ProDave

I got one of those, and I could not resist the £25 cordless drill. A cute little thing and it seems to have quite a bit of torque, more of a lightweight screwdriver really, but it seems well built. I'll bet the tiny 2AH battery won't last long though.

I told you the answer would be obvious.

There is generally no legal need to update them, unless some polution event occurs. A house near here was ordered to replace his septic tank with a treatment plant. On a new build now you would be mad to even try to get away with a septic tank, we would never have been allowed to discharge to the burn with a ST. A shared treatment plant might be the logical solution here if your building control will accept it. You will obviously be installing one, so the extra cost to install a bigger one is probably not that much more

The wiring is the same, you loop from socket to socket, no need for junction boxes. Think of a ring final. Remove the link between the two furthest sockets and then connect the two ends in the CU into their own mcb's. The disadvantage of radial sockets is in general you will need twice as many of them so more mcb's and a bigger consumer unit. No problem in a new build but in a lot of existing houses there is simply no room to fit a bigger CU Converting a ring to two radials is often a handy trick to have when you find a damaged circuit leg and the distruption to the property needed to fix it, can make it a better option to scrap the damaged section and convert it to two radials.

But there are only 22 circuits, it would have been easy to get that down to 20 and use the same large domestic board as I have. e.g do you really need a dedicated circuit for a shaver socket? And I am going to regret asking this as I am sure the answer is obvious, but what's the yellow "loxone" label on half the circuits?

One of our neighbours does that. Buys a lorry load of logs and processes them. You won't be lifting 3 metre logs onto a saw horse. He just saws them into slices where they are on the stack with a chain saw. I don't know if he splits them with an electric splitter or by swinging a splitting maul. And you don't want or need to do them all at once. Personally I have never paid for firewood yet, but then there are more trees over this side, and a god winter gale always brings some down, or at least the beech trees drop some useful sized branches. When I do collect big trunks, I usually saw them into slices fairly soon and leave them as slices and split them later.

They have. SSE almost always install a meter with a built in isolator.

Hi and welcome to the forum. That sounds like a very interesting project.

My solution to all that, is back to wall pan's, concealed cistern boxed in, and inset basin on the top of the boxed in bit.

It's not insane, it's the rules. The TNC-S earth is there ready for you to use when the supply is feeding the house, no need to get the DNO back again. it's usually there accessible on the side of the cut out, though I am noticing more often than not they now fit an earth block next to the cut out. In the mean time while it's feeding a building site, just for the moment ignore their earth and connect to your own rod. In the case of a static caravan, that must remain on a TT earth.

^^ CL stands for "Certificated Location" In I think the 1960's when the Caravan Act was first passed (before that you could park a caravan and wild camp just about anywhere) it introduced licenced caravan sites. After representation from the Caravan Club, an exemption was added in the form of "certificated Locations" that allow up to 5 touring caravans at a time to use the site. It doesn't need planning permission but it must be approved by an approved organisation such as the Caravan Club or also the Camping & Caravan club.

That Hepvo unit is a "waterless trap" It allows something like an unvented HW tank blow off to be routed into a stack pipe (with certain strict conditions on what pipe to use). You cannot use a normal wet trap for that sort of application, as there is normally no water to keep the trap filled so it would evaporate and dry out. I will almost certainly be using one to avoid having to take the drain pipe outside.

I think this topic has strayed a long way from ASHP's. Can we bring the earthing discussion to a close please, or start a new thread to discuss that aspect. And play nicely please.

Re neutral faults on a concentric incomer. It is actually a well known fault condition. If the outer sheath of the concentric cable gets punctured, water can get in and corrode the outer (unsheathed) PEN conductors. Eventually it will give out and you have no neutral. Inside the EZ it is surprisingly not much danger, but an exported earth to say a shed can rise to a lethal potential wrt local earth Carvans are the big risk where the metal bodywork is usually connected to earth and if you fed one of those with an exported PME earth you could have a lethal situation as you step in or out of the 'van, that's why the regsdemand they are fed from a TT earth. Up here, the DNO's token gesture to make TNC-S a PME is a little pig tail of "earth" wire buried in the connection pit alongside the potted joint box.

