Adsibob

I understand that Building Regulations now require that sockets must be positioned no lower than 450mm above the finished floor, and light switches no higher than 1200mm from the finished floor. This is bonkers. Unless one has very tall ceilings, sockets at 450mm from the FFL is just plain stupid and I can’t see any safety benefit as children/babies can still reach 450mm. 1200mm also feels a bit low. Why shouldn’ti be able to have my switches at 1250mm if I want to. Sh*t like this makes me mad.

Because effectively Zanussi, AEG and JL are all made by the Electrolux? For some reason I thought Zanussi was Italian.

We are having to make a last minute change to the position of a toilet because where we were going to put it, the soil pipe would crash into a steel almost immediately upon exiting the frame. We have found a solution we think, but it might mean returning the Grohe Rapid SLX toilet frame I’ve already bought. All depends on how thick the stud wall has to be to fit it. Below is the drawing from Grohe. With a 110mm soil pipe what is the minimum depth that my stud wall, including hardibacker, adhesive and 6mm tiles on one side, and plasterboard and skim on the other side? i just find this drawing very confusing.

Interesting site. Particularly the conclusion: Althoguh little more than rebranded Electroluxproducts in the main, the blend of good customer service and a strong warranty makes John Lewis a reasonable choice to make although a more expensive one what’s the better choice then?

I've had a John Lewis dishwasher and washing machine before and both worked fine. I didn't realise they made ovens though until I saw this: https://www.johnlewis.com/john-lewis-partners-jlbiosb650-single-electric-oven-a-energy-rating-black/p4816110 Anyone knows who makes it for them? Says it's made in Germany, so I'm wondering if it might be AEG. Looks a bit pricy, but maybe it's worth it given it's pyrolytic and has good reviews.

Ah, GDPR nonsense. Shame we didn’t leave the EU before that was forced upon us.

Really? As long as one isn’t trespassing or deliberately harassing somebody or breaching their right to privacy by continuously recording them, why would it be illegal? A path or road is not a private place, so no right to privacy there. The outside of someone’s property might be different.

No, wood burning stoves. Dik Guerts Bora in particular.

I've settled on a DG Bora stove, found a seller with a good price, but not so keen on his flue prices which are pretty high, though appealing it's a one stop shop that will supply and install everything. About a week ago he told me stove prices were going up at the end of the month and i should get my order in quickly. Is that just a sales trick, or are stoves really increasing in price? I know timber prices and insulation prices are being pushed up, but Stoves? Thought @Trw144 might know.

Yeah, that’s the plan.

Our house will be kettle-free. Takes up too much worktop space.

I think my present supply is 60A. Today the builder said for an extended house I should “really upgrade to 100A”. I wasn’t sure, but we do want to have an electric car in the future, so presumably that, combined with all the mod cons might mean I need more than we have at the mo, although we are not presently planning on having an electric shower, so after the car, the highest use would be the induction hob and the oven I imagine. Not sure, really out of my depth, though the new house should also be much more efficient as we will have much more efficient LED lighting.

Further update. Another 11 days have passed. You probably will have picked up that much of that time I have been stressing about this. So doors are in, I guess (!). The first floor roof has been tiled beautifully and first floor walls have been rendered and painted. Scaffolding went up to do the loft conversion. Apart from that, I'm not sure much has happened. There has been a lot of trench digging for the drainage, but I really can't see progress. I feel like they are never ending. Builder discovered that UK Power Networks cable has a tear in the sheathing and needs replacing because some wire is exposed. He also thinks it's not long enough which makes little sense to me, so he is going to ask the UK PN guy if he can lengthen it when they replace it, hopefully tomorrow. Just found out my power supply isn't enough for my requirements, so we are upgrading to 100A, hopefully on 11 August when a different division of UKPN will attend to do that. Still so much to do.

Yeah, door company has come back to say frame can actually be compressed by up to 3mm without affecting the performance. Apparently this is a tolerance designed into the frame. I will double check with the manufacturer, but if that’s the case, I think it should be okay.

Hmmm. I need to work out what proportion of the maximal load we have already put on. Anybody know what the weight of a breeze block cavity wall is per m2?

You were so right.

Update: there is only 4mm of space available in the middle for further deflection before there is contact between the lintel and door frame. We measured the defection so far again but with a better tool, and it has deflected about 3mm. So we are 1mm short if the beam deflects fully to the SE’s spec of 8mm (which according to the SE should only happen in heavy snow). Surely the frame can take a bit of compression? Particularly as it is not a top hung slider. My architect also wondered how the frame design accounts for the fact that it is actually screwed into the lintel (at least abusing to the installation instructions). Wouldn’t that suggest that any deflection transfers to the doorframe via the screws, regardless of how much of a gap there is between the lintel and the frame, or are the fixing points on some sort of sprung mechanism?

Some species of bamboo can grow 4m - 5m high. You can plant them within thick and deep plastic containers that you almost entirely conceal within the ground, with just a couple of inches of the container sticking above the ground (which you can camouflage by choosing the container to be black or dark green). In this way, you control the bamboo's spread. My parents did this and it has worked fairly well, but you really need rather large and deep containers.

The concrete is water retaining to an extent in that whilst it is just a foundation for a ground floor extension, the external side of that foundation is exposed to london clay soil which really gets wet. In the recent heavy rain we've had, water has pooled in the gaps between the clay and the concrete, the concrete has got wet and as a result the water bar has swollen as it has absorbed / reacted with the water. We are in the process of digging and installing french drains along the perimeter of the extension which will somewhat deal with this, but I wonder if this is the reason the structural engineer specified it?

I'm having an issue with the installation of some sliding doors which you can read about here. I'd be really interested in hearing from sliding door installers/manufacturers on your thoughts about Steel deflection and how much of an issue it is for a door which has the sliding mechanism on the bottom rather than the top. If you work in this industry, please PM me.

Agent electric matts expensive to run, even the low wattage ones?

Sunflex SVG30 with 2G windows and PAS24 security upgrades.

We can probably make it work. There are about 4mm of packers underneath. What are those for?

Yes, and I was not concerned because door company has been clearly briefed about deflection risk and knew the tolerance. Obviously if I knew everyone was going to cock up like this, I would have done things differently

Yeah. Ridiculous. Not sure why they prepared drawings which showed a level of accuracy their manufacturer couldn’t keep to. The issue I have now is that it would probably take three days of Labour to take the doors out and reinstall them a couple of mm lower. That is probably not cheap, but much cheaper than ripping them out in 6-12 months time when all the adjacent wall and floor finishes (which are all pretty expensive) are in. Their contract will exclude all consequential loss, so even if I go back to them in the future and force them to reinstall, they will say they can’t be liable for the cost to make good those floor and wall finishes. I wasn’t going to install the Seedum for a few months as we still have a lot of dusty work to do above the Seedum and thought it would be better to install it after the dust has gone. But now I’m thinking it should go in now so we can give the doors a bit more of a real world test before installing the adjacent finishes.