Carrerahill

Are you keeping your wires within prescribed areas and immediately horizontal or vertical of any switch or socket? I am not trying to be that annoying twit that just pokes, I only ask as the top image shows a wire but no apparent outlet/device to give someone the indication a wire may be present. Photograph everything before you sheet over (or are we too late for that?). I even wrote on sheets as I installed them the distances from walls, and plotted out danger zones. When it comes to installing the kitchen in particular I will lightly re-plot these out across the whole kitchen double checked with a wire finder so that there is no excuse for hitting a wire! For testing, there are various tests from very basic to more advanced. As a starter do basic continuity test, as said above, Wago the wires together at one end, and bell them out at the other. This can test for breaks and shorts, but not for a nail or screw which has penetrated a single core and no other.

How much???? Is that just looking online at merchants or phoning, or even better going in and smiling nicely and asking for a price? We paid £4.55 a sheet for GTEC 12.5mm Tapered. At £7 a sheet I wouldn't be so gungho with it! How many sheets do you need? I'll sell you some at £6.0 a sheet but you must collect!

Mad eh? Good on you, got me thinking about my kitchen appliances now! If it is worth myself and some friends driving about a 1000mile round trip to get some wine occasionally from France, then I suspect bigger ticket items would be the same!

What I do not like about that flashing is that the flashing sits on the peak of the tiles and looking at the tile exposed below it looks like the tile has been cut to fit, thus any water sitting high on the peak can get blown over the peak and may then pass over the tile and start its journey into your house. Looking at that, assuming roof is otherwise good and will be in service for some time yet, I would remove the lead and form a new wider piece which can be beaten down into the trough of the tile so that any water needs to be blown up onto the peak first before it can leak down. I also like the hidden valley types but that would take a lot more work and messing to install and if you are fed up of projects you may not want to do that! I know I am late to this party but just my thoughts without having read other posters replies.

Regarding electrics and plumbing that depends on what you need and where. If I had laid my floor first I would have had ridiculous electrical and plumbing routes not to mention a near impossible waste pipe route.

It is a mix from room to room to be honest, but we have a similar issue with some of them and I did note the reveals were getting close at some points. Another option may be for you to trim your tape back? If it was me I would pack out a little, board it, then use a fresh blade and cut down the tape at an inward angle, then by the time you FST and a bead of silicone/caulk etc. down the seam (as FST/Gypsum etc. always crack at interfaces to wood/uPVC etc.) you will hide any light mark to the window frame. Alternatively if you lightly score the tape will it tear cleanly along the score?

As I type this my plasterers are working on our build, I finished the reveals on Monday morning about 02:00! We were using plasterboard but the principle is the same, 11mm OSB packers to float the board over the window brackets, sealed to the window frame then PB over the top, plasterers did all the reveals and small bits first, I think they just ran their trowel in and also were using a small end-handled trowel which basically looks like a mini trowel with a cranked handle on one end so that as much as 6-8 inches of it could be slipped into tight spaces, the reveals looks great. For painting, I am sure I will manage, masking tape may come in handy!

OK having seen the rest of the images and read your additional info and as mentioned by someone else above, the blockage could not have been backing up too high or else your ground floor pan would have overflowed. If you knock the soil pipe in the loft, or even try to slightly lift it by hand does it feel heavy like that whole horizontal section is full? I think if if that was me I would get a piece of garden hose (perhaps a bit you are happy to bin afterwards) and some gloves on and shove it down the access point and round that bend from the loft. If it doesn't clear by the time you get to the horizontal section (i.e. passed via the 2 No. 45°'s) then I would abandon ship there and try it from outside. Get the camera on the tripod first.

Looking at that arrangement I am surprised where the blockage appears to be! You said your system backed up at one point and was never the same, did it back up that pipe much? Is it possible that a very high water level let waste gather high up in the pipe, say that horizontal section and allowed it to set up a bit like poo-concrete? Another thought, is the blockage much further down, like outside on the vertical and in fact that whole section it backed up? If it slowly drains away, how many flushes until it backs up again?

Thanks, I have just ordered a Shelly 1 and a 1PM.

