ProDave

I suspect few building inspectors pay much attention to the electrics, other than check socket and switch heights are correct. They rely on an electrician giving them an EIC. If the electrician was satisfied that the switches used were okay for DC and was happy to issue an EIC then I really don't think there would be any building control issues.

You are supposed to include it on your planning application usually for temporary permission for the static caravan. This will trigger the council tax valuation officer to keep on snooping. When we eventually moved into our 'van, I phoned them to tell them, and he said "let me get your file. Yes I have a photograph of your caravan, and I see I have been to your site 17 times" I have no doubt he is still snooping to see if the house build has reached a stage he thinks it can be assessed. It will be interesting to see if he notices that we might have moved in.

I remember wiring a house many years ago where the owner was keen to tell me how he had two layers of 50mm kingspan insulation in the upstands like that. I then pointed out to him the gap between them allowing cold air in between the two, meaning the outside one was doing nothing.

Yes indeed Steamy. Most people when working out the ROI on e.g solar PV tend to forget that the capital has gone, so you need to recoup that before you start making a return.

That looks to me like the float is wedged against the side if the cistern at the bottom and not floating up. Turn the whole fill valve a little anti clockwise to clear the float away from the side of the cistern.

Turn it ALL the way. One way will shut the water off. Is the float free to move up and down? Sometimes things can get assembles wrong so the float is not free to move up and down, then it will not rise and shut the water off, so make sure the blue float can freely move up and down. If it really won't shut off, then the problem is with the fill valve and you need to start examining that.

You have never done any car mechanics then, like getting to some oil filters or even spark plugs Car mechanics throws in rusted / rounded / siezed nuts as well as being inaccessible.

Surprised you had 38mm battens. I found 25mm is plenty for 16mm pipes and the pug mix. I fixed mine down with plastic P clips (cheap as chips from CPC) and large headed screws. Last time I used the nail in clips and found they had a tendancy to pull out easily when just nailed into OSB Our first house had the same UFH system and just had standard timber joists. The frame designer was aware of the UFH method. This time round they specified JJI joists downstairs and and Posi joists upstairs. I did our UFH mix 5 parts sand to 1 part cement, and to do our living room took just over a ton of sand. That was a dry mix, well just using the moisture in the sand no water added. It has set hard. Easy to mix in a mixer and barrow in, and because you are mixing dry, a joy to clean the mixer afterwards. I chose the pug mix method as we had the sand and cement left over, so cost was £0 I would have had to buy some spreader plates, and then dispose of all that spare sand and left over cement. Of you paid £4K extra to upgrade the josts for pug mix UFH, I think I would instead have bought the spreader plates.

I think the cistern is continuing to fill, and then overflowing down the flush pipe. Turn that bit Peter circled clockwise until the water stops. You might need to then experiment with it a bit as it sets how full the cistern will fill before the water stops.

To do the cost analysis, should you be working not on the whole unit price, but just the cost of replacing the batteries at 10 years, which should be less than the whole unit. That assumes in 10 years you will be able to buy suitable batteries.

I wonder if this will lead to DIY systems becoming more widely for sale, and at a cheaper price?

Since we are doing "what can possibly go wrong" Well we bought the plot, started the build, put the old house on the market, and gave up after 2 1/2 years on the market with no buyer. Now limping along as a self builder hardly employing anyone else, and building as and when we can afford it. The good news is when we eventually sell the old one, we will have more left over than we ever expected, but boy it has been hard and frustrating.

The problem with borrowing £500K is you need the salary to support that kind of loan. That will be your first hurdle. then you will need the lenders permission to take away half (or more) of the garden to build the new house. Sold old house and caravan on site will be a lot less complicated.

Hi and welcome to the fourm. You are in good company here and there will be plenty to hold your hand as you embark on what at the outset can appear a daunting process.

And skews the market in favour of new builds rather than existing houses that are not eligible for the help to buy.

