Kelvin

That’s a good idea at least in the larger open plan area. Too late now.

Good stuff. Mine has been on the ground for four years because fibre has been within touching distance and haven’t wanted to screw to the garage.

It can do. Case in point is in the town near us. New houses poorly thought through drainage was going into the sewerage system. As soon as we had any sustained rainfall it couldn’t cope so would flood the road at a dip with sewerage right in front of a primary school and houses. This has gone on for several years until Scottish Water eventually addressed it a few months ago.

Planning made it a condition for us to put in a large soakaway but it was never checked. One of the folk onsite suggested we just take a pipe right down to the burn because that’s what a lot of folk do because it’s never checked. That’s fine but way below us down in the valley where the water all ends up suffers from flooding a few times per year so I didn’t want to add to that so we put in a large soakaway. Cost very little and was easy to do.

Because I had a similar experience I decided to fit a commercial Hormann door and motor. I went with an insulated sectional door and the WA300 S4 shaft operator (which can operate a roller door too) I called Hormann directly they gave me a list of installers. My assumption here is with it being commercial and designed for multiple actuations per day it should last a long time. We shall see. The other advantage of this motor and system is it allowed the door to open and follow the pitch of the roof. Obviously not a concern with a roller door.

I did landscape. Easier to mange the boards too.

I’ve been driving around Perth and Kinross a fair bit the last few months and Openreach (via Morrisons) have been laying fibre in the grey ducts all over the place. I was little surprised at how shallow the trenches are for the ducts though given how soft the verges get and how deep the ruts end up.

I wasn’t recommending it and it was pissing water down the wall above the door at the time.

My experience of it is that it depends really on how much debris builds up in the gutters. If it’s a few leaves it’s ok. However, where we were in a previous house there were so many leaves that they didn’t dry out and blow away. They broke down in the gutters along with the build up of algae so it clogged up eventually. It was a right manky mass removing the brush to clean it all out. This wasn’t helped by the fact it was a three storey townhouse so quite high teetering about on a ladder.

It annoyed me when I was fitting them and nearly decided not to. I fitted the first one and lived with it for a while. I decided I never really noticed it wasn’t metal like the rest of the rainwater system so fitted the others. The only place I didn’t fit them is at the front of the house where the patio is as I wanted the patio slabs cut around the pipe. I did fit the shoe though which allows me to slide it up in case I ever needed access to the pipe without having to take it off.

Not for residential use yet. OneWeb is LEO based but mainly aimed at commercial use (last time I checked) There are a few other LEO systems planned to compete with Starlink (Amazon for one) Plus there are some high Earth orbit services but they have much higher latency (hundreds of ms) so not that useful for residential use.

We’ve had Starlink for almost 4 years. It’s been more or less problem free. When we moved to the new house I had some trouble getting it to reliably reconnect so contacted customer support which is done via the app. Contact is then mostly done through email. They have a process they follow which resulted in them sending me a new cable and then a whole new system (dish, router, mount, and cables) Our original system then started working but it was too late to cancel the replacement. They told me to keep the replacement just in case. This was all free of charge. A few weeks ago they sent me a Starlink mini for free all we have to do is pay the £4 monthly keep active fee and if we use it we get a 50% discount on the usage fee. It’s become noticeably faster over the four years and we regularly see over 300Mbps download and 25Mbps upload. The ping has also improved from over 30ms to under 20ms. It’s expensive though it has become cheaper since we first started using it. It works even in horrendous weather. The only thing that has an impact is obstructions so careful placement is necessary. The app helps you with this though. Since the Vodafone/Three announcement I am now getting a good 5G signal outdoors with speeds that match Starlink so that’s an option.

Self-cleaning is a bit of an overstatement by Lindab although the debris does end up in a neat pile in front of it. My only criticism of it is you need three bits. The downpipe, a shoe and the self cleaning trap. Four bits in my case as I also used one of those rubber boots. The plus side was I was able to use a single run of downpipe as the shoe and trap added length.

