ProDave

The annual desludge is something most treatment plants (and septic tanks) need. It's a man in a tanker with a big suction hose to suck the contents out. Costs us about £150 every two years. The one I looked at on Friday wasn't belt drive but a very lose coupled gear system. It looked like the motor and gearbox unbolted as one unit, but it looked a long reach over a stinking pond. At the very least I would want to put a few scaffold boards over it so you could lay on those above it to work from.

The best I have seen for the Tescon Venna was about £20 a roll from someone on ebay from Ireland, but the postage to the UK was expensive. so 5 rolls free of postage at that price sounds good. I am almost certainly going to buy the Protect Barriair membrane which is very similar to the non reinforced Intello, which Jewsons have quoted me £99 per roll which is still cheaper than that site.

That looks like good prices. How much do you have to spend to get free shipping to the UK?

I'm not sure I understand this "slot" in the back of the oven housing? Just about every oven I have ever seen is way to deep to allow the housing to have a back panel. Sure some are supplied with a back panel, but you almost always have to remove it to allow enough depth for the oven. You can probably allow the back panel to remain behind the microwaver shelf as they are not so deep. so all you needed was to get the cable exiting the wall somewhere behind the oven housing, and chose the final location of the socket or CCU once it's ready to put the oven in, then using a plasterboard fast fix box which personally I much prefer for this type of install.

I can't see anyone complaining if they take a long time to add a new property to the list and so don't charge you council tax straight away.

The main difference is simply the way they work. With an UVC you can set it to say 45 degrees, and it will produce hot water at very close to 45 degrees until it is all used up then it will very quickly go cold. So in practice, the stored water temperature only needs to be slightly higher than the water temperature you want. But with a thermal store you are not drawing the water that is in it, instead you pass cold water through a coli (or sometimes a plate heat exchanger) so as you run the hot tap, you are extracting energy fairly evenly from the WHOLE tank so the temerature in the tank starts to drop. So in order to get a decent amount of water at your chosen 45 degrees, the stored water temerature needs to be a LOT higher. That poses two issues, higher standing losses, and not so good to be heated by a heat pump which woks best at lower temperatures.

I have been using the Tescon Vanna tape, the standard one on a 60mm wide roll. I need to buy some more so I too am interested in cheapest place to buy this stuff and similar alternatives. The only alternative I have experience of is the Sega tapes but they are even more expensive than the Tescon.

My case is slghtly different. When the new house is finally finished then I don't think there will be a problem of being charged CT on the caravan. We have a planning condition stating it cannot be used for habitation after the house is complete and it will become a garden outbuilding so I would argue to the highest court in the land I am not paying council tax for something I am not allowed to live in. My concern is if we rent out our old house for a period and move into the caravan and start paying council tax on that. Then later move back into the old house and try again to sell it, I can see no way to stop paying CT on the static caravan until the new house is completed.

the usual idea would have been two two 20A DP switches where your 13A sockets are to the LEFT of the oven unit, feeding two 13A sockets behind the actual oven space. Usually the oven space does not have a back panel on it, so the sockets would have just been set into the wall behind the oven. I don't see why you could not have converted the original layout to that and because of the rating of the oven and it's supplied cable, fit a CCU instead of a 13A socket behind the oven space. You have plasterboard walls and a service void so should have been able to fish a cable that short distance. Often space is limited behind an oven, and you never know until you get the oven where the socket will fit, so in practice I tend to leave a long length of cable and not actually fit the socket (or ccu) until I have the oven and can work out where it can go. A lot of the confusion was the fact you initially described the two radial circuits as "spurs"

VP400 plus, though I don't know what the difference is.

That's useful to know. I am agonising over an even trickier one. We are considering renting our house out and moving in to the static van on our building site. So far so good. But if we do that, then later we will stop renting it and try again to sell it. I can't see a way to "unband" the static caravan on our plot short of physically removing it (or taking the windows out!!!!)

I'm pretty sure our SE specified RC30 for our strip foundations

It's more fundamental than that. My car unlocks and turns the alarm off when I PRESS THE BUTTON on the key fob. It's the doing away with that one simple operation, and making the key and car sense each other without intervention, that has allowed this amplifier trick to work.

