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All vents will be in the ceiling. Only one vent will be near a seating area and that one is in the living room. The rest will be as far away from beds etc as possible. You mention coanda effect. I take it general vents are just going to push the air out in a specific direction? Cheers.

My MVHR parts have arrived 😀 I have plvcu ceiling/wall plenums and wondering the best way to mount within the ceiling. The mounting tabs are useful but not sure whether to go direct to the underside of the 22mm egger floor above or whether I need to fit a piece of timber for each one and screw into that. Any advice and photos would be really appreciated. Thanks

Thanks Nick that picture’s really useful too 👍

Hi, thank you. We have already got a heatpump and underfloor heating. Do you think an a2a would be better than mvhr?

Yes, totally agree. It's painfully inefficient / deliberately slow (delete as appropriate).

Hi and thanks for the info. I have looked at other types of ventilation but it will have to be somewhat heated due to the wife not liking draughts. Air tightness is something we are going for, but it's a work in process type thing. Once everything is done then the place will be quite air tight. When you say vapour protection what do you mean? I was going to use insulated ducting, would I need to do anything extra? Cheers.

We had an estimation module in engineering school that asked us to do critical calcs in our head and come out with approximate answers. This allowed a very valuable sanity check on the fancier version of the calcs using accurate numbers. If the results differed by more than, say +- 50% you had a big problem. So, saying that, I just had some augur piling done. There's generally a fixed cost for design / mobilisation (i.e. getting off our arses) / testing etc and a variable cost per pile or metre, but sometimes the sales person might trade one against the other for window dressing. I was quoted £1.29K per pile / £92 per metre for 350mm diameter 14m piles and only a couple of £K for design etc. I was also responsible for the muckaway. Let me guess that you'll have 20 off 8m piles (who knows without seeing your soil investigation or knowing how heavy your house is going to be). That's £15K plus some fixed costs and the muckaway, say £20K. I'll guess that the ring beam will cost about the same as simple strip founds. So plus £20K for pile support. Sure, maybe you'll need 12m piles or longer and the cost will scale roughly linearly - nobody knows because you have not provided any info besides 'soft clay'. I bet a couple of local piling companies will be interested enough to give you a ballpark. To get an accurate quote number you need: A soil investigation with load bearing numbers and a sense of groundwater height. SE calcs of your house loads and a rough slab/founds design. The piling co will then do a pile design with a 3x safety factor and give you a reasonably firm quote. On consistent soft clay you shouldn't find anything too unexpected unless you suspect mine workings, archaeology, underground lake etc. A local BCO might give you an opinion on that too. This is what the interesting page(s) of the SI look(s) like. The N=xx result is what you're after and gives you an indication of the load bearing capacity. The SI may even give you a feel for what reasonable piling might look like, but the piling company will want to refine that calc.

The rwa 50mm is good. I've used soundbloc both sides with it too. I think the minimum for the regs in bedrooms was soundbloc ea side and 25mm acoustic wool. Even that holds itself in well if board one side first then fit up against.

What is it that makes you believe the second SE rather than the first SE.

Lol. I had a problem with a opus session - it wasn't doing what I wanted. Told the Boss session and it sorted it out. As I'm doing optimisations decided to get multiple Fable sessions up to look at different aspects. As timings are critical can only have 1 at a time using the m3 for rendering. To avoid messing each other up they have coordinated themselves . Each asked how long the other sessions needed. They all then scheduled themselves i.e. "I'll wait until 16:40 for my gpu session". Only got about 20% fable time left this week so it's going to be a stretch. But resolving some tricky issues - optimisations are thin on the ground but I'll squeeze what's left. Though any gains are lost as I add new features at the same time!. I got a feeling the video is going to be (expletive deleted)ing awesome!

I'd only consider adding a pre-heater if choosing a vent style that discharges downwards and if I didn't have the space to site them away from sensitive areas - beds, seating and the like; the supply air can be noticeable and, in cold weather, can be a couple of °C cooler than the general room temperature. However, if you use ceiling mounted vents that use the Coanda Effect - for example Zehnder Luna - the supply air will be dispersed at ceiling level and, provided the minimum distance to the walls is respected, there will be no problem.

We used Rockwool Flexi and it stays put very well. Just make a slightly interference fit.

Nope. It’ll fight your plasterboards until the death. Screws will wind in and pull through the boards, as they won’t be tight against the studs. Seriously, do not use 100mm, persevere and get 75mm.

