ProDave

Here is one more topic I have never seen analysis of. The conservation of energy. We all know that. So, if you build a LOT of wind turbines and solar farms, and extract a LOT of energy from the natural environment, then SOMETHING is going to change. I wonder what analysis and modelling has been done about that? We don't extract much power from the natural environment yet but as that increases what guarantee do we have it won't cause problems?

We are looking into one of these garden storage boxes to fix up there perhaps. No the price does not include good weather, that's why we are indoors.

Re the cost. As mine is just about finished I added ut the cost of the parts, and it has come in at about £100 per square metre. That is aided by a very cheap timber price from a joiner friend who bought a job lot in lockdown and was selling it at cost.

The only person I know to have had a serious electric shock was a lad at school. He was trying to repair a valve tape deck, the chassis was propped up with a bit of wood. He got the inevetable shock, but as he pulled back his hand, it knocked the prop out and the chassis dropped on his had trapping it and prolonging the shock. It was his sister in the next room that heard the screams, ran in and quick thinking kicked the deck off his hand. His hand was badly burned and needed skin grafts over a period of time but he survived to tell the tale.

Unless it was a really serious shock I would expect that to be so. There is this misconception that an electric shock is usually fatal. Not from 240V it is not, in most cases it is "ow bugger that hurt" then a minute or 2 later all forgotten.

Mine is 4M wide and 2M deep. Now it is up, it seems pretty big, bigger than I expected it to feel. Now, another issue I bet nobody has ever thought about. We want a couple of chairs out there, but don't want to leave them out all the time. Hands up everyone that designed in a handy "outdoor furniture cupboard" inside the house very close to the door to the balcony. Don't all rush at once........ Now we are waiting for outside weather.

We call them Skews up here. There may be another English name for them.

1) ignore. 2) If he persists ask the CARPENTER what tests he did to "test for dead" and safe isolation practice of the circuit BEFORE he removed the fan and if he isolated at the consumer unit, what lock off device did he use to prevent it being re energised. Ask for his electrical qualifications, details of test equipment used, and a copy of the calibration certificate for his tester. And ask to see a copy of HIS Public liability insurance policy. That should shut him up.

That would be me. Leaving SE England where "plastered on the hard" walls is the normal and moving to Scotland where timber frame and plasterboard was the normal, was a revalation. I never want to chase cables into a "plastered on the hard" wall ever again. What an utterly stupid and inflexible way to build houses.

Start by calling the DNO, tell them about the building in danger of collapse and you want to rebuild but should not build under power lines, tell them about the no wayleave and then say you will grant a wayleave if they move them and underground part of it.

I thoroughly agree we need to stop destroying the planet and stop over populating it. If we solve that, the global warming problem will probably solve itself.

The balcony, now it has it's deck on, does indeed shade the living room below. I now predict in winter we might wish it was not there and might make the room dark.

We have scraped by the last 70 years avoiding a hot war. I don't believe we will manage to avoid that for much longer.

Go on, post a picture, I find it hard to believe a 1995 install does not have a DNO cutout. Lets at least see the bodge someone has done. If it was you, don't admit to doing it.

An issue I see. you are not supposed to build under overhead wires or even within 6 metres of them. Existing buildings are okay because the rules were not in force then. So you really need a pole right at the left hand side of your garden and underground everything from there. Or even if the owner of the agricultural land agrees finish it at the first pole and underground from there. There is a similar case going on here at a farm and SSEPN are refusing to replace a rotten pole in danger of falling over because it has "third party equipment" on it. So I am not sure what extra complication having the telecoms on the same pole might create.

In this thread starting at page 4

Mine is only 2 leg, supported from the house but with spacers on the fixing bolts at the house end and set to a very slight fall away from the house to drain rainwater off the outer edge.

Normally something like this is offer them an indemnity policy.

Spelling error corrected.

I have just about finished my balcony, but the weather is not nice enough to sit out there now. If you want a cantilevered design as shown you have to design that in right from the start, no option to add the cantilevered support beams afterwards. A lot cheaper and simpler if you are prepared to accept 2 support legs.

Move the bath towards the tap end so the there is no gap there. That is where the shower is and most of the water. This will make the gap bigger at the foot end and you will have to fill / bridge the gap somehow, but there will be very much less water there. That's the best you will do without fixing it properly as advised above.

Me too. Perhaps that is a Scottish thing? I had a planning condition that the road access onto the site must be formed before any other work commenced (presumably to avoid vehicles parking on the road) and I had to notify the planners when we started. So I notified them when I had started building the site access and they replied in writing saying the development had commenced. That on it's own would have locked in the planning permission.

Just to be clear, I do think we should be reducing use of fossil fuels and moving to truly green renewable energy. I just don't think the present panic mode adoption is quite the way to do it. Policies implemented in haste in panic are rarely the best policies. I would like to see the panic taken out of the present approach and move in a steady and well planned way towards reducing fossil fuel usage. The dash to outlaw FF cars and FF home heating is the low hanging easy fruit, but they are trying to make it happen faster than the grid infrastructure can be upgraded and faster than we can build the renewable generation so a lot of what people think is "green" when they drive their new EV's and turn on their new ASHP's will still be coming from fossil fuels. People are being hoodwinked. And the switch to electric heating for older houses is probably going to be ignoring the real issue, the abysmal lack of insulation and air tightness.

From that: "The most distant period in time for which we have estimated CO2 levels is around the Ordovician period, 500 million years ago. At the time, atmospheric CO2 concentration was at a whopping 3000 to 9000 ppm! The average temperature wasn’t much more than 10 degrees C above today’s, and those of you who have heard of the runaway hothouse Earth scenario may wonder why it didn’t happen then. Major factors were that the Sun was cooler, and the planet’s orbital cycles were different." So we didn't get a thermal runaway last time CO2 levels were way higher because in the intervening time the sun has got hotter and the planets orbital cycle was different. Yet we continue to blame the plants problems on mans activity, not the fact the sun has got hotter and the planets orbit has changed. If that is not selective use of data to probe the MMGW point I don't know what is.

Interesting. When I was going through planning for the house and discussing finer details with the planning officer, it was her that said an ASHP is not PD unless you can meet the 100 metre rule and told me to add it to the planning application. Of course one does not question that a planning officer has got it wrong so I dod not check.