Ferdinand

I thought smaller companies were exempt from some levies made on the Big 6. My current deal (half of a dual fuel - First Connect First Fixed 2017v3 Electricity) is: Elec Standing: 14.42p/day. Elec Unit: 11.016p per kWh. East Midlands area. Iresa is my cheapest charge offer via MSE Cheap Energy Club, at Elec Standing: 12.72 p/day. Elec Unit: 10.9p per kWh. But they are 25% more on the gas/unit than current, and are not stellar in reviews for customer service. Tariff: "IRESA Flex 4 12 month Fixed Direct Debit (Dual Fuel Single Rate)" F

That is about right I think as to people's thoughts. Ferdinand

I don't know the firm answer to that; I have not had a conversation with a relevant professional yet. But on a 0.1 u value wall the difference in thickness between EPS and PIR (other things being equal) is over 100mm. 2 sides of a room would make an extra 200mm inside - which seems significant to me. I have just *not* bought a terraced house because the necessary extra insulation to be added to make it legal to rent out in a few years would turn a just-double bedroom into a single. I would love to build 2 semi-detached houses side by side with the different types for comparison. It is just the kind of thing I would do, too ! But let's not derail this thread - was just throwing in a concept for the OP to consider. F

@Gorlando My two comments: 1 - To get some idea of balance between spending money up front on better fabric, and energy costs that will save you, I suggest doing cost models of your house including the first 10 and 25 years of energy bills. There will be assumptions, but you will get a feel for the cost/benefit. 2 - Think about extra floor area from better insulation. It is true that EPS beads or pumped cellulose will completely fill your cavity, but a more effective insulant will make your walls 50-100mm thinner for the same performance and give you more space .. you will be surprised how much. And you can mulitply that extra by perhaps £3k per sqm to work out the increase in value, everything else being equal. I am thinking of materials such as Kingspan Ecobead Platinum or Celotex sheet. Ferdinand (Sorry - the thread title makes me think of Doris Stokes' Sherry Consumption.

So now it is the Cadbury Chocolate Wrapper competition. Solve this puzzle using your skill and judgement, using as little time and money as possible.

I think that if it is anything heavier than featheredge the panels are unlikely to be up to the job of supporting it for any significant period of time.

I think if you drill into the concrete posts you may be OK, but having taken a couple of hours drilling a mere *two* such posts myself I had discounted it due to practicality. Good luck. F

If you have to go on the existing posts then you are into long screws through the arris rails to mount vertical "ties" to put your planks on, or screw the planks directly to the verticals. I suppose you could also strap wooden posts to the existing posts. I think that in any of these cases, you will be redoing it before too long. The other option is to buy premade horizontal-plank panels and save your wood for something else.

When my site-for-sale was surveyed we had about 4 hedges and fences in one section. Their surveyor decided the one he wanted to survey was the one on my side (we kept some land).

Current wife? Are you Henry VIII?

There are some decent US sites about this type of fence. Where are you on your boundary? Can you move forward a few cm. Drilling concrete posts is like demolishing the Atlantic Wall (which is why it is still partly there :-), so I would be inclined to go in between them - either in front of the existing panels or after removing the existing panels. You need posts with pre-drilled holes, so i would use concrete (always for longevity) 1.2m repair spurs, such as these from Travis Perkins: https://www.travisperkins.co.uk/Supreme-Concrete-Fencing-Repair-Spur-100x100x1200mm/p/700248 and then bolt a 1.8m or 2m fencepost to the holes they contain. Then fix the horizontals to that. If you do not like the vertical expansion gaps between planks, then you can put a cosmetic vertical strip in line with each post. Alternatively you could find your local post manufacturer and get them to make you some concrete posts with boltholes ... they just need to insert a bit of plastic tube in the right spot before adding the concrete. Ferdinand

It depends :-). They can be "boundary features"; a concrete post obviously put in in the 1950s, wartime railings, or the corner of a 100 year old house will be given more weight than eg a Wickes post put in last week. A surveyor would make a judgement call based on all the information, giving much more weight to significant features. It is like scholars looking at 28 scrolls and fragments to find the original text of a bit of the Bible - they look at everything the give a weight to each source of 'authority'. We hope that there a small number of features which nail it down quickly. The easiest way is to be on good terms with the person the other side of the fence, and be able to have a conversation. As I am about to do with our new neighbours about their tree and the crack in my wall it is leaning on. I think the answer to your question is "your boundaries are what you accept for several years", because at that stage it becomes too much touble to fix. So check and measure against solid features - developers get things wrong from time to time. If you have lived with a boundary in the wrong place for some time you have not really lost (or gained) anything except an opportunity, unless you have a towering sense of theoretical injustice. My view is that life is generally too short to chase such things, unless there is a very important reason in the particular case. Instead take the trouble to get it right first time. Ferdinand

