ProDave

Why is the thickness a big issue? Is it "tap wobble"? This annoys me. In a previous house we had a cheap stainless steel sink and mixer tap. The tap came with two screw in solid copper tails, which when coupled to copper pipes made the tap very sturdy with no wobble. Every mixer tap I have seen for a long time now comes with flexi tails. They give no support whatsoever to the tap, so the sink flexes and the tap wobbles. I so much like the new granite worktop we have now. Even with flexi tails there is no "tap wobble" that now seems a feature of stainless steel sinks that you have to accept. Just how thick would a stainless sink have to be to completely stop "tap wobble"?

I got mine from Bimble Solar. The only way I got them as cheap as I did was they were second hand, claiming to be from a solar farm that was upgrading, and about 4 years old. We did well, because they were described as having a "degraded back sheet" but only 2 out of the 25 panel lot had any damage and it was extremely minor. This is what Bimble have at the moment https://www.bimblesolar.com/solar/individual e.g. 275w panels for £75 plus VAT, so 14 of those would give you 3850W for £1260 I got mine for slightly less than their list price as they also sell on ebay. I paid £255 for a new 4kW inverter. The rest was mounting hardware etc.

Interesting that you ask how it was financed, but then don't ask if you had difficulty getting finance? A lot seem to have problems with self build mortgages, and some of us have had difficulty selling the old house to free up finance.

A step down from the house is mandatory (in Scotland) Ventilation of a garage is only mandatory above I think it's 30 square metres. Our single garage does not require any. Building regs do say in that case not to try to seal the building, so I did not fit air tight membrane for instance.

Solar PV has to be cheap to justify itself now. I spent £1500 self installing a 4kWp ground mounted system, financed by expected self usage of £250 worth of electricity per year giving a 6 year payback time. Much more than that, and I would not have bothered. I think you would have to be "dedicated to the cause" to pay more than that for a professionally installed system. At 4kWp batteries are not essential. Simply by using the big appliances in the daytime (washing machine, dishwasher, tumble dryer) and diverting surplus PV to the immersion heater for additional water heating, I have kept export down to a minimum. I would like some battery storage but that would have to be cheap, so not yet. Battery storage would become more important if you fit more than 4kWp as it then becomes harder to self use all you generate.

I know I post this on most "dormer" threads when people ask for ideas so apologies if you have seen it before. I dislike dormers for all the reasons already given. So I instead specified "gable ends" which could be done the the size and scale required for your dormers:

This is nothing unusual at all. Standard detail for garage ceiling with habitable rooms above is two layers of 15mm fireline plasterboard, the pink one 15mm thick, with the joints taped and filled, and the joints of the two layers staggered. You will have thick joists for the spans you have so plenty of room for a decent amount of insulation. build in a taped air tight membrane under the floor and taped up to meet the wall air tight layers and that's your details sorted out.

Me too. In fact 25 metres is about the distance to ours and that is done with 6mm SWA and has not been a problem.

If you put the inverter in the garage, then you need do nothing more than a mains connection to the garage. Voltage drop on the cable is critical (it manifests as voltage rise with a generating inverter) If that is too high the inverter may trip. So fit what you probaably think is an over sized cable. Give us some idea of the distance and we can give you some help.

I think most electricians were disappointed that the "solution" to CU fires was to put them inside a tin box. Just about any other situation where there are a worrying number of fires, you look at what is causing them and design out bad engineering. Instead the electrical industry just designed a fire barrier. My pet hates are cage clamp terminals with no shield to stop the busbar going in behind the clamp and thus not being clamped at all, and heavy duty terminals on things like main switches that only have one screw. We didn't have this problem on wooden backed 3036 Wylex fuse boxes were every termination had two screws.

Well if they don't believe you have a water supply, your bills will be cheap.

I have fitted new 17th edition metal CU's with a door that hinges down. Perhaps that was an early one and you can't buy them like that any more?

