ProDave

I thought I had seen just about every form of house construction, but here is a new one for me. Terraced ex LA house, been stripped bare for major refurb and rewire. In the kitchen, the party wall between this and next door appears to be just a timber frame, with 3 layers of plasterboard on the frame (presumably the same next door on the other side of the frame) Customer wants sockets on that wall. There were none before, in fact there are no electrics on the party walls at all. I can't go cutting holes in the 3 layers of plasterboard without compromising the fire rating. The only solution I can see is leave the 3 layers alone, batten it to make a sevice void and then a 4th layer of plasterboard. He will have to accept the room shrinking a little. Anyoine encountered this before?

Ah a soft southerner Just coming up to a year in ours. And we picked the longest coldest Highland winter for many years. Had many nights of -10, even -12 one night. A mere -3 forecast tonight, balmy weather. The best thing we did was fit a wood burning stove. That thing has been going almost non stop since November. It's been a struggle at times to keep up with preparing wood for it, but it has saved us a fortune in heating. The first month we were in we got through 47Kg of gas in a month. We stopped using the gas fire then.

The shower in our static caravan is like that. Solution: Turn the shower on. THEN start getting undressed. By the time you have got your kit off, the warm water has arrived. No time wasted. Same in the morning. I have got to know the point during my shave when it is just the right time to turn the tap on, and as I put my razor away the warm water is just arriving for a wash.

But if you have a private waste water plant discharging to an infiltration field then you are adding to the water that the land has to absorb.

I did my own percolation tests for building control. Nobody questioned anything. I was honest enough to highlight the problem with seasonal high water table, which is why we had the struggle to find something that worked and ended up with a permit to discharge into the burn. I could have just ignored the water table issue and installed an infiltration field and nobody would have been any wiser, except me when the garden became a swamp. While I agree it is wrong that anyone can submit false results, I would not like to see a system where you have to use an accredited testing company for things like this.

How far apart from the road crossing? Ours was only a couple of metres in the field the other side of the road and it cost £1726 including the road crossing under a 3 metre wide single track road (same road ceossing used for telephone and electricity)

If you are fitting internal insulation then you would create a service void for cables etc then plasterboard. Be very careful dry lining and insulating internally. so many people do it poorly and create a "plasterboard tent" By that we mean a layer of plasterboard with an air gap behind it and that air gap is open to outside either through gaps around the windows to actually open to the loft. I work as an electrician and lots of old cottages around here are like that, and on a windy day if you unscrew a socket or switch from the wall, a howling cold gale comes out of the hole.

That is still not right. He has only "given you" 3 months grace. What if you are like me and expect it to be well over a year until completion? If you are happy you will finish in 3 months then fine, but I would still be fighting.

We have a mezanine to the largest bedroom (extending over the smallest bedroom) It was detailed on the plans including the building warrant drawings. We are not intending it to be anything other than a "storage platform" to start with so access only by a portable ladder and no hand rail. Eventually some form of fixed steps will be installed (and a firemans pole if my daughter gets her way) which will dictate the need to fit a handrail.

Hi and welcome to the forum. On a brick walled house you do the wiring by chasing a channel in the brick fitting the cable behind capping and re plaster. Are you sure it's cavity wall? unusual for 1930's most of that period were solid 9" walls.

Hi and Welcome. Yes I am not far away, probably 45 minutes or about 30 miles. Looks an interesting site, but being so sheltered may be midge hell in the summer.

You just bolt the pigtails to the cylinders and turn on. Remember they are left hand thread. If you bought the 'van from a dealer it should have come with a gas safety test certificate. If you have not got the cylinders yet, phone around the suppliers. You can usually blag a pair of cylinders without paying the hire charge, though when I tried this Calor would not do that so we have a different supplier (actually slightly cheaper for the gas)

Mine was through buildstore but I forget which insurance company the policy is with.

Our build used epoxy chemical anchors to bolt the sole plate down. About 10% of them did not set and had to be re done.

Ours specifically says on completion it transfers to normal buildings insurance for the remainder of the term.

So is ours which is why the pv will be ground mounted out of the way of the trees

I think it depends how the pipe run gets into the house. In my case, the pipes will travel a metre or so along the wall, into the garage, up inside the garage into the plant room above. I suspect that is a long enough pipe run with enough bends that I won't get any transmitted noise. If on the other hand they came straight in to a habitable room I would use flexi's.

Thanks. I wish someone had told me that a year ago when I was buying mine.

Ebay. A German supplier on there regularly sells bundles of 20 rolls or Tescon Vana for way below what any UK outlet sells it for. e.g. this one works out about £15 per roll delivered https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/pro-Clima-Tescon-Vana-Klebeband-Profi-VE-20-Stuck/261425541408?epid=1104754860&hash=item3cde2d3120:g:pI4AAOxy3HJTJhWC

Definitely trestles and planks. I bought a set of the short ones that go down to about 0.5 metre, very handy for indoor work.

"According to the team, the device had a peak short-circuit current of about 33 nA, and a peak open-circuit voltage of around 2.14 V. That's not particularly high, but it is enough to demonstrate that the concept works, and might be scalable. " So that is LESS than 0.7nW generated then. I wonder what the payback time would be?

The loss will be negligible. It's better to have long DC cables as the voltage is higher and hence the current is lower on the DC side. If you are losing 10% in the cables, someone has messed up big time and wired them with bell wire.

I am hoping I can hold off drawing what is left for a few years. I plan to retire at 60 which is when my largest DB pension starts to pay. If I stop work then, I will be able to draw most of what's left effectively tax free. In other words I plan to use this to fill the gap between retiring at 60, and reaching state pension age (at which point I will have plenty)

I just thought I would resurrect this old thread to say finances have unlocked. I am still awaiting the small nest egg I was anticipating when I started this thread. That is still locked up in legal and technical bureaucracy and the sheer inefficiency and ineptitude of the solicitors dealing with that astounds me. I get the feeling a conclusion to that is still months away, and it pains me to think of the fees they will be charging for the "service" (sic) they have given. Anyway the unlocking comes from the fact a few days ago I attained the magic age of 55. That is the age you can unlock and start doing things with your pension money. So on my birthday I arranged for one small pension fund (the only defined contribution fund I have) to be transferred to a flexible drawdown account and I have taken the tax free 25% lump sum from that. The rest remains in my drawdown account to be drawn later as I need it, but will be taxable as income should I need to draw on it. That was not a particularly straightforward process as the provider the fund was with did not offer what I wanted so I had to first transfer it to a different provider, a process I started in January to ensure everything was in place to action it on my birthday. I always thought this was going to be the last source of funding to be unlocked and it still irks me that I had to wait until a specific birthday to access my own money. Ar least now we can start spending again (actually we started spending in February trusting nothing would go wrong and we would have the funds to settle the bills later this month)

I found the SAP assesment particularly unhelpful. It gives me the total energy used in a year, but not the very much more useful heat input required at any particular condition. For that I found @JSHarris heat loss spreadsheet far more useful. With all the data for my house input into that, it tells me the peak heat input to the house will be a little under 2.5Kw when it is +20 inside and -10 outside. That should comfortably be met by my 5Kw ASHP driving under floor heating and should leave it plenty of time for heating DHW as well That is the figure you need to size a heat pump for a particular house.