Carrerahill

I cannot actually find the kerb on sale anywhere - yet. I like the idea of cutting strips of the board.

I am on a suspended timber floor, but I did see someone simply use some wood... bricks would work well if I was on concrete. I think it would just need to be solid and without flex so the tiling doesn't crack.

It seems you have completely ignored what I wrote, and asked, what I have already explained, what to do... The whole lot needs to be bedded and surrounded by concrete to lock it in. If you leave it as it is and just add more haunching you will be wasting your time.

At present I am thinking of using the Schluter system, they do a kerb, then I was going to do it the old fashioned way and use a dry pack mortar to make the base, then Schluter membrane and joint tapes etc. That is the plan for now, we will see how that pans out once others comment on options and experiences.

I am going to form a slightly raised shower area in the bathroom. I found a system by Schluter which is the membrane and waterproofing joints and tapes etc. Has anyone done this recently and can they give their advise and thoughts on it all, systems and products used please?

Use 50mm waste, solvent weld, include rodding points. Plenty of brackets, then you have a solid, larger bore pipe which will handle most waste and if needs rodded its bigger and a solid install. I have a fair bit of inaccessible 50mm waste but access points and a solid install mean I can get in and snake it easily enough. Under my sink I have a 50mm tee, into that tee I reduce to 40 and catch both wastes separately (this gives overflow protection if one U bend blocks and lets you get the job done before you get round to unblocking it). I also use Tee's here and there with a 50mm screw on access point so I can get in.

Ignore the 2 way switching, that is irrelevant to the stair wiring and all happens before the drivers. Let the electrician sort the switching and feed to the drivers. The RGBW LED's will be SELV so they will be run in on some multicore, so locate the drivers remotely and run the low voltage wiring out to the LED's. This also means you are not having to hide drivers etc. etc. and makes them easier, if you put them somewhere sensible, to access for maintenance & replacement. How to control them, I don't know what you want to do? Personally I would just fit some warm white LED's and be done with it, maybe your creating a fairground though? If just a warm white LED detail then just switch it, and you can pre-set your dimming, or add them to a dimming circuit. However, I assume it is just some ambient deorative light, in which case a nice glow would work well. RGBW control will require an scene controller, or a wireless app type thing. When done commercially it is usually paired up with a dimming system, I usually use Mode systems. In a domestic setting you could use Lutron kit for quality, but most of this ends up being the little scene wheels or LCD screen. All becomes a pain in the backside.

Simple, yes, but it will be time consuming. It needs to be lifted and reset to the highways standard. If this was done by a civils contractor to make it vehicle proof it would be fully bedded and haunched in concrete. I'd dig it out and down so that the bedding material can be at least 100mm deep under the kerb. So fully bed them in concrete complete with full haunching to the rear to support and ideally a lower huanching would be created to the front too, but that would mean lifting the paving in a section to get access. The lower hauching to the front is to allow for tarmac, concrete, paving etc.

This is my thought and why I am having a off-grit/island mode portion of the main system. Also why I have a WBS if I am honest.

You will easily get 25mm through duct.25 Practically every external circuit outside the domestic environment is installed in duct, 50mm, 100mm and 150mm being the most common. 95mm cable in a 100mm duct, no issue. How far is your run? Residential laterals I tend to design in 25mm up to about 35m then 35mm after that. DNO will use split concentric cable which is rated slightly higher than xlpe swa.

You don't read things properly, you make assumptions, you don't discuss, it is not really worth my effort replying. At present I have a fully standard grid-tie solar install. So apples for apples if you want to put it that way, you cannot play that card and try to walk away from this discussion. Equipment cost only, I haven't help pay for someone's MCS subscription or a sign written van or a jumped up salesman. If you cared to read my post properly, you would note I am "planning" on doing the off-grid element as an isolated project and at extra cost and alluded to the ROI etc. separately on that item. Several other forum members are now saying they have done as I have, so I am not alone doing something unfathomable, perhaps you need to step back from your position and see it from the point of view of someone who just wants a solar solution on the roof at the price it is worth and also enjoys doing this sort of thing, its a hobby of sorts.

