ProDave

Just after you made a tight turn? I was going to suggest if in doubt, don't make a tight turn just by skidding round, pick up one end of the machine and turn on the tips of the tracks.

Can you imagine the uproar, if Gas Safe was run as a scheme that added at least £5K onto the cost of installing a gas boiler, compared to just paying the plumber? Why is there not the uproar at the added MCS costs?

No, but someone, some group of people, sets the policies that "encourage" customers to use an MCS company in order to claim a £5K grant, and if those people cannot see that using an MCS company adds more than £5K to the bill compared to just using a plumber and an electrician to install it, then frankly we might as well give up trying. Then add into that mix, you only get PD rights for a heat pump if you adhere to MCS rules. Why do I feel this is the next brewing scandal?

Corrected that for you (imho of course)

Crabtree do a surface mount one which is an electricians dream, you fit the switch, connect the cables, then put the cover on without flexing any of the cables in the process. Because you can be sure it is connected well it is very likely to be more reliable, but Customers don't like them because they want flush. Personally I would never have a pull switch shower switch in my house, wall switch every time.

Just one little snipped from that: That about sums it up, admitting the existing system is broken, unworkable and expensive, and needs fixing. While projects like this are good, it is no good just finding a way round the problem for a few streets who have received a grant to do so, the whole system needs to be fixed, so getting a heat pump fitted is as easy, and almost as cheap as getting a gas boiler fitted. Until someone "at the top" grasps the problem, a proper solution for everyone will not happen.

But where he is, timber frame is the normal, brick and block is the niche and has been for some time.

No different to any other cable, if it's only 2 core, you ignore the earth pin. Making it less bulky is a good reason to change it.

+2 Are we a nation that has forgotten how to fit a 13A plug? When I was younger and had a small house, I had a bit of OCD and every single plug in the house was exactly the same type.

I don't think I can help with specifics. The building company I used have disbanded, but in any case were probably too far away to be interested in your job. Some of them have retired, and some are now working in an individual capacity or joined other firms. Just to be clear though a locally built "stick build" like this is exactly the same as if the same design had been stamped out in a bigger factory and all arrived on one articulated lorry. It is not in any way an inferior build. At least 2 local self builders have stick built on site, one all on his own, and the other by employing a general builder to help him.

Our timber framed house was built by a local building firm. They built the kit panels in a workshop nearby, and brought them to site a few at a time on a 3 ton trailer behind one of their vans. That would have fitted down your narrow lane. That is the sort of builder you need to be looking at.

Worth having a look to see what make switch and replacing with the same. A different make may have the terminals in a different order or different position and then begins the hassle of re dressing the thick cables in a confined space so match the new switch. Make sure the terminals a TIGHT then give the cables a wiggle and tighten them again. Any burned cables (usually die to not being tight) will need cutting back to good clean copper.

I could see that if the subsiding building collapsed on your contents and you tried claiming for that but otherwise why? They are insuring the contents not the building. Did they specifically ask "does the building have subsidence" or was it a little detail you told them without being prompted thinking you were being helpful?

Try a different insurer and don't tell them the building is suffering susidence.

So we have a posh oven with pyrolytic cleaning. Except last time we used that function, it slightly melted the internal plastic door lining, so I have lost confidence in that. Time to manually clean it. Now in all my 6 decades, I have never found an "oven cleaner" that easily removes oven residues. Forget what the adverts show you, I have yet to find one where you squirt it on, wait a bit, and wipe it clean in an effortless move to a lovely shiny oven (where is trading standards and trades description law on this?) Many moons ago I was dismantling to repair a cooker hood, covered in cooking grease, and by trial and error using all the chemical products in the house and garage, found white spirit particularly effective at disolving and removing the cooker hood grease. Worth a try on the oven? So yes I tried it, and it did indeed work WAY better than any oven cleaner at removing the baked on grease with not too much effort. Of course I now had an oven smelling of white spirit. Time to use the oven cleaner, that did at least seem effective at removing the last of the white spirit residue. Then time to try it. I ran it at a very low 60 degrees for about half an hour until all smells, of both white spirit and oven cleaner, had dispersed before putting it to full temperature and cooking my dinner. No obvious issues with said dinner and not a trace of white spirit or oven cleaner smell now. Off to get my tin hat as someone is bound to tell me how I narrowly missed killing myself or blowing up the house.

Work on a minimum of 300 litres. The big issue is the ASHP will not heat the water in the tank as hot as a gas boiler would. So in use, the hot water from the tank will be diluted with less cold water, so for the same hot water usage as before, you will need a bigger tank. Look at Telford stainless steel unvented cylinders, they will do any combination of input coils. You will need a high capacity heat pump input coil as well as a separate solar thermal input coil.

