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ooops I didn't spot that?

Over 70 years. It still needs to be used correctly, I used so out of date powder and it failed to adhere, which was a bit of a surprise.

I got pretty competitive pricing for Idealcombi vs Rationel (except for the super sleek Pure View). I looked at Cortizo too (good price!), but those were only double glazed. Thanks for the tip on checking PAS24! Apparently the Pure View passes https://idealcombi.com/pureview-sliding-door/pureview-technical-overview/

Thanks for the reply. Maybe just as well I don't have french doors! I think the ranges I'm looking at for sliders Futura+ and PureView won't have the issue of the badly placed lock. And yes, main reason I wasn't too keen on Rationel was the sliding doors were way too chunky. I would switch to Velfac sliders with Rationel windows, but I also really don't like the look and feel of the Velfac handles! Gosh, I know I'm picky, but I am an interior designer, it's my job! 😅

Did you have any issues with the product or service? My builder is a bit wary working with an "untested" supplier they haven't worked with before. We have an aggressive schedule to keep the budget lower.

Congrats on the rating! Thanks for the tip. Honestly didn't even think about airtightness with inline sliders..... but, prettiness is very high on my list, and Pure View is about the only one i've seen with slim lines and triple glazing!

I suspect this will be merged with another thread. I had the same email yesterday.

The elevations here. We really liked the elevations. I just hope we can get that through and make it a reality.

Filing the rebuild application hopefully next week. Thoughts on the updated design would be greatly appreciated. The project is moving way slower than I had expected. Had to rely on the planning consultant but even their advice to go with householder application was rejected by the council due to scale of the change. The reason for the advice was to need to avoid to NBG for the new build but I understand that certain self build are out of scope. Any thought on this will also he appreciated.

They were imported from Poland. I got mine via a small outfit in Kirkcaldy, but @craigcan supply them too.

Got a letter from Pete t Octopus today telling me that as of 1st March our feed in tariff will drop to 12p / kWh from 15. They are offering agile export as and alternative but are there any better rates out there I wonder?

@-rick- I appreciate what you say here. And most kind to think from my pov as much as you are doing. But I do find some opposing sort of opinion, if I may: the only time Ive ever said to myself 'ooh I can actually feel a bit of warmth! I can barely believe it! Warmth in my cottage?!' is since this new Monobloc's been in for the 3 weeks. Doing it's 2-hour block of rads on periods. That's the only time, in the last 5 years Ive actually noticed some warmth from them, enough to get a modicum of comfort. So to say to me, no I have this present setting wrong, that I have to turn the system output down & run it longer instead (which is I believe how I/ or rather someone else set the prior Split HP system to run: it was on more continuously, but the rads weren't nearly as hot) & as a consequence, I'll not feel my bit of warmth, Is.. well, it's just counterintuitive, it's taking my bit of warmth, away from me. I can't see how I could rationally make that decision. When I wake up, last 3 weeks, I'm not stepping from duvet into a freezing cold room. It's not say over 16*C, no, but I'm not noticing cold immediately as I'm so used to here for 10 years. That's a huge change. Even for just a block of 2 hours.. it's like a mini luxury for me. Honestly Rick as Ive said, I've only used the HP as a HW source. It's just not meant to reside in such a dwelling. And I feel grateful for the free cylinder. But iteasy to see they're designed for Scandi timber homes, having big insulation as priority in floors/ walls/ ceilings. I can't expect it to work here in a stone cottage sat upon cold clay with these slate & cold mud walls, honestly, I just can't. And I dont blame it for not working here as it's designed to at all. But I do need it to give me HW. Because it's impossibly cold in my tiny bathroom for 6 if not 8 months of the year to have a shower (even with it's towel-rail HP rad on). So I -have- to have baths. It's this bathroom, & adjacent kitchen, which are the most uncomfortably cold rooms. They pip the main old big room! It's barking mad the way this house is cold. Sometimes it's noticeably mild outside in the air, & when I nip to the bathroom, I can see my breath. It was 16*C on my iPad in my area outside in autumn I recall, & felt like it too, mild, then I go to pee.. & I can see my breath. THAT's what it is often like here. it's bonkers cold. Irrationally cold. Completely, unusually, cold. So imagine the bathroom when it's 0*C outside!! No HP can be expected to input heat into such a bathroom. Like the cloying wet atmosphere, the cold is & I'm not even exaggerating, like an huge enemy entity. Thanks, Zoot

