Kelvin

I would try and figure out a way of using PIR to switch the light on without it being activated by anyone else or buy her a head torch as suggested above

Cool thanks.

We don’t want a cooker hood above the island hob and don’t want to extract externally either. Therefore we are looking at a venting recirculating hob like the Neff N70 or similar. Does anyone have any experience of these types hobs and their effectiveness? It’ll be working alongside a Zehnder Q350 MVHR system.

Like I said above though be very careful about who you inform about your building control problem. It will invalidate any indemnity you seek to take out. Given you’ve already spoken to building control about it you may well have already jeopardised the indemnity.

A letter of comfort is a legal thing and is still used today including in England. I had to have one written up when we sold our house earlier this year.

The problem with the indemnity is you need to be careful you don’t notify anyone (like building control) before buying the indemnity as you will invalidate it. You might well have a problem trying to sell unless the buyers are cash buyers. If a bank is involved they have tightened up their processes on this.

Presumably the discrepancy has become apparent because the fence is marked on a drawing that is outside the boundary line that has been sent to the LR. I’d tell the LR this is a mistake and send them evidence of the fence in the correct position.

True but he’s been trying to do that and it’s taking months and is pressuring him financially. If it was me I’d be looking at the quickest approach to solve the problem and move on. That seems to me to match the boundary to what the LR thinks is the boundary. Hopefully job done, remortgage, and move on.

Also keep in mind the that in a lot of cases it ends up costing a fair bit more than your starting price so you need to factor in another 10%-15%. In terms of size. It’s possible to build a smaller house but designed in such a way that you use every square metre of it so it feels bigger. Our previous house was pretty big with 5 bathrooms. We never used half the house unless we had family/friends staying. The house we are building is half the size with two large bathrooms. It’s flexibly designed so we’ll use it as a two bedroom house but it could be used as a four bedroom house. You clearly have the money to do it but £3.5k-£5k per sqm is a broad range so lots of scope to save money.

This will be building it the most expensive way possible. Time for a healthy dose of cost engineering by going through every element line by line and deciding if you really want it and/or could the same effect be done in a different more cost effective way. Do you really need a 500m2 house? That’s pretty big and apart from build costs will be expensive to run and furnish.

As above, you don’t care about the 1 foot extra strip so move the fence so it matches what the LR has on record. The LR nearly cost my sale to go through back in March. There was a minor issue with my title and it took 7 months for the land registry to deal with it.

It’s constantly connecting to different satellites as they fly ‘overhead’ (they aren’t directly overhead us in Scotland) they aren’t geostationary.

Rural folk should look into Starlink. They’ve even recently reduced the price for both the kit and the monthly fee (from £89/month to £75) It’s not cheap but it’s a great alternative to BT Nevereach and faster than anything you’ll realistically get over copper. Copper can go much faster if you live within metres of the cabinet. It can also in theory get close to fibre speeds but not for anyone living rurally. FTTP is also very unlikely for the vast majority of rural locations. Starlink has also become faster recently as I am consistently getting over 200Mbps down and 20Mbps up. Yesterday it was running at 260Mbps down and 25Mbps up. Their long term plan is more satellites with high speed connections between them in a lower earth orbit to improve latency. It will eventually rival fibre.

Their database is variable as it sometimes says 80Mbps download speed and sometimes 0-1Mbps for my post code.

Remember that this is a trial. Load balancing will become an ever more integral part of how the grid is managed.

It’s more about incremental gains multiplied by potentially millions of people. We are too used to waste in wealthier countries whether it’s energy, water, food, or packaging. Add in the amount of unnecessary stuff people buy from clothes to electronic tat. This has been driven by low inflation and cheap money. Obviously the two extremes at either end of wealth curve still exist so the well off don’t need to cut back anywhere (luxury goods don’t tend to suffer in a recession) and the poor struggle to survive. As a very minimum if people think twice about their energy usage it won’t be such a bad thing in the long run.

I got a design for ‘free’ as part of the structural calcs for the house and garage foundations. They also look pretty good too. Just have to pass the wife test.

Do you have any powerline ethernet plugs doing anything on the network? I used to get much the same behaviour every now and again with them.

Thanks for posting. I have a retaining wall to build as part of our groundworks and these look ideal. My wall is 1m at the highest point and 21m long so these blocks look perfect.

Went through it in detail. They are off ok some big ticket items and hadn’t included some other big cost items. All the other stuff is where I expected it to be.

Like calories. Easier not to consume them than run them off. Apart from the fridge freezer and the boiler the only thing that is on permanently in our house is the printer for the same reasons as above because it consumes ink on start up. We got shot of the PVR because most things are on catch up so no need to record much so removed a box. We don’t use a landline any more so that removed another box. The computer equipment is only on when I need it including the NAS. Our internet is via Starlink connected to a separate router and two BT Wholehome Discs (was three) This does consume a lot of electricity relatively so is switched off overnight. I’ve not worked out our background load but will do. Our electricity consumption is about half the typical amount though.

How much more fuel do you think an AWD uses? I suspect you don’t do many miles and you reckon the driveway will cost £6000. Your biggest cost is the depreciation of buying a replacement car which would be a reason not to do it. You live in London don’t you? How bad does the winter get and for how long that you think an AWD on all season tyres wouldn’t get up the drive?

An SUV with AWD.

I’ve eliminated rads upstairs and the wood burning stove for similar reasons. We also eliminated 2 bathrooms and redesigned our plans which reduced the house size by 80m2. We’re still putting in PV but I am in two minds about the battery storage.

Exactly the way to look at it.