Jenki

thanks for the picture @joe90👍. Love it, Heath Robinson or not, if it works and saves some money I'm in... @joe90 - hanging from the roof do you get any resonance?

any photos / details of your DIY manifold and flow adjusters? please

The guy on You tube has reviewed a few which are junk and mainly points at two manufacturers on AliExpress. A non technical point is that weight is important. Copper is heavy, and the generator needs to be big thus heavy. He's reviewed a few 500w turbines and they weigh 11.5kg (top weight) the vevor only 9.5kg net? However they are double the cost.

@ProDave, id be interested knowing what wind turbine you would be looking at. have you seen this guy on you tube? some interesting stuff on braking and dump loads etc. and his mix of LifePo4 and lead acid battery storage. We are about 3 months in full time living in Caithness, and a wind turbine has to be an option for me. we are constantly seeing winds of 12-15mph. then the winds pick up and we can have hours @ 20 - 30 MPH. biggest issue for me, is permitted development only allows 1 turbine, anymore and I need planning permission and when I tried for the original planning application the information they were requesting about the turbine was impossible to get from a cheap Chinese version. So that leads me to think I should go big but then that comes with a cost and risk...... decisions decisions

Pearl window systems - Westhoughton - Bolton, manufacture in the liniar range, never used the Resurgence range but the other range I've had no problems with in the past. Pearl don't deal with joe public or smaller builders so you will have to find a distributor. I could pass on some contact details. might deliver to Yorkshire.

way too expensive for me..

I'm posting as a non Boffin, in search of ideas. I want to set up a weather station so in the future I can use this for weather compensation, but also want this information to have around the house. Additionally I have a project in mind that having wind speeds available, and being able to use windspeed as a signal may help. So I suppose the question is can I hack an of the shelf system and interrogate the data from say an RPI? Or should I go down the route of building one based in an RPI? At some point I will want to use an Rpi to monitor the house, and create a PV divert, but this will stretch my abilities as it will require some remote / wireless monitoring as my Electricity meter will be 50M from the house. But all this said I don't want to be tinkering with it all the time and it needs to work without me here.

I assume you mean he claimed for extra items, that covered his / her fee not the fee was covered by the VAT reclaimed.😂

Our project is two stages, get some form of income from new build rental cabins, which includes power,water, waste , access for all of the build then the house. We're progressing well, with the cabins being plasterboarded. So the end is in sight. But as @Gone West says the day in day out relentless slog is difficult. We're at it 7 days a week, weekends are no more a thing, it's just a day. My advice is to have several jobs lined up, and an overall list of jobs to do, if the weather prevents one task jump to another. And if you have it on a white board you can cross it off and feel progress. If it wasn't on the list, write it on and then cross it off. It's surprising at the end of the week all the little tasks carried out along with the main goals. Lastly there is two forms of labour involved in self build. Motivated and Discipline. When your motivated it's easy you just crack on and progress, but when the motivation disappears, you then need the discipline to push on and tick something of the list. I find thinking about it this way helps a lot. If this fails there's always homebrew, or go for a walk.😂

Hi. I dragged the pipe and sheets up from Preston when I moved here, I bought the pipe from sky plastics. Poly sheets from Varico ltd, but they wouldn't deliver up here. They deliver to the isle of Lewis (I think there is a company there making a version of the polycrub). So being near Oban they might drop off. I'm going to be making another in the future for a weening shed and store so post back here if you get success.

It's just a sleeve so yes id it fits👍

Just thought i'd give an autumnal update on the unit. The heat output is fantastic. Does what it needs. We're out busy most of the Day - building, digging blah blah. But we put it on in the morning, and of late several hours at night. And so glad went this option. You set the temperature and off it goes. we realised that when it hits the temp, rather than shut off, it then starts to cool, I assume to prevent overheat. In our static, this is not required. So initially we turned the unit off, and back on when the temp dropped. But lately we have just let it get on with it, and ultimately it does the job. Only slight gripe, is it would be good to be able to programme a time to turn on in the am. But several months in. It still dees a thumbs up.

