Services

[Vijay]

Afternoon,

 

Will be at the stage of digging the drainage and service pipework this week and still haven't got it clear in my head where to run the services too. I hate the outside meter boxes, so I believe I am allowed to have the electricity meter internally, as long as it's on an external wall. I'm thinking of putting it in the garage where the red dot is on the attached layout. I could also put it in the porch if needs be but I think they're a bit of an eye sore.

 

I have yet to confirm where I can fit the gas connection (they have been a nightmare getting back to me), but I'm hoping I will be able to fit it internally (especially with smart meters).

 

I though of running the water pipe to either the garage or the utility room?

 

Where would I run the BT ducting to??

 

The distance from the service point (blue dot) to the garage is approx 34m and to the front of the house if approx 25m, so would it be OK to have direct pipe runs? I will also have an understair area of approx 1.2m wide by 2m long with a good head height (black dot in hall) where I thought of putting the UFH manifolds, so maybe meters or CU boxes could be in there?

 

Anything else I've not thought of?

[Ferdinand]

You do not want to run anything where you will need to dig up your drive or 50k landscaped garden for any reason. 

 

I have just just negotiated an easement for a landlocked property and we put it approx 300mm in from the fence along the obvious location at the back of a wide flower border.

 

And you you want a spare duct or two, for obvious reasons.

 

F

Edited August 5, 2017 by Ferdinand

[RichS]

Could you not build a "cupboard" and put all the meters in remote cabinets just inside the boundary. You can then run the cabling/gas pipe to where it suits best.

Where I am the meters have got to be able to be accessed without entry to the dwelling, so certainly no inside meters, may well be different for your area though.

[Vijay]

But what's the realism of having to dig up the drive as long as drawstrings are left in? For what reason would it need to be done?

 

Gonna run an extra 2 or 3 ducts for electric cable/lighting/intercom for front gate

 

Not overly keen on an external cupboard but certainly better than meter boxes! 

[Ferdinand]

No idea what the reason might be :-), but I sure that one will turn up eventually if we don't consider it .

 

Spare ducts is a good mitigation strategy. I think I am in favour of putting services under loose laid paved paths on gravel trenches. For me it is probably paramount to be able to get to everything without disturbing too much else.

 

In our last house we had a whole area .. perhaps 250 sqm (out a of about 2acres) ... of our garden that was saturated for years, and the corner of the next field was the same. We eventually sold off the neighbouring bungalow, and the Fred Dibnah style chap who bought it dug the deep foundations and sunken floor for a gargantuan engine shed in that same area with his JCB, which then filled up with water too like a lake or Texan swimming pool.

 

Eventually he excavated the post war sweep driveway at the front, which was about 400mm of washboard concrete, and found no fewer than THREE leaks in the water pipe the supplier side of the meter that we measured at several litres per minute, and had been running like that for over a decade.

 

God knows what the bills would have been if it were on the house side of the meter and Severn Trent had no leak liability capping scheme.

 

Ferdinand

[Ferdinand]

2 hours ago, Vijay said:

But what's the realism of having to dig up the drive as long as drawstrings are left in? For what reason would it need to be done?

 

Gonna run an extra 2 or 3 ducts for electric cable/lighting/intercom for front gate

 

Not overly keen on an external cupboard but certainly better than meter boxes! 

No idea what the reason might be :-), but I sure that one will turn up eventually if we don't consider it .

 

Spare ducts is a good mitigation strategy. I think I am in favour of putting services under loose laid paved paths on gravel trenches. For me it is probably paramount to be able to get to everything without disturbing too much else.

 

In our last house we had a whole area .. perhaps 250 sqm (out a of about 2acres) ... of our garden that was saturated for years, and the corner of the next field was the same. We eventually sold off the neighbouring bungalow, and the Fred Dibnah style chap who bought it dug the deep foundations and sunken floor for a gargantuan engine shed in that same area with his JCB, which then filled up with water too like a lake or Texan swimming pool.

 

Eventually he excavated the post war sweep driveway at the front, which was about 400mm of washboard concrete, and found no fewer than THREE leaks in the water pipe underneath. Fortunately it was on the supplier side of the meter but measured at several litres per minute, and had been running like that for over a decade.

 

God knows what the bills would have been if it were on the house side of the meter and Severn Trent had no leak liability capping scheme.