Thanks Nick. I assumed the 100mm would just compress slightly which i don’t think would affect acoustic performance too much?

Thanks John. That’s interesting. I was pushing the insulation right up to one face and running the electrics behind where electrics are only on one side. I’m wondering how easy the slab will stay in position if it’s in the Centre.

Explain please? Btw our gauge has now risen to 55%. It increased when the rains came, demonstrating that it is registering the atmosphere and presumably the immediate effect on the screed surface. Still below the magic 65%.

Looking very good. Thanks for the info re the tape.

That seems rather bad, especially if the government is taking the money at source (eg PAYE) and has not adjusted quick enough to changing circumstances.

Yeah, this can often be the way with "simplification"!😁 I looked into it as I thought I was going to have to do it (turns out I'm in the group that avoids it). It's very dependent on your software. In theory all you have r to do is the normal admin (allocating payments to invoices and bills and tagging various transactions by type) on a reasonably timely schedule and then hit the upload button every now and again. If you're reasonably on it, there shouldn't be much extra work. But for the people who just chuck all their invoices and receipts in the glove box and then have a mad rush about just before the deadline trying to make sense of scraps of paper from 12 months ago - it's gonna be a change (but probably for the better)

One of the benefits of the tax by default, claim refunds for exceptions (and make that easy/quick) is that for some people (most likely well paid employees with simple affairs, some small businesses), they may find the admin of doing tax returns (as they need to do now) a huge cost/time sink and would equally find the refund process not worth their time. In the new system they could choose not to bother. The result in that case is the exchequer gets more tax in return for removing the need for that admin. In our current system you have to do the admin and for many smaller diy filers I'd guess they don't claim everything they could so end up doing the admin and paying the tax and similarly some, having been forced to do the admin, will try to claim every penny they can in order to try and recoup the cost of the admin. Only really applies to relatively small amounts but also applies to large numbers of people. It's a win for everyone involved (except accountants).

As a non-creative it doesn't help me either That seemingly poses a challenge, but would the 'creative' just create a different payment schedule of some sort?

I called today and they said they’re on stuff submitted 27th July. And once invoices are submitted, it’s back to the end of the queue, so another 5+ weeks. If they’re just selecting the largest invoices, or a few random ones, I don’t see why they couldn’t automatically request them after the initial submission, rather than dragging things out. Even at the previous request, just ask me for insurance docs and invoices at the same time, rather than separately.

under my system you would pay tax on a refund as it would be treated as income. Obviously genuine mistake would be an exception. I would tax state benefits as well. Then it just becomes an arguement about how large they should be, not a threshold arguement.

As a non-creative it doesn't help me either. Sure, but it's annoying to have to do it when your affairs are simple. Various 'single events' trigger having to do the whole thing (in some cases justified, in others not but its the only way to report the event). Sort of, though from what limited stuff I'm hearing it's adding more work rather than taking it away. You have to do the work once for the quarterly report and then do the tax return at the end of the year. Yes the software should eliminate a lot of the duplication but not all. Yep, free ability to file, especially for small businesses seems important. Biden introduced a free web based filing system for people to use. Apparently it was quite good. Cost a fairly significant amount of money to build. The accounting/tax filing software companies didn't like it and Trump scrapped it. 💵🔥

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/averaging-for-creators-of-literary-or-artistic-works-hs234-self-assessment-helpsheet/hs234-averaging-for-creators-of-literary-or-artistic-works-2026 There is a procedure for averaging out income for creatives, though it won't help my hypothetical once every 10 years artist (much) I'm very much for the use of digital technologies and designated accounts to simplify things. To be fair HMRC have been pretty good - they moved to online self assesment decades ago and the procedure is fairly straightforward (as tax goes). The making tax digital initiatives are moving towards what you described. Your accounts are automatically uploaded to HMRC and the taxes estimated from that. The issue is that whilst the online self assesment system was a free to use web service alot of the new MTD stuff requires you to use commercial (as in paid) software. You need to pay someone to file your return. There is no longer a default "basic" free service (for the new stuff - SA remains in place). I object to this a bit. Mind you, you should see the US, everyone has to file a return (even the homeless or people abroad) and there is no equivalent of free software. Only paid for services which make up a billion dollar industry, who coincidentally spend lots of money lobbying to prevent any free version being deployed....🤔