I'd be looking at about 10 course up, from where you can see. "Doing nothing" is an interesting point of view. There's probably 500kg towards 1000kg of Brick above ( we can't see the stack)., Granted it is tied in, but when you add wind loads to the stack etc it all adds up. You wouldn't want 2 bricks dropping on you from Any height. Never mind 2 or 3 hundred. Gallows brackets, plate and resin bolts for me, and don't forget to cap the top.

I used Visqueen behind the larch and lapped this onto the ground, so instead of guttering I will use some more Visqueen and create a french drain and collect from there..but it means breaking up rock so it will have to wait.

1, I used 2 rows of treated 4x1 horizontally screwed into the pipe/ posts. Then from inside used decking screws through the 4*1 into the larch. 2, time will tell. as it's in rock and not soil, and that the water tends to run off the rock I'm hoping a long time😂. Originally wanted to use scaffold pole, but it's too big for 65mm MDPE. On the future extension ( for pigs with opal sheets ) I think I'll go one size up in pipe and used scaffold poles.

This also helps reduce annoying squeaks and ticks with expansion and contraction of the pipe.

As the above replies, if your roofer thinks he's going to slide 1.5m of lead under the slates without removing them then he's not a roofer but a magician. The slates will need to be removed. I'm assuming this is remedial work? Then this will possibly be due to leaks? Then surely you want to ensure the wood (joists and battens ) are sound before spending money covering them up? If it's leaked inside, then you can be sure it was leaking for a long time before it came inside. As it's stone I'd opt for individual soakers as the upstands can be dressed individually to the stonework, same for the stepped flashing. That said a grp hidden gutter would work well with some stone dressing.

