Roof time

GL

Re the need to move the dish on to the roof, I would just temporarily remove the dish from the wall mount (having carefully marked both so you can bolt it back in the same place) but leave the mount in place and ask ("nicely" now!) for the monkeys to cut the insulation around it because they generally have to cut the insulation around other things anyway (as they did when mine was fitted) - but then keep a close eye on what they actually do do!

And ask for a suitably-sized off-cut of the insulation so that you can fill the hole up if you ever need to move house.
 
John my dish is down mate, well the motorised one is, striped down to its back plate (but left on the motor for quickness on re-sighting), dish face and push on and fix arm. The $ky dish in the video was my bedroom/secondary setup so we could still have television reception as there is no aerial feed and I hate freeview anyway. The two dimple f#ds that showed up at my door 1) Never identified themselves as to who they were working for ect 2) English accented boy remarked he'd never seen a dish with a "switch box" on it or even heard of DiSeQc 3) Said they would chap my door later to see if everything was working still (Never did obviously) 4) Returned the following night chapping all the doors because somebody in the block had phoned saying their $ky wasn't working....the list go's on. As for the mount, I don't think they have any intention of cutting out a section to expose the base plate as they have filled round the gaps with expanding foam. To be honest the whole wall/thing smacks of a rush job, the expanding foam should only be used where the blocks don't meet properly but the reality is its bloody sprayed everywhere, looks like a grey sponge cake where somebody had a sweet tooth for buttercream all through it just for the sake of it.

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yGL

If they have made a hash like you describe, then I would contact the council and complain, and tell them that the monkeys are playing silly bu****s and that the - the Council - should come and inspect the job right now - and PDQ! At least I was a direct private paying customer when mine was done and I wasn't going to pay the (biggish!) balance of the bill for the job until I was happy with the result - so I had the relative "upper hand" on how well it was finally done.

Then, when the "dust has completely settled" and everyone has gone away, slowly and very carefully, cut an appropriately sized hole in the insulation and refit your dish.

OTOH, another solution, which does not involve cutting the insulation, is to - and you will probably need a heavyweight SDS drill and bits to do this - drill straight through the insulation into the underlying brick (?) wall and secure the dish mount with 4x long (around 200mm probably) anchor studs so that the insulation is sandwiched between the mount and the wall. If you do that then I think that it would be a good idea to put a 8-12mm plywood plate between the mount and the insulation to spread the load more evenly.

That is the advice that I was given (apart from the plywood plate) by my insulation installers if I wanted to bolt anything to the wall - and that's roughly what I did when I covered quite a bit of the lower wall with trelliswork for the border plants to grown up.
 
Well its as I suspected, came home today and they have been skimming the foam with cement, looky:

IMG_20161114_185459.webp
 
Lol, exactly, they owe me £15 (Trade price) for the heavy duty elbow bracket the fuds.
 
See this whole thing about them fixing $ky dishes ect via them leaving a wooden block mounted under the skimmed wall, this is complete sh*te I've been keeping a close eye and the only wooden inserts I have seen left in has been for the rain fed guttering downpipes.
 
Ghostleader said:
See this whole thing about them fixing $ky dishes ect via them leaving a wooden block mounted under the skimmed wall, this is complete sh*te I've been keeping a close eye and the only wooden inserts I have seen left in has been for the rain fed guttering downpipes.
Click to expand...


They are hoping the expanded foam will do the job, once it cures of course.
 
The guys who did the work on my house did use expanding foam, but actually not a lot because they did cut and join the foam insulation panels quite carefully, and so your lot do seem to be "cowboys". As I said earlier, I would call in the Council inspectors PDQ, hopefully before all the insulation has been skimmed so that they can see what a botched job has been done, and thus that the cowboys can be told to "correct" the job.

PS: assuming you have telephone (or other cables - cable tv?) cables coming into the house, do check that these are working well as my installers managed to damage the telephone cables by getting them too close to the insulation lower edge insulation metal support trays (they did install those - didn't they?). Also check very carefully that the upstairs bathroom waste pipes are not leaking at the joints - they had to replace mine and the vertical soil pipe, and then 2 joints between the two did leak slightly, and so I had to get the installers (and they DID NOT take too kindly to me asking that!) to get another plumber to come in and fix that. (FWIW, the original "plumber", called "Percy", sprayed his name on the wall after he did his work!)
 
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Their not touching the waste water pipes as it quite clear they can't be doing with the extended time constraints & costs (more like the matter). My fear is one set of tossers or the other will damage my motorised shotgun cables, I have these in the wall along with my T.V.'s power cable. I'm a purist and I don't want to be bloody joining cables inside because the existing ones been damaged outside. As for the phone line, B.T.s been and fitted extended wall anchors before the idiot factory started their "quality" work.
 