Perfect, what I wanted to know - I have not issue with using the net, I just want redundancy so that I am not relying on a cloud server to control my house. I also note it will run on 12V, so I could even use it within a car. So I can have it connected to the net, but if the connection goes down it will still run it's schedule which is good to know, so where is that web server hosted, within the actual Shelly - if I have multiple does that mean they essentially act standalone albeit linked up when they are on the wifi? They are far cheaper than the commercial systems (Casambi is really meant for lighting but they are £60 each) so makes it more affordable for just playing around too. So which version are you using there? I see on Amazon a "Shelly 1PM Wi-Fi Relay Switch Watt-o-meter - that one? I see you can have temp triggers and all sorts, so what sensors do you hook them up with or do they have built in temp sensors, humidity? I think I will buy myself a Christmas present (another one!). I'll keep digging, someone no doubt has videos on YouTube. I guess you can customise the interface so one could be MVHR, some for lighting, some for heating and skin up the buttons so that it looks like a polished controls interface?

I have just been looking at these, the one thing I am interested on is where is the program held? Take for example Casmabi lighting controls, they use a bluetooth mesh network and are controlled by a device with bluetooth basically. Offices that I have seen Casambi used for lighting control have iPad's mounted into special wall mount cases, so you have essentially a very powerful control faceplate, you can have as many as you want and those trusted in the office can even have the pin and control the lights from their tablet or phone. But the scene program is on the device, so if you were to have no internet Casambi would continue to work. I have a couple of WiFi sockets and if they lose wifi that is it, I have lost control and the program is held on a cloud so they won't even do what they are meant to do until wifi is restored, so what I am looking for is something like the Shelly complete with power meter and whatnot, but is less internet reliant.

Hi all. As part of my first fix I need to bottom out the cooker hood, I have already included a piece of soil pipe through the wall when it was built which ends in the service void for now, slightly pitched to the exterior. The service void, which the duct will need to pass through will be plaster boarded over on Thursday/Friday and plasterer is booked for the 3rd of Jan so I need to bottom it out really before Christmas so I can order any bits now. I attach a sketch of the situation, idea is, obviously, hood above the hob, I can get the stainless duct I want and even the bend with the same pitch as the ceiling so the duct can sit parallel to the ceiling and it will go up via the service void to the outside. My thoughts were either, inline fan in the void, so the hood is just that, a hood, or a hood with the motor built in and just push the extract up the duct and out. I am tempted to have it custom fabricated and then I will incorporate a control and lighting but obviously off the shelf stuff would be easier. I can find images of what I want, but struggling to find who actually does something that would work, and not really being a cooker hood aficionado I am not entirely sure of the usual connections etc. Do the external venting hoods simply have a 4" (?) spigot for connection to various ducts etc, condensate drain somewhere? See attached a sketch and 2 images showing the idea of what we are going for. One option I have is to simply extend the piece of soil pipe out through the, yet to be installed, plasterboard and leave it sticking out then when it comes to duct install and hood etc. then I just need to get the duct up to the pipe and probably incorporate a small stainless flange to clean off the edge. Down side to this option is that I then lose the opportunity to put an inline fan into the void before PB goes up, but then, do I want a fan in a void, probably not as I don't want an access hatch which would then be the stupid design of a fan boxed into a void - bad plan! I suppose if I went down the self fab route then I could get the hood made up then have a good quality fan incorporated into the hood so all the M&E is incorporated into the hood which can be serviced easily. So if anyone who has recently had cause to procure and spec up a hood, what did you do, how did you do it and who did you use. Thanks

Looking at that I would just count them, I got bored after about 9 but then it is not my roof and I have no interest in knowing, but if it was, I'd probably have had them counted by now. The tile could also be a Redland Renown.

I have noticed this, for example a 100m drum of 4.0mm T&E list price in CEF is about £1000.00 but they always discount it - obviously! I think it is so they can rip of government organisations or something.

