stevejones123

I honestly don't think anything will completely eliminate them.

To keep them away from the house spray the interiors with DDT (though I don't know where you can get it from).

Just do a Google and you'll find plenty of instructions for making home made traps that use CO2.

Inside the house standard mosquito repellent mats or better the bottles will also do the trick.

A neighbour of mine in Sri Lanka soon got divorced from his wife because he persisted in fuc_king his mother and sister. Another neighbour explained it by saying he hadn't had much education. I wonder what the particular course he missed was called.

Last time I looked at a gay man, he was still a man: No different than a hetero male

But different from a hetero female. It takes two to tango.

But you said there are units a foreigner would not be allowed to buy so that must also mean that there are units that ONLY a foreigner CAN buy.

No logic behind that at all.

GBP790,000 gives a reasonable interest of twenty to thirty thousand per annum so he was hardly living in a monastery.

If it works for a 3 year lease why not for a 30 year lease?

Surely because a three year lease is much shorter than the maximum 30 year period for a lease.

There's no such thing as a 60 hour Celta.

The price quoted seems absurdly high.

On the other hand flat-pack diy kitchen units made of reconstituted wood are not a good idea. When moisture gets in them they expand and eventually split.

The best thing are aluminum kitchen units (no problem with water). For the counter tops granite is best; tiles will do but the grouting will get dirty.

The incest taboo works on siblings you were brought up with. So if you are separated from your biological sister just after birth the taboo doesn't apply. Equally it does apply to foster siblings you were brought up with.

unless of course you are building a chicken coup

Why not, can't be worse than all the military coups the country's had.

Not so! Roofs are usually made with a steel frame, steel for roofs is not expensive.

C Pack tiles are around 11 baht each

Total for the roof below Baht282,000 including insulation.

I've never seen a steel-framed roof. I have my house in Sri Lanka and every roof I've seen has been timber framed. Maybe there is a business opportunity for building steel framed roofs in Lanka.

Roofs are still high maintenance; a house will last you hundreds of years if you look after the roof and guttering, but you can expect problems with both every twenty years or so.

On the other hand, as londonthai pointed out there is the question of the cost of the foundations.

Another thing is that every bungalow I have seen in Lanka has been built with load-bearing walls. Two storey houses tend to be concrete columns.

Unless, like me, you have had a nasty experience of falling down stairs after a glass of wine too many, you would no doubt need to make the decision based on the particular plot of land and the exact plan you have for the house. I would have thought a bungalow the sensible choice outside of the town.

If you're building a bungalow the roof is going to be twice the size of a two-storey house roof. Rooves are expensive, both in timber and tiles.

The most common complaints I hear of, are regular deep brown out conditions, or frequent power outages lasting from 30 minutes to four or five hours on average and occuring throughout the year.

Brownouts or load shedding; the usual reasons.

The snow I referred to came from the normal reasons for getting a generator given on US websites. The falling coconut trees are the excuse we get here when it rains and the power goes, though they normally manage to get it up after a few hours.

I think you did miss out the information about not needing to back up everything in the house, or why you must connect to a switch and not directly to the meter. Both points seem overwhelmingly obvious but they might not be to all your readers or to the wife's cousin who installs the generator and inadvertently fries a few electricity board repair men. And you would be advised to mention that you do need to keep a generator away from the rain and that it it's in a building people are likely to use that the exhaust pipe vents through a hole in the wall if it's a gasoline generator.

It might also be an idea of giving the prices of manual and automatic switches and of the appropriate cabling, or even selling both.

I agree with you it is better to have the ATS switch located near the panel, but beggars often can't be choosers. What I was saying though was that a gasoline generator with an automatic start and separate ATM switch is going to be more expensive than just the generator itself (and of course there is still the question of the generator housing and exhaust valve). Manual start ups are great except when you have the power cut after lights out, or when you're asleep so you don't even know the food is rotting in the fridge.

It was 'Tiger', not 'Tigen' generators by the way. My apologies.

I think you shouldn't overestimate the technical nounce of your users. I only know the basics because I spent a long time googling them.

Incidentally, when you are giving maximum usage times, to get the weekly figure you seem to be dividing the yearly figure by 52. This isn't normally how a standy generator is used. If the snow, or coconut trees, bring down the service it may be off for three or four days, and then scarcely used again for the rest of the year. We've been told to expect cuts most days this month but that after the upgrade is finished they should become rare.

Nice story about Sri Lankan wire men but how does this help the OP and the quest to find a sparky in BKK

It doesn't but at least might make him feel less alone with his troubles.

Ah! Competent electricians! What a dream! I live in Sri Lanka and it's the same. For varying reasons my house has been wired incrementally by half-a dozen electricians. I originally built the guard house/guest cottage and the storeroom/shed so I would have somewhere to live and cook whilst the big house was being slowly built year-by-year. When we had the walls and roof of the big house done, and were starting to do the kitchen in the big house I decided I would prefer a 'proper' electrician instead if the local village variety, so I went to the owner of the hotel I had stayed at for years who is also a good friend of mine and asked him to recommend his electrician. The guy arrived wired everything and then we watched it blow when the water heater or clothes drier were on. After much shouting and furious insistence on my behalf that the dam_n things should be working we found the problem. He'd connected the whole main house to a wire in the storeroom.

(The writing of this post has just been delayed for hour because the power's gone. After much fuming at Lankan electricians it seems the problem was inside the water heater and not in the house wiring).