This has been coming down the tracks for some time, first for rental properties and now for sale. It has been blatantly obvious to me for years, that a house with a poor EPC should be worth less than a house with a good EPC. But that does not yet appear to be the case. You still hear of people buying an old house with a poor EPC because it has "character" and then complain the first winter at how much it costs to heat, information clearly available in the EPC. It is nearly 10 years since we decided to build our second self build, and it was obvious even then, that the only logical thing to do was aim for as close to passive house as I could, and I ended up with a house with an EPC rating of A94. Our BCO even admitted it was the first A rated house he had seen. That in itself is shocking. But I do feel sorry if people are not even able to sell a house even at a reduced price, unless the work is done first to upgrade it. Preventing sale of assets is for me one step too far for any government in any country. But it will be another nail in the SNP coffin which must nearly be shut by now.

Are you even sure that blockwork you have exposed is a cavity wall? It would not surprise me if on a 1960's house that was not just single block then the hanging tiles? I would not want the render to come right out to the face of the piers, I would want some small step back or are you intending to render over the brick pier as well (thus creating a joint in materials just waiting to crack?

I am thinking is the opening is the original width of the window in the room before the extension and this was the cheap option to just keep the lintel that was there. It is probably possible to widen the opening and replace with a much longer and stronger lintel, but it won't be cheap or simple.

Or do what we did, make Utility and downstairs WC all in one room. I could not find a way to make a WC and utility accessible from the hall without making the hall bigger to accommodate another door and waste space with corridors, or go through one room to get to the other, so I decided on just one room that contains washing machine, tumble dryer, sink, clothes airer and WC. Building control were happy with that, the space of the clothes airer is our potential future downstairs shower allocation and if we did fit a shower we would then partition it to a smaller utility room that you walk through to get to the shower room. But prefer it all open just now.

My 2 pence worth to that: We have our DHW tank in the spare bedroom (one day I will build an airing cupboard around it) It does not give off excessive heat and does not overheat the bedroom at all. No further insulation of tank needed, BUT ensure ALL pipework connecting to the tank is well lagged with good thick well fitted insulation, that is where you will get a lot of heat loss if not done properly. We have a noise issue with the water circulation pump being a bit noisy. It is NOT an issue with where the pump is, but routing of pipes. In our case the pump is in a different room, but mu "mistake" was routing the main flow and return pipes from the ASHP under our bedroom floor. Regardless of where the circulating pump is located, it's gentle hum will be transmitted by the pipes. So keep the pump AND the pipes away from your bedroom. If I could do it again, the pipes would take a slightly longer route under our en-suite bathroom rather than under the bedroom. We set aside a "plant room" (room above the attached garage) but it ended up not really being used for that. The only thing in it is the MVHR unit, some electrical controls for the ASHP and the circulating pump. It turned out MUCH better to site the DHW cylinder in a location central to all points of hot water use, to shorten hot water pipe runs and quicken time for delivery of hot water to the taps. Try and plan a suitable cupboard for that central to all hot water taps. Call it "airing cupboard" on your plans.

This thread shows a real deficiency in English building regulations system, that it is possible to build a house that does not meet the standards, but not find out it has failed to meet the standards until it is finished. The Scottish system is much better. You have to have a design SAP done before you can get a building warrant. And then you know if you build the house to what the agreed plans say, it WILL pass the as built SAP, no nasty surprises.

That almost sums up "the problem" Anyone would think there was a government policy in place to make it hard to install a heat pump, either by impossible red tape, or just make it plain too expensive.

Fit 4kW PV on roof. Least intrusive addition and it should get you "over the line" Not only that, it will reduce your electricity bills for the foreseeable future. DON'T go anywhere near an MCS supplier for the PV. You just need a roofer to fit the brackets and an electrician to fit the panels and connect it. I fitted my own for under £2K in parts cost. It is a great shame you did not ask the forum at design stage, we could have given lots of suggestions for how to build a good house. Sadly it looks as though you will have ended up with something akin to a mass produced developer house, the very minimum insulation and air tightness they can get away with and slap on just enough solar PV to scrape through. such a house will have higher ongoing heating costs but the developer does not care because 99% of buyers don't care or don't know. If you are self building you have a chance at the start to do it properly and get something better.

If it's the same Titan chainsaw I have that came from Screweys (brilliant saw by the way) it came with an Oregon bar and chain, and they sell the replacement so I will just buy it from there. But my original chain (with a quick sharpen every now and then) is lasting way better than the previous chainsaw I had. The key to chain sharpening is little and often. Don't wait until it won't cut and smokes before even thinking about sharpening it. If it won't cut 25mm to 50mm hedge trunks then boy it's "done"