ProDave

I find a 60cm desk perfectly acceptable. Long gone are the days of big fat CRT screens that took up half your desk and demanded a very deep desk.

That looks totally wrong to me. The lead should go on before the stone. They look to have put the lead over the face of the stone, and water will run into that gap. That is the way you do it if you are then going to cover it with render.

That is £803 per square metre. Not a huge saving over the £1000 per square metre I am building my house for. I would want to see a lot more saving than that to justify a cabin rather than a full spec house.

Yep that's the way I feel about wholesalers and avoid for that reason. BES, screwey's, Toolstation, CPC, Shop4Electrical, TLC direct etc provide most of my needs in a much more predictable and timely fashion.

Treatment plant discharging to a burn is a delightfully simple system. You will need a discharge permit from SEPA and they don't like giving them unless this is the only option. We had to prove, buy proposing 2 other schemes first, that discharge to the burn was the only option before they would allow it. now it is installed is is wonderfully simple with nothing to go wrong. Make sure you use one of the air blower type treatments plants. I would not personally choose one of the type that has rotating mechanical parts in the brown smelly stuff.

Yes the size limit is external, so the more insulation you have, the smaller internal space you have. The size I am sure is based on a typical twin unit traditional static caravan, limited to 12 ft wide for each half, so that would be just over 7 metres. It looks like in Scotland we are limited to the older definition based on a twin unit of 10ft wide sections which is where we end up with just over 6M maximum width.

the Highland Council's definition of a mobile home is here https://www.highland.gov.uk/downloads/file/1346/bst_018_caravans_and_mobile_homes I assume it is the same for the whole of Scotland. There is a size limit, and a "ceiling height" limit, but no ridge limit on a "caravan" Note that in England you are allowed a larger "caravan" then we are in Scotland, something to do with the Caravan act being updated in England but not here. Planning don't need to know if it is a mobile home or a fixed home, they just want the size and what it looks like. If you get planning for something that fits the definition of a "caravan" then it means no building regs for the building. You might need building regs for the waste connection, ask them as you are just laying a pipe to an existing system they may still want to take their fee and inspect it. @Crofter has a building warrant for his drainage system. Good that the company supplying it will zero rate it. I have yet to find anyone who has tested a VAT reclaim on a portable building, you won't have a "completion certificate" but it must surely be worth a try to reclaim the VAT on anything you spend on it. As to bending the rules? I am sure @crofter has a vaulted ceiling. And the "rules" say it must be transportable by dismantling to 2 sections, but I know a company that makes such portable buildings typically in 4 sections and seem happy that it complies. Another advantage of building a "mobile home" is more flexibility on layout, e,g you won't have to follow all the over zealous "activity space " and "circulation space " requirements.

Are you missing a trick here? A plot that big in the city would surely support more than 1 house? Or are you planning a phase 2 later on to the right of the house you propose? (what is the significance of the "1" in the house outline?)

Pop one out from the ceiling and look again with the flir at the empty hole. I suspect something (hot pipes passing through?) is making the ceiling - floor void very warm and it is that warmth coming out that you are seeing.

It is interesting how planning policies vary. Up here, if you try and exceed 5 houses accessed from the same private track, they insist on upgrading the track to highway standard and the road being adopted as a public road. I am sure that is what happened here. In 1980 when my plot first had PP it was a private track and would have been serving 5 houses including the one on my plot (if it had been built then). By the time we moved here in 2003 the road was surfaced, adopted as a public highway, and serving 7 houses plus the first one we built and the neighbouring house under construction. I don't know who paid for the road to be upgraded.

I was thinking of the Oban Tesco flooded a few days ago. I have a day on a boat tomorrow moving it to a new location, looks like it's going to be a wet one.

Mine only heats DHW OR heating, never both at the same time, with a much lower supply temperature when space heating. Mine also has a unique feature that it only heats DHW for 30 minutes at a go, then reverts so space heating for another 30 minutes. It will keep on doing these 30 minute bursts of DHW hearing until the tank temperature is satisfied. There is no explanation of why it does this, but I speculate it is to minimse the time the HP is working hard, and reduce the risk of needing to defrost.