Ok to bring this into the domestic context. I upgraded a 1920's conservatory, to stop it falling down. It needed some additonal structural skeleton and some crack stitching ect. The glazing is irreplacable as it the brick plinth at the bottom of the glazing. The roof is a modern abomination.. but fixed that. The top bit cantilevers over the bottom and the steels were rotted and needed replaced. Hat off to the Contractor who managed to install new steels , do other stuff without cracking any of the glass. The above is a work in progress. But you can see I've put a new timber structure (supposed to look modern) inside and tied the rafters with wire and turn buckles. Below is a bit off the drawing for the tie wires I selected this wire as it has less strands, less flexible but stonger. The wire you see has a factor of safety of 5.0, some ropes you see often have a factor of safety of 7.. but for good reasons which I won't go into here. So @SteamyTea you are right, the designer needs to select a cable that has the best balance between strength and flexibility.. the more strands, often the more flexible. One strand can fail with less impact, but you generally get a reduction in over all strength with many small strands.. the reasons are complex unless you use a fatter cable. If I was designing a ballustrade say at around the edge of a balcony I would not use this type of wire. I would go for something with more strands as it's more flexible and workable on site, even if it is a bit less strong. A common offering is a 7 x 7 rope that has 49 strands. The rope you see in the example above has 19 strands. So do I. There are many that swear by a D4 rated glue.. but this is not a stuctural glue. The D relates to the durability primarily. It does stick things a bit structurally but I won't sign off D4 glue (unless it also has a structural rating) in structural timber applications for example. One default timber glue is to use something like Cascamite.. a resin glue that has been on the market, tried and tested over 40 years.

Having similar debates myself. My main concern is that door/window u values are, at best, much worse than walls. Given a heat source like UFH, which is uniformly distributed, it is inevitable that close to the doors/windows will be colder than the rest of the room, more so with large expanses of glass. So it seems to me that saving money on the u value of doors/windows might be economic in cost terms but possibly has a significant effect on comfort.

Pretty sure Idealcombi aren't part of Dovista @Mr Punter but I agree Velfac are, and worth a mention. We were quoted quite a lot less for both Rational and Velfac versus Idealcombi. Neither's slider is that slim though. Lots of slim options around based on Cortizo Cor Vision but @rufiec if it's for a new build you have to be really carefully around PAS24 as most won't be

I am available tomorrow but don't finish work until 5.30/6 so it will be dark before I get home. I'm quite happy to meet up next month, I have loads I should be getting on with here 😉

Ah, tongue in cheek. You can ask ten designers like me and get ten different answers. So long as each answer is reasoned out and evidence based then that lets you make an informed descision. Sometimes these descisions are based on you just saying.. we like and want that, yes we recognise that it may not be the best technically and SE wise, but we want it! So long as it does not fall down, leak water etc this is our choice and just get on with the design. This happens a lot. Ok, that is good. If you like a spread sheet then set up another tab for labour cost. What I'm leading you towards is this. When you design things you are aware that the Client has a budget. When I'm doing this I always have at the back of my mind that if I introduce complexity, design some steelwork say, that very quickly the labour cost can escalate. Insulation/ air tightness details can be very labour intensive.. and to get them right you need a level of site supervision. Builders will often get apprentices to stick on the tapes that you are basing a lot of your calculations on.. mistakes happen! Complexity also adds additional risk to the Contractor who has to make a profit. You, at the stage you are at, don't have the experience yet, but you can experiment, just using your common sense with a bit more research. Set up a tab that looks a bit like this. I made this cost sheet for a Client like you, to play with. And another part of it.. I hope you can read it as have screenshotted it. The labour rates are maybe a bit low now. The main thing to take away from this is to say for two site operatives you are looking at well over 2.0k a week, before profit etc, down south or in say Edinburgh you are looking at a lot more. My inclination is to look for where we can easily insulate, do the structure in a buildable way. If you take this approach it frees up cash to spend on the things you see and enjoy. What this does is to let you see how quickly the labour cost can get out of hand, but also make savings. If you look at the top bit you can see I have contingency, contractor profit and so on. If you just set up a tab like this for now you can add to it as you go. This is a bit of philistine stuff but you can have a look at commercial websites like check a trade to get a feel for labour and cost rates. You can ask your local builders, here on BH.. feed all of that into your spread sheet to get a reasonable rate for your area. In the round you need to strick a balance.. but with a bit of thought you can often get to install the things you love..call these a luxury item, if you can make pragmatic savings elsewhere.

