Kelvin

Our standing seam roof (Greencoat PLX) is completely silent in high winds. Very little noise in heavy rain too.

Not much. Their argument is they don’t get the labour cost from the manufacturer so pass it on. I’d actually be happy enough to contribute towards the labour cost but not £637. 60% of the cost is because we aren’t local to them.

Some if the water usage is massive! We are on a private water supply. The pump tells me we are using 103l/person/day.

Hi Long post alert. I need a sanity check on something. Not sure if this is the correct place for the question as it’s really a legal/contract question. We have a private water supply via a borehole. It was installed 9 months ago so is still under warranty. It has a relatively slow recharge rate and it’s deep at 147m. The pump is fitted at 80m and it has three water probes. Not sure how far they are spaced apart. I think the top probe is at 10m and the other two are then 20m apart. The water level is nominally at 1.2m bgl. The control panel pumps the borehole between the top and the bottom probe to make sure the pump doesn’t run dry. We moved into the house 6 weeks ago so it’s only now that we are using the water on a daily basis. We’ve configured it to provide softened water as the primary main source and an unsoftened drinking water tap. A few weeks ago I noticed that the raw drinking water wasn’t working. I checked the pressure vessel and it had dropped to zero. A few hours later it was back to normal. It happened again a few days later but this time I noticed that the water level in the storage tank had dropped below where it would normally activate the pump and refill. I did some basic checks and couldn’t see anything obviously wrong with the pressure vessel or the control gear. There were also no alarms noted on the control panel. It lights up a red tell tale if it detects low water in the hole. I called the installer to get an engineer sent out to investigate the issue. Despite being under warranty they said I’d have to pay the labour because the manufacturers don’t credit them the labour cost. The labour cost would be charged at £65/hr ex VAT with the clock starting the minute the engineer left the yard and until he returned, plus a van mobilsation cost of £142 to cover the cost of providing a van with tools and spare parts. This is more than their standard callout fee as we are further away. So not cheap. We had a family party that weekend so I had to little option but to agree to this. The engineer investigated the fault and concluded a probe had failed. Rather than replace the probe he reconfigured the system as a two probe system rather than a three probe system. We’ve had no further issues since then. He also mentioned that it was unusual for a deep borehole with a slow recharge rate to operate as a three probe system as it means you need to wait until the water level reaches the top probe before it will pump again. The more standard configuration is two probes further down with the pump slightly deeper than 80m. The bill for this was £637 inc VAT. Made up of 2 hours travel down and back plus two hours on-site, plus the van mobilisation cost. I’ve queried this on three points. 1. It’s under warranty so to pay such a huge amount in labour seems unfair and excessive. 2. The travel time looks excessive. We are 82 miles from their yard. I regularly drive the same route with a trailer and it very rarely takes longer than 90 mins. 3. Their engineer questioned how it had been originally installed given the nature of our borehole. I’ve queried the bill which I have already paid as they refuse to send an engineer without first providing your credit card details. They then automatically bill you after the visit. All I got was a credit card receipt. I had to asked for a breakdown of how they arrived at the bill. This is the second warranty failure. They didn’t charge any labour for the first failure as it happened only days after it was originally installed. They pointed out they didn’t charge me for this like I should be thankful. They are also querying the engineers fault report saying that the water level may have dropped rather than a probe fault. I feel somewhat ripped off but I can’t quite work out if I am being unreasonable and this is normal or they are as they seem quite surprised I am questioning it.

These guys are really helpful. I used them for all sorts of stuff over the years. https://www.lawnsmith.co.uk/?gad_source=1&gbraid=0AAAAAD2nA9vmYyWhQY9klZuFfGzZRCnl5&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIsdHqjbOViAMVdpaDBx0KjCCaEAAYAyAAEgLDV_D_BwE

We had a catchment tank at the previous house. Shared by 8 homes. This had a pump in it that helped pump the waste to the main sewer line that was several hundred metres away. I repeatedly had to tell the neighbours to stop flushing the wrong stuff down their loos as it blocked the tank. Consequently I’d never share anything like this with folk again.

I appreciate it needs space but your typical dedicated kitchen design place lay their shops out all wrong as they focus on cramming everything they sell in rather than how it might work in reality. I rendered our rooms in 3D and we spent ages moving around the renders to try and imagine how it might work. I would have liked to have moved that to VR but didn’t have time. Trying to imagine how something will work from 2D drawings and static 3D renders is really hard.

I think young folk get denigrated too much by some of us older folk who tend to look at the past through rose tinted glasses. School and university only prepare people so far. As has always been the case, it comes down to two things for someone to get on; are they able and are they willing with the latter being slightly more important.

In which case you’d need to consider re-doing/adjusting your kitchen to accommodate your change of circumstances among making other changes to the house. Some houses would be completely unsuitable for wheelchair users. On balance of probability you’re more likely to become old and less mobile than wheelchair bound. Therefore building to that outcome makes the most sense. Also depends on the age you are now and the likely lifespan of the kitchen. We are late 50s so the kitchen might see us out. If we were in our 30s then we might have looked at things differently.

I suspect it’s a fake situation for the clicks.

