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I've only had 3 houses in 40 years - only 1 was a new build back in the late 80's. House had no issues was nicely built and good plot but there was one issue - The planners stipulated window frame colour to be brown or white, my house got brown - south facing garden - within the first summer the paint had bubbled up on the windows - I complained and they repainted them brown - I told the builders this is a bit stupid they will just bubble again paint them white and it'll be fine. They bubbled again and they repainted again, brown!!! I was in the house 4 years and at the end of summer every year I got my windows repainted for free - the last time they finally relented and painted them white!!!

Whats the metal tape you have used here wrapped around the insulation and is it worth using?

Working through it (slowly) as some of the terminology is new to me so having to understand what is being asked for (I feel it needs a bit more notation for those who do not work in this space or are more of a lay person like myself). A couple of suggestions... UFH construction to allow different options for different floors. My GF will be screed, FF panels, SF nothing DWH source - sunamp (appreciate though that not applicable for most people) Change the save confirmation window so not a pop up window - a little annoying. Auto-saving feature? Add air permeability target info

Bugger. It would appear that my All-In-One didn’t charge up last night but I only spotted that this morning when we had a brief (1 second) power cut. It looks like that was the battery emptying and the grid picking up. Pretty sure that scenario shouldn’t give us a power cut but it did. All indications I get is that the battery is at 7% and not taking any charge from the excess solar we have at the moment. A quick internet search for resetting the AIO is to press the button on the right hand side of the battery for 5 seconds, the battery will shut down and then 1-2 mins later start up again. Guess what. It hasn’t restarted. Any one have any similar issues? Or any pointers as to how I can get this heavy box of chemicals working as a battery again? ~~~~ It turns out that pressing the button again restarts the battery, so it’s up and running but discharging at max rate when it should be charging from excess solar. I reset to factory defaults and all seems to be well for the time being.

😁👍 It’s not a top performer, but most of our windows are fixed so I think (hope) the openers will be ’good enough’ 🤞 The manufacturer is Westcoast. We really like the appearance of the windows, their pricing is competitive and the installers, very local to us, have been extremely helpful so far. There are still a couple of other options we’re looking at but at the moment these are probably top of the list. It’s quite hard to justify an additional £30k+ for the likes of Internorm, even though they are undoubtedly better windows… it would probably be better spent elsewhere (like the home cinema and games room 😏)

Apologies for my hiberno slang. Just glancing at the section of the window I wouldn't be sure it was a top performer in terms of air sealing and thermal conductivity. I would like to see more seals and insulation. Something like this with 4 seals and thermally broken too. The Uw figure looks fine as a whole but just be cautious of it as large areas of glazing with a low Ug can hide poorer Uf figures.

Yes - this is what I’ve had proposed, but I’m taking it on myself now that I’ve accelerated up a steep learning curve!

The thing is that snagging stuff is mostly at the finishing stage, because that is what is visible. It begs the question of what 'snags' might exist in foundations, drains, structure, electrical cabling etc. New build estates can look good when newly built, go back 10 years later and you can find rainwater stains all down the render, paint/finishing peeling off window frames, rotten fences, cracked kerbs etc. Suddenly it doesn't look like a place you would want to live. As the generations pass, general knowledge and basic skills seem to erode. Most used to have some DIY manuals and knew how to change a plug, a tap washer, put up some shelves, change their car oil, mix cement, and keep house and home together. Usually learned helping out dad as a kid. These days a lot of that seems to have all but disappeared. Contributed to by youngsters in generation rent that have to call the landlord and not fix it themselves.

Only added a side/rear extension and originally still had an old wire fuse box. My electrician has put two consumer units in, one to replace the old fuse box, and then run a cable to take power from there to the second consumer unit which then serves all the new electrical requirements for the extension and new kitchen, boiler, outside power, etc. So evidently that approach is feasible. Don't forget to allow for any services you might want to run if you have any shed/outbuilding/greenhouse. You don't show your conduit routes, but you might want to consider any appropriate separations between drain, mains, gas etc. (If that car port might one day get converted to an extension, then you might want to consider whether you really want a drainage manhole cover in there.)

I plan on using the circular saw just for the length and depth cuts and cutting face down and front to back to get a neater finish. For the sink cutout I think the router might be overkill on a 28mm worktop and my jigsaw should cope using a downward cutting blade. I'll clamp a straight edge as a guide anyway and also use some painters tape to help avoid breakout on the laminate. Just remembered that there is also a shaped cut out on the front left edge, to avoid a door frame, so I'm going to have to use the router for that to get a decent finish.

That's good info... Thanks Craig 👍 👍👍

Totally different conversation in Brighton for example.

If your not confident marking and cutting for the underside. Just use your jigsaw with a downwards cutting blade and take your time. It won't be a perfectly straight cut but as above the edge of the sink will hide a lot

If this is a sink cutout it will With bot circular and jigsaw you will get a much better finish if you cut it from underneath as it will help stop the laminate being torn off the chipboard. The sink edge hides a multitude of sins. Seal the exposed chipboard with some decent wood glue.

