ProDave

Why is that the case with SIPS when it is not the case with Timber frame? I personally would not accept that. If they are saying there must be something as the frame does not have enough racking strength with just bare joists, then would not a sheet of 11mm OSB do that, onto which the OP could put his floor make up? Any resolution has to be resolved and agreed with the SIPS company and their engineer,.

A case of the tail wagging the dog here. You need to tell the SIPP company the floor make up that YOU want including your UFH and THEY should design it for that, including any extra allowance for extra dead loading. i.e. they should NOT fit the floor boards at frame erection stage, or if they must fit something, then a cheap layer of thin OSB onto which you can put your UFH panels then your chosen finished floor. They also need to make allowances for the floor make up to add extra height if needed.

I strongly suspect your problem is the same as mine, a spurious and very short pulse detected by the HP thinking it has a heat demand and turning the pump on for a fraction of a second but not long enough for the flow meter to operate hence it trips with the CH14 error. I "fixed" mine by filtering the thermostat input with a 100K wire wound resistor from input to N and in parallel with that a snubber consisting of a capacitor and resistor in series. Is that something you would feel confident fitting yourself? or do you know someone that would fit it for you? I am sending you the service manual. Don't get too excited there is not much in it,.

Tip No 1. Throw away the piece of junk that is the current version of the NTE5 master socket and buy the far superior older version. You won't actually achieve anything by "moving" the master socket. Just splicing on an extra bit of cable and moving the master socket will result in exactly the same length and route of cable, as leaving the master socket where it is, and just running a length of cable and fitting a slave socket where you want it. Then plug the router into the slave socket. You only need to "move" it if there is some reason why an unused socket cannot remain in it's present place. You just need 2 pair telephone cable, or 3 pair will do, and you can buy it in short lengths from most DIY shops, screwfix etc.

Definitely a good plan. It will have a toilet as well which satisfies your obligation to provide a site toilet for the workers, though you will have to empty it.

No but have you tried Rationel?

Am I the only one not understanding this? The window is 1200 mm but the hole is only 850mm? How the hell did NOBODY notice they had made the hole the wrong size by THAT much? And to be out by that much is there a MAJOR difference between the size shown on the drawings and the window schedule? or can someone not read the drawings and made it the wrong size?

I presume you will be placing contracts for various packages of work? Providing each contract is "supply and fit" of a particular part of the build, it should come to you zero rated. The VAT claim thing is for self builders who (not being VAT registered) cannot avoid paying VAT on materials they buy, so they claim back the VAT at the end. If all you are doing is project managing, not building, you won't be buying any materials like that will you?

That's £3000 per square metre so yes I would say that is steep. Time for a second or third quote?

Not all LED lights are dimmable. You may just have the wrong lamps in them. Or you may have the wrong sort of dimmer switch designed for filament lamps.

Ariel is a washing powder. An Aerial is a device for receiving radio signals. I'll get my coat.

Why is the first lift at head height? Anyone working underneath it would have to stoop? I work on 2M lifts with Kwikstage. If you have that hazard then pipe insulation taped around it with some of that yellow / black striped tape. Kwikstage etc does not have this problemwith sticking out bars.

Aiming to reduce energy use to half of what old houses use, is missing the point and will not get us to carbon neutral. Not unless ALL houses fit a significant amount of renewables. Even our new house is not carbon neutral. The solar PV generates a little more each year than the house needs to heat it. BUT we use more electricity running "stuff" (washing machine, TD, dishwasher, FF, tv's etc etc) than we do on heating. So to get to being truly carbon neutral, our house would need to double it's renewables generation to power all the "stuff" And that's where it gets difficult. Most of the extra generation would be needed in the winter, when it's hard to do with say PV. And if we had enough self generation in the winter we would have a massive surplus in the summer, but the FIT scheme has been scrapped, so that is hardly likely to persuade people to invest in renewables is it? Why scrap the FIT just at the time more renewables are needed? Clear LACK of joined up thinking, My guess is the figures will be fudged. Our house would be classed as carbon neutral because we generate more electricity than it uses to heat the house, so it would "meet the target" They would just quietly ignore all the "stuff" that is really making the house, as a whole package, carbon negative, because doing so we will never meet the target of carbon neutral housing.

I have met some of those Germain (or were they Austrian) Joiners in their "uniforms" We have nothing like that here whatsoever.