Anyway the 'hotel electrician' was sent on his way and we got somebody's father who seems to have done a passable job. As I started making the other rooms habitable we hired a twenty-odd year old school, leaver, a schoolmate of my best friend's cousin who actually has proved rather good. But when I decided that increasing power cuts meant I needed to install a generator, and that the electricity board were pressurizing to have the connection to the main house and not the guest/guard room I decided to kill two birds with one stone, and pay an electricity board engineer to design a connection to the generator and solve the problems once and for all. He and my best mate recommended an electrician who had worked on the installation of generators to the most prestigious hotel in the resort. We then found he had no idea about domestic generators and had never installed one, and the engineer wasn't much more clued up. We called up the company that sold the generator and eventually got through to one of their engineers on his mobile while he was going home on his motor bike in rush hour traffic. He informed me that he agreed with the electrician that I should ignore the built-in automatic transfer switch on the generator and connect to a manual transfer switch at the mains because Sri Lankan electricity was prone to outages, and the automatic switch on the standby generator was unreliable because it was made in China. I declined to ask him why his company had sold me the generator in the first place if they considered it unreliable, thanked him, and ordered the electrician to install the wiring as it said in the generator manual. It has been working fine for the last five months; guarantee expires next month

Anyway I was checking something else and found that the electricity-board-recommend electrician had wired up the two bedrooms (the last job pending) with lighting grade wire to the sockets on the grounds that he'd worked for a big multinational on a job and they said it was OK. Just pulled out the wires and replaced them today.

What a change; a thread from a sponsor which tries to give us useful, expert information instead of trying to sell us real estate

I don't live in Thailand but in Sri Lanka, but have just bought a generator as we seem to be returning to the brown-out times of the mid- to end-nineties.

A couple of points about your posts. I am surprised you are recommending small gasoline units for standby. Apart from anything else the cost of an external ATS would erode some of the difference the difference from a specifically designed standby generator.

Another point is that you don't need to back up all the power in the house. You can send the stuff you want to back up, such as computers, lighting, fridges, TV to a separate board and have only that serviced by the standby generator, leaving ACs, clothes dryers and other heavy duty stuff to await the restoration of power.

And a last thing; do you know anything about Tigen generators, specifically the 5.5Kva automatic diesel standby. So far I've had no problems, but who knows?

Why isn't there a large market for prefabs in Thailand. surely they'd be able to last the thirty years of the lease?

so if the pool rains down on you, you are screwed with NO recourse.

An umbrella?

I wonder why everybody concentrates on the 30 year lease while Thai Law also allows lifelong Usufruct?

Because they don't think a legal document that provides a strong incentive for the other party to murder you is a very good idea?

If there's 100% humidity then the sweat won't evaporate and there'll be no cooling.

If there's 10% humidity then the sweat will evaporate and you won't need airflow.

It's for the intermediate humidities that airflow provides cooling.

Bangkok seems to have a relative humidity some degrees higher than where I am in Lanka. That together with the couple of degrees higher temperature is probably enough to tip the scales into feeling uncomfortable with no air conditioning. I was using the AC when I was in Bangkok despite the exorbitant resale price.

natural air flow can't cool if the air is hot

You don't understand how things work. It's not the airflow that's doing the cooling it's your body. Your body is in fact acting as an air conditioner. It sweats. The liquid then evaporates. Evaporation uses heat and that heat comes from your body which thus cools down. However a given amount of air can only contain a given amount of water vapor, which is why you often find yourself covered in sweat that has not evaporated. Airflow increases the amount of air that flows over your body, thus increasing the amount of sweat you can evaporate, thus increasing the cooling of your body that is providing the heat for the evaporation.

You can certainly live comfortably without air-conditioning in most of the tropics; I have a house in Sri Lanka and the average maximum temperature is between 29 and 31 Celsius. The average maximum temperatures for Bangkok are from 31-34, averaging 32, edging towards the uncomfortable zone.

The point is that a house built for maximum cooling without air-conditioning is going to be built on diametrically opposite principles to one built with air conditioning in mind. If you are building without air conditioning you want high ceilings (eleven foot at least), because hot air goes upwards, and lots of ventilation points. Wiht AC you want low ceilings so there is less air to cool and almost hermetically sealed so the cold air doesn't escape.

There are places in the world where you can't live comfortably without air conditioning (much of Saudi Arabia and Dubai spring to mind), and cars need it because the metal heats like a furnace and driving with the windows open is more energy inefficient, but to talk about it as a necessity, or even advisable, in most places is little more than self-justification.

It's all to do with water pressure. PVC joints are glued and the joints will not stand up to water pressure. Plastics pipes (not PVC) can be used provided that the correct joints are used.

In Sri Lanka outside of big cities the norm is to pump the water up to a water tank, from where it enters the house by gravity. I would presume there wouldn't be enough water pressure to create a problem.

As somebody else has said, "What are Western standards?" New build houses in the UK with softwood window frames? Stick houses with 2 x4 walls in the US?

I have a house in Lanka not Thailand, but some things seem the same. Electricity is a nightmare. There's a definite tendency to use lower quality wire to the breaker, and it's hard to know the quality of the fuse box you are buying (though I suspect the same problem occurs in the US).

In my experience problems come when you expect the local worker to meet some 'western' standard that he doesn't understand. If he's building what he's used to he'll do a good job.

By the way what is the beef about using PVC pipes inside the house? In Sri Lanka I don't think I've seen any others, and I certainly wouldn't be able to find a plumber who would know how to work with copper. Leaks at the joints after some years is the only problem I can think of at present. What I fail to understand are codes that allow PVC for drainage but not for water; is the idea that drainage pipes will only leak when draining?

.... See it for yourself and you might end up getting a descent partner. :-)

... one who will go down on you?

No, one who will drag you down!