Kelvin

I’ve been where you are. Completely lost faith in the builder and faced with this decision. Stop the build. Cancel all follow on trades which will cause delays and likely money. However it’s the right decision to make. It certainly was in my case. Get someone (your SE) in to review and report on the build against the structural engineering drawings (I got Gus from here in my case) Even if you don’t get anywhere with your current builder it all still needs fixed and you need the detail on how it ought to be fixed so that whoever you get to fix it knows what they need to do. Builders aren’t engineers it’s just that a lot of them think they are.

That’s awful welding. You need to get an independent assessment of the whole build to this point while it’s still fixable. And I really doubt your builder is actually capable of fixing this without someone standing over him checking everything he does.

We had this in our previous house although mostly in the winter. In our case it was the large lean to living room ceiling that was attached to the main house. It was a single story room 11m x 6m and 3.4m ceiling with a large roof void above it (was an old cow shed) It had a complex set of beams in the roof void the bottoms of which were exposed into the room. In the winter and in the evening when the room was cooling down it would make loud cracking and banging noises. Was a bit disconcerting but we were there for 8 years and nothing happened, no signs of movement or cracks in the plaster.

I’ve avoid timber cladding over it as it needs an air gap behind it. How would you then finish it around your windows a cills? Stick with the stone work and finish the rest of better and correct what’s there. If you think you might end up removing it and starting again then that’s a decision to be made now not later. To help with that I’d try and fix the worst area now and let that make the decision for you.

The push in Wagos can be re-used. Twist the cable from side to side while pulling.

If I’ve learnt anything building a house it’s that it’s usually best to fit something slightly bigger than you actually need if you have flexibility with sizing things. Anything I’ve done where the size is just right has ended up making the job harder.

Good stuff. We’ve had ours running for almost two weeks now. 8.45kWp array (East/West roof), 24kWh battery storage, and gateway for whole home backup. Also on self-consumption. Working really well and easy to configure. A few outstanding issues with the install but happy enough with it.

2 guys for one day to punch down some cables. Holy moly. @Nickfromwales will need to lie down. And 60 cables!

We don’t have a back door as such but the French Doors open out. Like the discussion on the other thread about this you need to think about supporting door in some way as the wind can rip outward opening doors out of your hand.

😂 well it’s done now so I don’t care.

It does indeed.

Because the conversation was also about self-building being about more than just the economics of it which is marginal at best for a lot of folk that do it.

We have one TV in the house and one in the workshop although I use that as a monitor as my laptop screen is gubbed.

Reliability mostly. Everything that has an Ethernet port is connected via a wire rather than Wi-Fi. We have two printers for example (A3 and A4) that the other half uses for work. They are both more reliable with a wired connection. The Zappi charger is more reliable with a wired connection than WiFi which despite having a strong connection to the access point regularly lost connectivity with the MyEnergi server. Our network is slightly complicated by having Starlink in the garage in bypass mode and the router is in the house in the plant room. We also have several CCTV cameras around the place (hence POE) which. I’ve separated that out into their own VLAN. Plus there’s all manner of hubs for this and that. I wanted to keep an eye on the water tank level as we’ve had the odd problem with the borehole control panel so have a probe in the tank connected to a hub etc.

Some would argue that using cable in the first place instead of Wi-Fi is OTT. CAT6a cable is unwieldy plus I like to keep some length in the cable just in case. It’s much neater with a patch panel as all the cable is in some trunking and into the IDCs at the back of the patch panel then some short patch cables connecting to the switches. Cheaper too as I use toolless RJ45 plugs for the cable ends I do make up (that still technically need tools to make up 😂)

I have a 24 port patch panel (punching that down was fun!) and two 16 port switches (one is POE) in one cabinet and an 8 port hub in the other. I’m a habitual labeller so everything is at least labelled and I’ve stuck a network diagram to the inside of each cabinet.

I have two network cabinets, one in the garage and one in the plant room. My other half looks at all this stuff in there occasionally and I can see the despair on her face. 😂 I’ve started writing a how to guide, just in case!

I have a trade account with Travis and there is a big difference with some prices. Despite being 2 miles away I didn’t use them much as some stuff was horrendously expensive compared to online. It’s handy for the odd bit of sheet material as it’s so local to me.

For drainage I used dedicated civils place in Dundee. They knew their stuff so were great for advice.

Combination of Screwfix, CEF, and online. Screwfix prices are pretty keen I found but I used them because it’s 2 miles away so was convenient and they could get most stuff not off the shelf next day. They were also great at taking stuff back.

Similar size to the one near me (50KVA) It’s years old from 1960 something. It serves 4 houses from what I could determine from the drawing SSEN sent me. Fortunately we are on a different line that had been upgraded.

Yes, ours is 1.4m and I wouldn’t have wanted it much smaller. Due to the pitch of the roof the ceiling gains height quickly so it means you can stand at the head of the bed quite comfortably but I am only 5’9” which helps. The wall at the bed head isn’t structural so you’ll be able to adjust that once the frame is up and decided then how far to bring it out. It’s what we did. I marked out the king size bed dimensions on the floor and then made up a headboard out of cardboard to determine where to place that wall.

This is the issue we had albeit our ridge height is slightly higher at 6.1m and roof pitch 45°. My concern was about being in bed and feeling the ceiling was really close to us. Here’s a drawing of what we did.

The week before the system was installed we spent £36 on electricity (includes charging the car) The week it was installed we spent £6 also including charging the car. However we also exported £5 of electricity to the grid which we didn’t get paid for as we don’t have the export MPAN number yet. I’ve put the system into self-consumption mode currently. I did have it in ‘AI’ mode but what it was doing was dumping any energy in the battery to the grid outside of the cheap tariff window and adding some energy back through the cheap period and then using PV to charge it the next day (it looks at the weather forecast)

Coming up with plan and acting upon that plan are two different things. Like a lot of things everything is fine until it isn’t.