ProDave

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)

Hi and welcome. I to am interested in the CLT frame (I think that CLT sub forum is needed PDQ) Is the CLT because you want the wood to be the finished internal wall surface? I saw one build like that, then clad in wood fibre board for insulation. To say the installation of the services was "challenging" would be an understatement.

The bit I want to know is HOW did you fix the last sheet on each side, with no nice roof to stand on, and no scaffold up the gable end? 45 degree steel roof panels are to steep and slippery to stand on? I fixed my "last sheet" standing on the scaffold. Also how are you going to fit the ridge piece? I sat astride the roof, shuffling along as I screwed it in. That would be a bit hairy without the satisfaction of some scaffold to catch you if you slipped off, and without scaffold to get on and off at the ends. Fair game for doing it all on your own.

The new Amd 3 rules also cover "switchgear" enclosures. I am sure your box with timers would be classed as such. But of course you installed them before 1st December 2015 didn't you? Re UFH upstairs. fit a dummy thermostat on the wall, have your completion certificate done in summer, and nobody will ever know there is no upstairs UFH

IF there is no mains drainage available, then what you (or the seller) needs to do is perform a "percolation test". It's well documented in the building regs handbook. Basically you dig a 1 metre deep hole. In the bottom of that you dig a 300mm by 300mm hole 300mm deep. You fill that with water and time how long it takes for that water to drain away. That's a bit simplified but that's the general principle. From that, and the number of occupants that the house is designed for (a different figure to how many will actually be living in it), you calculate the area of leach field required. That can end up quite a large area. and there are restrictions how close the leach field can be to the boundary, buildings, the road, a watercourse etc which further limits available space. Then you need to see if that leaves enough space to actually build a house. If the ground is not suitable, e.g. if the water table is very high, then there are alternative above ground solutions such as a filter mound, or the Puraflow system that has tanks filled with peat above ground. We ran into this problem with our plot. we bought it and went through planning on the basis we could fit a filter mound system in. In the intervening time, building regs changed, and the distance from a road to the filter mound changed meaning we no longer had room for it. Eventually SEPA gave us permission to discharge to the burn, something they only do up here if there are no other options, and we had reached that point of having no other options that building control would accept.

The reason I asked is I thought discharging (potentially) boiling water into PVC waste pipe was not allowed? There is an nhbc document around that details how you can use a waterless hepco trap and a particular type of plastic pipe (not pvc, I forget which) to discharge into a stack, but it must be a direct run to the stack in that particular type of pipe that can withstand boiling water. I am currently thinking about the plumbing for our UVC and to be honest the run to do that would be far too long, so I am now looking at dropping a copper pipe down inside the internal walls and out through the blockwork under the ground floor level.