Carrerahill

True RAL should be RAL - a lot of manufacturers list a RAL colour but state it is not actually a RAL colour - it's just a close equivalent. Commercially within buildings colours are matched on all sorts of items all the time and although we come across the odd mismatch its usually about bang on - I am confident the RAL system at a commercial level is very accurate. RAL powdercoat and wet finish systems need careful mixing to get a good match between the two systems.

I'd say yes. Anthracite is an "in" colour, so lots of things are specified as Anthracite now and it looks right to me from what I see. Google RAL 7016 - Anthracite Grey I'd say your cabinet is damn near RAL 7016.

I had bags of Sure Rend in the back of a car in my dry garage over winter, I moved them the other day and the usual puff of fine dust ensued, the stuff feels nice and powdery, however, the stuff went out of date in October last. Drat. I was hoping to do a bit of dry dashing to the back of the garage hopefully over the next few weeks - the scaffolding is up and and weather is better. I know cement has a use by date, but my understanding was that if it was still dry it was fine and have often used out of date cement, I might not build a bridge with it, but I have never had an issue, one of the reasons cited was that a product in it to reduce cement burns wouldn't be effective - I ignored this and accepted the risk. So what are your thoughts on a lime based product that is out of date being used? Before you ask, I have asked the manufacturer but not heard back yet. http://www.enewall.co.uk/surerend-top-coat-pre-mix/

My favourite place, I have been going since they were in a little industrial unit across in the main part of the industrial estate selling small stuff.

I think I'd have done that too - as I said above, your work is already done there and looks good - pig to strip it, you then run the risk of damaging seals etc. when you disturb them. Problem solved.

When do I get my badge?

Sounds like a plan but a pig since you have done such a nice job of all of that! I would be mad! I'd probably have thrown something out the window - like the time I fell through the joists and destroyed a days worth of copper plumbing fully soldered, fixed and insulated which soon went flying out the back door much to my wifes, who was sitting reading a book in the garden, surprise. Alas, the MKII plumbing actually was better as I used more radiused bends and less solder joints which in my mind = less water noise & less failure points! If you do end up solvent welding bits make sure you clean the lubricant off the pipes seriously well. Keep calm and carry on. My accident cost me £45.00 in copper pipe, not including the joints, solder, flux, gas & wasted time! The best I was left with was a handful of 800mm pieces that were still sort of straight, I suspect you will get away with another £15.00 worth of bits and some spares you can use elsewhere! I do suspect having a solvent weld joint for the Y will be better in the long term, I feel there are more permanent and may last much much longer. They are also cheaper!

@Christine Walker if you decide to go along this sort of route PM me.

It depends, I think I would have gone for it if it was me starting now, but my thinking would have been if I was starting now, it would have been some holes in the ground, some concrete, maybe a bit of drainage, some block and a load of timber delivered and just cracking on. Our original house is still secured with the original doors and windows have been bricked up so if anything a little more secure, I will not break through until all the dusty works are over and this also means we don't need to heat it until we more or less start using the space. It depends on your personal situation, finances, where do you live, if you are middle of a town or city in time of social unrest then a potentially weakened point of entry might not be so good - but if you can do plenty of it before you need to weaken your security then less of a worry. Maybe your in the sticks in which case it removes quite a few issues in my eyes. Be prepared for delays, and perhaps material supply issues, we are heading into better weather so at least the site won't be hammered too much by weather. Will you have a lot of free time potentially, or can you work from home etc meaning you will still be occupied 9-5 and can you afford to buy the materials and potentially live off savings if you don't earn, maybe this isn't an issue due to reserves or income throughout the crisis.

Do you have a bit of land, acre or two? My great grandmother had a Baby Browning with Pearl grips on her farm not far from where you are. I still have farming family within a stones-throw from you.

The issue with alarms and CCTV is that if you don't have some neighbours likely to run out and have a look or at least peek out the window then an alarm isn't that great - I don't think the police come out to home alarm calls anymore. So you are better investing in means to make your property difficult to gain access to, fencing, locked gates just make it difficult, make it less appealing. Think about the process of a break in - someone passing who wants some cash and an iPad or someone who comes in a van wants to take a lot of stuff. So the opportunistic thief will be put off by decent secure windows and doors, the latter you need to make it as difficult and visible as possible for someone to park near your property and get stuff out. So if you were on holiday or at night could you close and lock a gate at the entrance to your drive or something. Potentially have some sensors that if someone approached your property a light comes on in a room upstairs. Ask a local farmer for a handful of fired shotgun shells and chuck them around the place outside, evidence of a 12bore would worry most!

Sounds a bit amateurish.

