Alan Ambrose

Yeah, agree with @IanR if you're finding the thing hard to wrestle with - planning consultant and apply for removal of condition - it has maybe a 50/50 chance with your LPA. Appeal if that's not successful - probably a 75% chance. I did it all myself and got them reinstated on appeal. You need a fair amount of patience - it'll probably take a year or more - say 12 weeks for the council, 40-ish weeks for the appeal if needed.

This may help - the stamp duty for dwellings is zero up to £50K value I believe- I did a little transaction that was just below that amount. Also, this article is a bit clearer and I think your solicitor is just being lazy at your expense: https://www.ukpropertyaccountants.co.uk/complete-guide-stamp-duty-on-uninhabitable-property/ See if that convinces them.

I’ve found those suction guides are fairly hopeless as they’re too pliable - or maybe I’m too stupid. I use a few layers of duck tape to give a tiny amount of support and hold the bit at an angle and run it slowly to create a little lip in the tile. As soon as you have a little arc in the right place you can gently straighten the bit out. Once there’s a little circle there it isn’t going anywhere.

May be easiest to fix the charging / battery problem, no? Suspect either you have the wrong batteries or the wrong charger - if they don’t play well together. A third, less likely, possibility is some kind of wiring fault. Double check the manufacturer’s specs for compatible batteries and chargers? Try charging the batteries off the equipment? See if you can verify whether either batteries or charger are good? My guess would be the charger as it’s ‘third party’ - borrow the correct charger to see whether that’s the case? When it works though, is the cherry picker a helpful bit of kit to have around?

Well that’s an interesting, and I think technical, legal/tax question. I think that only a specialist land lawyer/tax person can tell you for sure. My guess would be yes, it gets the stamp duty for land rather than dwellings, which will be less. The cost of locating an appropriately competent person may be greater than the tax though 😃. Any random conveyancer probably won’t be able to tell you though and will sway towards stamp duty for dwellings because that’s what they know best.

A subsidiary question is ... what will be the most likely panel size to stick around? I see there's a bunch at 1,134mm wide but then lengths from 1,686 to 1,990. Seems to me that's important if you're doing in-roof so you can replace them if needed.

Ah, I was looking at Viridian panels for the look, but cheaper panels makes the 'PV cheaper than tiles' argument even better?

I was thinking along the 'fill your roof with in-roof PV panels' line of thought both for aesthetics and because panels are so cheap these days. For materials (excluding labour, trays, fixings, battens etc) I'm seeing ~£50/m^2 for pantiles, ~£90/m^2 for PV panels. The idea would be to pretty much ignore any excess power in the middle of summer but have better availability in the shoulder seasons. My roof is about 120m^2 which suggests say ~60 panels, ~24kW peak - say 4 strings @ 500V DC each. Even if we use power for cooling in the summer, I can't see us using half that amount. Is this mad, smart or somewhere in between?

Well I need to get these levels down fairly promptly so I'll have to find a way to get more accurate readings with the laser I have. But for the future, who knows.

>>> i wouldn’t think planning would worry It only takes one difficult neighbour to make a complaint. Ours certainly would 😄. There have been some concerns here on 't 'ub that some insurers have limits on the % of cladding they're willing to insure.

I called off activity on site today based on yesterday's forecasts - the Met Office said rain all day and Netweather said the same and 10mm total. (I figure a couple of mm we can deal with). My main helper hates working in the rain. Turns out we've had a couple of showers today so far. Seems to me that watching the weather is a key skill especially before watertight stage. Anyone found the best forecasts?

FYI let me report back. I have recently emailed OR's 'CEO's office' and had a number of long conversations with someone from the 'Executive Complaints and Escalations team'. He has consulted 'the experts' i.e. the guys I have been communicating with so far and determined that they're correct. My feeling is that I'm not talking to a 'Complaints and Escalations team' so much as a delay, deflect and deny team. In my case the issues are: + running the fibre into a kiosk. (My other services are installed into kiosks already). This was originally agreed and now OR are now reneging on that. + not installing the fibre and lighting it up anytime soon. OR now maintains that as a matter of policy (a) it can only install into a dwelling which is ready for occupation and (b) the ONT must be inside the house. Somehow it had forgotten about those policies up until mid-August. Now we won't finish the house until at least next summer so that means no fibre until then. That's 'non optimal' as I badly want to be able to work our of the site hut for the next 9 months and without proper internet that's not really possible. My CAD package, for instance, more or less requires continuous fast access to its various servers. And we have installed OR's duct and a kiosk as agreed which OR seems now refuses to use. That install took quite some time and expense. This is actually the second loop with the Complaints guy - the 1st time he suggested ordering a second fibre and using the site hut as an address. I suggested that going round the process a second time with the same timescale (8 months already) and result (i.e. none) was not a welcome prospect or one that I imagine would lead to an actual solution (i.e. the install of fibre). If I thought that UKPN or Essex and Suffolk Water were slow, inefficient, expensive and hard to deal with - I take it all back. Openreach wins the prize by a country mile.

