Carrerahill

Second this. When I redid all the downpipes to the back of the house post extension we opted for square gulleys below each downpipe with a grille and a shoe at the base, in fairness the first iteration was the pipe sitting hard against the grille, however heavy rain dislodged a lot of moss which soon blocked the pipe (makes me wonder how much moss has been washing down the drains over the years), mid-rain storm I went out and slid the pipe up enough to remove the grille, which, by the way was by design, I put 20mm of play in the slip couplers to enable this. I soon redesigned these to shoes/45° bends at the base. Now the rain blasts through and moss gets left on the grille so I am also delighted I am stopping copious amounts of moss making it into my drains.

I have always used deep flow gutter by default, for small increase in cost it just makes sense, even on smaller roofs. I find that it allows for a much better roof gutter transition, allowing a deeper overhang into the gutter, I find it copes better in this increased heavy, more frequent rain we receive and I find that it copes better with some debris without impacting flow. Our original house roof on the north side is quite mossy, during heavy heavy rain last summer most was washed into the gutter, even during the heaviest sort of 1:100 year rain, the gutter still coped while neighbours had water overshooting the gutters and battering down over their windows and doors. I also think it looks better as it creates a much more bold line between facia and roof and helps to hide any little roof edge defects such as undulating edge etc. I would only use normal stuff on my shed.

Just checked, an advert flashed up of the big sliding mitre saw, that is the one I have, but if that is anything to go by, its little brother should be good too. The first gen of this: https://shop.evolutionpowertools.com/collections/mitre-saw/products/r255sms

I've had an Evolution saw since 2008, the first generation of the one you have posted I think. It was used for general DIY for a few years then was the workhorse saw for a big redevelopment at a business unit I had, now it has the house extension, garage, all the fences, skirtings, architraves, concrete formwork, every piece of wood I have put in for the last 14 years has probably been cut on that saw, when I go on tour to parents or brothers to do projects, it comes with me. So a good saw, paid for itself 100 times over. With a new blade I found it cleanly cut pine and MDF good enough to get perfect mitred joints etc. As @Onoff said it would not exactly be cabinet makers spec but its not far off it with care and good setup. I would buy another.

First I think you need to do a network traffic analysis. Then, design it. I have a wired network, it was done pre CAT6 so it is 5e and supports gigabit no problem. I only upgraded some key data points to a gigabit switch such as my workstation, server etc. the rest are still on 100Mbit and work fine, things like lighting controls, printer, smart TV type stuff (which works no bother). After I did some live traffic analysis I concluded that the network was doing just fine. I will be able to move to gigabit fully in the future if I need it but for the foreseeable the network is fine. You have 40+ LAN points, will they all be patched? If they are all patched then what are they all doing? Extra points in your office, what are you thinking, how many computers? Printers? Realistically unless your are running ATC from your home office I cannot see more than 2-4 being needed. Just run the required no. of cables, use a grid plate and just buy a single RJ45 module for now, add the rest if you need them. I have CAT5e cables buried all over my house, I cannot see them ever being used now to be honest but they are there. I also detect a hint of overthinking here. I would just get decent cable in and in decent qty's and don't worry too much about the hardware for now, even if you go down 100Mbit for now then the Gig can follow. BT home hub is Gig, so high traffic can go directly onto those ports from your patch panel if you need Gig.

You can use standard copper pipe with soldered joints under a floor. The solumn should be ventilated? Yes? If not, worry about that more than the pipe! A lot of misconceptions perpetrated by the trades who are getting lazier by the day.

I see nothing of worry, carry on. Just for information, if it was an issue, then "bonding" the cracks with mortar or epoxy would be futile. You need things like HeliFix to stitch cracks.

STOP!

Who made it? I am assuming not a proper door company, if so, start to kick up big time. It looks like an aspiring craftsman made it, to be fair, whoever did it is getting there and this would be a good learners door, but I do agree it looks terrible. I suspect that they have maybe bitten off more than they can chew or had an apprentice make it. You made a comment about the joiner being liable for the costs, so do I assume correctly that they made or had made this door? It could be cut out with minimal damage to your render and a good joiner could slot a new one in hard against the riser if they built the frame into the opening. A real craftsman could do this no bother with a little bead of mastic to seal up and cover any small damaged bits. Or cut the old one out and then fit a new smaller one and put a trim around it, would not be ideal as you should have the clean, first install look, unlike the retrofit look. As @Roundtuit says go gently at first, this could be someone's best attempt and they know it is not great. They might almost be expecting your call. When I was a student I never had a conventional job, I always did bits and pieces on my own, made good money at it too. I remember getting involved in putting lights into the garden of a family friends business premises. It needed some custom brackets so I made them out of angle and welded it all up, some of them looked mint, some were just a bit hashed together. I got away with it because they were up trees, but I always remember thinking, they sure were not going to break or fail, but boy were they rough. Had anything been said I would have, without hesitation, remade them from scratch, and having learnt from MkI, MkII would have been perfect! They were up there for over 10 years until the tree was felled due to rot. What a waste of oak!