I don't subscribe to the notion that burning wood is "carbon neutral" Burning anything sends CO2 up your chimney. The notion that cutting down trees specifically to burn is "carbon neutral" is some warped logic that I don't agree with. Would it not be better to leave the trees to grow and absorb more carbon and burn coal instead? (not meant as a serious suggestion but to illustrate the flaw in the wood is carbon neutral theory) I do burn wood myself but I never cut trees down for it, it is all windfall that I burn.

Been a little bit wet over there in the last few days.

You know when you are getting old, when you kneel down to do something, then ponder, "what else can I do down here before I get up"

I agree I have been tinkering with mine for weeks on and off, just a little adjustment here and there, then wait and see how it behaves. And it has been a steep learning curve to get inside the head of the heat pump designer to really understand what each parameter really means. Had I been paying someone to do all these tweaks, I feel it might have got expensive. I am also aware that having learned how my unit works would not help me very much if I came to set up a different unit. It is really easy to see how badly specified and badly set up heat pump systems can be dismissed as "useless" and removed by their owners after only a short period of time.

On my unit (I know it is different to yours) There is a parameter for hot (sanitary) water temperature. Mine has a temperature probe in the tank so heats the tank until that is satisfied. I also have a parameter for "sanitary water leaving temperature" that is supposed to set the flow temperature from the heat pump when heating hot water. I have that set to 50 but whether by overshoot, or simply ignoring that parameter, I have seen the flow temperature as high as 55 on occasions. What mine did not have was any external control ability for the hot water functions (i.e on and off times) so my solution was a bit of a fudge, already described on another thread.

The more I think about this, the more of a can or potential worms it is. So PP has been granted with the condition the turning space is provided. But the land the turning space will be on was not owned by the applicant that made the PP application. Did he serve notice on the owner of that land that he was submitting the planning application? Did the owner respond or make any objection to the PP application? The granting of PP for the turning space does not give permission from the owner to build it. If you build the house on your land without the turning space, you will be in breach of a planning condition, and if they try to enforce it but you have not achieved ownership or permission from the owner, what do you do? If the owner of that land knows this strip is vital to the development, he may value it as a ransom strip. I would either be looking to amend the planning (might mean re submitting) to get a scheme approved entirely on the land shown in the title plan (preferably without the obligation to provide the turning space) Or I would not be exchanging contracts on the purchase until an agreement is reached on the strip of land.

There is certainly some "interesting" logic applied by whoever programmed my LG ASHP. I could have set the supplied controller to be my time switch if I wanted to (though it is fiendishly complicated and no "normal" functions like advance to next program, or boost) But as soon as you enable the dry contact "thermostat" input, the internal timer is disabled and it just turns on and off according to the external thermostat. So my heating is now controlled by a conventional central heating programmer that powers the UFH manifold controllers when heating is on, and the volt free "call for heat" contact on the manifold controller connects to the ASHP dry contact thermostat input. I now only use the supplied controller just for setting parameters etc, not as a controller.

Hi and welcome to the forum I come from Oxfordshire but we moved up into a static caravan on site for our first build 15 years ago. Now 3/4 of the way through the second one.

As i said on the other thread. I would turn the issue around, and suggest you buy just the bit on the title plan, and your main access at the front to that comes directly from the track. Make the vendor responsible for creating the "public" turning space and he retains ownership (if he ever had it) of that bit. It nicely keeps it as the vendors issue to get any permissions to create the turning space.

Having seen that, I would turn it around and suggest the vendor creates the "public" turning space, and you buy just the plot without the turning space. That also passes the verge issue back to him.

I wasn't suggesting you put an Electricair back in again, merely saying that might give you an idea of the heating requirements of the property (assuming the Electricair had proved adequate) I know they were not popular around here. But then storage heaters in general are not popular, people prefer gas or even oil rather than electric storage heating. And it's also possible it proved inadequate in cold weather.

Having dug deeper than you "need" I would have just poured more concrete rather than filling it in again.

I just have a gut feeling the making an offer to buy it might have just killed an adverse posession claim as they openly admit it is not theirs. The bit that is paved and used as access and has been for many years you may have acquired a right of access over even without owning it. As this strip is only along one side, have you looked at alternative plot layouts that would take access from where your plot joins the track without crossing this strip? Can you post a site plan showing this strip?