Carrerahill

Key thing - it's like very slow solder joints going off! Move it and you run the risk - like I said I did with one of my connections earlier this year.

No, you do NOT need to do this.

The solvent is just that, solvent, it chemically reacts with the PVC so having it smooth or rough is not really going to make much of a difference, it will "melt" the plastic. In none of the guides or technical documentation does it ever say to roughen anything. I would suggest not doing, it just takes a a deep groove that may not fill with solvent and end up leaking (why you shouldn't clean up copper pipe for solder too roughly). If you look at and smell the solvent weld it is just a sort of thickened solvent - so the filling properties are from the gooey plastic squishing up and sealing it. There has never been any adhesive or real substance to this stuff in any of the brands I have used. First ever time I was sceptical because the fittings (both same brand) had quite a loose fit. But right enough slap on the old pipe melter and it formed a sort of solvent plastic soup which just filled everything up. I have since used bottles and bottles of it. If you paste some onto a piece of wood it will just flash off and you are left with a very slight residue. A tip I would say if you have never used it is work fairly quickly (but don't rush like first timers do). Get all your pieces setup and cleaned and dry. Undo the lid, paste up liberally both sides of the mating surfaces, line up the pieces then push together and give a little wiggle twist to mix up the melted plastic then hold it and keep it firm. On a boss like this I would hold it for about a minute or support. Different on pipe sections where you can make joints up and lay them down to set. I did have 1 union earlier this year where I stuffed the pipe into it, held it for a bit and didn't pay attention and it snuck out about 4-5mm - it did end up leaking but it was my fault for thinking it would stay put (it was a long piece into a Tee so the pipe wanted to drop) - to be fair it was a final piece and I was concentrating on the other end.

Pest I know. I have come to learnt that generally Toolstation is a bit like Home Bargains - shop about and there is plenty of good stuff, but there is also a lot of tat. I'd have tried 3 - it would have sat on my mind, and I would have ended up getting a good'un.

It is just a type of vertical reinforcement for masonry, sort of like an independent structural column for wall ties - but can also have flanges or other means of connection to the masonry. Depends on the wall makeup, loading etc. Who spec'ed them?

It depends how you will charge your tenant - I sublet an office in our building and to make things fair we simply bought a meter on ebay for £12.00 (same type as used by the utility co.) and wired his whole supply via this. Works well - he just pays his unit rate (we added 0.5p per unit to include for standing charge a little). If however you need 3 separate supplies that are wholly responsible for by your tenants then you need to contact the utility and have them do it all. I would not worry about phases and things, it all depends what is there and the DNO will advise.

Right, as much as I am enjoying this interesting discussion, and I do enjoy many of the discussions on this forum - we have some brilliant minds here and it would be great to sit in a pub with many of you and discuss many things from concrete pours to EV's, but I must shut my laptop down for the night (lowering my carbon footprint by shutting down and I switch off at the wall!) and go home!

Be careful, on a global stage many of us are the richest 10%! To be in the richest 10% of the globe, all you need is about a net worth of £100,000. If you earn over £25K you are in the top 1% of the globe by earnings.

You know what I am saying - it is just a point. Global single child policy?

However, the wood burning statistic is critically flawed. The calculations were based on a null and void figures, they worked out how many wood burning appliances there were (I think they said 1.5million at the time) and basically calculated the burn time as an average of something like 15 hours a day every day. Most wood burners I reckon are only on at weekends and for the evening.

If you halved the population of the globe tomorrow, current pollution issues are solved. We were at somewhere around half the current global population sometime in the 1960's but using heaps of coal and oil to and fuel the world, and generally didn't have a clue about the pollution many of the industries created, they were not regulated the Thames was a dumping ground so on and so forth. You cannot say 1 person created the same amount of pollution as 2 people do today and make that argument stand unless you consider the reduction in pollution generation. Simply put. If my grandfather drove 12miles it took him a gallon of dirty lead filled petrol, if I drive 12 miles I reckon it takes me 1/3 of a gallon of much cleaner fuel. So yes he polluted far more than me, but had they had today's tech...

Many of the smaller cars just will not last reliably past a decade and that is the ICE versions with traditional technology. So these manufacturers are cramming brand new tech into these little town cars for as cheap as they can and we are expected to believe it will last well. The batteries may survive but will the rest of the car? They still have to contend with all the other issues cars suffer from.

The problem with most things in the world is actually over-population. Solve that and all the other problems will go away by themselves!

Do I assume correctly then you are buying a Tesla Model 3 or something of that ilk, you are buying from the luxury end, most people will drive Leaf's and Zoe's and what-not. I drive a large estate, a large Saloon and an old Defender, the two cars are flagship models, one petrol and one diesel - I sit in traffic and almost 95% of the cars around me are small cars - your car will sit in the top hierarchy of vehicles. The Zoe's and Leaf's and what not including the similar model ICE versions are all, just now, tax free, or very cheap. Why - there are far more of them, doing the miles than the bigger cars that actually pay to be there. With any luck your high price tag vehicle will last well and give you excellent service - the mass produced small car won't.

