Ferdinand

The other type of inexpensive fencing that I like is metal "Estate Fencing", like this: The one above is "Chatsworth" style fencing at £25 + VAT per metre, which is not bargain basement, but is very reasonable for what you get. I think that would look attractive along your canal bank, and could be postcreted in without risk of rotting in 10-15 years. It should outlast you. You can get gates for it, which would help if you are mooring your own boat. And if within say 250-500mm of the edge people would be discouraged from getting off (the boat). Especially people on their first boating holiday ... who are your main customer group aiui? Here's another example: https://www.thetraditionalco.co.uk/estate-fencing/ I have noticed developers using an ersatz manufactured version of this, which looks good and must be inexpensive - but I have no idea where it is sourced. Distant crop from Streetview. This is on a development called Sutton Heights by a company called Gleeson if you want to follow up. Detail below. Above is outside the show house. Ferdinand

One of things to be said for above ground is that you can get a gravity feed. I have 3 linked Wickes water butts for 600l of stored water, one of which is plumbed in (with a piece of hose pipe) to an automatic watering network for my container plants and newly planted bushes, The advantage of that is that rather than turning it on from a tap (which would need a double tap) or a pump I just leave it to drip out with the 0.5m of head for half a day. If butt 1 runs dry I just move the hose to butt 2. Butt 3 is for the watering can. This year it is noticeable how much intermittent rain we have continued to have. If I go on hols it is slow enough that it lasts nearly a week until it has emptied one butt. But - horses for courses.

The cheapest option is always knock in round posts and half rounds as horizontals ie horse fence. It looks rustic, if that is what you want. Best source is an agricultural supplier. For this I would suggest heavy posts - either 5" 6" or 8". Should work out at less than £10 per metre run. Ferdinand

Incidentally, I have ordered *this* insulated 150mm duct, as it is more robust than those with an aluminium outside, and does not use fibreglass insulation. https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07HN37Q2M

Depending on the heat soak balance an extent of high temps, cross-ventilation may ot be enough. My house starts to struggle on just cross-ventilation after two nights above say 20C between hot days. I am just playing with a portable aircon / heat pump unit in this thread. To turn it from an air con to a heat pump you essentially plug it in the other way round. It's currently running via an upper window, and I need to make a sealing plate. The recommendation is to run it through a wall outlet. The says not to use to heat beneath ambient of 7C an dideally to get to 10C using something else, and the minimum cooling temp is 16C. I'll be using it as a sort of trial this summer and next winter to explore how heating and cooling works in my house, with a view to eventually maybe swapping out my gas boiler, or limitng it to hot water only. I have lots of EW facing solar (8 KWp and 2 kWp), which should make 2-3 hours in the morning to set the place up for the day free. Insulated 150mm air duct seems to be about £3 per metre if you buy more than say 10m of it. eg not a recommendation. https://easyhvac.co.uk/index.php?id_product=13&controller=product

Further update: It seems to be keeping my largish - 5x5.5m kitchen - quite convincingly cooler (22C) than outside (29C) on intermittent running on low after a boost early despite being provoked by a 400mm rather than 600mm ventilation pipe (ie 60% smaller) that just goes unsealed via a small window to the conservatory, which has an open window at the other end. It will need tweaking to a 600mm insulated, properly sealed to a window or a wall vent, hose, which should do the job. Getting a few strange noise, but that is perhaps because the venting is jury-rigged. F

Naval Mines sound more logical and appropriate to end the problem. Hopefully it happens once then they all see it on TV and get educated. BAE Systems still make these aiui which you can dial up and down between a force of a small amount of TNT and 600kg of TNT. You get a show because they also have a shelf life, then blow themselves up. You can help the other side too. The Shipwrecked Mariners Society still use WW2 mines for fundraising for "shipwrecked" people. You can host a fundraising location to help survivors and victims of canal shipwrecks. In a few months there may be some secondhand ones from Ukraine on Dark Web Ebay - if you are a bargain hunter with insufficient security clearance to purchase one officially. ATB. Ferdinand

I'm trying very hard not to post the "Talk like a Pirate Day" song, as a group of people who really understand "R". Sorry - as you were 🙃. Ferdinand

Why does it have to be a sink? What are you doing there. Why not a traditional stone with a shallow (6") 'sink', or a horse trough? https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/255623417534?hash=item3b8457cebe:g:qEoAAOSwR2NiuHVM

Update. My god it's big. Pretty much the same size as a normal dishwasher sliced in 2 vertically. W x D x H is 2ft x 1 ft x 3ft, with rounded corners.

