ProDave

Don't take this as a recommendation. I needed to make 1 good cooker hood out of 2. One had a tatty nackered case but a working fan, and someone had given me an empty new case. So I needed to swap the workking fan into the new case. But it was caked in grease. I tried all the kitchen and oven cleaners we had in the cupboard. Nothing touched the grease. Then I looked in the garage. White spirit just disolved the grease with ease and it wiped off (a bit like in the adverts for those kitchen cleaners that had not touched it) So I am not recommending white spirit as an oven cleaner, but it does work.

When you say "water services pipe" do you just mean "duct"? If so, measure where the blockage is, dig down there. CUT the duct, remove the blockage, patch up and thread your pipe.

Not true. I had no problem getting a BT landline. I am STILL not registered on the Postcode Address File as I refuse to pay the £100 Highland council want to do that. Our address is on just about every other address database.

Any BT landline customer can connect to ANY BT WiFi (identified as "WIFi with FON) You just have to be able to remember your BT logon and password, which is why I rarely use that function.

I pay BT £35 for line rental, broadband and a mobile phone SIM.

EPS insulation would probably survive a dunking. the issue would be what sort of water. Lovely clean rainwater, happy days. Something a bit pongy overflowing from next doors septic tank or coming up out of a sewer and not so happy days.

As others. Plusnet seems to be the cheapest. Just mention the Plusnet price and BT should match it. If you don't go to Plusnet. But before you do that look at mobile options. In particular Three's all you can eat data sim. If only we had three 4G coverage here I would likely switch to that. the only 4G we have here is EE and they don't offer anything similar (yet?)

No, just do it. They are my accessory of choice, cheap quite nice looking and good quality. I have yet to have one fail.

For sheer durability, I would use what is traditional in this part of Scotland. A sand / cement render made with snowcrete and a bit of lime. Gives an off white finish all the way through with no painting.

The Protect Bariar has an inbuilt tape at the edges but I didn't trust it, so I made sure each joint was pinched, either behind a batten, or if nothing convenient, I screwed a strip of plasterboard or OSB offcut over the joint to keep it squashed together. For all other joints I used the Tescon Vana that I bought from the German seller on ebay.

Yes, the 25 year old free standing one of unknown make we have been using until a year ago. It is old and tatty, far too tatty to adorn the kitchen in the new house, but it just works, and easy to keep clean.

EPS is used for floats for pontoons and houseboats. It was also used in the foundations of a car park with not quite the desired effect when it flooded

I would think in terms of a "non floodable" foundation. I think along the lines of an old cottage in the village where I used to live. It was a 200 year old listed building, and regularly flooded, but not by much. When it had a full renovarion, a new concrete floor slab was cast, with upstands all round the outside. The entire floor and 6" up the walls was tiled with quary tiles. Whenever it flooded, they went through the normal routine of stand the furniture up on blocks and allow it to flood, only ever to a few inches deep, then when it wend down scrub it all out and put the furniture back.

I have plenty of grumbles about the way the controls of the ASHP work, and the fiddles / inventiveness needed to make it work as I wanted it to work (simply from a conventional central heating time clock, not the hideously complicated thing they supply that nobody can understand) But no doubt anyone capable of designing a control system for a bit of kit like this (and there are several on this forum that could do it) will all agree we could make a better job of it.

I designed my house myself so there are no built in features that irritate me other than as already mentioned those that building regs forced me to incorporate (or not incorporate as appropriate)

Protect Bariair was the cheapest I could find. I got it to order from Jewsons.

Building regs that stop me doing some things the way I really want, or stop me doing them altogether (hence a growing "after completion" list.) On the subject of ovens. We wanted a matching conventional oven and microwave. What we were forced to buy was a fan oven and a mini oven / microwave combination oven. That combination is not as good a microwave as we would have liked (no rotating turntable for instance). I could have bought a "matching" built in microwave by the same manufacturer that functionally is what we wanted, BUT that type looks like (because it is) a free standing microwave with a front plate put on to make it pretend to be built in. I was not happy with that.

This is not some tin pot cowboy poorly erected set of Kwikstage that has fallen over. It is a big job with I am sure professional scaffolding. As someone already said, it looks as though the building it was providing access to has collapsed. I wonder if this was a building failure during work, or the result of bad weather?

Standing water or flowing water? Our risk comes from flowing water if the burn over tops. The shed next to it could flood (that bit of ground is lower than the garden on the house side) But it would dry out very quick once the burn went down. I could probably do a reasonable job of protecting the shed with some barriers to make the water flow around, rather than through the shed if I thought it much of a risk. A lot of the flooding you see on the news lately is standing water and might take days to subside and little prospect of preventing it. That is much harder to protect, you can't just divert standing water somewhere else. Stand it up on stilts above the highest ever known flood level?

Are you saying your shed has flooded? Ours did in the old house but it was just a plain shed with no insulation. I dried it out and 17 years later it is still fine. If it's lined with plasterboard that will be shot for a start.

Hi and welcome to the forum. The first thing is to get the basics right. And the No 1 thing if installing under floor heating, is to get the floor insulation right. So before you embark on this, what insulation is under your suspended timber floor, or what insulation will you be putting there? I guess the answer is nothing at the moment. If so you want a LOT more than the 20 to 50mm you are talking about. Re controls. Radiators upstairs and UFH downstairs work very differently so you will want separate controls. So use a separate programmer channel for each to allow different times to be set. Use 2 port motorised valves, avoid that work of the devil, the 3 port mid position valve. Upstairs the rads will be controlled by their timer channel and one or more room thermostats. downstairs it is normal for each zone of the UFH to have it's own room thermostat, and the manifold controller takes car of it, turning on the UFH when one ore more zones calls for heat. I will leave the plumbers to talk buffer tanks.

This may be of interest to some in the vicinity of Inverness / Ross-Shire. I had the heads up from a joiner I was working with yesterday that a new independant builders merchant has just started up in Alness. So I went there today. They have only been going about 2 weeks, so their stock is a bit basic but they are clearly building up the stock and were very happy to show me around. I ordered some chipboard and plywood from them, total cost was £271, Jewsons had previously quoted me £320. Hopefully this will give us some cheaper material for the rest of the build, and they are closer for us.

Ours sat for the most of the first winter exposed outside. I wrapped the most exposed end in some damp proof membrane sheeting to keep most of the prevailing rain off.

Yes, remember to test with your router plugged into the master socket and ALL other slave sockets disconnected before you get Open Reach out to check.

They also do the shorter uprights as well, handy for indoor use.