No I wasn't a member but I did follow posts - good forum. You an ex/present Bio man?

https://www.bes.co.uk/25-mm-x-15-mm-22-mm-straight-universal-transition-fittings-polyfast-13544/ Then from that into your new pipe (with insert each end) then your 25mm wall plate and 3/4 tap base into it or just use a 25mm inline and leave one end open. https://www.buildandplumb.co.uk/plumbing-heating-c36/plumbing-brassware-valves-c322/garden-hose-taps-fittings-c326/build-plumb-25mm-mdpe-outside-garden-tap-kit-25mm-wall-plate-elbow-25mm-liner-3-4-bib-tap-thread-tape-p13107/s35959?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term=build-amp-plumb-25mm-mdpe-outside-garden-tap-kit-25mm-wall-plate-elb-982687&utm_campaign=product%2Blisting%2Bads&cid=GBP&glCurrency=GBP&glCountry=GB&gclid=CjwKCAjwk_WVBhBZEiwAUHQCmTsPYRNPreeOzOlA6IBb0NxmtQc9o-XrjQ-kKsrRtl7ySRhPo4phAxoC7O0QAvD_BwE

You can get a copper to MDPE - or a universal transition joint, that gets you onto MDPE - see if you can blag a few meters of 25mm or something and just get a 25mm bib tap. Remember inserts for the 25mm pipe. That is it really.

I am glad of your anecdotal evidence that backs my point. Well done - those figures are good and about what I am seeing. What drove you down this route? Just a preparedness to go it alone?

Father in law is a retired civil engineer, just started his own extension, I was doing the CAD work for him but he realised I was too busy and went to the art shop and got a set of pens and pencils and dusted off his drawing board. A total work of art, beautiful plans. Just another option! Downsides, all I can say is it depends on your knowledge and skills pertaining to designing a building. 8K seems very very steep for an 18m² extension though... what are you getting for that?

I disagree with you. I am acutely aware of the commercial PV industry, upon which, I formed my opinions. How can you make a statement such as "...nor is it factual"? I do not want SEG payments, and I know of plenty of others who are not interested in SEG payments, what for anyway, they are peanuts. I would strongly advise, any technically minded person who likes a bit of DIY and doesn't get their knickers in a knot over doing things the unorthodox way, first investigates the cost of an array, an inverter and some isolators and a roll of cable and MC4 connectors and if it looks right to them, they get on with it. A variation of that is they do that but get some trades in to do the install and they get on with it. Then if you get someone who wants to do it all pukka through the books and pay someone's subscription for MCS accreditation then fine do that. Then of course there are those who are not able to do these things and just need a price to get it done, this is however a self-build forum, things tend to be skewed towards the DIYer! Horses or courses, but it is not for you to say one way is "right" and one way is "wrong". At the end of the day, it boils down to electrical design and physics. I have PV, my house more or less runs for free during the day now, I am exporting a bit but I don't care, I'll be taking the lighting loads, to start with, onto an off-grid setup with grid changeover for consecutive grey days, I will be doing this within the next couple of months and charging batteries to minimise export. So far I have saved about £240 on electricity and I still have another 1.2kW string to go on the roof (which is why I want the off-grid battery aspect) - at this rate I will have paid for the current spend in about 3 years. My aim is off-grid electrically within 3 years, albeit with more investment but my standing charge saving would pay for that within about 2.5 years as an isolated project. Some people also like to go to the main dealer to get their cars repaired and serviced some use a local indy. Depends who you speak to, they will tell you you must go and they are the best and they do it properly. You will also find the cowboy garage too. But there is a middle ground. Decades ago our family used a Land Rover master mechanic who went out on his own because he was fed up of working at the "creche" as he put it, it was him to 10 apprentices or something like that - they were damaging customer cars daily and he had to get out. Someone told us our cars would be damaged and the garage would not be right and we were taking a gamble, while he took his Range Rover to the main dealer, oil sump plug fell off on the A9 going on his family holiday. Once I have figures from the inverter I will post some of my own figures but I don't need to prove anything to anyone because the only person who would lose from me talking nonsense would be me, and you have to believe if I can save a pound, I will save a pound. So much so I am thinking about getting the Bio Diesel processor out of retirement.

