ProDave

Meter box. Buy and install your own attached to a post concreted in the ground. WAY cheaper than £600 Do ALL the digging on your own land yourself, and lay a duct with a draw string for them to pull their cable through and up into your meter box. By doing the above I save £1000 Re the earth, That is normally done at the connection pit for the permanent supply. But for a building supply you should not use the suppliers earth you should install your own TT earth (an earth rod or rods) The electrician that connects your site consumer unit and site sockets will be able to bang a rod in for that. Don't ask the DNO to provide the building site earth. Before you commit though what are your plans for the final supply? Leave it there (as many of us have done) or pay to get it moved into the house?

What an odd website. You can sort by make, alphabetical order etc, but NOT by order of which is the quietest. Isn't that somewhat missing the point?

We went through all the "fun" of buying a new FF for the new kitchen, we didn't want anything as big as the American FF's wanted an upright fridge above freezer. The only one that cut it was a Becko that was 700mm wide. Almost all of the uprights are only 600mm wide and did not seem big enough. Unfortunately the Becko is noisy, not only is the compressor noise more than I would have liked, but it creaks and cracks as it is cooling. Not so bad now we have the separate living room so I don't have to put up with it's noise while having a peaceful evening. It's a shame you can't view FF's in a "listening room" like a decent hifi shop so you could turn your chosen model on and hear what it really sounds like. The LG side by side American FF that we had at the old house I have to say was one of the quietest FF's I have ever heard.

Is it a posh one with a display and an error code? Agree a thorough defrost is the first thing. Freezers that use fans are prone to the fan icing up and jamming so a simple defrost may be all you need.

Normally an inbuilt diode is in parallel, and normally reverse biased. It is there to bypass the panel if it is shaded. I guess my situation is not disimilar to that and I could try them in series. At the end of the day when I wire it up I will just try it and see what works best, series, parallel, with or without external diodes.

The 2 things are separate. Creaking floors are usually the result of nailing, not screwing, the floorboards down, and not using any glue.

So continuing with the above post, I am now thinking of fitting these 2 spare panels. As I have decided on one facing E and one facing W to try and squeeze a bit more out of both ends of the day, my thought are turning to a suitable inverter and how to connect them. So they are both 250W panels so a total of 500W (though only one will be producing any meaningful power at any time) I feep coming back to these very cheap Chinese inverters https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/600W-MPPT-Grid-Tie-Inverter-Pure-Wave-DC11-32V-Input-AC230V-Solar-Inverter-BT3D/273358900685?hash=item3fa575cdcd:m:mx85YI3E9iyOMUo2KqEVq5w The input voltage is right for one panel, and it would handle the power from both panels. So how to connect them? I would say connect them in parallel, as only one will be generating at a time. The question is what effect witll the non generating panel have? Will it zap some of the power or just sit there as a high impedance load doing nothing? Should I put s series diode in series with each panel so only the higher voltage panel does anything and the other cannot back feed and zap power? Someone must have done this befoe and know how best to connect them.

That sounds like a heat collector for a heat pump system? I wish they would just say so rather than cloak and daggers "new idea" stuff.

In Scotland the tank mist be sited at least 5 metres from a building or boundary, and 10 metres from a watercourse. There is no limit on the electrical connection, that is just a case of choosing the right size cable for the load, but the load on a typical air blower treatment plant is very small so it would be hard to imagine a situation where the cable length was too long to cause excessive voltage drop.

We all have days like that. Even minor thing irritate me, it's hissing down outside, I need the multitool and it's out in the car. Put the kettle on and wait for the rain to stop.

You need to determine that for sure, see your previous answer a few posts up. Can you sketch out the plumbing, in particular the heating circuit to see if the heating circuit has a pipe (or 2) going up to a header tank. If it does not, then it is getting it's water from a primatic tank.

You don't tell us much about the building. The important thing is, is it lived in as a dwelling presently and has been used as that for a number of years. If yes, then even if it does not have planning for use as a dwelling you should be able to get a certificate of lawful development to confirm residential status. If it has only been used e.g as a workshop, store, agricultural building then you need change of use first which may or may not be possible.,

Yes 2 header tanks and it's an indirect tank, and rusty hot water means leaking coil. Time for a new tank.

