ProDave

Old news but surprising how many have not heard about it. I am not sure the bit about insurance not paying up is just scare mongering, but any excuse for an insurance co not to pay out I guess. This should have come in last year, but was delayed due to Covid. I am doing 2 this week and 2 next week.

Upstairs radiators by any chance?

It's called a "union jack" cut from the corners of the drain fitting to the outside corners of the shower tray. Cut the tiles and get the cuts right and neat before you even start mixing adhesive.

No wonder you can't read it, I get not found.

The irony is we pay more than most other parts of the UK in the form of the distribution cost.

Got it on our old house. It looks okay but it is slightly porous so in very wet weather it darkens and looks drab until it dries out.

I argued the slate roof thing on the basis there is not another slate roof in sight. They allowed a Marley concrete tile with a riven finish as a slate substitute.

Wet dash is usually the cement on the wall mixed up with snowcrete so it is natrually off white, and then the slurry used to "stick" the pebbles is also mixed from snowcrete. the result is an off white render that never needs painting. While the Highland default is 1.5 storeys and white wet dash walls that is not set in stone and "contemporary" timber clad buildings, often with flat or shallow pitch roofs are not out of the question. There are 3 such houses near here who had no trouble getting PP. Where they will not budge is if you try for a full 2 storey house in the countryside.

On a serious note, I have just fixed my electricity rate to try and beat the rise in the cap as I discussed a few posts above. My new fixed rate will start at the end of February so I will be paying a little over the odds for March. But i put the last 12 monthly usage figures into a spreadsheet and as long as the capped price rises by 40% in April it will be cheaper with my capped rate. And that spreadsheet did not allow for a possible October rise so if that happens the saving could be even more for next winter.

Interesting. I use the Pi Music Box which sounds very similar. Does Max2Play allow streaming of internet radio stations?

A thermal store is a very bad match to a heat pump. For a thermal store to work the water it stores has to be quite a lot hotter than than the hot water delivery temperature or else it will only have a tiny capacity before your hot water starts to go cold. And heating the water in the thermal store much hotter is not what heat pumps are good at. Many of us find heating the hot water to 48 degrees in an UVC works well and when you run the hot tap you get pretty much a constant 48 degrees until it runs out and then goes cold quite suddenly. The G3 won't add much cost if you can find a plumber you get on with where you do the bulk of the plumbing and just get him to connect the cold water with all the pressure control gubbins and test and certify it. Several have done that. I just asked a plumber I have met on several jobs and he was happy do do it for not much money. building control will expect to see the G3 sign off.

You see this on housing forums where a surveyor has marked a building down because of it. I believe the big complaints are they cannot inspect the state of the roof structure and in cases where there is no felt on old houses, the foam will be stuck to the back of the tiles making a roof repair very much more difficult. the notion that it makes the property £0 value is absurd. I would like to find one if these and would hapily buy it for £0. Surely at worst it would down value the house by the cost of a re roof?

Re planning permission. the requirement is that you "start" the development within 3 years. So if the planning lists a whole load of things, just starting one of them locks in the planning permission. I could take you round our local town and show you 3 house plots where the foundations and ground floor slab have been built to lock in the planning permission and have now sat like that for more than 3 years.

So it's the greens wot dun it forcing / embarrassing everyone to abandon fossil fuel and nuclear BEFORE the alternatives are ready. Even though we are going as fast as we can with the alternatives.

My suspicion is the boiler just stopped and the malfunction has nothing to do with the water turned off. If contacting plumbers just say it has stopped don't confuse the issue.

Well you have read my posts. I agree, the principle of render applied to wood fibre was a good idea. It meant the whole thickness of the wall make up was adding to insulation. And if it had proven reliable, then it would have been good. I would like to be able to say we solved all the problems with ours but I cannot, so i cannot recommend anyone to use the same system. The manufacturer have been "less than helpful" What alternatives are there? Well render board mounted on battens and a different render system applied to that? From the detective work I have done, the issues I have had / am having seem to be related to storm events when we get wind driven rain lashing the side of the house, then followed swiftly with temperatures well below 0 so the moisture that managed to get in, freezes and expands causing damage. Solve the problem of ANY moisture getting in during wind driven rain and you are well on the way to nailing it.

Turning the WATER off would not normally stop a system boiler. You would of course get no hot water out of the tap. Did the electricity go off? did you turn anything off?

My preferred method is create a proper 25mm service void made of battens and then covered with plasterboard. This allows you to run socket cables horizontally from socket to socket. As long as you have at least one socket on each wall, you create a safe zone all the way around the room where it is simple to add extra sockets anywhere you want to by doing little more than cut a hole in the plasterboard, fish out the cable and fit a socket.

Personally I don't think a bedroom is the place for rows of downlighers, and I much prefer some nice central or pendant light, and a bedside light possibly wall mounted each side of the bed.

Hi and welcome. It looks like you are building a warm roof structure to allow for possible expansion of living space into the loft. I also note you are planning wood fibre cladding and thin coat render. I am VERY interested to know who has specified this, which thin coat render you are using, what certifications they have offered you and are you aware of any issues with it in an exposed location like yours? Yours is probably one location where a small wind turbine would work and produce a useful amount of power.

I did not watch him but read his newsletter on the subject. He concluded the fixed rates on offer were too high for this strategy to work for most, with the possible exception of the Loyal Octopus fixed on offer. That is what made me go and look at it. and indeed it looks like it could work. By comparison, the "standard" fixed rate on offer by Octopus is 37.6p per kWh (presumably that is the rate on offer to new customers) That higher rate fix would not work. It would still likely be higher this time next year after 2 rises in the cap so as Martin points out it would not be a viable switch.

I just emailed Octopus. They said the variable rates on offer could change at any time and could not say how long this present offer will be available. What they did offer however was to apply this present fixed rate offer to my account but to take effect from the end of February. So it would lock in this potentially money saving rate from March onwards so there would only be one "penalty month" where I was paying above the capped variable rate. And if my crystal ball and the press speculation is wrong, and the cap rises from April onwards at substantially less than 50%, with Octopus there is no penalty for exiting a fixed rate so I could drop back to the capped variable rate if it did prove lower. I will go and check my usage and do some sums...... To aid my calculations, does anyone know when the cap on the variable rate actually rises? the press just says "April" but what date in April?

I have been looking at switching to a fixed tariff to "beat the next rise in the cap" Presently paying 20.24p per kWh which is a capped price. I could stay with Octopus and switch to "Loyal Octopus 12 month fixed" at 27.39p per kWh. Why would I switch now to a higher tariff? Well it's widely speculated the cap will rise in April by 50% which would take it to around 30p and then rise again in October by perhaps another 20% taking it to 36p If I switch now it would put February and March this year onto the higher tariff straight away where just waiting on the capped price it would stay at 20.24p until April. But if I switched now by next winter I could be saving 10p per kWh. What I don't know is how long this Loyal Octopus fixed rate will be on offer, e.g. could I wait until March to switch? If only I had that crystal ball?

How far below ground level are you there? As @joe90 our foundation trenches filled up with ground water and had to be regularly pumped out. Not an issue once you are out of the ground.

If you have 1.5M to build up you need all you can get, I would have kept that (I did on my own build) No point paying for muck away and then again to get more muck in. It only needs to be good soil for the top, plenty space to loose rubbish soil in a 1.5M buildup.