You should take a look at Jeremy's self-build Walk in Wardrobe article before you buy one in, even though the orientation is different. Potential to save 5k there. It was discussed on this Ebuild thread and I hope @JSHarris can point out a version with pictures. http://www.ebuild.co.uk/topic/14367-building-a-thin-partition-wall-how-thin-can-i-go/ Ferdinand

+1 I don't think there is much more I can add here. You have to decide whether you are going to play and endless game of Planning Poker check and check, or calll their bluff and see their hand. Pfaffing will cost you more than planting a hedge, and the only thing enforcement will likely do is to make you apply for retrospective Planning Permission. That is what nearly always happens when something is not catastrophically unacceptable. The stuff about 90cm (or is it 60cm?) for a hedge being too narrow is baloney.

Cover for an outside tap to stop it freezing.

There are. If you wish you can drill a 25mm hold in the EPS and fill it with expanding foam, which is tougher than EPS, then screw your plastic screw into that. Chatter here: http://www.greenbuildingforum.co.uk/newforum/comments.php?DiscussionID=8514

Also the 100% funding (if so) is unusual. Here ECO was 2/3 of the first 6k iirc. Good luck to them, however. Ferdinand

Various means. eg long screws into plastic sockets. Ferdinand

I thought that if you renovated whole thermal elements then it has to meet building regs(?) eg https://ewistore.co.uk/does-external-wall-insulation-comply-with-building-regulations/

Looks like interesting circumstances. Target to be met by end of Financial Year? Does 80mm EPS on a solid wall meet building regs? If not, presumably somebody is turning a blind eye. When I have had detailed quotes, the supplier would build out all utility gubbins, but not satellite dish type things and posts which touched the ground. These would be down to me. Ferdinand

On a technical point - can planning conditions like this one actually be enforced against before the project is complete? Ferdinand

@Trw144 They don't usually make things be undone unless there is a real real real problem, so really this now comes down to your judgement call. I see very little point in going for 2ft or 5ft rather than 1ft bare root plants for horticultural reasons. Look after them well and they will be at 2ft or 5ft in a very short period of time anyway. Precedent sometimes exists and sometimes doesn't and it can be very much on a whim and dependent on circumstances. If they enforce you will be able to tie them up for months in bureaucracy if you wish. But if the complainant turns out to be a barnacle you may keep being approached. Do you feel lucky?

You probably need your hedge in by the end of March at the very latest, then it wants flood watering twice a week through the summer until autumn rains. Makes a huge difference. For native hedging plants try the RHS website or your commercial nursery. That is probably a small issue once they are in unless you try bananas or pomegranate or similar. I am not convinced that anyone ... including an enforcement officer ... trying to argue that a hedge is unacceptable because it has not grown enough has a leg to stand on; practice recognises that hedges and trees grow and take time and develop iirc a bit like cats or peacocks but not like dogs, which is also why you are not usually responsible for your tree demolishing next door's Porsche until it is proven that you know the tree has problems. It may be different if you are Planning Conditioned for initial hedge height, which would be nuts. Surely we do not have many of that sort of Little Hitler even in 2016? The complainants are burbling away about dots and tittles, and full stops that are allegedly upside down. I think that this may be a smaller problem than seems; really the problem is about the complainant treating your project like a toothache. I am not sure how you close it down in your circs, however. But my stance would say once I have decided my position, I would do it and tell them all to put up or shut up. Ferdinand

What are the requirements re your Heras fencing and rules as to where it goes? Can you just put that back along the boundary? Or put in a 1.2m post and rail with sheep netting stapled to it on the boundary? Wpuld be very quick to do and cheap. Does that affect Adjacent? Or you could just ignore them and aapeal the enforcement, which would give you time.

For an extreme case you can look at the recent Fracking controversy in Cumbria, there was a major national campaign of objections. Ferdinand