Carrerahill

This has begun I would say, I am in building services consultancy and we have had to jump through hoops and over a few hurdles over the past 18 months to get buildings to work, the steepest learning curve was getting buildings to comply with the London Environmental Strategy, once we solved that it was easy to make other buildings work up and down the country. We are recovering heat left right and centre and working with more and more onerous figures and thinking outside the box. No training though, as engineers we saw it as a problem to solve and we got on with it. Most of the "training" would be through CPD's which are usually delivered by manufacturers, always with a hidden sales pitch (CPD's are meant to be unbiased, and cannot directly involve a product/service they sell). But it is always then followed by, "Oh by the way, we can sell you these which complies with all of that". So they are not good forums for learning. The electrical regs had a shake up in September, you buy the book, digest it and design to that standard, very little is via training. I will give you a key example of "training" that caused issues. Gyproc went around architects, builders and building control departments and did a CPD on fire rating plasterboard walls. It was pretty common to use a double sheet of 12.5mm to achieve 1 hour fire rating. However, Gyproc wanted to sell fireboard so basically did a CPD and released a white paper which muddied the waters and clouded the BCO's better judgement, which was the dawn of fireboard and 12.5mm board to get your 1 hour! The only person who won was the manufacturer and maybe the sheeting contractor.

They are so blind, so unimaginative, so lacking in foresight and ignorant.

Bravo! I doff my cap!

Nonsense. What happened to pragmatism. Guy is doing a temp job on a house that is getting demoed. Approved contractor? Go over to the EV Charger thread just now and read the contempt for "approved" and "certified" "clubs" - you will get some poorly trained muppet with a pipe shooting beads into your wall regardless. I guarantee you that the majority of this forums members (clearly not all), would be more knowledgeable and competent than most of the people who come to install it and will understand how a building goes together far better. Most of us on this forum build buildings, all in compliance with regs and building standards, of course someone can buy the approved material and blast it into a cavity.

I would just apply for it, if you don't build it then fine. Just make sure it is not a condition of the application.

It will come. Someone will deem themselves an expert and form a club and get all the homeowners fearful if they don't use a "club" approved installer - of course, club approved just means paid up member. All a money making scam - which is partly why I treat most of these club like approval organisations with complete contempt. When I first worked in consultancy I had all my paid up professional memberships - then I decided not to pay any of them and see what happened - nothing happened, I just saved about £389 a year.

True, but there is a silly club for PV stuff and I have not followed any of that either. I am not anti-establishment, but very anti-pointless-moneymaking-scam-club. If, it served to ensure these guys were good, professional, safe, etc. and had true meaning, I wouldn't have an issue, but if you use them to complain about an installer, nothing happens.

Just make one. All an EV charger is, is a contactor and some electronic circuitry to switch it on/off. You can buy an EV charge control protocol module which takes the DC signal from the vehicle and switches the contactor on to start/end charging.

Yes, sounds very suspect. I am in a 1960's build with 2019 modern rear end extension, retrofitted insulation to original building, less than £5 a day and heating to about 18°. Makes me sick that people are conned out of their hard earned, assuming they will get a "good" build from these cowboy builders.

If it was me I would try and close the hole as best I could with bits of brick and mortar around the services, then use fire rated foam to seal the penetrations. I appreciate it may not be possible to brick it up, but even if I could shrink the hole with some bricks here and there to reduce the size a bit I would. You say the pipes are central and the wires go to the sides, could you fit 2 bricks in on end, one about 50mm from each side to create 3 rectangular openings? It also means you have smaller foam fills and if you can compartmentalise the services into smaller penetrations it would make the whole thing a lot neater.

I had this detail in my extension on a sloped section and I just scribed the PB with my knife at an angle several times in quite deep and it came off with a roughly mitred edge. The issue is the edge may be prone to cracking, there are options here. You could put a bit of dot & dab adhesive along the edge to get a good ridged joint.

I'd strip the roof and add box profile sheeting if doing it on a budget or upgrade structure and tile/slate if I wanted to do a really nice job of it. Inside I would insulate and PB to a new build house spec. or better.

The weekly struggle to find capacity for developments, the inability to get LV connections, the requirement for a substation in practically every development now, even a small block of flats, developments that have been shelved due to the LA planning rules stating, for example, min. 20% of car parking spaces must have EVC, apply to DNO, sorry, no capacity for 5 years in this area and £300,000 please. DNO's telling us HV ring mains are maxed out because so and so down the road just put another MW tranny on it... Local residential infrastructure was sized on an ADMD of 1.5-2.5kVA for gas heated homes, start adding EVC to each home... The situation is not good.

Check your figures! Hunterston B produced about 6000 GWh annually! 2021 isn't a realistic year to use. We need to see what 2023-2024 is, 2021 was depressed and will remain depressed due to a lot of Covid related shutdowns and low occupancy levels in buildings. Anyway, the UK uses about 250TWh annually!

Installed capacity (2020) is 75.8GW - that will include PV, wind etc. and plants which do not normally run and things like pumped hyrdo etc. We are pulling about 40.2GW as of 12:45 - OK great, heaps spare. However, when you go and ask for a connection and they tell you the local HV network is maxed out and you shall need to pay and wait for upstream network reinforcements, does it still comfort you knowing there is about 30GW spare capacity (it will be lower as said, includes sources that will not be available)?

