by an offcut of insulation and half a brick on top! Could've drilled a hole for it, but it needed doing fast. Maybe you'll get better functionality if you bury the sensor deeper?

Welcome to BuildHub. If planning isn't doing anything about it, I'd just ignore it for the moment. You'll have plenty of notice if things get serious, and I wouldn't make any effort until that happens.

Harsh but fair.

You have to let us know what happens in the end!!!

Exactly this. A letter from a solicitor shows you've taken advice and are willing to spend money to defend your rights. Don't underestimate the impact of a formal letter on the average chancer.

I doubt it will be protracted. If everything you've said is correct, I don't see that the neighbour has a leg to stand on. Initiating legal action will be expensive for them, and the first thing a solicitor is going to tell the neighbour is how weak their case is.

I know it's a time and energy (edited to add: and money!) sink, but there's absolutely no way I could let this behaviour stand. I'd be in contact with a solicitor who knows about these things, and getting a letter sent with the relevant threats about trespass, and I wouldn't be giving up a single millimetre. If he has to do anything to things on your land (plants, a hedge, a fence) to do this marking out, I'd also be raising the prospect of criminal damage.

You're right that Wunda is thinking about spacing for a normal building regs (at best) house. I believe just about everyone (including me) on here with an MBC slab has 200mm spacing, and I don't recall any complaints.

That's crazy. Did he completely lack curiosity? When we moved into the run-down bungalow we eventually knocked down to build our house, I was more excited about going through the garage full of old crap that hadn't been touched in decades than anything else.

Not sure, I never had enough waste of this sort to make it necessary to find out. This was in Sydney, Australia, where it's been at least 20 years since you could visit a tip without paying a substantial fee.

It's also just the worst way to dispose of this sort of material. Having lived in places where burning waste is banned, the attitude to backyard burning as a way of disposal in this country makes me feel a bit ill.

Well it was the real cost to him. It isn't a cost someone like me could ever achieve, no matter how careful I was with my spending.

@Bud 1, I missed the subject of your post. Have you actually had a formal planning refusal?

No, you have every right to be aware of the content of objections that are made, otherwise you have no ability to address them. If those are the only objections you've received, I'd just ignore them. If "I have looked on that open land for years" were a valid objection, nothing would ever get built unless it were completely out of sight of every other dwelling. "kitchen smells" is simply ridiculous. The last one adds nothing to what the planning department will already consider as part of the planning process, so can safely be ignored. I can't see how you'd gain anything by learning the numbers of the houses involved. Proposals for new buildings are nearly always objected to, even by apparently otherwise rational people. In many cases, there are no long term issues, especially if you're a good neighbour going forward. Of course, there are some people who might remain prickly, but frankly it's unlikely you'd want to be friends with people like that anyway, so no loss.

Sure, but I'd rather that than nearly all developer estates. It'd be an interesting approach if you were to divide a self-build site into several zones on the basis of, eg, materials and/or general form. It might also be interesting if you were to engage a firm of architects per zone, and allow them to work with self-builders based on their individual briefs, while trying to generate a meaningful theme or tone for each zone. Really hard to do properly, I expect.

Yep. Would vastly prefer a range of styles, some of which are out there and/or ugly. Much better than estates full of dull, cloned, pastiches of another era.

It's a common theme on this forum. I had one bad experience when we started. Expensive, and just didn't seem capable of designing something that met all the requirements of our brief. We'd have a meeting, point out what was missing and what we didn't like. They'd come back three months later with a new design that fixed many but not all of our concerns, while throwing out a couple of things we liked and changing a bunch of other stuff for no apparent reason. We then found someone else to take over, and their first design just blew us away. It had everything we wanted, was set out on the block in a way I'd never considered (and yet was perfect for both planning and tree preservation reasons), and just needed a few tweaks before we signed it off. No way we'd have come up with something like this ourselves.

Out of curiosity, why did you give him all the other info about your needs and wants if you were just asking him to do CAD drawings of your design? Also, usually it's very clear what is involved (and what you're paying for!) at each stage, so again it's surprising that you could have been at such cross-purposes with each other. It sounds like he's just completely misunderstood what you wanted from him!

I doubt they're trying it on, but missing so many clearly listed essentials (I assume they were all listed as essentials, not wants or "nice to haves"?) is a red flag about attention to detail. Like every profession, there are good and bad architects, with most sitting somewhere in the middle. Certainly getting something so completely wrong from the start is not the usual way of things.

Not as I read it: My point is just that you were focused solely on inertial storage, when there are many other ways of supporting the grid over various time periods. I believe a synchroinverter adds voltage at a phase that tends to stabilise the frequency, rather than merely remaining in phase with whatever the grid is doing. A grid-connected PV inverter would be an example of the latter. I think that's right to a point, but you still need sufficient available power for this to happen. If that power isn't available, all the inverters in the world won't help you. I did a bit of digging around yesterday and was surprised to find that grid-scale storage projects are already well along the development pipeline for the UK. See this link for an example of a very large-scale battery in the works, and a discussion of some of the existing battery storage projects.