I have a little job to do for my elderly in-laws, replacing their rotten and blown sink worktop (1.5m). I've picked up a bit of matching (ish) 28mm laminate and thinking about best way to deal with cuts and the sink cutout, in particular what tools etc I will need as they are 160 miles away, so whatever I need will have to go with me in the car!! I've just picked up a new Makita DHS660 circular saw which did a great job of cutting down old weathered sheets of ply, OSB and MDF from the garden so they would fit in the car and off to the tip. However, I'm not sure if the blade is fine enough for cutting a laminate worktop without chipping the edge. It has a 25 tooth blade, which I thought was quite unusual as all the circular saw blades I've come across before have been multiples of 4 (24, 40, 48 etc) so I'm thinking maybe I need a different blade. I'm aware that I should cut it face down to get a cleaner cut with the circular saw. Any advice or recommendations for a blade which would make a good cut on a laminate worktop. My second question relates to the sink cutout. My thoughts here are to follow this sequence (all from the top surface): 1. Use a trim router with a 12mm bit to cut a shallow 5mm deep groove to the exact dimensions of the sink cutout 2. Run a jigsaw along this groove, being carefult to avoid wandering onto the "finished" edge 3. Remove the cutout and then run a guided trim bit using the edge of the original groove, with several passes at increasing depths. Any other suggestions or tips?

I would say that is the intended design.

No, no slope required as that is the area where the glass packers need to be. It is externally glazed though, which means the cladding needs to be removed to get access to the glass if it breaks/fails. This is the case for most outward opening systems, the clips break when removed, so they need to be replaced and service engineers absolutely hate them, as it's it a lot of time (money)/effort to remove all the cladding, place the clips back, and fix the cladding back on. That also means they need to have the right tool to turn the clips to hold the cladding in place (they get broken removing the cladding, easier to snap the lug than turn the clip).

So… somewhere between my contractor, the builders merchant and the manufacturer, they’ve ordered the wrong wall insulation. Whilst what they have ordered doesn’t have a significant difference in u-value (0.021 vs 0.02) when I scale this out across the entire build envelope it does take it above the threshold we set for SAP etc. Plus I’m a little loathed to compromise on something that is going to have to last the life of the house. The correct one will take 10-20 days to be manufactured and shipped from Ireland to us which has impact on brickies who were due to start on Monday to build ground floor walls. Bit of a long shot but does anyone have some Unilin ECO360 CavityTherm ECO/CT 150mm that they aren’t needing just yet? We can get ours ordered and then do a swap once it arrives or have delivered to you to replace.

Fair points, and I agree Apple is probably too important a customer to be left without supply altogether. My concern is more that AI demand has already distorted the memory market. So even if Apple can get what it wants, it may be doing so at a much higher cost, and that cost is most likely to show up in high-end Mac pricing rather than in total unavailability. In other words, Apple probably still gets the RAM — the question is how brutally it prices the top bins, and whether the niche 256GB/512GB configs end up with longer lead times because Apple allocates supply where it makes the most commercial sense.

I should have clarified, but I was 3 pints in at that stage. Nobody who gives a feck basically. I think you’re probably right. lol.

A couple more articles (linked below) from The Telegraph which may be of interest, by buyers of what turned out to be substandard new-build houses and the problems they faced trying to get all the faults fixed.... My nightmare new-build proves how much we’ve normalised substandard work. (Telegraph - 18th April 2026) Leaks, mould and a hole in the ceiling: one writer reveals why her move was not as straightforward as she thought it would be:- https://archive.ph/HrhpB What we wished we'd known about buying a new-build house. (Telegraph - 20th Nov 2022) Four months after moving into their new home, one couple are still dealing with an ever-growing list of construction faults:- https://archive.ph/aEmwj

Agree, Apple will have to pay and therefore so will Apple's customers. They have been suggesting this so far, but the economics are not yet stacking up. OpenAI just pulled back on it's memory order and has recently changed CFO due to accounting issues. They are struggling to complete funding rounds. A lot of the 'orders' placed so far may not get executed (orders in OpenAI case not actually being orders but rather letters of intent). Datacenters that were supposed to be complete by now are delayed to late 2027 (no datacenter to host the server, no point buying the ram for the server). But even if the AI companies are able and willing to pay (and they have datacentre space), so will a lot of Apples customers. Especially those who are buying big memory Studios. These are literally the same pool of people. AI developers spending investor money. Maybe the big labs aren't buying Studios but the smaller startups trying to come up with unique/differentiated products will. This I disagree with. Apple is big enough that the makers will build whatever Apple wants. Micron can produce x amount of wafers per month. Apple commits to buy 20% of the wafers. Micron asks what patterns do you want on them? I was wrong earlier in the thread when I said the dies on the large mac's are not common. Having read more I believe its more that each package/chip has a taller stack of more standard dies (still not anything like the memory used in by Nvidia for their AI chips but likely the same as used in iPhones). So Apple sells 250 million iPhones a year. Both the iPhone and Mac Studio use LPDDR5. One 512GB Mac Studio is equivalent to 64 iPhones (8GB). If Apple is limited by how many wafers it can get, then availability of product is a purely business decision for them, where can they make the most profit. If they can make more profit selling a Mac Studio than selling 64 iPhones they will sell the Mac Studio. I suspect any limitations on Apples supply will be minimal if they are willing to pay because they are a long term customer. Lead times will always be long for Apple. The packaging of these dies onto ICs and then those ICs onto the CPU package adds many steps. So if Apple misjudges quantities it takes a lot of time to correct.

Does it take you a long time to draw off hot at basins then?

But AI cloud buyers have already distorted the RAM market. Apple may be a major long-term customer, but that does not insulate it from higher input costs. If memory prices are pushed up by AI demand, Apple will likely pass much of that on to buyers — especially on high-end configurations. And unlike most consumers, AI cloud operators can justify paying extreme premiums to secure supply. That can also reduce the amount of top-end memory available to Apple for niche high-RAM Macs, leading to longer delivery times or higher bins becoming temporarily unavailable.

Slightly smaller planet than that, most self builders aren't really self builders, they get a builder to build a house, the builder dies what he normally does. Detail is someone else's problem.