ProDave

Well I thought I would update what happened. My neighbour "digested" the SEPA document I gave him. No pipes turned up. 2 weeks later the digger was taken away having done nothing. I am now billy no mates. I walked down the road while he was out at his van the other day, and barely got a grunt to acknowledge I was there. ~Normally he would have a good chat. At least I don't have to worry about being flooded.

That sounds very much like our burn More like about 3 feet wide when it's in a nice mood like that, but it can come up a lot and then flows very fast. Our house is probably closer than yours will be, and our floor is also bout 2 metres above the water. Plenty of places for it to flood to without causing problems.

underneath an upturned plastic dustbin then just to get it working for now. Graff do a waterproof kiosk to house the blower, I have one of those coming up soon to wire. https://www.drainagesuperstore.co.uk/product/graf-one2clean-external-cabinet-upgrade.html

As long as their is room for the plumbing. Ours is in the airing cupboard, built around it once the tank was in. We have 250L. SWMBO has showered until it went cold, then complained the tank was not big enough. Don't under estimate how long a woman can spend in a shower.

The Graff units mount the pump remote from the tank, so you just need to find somewhere to put it, e.g a shed, put a plug on the flex and plug it in.

I don't know if the Graff works on a timer, or pressure. The pipes from the blower pass through the control box so it may be reacting to pressure changes, or that might just be to detect blower failure. It will be interesting to see if those timings are repeated.

Further to this. Where I was working today, they have a Graff treatment plant. That has the air blower mounted remote from the plant, in this case in the garage. The garage was serving as the site tea hut, so during lunch, I observed the blower was running for 5 minutes on, then 10 minutes off,

+1, PROVIDING it's done by a good spread. If there is any doubt, ask to see a job he has done to check his skill. We are intending ours to be plastered.

A ridge beam is a large beam running the length of the ridge of the roof. The two sides of the roof are hung from and supported from this substantial beam. It means there are no other cross timbers or trusses supporting the roof. Combined with a warm roof (insulation at roof level) means the entire volume of the building is free to use as you wish. Have a look at this page of my blog http://ardross.altervista.org/Wilowburn/insulating-the-roof/ 4th picture you can see the ridge beam, and there are pictures of the mezanine we have formed from one bedroom.

Hi and welcome. That sounds like a fantastic chance to self build your first home. Something I wanted to do 30 years ago, but back then I could not find anyone willing to lend me the money to buy the land, so had instead buy a grotty little starter home and save my self build ambitions until later in life. There is no need to compromise insulation to get a mezanine. Build a warm roof, supported on a ridge beam and the entire interior of the house is inside the insulated and sealed envelope of the building. In fact now we have just done that, I think it is in so many ways superior to putting the insulation at ceiling level and having a cold loft, and then trying to seal that cold space from the rest of the house. Your budget should be doable if you can do a lot yourself, it's the sort of build cost we are trying to achieve. Lots of options. A timber framed house does not have to be clad with bricks or blocks, ours is clad with wood fibre board to add more insulation and then rendered.

There is no such thing as "The Scottish Scheme" * Unlike England and Wales, there is no "Part P" to the building regulations. All that building control require for completion sign off is a Electrical Installation Certificate as defined in BS7671 I have done this several times now in this situation of the original electrician either having gone AWOL, or (more likely?) never existed in the first place. To solve this, you need to get an electrician to issue a "3 signature" version of the EIC form. This has one signature for design, one for installation, and one for inspection and testing. I only ever sign the inspection and testing part of the form (I can't sign the other bits as I did not do them). I then tell the client to get the original installer to sign the other 2 parts. I strongly suspect (with a nod and a wink) that those parts might (cough) not actually be signed by the person that did the original work. But building control accept it. After all, they only want a bit of paper to say it is safe. * Scotland tried to introduce a "Certificate of Conformity" scheme a number of years ago. As far as I can tell it fell flat on it's face. It was a purely optional scheme that if you registered with an approved body then by using a COC acredited tradesman, you got a very small reduction in the cost of the building warrant. Because it was an optional scheme, and the costs of joining it were high, I never bothered. I continue, just as I always have, to just issue an EIC and the three different council's who's areas I work in (Highland, Inverness-Shire and Moray), all still accept this for building control sign off.

Dowsing rods. And no I am not being silly.

Another vote for a rotating laser level and measuring staff with laser detector. This is what my builders used, checking the level about every foot or so as they went along with a rake leveling it.

Yes indeed what a saga. I guess you took a risk by "starting" before all the pre comencement conditions were signed off, and got away with it. I guess the worst thing that could have happened was they could have issued a stop notice, but the important thing was you got it far enough for building control to agree it was "started" without issue from the planners. Let's hope the rest of the build goes more smoothly.

We had a similar detail issue. In my case I am wanting to avoid all exposed woodwork, and eventually the fascias will be clad with aluminium. On my gable end, the verge cloak fittings were not quite large enough to cover all the wood, so I fitted a plastic drip bead to keep any blown water off the wood, but it has the effect of making the water run down the drip bead rather than drip off (that detail is irellevant for me, as long as it keeps it off the wood) This photo was taken before the cladding and render were fitted. The drip bead is just a strip of plastic fitted before the cloaks went on. The under side of the timber is still exposed but that has now been treated but it never gets wet anyway (thanks to the drip bead)

Hi and welcome (back) That looks a good project. We look forward to hearing about your year long planning battle.