You need to run the covering be it cladding, render, wet dash, dry dash etc. down past the slab basically. Our garage is is about 1/2 done in dub coat (base coat) of a dry dash system, those walls are bone dry to about the bellcast, then the walls get damp in the rain, however, I will be using a smooth finish from the ground up to the bellcast and this will run over the bottom block and onto the slab (I intentionally sat my slab high so ground level would not touch the wall or even near the top of the slab). My hope is to have a fairly dry garage when the dry dash is complete (to be honest it is now except in heavy rain where rain literally leaks through the walls. On the 2 sides I need to bring the ground level up fairly close to slab height (door walls) I will ensure best practise to reduce damp transfer - the slab at the main door will butt up to a channel drain the full length, sealed to the slab and the pedestrian door wall will have a channel of gravel right along about 1 step high down from the slab height at the side door. Think of the whole combination of materials like a jacket and hood. There would be no point in having a separate hood and tucking it into the jacket, likewise in very wet weather there is no point in having a jacket over a pair of jeans, the water just runs down the jacket and soaks your jeans, but that is how many garages seem to be built, what you now need are the waterproof trousers, your feet may get wet but the rest of you will be OK and your feet will dry out.

Basically what he said, except replace "house" with "extension". One issue I foresee is I work from home anyway!

We nearly went with them then ended up going with Wren. I was happy with most aspects of my experience to date, I spent too much time talking to everyone I know who has recently bought a kitchen, time on forums, on Google etc. and I decided, they are all as bad as each other really. We went for the mid range, 25 year warranty or something - I reckon if it lasts 15 that will be good enough service. Some of you will go, "Oh no - you didn't go with Wren did you, overpriced rubbish" well yeah I'll take that, but then we looked at Ikea, I know Howdens stuff and I could not even be bothered going to Magnet so we just agreed then and there to go for it. The designer was a decent guy, we had some common interests, I know where he and his parents live - I know that sounds odd but the point I am making is the guy was really really open and friendly and I suspect that if I was to approach him in store and talk nicely to him, he would raise details with his manager who might lean on the factory etc. if anything went wrong. I am prepared to look at everything that arrives and try and have some sort of checking system in place, my thinking is that as the guys bring it into the kitchen I can quickly look at each item and sign it off, I could even be that annoying customer who won't sign on the screen till I am happy everything is there and if there is even a screw missing have a call put into HQ and or have them click the relevant tab to say customer not signing as incomplete etc. So I reckon it is like car dealerships, there probably isn't such a thing as the perfect firm.

OK - I made a start. 12mm Hardwood core external grade ply was finished last weekend. I screwed it down on a grid, 8x12" in the field and 6" on edges, this resulted in a very smooth level floor (floor deck was level anyway). I then used F-Ball Stopgap to fill the screw heads and also to feather a section of the ply that differed in height by about 0.5mm - as I had the stuff I ended up just feathering the whole joint, took the finest of skim and that's me happy it is damn flat and level and these variations and marks cannot telegraph up through the Amtico. I then snapped lines to work out where cabinets would be and the centre line, I was going to butt a piece up to either side of the centre line but after a little test layout I discovered I would be better centring a piece on the centre line as that would save me awkward slither cuts. I even sanded the F-Ball just to get it super smooth, I then vacuumed it all.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/kenable-Cooling-0-12A-Sleeve-Bearing/dp/B00HT52VD8

You don't need the 3rd wire, that is just a speed signal. I used to build a lot of PC's and Servers and fans were always coming in 2/3 wire mixes. I never had a 2 wire fan fail to operate on a 3 wire circuit - it just meant you didn't have fan speed in the BIOS and if it had speed control it often ran at full speed regardless, which frankly isn't so bad.

I have just looked myself as my switch needs fans too. https://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/axial-fans/6688808?cm_mmc=UK-PLA-DS3A-_-google-_-CSS_UK_EN_HVAC+%26+Fans+%26+Thermal+Management_Whoop-_-Axial+Fans_Whoop-_-PRODUCT_GROUP&matchtype=&pla-436838252065&gclid=Cj0KCQjwx7zzBRCcARIsABPRscO9z_Kt5TGUJ1y0seNnka8F-a5yIXL-PFUhGiuB7ZQCVTpp1iSDYQcaArPtEALw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds

Basically, the cheapest option is to drop the ground level to below that of the finished level of the slab all the way around. Basically your slab is a bowl in a bath of water and the lip of the bowl is under the surface of the water - simple as.

You really need to lower the level of the ground at the back, simply that is the only real "long term" solution. A french drain will work but that requires dropping the level of the ground and back filling with washed gravel, which will still sit against the garage, so it's a sort of half solution really. If you don't want to drop the level then excavate down the back of the slab, pour a foundation with a seperation gap from the garage slab and build a small retaining wall, back-fill the high side with washed gravel then make up your ground level to the wall, leave a gap down the back of the garage. This will keep the water back and leave a nice ventilation gap so the timber can breath. Ideally this section would have been built in block/poured concrete and waterproofed.

