ProDave

It says "LED G9" So could it just be they have provided a very low power LED lamp and it's not living up to your expectations of light output?

Need more information. Leaving the earth disconnected should not stop a light fitting working, but may make it unsafe so go back and connect those earths. You can NOT use an earth core for anything else don't even think about it.

I have a customer who (she claims) gets a headache under flourescent or LED lighting so is now on a mission to stockpile filament bulbs to see out her days.

Slightly related to this, the Scottish government announced is is to launch a "not for profit" energy supply company, the theory being if you eliminate the profit, then consumers will get a rate closer to the wholesale price. It will be interesting to see what that offers when it launches.

Make sure the power is off and long nosed pliers will extract that. Done it many times. I thought you were going to talk about silly light fittings, the sort where it is impossible to to get two 1mm cables into a terminal etc.

Well my stairs arrived from Staribox today. Managed to get the top flight in. Unfortunately there is a problem with the two newel posts that join the top and bottom flight. They don't fit and they have finished the top detail incorrectly. I have emailed stairbox with pictures. Unfortunately, until that is resolved I can't fit the lower flight (which in itself looks correct)

It arrived today. Fitted easilly and all working again. A big thank you to @Onoff

Our largest bedroom (daughters room) has a full height vaulted ceiling. It also has a mezanine floor above the adjacent small bedroom. The duct for both these 2 bedrooms is in a small boxed in area right at the very bottom of the mezanine ceiling slope. One goes down through the ceiling for the small bedroom under the mezanine and the other comes out of the mezanine overhang for the big bedroom.

I am looking for the confused smiley. Never mind I'll have to borrow one.

On our first build they did. The engineer that came to make the connection was pragmatic enough to leave a long coil of cable so that when the house was built we could uncoil it and route it into the house. As always, tell the suits behind their desks what they want to hear, and the man on the ground will make it work.

Steady on. MOST of you on this forum are "southerners"

4 days in total. 3 days with 3 men on site (2 spreading, 1 mixing) and the 4th day 1 mixing and 1 spreading.

Normal landline connection.

Downstairs is going to take a lot longer. The plan, once the stairs are in and it's painted, we will start sleeping in the house. Next step will be to get one of the bathrooms plumbed in but that's £££ to spend that are in short supply. Downstairs is even more big ticket items like the under floor heating, getting the heat pump plumbed in and working, flooring, kitchen etc, so progress will be limited by availability of funds. Downstairs is not even plasterboarded yet. So for some while yet we will still be performing a lot of functions in the static 'van.

This time it's plastering. Blog at the usual place http://www.willowburn.net/ Look for the entry Plastering Upstairs. Here's one picture to whet your appetite Next comes painting, lots of painting. And the stairs are due from Staitbox on Monday

The extra cost is put down a "distribution cost" It must be a bit galling on Orkney, where you generate more on the islands than you use, to still be hit with this surcharge.

Another company I worked for later on sent and received machinery all over the world. so had a lot of surplus packing crates. A lot of it came from Brazil and was really nice hard wood crates (far too nice just to use as packing wood) It used to get piled up during the week at the back of the site and a big bonfire light each Friday morning. So the accepted practice was to go and pick over the bonfire on a Thursday lunch time and put any you wanted in a separate pile then go and organise a wood chit and collect it after work. I built a couple of sheds, a whole load of fencing, and boarded my trailer with that nice Brazillian wood. Not long before I left someone decided it was no longer "correct" to burn it, so they started paying a contractor to remove the waste wood, and at that point employees were no longger allowed to have any.

I am sure @Stones is on the same Iresa tariff as I am, and you won't find cheaper at the moment.

A 35mm box works just fine with a 25mm cavity and the thickness of a piece of plasterboard.

Well I have continued my "test" Last night as the house had reached comfortable temperature, I turned the heater down to it's lowest setting, 750W As I went to bed it was -3 outside and +15 inside giving a temperature difference of 18 degrees. According to the heat loss spreadsheet, that should require a heat input of 1KW to overcome losses so I was now under heating the house. And this morning the internal temperature showed a drop of 0.5 degrees overnight. I think this shows the real world heat loss is indeed pretty well matching the predictions from Jeremy's spreadsheet, so I now feel a lot happier that we are on target to achieve a house with a low heating requirement.

Yes it is. I also managed to purchase an early laser printer. A monster of a Cannon thing. It was given a notional value of £50 which I was happy to pay, but then the cash office complained about the cost of raising an invoice so I could pay them the £50 so suggested a nill value disposal instead.

I see some dreadful plasterboarding where the fitters bash ill fitting boards into place, bursting the edges in the process and just mutter "The taper will fix that"

Slightly different arrangement. Having identified your scrap wood, you had to get a "wood chit" signed by someone to say it was scrap and counter signed by the storeman. Then present the chit at the gate on departure. No size limitation, my trailer was the method of transporting complete workbenches. This was UKAEA It really was a hangover from 50 years ago when most people had an open fire and were regularly collecting firewood.

Perhaps @Visti can confirm or not. I recall on another discussion about the Graven Hill plots that they were obsessed with the end builder not being able to reclaim the VAT for the provision of services to the plots, and they "solved" the issue by selling the "golden brick" foundation package including service connections which would be eligible for zero rating. I thought at the time it was a restriction too far. I don't know if this is how they ended up progressing or if the idea was dropped.

Just to be clear, there was nothing underhand about me finding a good home for a number of surplus workbenches. The lab at the time was undergoing a period of change and modernisation and virtually all the old wooden benches were being replaced with smaller metal framed melamine topped replacements. The old ones were scrap. It was a quirk of the bureaucracy that anything made of wood could be freely given to employees as "firewood" for free. If an employee wanted any scrap metal or scrap electronics that was a whole new level of difficulty. Scrap metal was sold weekly and it was pot luck what was there each week. Scrap electronics had to go through the radio club, and i remember it taking a whole year for a scrap oscilloscope I had rescued from a scrap bin to be eventually released for me to buy it for £3 (I repaired it and still have it)