vivienz

Check your deeds as well. There can sometimes be restrictive covenants as to what you can do with gardens that are open plan and on an estate in order to preserve the look of the area.

Mine has been in for a year now and the dishwasher installed and working for about 10 months. No sign of any problems with the outer door.

I will need to check back and let you know. They haven't been fitted yet - winter storms, covid and other impediments put a siginificant delay on things.

That's all looking fabulous - you must be delighted! The roof lights are beautiful.

How about using some of the solid laminate from the likes of Worktop Express? It's very nice stuff (a friend installed in her new kitchen extension recently) and would double up perfectly well for this purpose.

Phew! That will be toasty in the summer. I'm going for a home made silk twill mask with elastic to hook around the ears.

How big is your site? We're on clay and so dug a large pond into which rainwater from the house is directed via a land drain from the gutters.

Ours needs a bit of extra heat upstairs in winter. Two of the rooms upstairs aren't ensuite and so can't benefit from heated towel rails etc, and they got quite chilly. One is my office/work room and I needed an oil filled radiatior on in there in the absence of completed UFH.

It's always worth getting a separate quote for transport in case you can get a better price that way, but it's often difficult to get one that will know how to transport the goods you need.

Very exciting!

Are they Schroedinger's cladders? On furlough but on site at the same time, and only being observed by someone will determine which is the actual state at that time? Perhaps they're embarrassed that your work is as good as theirs? Certainly looks good!

Your neighbours are never going to be your besties, anyway, so build first and let them complain later. The speed that MBC work at, whatever complaint is made will be barely acknowledged by the time MBC have finished that stage and moved on.

The PV is on the house. It wouldn't be too much effort to put the batteries onto a trickle charge in the garage overnight.

Your logic is flawless, @SteamyTea , but we would need much more than 20m of cable to get power out to the greenhouses, hence my initial ponderings on the battery. I will ponder further.

Thanks, Jeremy, that looks good. Off to investigate.

We thought about a direct solar power connection, Jeremy, but the roof already diffuses the light and I'm really not confident that anything attached to it would stay there over winter due to the lightweight construction and the howling gales over the winter. The shading I'm planning for the greenhouse is only necessary for the clear vertical sides. We currently have excess PV generation on sunny days and I'd quite like to be able to use it rather than push back into the grid, so this seems a good use. Good idea, ST. I will have a look at bathroom fans, too. Any thoughts on the battery itself?

I want to rig up a simple electric fan system in our greenhouses to push some extra air through on hot days; it's already been peaking at 45C in there over the last week, so I want some more air circulation in addition to the shading that I'm putting in. The greenhouses are a cheap and cheerful construction and aren't up to having holes cut in them to permanently support a fan or blower, so I'd like to use a 12v leisure battery and portable fan set up, with the plan that I can charge the batteries from the surplus PV generation from the house array. The battery and fan set up also means that the whole lot can be easily removed once the days have cooled. I don't want to have a solar panel installation there as I'm not confident it would stay in place with the strong winds we get here, plus it's more complicated than necessary. Does anyone have any particular recommendations on the leisure batteries? They don't need to be lightweight as they will sit on the soil floor of the greenhouse, so lead acid is fine. I estimate that they may need to power a fan for up to 7 hours on a hot day to keep the maximum temps down to a non plant scorching level, driving a simple oscillating fan.

Sydenhams have re-opened for account holders (deliveries)

Gravity fed is a lovely simple idea but I don't think it would work for us as our water butts are only 100l capacity each. If we went away for a week in good weather I think the water butts would run dry quite early on.

Blimey, I had no idea it was so low powered. I will definitely look it into this further as it would save a good deal of effort on a summer evening when I could be busy drinking a G&T on the patio.

Funnily enough, OH and I were discussing some sort of solar arrangement for the kitchen garden area. Given that the time when the beds need watering most is when there is plenty of sunshine, it does make sense. If the light levels are low due to poor weather, nature will do the watering for me. We need to decide on the final arrangement for all the beds and fruit cages first; about half the raised beds are up and filled now and we will clad the second greenhouse once the wind drops at the end of the week. A watering system in those would certainly be useful over the summer, assuming that my straw bale growing experiment works out, of course.

Worth thinking about, thanks chaps. There's no power supply up there, but we do have a manual drip hose system that we used successfully at our old place.

Thanks, Peter. Yes, it's for the kitchen garden area, so very external.

A very basic question, please. I need to get an outdoor tap/standpipe fitted, to be teed off our mains water pipe. The mains pipe already has a stop tap on it, so I need to get a tee fitting, then the rest of the pipe and tap paraphenalia. Is there a particular brand or standard that I should be looking at for the underground fittings? The pipe is 20mm (or maybe 22mm as all the kit seems to be). Ta!

The raised beds look to be in reasonable order. Have you seen the principles of square foot gardening? Really good to intensively crop a small area with a variety of produce.