That is a valid point. we were only offered a "12KVA supply", which is a bit low for a normal domestic house, but that was on the basis of there being 8 houses now sharing one 100KVA transformer, and I know if we pushed for a bigger supply, there would have been a cost implication to upgrade that transformer. The reality is we get exactly the same supply as anyone else,same size cable, 100A fuse, so we could draw 24KVA from it without problem, but if everyone did that at the same time there would be a problem.

Beware if buying cheap. LOOK at the spec. I bought a cheap "8KVA" generator out of the back of a van (don't ask). It was petrol, and 3 phase. Now when you actually read the spec, that 8KVA was "peak" and it was only 6KVA continuous, but being 3 phase, it meant it would only power a 2KVA single phase load. It would do three such loads, but there was no way it would power say a 4KVA single phase load. I sold it on ebay or gumtree, I forget which a week later for a small profit. I would talk to the builder and see about hiring a propane or kerosene heater, the sort garages use is what I am thinking. Re house building power consumption, I am up to the grand total so far of 65KWh used to build my house. I typically get a quarterly bill of about £3

Mrs PD never had the slightest interest in having a go on the digger. Quick hitch MAKES fat digger drivers. Mine, you had to line it up and put the pins in. You soon learned to work the levers from outside the digger for that.

I sold my digger.

I am still not quite understanding what last minute changes the electrician had to make due to the change of oven spec. If it had been wired from the start with a dedicated radial for each oven, and one changed from 13A to 16A then all that needed changing was to replace the unswitched 13A socket behind the oven to a CCU to hard wire the 16A one, and perhaps change a 13A switched FCU on the wall to a 20A DP switch. There is more to this than I am understanding......

Think of where you might need some in the future? e.g foundations for a ramp to the front door? always handy to have a prepared space to pour any spare.

I thought these things were agreed at the time of planning. So if you have planning without charges, you are okay. just don't let the planning lapse and have to re apply.

A short bit of chain and a shackle, then I used rope.

I can see the headline. "Skye man decapitated by roofing sheet that came unhooked" You deserve a beer (I think I need a beer after reading that) A roof ladder would be safer than a rope and a sling. Reminds me of my "put a ladder down a well and climb down" episode and how I was told off afterwards about how dangerous that was (not to mention the extension lead and electric drill I took with me)

When I talk about "services" I mean electrical wiring and plumbing? You have no "service void" for cables. As the CLT is your finished surface, you have to VERY early on decide where EVERY switch and socket is going and cut the holes. Then where do you run the cables? not in the insulated wall otherwise derating will apply and a lot of over sized cables. You could (this is what the house I saw did) run them out in conduit to (almost) the outside skin of the house to avoid derating (questionable as the bit to get through the wall probably still needs derating) Then what if you change your mind, want an extra socket, want something moved? an almost "unmodifiable" installation. That needs some serious thinking about (unless you really want the whole house wired in surface galv conduit) Don't under estimate the weight. The house I saw was a modular off site build and they were scratching their heads to find a hiab truck that could lift the sections. It was much heavier than any other construction method they had used before.

In present house we fitted the hall and the landing with their own UFH zones. Total waste of time and pipe. There is so little external wall to lose heat, and so much internal wall to gain heat from other rooms, that these never turn on.

Copied from the other thread, I was just thinking about the discharge pipe for my UVC which has to be installed before my floor goes down. So this is my planned run: It will emerge in the airing cupboard space at floor level, so plenty of room for the 400mm above and below the tundish. From the airing cupboard floor it will drop down inside an internal wall 2.5 metres, bend (in bender) run horizontally (with a slight fall) 1 metre, bend (in bender) 2 metre horizontally (again with a slight fall) which will take it out through the front wall. Bend (solder or compression) to turn it downwards where it will discharge into a French Drain. So if each bend counts as 1/2 a metre that makes a total of "8 metres" so it will be okay. And yes that will all be 28mm copper. I will need to question where and how it actually drains. The easiest would be to take it through under where the front door is, BUT that will get enclosed by the ramp up to the door, so I suspect BC won't like that as you won't be able to see the discharge point. So I guess I have to discharge it a bit to one side so it's visible? Also, will it be okay just discharging onto a lot of stones that make up a French Drain? If not I can put a gulley there and tell BC it goes to a soakaway (which it will as the back of the gulley will discharge to the French drain but underground)