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snoozee

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Everything posted by snoozee

  1. Basically if your house is already fiber ready, before demolition works commence, the fiber termination point should be relocated back to the meter box by NLT. Else most contractors will just cut away this fiber point and owners will then need to pay for a new fiber point for their house. For new builds, NLT will only terminate their fiber point at the meter box whereas when they were rolling out fiber for houses previously, the fiber point was installed all the way inside the house. so basically new builds will need another fiber line done by the contractor to link the NLT fiber point at the meter box to a fiber point inside the house.
  2. Are you comfortable with working with electrical components when main breaker is turned off? If yes then switching the SPD is just a matter of unscrewing then cables, removing from the busbar and then reversing the steps with the new component. most important is to make sure main breaker is turned off, use a test pen to confirm no electricity before removal and never let the bare wires touch each other after you remove them from the device.
  3. If you've not hired/appointed an architect, go and do this first. After appointing the architect, the architect can help you source and appoint the other consultants.
  4. my electrician used cables from Sigma. I had wanted to split the DB into one for each floor initially but ended up not doing it and put it inside a store where my network equipment rack is. The main consideration of not having split DBs was how/where to hide the DBs. torch light is subjective la. Nowadays our mobile phones usually near to us all the time so can use the phone's LED as torch. how much you ended up paying for all the SPDs?
  5. SP would have sent you a letter of confirmation along with the estimated timeline for provisioning of services. timeline is about 3months on average before the pandemic. So nowadays wait a bit longer is not surprising. That time I waited 8 months after payment as kenna CB just before due for installation.
  6. main DB. in one of the other threads @AWS had gave quite a detailed view on surge protection and such
  7. with swing gates, the gates will always be in the way when open but sliding gate will be like part of the boundary wall when opened. We didn't want the obstruction but no choice had to do swing gates instead. Also if the swing gate is opened outside, it narrows down the access angle to drive into the driveway since now you have a channel formed by the swing gate which you need to clear before you can get into the house. it can be quite challenging if the road in front of your house is narrow and/or if someone parks on the road directly opposite your gate entry point. imagine trying to do a 90 degrees turn from the road into your house with just less than 2m of clearance between your car and the edge of the gate panel when the gate is swung out. by right swing gates are supposed to swing inwards. of cos most people do it "by left" to swing the gates outwards or alternate with one side in and one side out. anyway the swing arm mechanism can be installed just before you move into the house so ahem... another consideration is whether one chooses to have a separate side gate or not to enter/exit the house. Some people integrate the side gate into the main slide/swing gate. But with integrated side gates, it will be challenging to do the electronics to perform remote unlock of the side gate from inside the house. This also means one will need to manually unlock the gate from outside the house as well and can't use a keypad or access card to unlock the side gate. Of cos one can always open the main gate for pedestrian access but it will just reduce the life span of the motors since these things don't last forever. whichever type of gates is chosen, request for the optical sensor to be installed as well to stop the gate from moving when obstruction is detected. I had accidentally closed the gate on my car at my in-laws place when I accidentally pressed the remote control to close the gate when my car was still halfway out. caused a small ding on my car. haha most gate suppliers will provide 2 or 3 remote controllers for you. Don't need to waste money to buy additional remotes at $20+ per remote from them. The remote controllers can be bought online for about $4 per remote controller. Just need to open up the existing one to check which frequency the gate control receiver uses (either 333mhz or 433 mhz). After buying the new remote controllers, it's just a matter of adjusting the dip switches inside the new remote controller to set it to work with the gate side control receiver. Can always buy a few more to keep as spare with the batteries removed so won't spoil the PCB inside if battery leak.
  8. just put in a LD clause and fine the contractor for every month of delay beyond the contractual period. $350psf seems unlikely in today's context with raw materials price already increased and shortage of manpower. you should be looking at about $400 psf or higher already.
  9. sliding gate make sure you have enough set back at the front for the track and gate since these are supposed to be within the boundary unless you want your gate to slide on the inside of your boundary wall instead of outside. sliding gate will be slightly slower than swing but negligible. your gate width of 4m if you do swing gate means need to do bifold of 4 x 1m panel width. note that by right swing gates can only swing into the house for safety reasons. some swing gates will have an additional locking plate on the floor for the gate to lock into and prevent over-swing so if you don't want the plate on the floor, have to tell the contractor in advance. ultimately which one you choose also depends on your terrain. if perfectly flat ground then no problem with either. i wanted to do a sliding gate but ended up doing swing gates as my terrain too challenging to design and install a sliding gate.
  10. 2 storey zone the attic balcony usually is open to sky and must remain open to sky. Unless you have an open roof terrace as your attic then you could possible enclose the parts which are within the building envelope. Unless you don’t mind having a fully enclosed area based on the 45 degrees slope then no issue since the enclosing will still be within the envelope. Take a look at the envelope control building envelope outline. If your balcony falls outside the area enclosed by the building envelope (45 degrees line), you cannot enclose it with a horizontal roof. Roof is a structure element which must be within the building envelope with a leeway of 1m protrusion for eaves. timing wise don’t trust anyone who says can complete within 3 to 6 months. Shortage of workers is a problem now and projects will drag on unless your contractor is just only doing your project. A house near to mine was supposed to complete an A&A within 6 months. Now 7 months later it is still no where nearing completion and by my estimate should take another 3 months. Main problem is that the main contractor will pull the workers to work elsewhere and sometimes hardly any work done for weeks.
