ProDave

He certainly did need to do some work before calling the DNO, otherwise they may have refused to reconnect the installation if they thoght it was dangerous.

^^ That does indeed take the biscuit. I don't think I have personally seen anything as bad as that. Definitely a candidate for an EDN.

How did you secure the back box? It would have had a dwang originally to screw to. It's unlikely to have a dwang at the new height. I would have replaced it with a plasterboard box, and given the amount of cables, a 47mm deep box.

From the above link: So the plant must be 7M behind the house but the soakaway must be 15M behind the house. No mention of distance from boundaries, but check the 15M to the adjacent properties, depends how long their back gardens are (hopefully at least 15 metres) If you can go up to your boundaries (check with BC) you will have roughly 15 metres by 5.5 metres, widening a bit towards the house. That's something like 80 square metres available, which I am sure is plenty (our previous 5 bedroom house needed 85 square metres) The crucial thing to look up to confirm that is whether you can indeed install the soakaway right up to your boundary

If we are talking about layout, make sure you put your hot water tank right at the centre of where all the hot taps are to minimise pipe lengths to the hot tap. Don't do what my (plumber) friend did, and put the HW tank in the plant room at one end, the complete opposite end of the house to the bathrooms and kitchen.

Why are you raising them? Beware of building regs minimum and maximum heights, you don't want to fail on something so simple.

Anyone looked up the English Building Regs clearance distances yet? Without that we can't proceed. Another alternative we looked at is the Puraflow system. http://www.symbiotictrading.com/products/puraflo/ This discharges the effluent into containers full of peat and it filters out of the bottom. They are laid on a bed of stones and gravel so what drains out soaks into the ground. They can either be buried or sat on the surface in that case acting like a packaged filter mound. When we looked that solution would fit the very small amount of space we had available, we would have needed 2 crates of peat for our 3 bedroom house and the percolation rate of our soil. But for some unspecified reason building control rejected it, and at that point SEPA granted us a permit to discharge into the burn so we stopped looking at surface discharge. Can you find out who owns the 25ft border between you and the road? and see if you can get permission to put the soakaway under there. This is quite common up here, indeed the soakaway for our old house is under the field behind it.

Firstly, a properly skimmed wall or ceiling needs no sanding. It is totally different to taping and filling where a soft filler is used and sanding the joint is normal. Sorry to say, you need a different plasterer. It really is a job where you want a personal recommendation. We are pleased with the plaster finish in our house, but I knew the plasterer. I know you contracted the job to a builder so did not employ the plasterer directly, but he would have been off my site by now.

This could be a long list. LOTS of insulation. Air tight membrane and seal everything to death. MVHR Good triple glazed windows and doors. Efficient heating system probably with under floor heating. Beyond that it gets very much into personal tastes.

I thought I would post my own take on a manifold hot water distribution system. Requirements: To provide a central distribution and isolation point for hot (and cold) water distribution. To minimise pipe length to hot taps. To minimise pipe usage and be as cheap as possible. The location proved interesting. There is no central cupboard to locate such a thing without making the hot pipe runs longer. So I put it under the floor. It is above the utility room, so when the ceiling is boarded a small "loft hatch" will be made that can be lifted out to gain access to the manifold. This would not have been acceptable had it been any other room. This is what I came up with: All just standard soldered fittings and ball valves. This feeds the bath and shower in the main bathroom. The basin and shower in the en-suite will be added later when that room is done. The basin in the main bathroom is on the wall backing onto the HW tank so gets a more direct feed straight from there with it's isolation points inside the vanity unit. The compression tee is the "I forgot that" hot water feed to the utility room (which will have it's isolator in the unit under it) and I decided it was a little busy there to solder more joints in situ. The kitchen will also have it's own feed from the HW tank as that will run in the opposite direction to all other HW points. Not as pretty as a bought "proper" manifold, but a damned site cheaper.

Have plenty of strong mates, and the beer ready for the topping out ceremony when it's in place.

Speak to your building control, I honestly don't know the rules under English building regs (anyone else?) Up here it's possible to phone them and speak to the "duty building control officer" to ask a question, or download the whole lot and get reading. There should be pages of information on "infiltration fields" that show you how to do the percolation test an show the distance limits EDIT (following your second post) You can't share a soakaway so say front garden for rainwater soakaway and back garden for foul soakaway. There will also be a minimum distance from buildings etc to the treatment plant. The soakaway can start immediately from the treatment plant unless there are different limits (e.g. here the treatmernt plant only needs to be 5M from the road but the soakaway must be 10M

Don't go any higher with your kwikstage yet. Get the beam up onto what you have (lift with the digger) then raise it an end at a time one lift (500mm) and insert the next transom and build the tower up. When you get it to the gutter level you need 2 winches and raise it "Alaskan" fashion by pulling it up the slope from both ends. Put a temporary plank up each ridge to give it something to slide up. A safety rope at each end to catch it if the winches fail and stop frequently to take up the slack on the safety ropes. When you get it to the ridge you will have to drop the 2 internal towers a little to get the beam over them, then rebuild them. And working from those towers lift it into final place an end at a time.