IF it's purely a desktop study, then you don't necessarily need a local company. I'd trawl an area where they can commute easily without staying overnight - just in case you need a site-based study later.

I don't see any problem with this strategy, other than that you need sufficient leeway to allow Plan B if you calculate wrongly (in either direction). One aspect of plan B for underestimating heat need could be awareness of double or triple rads for one or two of your locations as a future swap out if you need more hear. Or have some extra pipework installed. If you need less heat them 45C is quite a high flow temperature, so if you Heat Pump can be reduced to say 35C that (and some TRVs) could give you that side of it. Using common sizes is a universal tactic - for example the standard 18mm sheet materials will always normally be relatively less expensive as it is the standard thickness. The same goes for whichever thickness of floor insulation board *just* meets building regulation standards. F

Well, it's arrived 2 days early, and they woke me up. Big parcel - 28kg and got a "f*ck's sake" from the nice delivery man as he lifted it over the doorstep very kindly, having suggested he leave it on the drive. Looking forward to a cool weekend. 🙂🤗

I'll address the proposal in this thread and the doc separately. However, on Councils and Appeals - my small housing estate proposal received what I call a "political no", despite a recommendation from the Planning Dept to approve. That is, the Councillors on the Planning Committee did not want to be held politically responsible for saying Yes. It went through on Appeal instantly (about 6 weeks), but the local Councillors had improved their chances of votes. In my view the Planning Inspectorate are the most strategic body in the Planning arena, as the only one that is committed only to following law.

Quite interesting, and I'll try and find half an hour to comment. I'm interested in the first para of Trees about the Leyland Cypress: The site contains a TPO tree in its northwestern corner, a Leyland Cypress (TPO ref 161/T5 10/07/1985) which would be removed as part of the proposals. (I've checked and that is what it says.) Which individual put a TPO on a Leyland Cypress? Have they subjected to death by Candiru fish yet, and if not, why not? 🙃

Several factors here. 1 - I don't think you can rely on the long term Electricity price, because the French grid is in transition, Last winter at one time 70% of the French nuclear fleet was closed for maintenance, and it is still about half closed. The underlying issue is that no new reactors have opened since 2000, so whole shebang is like a clapped out Citroen - complex and unreliable, due to lack of consistent investment / problems with getting it done. Mons. Macron made promises for umpteen billions of investment in nuclear and renewable, but then also in mini-nuclear. he has earmarked something like 100bn of investment in several directions. It is not clear what will happen, or who will pay for it via what mechanism. Difficult to see prices coming down, though. 2 - Not clear wrt EDF. Their share value was wrecked by the enforced reduced price, and the ~14% minority non-Govt shareholders badly hit. For - according to me - political election-related reasons. Now it has been (or is being) nationalised. Share price has partially recovered (by about 30% after more than halving) in the last 7 days. 3 - France has been importing up to 15% of its electricity in recent months, especially from Germany and the UK. This morning they are importing from UK, Germany, Spain and Belgium - the first 3 are countries that by policy invested in renewables whilst France was committed to nuclear. I also see that the broken UK 1GW interconnector seems to have come back on stream as we have more capacity, but that the Govt has declined PP for one of the new proposals for another one for what seem to be confused reasons. 4 - So what does that mean? Personally, I would expect electricity prices to be rather less controlled, so I would prioritise being more independent from the network by reducing usage / more efficiency / self-generation - as the investments will not deliver until the mid-2030s. The current UK renewable surge is as a result of processes launched by Blair-Brown; it takes that long. Have you considered a place for solar pv to do your air-conditioning in the summer, spring and autumn? 5. As an aside - how cheap is it for you to replace radiators? The last time I looked at having a system flush when gunge jammed up the workings of an old boiler, it was barely more expensive to replace all the radiators. Ferdinand