You don't buy it through the rip off installers or PV specialists. Solar is cheap. Rip off installers make it expensive and put huge mark-ups on the equipment. I bought my panels, inverters, mounting systems all from separate suppliers, I've installed some of them myself and the big Canadian Solar panels for the main roof I am getting a roofer to install the panels. Not a lot of money has been spent here. The PV market is one of these industries which is being built up as a big cash cow and myths are being spread around by those who it benefits to make people think it is all terribly complicated and very technical. The truth of it is that it is more or less plug and play and very DIY friendly, even if you need to get a friendly spark to do the final hook up. The cheapest non DIY install I know of was £1600 for 2kW, roofer put the panels up for £150 - electrician put in the electrical system for £300 and the rest was parts. That will pay for itself within 6 years and that time scale is reducing each time the energy costs go up, by the end of the year it could be 4 years! It was like the insulation firms, £10,000 to insulate your house, save £££ - but when you did the maths it would take 30 years to pay for itself. If however, you went out and bought rolls of insulation for £2 as it was at the time, things were much more sensible.

But that problem only impacted the motorist (and his Butler), EV's will impact everyone, driver or not, because of their demand on the electricity network. We have been sitting on the knife edge of being able to keep the lights on or not. The tipping point is here. This whole thing is driving me to an autonomous system using PV.

Alternative is to do as a neighbour of mine did, on my advice, he built an EV charger for about, £180 I think it was, including the charge cable & plug.

You can disable it. They just need to come, "out of the box" that they limit load at peak times. This is the beginning of the problems of the electric future rearing there ugly heads.

If a patio is built properly, with the ground prepped and then build up with compacted hardcore, and a sand/cement bedding, there should be no weeds getting through anywhere.

Odd one. In fairness there are people who you would not typically want to issue DWG's too. Your not high on the list of unfavourables! As a consultant engineer myself, I know what it is like to create drawings knowing that they might be poached but at the same time I would be kidding myself on if I really thought by withholding DWG files I was protected. On the whole we will provide DWG's unless we clearly know they will be used for nefarious purposes. Within this industry CAD drawings are just the norm, we use architects drawings every day and getting them is just automatic as soon as we start a project, be it a 3 room school extension or 13 storey office block, complete with elevations, sections, details, the works. You can import PDF drawings into CAD anyway and 99% of the time you can scale it correctly and then convert the PDF xref to DWG and bind and essentially end up with a CAD drawing which apart from the layers sometimes being a bit crazy, is as good as the original for most purposes. Interestingly architects should be the very DWG's that are released because they create the GA's from which everything else is usually drawn upon, just contact them and tell them you have an M&E engineer who is doing some designs and wants the GA's, elevations and sections as a CAD package. I would first look at what I signed up to, maybe they clearly state no DWG's, secondly I would speak to them and explain as a self builder you want them for your use, thirdly, if you need to use them for measuring, ask them for the CAD's or alternatively tell them to dimension their drawings better. To be honest, they sound a bit childish. What are you going to do, run off with some pretty standard details and your house drawings and sell them on eBay?

You will be glad to hear you are not unique. Basically all you need now are your insurances. PI and liability.

I had this issue too, the issue is it needs to be UV rated, most normal membranes are only good for 6-8 months sun exposure. I think I got this in the end: https://www.insulationsuperstore.co.uk/product/powerlon-uv-120-breathable-facade-membrane-15m-x-50m.html?gclid=CjwKCAjwzeqVBhAoEiwAOrEmzT_5sr9YFdkMhINvuCB9ID9Yc0ZX5fzyyREICT_M3SS4bJig4y1erBoCG64QAvD_BwE