ProDave

I tried sorting out insurance earlier this year, but when I started rattling off the list of things still to do, nobody would quote, so I renewed the site insurance for another year. I will try again in the spring, when hopefully the list will just be the sun room is still under construction and see if anyone will quote. MY site insurance says it converts to buildings and contents when you move in so I assume I am covered.

I did my own foundations, just the digging, the builders did the concrete pour and built up from there. I marked it all out with a long tape and triangulation, and marked the centreline of each trench and dig to that. The builders said I would never get it accurate enough. When they came and surveyed it properly before the pour, they found it to be spot on.

You would need to see them in the flesh to see if it is possible to mount them on the wall with the flex exiting through the back into the wall. Even then, if not designed for that, you would probably have to set a round back box into the wall to provide space for some terminals. Or just keep looking.

Interesting. I had one that failed, that I kept for years, wanting to so a post mortem, but could find no way to open it to get at the bladder short of cutting it in half with an angle grinder, which would make it rather hard to put back together.

I had the run around for a week with a delivery. I kept getting a message to say "not delivered, nobody in" But I WAS in. In the end on the 4th day I watched the road like a hawk and stopped every van coming down, and found my parcel. He had been trying to deliver to the wrong house. The thing was I kept telling the delivery company to give my number to the driver, and that if there was not an old green Landrover outside the house, then he was at the wrong house. But none of that information got to the driver, he just had an address and nothing else. So not always the drivers fault. I did have an item ordered from ebay, when it was a week over due I sent a message to the seller to ask when I might expect it as it had not yet arrived. I got a message back immediately "We have refunded you". I did not ask for a refund, just asked when I might expect it. It arrived the next day.

Must have done but neither of us remember what it is.

That got me all excited that I could disable the keyring thing. Only it requires you to know it's password, which I don't.

I have this "keyring" thing on mine. I thought it was something SWMBO put on there but she now nothing about it. Neither of us know the password it is expecting. I just dismiss it by pressing Cancel, but it is persistent and you have to cancel it 5 times before it gives up. Then the browser (chromium) operates as normal including remembering passwords if you have chosen to save them. Use Firefox instead and this keyring thing does not pester you. I would turn it off if I new how but have never found any reference to it.

It looks like the bank is quite long and steep. You would have to run the pipe a long way down and build the head wall much lower to have a direct discharge pipe. Then it runs the risk of being flooded with the burn in spate? As long as you lay teram or similar membrane before laying the mattress I can't see an issue with erosion. It does not look too difficult to build. As long as SEPA are happy I would just do that.

If there are any pictures or diagrams in that report it would be interesting to see them, I can't imagine what a gabion mattress is at the moment.

Reading all that about made up ground, almost certainly means piled foundations. I doubt any other solution would prove stable enough. Our first plot, unknown to us, was made up ground. That too was a sloping site down to the burn that had been infilled to make it more level. In that case the infill was only about 2ft deep at the worst point, but it meant the strip foundations went down nearly 6 feet at the deepest point to get to original firm ground. Dealing with the drainage as you suggest will dry the ground, but it won't solve it being made up, and I would be surprised if there was any option other than piles. The gabion thing is trivial. Some Gabion baskets set down into the bank, filled with stone, and the discharge pipe emerging through the gabions at an appropriate level.

What is the present or previous use of the land? Are other buildings around? At this time of year it is bound to be muddy but are we talking welly sucking mud?

That's odd. I will have to see what the Scottish regs say. It would be strange to have it that high. What is the logic in saying a light switch can be no more than 1200mm high, then insisting the consumer unit has to be higher? I installed mine above the utility room worktop, but below the utility room wall cupboards. If I had to put it a minimum of 1350mm to the centreline of the mcb's, then I would have had to cut a dirty great big notch out of the bottom of the wall unit for the consumer unit to intrude into.

Can you post any pictures of the plot?

No point in 1.5. In fact I rarely use 1.5 for anything. 1mm 3 core & earth will be fine. BUT some thermostats are indeed low voltage and use network type cable. Post a picture of the insides of the thermostat?

When I got mine connected, someone told me each new connection is "allocated £3000" and the customer only has to pay if the works are going to cost more than that. I guess it rarely does. I paid £50 connection fee to BT and then got most of it back, because it took Open Reach so long to find a working pair between our house and the exchange.

