PeterW

Its a trademark ! You do have to be very careful and I'm sure that there is a thread over on ebuild about someone having to retract their "status" to Passive House as its not one that has the certificate..

Lifted because ....??? Give Frank Hope a call ...

Have you got to do any RPA fencing before you start..?? If not, drive the rig onto site and if it "catches" the trees the they are damaged and you have a duty of care to prune the damaged branches back, remembering to give next door back the trimmings ... You could also give Frank a quick call for advice too - may advise over the phone

So is it possible to run a 4mm to a point and then do a star of 2.5mm to the sockets ..?? Or is that more hassle ..?

For the slightly dense one here... what is the benefit in radial for power circuits as surely a radial is just a ring with the last leg to the CU missing..?? I would have thought it needed a larger cable size so the cost of completing the ring circuit must be far cheaper..? Or have I missed something..??

I've just read that report on the train and its legendary ! Its a 16 page obliteration of the council and their understanding of BS5837 and how it is applied - what concerns me most is that the TPO does not indicate which of a group of trees are actually covered..?! Legally unless the council can provide the tree map that was initially provided, then the current TPO is worthless - the downside is that the council may well just slap a site TPO on the lot and that leaves you and the owner with very little place to go when you do want work doing. Questions from me are : - how well do you know the owner of the trees..? - how much do you want to prune back..? - does the owner plan to re-pollard the trees in the near future..? For those who want to know who Frank is, just look at his website.... Expert is doing down someone who I would say is one of the best - if not the best - TPO and legal expert in the UK. He's a former inspector who dealt with TPO appeals, and I've read some of his judgments.....! http://www.frankhope.com/tree-expert-witness

Do they sit on your land..? You can't willfully damage a tree and get away with it as "pruning" but if you put a piling rig through there and observe the 4m RPA and branches are damaged in the process (so you have taken REASONABLE CARE) then trimming back the damage would not require permission under the DDD&D clauses relating to TPOs. Can you PM me a link to the the Dr Frank Hope report..?

10m is a long way away - 3-5m and you're into different territory ! Add in a clay soil and if you remove them then you can see a significant change in the soil. If you look at a tree as an "8", the roots will be a similar span to the branches - some such as sycamore and chestnut will throw a decent tap root, whilst others will run for quite a way around 19-24" under the surface. Its a lot about common sense with design - I am looking at a significant sycamore within 3m of a foundation but NHBC guidance only needs 1.2m deep trench fill with a 50mm expansion foam.

Lets have some photos then as Ferdi seems to have got me on this one..! Questions... - Did your planning application include any tree reports or require any pruning..? - What do you need to trim the trees for..? Are they in the way..? - Who's done the foundation design as willows can be a bugger for drawing water and building near them needs serious thought !

Noggins are required to meet building control - it means the strength is in the timber in compression, not the nails in shear in each rafter. Not quite sure about bringing the straps all the way through the wall but as its single skin you don't have any choice ! make sure the galvanising is intact before he renders (or just paint it with red oxide) as if those straps rust they may blow or stain the render. Other than that it looks good !

I thought the whole point of the EPS raft foundations was they were very low ground pressure ..?? I've just done a quick fag packet calc from my BoQ and I reckon a 3 bed that is built with standard construction has around 90 tonnes of materials in it. If you double that for good luck, my 90sqm building would exert 2 tonnes per square metre, or 0.2kg/cm2 That isn't exactly a lot ..! The bearing capacity of compacted gravel is >300KPa that equates to 3Kg/cm2, the loading applied by the foundation is vastly less than the bearing capacity. Who has designed the raft out of interest and who is providing the warranty..??

Agree to all that Terry - when I said Linux was an overhead I meant against something like a PIC. Being able to download packages as you say makes things easy. thingspeak uses a https post for the data using an API write key - there is also a read key but I've not enabled that as I'm only using the private service as it also gives me access to matlab ..!

RPi is pretty easy as it can be scripted with python - I can write c and I could program an Arduino if I wanted but it was more about what was sat on the shelf ..! By using cron it means I'm less susceptible to failures of looping scripts etc and yes there is an overhead of using a Linux distribution as the OS but it makes my life easier when I want to expand it to do more. pi zero has come out but I'm not sure I want one as they have removed most of the useful connectors ..! Mine will probably end up as PoE eventually too

As way of an experiment I've resurrected the old Raspberry Pi to see what sort of monitoring I can put in place with low cost components such as DHT11 and DS18B20 sensors. An hour or two of dodgy scripting on my part (god my python and bash is rusty..) and I've got a nice neat cron script that is logging data every 2 minutes pretty reliably. As I'm inherently lazy when it comes to backups and other stuff, I decided to use one of the online services for IoT to log to. Logic is that if I log at short enough intervals then any lost data points would be averaged out. I can also download the data if needed so it's not like I can't review the data offline Has anyone else done anything similar ..??

Meter is going at the gate with an 80a switched isolator before the 30m SWA run to the house. Secondary isolator on the end of this before it goes into the CU

Quick one for the sparks. Current plan for the CU is to go into a cupboard which is roughly central to the house, with the main supply coming up from the slab ducting and then an isolator and into the CU. I know the CU casinghas to be a metal one for fire risk, but does the wall structure need to be anything other than a standard stud wall - albeit reinforced to take the CU etc. It would most likely be a timber stud wall with fermacell both sides but could be blockwork if necessary.

@Nickfromwales I slightly disagree with you on that one ..!! Whilst 10mm could be chased into a wall, there is significantly less water in the pipe and therefore the time to freeze becomes dramatically shorter - at -10c, a 22mm pipe with 45c water in it and 10mm insulation will freeze in 14 hours. The same spec but a 10mm pipe will freeze in less than 6 hours. The problem becomes pipe size and insulation as 22/25 is 72mm deep ..!

It's one port per loop as they are "stacked" on top of each other. A quick measure of mine it's about 40mm per port and then around 220mm for the pump etc so you would be around 600mm for a 9 port

Is this to run a hot and cold supply through an un-heated space rather than on an outside wall ..?? How often will the pipes be used ..?? In most instances you are better increasing the pipe size to 22mm as it has a higher volume of water and therefore freezes more slowly. I can run the numbers through CIT but from memory you will need 22/28 in PE Foam or 22/25 in nitrile rubber to give you 8 hours or so frost protection at -5c For protection can you box the pipes in too ...?? Neither of those insulation products are fully UV stable and will degrade over time so really need some sort of enclosure

Go direct onto the stopcock, don't bother insulating it as at 300mm down you need a couple of weeks of -10c to get that far with permafrost ! Just push it down to the right level as soon as practical.

Ok sounds like the top stat maybe incorrectly wired - if it only has a single set of contacts it will need switching out. Top stat is set to around 50c so the stat will not open until the tank gets this cool. This is wired through the bottom stat set to around 70c, which is wired as a normal stat - it closes when the water reaches 70c which means by definition the whole tank top to bottom has a minimum of 70c . The other way is a latching relay that triggers the boiler.

Does it have one or two thermostats in it...?? And how far up the tank are they ..??

Are they a glass shade and are they just hanging from the cable ..?? If so you may find the cable is bonded into the fitting as it is a structural part of the actual light - it won't just be flex as it may have nylon core. In the instructions it should tell you whether you can shorten the flex and how to do it. Can you not have a hanging bar with the lights fed from that below the ceiling ..?

In general the MiniSun stuff I've had before has been really good. What are the transformers like ..?

So what happens if you are on sand..?? Do you have to buy sand to back fill or can you just chuck the pipes in the trench ..??