Indeed :-). Not fiction. One Jon Goddard-Watts. Around here we seem to be in a competition for number of branches. I used to have Screwfix One 12 minutes away. and SF Two 12 minutes the other way. Then TS One opened up 50m from SF One. Then TS Two opened up 6 minutes away. And we just have SF Three opening up 6 minutes the other way, having failed to get a unit by TS Two. And 12 minutes the other way we also have TS Three in the adjoining unit to SF Two. It's like Boris Johnson, Wives and Mistresses. Though he has rebranded to Screwstation, and has 7 (known so far) direct subsidiaries. Ferdinand

Hope you didn't buy one 😁. To be fair I live around the corner (2km) from the old Appliances Direct depot in Derbyshire, and have bought more than a dozen appliances from them over the last 10 years, including 6 in one go once, so I know that Electriq is bascially an Appliances Direct house brand, roughly like Lamona with Howdens. Though I do not know if it is a separate related company. So it was a huge red flag when it appeared on a third-party site. For me AD have always been there-or-thereabouts on price, and I could go and look at the showroom in 5 minutes, pick up ex-showroom stuff, and collect easily in the estate car for smaller items. They have now moved to Castle Donnington, which is half an hour. My first thought was whether it was a secondhand bit of kit, but I think it is probably just sell-and-vanish. The brand is also now sold via Amazon, so slightly stretched and repositioned ('we only work with selected retailers'). https://www.electriq.co.uk/content/find-a-retailer . The others eg Laptops Direct, Drones Direct are Appliances Direct verticals. All run by a man in Huddersfield called Nick Glynne. Rapid-growing discounters leveraging scale remain a way to get quite rich, quite quickly. Very much a version of the same model as Pound Shop Chains, Dunelm or Screwfix. It's easier to build the front end presentation - as Toolstation prove to Screwfix' frustration. F

Order placed for the new one, since the refurb is on a 4 week lead time. I'm seeing this as a sort of informal test of a small heatpump in my house, and see how it compares to the GFCH in winter.

It may just be that it came up as one of the small number they do every year, or they think it is an unusual house. I wouldn't worry about that unless you approach 3 companies and they *all* demand surveys 🙂 .

Thanks. Looks identical. But that site looks to be questionable to me - the domain was only registered in May 22 for one year, for a start. And the discount seems too heavy. Ferdinand

OK decision time. £324 for a scuffed one without WiFi and Google Hub / Alexa linkage controllable from a mobile telephone, but with its own 24 hour timer, thermostat, and remote, or £469 for a new one in the sale with WiFi? Hmmm. Since my intention is to run it off solar for a temperature adjustment in the morning, the non-Wifi one seems adequate. Unless the timer is a delay timer than has to be reset, which would then require a master timer on the plug socket.

I haven't mooted with Zoot for a time. Hope you are well ! But depending if a smaller number is better for you, I'd consider getting a different quote from another insurance company. Just as a check that the number is in the right ballpark. AIUI, a rebuilding cost survey is unusual. My insurers have always had a number in their computer based on the features of the house, or pulled a number out of the air, or asked me. The rebuilding cost has an impact on your premium, but a relatively small impact. It is like agreeing to a mileage limit on a car insurance - can make a difference but is unlikely to make it half or double. F

Leaving aside your repeated turning of my mighty thread into a soft **** movie, you should be grateful for the more intelligent female half of the inhabitants of Bristol. If you had to wear something with that many interlinked straps, you'd be like a kitten with a ball of string, and would probably end up hanging yourself from the ceiling hook without even needing any help from the local dominatrix. Edit (Ooops. Did I just say that out loud?)

I'd suggest your point of comparison could perhaps be Building Regulations requirements for the walls of a new house, or an extension to an old house. I did a sun lounge from a repurposed conservatory a few years ago, and installed 100mm of rockwool in the roof, 75mm of celotex in the floor, and 50mm of celotex in the walls. The tenant has been very happy, and that has become the main living-room throughout the year. The thing you do need to provision for is overheat in summer. My T has her dog-crates in the sun lounge, so uses an air-con to manage the temperature for a week or three in the summer. Make sure that decent ventilation is available. In a garden room I would perhaps suggest a reversible A2A heat pump as a good option for warmth and coolth.