ProDave

The thing is, a Sun Amp is a technical product. It needs thought as to how you heat it, be that electric, boiler etc. Correctly chosen and installed it is a good product. I see MASSIVE scope here for a poor choice of product, poorly installed, and poor performance. I see massive scope for a lot of unhappy customers and what was a good product being tarnished as "over priced rubbish" Will they still be selling direct or via skilled installers as they are at the moment? It seems the ASA are pretty toothless if the complaints keep being upheld. All they seem able to do is stop a particular advert being repeated if found to be misleading, so they just make another slightly different advert that gets aired for a while until the next complaints are upheld. For "repeat offenders" the ASA need the power to pre vet all adverts before they are allowed to be aired.

2 properties can share the same tank. I know of 5 houses sharing one large tank not far from here. The issue you are going to have is getting this approved by building control. There is a set forula to work out how many people (PE) you house has to be designed for based on the number of bedrooms. The tank must be capable of processing the PE of both houses combined. That is the easy bit. BC may accept the tank as is for that, or may demand a new one with a known rating. There is then another formula for determining the area of the infiltration field, that again depends upon the PE but also the percolation rate of the ground. That bit will almost certainly be unknown unless there are any old plans that state the area of the infiltration field. This I expect will cause more issues with building control. Worst case is you need a new tank and you need to dig up and re lay the infiltration field to a known size. This will not be a pleasant task as the ground will by now be heavily contaminated. Is there enough land to fit a new tank and infiltration field just for your new house and leave the old tank for the neighbours and remaining their responsibility? If fitting a new tank, make it a treatment plant, not just a septic tank.

For temporary habitation, BC here insisted that all rooms be plasterboarded but not necessarily finished (i.e taped or skimmed) They are not botherered about things like a pile of concrete blocks forming a temporary step to get into the house. They passed a house here for completion even though one entire wall only had the render scratch coat. 2 years later, it is still like that.

If you could tolerate the pain, and the inevitable chasing afterwards, it would be interesting to get a price for one of the Fischer Aquafficient units.

There have been cases where hmrc have decided the building was "complete" before the VAT claim was submitted and refused it. We had a visit from the council tax assessor at the start of the year and he decided it was not complete enough for council tax. He will be coming back again later this year. The point at which he decides it is complete enough for council tax will be the point I get a temporary habitation certificate and do the VAT claim.

You need everything on the plans for sign off at completion. You can get a certificate of temporary habitation when the building is basically safe, has working heating, hot water, one working bathroom and a working kitchen. Some of us might have moved in before even doing that. You get 2 goes at the VAT reclaim. You can use the cettificate of temporary habitation as proof of complete for VAT, and submit your VAT claim within 3 months of that. Or you can wait until final completion and use the completion certificate as proof of completion and submit within 3 months of that. I am intending later this year to use a certificate of temorary habitation for the VAT claim. There might be some issues if it takes too long for final completion so that is a safer route under those circumstances.

+1 to the above. Even though it should just be okay, I would not even consider 6mm for this. I would be putting 10mm t&e without a doubt on a 40A MCB Keep it as far away from the insulation as you can.

Scrape that back to about 50mm lower than the finished level you want and get tarmac laid, It looks solid enough to be the sub base for tarmac. But if the "joint" to the lane is lower than your drain, then it won't drain away.

That's a pet hate of mine, that most LED floodlights now come with a flying lead, forcing you to fix a waterproof junction box to the wall, What was wrong with the old idea of a terminal box on the back of the light fitting?

I thought the roof pitch looked steeper. I have seen one done with a 34 degree pitch and a much higher vaulted roof and the reply was "if anyone complains, we will fit a false ceiling at 3M and create a loft space"

Be careful. The definition for a "caravan". does not impose a ridge height, but does impose a maximum ceiling height of 3 metres.

I did some work for a local company specialising in this. They now do it properly and build their units in a factory and transport them to site as modules. But a few of their early builds were built on site and I remember one, when it was finished they fixed a bit of beading across the ceiling and down the walls to "show where the joint was" (cough)

I am interested in the 0% VAT claim and how you are going to achieve that. With no building regs so no conventional "completion certificate" you can't do a VAT claim. So I assume you are doing this as a VAT registered company and zero rating it? Made of 200mm logs, that will take a BIG crane should you ever wish or need to move it.

I would be getting an electrician to rewire the supply to both the shed and summerhouse. I think you have proved none of it is safe.

Yes, not an RDC to be seen.

If the big arch is just plasterboard, I would strip the plasterboard off that first and see what it reveals.

Aerial views are not very good. If you look at the pre build aerial google earth photos of our pot they were taken early in the day and the trees cast a long shadow. Unless you look very closely, it gives the impression the entire plot is covered in trees as with the low resolution it is hard to see where the tree stops and the shaddow starts.

In our last build we designed the en-suite for a 900mm square shower tray and left the space underneath free of UFH. Of course we fitted a 1200 by 900 shower instead, and when cutting the hole in the floor for the trap, it took a few seconds to understand what was causing the pretty little fountain that started coming out of the floor.

There is nothing to stop you having a suspended timber floor upstairs and having UFH upstairs. You can still have UFH downstairs but make sure each bedroom has it's own zone and it's own thermostat so you can have cool bedrooms if that is what you want.

We bought a plot with lots of trees. Most of the site was covered in young saplings, with a few mature trees. Before we bought the plot, I secured outline planning, and made it clear in that planning application which trees would be felled (I couldn't fell them before the application as I did not own the land) I wonder if you should have a pause, perhaps even withdraw your present application, get the tree survey done, and re submit the planning stating clearly which trees will be felled. Then you will have a clear answer. Of course if one or 2 fell down before that happened ....

They described it to me as a "partial soakaway" but the stupid thing was this partial soakaway must meet all the normal restrictions for a soakaway, including it must be >10M from a watercourse. So I had to go back from being perforated pipe to solid pipe for the last 10 metres, where of course whatever is left runs out into the burn.

That's an "after sign off" project, a ladder up to the mezanine, with a counter balance weight so you can raise and lower it with 1 finger.

Se post #2. A scaffold tower is a one trick pony. Kwickstage is anything from a simple tower to full blown whole house scaffold. And towers, particularly aluminium ones, will likely cost a lot more than the same amount of Kwikstage.

A tower like that is fine to access one point for a specific job. Kwiksage (or similar systems like cuplock) can be a single tower, or they can scaffold your entire house in one continuous run. That is the attraction, versatility.

I had that same stipulation from SEPA when they granted my permit to discharge into our burn.