ProDave

I got my upload and download mixed up (now corrected in quoted post) they say upload is capped at 20MBPS. Latency, if you mean ping time 43mS

Good, so dig some trenches across the clay filled with stone and perforated drain pipe leading to a perimeter French drain and put all your good soil on top and sow some grass.

This is where it started to go wrong. I hope you did not get rid of all that top soil as "muck away"? I would have removed a lot of that clay as "muck away" and put back a good thick layer of your top soil on the bit that is to remain as garden.

Well we bit the bullet and our CFWN broadband was installed yesterday. We now get a blistering * 45 MBPS download and 20MBPS upload. As well as being faster, it seems more reliable, by that I mean I have had the Pi Music Box quietly streaming Radio Caroline for nearly 24 hours now without a single drop put. Previously it used to stop and start a lot, particularly early evening. There was a little "confusion" with how to cancel the old BT service. The advice from the new provider was cancel your broadband and keep your landline, and when you are ready to migrate the LL to VOIP let us knw and we will transfer it. So I phoned BT yesterday. "Yes sir you can cancel your broadband, but to keep the landline that will enter a new 12 month contract" and it appeared when you left you still had to pay the remainder of the 12 month contract. I argued and got nowhere, so I ended the call without cancelling anything. Another call to the new provider and you could hear the lady on the phone sigh, BT up to their dirty tricks again. So the result Is I have signed the forms for the VOIP transfer and just received an email from BT the landline transfers on the 15th October and on that day both my LL and BB contract with BT ends. So both ending together they can;t play the silly new contract trick. BT really are acting like a spoiled child. I have given them plenty of time to improve their service and finally lost patience and am leaving them. Their behaviour in this matter does nothing to make me want any dealings with them again in the future. I wonder if they will ever learn the way to get happy customers is give them good service? *Some of you lucky enough to get FTTP will wonder how we manage with such a slow connection, but it is 15 times faster than wired ADSL was here and all we are ever likely to get in the near future.

They never empty the tank completely, there is always a bit of "the good stuff" left to seed it's continued use without doing anything. All we ever do is refill the tank with plain water, but that is for fear of floatation if the ground water level comes up.

Timber frame does not mean "paper thin walls" The walls can be as thick and solid as you want them to be. Arguably properly made timber frame with the right insulation transmits sound less than a brick wall. If you want the traditional look, timber frame with a brick outer skin is common.

I would look at trying a different dimmer.

It could be a buffer tank. A picture or 2 would help greatly.........

Didn't we already discuss this? It is the as built SAP that matters, there you tell the assessor all the improvements and correct the often poor assumptions of the design SAP. Solar PV has to be the easiest one to add. Just ask your assessor how much (in kWp) of solar PV you would need to push you up to the rating you want? It need not cost much, if roof mounted then an in roof system saves on tiles so costs little and the scaffold is already there etc. You are probably being misled by quotes for retro fit PV where the roof has to be scaffolded and a lot of MCS schemes seem to give over inflated quotes. Just getting the trades already on site to fit it, need not cost a lot more than the actual materials.

I fitted a free standing bath. They usually work by using a flexible waste fitting. You place the bath in position but lifted up on blocks a few inches above the floor, connect the waste and then remove the blocks and lower it down. There will be adjustable feet reached when the bath is lifted on the blocks. Personally I dislike flexible waste fittings. While it was up on blocks I connected a length of solid waste, when lowered the solid waste went down through a hole in the floor and I connected from below. This was a new build before the plasterboard in the utility room below went on. I know if ever I have to lift the bath, it will mean cutting a trap in the ceiling below, but with a top access click clack waste and wall mounted taps there should be no reason to do so.

Can you post a picture or several? I think as a new member you might have to post it to some image hosting service and then provide a link to them.

Sadly a lot of light fittings recently are throw away items. Care to post a picture?

