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Octopus have offered me a “loyal Octopus” 12 month fixed price deal. This is the offer: I’m currently on their flexible tariff. Should I fix now, or hold out till wholesale prices fall further?

I’m currently being offered a two year tracker at 5.39% (0.14% over BoE Base Rate) interest only; or a two year fix at 6.09% interest only; or a three year fix at 5.94% again, interest only. If I opt for repayment, the rates are the same. In each case, a fee of £995 is payable, but that’s a tiny proportion of the £855,000 I’m borrowing. Anyone been offered better? my LTV is slightly less than 50%.

No.

No, I had a routine set up on two lights (which I set up through Alexa), but otherwise I was just going into the app on an ad hoc basis and toggling lights on and off. I wish I had known about the holiday mode. Where is that setting? i find the Philips Hue app pretty basic. Couldn’t see how to set up a timed schedule, for example.

Yes, my ring cameras are still working, and my Ubiquiti dream router can still be rebooted remotely.

Nowadays, most lenders will offer you both fee free rates, and rates that are only accessible by paying a fee. The fee is typically £999. In my case, because my debt is so large, it always makes sense to pay the fee to access the cheaper rate. Endowment mortgages were a con. Lucky I dodged those.

We are abroad on holiday, and I was relying on our Philips hue lights (we have about 20 of them) to simulate occupancy at our house whilst we are away. To my great annoyance, yesterday remote access suddenly stopped working. I was, for about 24h, able to control them via my Alexa app, but now that has stopped working as well. I can reboot my internet remotely, but that’s not doing anything for the Philips Hue. I asked my cleaning lady to unplug the bridge and plug it back in. She did that, and it temporarily fixed the access, but via Alexa only. Now the Alexa access has stopped again. It’s all rather disappointing for the money I’ve invested in it. Pretty pathetic really, as was working flawlessly for the last 6 months or so, although to be honest I rarely had cause to access it remotely. Any thoughts?

What complications? I find mortgage finance very straightforward. If you want to fix, you fix, but at a cost. If you don’t want to pay that cost, don’t fix. But then you run the risk of paying when interest rates suddenly go up, like they have this year.

This already exists and has existed for ages. I had such a mortgage with Santander a few years ago. It was a tracker with no break fees. Handy as I didn’t know how long it was going to take to sell the property, but I still needed a mortgage until the sale went through.

Yep! We had a 300L Telford tempest and the structural engineer was fairly relaxed about me installing it next to an external wall of the house, as minimum moment there on the joists. When I suggested it would be better in the middle of the floor, some 6m from the external walls, he said we would need to strengthen the floor.

The loft will be warm, because the heat from rest of the house will heat it.

The architect measured and did a drawing. The glazing company attended to check his drawing. Then they proposed some minor amendments to the design, which I and the architect accepted. It appears that one of their amendments was to include a flashing over the 1m length of exposed edge of the glass, bridging over the silicone joint between the upstand and the glass. That was not done. The roofing guy’s advice now, suggests that this flashing would not properly adhere to self cleaning glass, but it seems the glazing company disagree. I guess it’s their glass, so I should ask them. So I guess it’s an omission by my main contractor and architect who was meant to be project managing this aspect of the build for me. Rotten luck really, as my snagging was done in May and I made the final payment at the beginning of July. This issue surfaced right at the end of July. The contractor probably would have rectified this if he had known.

So I raised this as a possibility with the roofer, and he said that the problem with that is that once you damage the non stick coating of the glass, even on just one portion of it, “the coating starts to peel off the whole pane”. Not sure how current his knowledge is, given he’s been in roofing for many years, and was in glazing prior to that, but he has seen lots of skylight issues as part of both careers. I will post some pictures over the weekend to explain it better. But imagine a slanted sheet of glass that should be bigger than the upstand it is covering to overhang it by a couple inches on each side of the upstand, but instead of being bigger and overhanging on all sides, it doesn’t overhang on one 1m length of upstand. It is that 1m which has the exposed joint of silicone. Luckily the roofer removed the existing “blown” silicone and applied a new thick bead of his preferred product, which he says is very good, but even he wouldn’t guarantee such a silicone joint for longer than a year or two max.

Luckily, yes. It’s a skylight in the roof over the ground floor extension, and I can easily climb onto that roof from a couple of first floor windows. Requires trampling over some Seedum, which is a shame (already from today’s visit and patch up by the roofer, it looks a bit trampled - hopefully it will recover quickly).

This sounds promising. Can you expand on the detail of this product please.

Roofer came, good news and bad news. Good news is he spotted some minor issue which he patched up pretty quickly with another coat of the triflex membrane on a small area. Also good news is that they didn’t forget the fabric membrane that goes between the sedum trays and the triflex, that’s been there all along. Bad news is that as @saveasteadingforeshadowed there appears to be an issue further upslope from the site of the leak: a large 4m by 1m skylight. Of the 10m perimeter of that glass, the two short sides and the long side at the bottom are all fine. However about 1m of the 4m top side is not bound by a wall. That 1m should have an overhang of glass that surpasses the upstand. But it doesn’t. It meets the upstand approximately half way across it. There is then silicone covering the join with the upstand. That silicone has failed/cracked. According to the roofer , who says he worked for 20 years in glazing previously, putting in new silicone will only ever be a temporary measure because it is still vulnerable, due to the lack of overhanging glass. He said that these types of designs never work long term and that I should look at replacing the roof window. From my perspective, that is prohibitively expensive, I think it cost c. £3k and removing it would also create potential damage to the roof. I asked if as an alternative they could install a flashing to cover the vulnerability, he said it would not stick because of the self cleaning glass is designed to have nothing stick to it. I’m just wondering if that is really that accurate? there is some lead flashing which has been stuck to the glass by using Tesco’s Vana Pro Clima airtight tape sandwiched between the glass and the leaf flashing. Reading up on the specs of that tape, it is only designed for 6 months of outdoor use, but I wonder whether we got away with that as being sandwiched between glass underneath and lead flashing on top, it is not actually “outdoors”. Trying to stay calm, but very difficult.

