ProDave

What's the desired outcome? Cheaper or easier filter changes? or better filtering?

When it has calmed down, I would want to inspect the aftermath and see what has failed, and see what improvements you could make if you re install the same i.e. look at reinforcing or suplementing the fixings provided. Flooding is our issue today, heavy rain and melting snow. The burn is up as high as I want to see it just now and still it rains.....

Oh dear. I wonder if your site insurance will cover that?

Sounds a similar situation to mine, though I steadfastly refuse to borrow so we are scraping along slowly. How finished is the house? If you can get it basically habitable (basically safe, working heating, a working kitchen and working bathroom) you can get a certificate of temporary habitation from building control. That will be taken as "complete" for the sake of getting normal buildings insurance, so would a lender also take that as "complete" for the sake of a small mortgage?

I kept the function of sample chamber and distribution separate. But I don't think this sample chamber is much cheaper http://www.drainstore.com/premier-tech-aqua-conder-sample-chamber.html

Hi and welcome. Which side of the border may determine which building regs you have to abide by. I would be surprised if an oak frame and then infil with I beams would be cheaper than an MBC build. Make sure you are really comparing like for like i.e. including all the wall structure, insulation, air tightness detail etc. Make sure lots of S facing glazing does not overheat the house in summer (the sun does occasionally shine in Wales)

Which might tie with the primer not put on at all?

To recap for those that don't know, my house is timber frame, clad in 100mm thick Pavatex wood fibre board and rendered with the Baumit.com render system, comprising a base coat of lime based render mixed from powder, and their silikon top final coat that comes ready mixed in tubs. We were away for the xmas / new year period and came back on 3rd January to find a thick layer of ice all over the plot and the road, the neighburs told me nobody had been able to get their car up the road for 2 days. So it had obviously been very wet, then very cold. I observed a small but of render has "blown" almost certainly frost damage. This is the end wall of the garage. No other parts of the house are affected. Obviously it will need repair. But I am trying to understand why it happened, and what I can do to stop it happening again. My random thoughts: I believe it is only the thin silikon top layer that has blown, the base coat I believe is still solid. This bit is closer to the ground than any other part. That together with the fact it's a concrete parking area, means it will get splashed with rainwater far more than any other part of the house. That should not be an issue. The wood fibre board sits on plastic support trays at the bottom so splashing water should not make the wood fibre board wet. The fact it is only the top layer that appears to have blown suggests I am right and the wood fibre board is dry. If excessive splashing rainwater is the problem, that will largely be solved eventually by the fact this concrete parking area will eventually be covered with a car port. My other thoughts are at the moment, there is no garage door (garage door opening only just out of shot to the right) So the inside surface of this wall is at ambient temperature (i.e. damned cold during the period this happened) So this section of wall is cold right through, so much more likely to get frost than any other part of the house. That situation will improve a lot when I can eventually afford to fit a door. My last thought is a bit of an unknown. With this render system, you apply the base coat, then paint on a primer then apply the top coat. I was not present when this wall was rendered (the last one to be done) but I have a suspicion the primer may not have been applied, or if it was, the primer was applied and then rendered the same day. All other walls had the primer applied and top coat of render next day. This wall has always been "odd" in that it appears a whiter colour than the rest of the house, in spite of being finished with the same colour render as the rest of the house. Also worth noting, it is common to see frost on the walls, particularly the north facing wall and it has never created this problem before. Anyone got any thoughts on this please or experienced similar?

Did YOU not specify what windows and finishes you were proposing on the planning application?

I have has a poke around in the routers menu's and find we have used 18GB in the last 5 days (presumably that's the last time the router crashed or was reset) That scales to a scary 110GB per month. Unlimited it is then, any pay per amount mobile package would be astronomical.

Perfectly true. But to someone like myself perfectly capable of a DIY install, it "hurts" that I can't install approved kit myself and claim the FIT. So to all practical purposes for me, the cost of a professional install is the premium I have to pay in order to claim the FIT . My last install took me two part days. Had it not been winter with the short days it could have been done in 1. So lets say there are 2 man days to install my proposed ground mount system. Now show me an MCS registerd company that will install it for £400

UVC - turn both the pressure ant temperature relief valves periodically to make sure they discharge and the water flows through the tundish and out f the discharge pipe without it blocking or spilling out of the tundish. And to check they seal again whern you let go.

My bad. Because the links are on the same line without even a space berween them I thought there was just 1 link. I don't see the chimney in the joist layout, just a big opening that I assume is the stairwell. I am wondering if the "problem" is just the size of the joists. The smallest they could get away with that just about meet the requirements for sag? and perhaps my own joists (similar span and no walls above) have simply been over engineered to give a better result?

I have seen DIY kits including pane;s and inverters for £2K so my £2K mcs pewmium is about right. Remember mine will be ground mount but in any case I have my own scaffold so that is not an issue. When the time comes (which will be near the end of our build so a while off yet) I will look again and compare the options.

In other words the total FIT payment is about £193 If it costs £2K more to get a system installed by an MCS contractor so you can claim the FIT than it does for a DIY system and no FIT then it will take just over 10 years to recover the "MCS premium" That's what I am battling with. In my book the payback time for the mcs premium needs to be no more than 5 years or I will be going the DIY and no FIT route.

Would have to find out the data used by 2 tablets, 2 pc's and 2 phones and add it all together. Of course BT must have measure of what we actually use but don't want us to know in case a metered rather than unlimited deal might suit us better.

Daughter seems to spend a lot f time on you tube, but we don't stream films.

I'm on a discounted deal until about May paying £26 per month to BT. I will be looking at other options if BT are going to hike it to £43 then.

Last time I made a hot wire cutter, I used a bit of wire from one of those very old bar heater elements, the sort where the wire spirals round a ceramic former. They were 1KW elements so about 4 amps will get them glowing red. I just fed whatever length I was using from a bench power supply using the current limit facility and adjusting the current to set the wire temperature.

Ouch, those seem expensive. I had hoped t move off wired BB as soon as an alternative became available. Our community council was looking at a wifi system and were talking of £25 per month, but that has stalled as nobody has tendered for the contract. EE are building a new mast near us some time soon so I was hoping they would offer a decent deal. Our "problem" is we are on BT unlimited and there seems to be absolutely no way to tell how much we actually use so don't know how much we would actually need to replace that.

Which probably means you could have got it half the price elsewhere. Chandler's are not renowned for being cheap places to buy stuff.

@readiescards Are there any internal partition walls above supported by this sagging floor? That might be quite a difference. My long spans are just supporting the floorboards of the identical sized rooms above with no walls sitting on the joists.

I only see the joist sizes not the layout plan? As has been said, your joists look small. For my 4.8 metre span I have 300 by 100 on 600mm spacing.

You really don't want to be running 24V that length. If you do it's no use applying the voltage drop calculations for 240V. A 10V drop may be allowable for 240V but would be catastrophic for a 24V system, so you would end up with a monster sized cable. Stick to 240V and put the control box close to the gates.

That's a very good point made by @AndyT My heat pump wants control of the immersion heater for the ant legionella cycle. I am planning my own home made immersion dump controller, and it will include switching of a changeover relay so the dump controller takes control of the immersion and disconnects it from the heat pump for that time. That eddi device looks interesting but at that price I will stick with my home made one, which will be a derivative of the one I used at my last house using an arduino as the controller.