I was watching a "professional" ballance an mvhr system just last week. The device he was using was a wind vane anemometer, the sort with a small fan blade to measure the wind speed remote from the instrument (on a short curly cord). This was attached to a large square "funnel" large enough to go over the external intake and exhaust vents (the flower pot idea should work just as well). He used the same attachment for all the measurements including from the internal vents.

Hr said that's a topic we will address once the line and broadband is complete, so on the agenda for this week I believe.

I'll complete this thread with how it panned out, though strictly it's not "finished" yet. So we were waiting for traffic lights to access the awkward junction box. I was originally told "up to 2 weeks" for those. While waiting I took Stone's advice and raised a complaint about how the install was being handled. I was allocated a complaint manager. I soon found his task was just to try and placate me and keep me happy and informed. I do not believe he ever did a single thing to speed anything up. Anyway, he told me the traffic lights were booked for 17th April and there was absolutely nothing he could do to speed that up. Note that date. I didn't realise at the time but that was Easter Monday Bank holiday. So while waiting and fuming, something else happened. We moved out of our old house and into the static caravan on our building site. No we haven't sold the old house, we have implemented "plan B" and the old house is now let. So that left us in the 'van with only a poor mobile phone signal and no interned. So if you wonder why I have not been on the forum much for a few weeks..... Anyway on 12th April, unexpected, the traffic lights appeared. They sat there from 9AM holding up the traffic until OR eventually turned up at mid day. By the time they took the lights away at 3PM they had done the connection in that awkward junction box. But that was not the end of it. That only got a line from half way down our road, to about 3Km towards town. It took 2 more days, until mid day on Friday before they had pieced together a working line from our house to the exchange. Note that was Good Friday, a Bank hoiday, but they still seemed to be working. Lesson 1. Do not believe any date given to you even by your complaints manager. So we had a connection. so the line will be on very soon? NO. The OR engineer departed at mid day on Friday saying "I will submit the request for connection when I get back to the exchange" My complaints manager could do nothing to speed it up, pointing out the Bank holiday issue, saying it could be up to a week to get connected. Lesson 2: Open Reach as an organisation know nothing about project management, and the concept of getting the stuff ready in the exchange in parallel to the line work so it could be activated as soon as the line was complete, is obviously something they have never even considered. Wednesday 24th I get a call from the complaints manager. Your line is active. I was out at the time, so I phoned SWMBO to ask her to go and check the phone and then the broadband. Sure enough the phone line was working, but no broadband. Back on the blower to the complaints manager. Ah yes, you ordered just a line to start with, and added the broadband to the order a week later. That will be treated as an upgrade, and the broadband won't be ordered until the line work is complete. That can take up to 2 weeks. Yes of course I blew my top at him. again. Thursday the complaints manager phones me to say the broadband will be active next Wednesday. Then, half an hour later, I noticed the broadband light on the router was on, and we now have broadband. The closing bit of incompetence was then on Friday, I had a phone call from someone else at BT followed up with an email. telling me our broadband would be acivated on 8th May. I didn't dare tell hime it wa already active in case they realise their mistake and turn it off again. Lesson 3. considering they are a communications company, Open Reach and BT have the worst communication I have ever come across and you simply cannot believe anything they tell you. Still some "issues" to sort out next week with the complaints manager, one being the very slow speed "broadband" It's barely making 1Mbps download. The previous house, 100 metres further from the exchange was almost reaching 2 Mbps and we considered that slow.

There are two junction boxes that our line passes through down our road. Both are cast iron boxes set into the ground next to the road. Both were full of rainwater with the cable junctions under water. Let's hope the tunction boxes are truly waterproof as in submirsible? Vfast does not cover our area, but that sounds exactly like the system the Community council are looking at getting installed up here.

At the very least, choose a window with the handle at the bottom, e.g a top swung Velux? The other issue with small (short) windows like that, is if you lower the bottom of the window, you might then bang your head on the top of the recess. Stones solved that by having nice tall windows so you get the view low down, but there is still head height clearance. At this stage, probably the easiest solution is replace the windows with taller ones. Then the top can stay where it is and the joiners just have to cut some of the rafters and re frame the bottom. A lot easier than keeping the same size and moving it down.

Tell me more about this Vfast thing. Is it available everywhere? i.e in the Highlands? After the pain I have had with OR in the last 4 weeks I would love to tell them where to shove their useless antique copper cable with junctions sitting in pools of water......

I think I would want to know more about the type, age and condition of the cable. Worst case scenario is the cable fails after the extension is built, and you have to somehow get a replacement in. It might well be worth getting a quote from the DNO to at least replace the cable with new, and route the new cable in a duct so in future a replacement could be pulled through, or even better re route it around where the extension is going.

This is really a multi part question. There is no issue with having the supply routed into the garage, and the supply head and meter in the garage. Then have a local consumer unit in the garage for the garage circuits and any close by outside circuits. Next a submain run in SWA cable from the garage to the house. That is best done with a switch fuse, the good old KME is the usual candidate with an 80A fuse. This is better in many ways than feeding the submain from one of the circuits of the garage CU. At the house end it's a separate question about where to locate the house CU, and the utility room looks like a good candidate.

No I was definitely contracting a firm of builders for one (yes rather large) part of the build, not employing one individual. Probably just a bit of aris covering on their part.