Except that we don’t have a painted finish. It’s a clay plaster finish, applied by a specialist.

I estimate we’ve had 11mm of rain today, nothing excessive. Here is data for the last 31 days for a weather station about a mile from our house (showing 11mm there, today): It’s not a gutter issue, as this is on a part of the roof above the gutter. In any case, I can see both gutters and neither is blocked. When I was sold this product, I was told that even if water ponds on it, it won’t fail. The same company also install GRP, and there was an aspect of our roof (I think integrated gutters) which made GRP unsuitable. The guy on the phone today thought it might be that the roof was damaged when the Sedum was installed.

We had a Triflex ProTect “fully reinforced PMMA resin roofing system” installed about 18 months ago as well as a modular sedum roof on top. The roof pitch is about 20 degrees, but we were advised to go with this specialist system instead of GRP because apparently the angles and profiles were needed for parts of our roof were not suitable for Grp. The Triflex ProTect is fully BBA & ETA approved and certified and are covered by a 20 year guarantee. Today we spotted two damp patches about 5cm apart from each other. They are both quite small. One is very small, about the size of a 50 pence piece, the other maybe 6 or 7 times that. No drips of water that I can tell, just patches. The two patches are on the same perpendicular from the external wall, so I’m guessing the weakness in the membrane has occurred where two boards of OSB meet, as that is the substrate that the triflex liquid membrane was applied to. I emailed the installation company at 6:15pm to notify them of the issue, with a photo of the damp patch. Owner called me an hour later and tells me he’s never had a leak with this product in over 10 years of using it. He has agreed to send the original installer back tomorrow. I’m not very good in these situations, because things like this make me quite upset and irrational (the roofing system cost a fortune, about £8k more than if we’d just used GRP. So that I can stay as rational as possible, what some I expect the company to do? The internal decor of the ceiling is exposed clay plaster, which might look ok when the damp patch dries or it might not. We have MVHR so I’m expecting the plaster (which is incredibly thin, about 2mm on top of the plasterboard) to dry quickly once the source of the ingress is rectified. If the decorative plaster ends up stained, is it reasonable to ask for that but if ceiling to be replastered? What about the structure of the roof itself and the insulation? Should that be replaced or is it fine for it to just dry? i haven’t got the exact build up in front of me, but I recall the roof insulation here is a mix of PIR and superfoil. The rafters are timber. On top of the rafters, plywood was laid, then the OSB. Then the triflex liquid membrane. Once that membrane cured a geotextile membrane should have been laid, to protect the triflex, then the modular boxes of Sedum. I didn’t check that they put the membrane down, but they certainly specified and charged me for it, because they said it was important to protect the membrane from being damaged by the Sedum boxes. Shit like this had a tendency to push me close to the edge. Not healthy I know.

No, but looks good. Will look even better on my new bookcase. Though when I search for it, all I can find is this: https://www.abebooks.co.uk/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=30397714250&ref_=ps_ggl_2039220669&cm_mmc=ggl-_-UK_Shopp_Tradestandard-_-product_id=UK9780340951699USED-_-keyword=&gclid=CjwKCAjwt52mBhB5EiwA05YKo4hD643lW8QaCwYwUisA5XQpaY0aBGFaKXY5LVqo9jdZhtj-EwMf7RoCwPcQAvD_BwE

I’ve found a solution: I will buy a rifle and some bullets. Lots of bullets. I will buy some <s>bait</s> chickens. (The law allows shooting of foxes to protect livestock, so long as I notify the police within 48 hours as per the Animals Act 1971.)

Ghosh, sorry to hear that. Hope you're on the mend now.

If the only think that is pushing the OP towards imprinted concrete over paved slabs is the weed issue, then I can recommend Marshall's Drivesys cobble system. Each "cobble" is cast from concrete and has a ridge, so that once laid there is a barrier preventing weed growth. The diagram below isn't that clear, but effectively each "cobble" has a 6mm ridge protruding around the perimeter of the bottom half of the cobble, so that when installed adjacent to another cobble, there is a 12mm gap between cobbles (above the ridge). That 12mm gap is then filled with the joining compound to create a barrier. Weeds don't get through. You can get a very nice "cobbled" look, but with the benefits of modern engineering. I think that at most it would work out the same as imprinted concrete, but probably a bit less.

That sounds very expensive. Do you really need all 300m2 paved? Won’t it look like a car park? How many cars do you have? 12.5m2 is plenty big to park one car. Even a disabled parking bay is only 16m2. Unless you need so many parking spaces, I would consider some soft landscaping to reduce the area you need to pave. Will work out much cheaper and will look much nicer.

Returning to the issue at hand, I saw this in the Express. I generally don’t trust anything that paper prints, but could this be true: https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/garden/1658271/how-to-deter-foxes-from-garden-tea-bags-natural-repellent/amp