ProDave

If drilling from outside, be prepared for missing the light switch or drilling through an existing cable in the wall (which you will have isolated at the CU first just in case) and be prepared for making good the mess you make of the plaster inside.

One other thing, if you have spent a while designing developer boxes on housing estates, design your own home a LOT larger. Don't confine yourself to a developer type house where you barely get room to walk alongside the bed and no room for a dressing table etc. Be generous with your living space. Our 5M by 4M bedrooms are about adequate.

In old houses I doubt too low humidity is your problem. It would be good to identify what you are trying to avoid. Start by getting a hygrometer in the house that affects you. I think most people with an mvhr like me report good internal air quality as one of the benefits. Have you ever been in a house with mvhr?

Can we see a more zoomed out complete picture for perspective please?

I thought being an architect, that bit was a given?

Yes get a new CU that is very old (1965?) and as pointed out no RCD protection and no hope of getting RCBO's to upgrade it. Once cable witn no sleeving on CPC but that is trivial to fix. Likely no earth bonding to water or gas. Third MCB from main switch seems to feed a lot of different stuff.

Just drill at an angle. I would drill from inside, taking care as you are nearly through to go gentle to avoid bursting the brick. Drilling from outside, you might miss the switch.

A 100A single phase supply is 21KVA. You will not get any higher than that for a single phase domestic supply. My 12KVA supply would allow me 52A.

So it means you need to request a "formal offer" only then can you discuss it and negotiate it. The formal offer should state which items are contestable (could be done by others) and which are not. I got my quote down a lot by doing all the contestable work myself. On the subject of capacity, I was offered a 12KVA supply as the most that was available, any more would require a transformer upgrade. That is ample for our needs.

Post pictures of what is on the outside, and the corresponding inside. I usually solve this by putting the switch for the lights on the inside if the wall they are fixed to and the switch creates the safe zone for the cables.

Looking in the loft will show you if it's a pipe leak or rainwater leak. It's above the fireplace, so strongly suspect a chimney issue. You should be able to see water running down the wall in the loft. If it is chimney then getting properly onto the roof is required which most likely will need scaffolding.

On an EICR that would be a C2 and so "unsatisfactory" so he should not have left it like that.

Up here, a 50KVA transformer feeds 5 properties, so start by arguing them fitting a 50KVA transformer is overkill and they are in effect asking you to fund the upgrade for another 3 houses to connect to it.

Post a picture of your controller. Unless it is really ancient a replaceent should just fit on the same back plate with no wiring changes.

Fair enough. But having done the right thing and told them you are parking it in a garage, for them to say if it gets stolen from your drive it is not covered is bang out of order.

Insurance companies can do strange things. when I built a garage I told my car insurance company it was now kept in a garage. How much did it reduce my premium? £NIL. Then I asked what would happen if I left it outside one night and it got stolen. NOT COVERED. I now declare the car is parked on the driveway.

I guarantee there is no insulation behind the panelling in the bedrooms, hence it is cold and condensation can form mould. Thousands of croft houses were like that. If you want to keep the panneling you can rewire leaving it largely untouched. You just need to create an access hatch to the coomb spaces at the eaves and be prepared to crawl or use a fish wire. Take the chance to at least insulate the coomb space. To insulate the sloping ceilings without blocking the ventilation is a whole other problem which will need the ceiling stripped and is probably impractical anyway as you would loose ceiling height, which there is not much of to start with.

I certainly would have grabbed a good number of those slates they ripped off before they got skipped, if nothing else so if you get anybody to improve things you have the material. If the builders had said anything i would just tell them I am reclaiming the ones they took off my roof.

Or a couple of courses of brick then a UPVC window to give light into the garage.

All this talk of what if the nut comes off. But no mention of nyloc nuts or even loctite?

This "housing crisis" is nothing new, it has not just appeared, but is the result of a generation or more of flawed policies limiting the number of houses being built and the policy of selling council houses to tenants, but not then being allowed to use the money that generates to build more council houses. And lets just say I am very glad I am no longer a landlord. The policy makers just cannot see the cause and effect link between the policies they implement and the result it has. People talk of Tory Austerity, but I have spent my whole working life under all sorts of governments and a common them all that time has been cutbacks, savings and efficiency. You would think by now having been trying for 40+ years we would have the most streamlined, and efficient public services on the planet providing tremendous value for money and an excellent service...... I am retiring now and I am probably one of the last that left school into a 4 year apprenticeship that set me up well for the rest of my working life. In a time when only the really bright kids went to university and did a proper worthwhile degree. Then it became fashionable for everyone to go to university how dare you say I am not intelligent enough. Then someone decided it was a good idea for the students to pay for it and start their working life with a massive debt burden. But in spite of that, the lemmings still continued to go to university.

My 5kW ASHP draws a maximum input power of under 2kW so happy on a 16A circuit.

Your complaint is not about the mix of the mortar, but the fact it is crumbling and falling out. No point claiming it is 6:1 and they counter that it is 3:1, it is still crumbling and falling out.

The solar PV will try and produce a sine wave output at whatever power is available. Burst firing of a PV diverter is easier and less likely to cause RFI problems, Just think of the meter as averaging it's reading over a short time period, hence the shorter higher bursts of dump load get evened out as far as the meter is concerned.

Many (including my home made one) work by burst firing. Most electricity meters work on an "energy bucket" and only register power consumed when one whole watt hour has been consumed. That takes a little under 1 second with a 3kW immersion heater. So I set my burst firing time to be half a second and the immersion is on anything from 0% to 100% of that time. So say there is 1.5kW surplus, then my immersion heater would be on for half of that half second period. As long as energy both ways does not exceed 1Wh the meter will not register, it will count up a bit then count down a bit.