Thought I'd do a short blog on the Polycarbonate tunnel we built. Our big field suffered with no storage, and location meant containers were very expensive to transport. so one option was to build a polytunnel, which we have planning permission for. again due to location, 500m from the coast 73M AMSL I wanted something sturdy. so looked at off the shelf packages. in the Highlands and Islands the PolyCrub is seen as the mecca. Designed in the Shetland isles, guaranteed to withstand 100MPH winds etc etc. due to the ability to get CROFT grant assistance on these, the price is, IMHO, artificially high CIRC 6K for 4M *6M.. this wasn't going to happen, so after looking at many photos I designed my own.. Basic principle is hoops of MDPE pipe secured to posts in the ground, then 3*2 timber used as horizontal support, with Polycarbonate sheets secured to this timber. the bottom sides are then clad. My design was to use 65mm Black MDPE pipe, and secure the timber with coach bolts and penny washers through the pipe. this way I get a guaranteed fixing that won't pull out , and it still allows for flex in the whole structure. 4m wide x 6M long, but this can be extended. My ground has bed rock close to the surface, 300-500mm below ground, so just knocking in post wasn't going to be secure enough to withstand the winds, also where I was sighting the tunnel its on sloping ground, so I couldn't get it level. I cleared the area to removed the top vegetation and a bit of the top soil. and dug 14 holes. then due to rock levels I then core drilled the rock to allow for the post to be deeper. We then set these in concrete, (at the same time as doing the slabs for the cabins.) The next day we had a look and I wasn't too happy with the security of the posts, so slight change of plan, we created a plinth. basically I used some 6x2 either side of the posts, with a slight angle, then filled this with concrete (again we used ready mix at the same time as back filling the treatment plant) this added about 300kg of concrete to each side, and joined all the posts together, and gave us a solid plinth at the side. No Photos of the next stage but we cut 7M lengths of 63mm pipe, this when placed over the posts gives approx. 500mm dwarf walls and a 6M polycarbonate sheet, giving a head height of around 2.3M. we used a plumb bob to get the centre line on each hoop and drilled an 8mm hole through the pipe and secured the top 3x2 treated timber to al the hoops. One thing we found was that the MDPE did not bend uniformly, this may have been due to slight errors with the posts being plumb. The resultant timber (which was not very straight), snaked from hoop to hoop. after head scratching and re thinking. I decided it was a poly tunnel and to get on with it. we used 7 lengths of timber jointed with half lap joints to extend the length to 6.5M. if using a clock analogy the timber was placed at 9,10,11,12,1,2,3 positions, with the 9 & 3 o'clock being 500mm off the ground, also ensuring the 9 & 3 o'clock timbers were approx. 5.8M apart circumferentially. Then it was a case of securing the polycarbonate sheets to the timber. each sheet is joined with some soffit H joint strip. (you can buy a clear joining strip for the sheets but for a 6M length it was around £65. the H strips proved extremely difficult to connect the two sheets together, or should I say impossible. so I cut off the back edge on one side and used some glazing sealant. this way we could attach the strip to the polycarbonate prior to bending over the tunnel. and each sheet 'H' strip basically lapped over the previously installed sheet. day 2 we had the basic structure. It was noticeable that the curve was not symmetrical, so putting the door frame header in by securing to timbers at 11 and 1 o'clock was not level. I overcome this by using a ratchet strap attached to the 11, and 3 o'clock timbers and tightening until timbers at 11&1 o'clock were level. I then put the two door jambs in (concreted at the base) and cut to the length required and secured to the header. This worked and the tunnel was now more cylindrical. I framed the rear by baring 3x2's off the horizontal timbers. Last steps were to clad the base, I used 4*1 treated timbers that were screwed into the MDPE pipe and wooden posts. then used strips of visqueen to create a more sealed dwarf wall, this will help prevent driven rain from the winds getting inside. over this I used Larch timber backs* to create a vertical cladding All in with hardware, polycarbonate, timber, concrete the project cost £1200. not cheap, but its solid as a rock. It withstood the first Autumnal storms this week with winds hitting 50MPH. Its also very warm inside, even now as the temperature is falling. Larch timber backs are the offcuts from the saw mills and are reasonably priced as scrap. we purchased a pack of timber backs, approx.40 lengths of larch timber with bark in 4.8M lengths for £100. these are not uniform and taper etc, but as i only needed 500mm lengths it was straight forward to make it work.

Confused. I thought if I use my main router, and set up a guest network on that, that separates my home network from the guest wifi access? Then using the wireless Access point, this guest network will be broadcast in each cabin with no additional setting up? Am I missing something... I've already got the cables in place, so was hoping that it was a case of adding the boxes / power and plugging in?

I added a large Poly (polycarbonate) tunnel for this very reason

Thanks, Looked at these last night, and decided to sleep on it. This morning on my phone Amazon suggested I buy them and the price had dropped to £16.19🤷‍♂️. so all being well this will work seamlessly. Thanks all....

Too much hassel I'm not after. But economy I am. And these are not economical.😬 Thanks for the option, but i'll accept some hassel to reduce the bill. Also concerned that the full wrap of PIR may affect signal strength. In each cabin.

At the moment the amenity is my tool store and washer dryer room.😂. but no WIFI is not required in there. so if I opt for a small 5 port switch, then put one of these Routers into each cabin, with a bit of setup (???) I should be ok? all in for £30 ish cheapest wifi AP I've seen is around £45?

Has anybody got any links to some cost effective Wireless access points? They seem very expensive.

Hi all. Some advice please. For my 2 guest cabins I want to supply internet access. I've currently run a Cat 6 external cable from my static 40m to an amenity block. Then a cat 6 cable from the amenity to see each cabin Eventually the feed to the amenity will be from the house about 70M away. Will the following work? connect the cable in static to plusnet router. In amenity block connect cable from static to WAN Port on a tp link router (this is a 4g router I'm using at the moment) Then connect the cabins to the lan ports. I think I can then use the tp link router to create the guest network.? Any issues with this? What should I use in each cabin to give a network port and WiFi? Thanks in advance.