ProDave

Significant progress in spite of the weather. All panels now mounted, view from the East View from the south The unistrut is still to be cut to length. Fixings worked reasonably well. Between panels a simple penny washer and matching rubber washer The end fixing was not so good. Plenty of people on ebay selling the same solar pv brackets but nobody gives any dimensions of them. As it happens they are too small for these panels, so the self tapping screw has been added to stop any inclination for the bracket to slide off. I connected one string today, just the east facing string. It was just gone mid day when I connected it, so well past it's peak and it was generating 300W in the low winter sunshine, and gradually reduced as the sun went further. Although all the cables are in place, I can't connect the other string until the rest of the MC4 connectors that I have ordered arrive here.

Are you saying it failed withing the guartantee and they replaced it, with a new guarantee, 5 times? I will bet it was just brushes. I just replace mine but if SF are daft enough to keep replacing it why bother?

Floor plans so we can better visualise both? Building on the existing extension may make rooms hard to reach or lots of long corridors.

It Was.

There are some big advantages to a caravan with the living room in the middle and a bedroom at each end.

You have Kwikstage. Make stairs out of that.

Used JJI I beam joists, I think that solves the cold bridging issue. All I know is it passed SAP and building control.

Why not use a dry ridge system?

My cheap one has a clutch. First time I jammed a drill and it operated I thought I had stripped the teeth in the gearbox.

I have been using one of the cheap generic "no name" SDS drills for 15 years, I got mine from Screwfix called a Titan but the same thing is on sale with any number of different names on it. I have changed the brushes twice otherwise it just keeps on going, and put a longer flex on it (which I do to most of my tools as the originals are always too short)

Just get a non MCS electrician to move them and say nothing, Your output will go up a bit, if the FIT provider queries it, you have cut down a tree and reduced the shading you were previously getting

We managed okay the 3 of us in the static caravan for just over a year. IT helped a LOT having the laundry already functioning in the house, and having my office set up in the house so that took a bit of pressure off the space in the caravan.

Well I am the master of that. We started our build not expecting to get beyond a bare frame until the old house sold. But it didn't. So far we have got to a habitable, but not finished house. The shortfall has been: Rent the old house so so far £20K in rental income. Wait until I was 55, then transfer one small pension into a drawdown fund and take the tax free 25%. The rest remains there but will be taxable so I am trying not to draw on it yet. I had a small inheritance. Buy materials as we earn the money, which is one reason it is taking so long. And the big one has to be because I have done so much myself a conservative estimate suggests I have saved £30K in labour costs.

Could be. But I never saw the point in doing that. When I was doing the spec for my house one thing I wanted was simple foundations, i.e specifically no sleeper walls to add to the number of trenches and ground work. If the first floor joists can span that gap, then so can the ground floor joists. That of course meant thicker joists, which meant I could get enough insulation within the width of the joists so no adding extra above them.

150mm joists? That sounds rather thin. Ours are 300mm JJI's

I wasn't so much having a dig at the nomadic lifestyle, I was more "concerned" about an over size american caravan weighed down with stone kitchen worktops and how the hell you could legally and safely tow that in the UK.

Howdens sell a basic straight staircase for about £100

Yes I have 100mm wood fibre board on the walls (rendered) and on the roof as the sarking board. Building control accepted it for the building warrant and the structural engineer had no issues. I am not sure if the wood fibre gives enough racking strength on it's own. Our SE specified an OSB layer on the inside of the roof frame, and 2 layers of OSB on the inside of the wall frames to give the building the required racking strength.

47Kg propane bottle lasts over a year for cooking and costs about £80 (expensive up here) but that is less than the standing charge for mains gas. So I doubt mains gas just for cooking would be worth it.

So a couple with a small baby buy an old Silver Streak caravan and pay £5K to ship it from the USA. They strip it bare because it was rotten and re model it. Complete with kitchen with stone worktops, and a woodburning stove. They have sold their house to live in this thing as a travelling home. So: Is even legally towable in the UK in it's original form? How much does it weigh now with the stone worktops? Will the chassis and axles even take that extra load (there is a reason caravans are mostly built of very thin plywood) and if it is legally, will it tow without falling apart? just what do they tow it with? And where do they propose to live in this mobile home? Oh and they built a cot and activity wall for the baby. What abour when he grows up and wants a proper bed and his own bedroom? This one must get the prize for silliest idea yet?

We never have problems with the cluster flies entering the house or being a nuisance. But like you they crawl into the gaps around the windows outside of the seals, and when you open a window, they all come in,,half dazed. When I was on the roof a few weeks back doing the stove flue, and took a few tiles off, they were there as well, under the tiles but above the roof membrane.

They do vary wildly but I can't actually think which is the quietest. A switch on the wall is my preferred option. But if it's night time use that is the complaint, well I never use the light at night. Once you know your way around, it is surprising what you can do in the dark.

The gradient is not the issue, it's the rate of change. I see lots of people have a very short very steep ramp which could be either the clutch burner, or spoiler catcher. Why not just grade the aproach so you make any necessary rise over the length of a car? We have the opposite problem, the garage is lower than the road so we have a slope down to the garage, then a very small step up (with a drainage channel) to prevent heavy rain filling the garage.

Can that be met by importing from another country? On the basis it is unlikely the wind is not blowing and the sun not shining everywhere.

I share the stove concerns. That lounge would overheat very quickly. We do have a stove and we do use it, but our kitchen / diner (similar size to your lounge) opens with double doors straight to the stairwell, then double doors the other side to the lounge. With all doors open it is pretty much the whole ground floor open, and a stairwell to let heat upstairs. Like this with everything open, the stove can be used carefully. But in your lounge, with little obvious route for it to heat the whole house, I think you would kust overheat that room very quickly indeed.