Carrerahill

You could try, as a bit of a bodge, setting the GU10 lamp into the base with some silicone (all of which will withstand high temps for this application - it won't melt or burn, but use silicone). Yes it means they will take a bit to get them out but a little pry with a screwdriver and it should achieve what you want. Good news is your draughty ceiling void will help prolong the life of these lamps!

I think they will still leak air. The lamp will be a tighter fit into those, but not airtight. Technically only a fire rated downlight will achieve what you want. You can get some decent fire rated GU10 down lights - but if you can stretch to the more expensive option I would high recommend it.

Install those Aurora or Luceco ones and you will not have to change a bulb all built in and fully sealed, also a little more efficient and better optics and lumen output than a GU10 LED lamp (which have little inbuild LED power supplies (drivers) which get hot and fail.

I have 3 panels on my wood shed, 340W in total, the first solar panel I got was just a little experiment and I bought a 120W microinverter from Amazon for £40 - they are now £60 and out of stock in most places, so I bought some more from Aliexpress for £25 each plus shipping. They are the little aluminium housed ones with a green and orange label, I think they are great value for money and when you consider £ per W on the roof installed and working they are very economical for little stand alone systems. I am however using a normal inverter on the house array.

Just bought some micro solar inverters from Aliexpress - hope my luck is as good as yours!

But don't buy unbranded Toolstation ones with a 120mm cutout!

Replace them with fire rated LED downlights. Something like the Aurora Enlite E8 or the Luceco F-type will work on a budget.

I have a 6kW inverter donated by a kind BH member, so I decided to buy more panels today and put it to use as I have had good success with my smaller array using micro inverters. So I decided to setup the bigger inverter so I could connect it to the Wi-Fi etc. however, no dice. It's all hooked up on the AC side, but nothing lights up on the LCD screen - so the question is, do some models not fire up unless the DC side is active? I did plug in a single panel I have in my garage just to show the inverter a non-generating closed circuit, but to no avail. I know my micro inverters, when plugged into the mains, with a PV string attached but no DC generation do nothing, they look dead, you would only get a fault warning LED if the string was generating without AC connected. The inverter manual is a bit poor - Goodwe GW6000D-NS is the model. Thoughts welcome.

If it was commercial building a load analysis would be carried out, but in the case of domestic they use a standard load, in this case an ADMD of 2.5kVA would be about normal - stick with the 15kVA and you will be more than fine and will have the equivalent of 6 houses capacity and that is as per SPEN, UKPN and Western Power, not sure about other DNO's but those 3 I deal with regularly enough and plenty of IDNO's can state with certainty that your sorted. We put in an application with Dewhurst (IDNO using Western network in this case) last week for 16 flats, each flat has a 7.9kW ASHP - all electric and some EVC's, for the whole development I applied for 52kVA total POC - 32kVA for the flats at 2kVA each and 20kVA for the landlord supply which has a lift and 2 EVC's on it. For the record, this does not mean you are fused at something lower, you still get a 100A fuse and can still pull 100A if/when needed. They just won't sell you a supply designed on your max demand or else we would all have excessive supplies. It is all designed to keep transformer sizes down and upstream HV network infrastructure sensible.

Stick with the 15 - plenty. Are you just converting your estimated load into kVA? If so this is where you are going wrong. 60kVA is the magic number, over 60 you need CT metering which is costly in its own right. A couple of K for the CT chamber and meter etc.

I think you will be expected to pay about 10-20K for that. We recently put in an application to Western for a project of ours and needed a HV POC with a 250kVA tranny, that was £100,000. We wanted 175kVA from that right enough so deduct some for smaller cables to your property. You should have applied for no more than 2-5kVA for a residential power supply, you might want to check what you are looking for and see if someone has screwed up their figures.

It is an existing building therefore it shall need to comply only with the regs when it was built and there is likely no legal requirement for anything. These days it would be fully compartmentalised, probably 120minute ceiling fire barrier. When you say polystyrene tiles, do you mean a 600mm x 600mm suspended ceiling like you typically get in offices? I would doubt it is just floor joists with only a suspended ceiling below, how old is the construction? At a guess I would say the ceiling in the chippy is false, if you know the owners well enough why don't you ask to pop in when before they open and get an idea of the ceiling makeup, or lift a floor board and look down if that is at all feasible. Is the noise transfer really really bad? Or fairly muffled? Critically here you cannot really do anything about it, you would need to have a very understanding and willing chippy owner willing to close the chippy and install a fire rated ceiling. There is little point protecting it from above as the joists would burn out leading to collapse anyway. You could add some fire boarding above in your flat, which would help, in the early stages of the fire, to stop the spread, but once the structure is gone its gone and so is your floor.

Just how tight are we talking? Have you seen slate clips? I am sure you could rejig those to work. Angled screw driver and screws? Could you, depending on weight/size here, fasten the slates down first as a panel then move into position and fix down? Draw the layout out of the slates on the membrane then put in nails where required with round heads just smaller than the slate hole and sticking up enough, and "hang the slates". A combo of the above plan with slate hangers. Buy one of these panels of fake slates. Get the mouse to do it with a tiny hammer.