 

Following the theory of the Critical Job Detector which exists in every piece of computer equipment to make sure that it breaks down at the precise moment of maximum stress and cost, I formally formulate Ferdinand's Law.

 

Ferdinand's Law Draft One. The likelihood of needing to access any item of equipment or service in your house for any reason is inversely proportional to the time, cost, difficulty, domestic disharmony  and disturbance required to gain access to the item.

 

Ferdinand

Edited August 5, 2017 by Ferdinand

[Vijay]

I completely understand your thinking, but if things are in ducting, surely it's easier to replace pipes/wires without digging much up. Plus the beauty of cheap long length endoscopes surely helps

[Vijay]

So any suggestions where water and BT should be ducted to? I assume BT would be the hallway and water could be kitchen/utility or garage?

[PeterW]

BT will run to your master socket - beware that this can sometimes mean they terminate at a point and you need to put the ADSL filters at every location past that point. I think @Bitpipe had a similar issue and resolved it quite neatly. 

[Ferdinand]

8 hours ago, Vijay said:

I completely understand your thinking, but if things are in ducting, surely it's easier to replace pipes/wires without digging much up. Plus the beauty of cheap long length endoscopes surely helps

 

The sort of things that happens is that your ducts fill up with water through microfractures, or the plugs at the ends shrink and leak.

 

I am sure that BH people have experience and solutions (eg you can blow them out again with a blower, which might be an elephant, or a Henry-hoover type thing, or an air-line. Just do not stand in the wrong place at the other end :-), and we are perhaps dealing with things decades down the line.

 

Ferdinand

 

Edited August 6, 2017 by Ferdinand

[Jeremy Harris]

9 hours ago, PeterW said:

BT will run to your master socket - beware that this can sometimes mean they terminate at a point and you need to put the ADSL filters at every location past that point. I think @Bitpipe had a similar issue and resolved it quite neatly. 

 

 

The new master sockets get around the need for ADSL filters, but do mean that your modem or modem/router has to be co-located with the master socket (it's good practice to do this anyway).  Just make sure that the guys install a MkIII master socket, as that has a built in VDSL/ADSL filter, so all the extensions are free of the broadband signal.

 

In our case (we have fibre to the cabinet, FTTC, broadband) I fitted the OpenReach VDSL modem on the wall next to the master socket, and powered it using power over Ethernet (PoE), so no power supply was required for it at the master socket end.  I ran Cat 6 cable to a point next to the master socket, with that cable running back to the PoE injector and the WiFi router.  The router connects to a switch that then runs all the other wired network connections in the house.

 

Worth thinking about where you are going to have network connections in the house, and where you want to put the modem/router, as that can have a bearing on where you put the master socket.

[Oz07]

Don't want a boundary box with gas if you can avoid. The governor after the meter restricts the flow or pressure I believe which means big pipe size to appliances if far away (could be wrong here @Nickfromwales). Also that flexible gas pipe costs a fortune! Far better to get it as close to house and appliances as poss using the 41m or so that national grid provide at subsidised rate. 

[Jeremy Harris]

Depends where the governor is.  At our old house, the governor sat inside a green box near the boundary, with no governor at the meter in the wall.  All the houses along the road are the same, as you can see the green boxes at the boundaries of most of them. 

[PeterW]

25 minutes ago, JSHarris said:

I fitted the OpenReach VDSL modem on the wall next to the master socket, and powered it using power over Ethernet (PoE), so no power supply was required for it at the master socket end.  I ran Cat 6 cable to a point next to the master socket, with that cable running back to the PoE injector and the WiFi router.

 

Neat idea @JSHarris..! I have a PoE switch that will go with the current network and I hadn't thought about powering the modem from that. Have you just used a standard 5v/12v DC buck at the modem end ..?

 

I'm not even considering a phone line at this point either - I have a Sipgate local number already and will most likely go to fibre with a commercial broadband provider such as XLN Telecom. I think the days of landlines are numbered, pardon the pun, as most people have mobile phones anyway. I have a company provided PicoCell from O2 due to us having a none existent signal at the current house so that will move (even though we get a pretty decent O2 signal at the new one ..!) so my mobile works wherever I am in the house. 

[Jeremy Harris]

Just now, PeterW said:

 

Neat idea @JSHarris..! I have a PoE switch that will go with the current network and I hadn't thought about powering the modem from that. Have you just used a standard 5v/12v DC buck at the modem end ..?

