Kelvin

On its back. Whichever way allows you to operate the ratchet

Open the ratchet and lay it flat. Feed the strap through the mandrel slot and then fold it back over the top of the mandrel and through the ratchet. If the strap is very long you might need to pull a lot of the excess through. Attach the hooks and then tighten the ratchet. I have the hooked straps and some straps without hooks which are an absolute swine to use. If you look at lorries you’ll often see they put a twist in the strap to stop it sliding off the load it’s securing.

Well Mrs Miggins in the local pie shop told me we are in for a bad winter this year.

We are going to the old miserable mother in laws as it’s our turn and we live too far away to go and get her. Therefore no first Christmas in our new house unfortunately. Christmas may as well be cancelled as she hates Christmas and does nothing but moan about it. Ho ho ho! Technically our first Christmas was last year anyway

Hold my beer. There’s one obvious corner for the Christmas tree so I fitted two double sockets there just for that reason.

Our Nordan 3G windows are good. They look good. Operate cleanly. Are very airtight. (Well our final airtightness score was 0.44) And we haven’t had any issues with them other than the French doors need a regular squirt of lubricant on the slider at the top of the door to keep it sliding smoothly. I went around them last night to check how airtight they were in the high winds and the only window where there was a hint of air were the French Doors and only when the gusts were hitting the house straight on. I can’t really compare them to anything else though as my only other experience of new windows were the custom built ones at our last house. It was a listed building and the windows were garbage.

I’m so confident I gave away all my multitude of extensions. 😂 The biggest test was the Hi-Fi/AV corner. Everything is in and I have three plug points spare.

Nope. Everything is in and there are sockets spare (all double sockets) should anything else be added. Plus, the service void makes adding sockets easy. Two things I hate are extension and trailing cables along skirting boards or tacked above skirting boards. They either collect dust or dog hair.

Plug sockets can be hard work where to put them. Before we moved from the house we sold and the house we rented I went round and made a note of every plug socket that was in the rooms highlighting the ones in the wrong place for our use and why and the number of plug sockets in the room and everywhere we were using a plug extension. Now that doesn’t translate to the house you’re building obviously but it makes you spend time thinking about why things are in the wrong place. When we were designing the layout of the house we placed all the sockets where we thought we needed them as a first pass. When the house went up we went round and marked them on the walls which led to some changes as a second pass. I then 3D rendered every room and placing furniture in different configurations which made some more changes as a third pass. When the electrician came to do the first fix he made some suggestions so that was a fourth pass and then when it came to the second fix we made a few more changes. So 5 iterations of where do the sockets go. Additionally our electrical service void runs horizontally around the room so it’s easy to move sockets and pull cable through etc. should that ever be needed. The result of all of that was we don’t have a single plug extension in the house. Every socket is exactly where we need it. We possibly have too many sockets 😂 There are two odd sockets in the house that I can’t recall why on earth we put them where we have.

This was the only point of contention with our build. Other half wanted one because she’s always had one and I didn’t for several reasons. In the end we didn’t fit one (not because I won the argument) We also don’t have a TV in our main living room. We do have a big picture where the cabling for a TV is. The view from our living room is terrific so that’s the focal point during the day. We have a separate dedicated TV room and we use that in the evenings.

ASHP noise is intermittent and in a well insulated and well built house they might only be running for a handful of hours per day and only for a few months of the year. Farm machinery might be intermittent but it depends what they’re doing. At harvest time round us, for example, the combines are running for hours per day just at the point you might want to be sitting outside. Then if the grain is slightly damp they switch the driers on. We’re at the top of a hill a few miles from the farms too. Fortunately I like the sound of the countryside including all the farm machines.

The World is a noisy place. Background urban noise is in the 40dB-50dB range. I live very rurally surrounded by farmland. Over the course of the year there’s the constant noise of the rural countryside which is a lot of farm vehicles ploughing, planting, harvesting, moving stuff, and cutting stuff. Add in the burn that runs across our land, our two noisy sheep and you can’t hear either the ASHP or the MVHR extract unless you’re near them. If the wind is blowing in the right direction and it’s not too windy you can also hear the whoosh whoosh of the wind turbines that are 2 miles away up the Glen a bit.

Most road noise you hear is from the tyres. Modern ICE cars are relatively quiet at a constant throttle. Gas boiler flues can be quite noisy too. Our MVHR makes more noise than the ASHP and it’s running 24/7.

We have loads or rodding points too. Building control seemed keen to make sure you could easily access every part of the drainage system. Therefore every straight run has a rodding point.

I get that but SSEN were very insistent on 3m being ‘the limit’ which is what I meant by they’ll tell you…

What a lot of us do is leave the meter in the box and run a cable from the kiosk to the house. They’ll tell you there’s a 3m limit for this cable from the cutout to the CU but most of us have a much longer cable, you just size it accordingly with the correct protection and an isolator after the meter. I have two points of isolation, one at either end.

The one I have is sold as a three phase box and it looks smaller than yours. The SSEN guide has dimensions of 800mm x 900mm for a wall mounted three phase box (600x900 for single phase)

Reasonable price for quite a big box. Some of them are stupidly expensive. I tried to search for the UKPN guide and it returned a page not found error! If this is going under an agricultural field it needs to be 1000mm deep. Driveways are 600mm and cultivated ground 450mm

I cut a small hole in the bottom of a thick ziplok type bag and taped it all tightly. The issue I have is a lack of space to feed all this through behind the cladding.

Yeah don’t use drainage pipe. Didn’t you get a customer works guide from UKPN that specifies what you need to do? The guide I got from SSEN says this. Your cabinet is quite big so plenty of room to get the ducting in. You could use smooth wall flexible 50mm electrical ducting into the kiosk for UKPN and your connection to the house and a 38mm hockey stick for the earth requirement to save a bit of space. The hockey sticks are mostly used to bring the cables up into a meter box on the side of a house.

The cable from the kiosk to the house is 35mm2. I’ll take a picture and post it shortly. Have you been asked to provide your own earth? I generally add extra ducting just because it’s hard to add it afterwards.

If you have the cable on-site that will be easier. Just keep in mind the cable is very unwieldy. The issue we had was I put the kiosk in when the plot was still a field so just had the service cable from the pole and nothing else. I made up a template out of a sheet of plastic board marking the holes where the ducts came through the bottom of the kiosk. The spec I got from SSEN had a duct to put in the trench I couldn’t buy anywhere. When the guys came to fit the service cable they basically said as long as it’s black 😂 I had a temp CU and some sockets fitted to get us power on-site.

I used a 44mm hockey stick for 35mm2 SWA cable. It fitted but it was hard work. If it’s into a kiosk the guys won’t care if it’s a hockey stick or the smoothwall flexible electrical ducting. I put an extra hockey stick into my kiosk just in case I had a need to run something else into it.

There’s no reason to let them take photographs of anything other than the retaining wall. The SE won’t want to get involved in whatever the wider dispute is. They will have heard it all from your neighbour. Don’t give in to the temptation of you telling the SE your side of the story just concentrate on the wall and nothing else.