ProDave

Most industrial (3 phase) boards are outside the scope of these new fangled fireproof CU's that are only a domestic requirement. A good compromise might be one CU downstairs and a submain to an upstairs CU? I have a 20 way Hager board in my house. Deliberately fitted a few weeks before the new regs came in. It has a metal back part and plastic front. P.S I would hope all your circuits are on rcd's now?

Safe Zones are your answer. Basically straight up,. down, left or right from any accessory, and 150mm from the wall / ceiling joint. Assuming a sloping ceiling is still a ceiling, then anywhere, so that bit is easy. To get from first floor void to downstairs, any safe zone created by any accessory, and of course the consumer unit creates a safe zone above it, so first floor wiring staright up from CU to floor void above. Nothing wrong will drilling a counter batten to run cables through in a safe zone. I like to make my life simple so when fitting vertical battens for a service void, I leave a small gap at socket and switch height to save having to drill them.

Probably too late for my solution, but sleeve the studding e.g with pvc conduit, so the concrete never touches it. Withdraw the studs from the conduit once set and fill with foam. You will also then have a lifetimes supply of lengths of stud for "projects"

A had a quick look at County Battery, but that one is only 26Ah, The one OnOff linked to was 45Ah and at that rating County could not come close the the price he linked to.

Not staggering the tile won't make it leak, it just does not look right. The house next to me, when it was built in 2003, was done like that. To make it even worse, it was done with a tile that was "scored" down the middle, so each concrete tile was meant to look like two slates. With that, you stagger them a 1/4 of a tile so the "slates" look like they are staggered half a tile. But with them all laid in line, it looks like a slate roof with all the slates in line. The "error" in this case was employing a builder who you had previously not had the "best" results from?

Yes, but isn't the choice of Stainless to get long life? Talk about a report missing the mark.......

My partial soakaway is simply one section of the drain run, that runs parallel to the burn, being made of perforated pipe, and set on a bed of stones before being encased in more stones, covered in plastic and the trench refilled. The theory is, when the ground water table is low, most of what flows in will exit the perforated pipe into the stones and soak down into the ground, leaving very little coming out of the other end to enter the burn. This indeed is how it seems to be behaving in summer. In winter the water table will rise and the stones will become saturated in standing geound water so nothing more can soak into the ground, so it will all pass straight through and out into the burn, I believe it will actually act as a land drain to stop the water table rising much above the level of that section of pipe. The stipulation here is no part of an infiltration field will be less than 10 metres from a road, or a watercourse, so I have used that only available thin strip in the middle of my plot that meets both those dimensions. It does seem rather logical that one might want to continue with the perforated pipe and partial soakaway right up to where the pipe discharges to the burn, but one is not allowed to have the soakaway less than 10 metres from the edge of the burn. That restriction seems a little bit daft when one has a permit to discharge what is not disperseded to land, into the burn. EDIT: Another difference betweern England and Scotland, is according to the binding rules, a partial soakaway must be within 10 metres of the watercourse, but as I have already mentioned, Scottish building regs prohibit it being within 10 metres of the watercourse.

You normally start at the bottom and work up. If he has left the bottom row until last, then they won't be nailed, you simply cannot get in there to nail them. They may feel solid, but never under estimate the power of wind in a storm. I recall as a child a storm that stripped a whole lot of tiles off the roof of our house. My dad just went up the next day and put them back (replacing the broken ones) none were nailed. If they had been, they probably would have stayed.

I would not be happy with this job. More importantly will your BCO be happy with it? The nail holes are not only for "vertical tiles" they are to hold them down in a storm. Someone mentioned nailing every third row is normal practice and it certainly does not hurt to nail every row. The clips at the bottom edge that clip them to the batten below are to stop the wing getting under and lifting them.

If I am understanding that statement, and the pictures, then ALL the joints of all rows are in line, and no tiles are nailed? Oh dear. All mine have "coursed" joints, each tile nailed at the top and clipped to the batten at the bottom. And the bottom row of riles overhanging the gutter seems to me missing. I guess they will just be slotted in with no fixings either? Sorry to say you could have done a better job yourself.

If the armature was a permanent magnet, it would shuttle back and forth at 50Hz with just a simple coil energising the armature. I would have thought they would have designed the mechanics to be resonant at 50Hz so it would shuttle back and forth at 50Hz very efficiently. Any other mechanical resonant frequency and it will need more power to force it to move at an unnatural frequency.