It depends, if its going to end up getting ruined by careless contractors bashing past it for the next 6 months then I would say hold off, you could put the lining/frame in and add protection. Depends how your going to trim round the door ext/int when you would need to get it in, but in most normal situations you could screw in a wooden door lining, made from 2x6 and a temp door. Also depends on things like security. Can you obtain a second hand temp door?

Would the IC let you rod down the line then?

If it was me and your neighbours were amenable and not feckless, handless types, then I would be thinking about getting some rods down the line and see what you can do initially. On a run like that I would be concerned as to why it blocked up, slipped joint, or is there a branch or chamber with a bad bend or high point that has led to a blockage. Straight lines of soil pipe laid correctly should be bombproof. You show a photo of the pipe, no pea gravel in sight, did they just throw it in and bury it? If the pipe section with a blockage is anything like that I can see all sorts of issues potentially from settlement letting poorly coupled pipes disconnect and slip etc.

It is possible, in a bind, to split a cable and use 2 pairs for one connection 2 pairs for another assuming no POE etc. Has its limitations such as only 100mbit, but I have done it and it works fine for things like printers.

Before you continue, what are the reasons for this and have you assessed the impact on under house ventilation etc.? I am not suggesting you should not do this, but I am suggesting you need to take into consideration quite a number of things. Even if it is cross air ducting for vent to other parts, ducts for services that may or may not go in in the future. You don't mention a DPM in your make up. The answer is yes you can add more hardcore, lay it in 100-150mm layers and compact, but we aware of using a compactor inside a house as the alterations to ground conditions can damage founds and walls but at 200-400mm of hardcore you do need to compact it.

Don't wrap anything in tape, that is not really a suitable termination. If it was me and the house is, by the sounds of it, original 30's wiring, I would take it all out and rewire. If that is not on the cards for just now then strip back each circuit to the last accessory on the circuit before the area you want to remove. I must however add some caveats. Depending on what the circuits are and how they were wired you may have ring mains, in which case you might think you are terminating a circuit but it's actually live from both sides, I do not know how much you know about electrics so forgive me if you know this stuff. So say it was lighting circuits, I would want to find the last thing it connected to before it entered the demo-zone. Say it was a lighting radial, then I would want to go back to say the hall light, and disconnect it there so that there are no pieces of random live wire kicking about. It might be worth uncovering it all and asking a spark to come and carry out the isolation and maybe advise the state of the electrics.

Google images, Pinterest and Instragram is all you need. Even go through the Dulux, Farrow & Ball, Little Greene sites and look at the photography, I get a lot of ideas by accident when looking for paint. Wallpaper manufacturers, even carpet manufactures sites, all show interiors. I have to deal with interior designers maybe 1 in 6 projects we are involved in, the worst are the ones who have no clue about how buildings go together and work and just show colour and fabric swatches and pick daft stuff that will be a nightmare to make work. They also overstep their mark in my opinion when they start to get involved in things that have nothing to do with them. The most recent was one who wanted to omit fire alarms in a hotel lobby! You would be better with an architect with an interest in buildings, at least they then know what can and cannot realistically happen.

That is immaculate!

No, the waste pipe will be rated the same or higher than the water pipes, the solvent weld stuff I bought was 90° constant and 115° temporary. Think that you could have a hot shower from water pipes made of the same stuff as the heating, draining down the waste, essentially the temps are the same after a while. Or a dishwasher or washing machine emptying from a 90° wash. I often give my kitchen sink a kettle or two of boiling water when I think fat may have been spilled. Don't panic! If it was wiring, I would maybe start to sit up.

Assuming all of this will be after the meter and it is therefore your responsibility and of no concern to DNO, then 25mm 4 Core SWA, at that size conductor, armour will be suitable for earth. If DNO side they will supply 16mm or 25mm split concentric - probably 16mm as they apply a lot more diversity than anyone else ever would.

I got a piece of 18mm OSB, built a frame under it with 2x4, sanded it and gave it a coat of clearcoat so it actually looks decent (well for a garage workshop) resin anchored some threaded rod into the wall, put this "shelf" up just above head height above my work bench, it gave me some hanging space, somewhere to mount a task light (just a 4500Lumen 4000K LED batten on a local switch) - next decent offcut of OSB or ply I will make my tool board. But having the shelf there solved so many immediate issues. I call it the tool gantry. I have my safety specs, carpenters square, hammer, level, hand saw and things like that all hung there as they are sort of the everyday stuff. Toolchest and safe next to the bench so everything is within a few steps.

You need something like perfo board or "shadow board". https://www.zoro.co.uk/shop/storage-and-handling/storage-systems/14025115-11-0-5m-perfo-panel-single/p/ZT1021308X?utm_source=google&utm_campaign=pla%2B|%2BStorage %26 Handling&utm_term=ZT1021308X&utm_medium=pla_css_2&targetid=pla-395480001257&loc_physical_ms=1007336&dev=c&gclid=Cj0KCQjwr-SSBhC9ARIsANhzu16z25Hc8ruFNQ2aXnppzH5Y2irm_EBZqnA8vuse6MaMri9p8rcudHAaAkhZEALw_wcB I use a sheet of 4x8 ply or OSB, painted white and carefully mark out and fit hooks and pins.