Good work, probably very tiring work - if a little unnecessary. I don't think I would have spent all that time getting it to that stage, you would have saved a lot of time just having them all in one go with the chainsaw.

Indeed, but they think they should get free charges because they are "green". They also don't pay road tax but still use the roads. So now they are considering toll's - so those of us still paying road tax will get hit twice! Just tax electric cars. Totally ridiculous they get free tax because their pollution has been deferred or relocated to the nearest coal burning power station. They have tyres on the roads, they use the infrastructure, they should pay for it.

Indeed things are shipped, but I am simply reminding people that this "green vehicle" has a high carbon footprint before it even comes into existence as a car, just like any other! Many of us understand how it all works, how things end up in our house or on our drive, how the fuel comes to be in our tanks, but most don't. I know a woman who is blissfully unaware that her EV is frankly just as polluting as my car for the first however many 10'000's of miles (she won't keep it past 3 years either, so arguably she never enters the benefit stage) but my car has a large-ish petrol engine, so she can't see past that. I am looking forward to getting the chance to explain it all to her. Reports vary too yes, but if even if the claim is say 50% accurate, that is pretty good and required very little additional effort to make it happen - EV's I just see as a disaster through the additional infrastructure and waste associated with installing it. I make the 10 year comment based on the fact that many cars made today won't be reliable in 10 years, you must bear in mind that many cars are not the well built Volvo's and BMW's and Merc's and Audi's, most cars on the road are little soulless boxes made of cheap steel and poor quality parts. Take many of the little EV's, their petrol counterpart hardly makes it past about 7 years let alone being a good reliable car at 10 or older. My point is, what happens to a 9 year old EV which needs a full new battery replacement? At 9 years old people will not spend £1000's on repairs unless the car is a higher end model or a pristine example someone just wants to keep for as long as possible - I can see plenty of them scrapped and who, for the foreseeable, will want an old EV car? Let's suppose you find a 8 year old EV with 75,000miles on the clock for £2500.00 - it might need a full battery replacement soon - so, do you buy it knowing you may need to spend big on batteries - or have to keep paying a battery lease on a car you bought for cheap. Possibly not, so many of the early EV's will be scrapped young and never be green. Yes I am sure the time will come when all batteries will be the same modules and we can go to Shell or BP etc. and simply pull out your battery packs, slot new ones in, pay for the electricity and drive off - much like Calor gas bottles they are checked before refuelling and can be maintained so they always stay good, but until it is this simple, and hopefully economical I think EV's will cause more issues than solve. What is interesting is that cars are becoming more and more efficient, but at the same time more and more powerful than it's 30 year old counterpart, manufacturers keep making them faster and with better acceleration, had they just maintained the sort of power that was available 30 years ago in a similar car but used new engine technology we could easily see far lower fuel consumption figures again so really we are solving a problem by creating more and throwing more money and tech at it all. My wife has a VW, when we first got it I looked at having it tuned, one of the tunes available was an economy tune, the figures still kept the 2.0 diesel in it's power class but certainly shaved a little of the 0-60, top speed and HP - but it was still about 2 times more powerful than a similar sort of saloon from 1990!

In fairness I wasn't referencing those type - this is the on the street version that will not be affiliated with businesses. It's all very well having them attached to M&S at a shopping centre etc. but that is not where the bulk of road traffic exists. We need hard city infrastructure. Many commercial properties will no have the capacity for fast chargers. I just don't see 2300 a day going in.