Not sure how a diode halves the frequency? the waveform is still 50Hz but now somewhat lumpy. I can see it as a crude way to reduce power, not one the electricity suppliers would like.

Alternatively:They have said you can discharge to the watercourse via a "partial soakaway" Is not this open ditch your "partial soakaway"? If it were filled with a perforated pipe and covered, there would be no question. I have gone the "partial soakaway" route as that's what SEPA stipulated. Like you in winter I expect my partial soakaway will act in reverse as a land drain helping to lower the water table, but certainly all summer it has been working and actual discharge from the pipe at the other end into the burn is not very much at all in the summer. Here SEPA wanted to know flow rates of the burn in the summer to work out dilution rates etc. I guess the partial soakaway does work as it ensures in summer when the flow is lower, so too is the amount of discharge into the burn. In winter if the water table gets high enough that it does become a land drain, then the flow rate in the burn will be very much higher so should still have a good dilution rate.

Re a road crossing for services. That is up to YOU to be well organised. I had to cross the road for water, electricity and telephone. As you say, there is no way you will get all 3 out on the same day. So as it happens, Scottish water gave the cheapest price for the road crossing, so they were the ones that did it. So while the trench was open for the water pipe, as it got filled back in again I installed a duct for telephone and another duct for electricity, at the approporiate depths, so when the other utilities turned up, the duct was already under the road for them.

Re noise of ASHP's For a start a well insulated house with triple glazing won't hear much outside noise for a start. So a monoblock ASHP will have all the "noisy" bits outside and quite apart from the fact they don't make much noise, what little noise they do make is outside the house. Compare that to a GSHP where the circulating pump and the heat pump itself is inside the house. Even though that is not particularly noisy, the noise it does make is inside the house, so more likely to trouble someone who is sensitive.

Don't do what I heard of. A bloke tied the rope to his car, that was big and heavy. Didn't keep the keys in his pocket and didn't tell anyone else in the house not to use the car.......

I missed this post so late answer. You have your verge cloaks on upside down, the fat end goes at the bottom. L for left, R for right. Each one fits over a single tile end. The one above slots into the lower one to locate the bottom end, and the top end nails or screws in place. I don't see what your sheet of OSB hung over a tile batten is trying to achieve, other than a slide to ensure you do fall off the roof. As already mentioned, use the tile battens as steps. Of course with the Scottish system of a sarking board, you can't put your foot through the membrane. If you are afraid of heights, do not be afraid to get a harness and clip yourself on. It suddenly makes a scary situation a whole lot less scary if you know you will only fall a short distance. As for getting from the scaffold to the roof, raise the scaffold higher? Or failing that I just used a baby 2 step ladder. Your hop up looks fine for the job.

Then I would not have described it as a "lane" but a "path"

Am internal meter box can be anything. Does not even need to be a "box" A bit of chipboard, mdf pr ply on the wall seems to be accepted (at least by the Scottish bit of SSE)

But what about when someone wants to drive a car along it?

Try and get more insulation under the UFH otherwise some of your heat just heats up the ground under your extension. Do you need a SAP assesment for an extension? if so that should tell you the heating demand. Without that it's hard so size a system. That's a big extension, bigger than some people's entire house. I am going to be using an air source heat pump, probably a colder but less windy location to you. Search around for a bargain and you will buy the heat pump quite cheap, then it's just plumbing and some wiring. If it's only running the low temperature UFH then it should work very well. I would suggest fitting a buffer tank to avoid the heat pump short cycling.

Long shot, but look up "woofers" Usually East Europenans, travelling, will do almost anything in return for board and lodging. Very common source of short term labour on farms, and a near neigbour "employed" one to help re landscape their garden. Also the passive house builder up here, in their early days employed them as building labourers.

They don't "need" to be 50mm back, it's just that if they are less than 50mm, the circuit must be protected by an rcd.

My only gripe is nobody else apart from electricians knows about safe zones. I am not convinced they are entirely well thought out. I have seen it before, someone wants to hang a picture on a wall. There is a socket below it. So to make it "look right" out comes the tape measure to ensure the picture is exactly centred on the location of the socket........

+1 to running horizontally from socket to socket. I had a stand up finger wagging argument last year with the joiner building a house I was wiring, he was trying to tell me you can't do that and must take the cables up above the ceiling across and back down again And yes that left hand run looks to be more than 150mm down from the ceiling.