Our caravan was on site (with permission) some time before we moved into it. When I contacted the council to pay council tax on it, the assessor said "let me git my file out. Ah yes, I have a picture of your caravan and I see I have been to your site 17 times" So they were regularly snooping to see if we had moved into it. They don't seem so bothered now we have moved into the house. He came in January but decided the house was not sufficiently finished to be valued, so left it as us paying band A CT for the 'van. He said "see you in the summer" but I have not seen him, so I guess he came when we were out and had a look through the windows and decided it was still not finshed. Regarding keeping a caravan after the build. I have mentioned this before. We wanted to be able to keep the static 'van to use later as a work space, store room and studio. We chose one with an unusual layout that would suit that use better than most. When it came to the planning, I told the planners of our intention to keep it. Originally they said no. Then I pointed out on the day of completion, I could remove the caravan, and then immediately put an identical 'van in the identical position, and it would qualify as a permitted development garden outbuilding. They then changed the condition to "habitational use of the 'van will cease upon occupation of the house"

I don't have experience of installing boreholes, but there are several near me and I have worked on a couple, including replacing the pump. In the case of that one the pump did just hang a long way down the hole on a stainless steel wire alongside the riser pipe. Don't discount rainwater. It is the default water source in the bush in Australia, and they get a lot less rain than us. My BIL's house in Queensland collects water from the house roof and 2 barn roofs into a total of 4 different tanks, and was lovely clean drinking water without any treatment. Their infrastructure is set up better than us in that during the dry season, it is easy to just buy in a tanker of water if your tank is getting low. I am not sure if Scottish Water could sell you a tanker of water if you were getting low? Spring water can be more troublesome to get it wholesome, think dead sheep upstream? or even sheep urine.

13A is 3KW. Put all 4 rings on and that's 750W per ring available. I hope you are not in a hurry.

Induction hobs usually draw a LOT more than an oven. An electrician is not qualified to cap off a gas supply unless he is also gas safe registered.

Ovens don't actually use much, typically they are 2.3Kw and often do come with just a 13A plug. But the thorn in the side is fixed heating appliances over 2KW are supposed to be on a dedicated circuit.

I had to provide a "partial soakaway" between the treatment plant and the discharge. This is where it all gets silly. Building regs say an "infiltraton field" must be 10 metres from a road and 10 metres from a watercourse. That just leaves me a little strip down the middle of the plot that complies with that, which is why BC rejected any other proposal. So I have just that little strip to create my "partial soakaway" then it goes back to solid pipe for the last 10 metres before discharging into the burn. If you applied an ounce of common sense to that, you would say well it's going to end up in the burn anyway, so why not make a larger partial soakaway that goes right up to the edge of the burn, but no you are not allowed to have a soakaway within 10 metres of the burn. I had reached the point of not caring that they were being silly.

I don't think it is the busbars that are the issue it's the standards of some of the switchgear. I fitted a Wylex CU a week or so back and note they now have main switches with 2 screws on the incoming terminals (it is a while since I have fitted a Wylex) But if you have one big load, I would still strongly lean towards splitting the tails with Henley blocks and having a separate small CU for the big load.

As time goes on, the requirements for "reports" seem to increase. My first plot in 2003 had no such needs. This one did, and the requirements for things like visibility splays seem to keep being added to. So it sounds like the ground conditions are no good for a drainage infiltration field. The GOOD news is you have access to a burn. There are some hoops to jump through with SEPA to get permission to discharge into the burn. It is not a automatic right like it seems to be in England and generally they will allow it if there is no other option. We had to submit two different drainage plans to building control, who rejected them, before SEPA allowed us to discharge to the burn. You can probably simplify that process by getting a report done that shows (by percolation tests for example) that an infiltration field will not work, and recommends discharge to the burn. In order to discharge to the burn you will need to use a treatment plant, not a septic tank, but you would be well advised to do that anyway. The Gabion thing probably emphasises the soil conditions and suggests without something like that, just poking a discharge pipe out of the bank may lead to the bank disintegrating, but again not a problem. Perhaps of more concern is the ground conditions for building. You do not want a lot of peat for example. Long lapsed planning is not on it's own a problem. My plot I am building on had PP in 1980 but was never built on, it was not hard to get PP re instated. Re PIP or outline, Planning In Principle is simply the name given in Scotland to what everyone else knows as Outline Planning Permisson.