ProDave

It was lucky it failed today. Should be able to get and fit the replacement tomorrow. No guests in tonight but a full house tomorrow and they may have been less than best pleased if there was no hot water.

Phone call from tenants in our old house. Water dripping from the ceiling. Went to investigate, floor under the Telford Tornado cylinder wet. No visible leaks from pipes. Feel round the back and water is seeping out of the seam on the outer jacket. Immediate thought was o b*****r the cylinder is leaking. Take the top off to check the internal expansion vessel. Phew, that was leaking filling the top of the cylinder with water that was seeping down. The strange thing with this one, is the bladder is still intact and it was working as an expansion vessel, but the vessel had rusted through. It was 7 years old. The original one also failed at 7 years old, but that failed as the bladder had split. So I guess 7 years is all you can expect from them then? Tenant is off to trawl the merchants tomorrow to see if anyone has one in stock.

We used to have those at work, damned handy bits of kit to wheel about a lab to reach stuff on the top shelf. You will curse when you try and carry it upstairs though.

I am pretty sure the Danfoss ones in our old house actuate the microswitch when you move the override lever, but the Honeywell ones in the new house do not.

You can get 4 post lifts quite cheap that are on the verge of needing a new set of cables. Not sure why people sell them at that point rather than replace the cables?

My pit is covered by planks made of offcuts of 6 by 2 C16 When the builders poured the concrete slab, they set a ring of 4 by 2 around the edge to form a lip for the planks to sit into so they sit flush with the floor.

Voltage pen. Work of the devil. Proves nothing. Lets get back to basics. Forget voltages or currents that may be present. Does the system work? If not in what way does it not work? PS voltage present does NOT = current flowing, completely separate things.

The lever feels floppy when the valve is energised. If there is resistance when you push the lever and it then springs back, the valve is not energised.

Yes they work out the total gain and then the period you lived in it, plus the last 18 months (regardless of use)is exempt. That 18 months reduces to 9 months in April 2020.

CGT is normally declared on your tax return, e.g when we sold our former buy to let properties (that had never been our own home) you declare the gain on the land and property section of the tax return. By only selling one in each tax year, and they were jointly owned so 2 lots of CGT allowance applied, the amount of CGT actually payable was quite small. If you sell your private residence that has always been so I don't believe there is any need to declare it, but when we eventually sell our previous house that is now let, I am expecting to have to declare the sums on our tax returns that may or (hopefully) may not result in any CGT actually payable. I didn't think a capital loss could be carried forward to next year. If you make a gain on one transaction and a loss on another in the same tax year, the loss making one should reduce the tax payable on the gain, but I thought that only applied if both happened in the same tax year.

Re electricity usage. Forget the silly remote monitor thingy they give you, I keep hearing how in accurate they are (I can't understand why that should be the case). Just take a daily reading from the dial actually on the meter itself and record that, take the reading at the same time each day.

CGT is charged on the simple sum, purchase price and sale price. They then assume a linear gain over that time, it is no good arguing it went up in the first x years and then down in the last y years. There are indeed some nasty changes to PRR due in April 2020. At the moment PRR apples to the time the house is your primary residence and the last 18 months of ownership, that reduces in 2020 to just the last 9 months of ownership. Also in 2020 letting relief ends. Currently in most cases that will reduce any CGT to nil on a house that was previously your main residence and was then let. I would think this situation would not bother a self builder like me taking a long time to build as for most of the time the plot has been my primary residence, though in the caravan not the house.

Sorry to hear about the UFH. I wonder what the mental block is that prevents some people just setting up an UFH system so it works. Mine just worked first time, it's not rocket science. I hope you get it sorted soon. We were glad to move into a part finished house,infinitely better than a cold cramped static caravan, with the bonus that you can spread the butter in the morning. Try to enjoy your new surroundings in the knowledge all the niggles will get sorted out. This forum will give you all the help you need with that.

If it goes wrong, put the original hose back.

I am not sure SEPA will allow discharge to a dry "watercourse" It is a lot harder to get a discharge permit from SEPA than it is the EA in England and dilution rate is one of the things they look at. If there is no flow, there is nothing to dilute it.

I would move that land drain you have dug ASAP right up to your plot boundary, and fill in the ditch you have already opened. The problem you have is a filter mound needs to be 10 metres from a watercourse, and if SEPA decide that is a watercourse that excludes a large chunk of your land from being usable as a soakaway. There wasn't a watercourse there before you dug it so make it so again. I would be inclined to dig a land drain right around the whole perimiter of your site, fill it with rock, making it a French Drain, and cover with geotextile and a thin layer of soil. Make it run into the roadside drain, as inconspicuously as you can.

Hi and welcome I researched filter mounds as I very nearly used one myself. They are not that scary. No 1 thing is to do a percolation test. But you don't dig a deep hole as normal, you dig a 300mm cube hole at the surface, fill it with water and time how long that takes to drain away. I can fill you in more on the details as this progresses. This will give you your percolation rate Vp. From this, and the No of bedrooms in the house you can then calculate the area of ground that needs to be covered by a filter mound. This filter mound is just a pile of graded sand of a known percolation rate. Because it is graded it is more expensive than building sand, I got a quote and it would have been about £1000 for the graded filter sand. Add a bit for a ferry ride unless there is a quarry on the island that can supply it. You build a mound of sand, about 1 metre high, on top goes your normal perforated drainage field then the whole lot gets covered in soil, so you have a garden with a bump in it. All you need to know about filter mounds is contained in this little book https://www.brebookshop.com/details.jsp?id=148788 It is only about 25 pages and I objected to paying £2 per page, so I borrowed it from our local library, they got it on an inter library loan for me at a cost of just over £1 for the postage. Once you have worked out how big the filter mound needs to be, you have to work out where you can fit it, given the building regs limits how close it can go to a building and a boundary. It was lack of space in the end that made SEPA give in and give me a permit to discharge to a burn instead. Another tip: Avoid treatment plants that have moving mechanical parts. Trust me, you do not want to be servicing them when they go wrong. Instead choose one that works on an air blower principle like Biopure, Vortex, Conder, Graff and probably many others.

It is often terminated inside direct to the drain pump so to change it you have to take the machine out and turn it on it's side, then it is obvious how to detach it and what fitting it needs.

I did deliberately place the ASHP on the south side of the house as in winter on a still day, the air is very noticeably cooler on the north side. But even that is probably very marginal given the volume of air it moves.

And why was the resolution in one case to buy back the house, not to properly repair it? This can't surely be down to deliberately saving money by using less cement can it? so it can only be ignorance by whoever is doing the mixing then?

You can buy or make a waste water heat recovery system. Typically this would absorb some of the waste heat from say a shower waste and put it back into pre heating the cold feed to that shower.

Where these cases lose my sympathy is when you get statements like "demolition and complete rebuild is the only answer" Er, no, there is nothing wrong with the rest of the pool complex, just the home cinema "box" so worst case rip that out and re design it. I also agree it is a lousy environment for a home cinema anyway with all the humidity from a pool.

I thought this was going to be a thread about a home cinema on a house boat that proved to be a little bit too heavy for the boat........

This was discussed before and it seems to depend where you are. In some areas it seems easy to remove a derelict uninhabitable property from the valuation list, others not so.

Forgot to add, we are on the electoral register at the new address as well.