 

I'm not even considering a phone line at this point either - I have a Sipgate local number already and will most likely go to fibre with a commercial broadband provider such as XLN Telecom. I think the days of landlines are numbered, pardon the pun, as most people have mobile phones anyway. I have a company provided PicoCell from O2 due to us having a none existent signal at the current house so that will move (even though we get a pretty decent O2 signal at the new one ..!) so my mobile works wherever I am in the house. 

 

 

This is what I did, @PeterW:

 

 

The modem wasn't fussy about power, and runs on 12VDC nominally, so I have just run 12V directly down the unused pairs in the cable to provide power.  This works fine, I just wish I'd had a white power plug and a bit of white two core cable for the power lead that I tapped into the home made link cable  The VDSL cable is also home made, just so I could keep it short.  All this stuff is tucked away on the utility room wall, so pretty much out of sight.

[Vijay]

So JSHarris has has BT master socket in the utility room (which I never though of). Did you just run the ducting to there and in through the floor or did BT have any say in the matter?

[Jeremy Harris]

4 minutes ago, Vijay said:

So JSHarris has has BT master socket in the utility room (which I never though of). Did you just run the ducting to there and in through the floor or did BT have any say in the matter?

 

Yes, I ran the ducting in there, as it seemed an out of the way place to stick all the odds and ends that I didn't want on show in the main part of the house.  On that bit of wall there is the power for the ASHP, the ASHP command unit and the thermostat receivers for the wireless thermostats.  Underneath the work surface that's below that photo is the UFH manifolds and controls, with a space for dirty boots and shoes in front of it (this is right by the back door).

[PeterW]

1 minute ago, JSHarris said:

Yes, I ran the ducting in there, as it seemed an out of the way place to stick all the odds and ends that I didn't want on show in the main part of the house. 

 

@JSHarris out of curiosity what ducting did you use ..?? I'm considering that I could get a duct to my comms room relatively easily from the external wall so BT would just need to pull his cable through. 

[Jeremy Harris]

5 minutes ago, PeterW said:

 

@JSHarris out of curiosity what ducting did you use ..?? I'm considering that I could get a duct to my comms room relatively easily from the external wall so BT would just need to pull his cable through. 

 

My very helpful local OpenReach engineer supplied a load of free Duct56, hockey stick bends, cast iron boxes etc.  This was just cast into the slab alongside all the other stuff, you can just see all the ducts coming up at the far corner of the slab:

 

[PeterW]

I was thinking about running 25mm black duct for him to run the cable in, and then terminating it at a closed round box or similar at either end.

 

I do want to drill the wall where it goes though - the one monkey I'm not looking forward to is the Sky engineer ....... 

[Jeremy Harris]

I only used the Duct 56 because I had loads of it (still have, I think there are around ten lengths on a rack on my workshop wall).  We needed Duct 56 for the relocation of a phone cable that used to run overhead, across the site, and which was put underground when we took down the electricity pole it was mounted on.  Because the pole was an SSE one, we didn't have to pay anything to relocate the phone cables - some bizarre rule about only needing to pay for relocation if the pole is owned by OpenReach.  Anyway, we ended up with loads of spare underground cable and Duct 56, so it was easier to just use that to bring the phone cable into the house underground, too. 

 

I can't see why a bit of 25mm duct shouldn't do the job OK, as I don't think that OpenReach are fussy about what happens for the run into your house, they only seem to insist on using Duct 56 in some areas, too, as I seem to remember Dave saying that they still use armoured cable, buried direct, in Scotland.

[PeterW]

Thanks. Ironically the fibre joint unit is opposite the end of the drive but they would need a 35m duct into the house to do that and the preference is the pole on the opposite side of the road to the side of the house - it would be a 6m catenary connection to the gable end which is fine with me. We will "only" get 76mb which is fine by me although I currently get over 150mb from Virgin who happen to have a nice cabinet in my verge ..... 

[Bitpipe]

14 hours ago, PeterW said:

BT will run to your master socket - beware that this can sometimes mean they terminate at a point and you need to put the ADSL filters at every location past that point. I think @Bitpipe had a similar issue and resolved it quite neatly. 