Charging points probably take quite a few days to install (when all required utilities and trades play fair) - there is the civils, dig-up the pavement up, lay in electrical duct, electric board need to connect up to something (or electrical contractor needs to connect into a suitable DB for example inside a shopping centre etc.) then it needs to be installed, commissioned, and the ground reinstated. 2300 a day would require 2300 crews a day - this is not happening. Also, what grinds my gears is the carbon footprint to install these, no one ever considers that, all the waste of roads and pavements being dug up and spoil carried away and then new material trucked in - these processes must be made greener. We must adopt the European way of doing things and go for more setts and slabs - they lift them, remove the sand/MoT do the repairs, put the material back in, compact it and relay the same setts and slabs. It takes one 2-3 man crew on 1 van 1 day to do a full repair start to finish. Very little waste. Then there is another issue, if all these charging stations were to go into service the grid would collapse on day 1. Guaranteed, there is only enough energy generation capacity to cope, when demand increases fossil fuel plants ramp up first, nuclear plants take a little longer due to processes and the current state of the plant. A friend of ours is a nuclear systems engineer for EDF - he works mainly at Hunterston but travels around many of their sites - usually 50% of there reactors are down for maintenance, Hunterston B only just restarted after over a year of downtime for safety concerns and is only allowed to operate until 2023 (assuming the cracks do not get worse or something else fails). So really electric vehicles just move the pollution issue somewhere else. We were also involved in a project to design LV distribution and swithgear for a new retail area below student accommodation, builder was trying to get a good BREEAM rating and some green award from the council so they wanted to put in loads of charging stations. When we submitted our connection calcs to Scottish Power we were told there was no enough supply locally and to allow it they would need to run a new HV cable and site a new substation (which they requested was in the new build). When we did the maths, worked it all out, we unanimously voted to remove all but 1 and came up with other options to obtain good green accreditation. There was a report last month which calculated how much more environmentally friendly an EV was - compared to a similar ICE vehicle driven the same miles (it was about 100,000miles) it would take 10 years for the EV to come out on top! 10 years! They will be scrapped by then. It was suggested that running an ICE vehicle for longer would work out cleaner than an EV - I can believe it. The batteries are made from lithium mined in Chile and Bolivia etc. it is then shipped to China, made into batteries then shipped all around the world - the locals in these places are in trouble with their health and the ground is being contaminated something rotten as the brine pools leech into the groundwater. You will also have noted from the media or fuel pumps that fuel is now badged B7 or E5 - diesel and petrol respectively, which is the maximum bio-diesel/ethanol. When running at or near allowable content the result is reduced carbon dioxide from the equivalent of 1,000,000 cars (UK Gov Source so easily reduce by 10%). Whole thing is a farce and the politicians don't understand the technology or science to realise they are pushing something just as damaging or indeed more damaging than the current option.

Yes that is it, that will almost certainly be your soil vent, assuming is is directly above the pipe in the kitchen/bathroom etc.? That is what I was wanting to know indeed, if you had anything penetrating your roof, so it will pass through the roof and on your roof you will have a funny looking tile or a piece of pipe sticking through it. The issue is probably with the flashing piece around the pipe, it looks like a big rubber grommet with a hole through the centre which the pipe will pass. Over time they harden and the seal fails. It may of course be something else like a tile has slipped and the water is running under it etc. but the issue would appear certainly to be related to the soil vent. Remedy would be to get up someone up there to look at it, a roofer would be who I would call (well no that is a lie I would do it myself) - you could attempt it yourself it is not difficult but it is high and dangerous and requires the knowledge of roofing and flashings to get it fixed well, but with all due respect, I get the feeling you are not a DIY/technically minded person so you may just create a bigger issue. Time to call the roofer.

Fischer fastenings for the lot, about £75 a box for 90's. Good nails, they take a lot to bend, but will then take a hell of a bend, I see a lot of framing nails simply shear off when you are violet towards them, indeed plenty also just bend too, but any of the SS nails I used to temp nail stuff during the TF build took a hammering to undo - to the point I switched to some 75mm galv's for temp work as they came out easier. The 35's I got for my fence 2 years ago are galv and holding up well, but a temp fence during the build was dismantled last month - I could loosen the bottom of the board and pull it upwards, almost all the nails sheared. The metallurgy there suggests they have been hardened and left brittle or too high a chrome content in the steel etc.

I concur with Starcky! I went 400mm on my extension floor (total overkill) but it is SOLID! I like it. It would take a concert grand and a concert audience! I also consider lifespans, older houses have lasted very well, when things do go a bit wrong like a joist rots out they don't suffer the same because it was all so heavy duty. Which is why for the sake of an extra bundle of timber joists per room I think it is well worth it.

It's dry! I have removed plenty of rusty nails from timber. Also, they were far better quality, the "nails" would be made from wrought iron, maybe even bronze and made by Nailors. Not the little 3.1's framing nails we use these days. My 1960's house has some proper nails in it, my childhood home and still my parents house, built in 1902 has nails through 9x3.5" joists which are about 6mm in dia. There is a known issue with cheap fixings and poor quality causing building issues. There was a house builder just outside Glasgow, built some TF houses about 20 years ago, the nails were just cheapy steel nailgun nails. There was a design flaw to some aspect of it, cannot remember, moisture in the walls or something, anyway, in almost all the houses this particular wall started to look "odd" on inspection the fixings had rusted and in many cases just sheared. My BC drawings spec stainless-nails for everything. Cost a bit more but at least I can hopefully count on them! Do not underestimate the importance of an appropriately selected fixing for a given situation and it's longevity.

I would use this under the lead: https://www.roofingsuperstore.co.uk/product/flash-vent-boxed-in-3m-roll.html Not designed for this exact purpose but think it wold work.

OK - do you have anything on your roof? Like a piece of pipe sticking out, or a roof tile that looks odd - like it has a raised bit and a slot to the bottom etc. Or even better, can you find your soil pipe in the loft space, does it emerge up there above the bathroom? Tell-tale sign of this would be if the pipe-riser continues up through the bathroom or within a partition wall etc.