Almost certain this was me.

Also, do not confuse generation capacity with network capacity.

What is this based on? What data? The longer term takes decades and £££ of investment.

Firing up and doing what? Heating a cylinder or radiators, both? Some boilers do exercises, some have a frost stat to protect from freezing, if this fails they can think it is colder than it is etc.

I agree with you 100% - I have alluded to this issue before only for people to try and shoot me down with random figures and stats plucked from random sources. People don't allow for the big picture. This week I put in an application to a DNO for a 100 bed carehome, fully electric: heating, laundy and kitchen - had to put in for a HV point of connection and a 500kVA supply. For what it is, that is ridiculous, the last gas home we did was on a 250kVA supply but we put in a 80kVA CHP so the load would probably never reach that - so as everything else goes electric and it will get worse as of next year, EV's are going to be much lower on the pecking order, which is also why they brought out the charge control times mandate! Too much electricity too soon. In the meantime we abandon reasonable energy sources like gas. The time will come, but it is not now. 30 years of infrastructure upgrades and we will be ready, but be prepared to pay even more for electricity. Also, the energy prices being so high, believe what you want, but its to curb use. DNO's are now reporting that their HV networks are stretched, that was only ever heard of in parts of London previously.

It's an odd one, I believe a common clay brick has a fire rating of about 4 hours, however, the FP sheeting may be for fire sealing (fire and smoke transfer) as much as anything else as the mortar might not be perfect. This looks like a can of worms question. First, why are the walls being considered as part of the warrant, had you left them alone would you have been allowed to leave them as is with hard plastered on top? You are going to need to re-plaster anyway, how were you going to do that, PB then skim? Build doesn't look too big, so do you just buy the FP board, get it skimmed and be done with it, nice smooth walls. Plastering hard onto brick will take more skilled labour to do from base coat then top, by the time you factor in material cost and reduced labour to throw up board, you will probably come out even. You can always ask your BCO, they don't bite.

I wouldn't count on that. BCO turned up at the end of my builds, have not shown up yet for my parents build (its just internal fit out to do now) and they are really only looking at a finished stages, there is plenty room for stuff to get fudged and the BCO would never know. I recently went to do the electrical snagging visit of a commercial building I did the design for, my colleague doing the mechanical where he found issues, this building had been signed off by a major cities BC department, things I pulled the contractor up on were, no interface units on door access control units with the fire alarm, so on alarm none of the doors automatically released, emergency lighting not working, it was even flashing the charge indicator red, missing covers on panel boards and DB's, no labelling and in some instances the ON-OFF stickers were reversed so it looked like things were in the off position when in fact they were on, fire exit signs missing or installed incorrectly, inadequate cable support or saddles on conduit - I will not list them all, however, my point is, you cannot count on BCO to check and snag your build.

If you do not have a good to excellent understanding of the building process and the industry - yes you are mad. BCO is not there to check your build goes to plan, they may not even show up till the end. They just look at compliance and will not really do what I think you think they may be doing. They might just see a concrete found and go, yup that looks fine (like a recent build of mine) but no check or rebar, depth, didn't even ask for a concrete delivery note to prove mix and volume. It could have been 50mm deep! Speaking to a consultant engineer(s) is a good idea, structural to start then M&E - agree X no. of 1/2 day visits and reports and I think you will be sorted.

Just what the board came with, its just the isolator rating, not an issue. Usually they are 80A and 63A or a combination of such, there is usually a bigger one for heavier loads. The issue you will also have is cascading, which RCD trips first?!? When the RCD goes, is it only ever the one at the supply and not the CU? This is why my garage is on a 50A SWA submain fed from an MCB in the house CU. So when I drop my extension cable in a bucket of water only the RCBO for that circuit in the garage goes and because I used RCBO's for each circuit, I still have lighting on in the garage to go reset the small power RBCO!

I think I would be looking at doing some upgrades and changes to this setup. That RCD's is protecting as entire, pretty bad way of doing it as you are finding. I cannot see from this image but the tails feed the little CU - then that must feed a cable which feeds the distant consumer unit, I can only assume that it's like this to protect a submain that needed protection under BS7671 but its a poor poor way of doing it. I would be getting rid of that RCD, running an armoured sub-main to the distant consumer unit, then think about having it rewired with a RCBO board ideally or split board if, and I will make the assumption, it doesn't have any RCD protection. Are the freezers in a garage? I would also be looking at getting those tails and things upgraded. Not sure what the "local circuits" are on the small lower CU but I am sure with a bit of thought this could all be revised and made quite a bit better. The BS88 fuse appears to be a 60 - I would be tempted to get rid of the Henley blocks and mess of old tails, run two new tails into a new 4-6 way CU - feed the local circuits from a RCBO, and feed the distant CU with an MCB - probably a 63A or 80A unit - single pole MCB's of that rating are not too easy to find but do exist. Run that out on SWA to the house distant house consumer unit. That then takes care of your submains and you can worry about the main house consumer unit at a later date. I can think of 2-3 other ways of doing this, but that is an option.