It works OK for you? What kind of accuracy do you feel it has in real use?

Re: Ziplevel Says it has gas and liquid and a reference cell. Reads in cm and I wonder if that gives a clue to accuracy. Claims 0.25mm / 0.2% reading, which I guess means 2mm per metre height difference. I wonder if that's +-2mm? See below. There's a competitor called the Nivcomp, claims +-2mm. ZIPLEVEL® is a high precision pressurized hydrostatic altimeter. It works much like an aircraft altimeter that measures the weight of the air above it except that ZIPLEVEL does not use the atmosphere to measure elevation. Instead, ZIPLEVEL is a pressurized system that measures the weight of a proprietary liquid sealed within its Cord relative to a Reference Cell in the hub of its reel. This makes ZIPLEVEL 10,000 times as precise as an aircraft altimeter and immune from both barometric pressure and altitude changes. It's internal pressure prevents bubbles from desorbing from its liquid when under vacuum when the Module is above the Base Unit and is one of our powerful patented features.

There’s a squeezy clamp that you just use to pinch off the pipe. I saw one on our local water company’s van when they were doing our connection, so they must be kosher.

>>> digging holes for whatever reason is just digging holes I think thought that some LPAs, for CIL, use presence of heavy machinery as a proxy for start of development.

The alternative most big building firms use are converted containers. We picked up an ex-Bellway one for, I think £1,800, including delivery. It’s pretty nice to shelter in out of the weather. Came fully kitted out - almost like the guys just walked off site one day and left everything where it was. Plumbing, power & CU, pinboards, desks, microwave, you name it.

>>> I have a high tech equivalent, a long tube connected to a pressure meter, and giving height difference digitally. That’s interesting - tube has water in it? Digital pressure meters are expensive, no?

Little emdoscope cameras that attach to your phone are not the greatest but they may help you too.

OK I repeated my rotating the laser on the tripod thing again with the laser and receiver fixed at the same points: So, the laser seems fairly consistent and close to spec. I don't think the E60 has any adjustment possible. One thing I learnt is that '3mm @ 30m' really means '+-3mm (i.e. 6mm total) at 30m'. Maybe this argues for figuring out the most consistent laser direction and then positioning the laser to keep most of the measurements in that arc.

Anybody have a take on the original question i.e. VAT on muckaway?

OK understand, let me try those ideas and report back. >>> Do you need to be accurate with your posts you normally pack them up with steel packers and then grout underneath them. Yeah. that's exactly what I'm at - but either way I need to get them all level - which means measuring that they're level.

Ah thanks, I should have said that this is an outside site laser with only a horizontal sweep.

I'm trying to measure height on various bits of my slab accurately to figure out whether I need to adjust some structural post heights which assume a flat slab. I went round the 8 points needed a couple of times and measured the height with the receiver (new Spectra HL760). I tried four circuits with the rotating laser (a 6-month old Imex) in various positions on the slab. I thought I got the rod accurately vertical at each point. I went round 4 times and the results were a bit nonsense: That is, the height of a post base seems sometimes 20mm different when measured again. The slab is ~12mx6m i.e. not huge. I thought I would check the accuracy of the set-up today by leaving the receiver and laser in the same positions and just rotated the laser on the tripod carefully through 45 degree intervals. I got rained off before finishing, but I was getting readings that varied only a couple of mm. I did notice that the wind made a difference and the tripod (the Imex one) is a bit lightweight. Any ideas or tips on how to ensure laser accuracy?

>>> HMRC guidance I'm impressed you know this, but FFS we need to look at case law to get the answer?