I'm a self employed electrician as well. We started our search in 2002. We came up for 2 weeks holiday in our caravan. At that point we did not know we would be buying a plot, we came up with an open mind. But given the big difference in the way you buy and sell between England and Scotland, we wanted to buy something we could afford before the old house sold. In that visit, we ended up buying a 1 bedroom flat in Inverness. That was always destined to be a buy to let. A few weeks later we were back, staying in the flat and getting it ready for rental. That was the point we decided on a self build, so we looked at all the plots on the market at that time and the one we bought was the flattest, largest and strangely the cheapest, so we bought it. The purchase of the plot completed in late 2002 so we came back with the touring caravan and stayed on the plot and started planning the build. We were back in March 2003 to get services onto the plot. On the journey back down, I heard on the radio that Gulf War 2 had started. That killled the housing market and we did not have a single viewing of the old house for 6 months. At the same time the company I worked for was running out of orders so I voluntered for redundancy. It was late 2003 by the time we finally had a buyer so we moved up into the static caravan and building started in 2004 Go here https://www.hspc.co.uk/ and put "plot Sutherland" into the search box and you will see what's available.

Hi and welcome @Lois We too relocated from South Oxfordshire to the Highlands in 2003 and now building our second self build. Our target area was "half an hour from Inverness" and we ended up on the northern limit of that. Sutherland is very nice but not much employment so I assume you are self employed or retired? Several cheap plots around Lairg / Rogart area at the moment. or even cheaper if you want to go further north to Helmsdale.

You can't keep blaming Mrs T. How come the labour governments after her did not stop right to buy and did not build more council houses?

What sort of signal strength do you get? You can only try it and see but it will be nowhere near as good as a proper aerial.

I keep a running cost of spending, and looking back it looks like about £25,000 from bare shell to when we moved in. Re the VAT, I am getting a little nervous of the time it is taking so this spring intend to get a temporary habitation certificate and do my VAT claim then, buying as much as I can think of first. I don't think we will have an issue as the council tax valuer is still of the opinion the house is not "ready" so still has not valued it so we are still paying council tax on the caravan.

Change your target. NOTHING has to be "finished" to move in. We moved in with: Kitchen diner functioning with cheap temporary worktop and sink (later moved to the utility room) Floor laid, walls plastered and painted, no finishings, no skirting etc. Rest of downstairs just bare OSB floor and walls. Utility room washing machine and tumble dryer connected but room just bare OSB Stairs in but temporary hand rails Upstairs bedrooms plastered and painted, no carpets, no skirtings. Bathroom just about finished, en-sute not even started. NO DOORS or even door frames on ANY rooms. Bathroom and bedrooms had very temporary cardboard doors to give a little privacy. Heating and hot water functioning, but only the kitchen / diner had the UFH pipes laid. We then carried on building it around us.

Hi and welcome. I wonder where you are? Highlands is a big place. I am a little north of Inverness.

I thought small value invoices were allowed without full details. I would include them all, and they might all get paid.

This is the problem imho. That lead at the top should be much longer and tuck UNDER the roof sheet above the window. At the moment at best it buts up to the joint between the roof sheets and has a tube of sealant trying to stop water getting under the lead. So start with replacing that with a larger strip of leas that really tucks under the roof sheet above the window. Because the rest of the window is also a bit dubious, I would try and form a bit of an upstand in the leadwork so instead of allowing water down onto the glass, it encouraged it to run off the sides above the window and down the roofing sheets While you are at it, the lad down the sides should be wider so they at least lap down into the first valley of the roofing sheets. At the moment water on that flat section can blow under the lead.

Before you can address the problem, you need to know where the water is getting in. Initially I thought it was the poor detail at the top where the top flashing is not correctly tucked under the sheet above. Are you now thinking it is getting in at the edge of the glass and there has been a previous attempt to re seal it there?

But you CAN split a ring into two separate radials as long as you change the mcb size, you can usually put the 2 halves on 20A mcb's. I have done this occasionally to solve a problem on a ring final by disconnecting a damaged section and converting to 2 radials where the disruption needed to replace the damaged section would be too great.

I have just checked and our joists are about 280mm overall depth. they are all on 600mm centres. Most of the joists are about 11 metres long. they don't span 11 metres of course but run end to end of the building with intermediate support from the wall either side of the stairwell. The only difference in the "downrated" ones that only span the 4 metre gap is the timber used for the top and bottom chords is thinner. Generally the floor is pretty solid but as I noted on that bit with the downrated joists there is some noticable bounce so had I anticipated that, I would have specified the same joist size throughout.

It only lists up to 10 instances of a particular house name from all over the UK. So I can't tell how many houses there are with the same name as us. But if you narrow it down by typing part of the postcode I find there are only three in the IV postcode area (4 counting ours that is not on the list) the nearest being 12 miles away.