Try twisting the silver bit and see it it unclips leaving the white bit still in the ceiling

To pull out, the posts would have to spring apart. Not going to happen with steel wire "balustrades" tensioning the posts together.

How did you fix the rails to the posts? screws through the post into the end grain of the rail? I will probably be using steel rigging wire.

That's a bit more done. The endless painting has finished (for now) and all the pieces are assembled. Taken from inside the sun room looking up, hence the odd reflections looking through the glass. Awaiting post feet now, I am still not sure if my neighbour is making them or not, I have not heard. Once I have the post feet I can put the posts up, fit the last 2 end joists and remove all the packing and temporary props presently holdin the frame up. Now I turn my thoughts to posts for the balustrades, I think I am settled on 4" posts, which will dictate a wider handrail on top probably just a bit of painted decking board?

Does that window stay like that? or does the bottom bar lift up and get supported on stays?

Our design SAP was I think 84, which I was disappointed with, but it made a lot of assumptions, including an assumed air tightness of 4ACH. Right at the end of the build, I got the as built SAP done by the same assessor. For that I was able to provide all the finer details to replace the assumptions, every Uw value for all the windows, the actual tested air tightness reading, details of the exact stove and ASHP fitted , solar PV fitted, heating controls fitted (thermostat in every room gets a couple of points on the SAP even if totally pointless in a near passive house) etc My instructions to the assessor were if it does not achieve an A rating, (92 or greater) then don't issue the EPC, instead discuss with me what improvements I need to make to get it to an A. the final result was A94 Our BC inspector said it was the first A rating he had yet seen.

At our old house every autumn (harvest time when they get driven out of the fields by the big lawnmower) they would get into our loft. They were able to climb the outside wall, roughcast render, think "mouse climbing wall" and enter through the eaves vents or soffit vents. You can't block those up to stop the mice. Then you would hear them scurrying around under the loft insulation. We used to just permanently keep rat poison in a tray to feed them so they did not last long. That is why I am so glad we chose a warm roof this time and why I thoroughly recommend a warm roof vs a cold roof. No need to provide mouse sized ventilation openings. The only ones that got inside the old house entered via the cat flap in the mouth of the cat. occasionally one would escape the cat still alive and take up residence under the kitchen units.

Airtight house builders will tell you a "satisfactory" air test, is when after 5 years, not a single mouse has found a hole big enough to enter and get into the house.

What is the flow temperature from your boiler?

I regularly look at the local weather station, mostly for the wind and temperature but also look at RH and that is often up around 70 to 90% e.g here is last day or so with a longer time in the little graph at the bottom. This is not an unusual location so I would assume RH here is much the same. RH inside the house barely changes from about 50%

How is that going to comply with building regs? Unless you have mvhr or similar, you must have a certain amount of trickle ventilation. e.g none of our main house windows have trickle vents because we have mvhr, but the sun room, not heated and not covered by the mvhr has trickle vents in the windows. P.S that unheated room has no condensation or mould.

Are you expecting the cladding to provide the racking strength? That frame as it stands has NO bracing whatsoever. If just clad in say plasterboard inside and timber planking outside, it would fall over like a pack of cards in the first gale on an exposed site. You need to think what are you going to cover the frame with to provide the racking strength, could be OSB or ply and could be on the inside or outside or both. Then the cladding is just that, something to keep the rain out and plays no structural part. Choose the cladding either on price or for the look you want.

I just watched this weeks build, a big house on a farm in Derbyshire. Not much to mention about the build, but what I took from this is how broken the planning system is in the UK. Something like 20 failed planning applications in the past. All he wanted to do is build a farmhouse on his 16 acre small holding adjacent to all the existing farm buildings. If the present planning system will not allow that, then imho the system is broken. You would have thought this would be allowed perhaps with an agricultural tie? The only way around this was to build a section 79 "outstanding" property, which ironically probably means the site now has a much larger house built on it that would have happened if we had a sensible planning policy.