It's a bit more complicated. The first ones are man plus whistle and the last one is man (no whistle) Which means my values for man and whistle are wrong, and becomes a simultaneous equation to solve to get those.

Got it. A bit sneaky 3 pairs of shoes = 30, so one pair of shoes =10 1 pair of shoes plus 2 men = 20. We know pair of shoes = 10 so 2 men = 10 so 1 man = 5 man (5) plus 2 (pairs of) whistles = 13 so 2 (pairs of) whistles = 8 therefore 1 (pair of) whistles = 4 So the final sum single shoe (5) plus man (5) plus single whistle (2) = 12

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Another related method is cut a number of vertical slots in the stump with a chain saw and light it by emptying your hot BBQ charcoal on top. The slots burn in a similar way and it just smoulders and burns down.

Well at least we know the door switch works. The water pressure would have been pretty close to 0, we turned the water off and then flushed the loo and left. I don't think the stopcock was letting by as when we got home the loo cistern was still empty. So it was just all the water in the pipes able to drain by gravity. At the moment we don't have a HW tank so I have all the hot and cold pipes temporarily strapped to the cold mains in so there would have been more pipe work to drain down than normal.

The basic rules are you have to find somewhere for the treated water to go. This usually mean a soakaway (or more correctly an infiltration field is the correct name) To design that you need to know more about your land, you need to know the percolation rate. So, dig a hole 1 metre cube (i.e 1 metre deep and room to get into) In the bottom of that dig a hole 300mm cube. Put a stick in this hole with a mark 75mm up from the bottom, and another 225mm up from the bottom. Fill the 300mm hole with water. When the level drains down to the first mark, start timing. When it gets to the bottom mark, stop timing. From that you can work out the percolation rate of the ground, and then knowing the number of bedrooms work out the occupancy and calculate the area of land needed for the infiltration field. Then look at your local building regs for the limitations on position, e.g here the infiltration field must be kept 5 metres from a building, 5 metres from an boundary,. and 10 metres from a road or watercourse. Then you can work out if you have enough land to do that. If not I am afraid you have to stump up for a connection as new cesspits are not allowed. If you can get that percolation time figure I can talk you through the sums. It might be handy to work out where an infiltration field might fit in the plot first and work out the area you might have available, it might be obvious from that it won't be possible. If your ground is poor draining or has a high water table an above ground filter mount might also work but you will have a garden with a large hump in it.

I would look at this from a different angle. The issue appears to be the window flashings and the minimum overlap in a situation of adjacent windows meaning you need to put the windows closer together. I would instead be looking at what you can do to make the flashings work with what you have, first suggestion being a roll of lead down the doubled up rafters before you put the flashings on.

Yes, go carefully and the first sign of sparks STOP. As above, I removed one a similar size. It took a long time, but I had left the stump about 4ft tall (only as it had got to the point the stump was wider than my chainsaw bar) so I could push and pull for all the digger was worth to loosen it and determine what was holding it. The resulting hole was quite large, if that fence is a boundary and you don't want to disturb that, you might have problems.

Daewoo. I forget the number. I will probably post it on the white goods forum but don't expect much help. I haven't checked if the door switch is working, but the machine certainly is it ran a full wash through this evening so it isn't "broken" it's just poor design imho. Like I say I have known plenty of software driven consumer items to misbehave but no others made the floor wet. Yes I am not after wet room tanking standards, but something to ensure any puddle that forms stays there until mopped up or it evaporates, and cannot seep into the fabric of the building.

Remember my thread about the WM bearing? Well that one is still pending, I have not plucked up the courage to have a go and for a short term "fix" we are using a slower spin speed. Anyway we have just had a dew days away. Turned off the water in the house before going. When i got back, the WM was sitting there with it's door open, full of water level with the door opening and a puddle in front of the machine. The display was flashing "Le" level? My thoughts: This relatively modern machine is all controlled by a micro controller. I think the software gltched and opened the fill valve. It was only the contents of the water in the pipe that filled it and just a bit overflowed. What a good job the water was turned off. My understanding from what I can see with this machine is the door switch is just another input to the micro controller (unlike older machines where it was a proper interlock switch) SWMBO is now firmly convinced the machine is "broken" and should be disposed of and no further attempt made to "repair" it. I believe this is "just the way it is" I can point to many instances of software controlled consumer items where the software has glitched and strange things happen, (like a tv we have has a habit or turning the sound on, when in standby,) And this would just as likely happen with a new machine. I always used to turn off both the water and mains to items like WM's but SWMBO kept telling me I was silly. Just now does not seem the moment to say "told you so" Actions as a result of today: I have to lift that section of floor to see if the air right membrane held the water back, or have I now got a lot of soggy insulation. The finished floor in the utility and at part of the kitchen needs to be done as a wet room floor for next time this happens.

My concern would be noise.

I found the BB company okay, but it totally defeated them to give me a parcel tracking number that worked. They first gave me just a number, that didn't work. Then they gave me a number with a letter on the end. That didn't work. When the parcel did arrive, the number was correct but with the wrong letter on the end. It would have been less stressful if they could have got that simple bit of communication correct.