+1 to dig a hole and postcrete a post into it. A half way house I often do, is dig a hole to part depth, then use a post with a pointed end and hammer the post in as far as it will go then postcrete in the hole. the important thing being you only need a small hole (I use a 6" "ladies spade" and you want nice parallel sides to the hole, not a V shaped hole. Then just pour the postctrete in dry and pour water on it. It sets in minutes. As to panels, buy 6" treated fencing planks and nail them horizontally alternating between one side of the post and the other. A lot lighter and cheaper than scaffold boards. This method lets a lot of the wind through so the loading on the posts is a lot less than a solid fence panel.

My builder thankfully incorporated a tony tray, before I had even heard of it, and I am sure they would not have referred to it as such. Another new build up here didn't and I watched slightly smug when I saw them taping the VCL around every single joist.

What I am finding up here is most people totally over state the circuit breaker requirements for a heat pump. Most have their heat umps fitted at an inflated price by an mcs approved contractor so they can claim the RHI. It is the installer that usually gives me the spec and it's quite normal for them to specify a C40 breaker, so I install an isolator with appropriate cable for that, and they connect from it with a bit of 2.5mm flex, and the unit turns out to have a max load of a little over 3KW. I think they are stuck in the dark ages up here when heat pumps didn't have variable speed drive and soft start, so had a huge start up surge.

Advertise the stones on Freecycle "collection only" That is certainly a big improvement opening that up, and I would sleep a lot better with that new pillar to hold it all up.

I am doing much the same, but do not tape the VCL to the floor, cut it a bit shorter, and tape the VCL to the tony tray. You can save quite a bit of material, the VCL only needs to come just below the top of the tony tray, say 100mm overlap. Why horizontal battens for the service void? that will make fitting the PB a bit harder won't it? I am having vertical service void battens following each wall stud.

Put the oven on it's own circuit as noted. Also make sure there are 2 or 3 spares ways in the CU, e.g. you might want an electric shower, and of course one for the solar PV. Mains drainage if not a circuit for the treatment plant. I have a broadly similar mix in a 20 way all rcbo board.

I was going to comment in a previous post about that CPC. I was going to ask if it was some previous 16th edition cross bonding gone wrong I didn't realise it was "supporting" the waste pipes. Some people install waste pipes thinking they don't need much support, not realising they get a lot heavier when the water runs through them. P.S the insulation on that stud wall wants an upgrade.

If you apply for permission on land you don't own, you have to serve notice on the owner that you have done so. This is quite normal when buying a building plot. When I found our site, that had planning 30 years ago but was never built on. I made an offer to buy it subject to getting planning permission, and I then submitted the planning application even though we did not own the land yet.

The electricians on this forum are a bit more friendly and will try to help. You definitely can bury SWA direct in the ground, that's what it was designed for. And terminating it in glands is not particularly difficult, but I guess I have had plenty of practice. The concentric cable that the DNO's use is not recognised in the wiring regs (they have different regs to work to). And in any case it's only a 2 core cable. There is a variation on that, split concentric, where half the outer cores are bare, to be used as the earth, and the other half are sleeved, to be used as neutral but that does not strictly meet the requrements for direct burying.

That's funny. The panel had a window in it when it was lying down.........

Building Warrant is the Scottish term for Building control approval. I have to question the motive for squashing the kitchen into the lounge and making another bedroom. I did the wiring for a similar conversion (1 bed house into 2 bed house) and it made a very pokey bedroom where the kitchen was, and a very cramped living room. The owner did it so he could let it as a 2 bedroom house, but I suspect it would not have added any value to the property if selling it.