ProDave

Metal tank. I've only just poured another 20L jerry can full in there, so drainig it would be a problem finding something to drain it into. Yes I don't want to carry on trying to use it, if the other part of the bracket breaks it would fall off and then be infinitely harder to fix then. As it is now, as long as I can get at it to weld it, it's fixable.

I've been finishing off the last bit of drainage, the rainwater drains. While digging the last trench something didn't "feel right" But I carried on and finished that. I also flattened out a pile of soil while the digger was around the back of the house ( dare I say the first bit of "landscaping"). It was then I realised what the problem was. As I put weight on or take weight off the bucket, the king post is moving a bit. Oh dear. A look underneath reveals a chassis member supporting one side of the king post has cracked where it changes angle, I suspect a weld at that point has given up, so it's only being supported by the other side, which is flexing. Not good. I think it's going to be a straightforward repair, just re weld the seam. But it will be awkward to do from below so I am hoping I will get better access from above if I take the floor plate out of the cab. Watch this space, photo's to follow when I get around to lifting the floor plate. No hurry, I have finished all the immediate digging jobs so it can wait if it has to. This is the penalty for buying an old cheap digger. Serious question. It will be welding about 12 inches from the diesel tank. I know diesel is a lot less volatile than petrol. Would you drain the tank? or just do it?

A garden outbuilding under 30 square metres does not need building regulations (that's the situation in Scotland, check it's the same in England) Another "get out" is if it's a portable building (e.g shed or caravan) then you can build up to nearly 100 square metres without building regulations. Strictly speaking, in both cases a drain connection does need building regs, that is all. Could you make a "temporary" drain connection and then regularise that as part of your building control when you start the house I wonder?

Is the garden room going to be attached to the house, or is is a seperate garden outbuilding?

So many months of delays, and many £000 of pounds, and it comes down to "dig a trench and bury a plastic sheet on sticks" Couldn't that have been agreed much quicker and much cheaper? Talk about mindless beurocracy.

I think your best course of action is a new treatment plant in a new location with a new soakaway. Now whether you have enough room for that is another matter, but I think you can be sure the ground around the existing tank is going to be pretty dire.

Pictures are good. Here's my treatment plant being lowered into it's hole. This is one of the designs that works with an air blower, and much like a lot of the other air blower plants gives just about the cleanest effluent possible. It costs under £2000 I would personally avoid the designs that use mechanical rotating parts, as I personally would not wish to be the one reparing them when dirty mechanical bits fail. Are you SURE you have a cess pit? if you do you will be emptying it very frequently. Are you sure it's not an older type concrete built septic tank?

Hope it's ONLY the grey water he is taling about. Seriously you don't do that. Update the cess pit to a treatment plant and a soakaway.

Re different rules for adjacent plots. The council tried to impose a visiblity splay requrement of 90 metres (which I could not meet) and required me to "demonstrate control" over the visibility splay, which would have meant negotiations with two neighbours. when I pointed out a plot 2 doors don the road was granted permissionwith only a 60 metre splay and no requirement to demonstrate control over the land, they changed mine to the same.

That's part of the reason for wanting to separate mine. They will be going at either end of the gable end wall above the garage. Later on, a car port will be built joining on the the garage wall. So the aim is to place them one each end of the gable wall, above the line of the car port, but close enough to each end that I can reach them without actually climbing on the roof of the car port.

In defence of Russian sites, Elektro Tanya (or something like that) is often a good source of tv service manuals and I have never had dodgy downloads from them.

This "one rule for me, one rule for next door" thing also apples to building control. I had to jump through hoops to find a drainage solution that worked on my plot due to a road, a burn, and regulations saying how far things should be from both, I see my neighbour has just put his treatment plant in, not 2 metres away from the burn. Either he has dropped a b*****k or he has a different set of rules appled to me.

I have edited Tennants Lager's post to remove the link to save any grief if anyone clicks it before reading Jeremy's warning. For some reason the "reason for editing" does not show in the post.

Yes I too am confused. I thought the SE was the one that took a concept of what you want and produced the drawings and calculations to show how to do it correctly.

Sounds like my Landrover "Leaks oil in all the right places"

How about another option: Make a SMALL change to the design and re submit a new planning application. IF they impose the same conditions, appeal on the basis the other plots did not have those conditions.

Talk to your local newspaper.

What did they survey say about the roof? surely you knew about this issue before you bought it?

the lesson from that, in my case where for aesthetic reasons I plan to put one each end of the wall, is make the inlet the one that has the long run, and the outlet to the one that has the shorter run.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

I like those SS cowls. Do you want to sell your spare ones Jason? if so I'll buy them then I just need two lengths of rigid ducting to put through the wall.

So it looks like I need to size a unit based on the square metrage of the house to find out what size inlet and outlet ducts it uses, even if it's not necessarilly the exact unit I will be using.

I see there are national tv adverts promoting smart meters at the moment. The only benefitt they seem to be telling customers is you can "see what you are using". Well you can do that by reading an ordinary meter but let's not rain on their parade.

My solicitor picked up a possible "ransom strip" issue. When my plot was last sold, the access road was private, and the plot came with a right of access over that private road. In the intervening time the road was surfaced and adopted as a public road. My solicitors concern was that if the new public road was not built on exactly the same line as the old private road, say it was built a little bit further from the plot, then there could be a little strip of land between the plot boundary and the new route of the public road that we didn't own and had no right to pass over. I concluded that in order for that to happen, the new road would have needed to be built entirely on "new ground" with no part of it on the course of the old private road. I thought that was very unlikely indeed so I took the risk. As it happens, when they dug up the road for the services, there under the new tarmac road we found the old concrete private road surface confirming the new public road was indeed exactly on top of the old private road. I had also checked by comparing the route on old and new OS maps and could see no difference in the line of the old road and the present road.

got a link to what you ordered and from where? So they can be a long way apart so one each end of the wall for aesthetic reasons will be okay, even though that means one of them will have a longer duct than the other to the mvhr unit.?