Because we have a rainwater soakaway I have a rodding eye on each straight run and a silt trap before the pipework enters the soakaway. We get a lot of debris in our gutters. A combination of leaves on one side and a bit of algae on the North side. I also fitted self cleaning leaf traps which actually work quite well.

No pressure either way but I still had to provide as much information as I could about appliances, ASHP and any other high loads including model numbers but as it was just a field at the time I just gave them my best guess.

Agreed with the WAN port use. I had assumed you’ve switched off all the routing functions in the router. In my case the garage BT WholeHome disc is plugged into a switch that is connected to the router in the plant room in the house.

There’s no particular reason for UFH pipes to fail under normal use. Every house I’ve lived in with rads have had leaks. Other than the obvious benefits an often overlooked benefit of UFH is the practicality of no rads on the walls so it makes room layout better. I’ve also simplified our heating system so there’s nothing overly complex about it. We’ve done the wall of South facing full height glass, big West facing picture window, and big full height picture window in a small bedroom. There’s no doubt it has some impact in the hot summer days and on cold dull days (especially the bedroom) and less glass would have been better from a performance point of view. But houses are a compromise between aesthetics, performance, and how they make you feel and I’d rather have the view and live with the minor downsides. That said the heating has only really started to come on in the last week. Had we built the house with a performance at any cost perspective we’d barely need heating at all. Interestingly, despite us running the house relatively cool, all our friends, who live in old cold stone buildings, find it too hot.

Very nice. Congratulations. As fast as a kit should be.

Very nice job. I don’t have the room but our filters don’t get too dirty that quickly.

In Scotland it’s a two stage process where you apply for planning (what to build) and then once achieved you apply for the warrant (building regs) It took us 6 months to get the planning approval then 8 weeks to get the building warrant. However we had a 9 week gap between gaining planning approval and submitting the warrant application as getting the construction drawings, structural drawings and a couple of other things took weeks. It was a year from when we started the design process to the first spade in the ground.

I installed a 3 phase cabinet (we have a single phase supply) as I thought that would big enough to future proof us. However this was a year before we started building the house so was a bit of guesswork. Our meter is in the cabinet and the house 25m away so needs a big cable and an isolator. I hadn’t considered how big the isolator is. Fast forward 3 years and we installed the EV charger which needs its own small CU. It was installed at the meter end and there wasn’t room in the cabinet for it so I had to install a second smaller cabinet just for the EV CU. Bit annoying. It’s a different colour too so shall have to paint it at some point or possibly build a wooden cabinet around them both as I have plenty of wood left. We also have a workshop and sewage plant but I ducted them into the house on the main CU rather than into the electricity kiosk. My cabinet has three ducts. One in for the mains supply, one for the house supply, and a spare just in case.

It just highlights how difficult our energy market is and is still dominated by a few large companies. I’ve had two (maybe three) companies go bust Bulb and People that I recall. The People one was particularly difficult because I moved at the same time. I paid the final bill etc. Two years later I got a legal letter demanding £334 for a different final payment that they claimed to have sent me. It was eventually dropped after months of back and forth. It also impacted my credit rating for a while. Not sure I’d ever go back to trying any of the smaller suppliers now.

I had a similar estimate for a supply where the connecting pole was literally the other side of our fence. I dug the trench from the pole to the kiosk. All they had to do was pull their cable and connect it. I didn’t get a sensible cost until I asked for an actual quote which was £5k. I queried that and it reduced to £2k. Then when they came to do the survey they said it would be £1k which is what they charged me. A few weeks after the install they contacted me to say that they hadn’t used half the materials they planned to use and gave me a £600 refund.

What you’ve done is the best approach. I did similar into my garage using BT Wholehome discs to extend the WiFi into the garage and for the Zappi to pick up. Cheap to buy second hand although I already had four.

I’ve also noticed that the accuracy of the various sensors is quite variable, especially the Loxone ones. I bought a Ruuvi one that you can calibrate and use that to apply an offset to all the others.