What your wholesaler has tried to explain to you is true but the GU10 will cause more grief over time and also suffers lumen loss. A domestic downlight will probably average about 300-500Lm - so say a reduction of 30% (L70 I'd suggest if after 50,000hrs) so 150Lm loss, at that you would be hard pushed to actually see a difference albeit yes it would be there. The fact your wholesaler seems to well versed in this suggests that the integrated products they are selling are not very good and thus this issue is rearing it's ugly head too soon. I was on a site that had been handed over to the client 2 weeks ago, reception staff complained their desk was too bright, we had run the calcs and inline with CIBSE guides had designed the reception to 300Lux Avg with uniformity greater than 0.6. So in we went one evening with a light meter (only way to measure light in rooms with natural daylight penetration) and took a reading, on the desk we got readings of 250-350lux - fine, CIBSE LG07 would recommend 300-500lux for office spaces depending on use, so even allowing for the peak area of 350lux it was still well within spec, what I suggested the problem really was was the high gloss white reception desk reflecting light into her eyes! We rolled out a piece of cardboard immediately the issue was gone! However, on the lead up to this I advised the electrician to go into the fitting, and turn down the drive current from 1050mA to 750mA - now I didn't have the current/lumen curve so I don't know what lumen reduction that would have resulted in but at a 300mA drop we couldn't "see" any light drop - we eventually dropped it to 500mA and we began to notice it if we looked, others still could not see a drop - the humen eye is actually not that good at these relatively small light changes. The issue I have with GU10 is the little "driver" it is often no more than a cap and a resistor and some other bits, prone to being inefficient, getting hot and potentially being a big of a weakspot as the "driver" circuit usually fails before the LED. Aurora, JCC, Enlite etc. are "popular" among contractors as they are cheap and cheerful, you will generally not find Aurora speced on a job unless it was D&B or contractor lead - do not get me wrong I think they do fine, but as I see it they are really only suitable for the domestic market and often the optics and distribution is a bit rough. So most LED products that we would spec would be L90 - 100,000 - very basically it means that the LED will output 90% of it's initial lumens for 100,000hrs. L90 industry standard was always 50,000 - so if someone quotes L90 with no figure after it then it is only 50,000. You will also get L80, L70... Now even at 50,000hrs that is 11.41 years at 12 hours a day! So if the wholesaler is telling you about 30% lumen loss, then just how soon are they expecting this drop that you would start to individually replace lights? If I got say 15 years out a set I would probably be happy to replace it with the 2035 version which is 0.5W for 500Lm! Something to bear in mind is that all light sources degrade with time, florescents were terrible for it, people just saw they lit up and assumed they were fine but in fact they were well beyond their service life and could be as low as 50% of original lamp lumens. The high quality range of LED downlights use an LED engine/module which can be changed out, the Aurora units are largely all glued up and sealed - once dead, you bin them. A nice option for dometic installs is to buy a nice GU10 downlight and then buy the likes of a Tridonic LED engine and driver. You end up with a cost effective product with the light output and quality of for example a Flos or Erco down light which can cost £200 each! Like this: Note it has a decent heat-sink on it and optic etc. all built in. You can get a nice downlight for about £12.00-£15.00 and the Tridonic module and driver is about £15.00-£20.00 depending on lumen output - also, try and stick to around 3000K unless you want a white commercial feel.

Mad eh! I know where you are, I have family just on the outskirts of Stranraer.

Exactly! The issue however I think is the lack of official public announcements, even a simple ad campaign blasted out giving out fact, talk about the 10,000's of people who have recovered. If I was older or had existing morbidity yes I think I would be taking a lot more care and limiting my exposure but people have gone mad, I am sure they are expecting scenes from 28 Days Later. The media is to blame for a lot of this and ejits on social media with followers because they sang a song in 2004 and are now looked up to by the deluded.

Hopefully this will drive down the demand for pointless meetings, people love meetings and most of them are totally pointless, not all, but most. I used to fly down to Heathrow nearly every other week for a meeting, I came away from the meeting 1/2 a stone heavier and with some liver damage as all that ever seemed to happen was a couple of days of people talking to convey would could have gone in an email then eating and drinking a lot! So perhaps meeting lovers will soon realise that having people trotting up and down the country just to be seen to be doing something is a waste of time, resources etc. I worked for a firm about 10 years ago where the MD wanted to Scottish office to have a monthly meeting, so we duly had this meeting, we all sat in the conference room and ate sandwiches and discussed pretty much the same stuff every time, it was fine and they only lasted 2-3 hours. Then the MD decided we were to have our meeting in Manchester... so every month we all met at motorway services and travel lodge carparks in the middle of the night across Scotland to car-pool groups of us to drive down... Must have cost the business at least £1000 in fuel and parking then on top of that the loss of productivity.