  11. It depends on whether your house is in a 2 storey or 3 storey zone. Assuming in. 3 storey zone, I don’t think it will be an issue to extend the roof to cover up the existing 3rd storey balcony. But if your “3rd storey” is actually your attic storey, then you can’t cover up your open to sky balcony. if your existing 2nd storey toilet has waste pipes going to the upper storey then doing the new toilet directly above might be easier. But if there’s no waste pipes going upwards from your 2nd storey, then your new toilet on your 3rd storey has to have a new waste pipe going down and through the 2nd storey to join to an exiting waste pipe at the ceiling of your 1st storey. Basically a big job to hack through the floor to run the waste pipe down. a PE can do the submission for you. But you need to find a PE who is very very well versed with the envelope control guidelines in order to know what you have in mind can be done or not.
  12. Balcony usually is open to sky and should remain so unless it falls within the building envelope. adding a toilet is not that simple like you want to have one. There are water supplies and waste pipes and you need to consider how to join back to the existing pipes. Look for an architect or PE who is well versed in the regulations for landed houses and see how your existing house can be renovated to what you want.
  13. check with your PE. Cantilevered roof would depend a lot on the loading and materials to be used. If you are doing RC carporch roof with roof terrace, then don't even need to think of cantilever so much without columns. But with lightweight materials then it's different. your PE should be able to calculate how much can be done. worst case is you have exposed tie rods to tie back the roof to a higher part of the column to provide the additional support if you don't want to have columns.
  14. not better or worse. standby power is negligible. the only difference is the running power. if you have multiple medium or small size rooms, the sensible thing is to install a multi split unit so the rooms can share a compressor. but if you have a large room, then a single split unit will be needed to effectively cool down the room since you need a unit with a bigger BTU unless you are ok to install multiple wall units in a single room. for my house, i am using system 2 multi split units for bedrooms. my master bedroom is using single split unit. in terms of running cost, the single split unit is slightly higher than the system 2 unit as the power drawn is slightly higher.
  15. your front boundary setback is min 7.5m with leading edge of car porch at least 2.4m from front boundary. this means your carporch roof can only have a max length of 5.1m if you adhere to the standard setbacks. the only way you can exceed 5.1m is you set back your building beyond 7.5m. my carporch roof is 5.1m and cantilevered with no additional columns. using steel beams with 3 main beams tied back to the main columns of the house.
  16. depends on how many aircons you are planning to install. a rough guage would be the list price for HDB systems plus another 20% to 30%
  17. pull a 32A point to where you are planning to install your cooker. better prep a higher amperage point even if the cooker you are buying now doesn't require it. at least future proof the point first.
  18. Just walk around your estate and see if anyone has gas installed for their house. You will see on the pavement near the meter box showing a metal plate saying gas pipe below or something similar. If you see the sign then should be able to get piped gas. Else means no chances already.
  19. Write in to city gas to check. You will likely need to pay for the laying of pipe to your house if there is supply nearby.
  20. Haha. Yeah funny why only tarp one side. that’s why need to do precon survey of the neighbors houses to cover this type of situations so that there won’t be any disputes on damages
  21. normally when the house is demolished, contractor should use tarps to cover up the exposed areas first to prevent water seepage before tidying up the party walls, etc. looking back at my old photos, my contractor had already tidied up the exposed roof areas on my neighbour side prior to my old house roof was removed. no matter how careful the workers are, there will definitely be cracks and leaks happening on the neighbour side due to vibrations, etc during construction. my neighbour also had cracked walls and some leakage during my construction period. anyway contractor will have to bear the cost of any damages and reinstate at his own cost.
  22. note the part of RC roof. if you decide to do RC roof, then submission can't be avoided.
  23. No need submission but you still need a PE to draw up the design, etc. as long as the extension is done according to regulations, should not affect future sales even without submissions. Just don’t extend all the way to your rear boundary line as this is illegal and will affect your future sale of the house as buyers can use this as reason to back out of purchase.
  24. You need to do routine maintenance and have the lift inspected and tested annually before you can renew your operating license with BCA. So if you buy from overseas, you need to find a company which can install, maintain and inspect the lift for you here. If the lift you bought isn’t used locally, then you will have problems finding spare parts as well. buying a home lift is not like buying an appliance or gadget overseas where you can just DIY replace it when it’s faulty. It will be easier to just buy it locally with the relevant service and support from the company rather than try and save a few K and end up with a while elephant if it breaks down without being able to get spare parts for repair.
  25. I'm not a fan of smart switches, etc. why waste electricity (no matter how little usage is still waste) to have these devices on 24/7 when you can just take a few steps to turn on/off the switch/appliance when needed? If you really want to have these smart switches, do tell your electrician in advanced so that neutral cables can be pulled to every switch location. Even though there are smart switches which doesn't need the neutral cable, I've seen quite a number of photos of them melting after some time. Also some smart switches require the neutral cable in order to work. The other question is the availability of smart switches with safety mark. Without safety mark, you will definitely not pass the SP inspection prior to TOP approval for your house. So the only way to circumvent this is to change to smart switches after the inspection. But how to hide the neutral cable is another thing you need to consider since random switches/sockets may be asked to be removed during the inspection.
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