 

We ran grey underground duct from the site boundary to the basement plant room wall, when we crossed the road to the pole, the ground worker just used black electricity ducting and finished with a grey BT hockey stick.

 

We pulled through our own gel filled 5 core cable (bought from TLC) as it was £50 for 100m vs £5/m if pulled through by OpenReach (total run was about 50m). We have two active lines on this cable, one domestic (voice only) and one business (with DSL).

 

Internally things were a bit more complicated as we'd made contingency for a traditional drop wire to the loft if the road crossing was not possible for any reason.

 

Sparky therefore had a multi-pair telephony circuit that ran from the basement plant room, to the basement media room, to the ground floor study and then up to the loft space where the Cat5 rack & switch is located.

 

OR initially put the DSL master socket in the loft, patching that incoming circuit through the whole run with the voice line running back down to the study. The BT Smarthub was located in the eaves and patched straight into the Cat 5 switch and distribution.

 

The voice only circuit master socket terminated in the media room and was then patched up to the study where the DECT basestation lives.

 

This initial arrangement did not give good enough WiFi coverage, so we re-configured it to have the DSL master socket in the basement plant room (there was already a box here, just needed to change the face plate) and the signal is patched up to the study where it comes out of a standard Euro plate double BT socket, along side our voice only line.

 

I needed to use a microfilter here to split out the DSL and voice signal so I can have have the Smarthub in the study. I just patch the ethernet from the SmartHub back up to the distribution panel using an existing Cat 5 data circuit, and it then gets sent around the house through the distribution panel.

 

The loft BT socket is redundant now  - I used the old BT Homehub 5 to act as a slave WiFi for upstairs, hanging off the cat 5 distribution rack. 

 

Hope you all followed that  Didn't recall it being that complicated when I started typing....

 

Anyway, the advantage I have is that the DSL master socket is next to the incoming line (with the built in filter) which is best to measure performance and remove any internal wiring from the equation. I also have the BT hub in an accessible spot which is useful for checking status and connecting wifi using the WPS button, plus wifi coverage is maximised across four floors.

 

Lesson learned, build in redundancy (we lost one pair in the internal circuit) and flexibility in where these services are located - you may not want your DSL hub right at the master socket if you're relying on it for WiFi also.

[Bitpipe]

2 hours ago, JSHarris said:

I only used the Duct 56 because I had loads of it (still have, I think there are around ten lengths on a rack on my workshop wall).  We needed Duct 56 for the relocation of a phone cable that used to run overhead, across the site, and which was put underground when we took down the electricity pole it was mounted on.  Because the pole was an SSE one, we didn't have to pay anything to relocate the phone cables - some bizarre rule about only needing to pay for relocation if the pole is owned by OpenReach.  Anyway, we ended up with loads of spare underground cable and Duct 56, so it was easier to just use that to bring the phone cable into the house underground, too. 

 

I can't see why a bit of 25mm duct shouldn't do the job OK, as I don't think that OpenReach are fussy about what happens for the run into your house, they only seem to insist on using Duct 56 in some areas, too, as I seem to remember Dave saying that they still use armoured cable, buried direct, in Scotland.

 

in a domestic setting they don't seem to care, as long as there is grey BT duct popping out of the ground next to the pole. They're also very happy if you pull your own cable and just leave 10m or so coiled up beside the pole - only mistake I made was not to run it up the metal shoe at the base and through the 2m plastic shield on the side of the pole - OR just tacked my cable to the rear of the pole by a hedge (out of sight but not otherwise protected).  

[Bitpipe]

4 hours ago, Oz07 said:

Don't want a boundary box with gas if you can avoid. The governor after the meter restricts the flow or pressure I believe which means big pipe size to appliances if far away (could be wrong here @Nickfromwales). Also that flexible gas pipe costs a fortune! Far better to get it as close to house and appliances as poss using the 41m or so that national grid provide at subsidised rate. 

 

Our house is about 20m off the boundary where the gas main is so we had to have a meter next to the house (in an ugly brown ground box and then take it into the house from there. Electricity is in a kiosk near the boundary, did this prior to demolition so we only had to get the DNO out once. 

 

Don't forget to run data cables (or make duct provision) if you plan to have video / audio intercom on boundary and /or want access control of gates or entrances. I've just run an exterior grade ethernet cable to my kiosk from the basement plant room in black electric duct for this purpose ahead of completing the landscaping around the house.