The temperature probe switchover relay is now installed. With the relay de energised it is connected to my 560 ohm resistor and that gives a temperature reading of 85 degrees which is way above the setpoint so the hot water heating is off. When I turn the hot water on at my programmer, the relay energises and switches over to the real temperature probe, and the hot water heating turned on immediately, giving a current tank temperature of 38 degrees. So that appears to be working. I am making some progress on these spurious flow errors I keep getting when everything is idle. So far LG have not been much help in solving this. Yesterday I just happened to be next to the controller when one of these flow errors happened. What I saw was the "on" light came on very briefly, just for a fraction of a second, and the pump also ran for that very short period. Then a few seconds later up came the low flow error. It is no surprise it didn't measure any flow as the pump was on such a very very short time. This got me thinking WHY did it power up for such a short period? As a test, I have for the moment disconnected the thermostat input to the heat pump (this is what calls for room heating when needed) and with that disconnected it has now gone 24 hours without a spurious low flow error. I don't believe it is the UFH manifold controller that is generating a real short demand. That is all very basic relay logic. There is nothing there to glitch like that, and the room thermostats are all mechanical, so again they would not glitch like that. So I am wondering about crosstalk? Perhaps the thermostat input is a high impedance input with a stupidly sensitive threshold and it sees a small spike from an induced voltage from something else? To test that theory, I am going to re connect the thermostat input, but connect a load resistor and a snubber to try and kill any induced voltage it might be seeing. I will report back once that test is done.

A kit house does not have to arrive on a low loader and need a crane. Ours was built by a local firm of builders in their steading nearby, and brought to site a few panels at a time on a tri axle 3 ton trailer behind one of their vans. Concrete delivery is the one that is likely to be an issue. Park the concrete lorry in the wider road and bring it in in a dumper truck? or mix on site?

My honest advice is go to a caravan dealer and look at the stock they have for sale. We are fortunate there are 2 such dealers close by up here. This will let you look at a lot of 'vans from the old £1000 barely habitable wrecks to some quite nice younger vans. and make a choice what suits you. The one we bought, we chose because it had an unusual layout with the living and kitchen area in the middle and a bedroom at each end. Not only did that seem a better layout for our site to live in during the build, it also has more potential for later use as work / storage space. (we are keeping outs as a garden outbuilding so it is not going anywhere) The advantage of buying from a dealer is usually transport is included. If you buy privately you will have to arrange and pay for transport, and not all the dealers up here will transport 'vans they have not sold. Ours was only single glazed. Yes double glazing would have been better, but you are never going to get particularly good DG units in a static, expect a very thin gap between the panes. Don't rely on bottled gas heating. In the first month of living in ours, the inbuilt gas fire had emptied a 47Kg cylinder at a refill cost here of £80. We stopped using it then and before the winter fitted a wood burning stove, that hardly went out between November and the end of March. Top tips. Support it well, ours sits on 12 piles of concrete blocks. Panel in the gap between the bottom of the 'van and the ground. Insulate under the floor. Strap it down to some stakes so it stays put in a gale. Lag all the pipes. Check the lagging from time to time, we had one freeze up due to mice stripping a 12" section of pipe insulation. These things are poorly insulated. However having said that we had no problems with condensation, unlike the very old one we had last time, so the more recent ones are not quite as bad so perhaps buying a more recent one is a better idea than an old wreck.

You tried asking anywhere for DIY gas advice?

Surely the DNO will give you a price for the 2 connections and you pay half each. To try and split hairs by saying "yours uses a little bit more cable than mine" is just silly? the cost difference will be a tiny fraction of the total cost. The cable might be something like Wavecon 95 with a drop down to 23 or 35mm concentric to feed into the houses.

Last house was tape and fill, almost the normal up here. Screw heads pop, and some taped joints the tape started lifting after a few years, needed some rework. Also some boards were not perfect with ripples visible on the untaped bits in some light conditions. So this time we have had it skimmed, now we have found a good plasterer who is as rare as rocking horse ...... up here. At this time of year, a plaster skim is dry in 2 days and painted in 4.

It could be that if someone "gives them all the information" they think you are trying to pull a fast one and get an EPC better than it really is, so deliberately ignore what you have given them. It you told your MOT tester "the brakes are just fine" would you expect him to not bother testing the brakes?

My guess is it was once an airing cupboard and where the socket is once powered the immersion heater.

Because the special location is a room containing a bath or a shower. The barber shop has neither.

Another option, if it's a plasterboard wall is just move it to the hall then? This no electrics in bathrooms is just because we are wimps and not allowed to make our own safety decisions. In Australia it is normal to have a socket right next to the shower and that is usually where the washing machine stands, and a hairdryer plugs in. When I told my BIL we are not allowed to do that because someone would walk into the shower with the hairdryer plugged in and the water running. His reply in his Austrailian accent was "well if they are that bloody stupid they deserve to die"