Recent content by Stevos

Thanks to everyone for the helpful and clear advice, as well as links and video. I think both the regulatory and practical aspects should now be clear to anyone in this situation. As an aside, it seems mad (especially in these days of smart thermostats being marketed directly to end-users as...

A reasonable question, but I don't have it yet - and cash flow is not great at the moment - I'm planning for the future Edit: The replacement boiler and installation costs are significant and weren't a planned for expense. Additionally I'd like to get a baseline for how the system performs...

My heating engineer is going to install a new combi boiler for me (Ideal Logic 2 Max), which I think he will fit with a standard thermostat / control. This boiler seems to support OpenTherm, and I'm wondering about fitting a smart thermostat and radiator valves at a later date to improve...

Yeah that's basically what I did, but also put some 2.5mm steel strap across the top to help bear and distribute the weight. The access isn't good due to the boards disappearing under a tiled floor. It's no doubt a bodge that someone in future will curse me for, but it's about what I can achieve...

The pictures aren't very clear, but there's nothing but splintered wood in the middle where the two floorboards meet (obviously the t&g has also been sawn through to install the pipes). Floorboards basically resting directly on pipes when loaded.

I'm assuming the person who fitted these water and gas pipes was aware that the joists, not the pipes are supposed to take the weight of the floor. This explains the noises when walking on this part of the floor

People needing to replace roofs that don't fully belong to them must happen, surely? I've been unable to find anything about this by googling etc

Probably doesn't make a difference, but I should have mentioned - this is a "flat" type roof with a very shallow pitch - see pic.

Hi, I have a garage in a run of terraced garages all sharing a continuous sheet roof (corrugated cement material, probably asbestos), with the sheets fitted with an overlap of a few corrugations. I'm interested in making the garage a better working space, clean, dry and dust free etc, but not...

I've just done a bodge job on replacing an immersion heater, cable and switch for my hot water cylinder, as a backup to the gas heated water. The old one was completely corroded through meaning it was tripping the RCCB, and the wire and switch was unsafe. I had a devil of a time trying to...

Thanks for the suggestion. Are there any bolt / sleeve bolt / carriage bolt / coach screw type fixings which could be installed without removing the wall plate? (Either to fix the two pieces of wood together, or to fix one or both of them into the brick to provide another anchor point...

I'm starting to wonder if an option would be to drill through the wood vertically to pass the armoured cable through it without the duct, then screw a heavy duty fishplate type thing right across the area in a naive attempt to add strength. The hole for the armoured cable would probably have to...

If it's not water based, perhaps it's some previous coating / treatment / spillage seeping into / through the ceiling paint. I seem to recall once seeing some kind of bitumen / tar type product causing delayed stains which got worse as it migrated.

After some reading, it seems that the "joist" that is in the way might be called a ledger board. As far as I can see the joists for the rest of the deck are suspended from these using metal joist hangers. something similar to this: http://www.decks.com/images/articles/ledgerbolt.jpg The deck...

I'm currently running some exterior cabling in 50mm external diameter flexible duct between two buildings. At one end, the cable will be running under wooden decking. Upon lifting the decking to dig the trench, I was surprised to find that the decking is suspended a few inches above the soil...