ProDave

@Onoff ?

You simply have too much time on your hands to coil the pipe up like that.

What new services are you burying? I doubt even water would go more than 750mm deep, so if a trench that deep bothers foundations of a 2 storey building, it is built on inadequate foundations.

You can easily buy an ASHP for about £5K and it just needs a plumber and an electrician capable of reading an instruction manual to install it. Or you can pay a "specialist" company a lot more to install it.

Probably the pictures are too large and too many for the forum software? That is never going to be a pretty house, it probably was not when it was new, and I doubt it is going to fall down. It does not take a surveyor to tell you the workmanship is basic and it would benefit from repointing and some spalled bricks replacing.

My issue is a PV system with battery storage that is set to NEVER export and only supply the house needs should be allowed in any quantity without restriction. As batteries come down in price this is becoming much more normal. WHY do such systems still have to jump through all the hoops and be subject to power restrictions? THIS is where the DNO's need to modernise their thinking. I am starting to look at this aspect as I might one day want to add such a system and would prefer to do it legally.

The voltage drop when you draw 16A is tiny. So the voltage rise when you export 16A will also be tiny. If the local grid cannot cope with a few houses exporting 16A then it is going to collapse when everyone cooks their dinner at the same time. The DNO around here does not seem bothered about maintaining and upgrading the network apart from fixing faults when they happen. e.g. a few weeks back our power went off, it was windy so I suspected the usual tree branch brought a wire down. But no, it was the pole mounted 100KVA transformer at the top of our road that had failed. They appear to have replaced it with an even older second hand one, that appears if anything to be smaller than the one it replaced. I really wish the DNO would relax the restrictions on a PV / battery system that is designed not to export. Surely that should be allowed regardless?

Put the insulation between the joists. What is below? cold space or another heated room? We used glass wool type insulation rather than rigid. Supported by netting for a suspended floor. A layer of OSB over the top of the joists, we used 13mm. Battens following the line of the joists and it is these you leave gaps in where pipes need to cross over joists. Then dry pug mix laid between joists. Finally your chosen flooring, ours was engineered oak laid onto the battens.

It cost me £3K to get the base layer of the bit adjacent to the road done. This time it is at least twice as much to do and 5 years later. I will be pleasantly surprised if it is less than £6K which I do NOT regard as good value but all other options are more expensive. If it were not for the constant rainwater run off from the road I would be considering some form of gravel, but it will silt up and become horrible mush.

That's the one

All working now. Well done.

This is one of the long overdue jobs on the house, that has been put off and put off, because there have been more important things to do and spend money on. But now it's time has come around. we have been literally saving up for this since the start of the year, and now I have started work on it. Background. Before the build a planning condition meant we had to form the access from the public road and surface the first 3 metres from the road, so that we did right at the start. Later we laid a concrete parking area alongside the garage that will eventually be covered with a car port. the bit between the tarmac entrance and everything else was just various layers of assorted hardcore, some MOT1, some "as dug", laid roughly to a constant slope and well whackered down. It has then for the last 5 years been driven over by all sorts of vehicles so it is well compacted. Because the ground slopes from the road down onto the plot, rainwater runoff has been a constant problem. So first thing is lay a drainage channel in front of the garage and parking area, then re grade and re level the hardcore infill ready to take a layer of tarmac. The area under the touring caravan will get the same treatment and the tarmac will cover the lot including where that parks. It will be shortly time to measure it all up and get quotes, which I am expecting to be astronomical, I only hope what we have saved up so far covers it.

I don't know I don't have a buildhub blog. How did you create your test blog entry? I think the only reason @SteamyTea can't do it now is he is at work. Perhaps he can try when he gets home. If there is an edit window time then once the blog entry is created, a mod can copy the bulk of the content presently in the "about" section into the blog entry.

You have to buy a trap with the AAV built in, sometimes called a silent trap. e.g. https://www.screwfix.com/p/mcalpine-swivel-p-trap-white-40mm/50408 But that won't fit, you need a telescopic P trap with the AAV, I have not found one yet.

You have not made the blog correctly. you have lots in the "about this blog" section which is just meant to be a summary of what the blog is about, e.g "This is a blog about energy monitoring" Then below that it says "there are no blog entries yet" THAT is where you make a blog entry to put all the meat of the blog. Only when a blog entry is present will comments be possible. It is technically at the moment an empty blog.

New or old (i.e. has it ever worked without gurgling? Probably needs an air admittance valve on the trap.

Some do, some don't. In our last house it flashed when exporting but obviously did not count that as import. Our present meter goes solid red when exporting and the display now cycles between the meter reading and "rED" meaning Reverse energy Detected. Designed to alert a meter reader to someone being naughty with their supply.

Germany is on the brink of rationing gas. It's going to be an "interesting" winter ahead.

It's a good job the other side of the wall has not been boarded. At least you can easily correct the fault.

This thread NEEDS some pictures.

I suspect the guidance you were looking at is what is allowed under permitted development. A true wrap around extension would need planning permission. Perhaps you can post a sketch of the plot layout and what you want. Are you sure you are not missing a trick here? Double garage, spaced a double garage width from the house, is going to be about 15 metres wide. Plenty to build another house.

That is not good for a "professional" Did you get recommendations before choosing a decorator? Always unscrew sockets, if the decorator won't would you be happy to do that and re fit them when done? At least now you could unscrew them yourself, touch up the wall with a small brush, carefully scrape any dried paint off the switch before re fitting. And use Frog tape for masking, it's the only one I have found that actually does what a "masking" tape is supposed to and keep the paint out in a crisp straight line.

That's pretty much the same clearances for LPG bottle storage.

Does ANYONE actually have one of those? Even my new build EPC A94 recommends I install a wind turbine at very high cost and impossibly long payback period. So that would not qualify would it?

Who told you that? Watch this