You're telling me. Our firm are working on the strategy paper with SGN to come up with a solution!

Whatever you do, if using wood, hardcore in the holes first, compact it a bit, then the new fence post should sit hard on the hardcore, then top up around it with more hardcore, then add concrete. This stops the post sitting in a socket of water for the rest of it's life and they last much must longer. I always trowel the concrete at the top to slope away then backfill with more hardcore or decorative gravel.

If you do go down this route, use someone like MK, they were doing the battery-less piezo switches 10 years ago, so have been at it for a while.

The issue is more than that though. The local HV and LV networks are struggling now, they reckon that for every existing primary sub-station and secondary they will need the equivalent of another 1. So that 1:1 ratio, in other words they will need to double the capacity of the grid. They need to do everything simultaneously to ease the burden. A good business to get into just now would be package sub-stations!

They will and they are sort of thinking about it, but not at a great rate. The race is on to solve this issue and I am not convinced in the short term, 15-25 years, that electric is the answer. I am dealing, daily, with electric network constraint issues. We are struggling with a big development in London just now, we may need 4 separate supplies from 4 local substations to get this building hooked up, what a mess.

Hydrogen is not that far away. There are issues, many issues, but it's certainly not sci-fi. One of my colleagues was at a high-level SGN meeting late last year where 20% hydrogen trials are going to begin in Scotland this year, the trials are not big, they will be limited to small towns, but it is happening now. I am currently shopping about for a new gas boiler and all the ones I am looking at are claiming 20% hydrogen compatible, which is actually an attempt as a selling point rather than anything new as most gas appliances will cope happily with 20% and higher mix of hydrogen. The biggest issue is generating the hydrogen. However, because the gas network exists and burning gas to heat and cook is quite convenient, there will be a big push to use the existing network and reduce the demand on the already struggling electric network. So the next stage will be large scale hydrogen generation stations, centralised they could find a means of using renewables to do this, then it will likely be that gas will stay in our homes for many many many decades to come.

Not sure what that bodge of ridge tiles is about. As far as I know those are ridge tiles for a ridge. What should have been used is called a "Secret joining/bonding gutter" - it looks like a flat piece of tray with an upstand in the middle, the flat sections have some grooves and usually a rough finish to limit water travel, you cut back the neighbouring roof slightly, they lap the hopefully good felt up onto the gutter, then your new roof membrane is laid up to the gutter before re-covering. Job done. Looks like someone has gone cheap and used tiles on your roof instead of slate which has maybe caused the contractor (horse tied up out back?) some issues with the joint. But that is an abomination. If they have not used a gutter, which I suspect they have not or else why the ridge tile bodge? Then I do wonder if they have just lapped the felt, then tried to rely on the ridge tiles and mortar to provide the seal. The ridge tiles and mortar are now ropey and there you have it, a leak.

There is about 3' under my house, I screeded some of it as I use part of it as a sort of plant/storage area, my son is short enough he can walk about down there just now, it's tempting to stick him down there to play!

He takes it out in bags in his trousers and kicks it about the yard at exercise time.

I had a friend who had this issue, we were convinced it was a leak because he lives on a hill and his garden slopes away quite briskly from the rear elevation which was where the problem was worst. Both of us being in the construction design sector we pulled our resources and ended up getting friends who were civil engineers, water engineers, water retaining structure engineers, geo-technical engineers etc. to come and inspect and give thoughts, we even dug up his drive and inspected soil pipes, dug test pits around the property and he got Scottish Water to come and investigate. No leaks. The water & ground guys eventually concluded on the cause which was likely an increased water saturation level due to increased rainfall and the soil conditions not being ideal for drainage, the soil samples suggested this too. Increased rainfall over the last few years has changes the soil conditions to a point it changed the behaviour of water percolation in the area - @Gus Potter alludes to this in his post above too. Essentially water was percolating through the ground from the higher area in front of his house, but when it came to his cellar the water was pooling as it was easier for the water to filter up and through into the unsealed cellar rather than to continue on its merry route down the hill away from his home through saturated clay and silt. The constant flow of water coming down the hill kept filling the cellar and essentially the height increased as the water level in front of the house was far higher. He had a groundworks contractor dig out around his house and install French drains. The problem was also seasonal so it took nearly 6 months before he could see the results. It worked! So, even just eyeballing the lie of the land around your property etc. might give you some clues.

