Gone West

I can only remember back to the 1950s when IIRC there were the:- Electricity Board Gas Board Water Board GPO Egg Marketing Board Milk Marketing Board British Railways Board

We had a deep bore soakaway drilled that went down 47m through various layers of material that were water bearing until it hit chalk and even that was water bearing. Needless to say we had to think of an alternative but on the positive side we had a borehole that produced plenty of water that we used for watering the garden.

They are plain compressed glass fibre hoods, not intumescent fire hoods, that I used for all my downlighters. I used them to keep the insulation away from the lights. I bought them from TLC many years ago but they don't seem to sell them any longer. They were about 250 to 300mm diameter IIRC.

Might have been this stuff. https://www.everbuild.co.uk/products/landscaping/jointing-compound/sika-fastfix-all-weather/

We had an AEG combi microwave at our last house and we've ordered another one for our current house. https://www.aeg.co.uk/kitchen/cooking/compact-built-in-range/built-in-microwaves/kmk761000m/

I taped a plastic bag over all mine.

We paid £1300 for our Build Zone Warranty twelve years ago so £1500 doesn't sound bad.

We went to the Planning Committee after our application was refused twice, as we had Parish Council support and support from our District Councillor. I spoke for the three minutes allowed pointing out their errors and the Planning Department was overruled unanimously. The Head of Planning was furious and we were elated. We weren't asked any questions.

The only comment I can make about this is that I used a silicone based treatment on a solid brick walled Victorian cottage back in the nineties. I thought it was breatheable but I may be wrong about that. It worked well with water beading off and I lived there for another twelve years without any problems.

If you want to build to PH standards then using PHPP is the easiest and correct way. I bought a copy back in 2009 when I was designing our house. It makes it very easy to alter single aspects of the build to see the overall effect on energy usage. It may seem overwhelming when first looked at but I read through the whole manual a couple of times before entering data. If you are accurate and methodical it's fine.

+1 What I thought as soon as I saw it.

You can check with the Wayleave Dept. at your DNO for wayleaves for the stay and overrsailing cables. You can ask the DNO to remove them.

Not having a TV means you miss out on all the delightful? programmes where people want to change the layout of their houses to create these spaces. Nowt as strange as folk.

Quite a lot I should think. For example it seems to be common now for people to want a large living area that includes kitchen, dining and sitting space. I like separate rooms so in our new build we compromised and had a kitchen/diner and a completely separate sitting room. I also like verandahs so I put those into the new build design and Wendy wanted a balcony so we designed that in as well. That is the real advantage of a new build and if you know what you want you can do it yourself. I'm not saying everybody is able or wants to design their own house but to think it is solely the preserve of architects to design good houses is wrong. I have also built kit cars and rebuilt engines but I'm not a qualified mechanic but still did it successfully. Taking this arguement to the extreme no one should self build at all but employ an architect and then a builder to build a turnkey house.

I thought we went through all this before and it was decided that design is a combination of function and aesthetics. Designing 'beautiful' houses is just aesthetics and is therefore subjective. How a house functions is dependant upon the owners lifestyle and therefore something best decided by the owner. We designed our own house to include all the features that we wanted for ourselves and we also at the same time designed a PH. After living in it happily for three years we sold it and had no trouble in finding a buyer very quickly so it couldn't have been too bad a design. We didn't need anyone telling us what we need, we already knew what we wanted.

I fitted a TP-Link Deco mesh system, as I live in an old stone walled cottage, and it has worked well for the last nine months. I then bought a Meteobridge Nano SD datalogger for my Davis weather station and it didn't work. After reading through a bundle of documents from the suppliers I found in the small print that it won't work with mesh wifi systems. I have now bought a TP-Link AV600 Powerline wifi system which according to the Meteobridge manufacturers should be ok. When my new computer turns up I'll try it out. Shame about the mesh system as it worked well but surprised it's not compatible with everything.

A mate of mine used one for cutting green oak timbers for his barn conversion.

I've seen GRP angle but not used it for anything. It's certainly strong stuff if you're talking about 50mm x 50mm. I should think it's easy to drill so bolting a framework together shouldn't be a problem. Maybe @PeterW has used it.

I had a similar softener to that many years ago. We used to have a lot of power cuts and unfortunately it lost the time setting with every power cut. If I didn't remember to reset the time it would regenerate unexpectedly. It was less than half the price of yours though so I expect yours has a rechargeable battery in it.

We had the first Isoquick foundation installed in the UK back in 2010. It all went well until the concrete was poured. Unfortunately the concrete laying did not go so well. A combination of cost cutting, by not using a pump, and the concrete setting too quickly left large voids in the 200mm slab which were detected using ultrasonic testing. The results were confirmed by drilling core samples. Fortunately we videoed the whole procedure and had the evidence to show to the boss of the company. The result of the farce was that the whole system was cut up using a diamond road cutter and taken away. The second time around it all went smoothly fortunately.

https://rbjplastics.com/standard-profiles/glass-fibre-angles.html

Sorry I didn't understand. You could use fibreglass angle if you're worried about thermal bridging.

Tell me about it!!

Can't you just fix four lengths of aluminium angle in the corners hanging down whatever length you want and attach your ceiling struts to them.

I already offered this a week ago - "We are hopefully replacing our oil fired Rayburn this year with an external oil fired boiler. Oil fired boilers are not quiet but I don't hear it when I'm in bed and it does produce very hot water very quickly. You are welcome to it if your new system doesn't work as you would like, although you would have to collect it."