My few comments. If you are trying to make cheap to build, don't have the front wall of the kitchen stepped out. Keep it in line with the rest of the house. The cost of that extra space will be disproportionately high. The area of the wc / rear vestibule / boot room / utility seems cluttered and an awkward path through. I don't like a "corridor" utility, no good if you want a "pulley" (clothes airer) I would make the utility just a corridor to the back door (where a window is now) with coat and boot space. The boot room + rear vestibule the utility. Even consider doing what I have, the WC in the utility, so that whole back section could be a decent size utility incorporating the WC. Which way is North? Can't comment on room positions without knowing that.

It still staggers me that houses with a poor EPC don't sell for less, and most buyers don't care. All that has to change. Even the target to get all houses to an EPC C will not make them carbon neitral.

I would not try connecting a socket to the supply to your heat pump. My 2 concerns, that circuit is rated for it's load and probably does not have much capacity spare. Secondly it would be physically hard to connect extra cables into that isolator switch.

Well today, the tap, trap and waste all arrived. Slightly disappointed. the "extension pipe" is not really long enough. Just 200mm This means with a 400mm diameter round basin, the pipe won't reach all the way through the plasterboard into the service void. So instead the plastic compression fitting is going to have to poke through the wall. Not the look I was hoping for. I might even consider changing the trap if I can be sure a different one has a longer pipe. something they don't seem to tell you much about. Does nobody think these things through?

We too have a burn running right through our plot. But we were not asked to provide any flood risk analysis as looking at the SEPA flood maps our plot is not at risk. It correctly shows that the field behind us does indeed flood (though little more than a large puddle) I just applied common sense. Make the finished floor level of the house much higher than the rest of the plot. Basically the vehicle entrance is o the highest point of the plot and that sets the garage floor height and then there is a step up into the house. this puts one part of the house a metre above the ground level. We then used all the excavatred soil to raise the ground level on the house side of the burn, but deliberately left the other side of the burn at it's original level, so if the burn is in spate and is going to over top, it will flood the other side first. The obvious things are keep the building as high on the land as possible, even to the extent of raising the area where the house is built. It is also worth considering the local topography and how the land will flood. The road we are on slopes significantly down to the river that is about 1/2 a mile away and 100 metres lower. It is impossible to imagine any event that would result in standing water here. Whatever level of flooding occurs, it will be running down hill. So obviously don't put anything in the way that would block it. I think flooding on flat, low lying land is very much harder to predict and do anything about. With standing water, it seem sand bags etc are just about next to useless.

Re visiting this old thread, because after working fine for well over a year, in the last week, my ASHP has thrown up 3 spurious CH14 low flow errors. the common theme once more being this happened over night with no demand, just as they did before, so the unit refuses to start in the morning without the fault being reset. So I had another look and think I have a hunch what the issue is. In the summer, I connected a wire to the "cooling" thermostat input to test it's cooling function. That is unused at the moment, but the wire is still connected. Now I previously had an issue with the heating thermostat input being over sensitive, and I cured that by fitting a pull down resistor and a snubber. But I never thought to do the same when i connected the cooling input. It is reasonable to assume they both use the same input configuration, and either will trigger the ASHP to start so it's reasonable both will trigger the same start up checks for flow rate with the same fault mode if a short spurious input is detected. So today I fitted the same snubber and pull down resistor to the cooling thermostat input. I will now see if that has cured it's latest bout of flow errors or not.

It must be 35 years since I visited Barra. When I was there, the Vatersay causeway had only just been completed, and I found I had missed out, two derelict houses on Vatersay had just been sold for £5K each.

The middle dial is set for "comfortable" and never gets moved. Most of the time my HW is only 48 degrees so that would be "bloody hot" but not scaldingly so.

Hi and welcome @Nick A Are you on Barra? That's the only Western Isle I can think of with such a long ferry crossing.

I have always fitted them for comfort, so you know the water temperature won't vary and you don't have to fiddle. I have never thought of them as a "safety feature"

As above. We have two bowls and two appliances all connected to one trap. the pipework above can get a bit smelly if you are not careful. It is the pipe from the half bowl sink that often gets smelly as it's not used much. I tried to mitigate that by putting the trap under the half bowl not under the full bowl, to eliminate a dead, seldom used leg of waste pipe. If the trap is blowing dry then you have a stack ventilation problem. The Klargesters do seem to work. The "complaint" we have with them is the moving mechanical parts immersed in the smelly stuff, and none of us would want the task of repairing something when it goes wrong. The air blower ones are nicer in that respect as the air blower is not immersed and is simple and easy to swap when it needs servicing.