ProDave

There must be builders merchants in Wick who will deliver?

My guess is the ceiling is lath and plaster and in danger of collapsing if he tried to skim it. Best solution strip the lath and plaster off and plasterboard. Quicker less messy solution plasterboard over the old lath and plaster then skim or tape and fill. Did the sockets work to start with? If so what happened immediately prior to them stopping working? Did you get an EICR done? What sort of fuse box / consumer unit (will give a clue to age) Is that only a total of 7 sockets in the whole house? If so you probably want more so at least a partial rewire is probably in order. (my previous 1930's semi had a total of just 4 sockets, 2 double 2 single, when I bought it) If you are doing a full renovation have a long hard think what you want to achieve? rewire, new plumbing, extra insulation and detailing the air tightness, new heating, change of layout etc etc. There could be a lot more than just patch up the plaster and re paint.

Solvent weld slip coupling (that could be shortened if necessary) to join to a single socket coupling, again cut to length. Not sure it would work but worth a try?

I think we would need to see the plans to make sense of that? Are you suggesting your fan will vent into a narrow gap between your house and next door? Why not just route it to the back of the extension and out the back wall?

No. Think in terms of a completely free standing cantilevered car port supported entirely on your house wall and sloping away from your house. That would have a normal gutter at the left hand edge to collect the rainwater and you would pipe it to some form of drain at the front or the back of the run of gutter. Now just make that so the width is such that the outer edge of your gutter almost, but not quite, touches next doors wall.

"We hope we can resolve the issue by the Spring" Erm we are almost in summer, so does that mean it will not be resolved until Spring 2023?

The actual thing that defines what will pass building regulations is the height above the stairs must be 2 metres and that includes the "landing" that is generally taken to mean 1 square metre of floor at the top of the stairs. If you can meet that, there is no actual minimum ceiling height for the rooms.

And absolute worst case, you can still run your B&B just letting two rooms, the council have already confirmed that does not need PP, and continue fighting / appealing while you do that.

The vent above the gate looks to be the exhaust from an extraction fan, not a flue.

I guess the message from this thread is ask the manufacturer before you order an ASHP, what is the standby power consumption in kWh per day. And then if you measure more than they quoted, then complain.

Agreed. 6kWh per day of "wasted" energy is almost as much in a year as my ASHP consumes doing something useful with it like heating the house or the hot water.

Well done and thanks for letting us know.

You should get planning for a temporary residential caravan, and given your neighbours delight in looking for ways to frustrate you, that would probably be a good idea.

A picture might be helpful? I would not slope it down towards the neigbours wall.

I am surprised the figures are so high in the south. Up here in northern climes, 1kWh in december is good, and 0 is not unusual. I did mine on an East / west split at a low angle to try and prolong the generation throughout the day with less of a big mid day peak to make self use of the electricity easier. Perhaps if you are installing batteries and they can charge at a rate to use all the peak generation, then optimising for mad daily output would be better. The real boffins would of course have tracking panels, or at least a manual summer / winter adjustment to elevation.

Just to add by way of comparison with other makes. My LG Therma V in the last few weeks has metered precisely 0 kWh when idle (i.e. any time it is not heating DHW) as there is no space heating use at present. This confirms the only metered use when idle is when it invokes it's anti frost water circulation function when it's very cold outside. And it's only averaging 3.5kWh per day heating DHW.

What sort of ASHP? If monoblock, then the circuit going out to the heat pump needs antifreeze. You don't want to be filling your 1000L thermal store with antifreeze so you need the break of either a heat exchanger or input coil to separate the outside ASHP circuit from the inside store / heating circuit.

If there is no space for a pillar, then there is no room to open the car door. Surely a slim pillar at the front and back would be okay?

We found that when running the B&B, you would go into a room in the morning after the guest had left, to find the room thermostat at 30 degrees, the boiler burning away to keep that running, and the windows wide open. To say it "annoyed" me is an understatement. I am convinced daughter showers however long is necessary to empty the tank of hot water before turning the water off. I simply cannot imagine just what one does in a shower for half an hour, even if you have got the excuse of having long hair and needing 3 lots of shampoo and conditioner with instructions to leave each in for several minutes before rinssing.

Is this in the context of a new kitchen install? Or just wanting someone to alter what is there? A kitchen refit it would be easy, floor up if necessary or run pipes under or behind units. Changing what's there, much harder to run pipes under units and almost impossible behind, and taking the floor up not practical without usually wrecking the present floor covering.

I have started writing a "home manual" documenting everything in the house so that when I am gone, it should at least help someone else understand some things. That has gone as far as even listing the code for my PV diverter, but I suspect if that stopped working it would be binned or replaced. Given my daughters complete lack of interest or knowledge in energy efficiency etc (she shrugs her shoulders and says so what when I point out she has been out all day and her tv was left turned on) if she is the one that has to deal with it, it would not get replaced. Really surprising that teenagers growing up now have no comprehension of using energy efficiently. Perhaps you only "develop" that interest when YOU are presented with the bills to pay from your income?

Looking good so far. What I concluded (and is general knowledge any way) is most electricity meters work on an energy bucket of 1Wh. So the meter will only increment it's counter when 1Wh of energy has passed. A typical 3kW immersion heater will take just a little under 1 second to consume 1Wh. So on that basis I did all my timing on a half second period. The immersion heater is burst fired within that half second anything from 0% to 100% of the period to match the surplus power. And thus within that half second the same amount of energy passes both ways and the energy bucket never reaches 1Wh so never counts up. Where it all gets interesting and will test your measuring and calculating algorithms is when you start firing the immersion heater, as the power that consumes will show up on your measurement. The bit I never perfected is accounting for that. In theory you should be able to measure the surplus power and calculate exactly how much goes to the immersion heater and apply it. That never worked for me. so instead mine works on incrementing / decrementing the immersion heater power level each cycle. that results in a slower response to changing loads or changing generation. On the whole it works well but no doubt causes a small amount of over / under immersion heater power when a rapid change happens. If you are sampling every cycle individually, you probably then need to average 25 cycles consecutively to give you 1/2 second average and work on that, but this will introduce the time lag I have. Perhaps a way to improve that would be rather than average over 25 seconds then do a calculation, do a rolling average so as one new reading for a cycle comes up add that to the average and the oldest one drops off, that would still give you an average over half a second but updated every cycle.

Obviously the scisor lift is broken, or he does not have permission to use it and so does not have the key.

You need to work out what you are trying to achieve. At the moment you have a shared system that "works" but you are not happy that it it technically in breach of the GBR's Apart from not complying with the GBR's are there any other issues, smell, blockage, visible polution etc? If you continue pressing with your legal complaint about it not complying with the GBR's then sooner or later someone is going to order you to update it (either install a drainage field or upgrade to a treatment plant). Whoever issues that order does not care about who owns it, they will just want it upgraded. At that point you could then end up having to organise the upgrade (it is on your land) and then fighting to the the other co owner to pay their share of the upgrade. There are some times when if there is not really a "problem" being created the best course of action is none.

As you share it, you are between a rock and a hard place. Notify the EA of the illegal discharge and you will get a notice to upgrade it to a treatment plant. Then you will be jointly responsible for the cost of that with your neighbour who you appear to have a bad relationship with, so that will make for a difficult installation particularly getting the neighbour to pay his share I suspect. BC "signing it off" does not stop it having to comply with the GBR