An alternative is to have automatic switch over to backup power, but with a long (multiple seconds) blackout period on grid loss before reenergising from backup. This way most heavy power users will automatically stop and not restart on power restore thereby shedding most the excess loads. All modern, digital controlled ones would; Certainly my ovens, microwave, washing machine and dishwasher, heat pump and hob all do. The immersion is the exception if hard powered on, but if on a PV diverter it's also taken care of. Even power tools probably power off too (as operator would have chance to release the trigger before the backup returns)

I also like the idea of a large tank as if the soakaway ever failed, I could simply fit a submersible pump into the tank and sneakily pump it out onto the road, which then flows down to a very large pond which always has loads of capacity. Hoping it would never be required, but it's a useful backup.

Why? Our 6kW inverter runs both, obviously you can't run all the induction hob rings at once. Or just go GivEnergy AIO AC coupled, none of this EPS nonsense, it all works as normal in a power cut, that is the whole house electric carries on as normal, as well as the PV. So no change over switches needed the Gateway just does it all automatically. So much so you generally know nothing about power cuts that occur.

Houses that can't be heated exist but the reason they are like that is that they have problems and these problems can be fixed. As we've discussed already, houses that are relatively well sealed from outside air blowing the heat away can be heated. The only question is whether the cost of heating them is economical. So far you haven't got to the point where you can make that decision and I think you need to get to that point before giving up. I doubt that's a good description. The hotter the heatpump runs the radiators the less efficient it will be. I'm sure he set the temperature high because your house seemed cold and he thought it was what was required. It certainly would be required if only running the heating for a few hours a day but running the heatpump for longer at a lower temperature can be less costly than running one at high temperatures for shorter. No thats wrong. You need to get that changed, you can change those setting to run the heatpump as much as your want and I very much doubt that running it as above will result in anything other than wasting money and no real feeling of warmth. In a house like yours, it's likely you need to keep the internal temperature of the building fairly stable because of the amount of energy it takes to change the temperature is immense. It's why I suggested being ready at the end of summer with the heating set to never let the internal temperature drop below a certain point. At least for a while so you can work out how much it costs to do so.* The exact opposite in many ways. You are asking the HP to work at maximum output for those 2 hours then turn off. Heatpumps ideally like to run continuously and a relatively low output. Basically you are asking a marathon runner to compete in 100m sprints. Do you have a copy of those calculations? Would be good to see them. I tend to agree that it's a big ask for a 9kw heatpump in your space especially if you want warm (>20C) rooms. However, given the work you've already done plus a bit more this summer I do think the heatpump should be able to keep your space warmer than it has been. Maybe it's only capable of maintaining 17C or even 16C when it's really cold outside but thats still much better than what you have now if you can see your breath inside. But the key to making this happen is to make the heatpumps job as easy as possible and that means not letting the building go cold in the first place. This is something you really need to confront not run away from. At minimum you need to know how to turn the heating on / off manually and adjust the temperature. I had a quick look and it's only a few button presses. Ideally you'd also know how to adjust the timer. Best advice for how to get this from the engineer is to say something along the lines of 'I really struggle with technical stuff like this can you show me how to turn the heating on and off', then when they try and press the buttons say 'no, can you let me drive, just tell me what to press'. Then you build up the muscle memory and can go at your speed rather than let them do that. If dealing with the timer is too difficult I would at least want to know how to switch between timer and 'always on' (or 'always off'). This is concerning, you don't have the best of luck. Hopefully, things improve from here. That's very defeatist and I do understand the feeling, it's been a long journey for you. If you have the conversation with the engineer as described above you should come away able to switch just the heating off while leaving hot water on. In anycase, if the temperature is set to something like 17/18C then theres no real need to turn it off at all. During the summer the heating just wont come on because the temperature won't drop enough to trigger it. Plus, if something else is wrong best to find out about it during the summer when it's warm, not when you are wanting the heat when it's cold. Edit to add: * I know the old system was set to be always on at 17C and you also had no luck with the stove on for long stretches. So I definitely see the need to make some improvements (and also make sure the thermostat is located correctly), but with the work you've done already I think you are not far away from where you need to be.

that’s why we don’t do them! And you don’t pay VAT on new build.

Less than 20 years for rust streaks I should think, and yes I was insistent that the screws must be stainless for this very reason. I did check the screws on site rather than just take their word for it. The screws will be powder coated, but they will not be ready until the end of next week. Which is not going to go down well with the builder as he has scheduled the joiners on site Monday to finish fitting the guttering. Oh well.

When i pulled a concrete slab driveway up one time there was an existing clay pipe below it. Was fine. Bet that was less than 200mm. Concrete had mesh in was tough as nails. See lots of shallow pipes under driveways.

Also with ply you can staple it no risk of hitting anything below then