You can get LED G9 lamps now, we have one light fitting with them

If it is a primatic tank, there is probably nothing "wrong" with it. Just drain the whole system, give it a good flush through, and re fill it. That will re generate the air bubble that keeps the heating water and hot water separate and it will probably return to normal service. If you do want to swap the tank there will be some re plumbing to separate the heating circuit and put it on it's own new header tank.

More about them here http://www.gasboilerforums.com/primatic.html The point is you can;t tell just by looking at the cylinder, it has the same number of ports in about the same place. Look in the loft at the number of header tanks, that will tell you the type of cylinder.

Sory got my terminology wrong, I was thinking of a Primatic Cylinder Look in the loft, are there one or two header tanks? If only one, it is probably a Primatic tank and getting the HW and heating water muddled up is just a normal little party trick for them.

it's not an old Fortic tank is it?

Mine is being built to 2013 building regs. It was the BCO on an early visit that told me I can't do the ramp to the back. It is probably very subjective but I suspect the issue was I wanted to build a ramp up to the deck, which would then have been a level timber deck leading up to a level threshold door, and it would have fallen foul of the "must be a permanent structure" bit which he does not believe includes a timber deck.

Instead of PIV do the job properly and fit a MVHR unit (Mechanical Ventilation with Heat Recovery)

Some aspects of the "accessability" regulations are just plain daft. We have to have a "circulation space" in a kitchen at least 1400 by 1800. We have an ilsland in the kitchen, so it is set 1400 from the main units. The other side it also has a 1400mm gap to the fridge and some shelving, so it complies. BUT at that side there is a 300mm overhanging breakfast bar, which is allowed to intrude into your circulation space. It none the less makes that side feel cramped. Once it is all signed off the island is going to walk over 200mm closer to the main units and it will feel a whole lot better for it. One of my "after completion" jobs

It is not just LED's, ordinary lamps are often rubbish. The amount of times people call me because "the lamps keep blowing" they seem to think there is some kind of an electrical fault with a light fitting that can cause the lamps to blow. Most of the time I just check all the connections are tight, more to humour them than any expectation of finding a fault. So far none of our cheap GU10 LED lamps have failed. These have mostly been the ones that came with the cheap Screwfix downlighters which I highlighted the link to at the time, something like £2.99 for the fire rated downlight with LED lamp. I am sure they were priced wrong.

Apparently their first attempt at finding us a spare pair to the exchange, they found one that was "dead" and 24 hours later they were back again as that "dead" one was a leased line and they had a very unhappy customer complaining, I know the old twisted pair network is out of the arc, but you really would have thought, 20 years ago when broadband was introduced, from THAT point onwards all NEW cabling installed would have been something very much better. But no they have just carried on with the same rubbish. As far as I know we got the last "good" pair down our road. There was another pair that was spare but tested as dud. Next time someone builds a house (or the guy down the road finishes the one he started before mine) and want's a telephone line, they may have some work to do.

We were told the same. Our car parking is alongside the house. I wanted to make the ramp from the back of the parking area along the back of the house up onto the deck that will have level access to the patio doors. But I was told no, it has to be to the principle entrance now.

I won't bore you all repeating my phone line instalation saga, but suffice it to say I got my installation fee refunded because of the ridiculous and stupid delays. It was something approaching 2 months for them to find a working pair of cables from the top of our road to the exchange. What I saw in my many discussions with the many people that attended and the many junction box pits that I looked down, was an archaic network designed 100 years ago for telephony, that is in a woeful state of chaos and degredation and is a wonder anything works at all. And almost nothing seemed documented. To find a spare pair, the procedure was cut a pair, listen to the line to see if it was live or dead. If live re connect it and try the next one. And this procedure was repeated at every junction pit and there are 4 of them before our line reaches the "trunk" cable at the top of the road, where the pit contains a massive amount of junctions. Next time you see an OR man sat at a junction cabinet for a couple of hours you now know what he is doing, that "trial and error" technique to even find the line he wants to work on. Not long after connection we got them back because the BB speed was poor. Simply by re making the corroded connections on our line in the 4 junction pits they doubled the broadband speed.