Is that what you call it? In the last 5 years about 5 houses on one street near here were bought, demolished and better ones built. The houses were 400K houses, I wonder how the financials stacked up if I was honest. As I see it there becomes a point where a home on a plot on a street will struggle to go for much more. Say they build a new house and want £800,000 for it, I don't know that people are going to pay £800,000 for technically a smart £400,000 house. If you had £800,000 you buy a £800,000 house within a street, area or land that is £800K worth.

What was wrong with it? The firebox should be in negative pressure.

Can you make the house super well insulated, then put in a wood boiler in an outhouse or garage or utility room to charge a big buffer tank which you can then use to feed rads? You can then control the amount of heat that goes into your home so you don't overheat. You could also then have a little 5kW stove if you want "the look" and use it on coldest nights but still heat with wood fuel.

If a tree is cut down, because someone is building a house for example, and it gets chipped or cut up and taken away, the chances are it is going to either get burnt, or allowed to rot somewhere. Either way CO2 will be returned to the atmosphere, as a cycle is is fairly short in the grand scheme of things. Tree's are being planted at a great rate, there are more trees in the northern hemisphere now than 100 years ago, all taking in CO2, CO2 which previously was not embodied in a tree, if that tree is planted for fuel, then the CO2 was just borrowed from the atmosphere to grow the tree. Had that tree not been grown for wood fuel the CO2 would never have been taken out the atmosphere anyway. We must apply the law of conservation of mass. As a process it must be carbon neutral, you cannot create or destroy the carbon, in this instance it is just the speed in which the carbon is released into the atmosphere changes from slow to pretty damn fast. It is however by definition carbon neutral - processes excluded. For every tree used as fuel about 1.1 is used for construction. Therefore for every 2.1 tree's planted only 47% of the Carbon is quickly released into the atmosphere, i.e. within 1-2 years typically which means 53% is stored long term and the construction timber value is increasing year on year. If you include haulage and preparation of firewood, then you add some CO2 to the process, but most energy for heating currently releases CO2, wood fuel just has a benefit that it is renewable and the CO2 is cyclic. Interestingly, if you grow a carrot and eat it, you have taken CO2 out the atmosphere stored it, you eat the carrot, the human body uses the energy, or maybe stores some as fat, you burn the energy and breath most of the CO2 back out, some remains as solid waste. If you grew that carrot in your garden, then that carrot is pretty much CO2 neutral as a food stuff.

About the only thing you will be able to afford - assuming DIY woodfuel, which is about the only way this should ever be done - to run in the near future and they cannot turn it off when the SHTF. It can be about carbon neutral as a fuel where you are a self wood fuel producer - you must however allow for some chainsaw fuel. If you bring it in from external sources then the C02 starts to add up a bit, keep it local. All the wood I burn is from within about 2 miles of the house, I reckon a litre of diesel to haul it in, then maybe a litre of petrol for the chainsaw. I do sometimes bring in wood from about 25 miles away but I am going there anyway. I know people who got stoves and then buy heaps of kiln dried stuff from Latvia... seriously! I have no issue with the many many many stoves which the media like to include in their false pollution figures that get burnt at Christmas and the odd cold night in January. They are £2500 sculptures that emit very very little by way of pollution. The only argument is the actual particulate, depends where you live, if you live isolated from other houses/people then the argument looses its gravitas. The figures that are banded about are totally inaccurate and tell a narrative that enviro types want to tell. The pollution in the room argument is one of my favourites.

Right got you, so your limited to 8kW which is your 2 inverters, but in fact you could actually have 4 inverters at 2kW and your DNO would be fine. I just wondered if you were being told porkies. Micro-inverter installs have 10's maybe even 100's of inverters. You could of course do this entirety off record and just not export. Have they capped you at 8kW then? Which DNO is that? I know some were 5kW per phase. 8kW sounds more generous.