GL
Ref those cables inside the wall (cavity, I assume?), any chance you could roughly mark the positions down the outside of the wall and tell the idiots (verbally, and with a letter to the site foreman!) not to put insulation fixings around the lines you have marked, or else you will hold them responsible for any damage to those cables, and you will then get a pro sat installer in to repair it - and charge the insulation contractors for the cost of the repairs, AND your own time in arranging for it to be done.

However, it looks like your other pipes and cables should be reasonably safe from damage, but do look out for any gaps and "reveals" back to the brickwork where dampness from the rain (etc.) could get trapped and then soak into the wall - I found a few like that with my insulation, and especially around the edges where it terminated and left the rest of the walls uninsulated (one of my adjacent walls could not be insulated because of access problems, and my party-wall neighbour next door did not have his done).

Also, we have a gas supply pipe up one wall because the boiler is in one of the upstairs bedrooms, and my contractor capped that with metal cladding which bridged the insulation on one side of the pipe to that on the other and covered the unsightly gap - any chance that yours might do the same for your pipes?

Other suggestions:
- blag a few off-cuts of insulation and some of the skimming cement/top coat paint so you can repair any small defects that you find later when the contractors have gone as it will probably be impossible to get them back to "fix" those.
- whilst the scaffolding was up, I took the opportunity to thoroughly "deep clean" (not just wash) the windows and uPVC frames and (after a lot of hard work!) they looked 200% cleaner and better. Can give you some tips as to what you would need to do that if you want to do the same.
 
Did you use upvc cleaner? Its like white cream, think Jiff or Cif as its now called I think?
 
GL

I used a specialist cleaner "BONDIT PVCu CREAM CLEANER 1 LITRE" which costs ££4.30 a litre and it worked well if you are prepared to really work it hard - I used large amounts of kitchen towel instead of cloth because the material rapidly get clogged up and has to be disposed of or washed.

You will probably need quite a lot of the stuff and so I would order 2 or 3 bottles to start with!

BTW, don't be tempted to use the solvent version of the same cream because it does not actually work any better and can easily mark the surface of the window frame - and it's a lot more expensive!

Also need some plastic sponge scourers, a window paint scraper (the one using a Stanley Knife blade) and some small thin screwdrivers or similar to get into the corners - a very flexible paint scraping knife is also very useful. Also lots of buckets of clean water and big sponges to wash off the cleaning compound just after you use it, or else there will be a lot of quickly dried residue to remove if you don't.

PS: By the time you have finished you "will know what your right/left arm is for" because it will ache! :)
 
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Ooft even more hassles, bloody missing transponder in the room has left me stomped, bet its a crimped cable.........Grrrrr!!!
 
Bit confused - thought you only had the Sky dish connected now, so on which dish/sat is the transponder issue?
 
Same fortec star quad is feeding both the single feed into the room via a Diseqc switch though, and two other direct feeds into the living room box. The MTV transponder is showing between 0% & 60% AGC and a constant 0% SNR in extended info but on sat finder on the wee Alien 8900 it shows absolutely nowt for both. Its 11895 V 27500 the transponder in question. I checked the f connection, rebooted and complete restarted the box etc but this never made anything spring to life. I'm out at the moment visiting but I will have a look tomorrow.

P.S. That transponder on 28E hasn't seen any movement since May according to King of Sat, definite issue with my end.
 
GL
If that is the only transponder missing then that, to me at least, sounds like a specific-to-sat issue as I would have thought it would been that you would see pretty much all the transponders on that sat - or virtually none at all if it is a cable-related one.
 
Well its too late tonight but will check that transponder tomorrow with my meter. Be glad when all this work outside is done, and I can fit my dish and cabling myself.
 
Checked the transponder today, all fine on the meter, stuck the feed back onto the receiver........magically working on there also now, sods law! The old Quad I stuck on the dish was purely to have all three lines into the house working, I suspect it may be failing, nevertheless interment faults I do not like at all. Just to ad so dirty sticking piece of crap took it upon themselves to rip off the bird house I had screwed onto the back wall so hopefully some finches or the like would nest and my wee daughter could see them coming and going. I found flung half way up the backdoor after being flung from the scaffolding obviously, so the word for today is SCUM.
 
GL
Your description of the "workmen" seems "accurate" - another reason for reporting all this in detail, verbally and in writing, to the local Council, and also raise the problems directly with your local Councillor (if you are on speaking terms - politics may however "intervene"!).
 
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