ProDave

Yes it can. With those voltage readings you will be fine. Lucky the original person properly sized the cable for the length. It is surprising how many sheds you find wired with a bit of wet string. I was asked to check a DIY garage conversion complete with electric panel heating, electric water heating and an electric shower. The whole thing was fed with 2.5mm cable.

I would walk away. There is no way you can build a garage on top of next doors drainage field, even before you think about distances to the house. Unless an off site drainage solution was available for both houses I would say the plot is not viable. The minimum needed is permission from the land owner to the south for drainage fields for both properties to be installed under that field (assuming it is a field not other houses). If I was the vendor I would be looking for such permission, and then thinking of installing a large TP to serve both houses and the drainage field for it, then sell the plot as a serviced plot. That is about the only way I think it is viable.

Yes that looks like 25mm. At 16A (typical 4kW PV array) you are likely to get about 3 volt drop over that cable, which should be fine. Remember that will be voltage rise when it is generating. So as long as your mains voltage is no higher than 250V (it should not be) you will be fine. Most inverters trip or start limiting when they reach 253 volts.

If it really is 25mm armoured cable, then you are okay, but only 6 strands per core it is far more likely to be a lot smaller. Can you post any kind of picture of the ends of the cable, e.g. where it terminates at either end? Or get an electrician to measure Zs at the shed and post the reading he gets here, from that we can work out the likely volt drop (will be volt rise with PV generation)

He was one of the last able to sign up to the FIT, sadly gone by the time I was ready to do so. No such golden goose for us now. Until the end of last year I was still getting the FIT from our old house, that paid for all our electricity used in this one, but that went with the house.

I don't see the problem. The stopcock is on the supply side of the meter. In any event it would be the water company removing the meter for any reason so let them worry about isolation for that. As I understand it, your issue is a leak. You need to dig down to the customer side of the meter box to check for your leak there. If you di find a leak and want to fix it, you turn off the stopcock in the meter box to isolate it.

Not needed. worst case a little water drains back from the house pipework if you remove the meter. But the house stopcock should contain a non return valve.

Check when the CH goes off that the pump stops (assuming no DHW demand also) and the boiler stops. My guess would be the feedback switch in the CH valve has failed and the pump is still running because it has not opened and the thud is the water diverting to the bypass valve.

That spindle is for the stop cock handle. There is only ever one stopcock. Why would you want 2?

We had one in our last house for an otherwise dark landing. It worked very well indeed. But if I had a £ for every time a visitor said they could not find the switch to turn the landing light off.

Interested in the straw bale idea. I worked on one straw bale house and I recall the biggest issue was firstly finding anyone with a working small baler, and then finding a weather window to cut it, dry it and bale it then a barn to store it dry until ready to build. It was certainly not a cheap solution and you end up with thick walls for an insulation level you could achieve other ways with a much thinner structure.

If you want to switch to Octopus for a better service PM me for a referal code.

Yes well done, a result anyone would be well pleased with.

Local planning restriction "windows should have a vertical form" Most of our windows were 2 panes side by side, but this one smaller window we thought it a good idea to split it with the centre bar to make it in keeping with the others. No technical reason whatsoever.

Rationel 3G window with centre bar The only way you can tell it is one pane, is in the corners, the filler bars bend round the corner. The centre bar just butts up to the others.

All I can think of is that is some kind of home made wet battery?

This thread is just showing how individual houses differ. My 5kW heat pump copes with heating our house at +20 indoors and -10 outside. -10 for a week or more is quite normal here in winter with high pressure and no wind to bring warmer air. When you hear on the weather forecast "colder in some sheltered glens" that is us. It rarely defrosts at -10, there is just too little moisture in the air by then. A few degrees either side of 0 is when defrosting is more likely. My LG heat pump seems incredably quick at it's defrost cycle, the compressor and fan stop. You hear the 4 way valve change over. the compressor starts but not the fan. When the evaporator warms up and melts the ice, only then does the fan start and blow away all the now melted ice in a puff of "steam". Then the compressor and fan stop the 4 way valve changes back and normal operation resumes. That takes about 2-3 minutes in total. Another feature of our house is it will not heat up or cool down quickly. Nothing to do with thermal mass but everything to do with low decrement delay insulation. Perhaps that is why the WBS does not overheat our house but others have that problem?

We keep on having this WBS debate, it is a Marmite subject and nobody is going to convince the "other side" that they are wrong. I have one because we have trees which properly managed produce wood so I burn it. If I had to buy wood to burn, I would not bother. But the WBS is a good second source of heat, even a passive house will loose it's temperature when it's well below 0 and the the power is off for several days because we are a low priority after a storm. The over heating myth. Yes if we crank the stove up full and shut the doors to the room it is in (largest room in the house) it would quickly get very hot in there, but leave all the downstairs doors open and the heat can get to all the house without overheating any one room. Perhaps that is down to design that we wanted double doors to the main downstairs rooms to open it all up when we want to. I will start to give the environmental arguments against a WBS just a little credence when there is a public admission that burning wood in DRAX on an industrial scale was a bad idea and should never have been done and it has been closed with immediate effect. In the mean time some of the electrons powering my ASHP may well have come from there.

Speak to your neighbour 2 doors to the right in your aerial picture. It looks like he has done what you are proposing (with a flat roof) Ask if it was PD or needed planning permission and if it needed PP was it easy or difficult.

But if you fit 20 in a big kitchen and a few years later a couple blow, and you can't buy replacements that match, you DO worry. That is why I advise people if you are buying fittings with no replaceable bulbs, buy a load of spares now, while you can.

If it is in a grass verge and there is no tarmac pavement involved I would have no hesitation digging it up to have a look. Just have some kind of barrier ready to place around the hole if it is going to be left open.

What boiler? assume gas or oil. You need to measure the flow temperature coming out of the boiler, it sounds like the boiler thermostat has failed and the burner is running continuously and overheating the water. Turn the boiler on and watch while measuring the flow temp, does the burner shut off after a while of just keep on going and going?

I think the LED GU10's I have were Screwfix cheap ones (probably LAP) sold in boxes of 10 for about £1 per lamp. Only 2 failed so far in nearly 5 years.

That's one of those "because I can" projects. We all know it would be a whole lot easier to drive four 7 segment LED displays from the Arduino........

Then they need to supply parts at a reasonable price. There are 2 headlights in a car (sometimes more) I simply do not believe at manufacture time they cost £1600 which would have been more than 5% of the cost of the car (possibly a lot more)