You’d design the entire kitchen differently for wheelchair access. There are lots of options available nowadays for wheelchair users plus wheelchairs with adjustable seat heights.

Basic English you say. It’s maths not math. It’s Ofsted not offstead. It’s can’t not cant. It’s ‘been doing’ not being doing. D- needs work.

Just to reiterate the point about the kitchen units being furniture in a living space. It was something we realised very early on but only after we visited another Heb Home similar to ours. The kitchen was awful as everything was greyish or white shiny laminated units so consequently it reflected everything else in the room. They’d also integrated the dining table with the island with the table being stepped down. It looked quite nice but it was an irregular shape so the dining table could seat two one side, three the other and one at the only end. The owner owned a kitchen design company too.

Yes it’s what our tall cabinets are. Cupboard doors with low profile glass fronted pull outs.

I’ve posted this before but worth repeating. We went to Blum’s HQ in Milton Keynes. They have a facility where you can lay your kitchen out using movable units to give you an idea how it might work. They also have weighted age suits that simulate what it might be like as you get older and find it increasingly hard to bend and move. Consequently we have very few cupboards in our kitchen everything at just above waist height is drawers. This did add a lot of cost to the kitchen but it was a good decision as everything is very accessible and useable. Having the ovens higher up also makes cleaning them really easy. I’d also make sure the ovens have some form of self-cleaning option. Ours are steam cleaners which works really well. Our island also only has drawers and I went to town with the Blum organisation accessories for the drawer units. These aren’t cheap and there are cheaper ways to do it but our drawer units are Blum so all the accessories are sized correctly. However, it’s worth putting some thought into all that too. If ever a room needed a place for everything and everything in its place it’s a kitchen. The consequence of all that is our kitchen is great to cook and entertain in. We had a family party last weekend so had 16 people in the house so was a proper test of how well the kitchen works. As far as your kitchen is concerned. Others have said it. I’d use the alcove space where the oven is for tall cabinets with two ovens or an oven and oven/microwave combo. Relocate the hob to the island. Integrate the fridge rather than stand alone. Extend the units beyond the window. Not sure if the colour in the render is the actual colour. It’s a bit dark. Also consider mixing up the colour scheme. The tall cabinets could be one colour and everything else different or the island could be a different colour. As @JohnMo says it becomes furniture in an open plan space.

Well said.

Iron prescribed level in Scotland is < 200 μg/l so that’s still very high. As @JohnMo says every installation is individual based on water analysis report. Ours seems overly complicated now I know more about them. We do have a DAB pump after the 1200l water tank to pump into the house. We also have a secondary ‘raw’ water supply for drinking water which complicates things further as we therefore needed to add a second UV disinfectant light. Our water showed slightly elevated nitrite levels although this has reduced through use but we still fitted a suitable filtration system. It was also hard so have a softener too. I also bought some water testing kit and check it every month.

Definitely change employers.

I witnessed it first hand with the flat roofing company and the way the lead guy spoke to their apprentice. Not just banter but outright bullying about his workmanship to how he looked. There was an issue with how my flat roof was installed and he blamed the apprentice. I pointed out he was the lead guy so the accountability stopped with him. Fell on deaf ears. Everyone else was broadly ok in terms of how they spoke to each other. It’s mostly local trades though so all know each other therefore it doesn’t pay to be a dickhead.

What I noticed was architects/SEs use Klargester as a catch all much in the same way we call vacuum cleaners Hoovers. I was recently speaking to someone who had a house built a while ago and they had a Klargester fitted but for no other reason than that was what the drainage designer had written in the description. He thought he had to fit a Klargester and didn’t realise he could have fitted anything else.

The only issue with the air kind is the blower does make a noise when running. Our blower is remote from the PTP in a cabinet and 30m or so from the house. It’s set to run on an on/off cycle. If it was close to the house we’d likely hear it but being so far away we can’t. The other slightly noisy element is through the mushroom air vent I fitted in the pipework just after where it exits the treatment plant when the blower is running. There’s a gurgling noise as the water exits the tank into the pipework on its way to the drainage field. Ours is a Graf One2clean so might be set up differently from the other air products.

£299 plus £20 shipping then £75/mo. Starlink has really improved the latency averaging under 30ms so web pages load quickly and works well with Teams/Zoom if you need that for wfh. I would check to see if you can get 5G access from three. We live very rurally but can actually pick up 5G from Three from the local town which is down the hill into the valley below us. However, three, in their infinite wisdom claim we are outside the coverage area. I bought a three unlocked 5G router from eBay and a three data SIM and it worked. We’re getting 60Mbps download, 20Mbps upload with reasonable latency. Plan is to test it for a few months and if it’s reliable ditch Elon.

You missed an opportunity there. I would not touch a biodisc with a shitty stick especially when the stick us covered in your neighbour’s shit. The issue with them really dawned on me when I saw a cross section of one at the NSBRC.

Perfect Perth. Looks out window at biblical rainfall. 😂

Very dependent on paint. The Valspar Coverall stuff I used for the mist coat and upstairs isn’t very robust and will come off with the masking tape if I leave it on too long. The stuff I used downstairs is as hard as nails and is even quite hard to sand.