The irritating thing is, if you were known to them, that price would probably fall to about £2! Over the years of DIY I have built up relationships with merchants and the prices I get are the same as trade but the issue is if you go in and the guy behind the counter is not your usual guy you are back to square one. There is a wholesale motor factors I go to for oil and wipers and things, if I go in and it's not the guy I know I tend to just look about and then leave. I needed an alternator one Saturday in a hurry, it packed in on a Friday night and I needed to go somewhere on the Saturday night, garage said they couldn't do it till the following week, went in and luckily my chap was on, I got a genuine 160A Bosch alternator for less than £100 - when he rang up the part at first he said, "Right so, £268, but we can do better for you, £85 (I think it was) to you" I would have been happy if he said £200! I do think however that merchants are better than they were say 10 years ago, I think with the likes of Screwfix and Toolstation (mind you, a lot of the TS stuff is cheap for a reason) they have realised they need to be more competitive even for the average walk in. I went into a Jewsons about 10 years ago for 2400x600x22mm T&G caberfloor, chap said £33.00 a sheet and looked at me with a serious face when he said it, I just laughed and said, I assume there is a mistake, he looked again and said no £33, I said for both I assume, no no each! I said we both know that is a £7-8 sheet at best, what can you do it for - £11 - not great but for 2 sheets not bad either! I have since been in after about a decade of boycotting them for that ridiculous price and this time they were much more sensible prices.

This makes me laugh, I was out in our garden at about 22:00 last night with the secateurs cutting some pine and cedar for the wreath, however I then noticed how overgrown a section of the garden had become, what was meant to be 4-5 clippings to make up a wreath ended in me filling the recycling wheelie-bin! Looking out there this morning amazingly my pitch black gardening looks quite good! The issue was I could not see the branch to cut, so it sometimes took a few goes to actually cut something! I like what you have done, it looks very smart and a nice little extra!

It's bad now isn't it! That is quite tempting, but it would fall to me to source the components and repair it and to be honest in this instance it is easier just to let him get a replacement. I will ask him for the old one with a view to repairing it.

Thanks, however, I should have said, I had my friend check all the basics including putting a new fuse in the spur etc. checking MCB/RCD. Anyway, it transpired the power circuit for the controller was knackered, to get him up and running again I replaced a blown capacitor and some resistors and he has heat again, it is only a temp fix as I didn't have any SMD components so to replace the knackered ones with, so the new ones are soldered in but it meant the cover could not be put back on properly so we have used about 4 x 1G faceplate spacers to get it all back in! He will order one from Myson tomorrow - his wife had to have warm feet tomorrow morning, I suggested a bucket of warm water but that wasn't acceptable.

I am about to head over to a friends house where they say their Myson EUFH has stopped working, no illumination from the LCD display and bathroom freezing. I suggested it will just be the controller and it will be as simple as getting another but I will pop over with a meter and do some checking. So the primary question I have, assuming the in-floor temperature sensor is of type X and in the say 1Kohm-1.5Kohm range, just figures plucked for discussion sake, will another manufacturers controller also use a sensor within the 1-1.5Kohm range? In which case generally they are interchangeable? That would let them pick one up from screwfix or similar today, if not I will need to get them to order a Myson replacement. Any advise would be great. I have only ever installed EUFH once and didn't really need to think about it as it all just worked!

Did our extension and garage, hired a JCB for 3-4 days and got to work. Good fun and a good saving. Just be accurate.

It didn't arrive.

Buy a LED bulkhead like this: https://asdlighting.com/products/centro-range/centro-circo/ or https://asdlighting.com/products/clarity-range/clarity-portrait-plain/ Get the model with built in presence detection, they consume less than 16/8W depending on model - walk into garage this product comes on, probably bright enough for simple tasks or getting something out of garage, set it to run for a minute or something or even less when no motion is detected - job done.

That is how I would do it. Assuming there is no way for them to get the cable across your property other than to walk across your property I would just do this. I would probably serve Openreach with a a writ (£20-30 in court) simply telling them you do not permit any access to your land. If you then find they do enter your land sneakily to put up the cable you then have more ground to stand on as you implicitly told them. Even a very well written letter denying all access would work but may be ignored. This is actually a big problem at the moment in the UK - all the Openreach cables are going in for fibre broadband, you will note on telegraph poles fibre junction boxes and new poles going up left right and centre and pavements being dug up all in the aid of some faster internet. I noticed Openreach contractors going in and out our neighbours garden a month ago, I text her and warned her what they would be up to and not to accept the pole in her garden - they duly turned up with their offer, £150. She said no and that was that. So they tried to put a pole into a little patch of land behind hers, but she said they were not allowed into her garden (they were literally about to carry a telegraph pole through her garden) she stopped them from coming in and that was the end of that. This whole Openreach network upgrade is a disgrace and a waste of time, money, resources and a lot of dug up roads and mess.

Move your laundry upstairs! I think your situation is fairly typical of a family house.