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I agree with the article while heartedly. If I could have sourced UC3 timber, is have used it. However, issues: Firstly, suppliers (at least near me) have NO IDEA about different class ratings for timber treatment - they will all say "yes yes it's pressure treated" which means nothing, it's definitely UC2. Secondly, practically speaking as a novice self builder trying to do it properly, I couldn't not find a single supplier for 2x2 UC3 near me. What I cold find was the other side of the country and 4x the cost. I agree, fencing batten not any good for a building. So practically won. I got standard UC2. Barn painted it black and then, when fitted, went round with DPM paint and painted the top surface to guard against standing water as best I could. We are nearly 18 months in and (as you would expect) so far so good. If there are to be any issues, they will be after 10+ years is my guess. Fingers crossed I've done enough for it to last as long as the thermowood.

I guess you mean lost freeholder? I wonder if it's a case of first time there was a lot of risk priced in and since then, they get a referral and kept the price the same? Can you wait and see how your neighbour gets on with the cheaper option?

Pro: It appears to be thermostatic. Con: It's 100% cheap seats. I would recommend buying another unit, or at least a spare thermostatic cartridge (or two) for when this inevitably snuffs it. I bought a cheap unit, very similar "quality" and fitted it in my new bathroom; I had the splendid notion of doing a much better bathroom in maybe 5 years. Same bathroom remains like maybe 7-8 years later............. Issue: the shite cartridges are giving up the ghost, so when the diverter should only be sending water to the rainfall head some is now finding its way to the bath filler and handset (3 way output). Plus, to turn mine off 100% now In have to turn the flow valve off to around 2 o'clock vs 12 o'clock. If you're on a budget, buy a surface mounted setup vs a concealed arrangement. Don't bury a ticking timebomb. Cheap is cheap for a very good reason.

Horrific bugs I'd never had found. Absolute bitches - well above my pay grade. But.....better than my holiday snaps!

Great point Nick. Often we get what we call "water hammer in pipes" this is where there may be a bit of air, or occasionally pipe lengths that deflect. It sets up an oscillation in the "instant" water pressure ( potentially can exceed normal working pressures by a long way) that can destroy sensitive modern systems. over stress pipe connections. I would for all it costs.

Fair, though I didn't initially put my point across as clearly as I should (later edited to mention the pipes but still maybe that's not clear enough). I've both experienced personally and know people who've had leaks caused by the connections between the appliance and the fixed plumbing. That is the element that I'm most suspicious of and it's an age related issue. In my mind the lower the pressure the less likely there is to be a problem and for most appliances pressure is not really required to be high. If the washing machine takes another minute or two to fill who cares? So for me, if building new and lucky enough to have a high pressure feed (around here people are complaining about <1bar, thankfully not affecting me) then I would intend to feed the appliances off a separate PRV from the DHW one.

If you use superglue, do NOT use too much as it won't sand back as quickly as the plaster / paint around it. As it's plaster you could prob happily just use neat PVA, with the benefit of being able to wipe this with a wet cloth to clear away excess when wet. Remember to stop the scrim tape well away from the edge as you defo do not want to catch that when tidying up after the plasterer with some sandpaper; I doubt they'll get them A1 so expect to have some faffing to do before paint. Also, don't forget to take the centres off and remove the foam restrictor before (and put them bloody safe so you don't need to repair those!!).

How many washing machines are sold each year in the UK? And how many of these have someone raise their hand to halt proceedings, stating "I need to check the pressure first!". I'd say that's <20% if that. WRAS stuff is tested to 10bar, and dynamic pressure is very different to static, so some diversity remains here; the reason washing machines / dish-washers et-al don't just blow up all over the place. I used to fit domestic appliances each evening for an appliance showroom, for beer money, and I can't recall any such failures tbh. Almost nobody reads the MI's before installing an appliance, we're a rare few on here, plus most installers are against the clock so simply don't GAF. Agree, softeners throw a curved ball here, good point.

Ok, my suggestion is that you don't rush this. It's a key step as if this does not turn out the way you hope you'll store up loads of problems that you'll have to deal with later. The great thing about BH is that what your are doing is quite common and folk will fesse up the mistakes they have made, so you don't repeat them. We just want to help you out! There are few if any on BH that will relish hearing that it has gone wrong for you when we could have helped. In that context. You say you have a ground bearing slab and that BC have signed off what you are going to lay your slab on. Thus it may be assumed that it is reasonably flat and level. But BC won't have checked this for you! In general terms level means that what you are laying on does not vary too much from one end of the building to the other. Flatness is roughly a measure of call it "undulation" between often 3.0m points. A slab can be level for corner extremities but go up and down like a roller coaster in between. I suspect you don't know what tolerances you should be working to. This is your SE's fault possibly, it may be buried somewhere in you specification? You say you have a 150mm thick slab. Roughly if what you are laying on is 15mm high in places then this can start to compromise the cover to the mesh. If the top side of your slab coincides with a high spot in the sub base it really eats into the performance of the slab as you are reducing what we call the effective structural depth. Ok your sub base is down now. We can have a look at how and where you finish the top of the slab. Now as you are doing this your self I can tell you that slabs often end up high. Contractors, in rush often leave slabs high also more often than not, bugger off and leave someone else to fix it. A over high slab impacts on everything that comes after. But lets turn back to structural strength first and a bit of rough techy stuff. You SE will have specified a basic structural strength of the concrete. If they are doing their job correctly they should specify a level tolerance both on what you are laying on and the top surface. I do this as a matter of course, it can go horribly wrong if you don't as you can end up with a slab that is only say 120mm thick in places.. and it's sods law that the thin bit will be under the point where there is a bit more load. Your basic might be something like a C28/35 concrete, there are lots of way we can specify concrete. It's then up to you / contractor to find a mix that can be work into place / p[properly compacted to meet the level tolerances and concrete strength. Basic concrete is made by mixing cement, concrete sand and water. When the water evaporates we have voids in the concrete, like the cell structure in wood. Thus we want to design a mix that is workable enough, but does not have too much water as this reduces the concrete strength. We call this the water / cement ratio. We measure how workable the concrete is by using often called the "slump" test. Google this and read around. It will help you lots! Now we can also add things to the concrete, other chemicals and powders which also can slow down how fast the concrete cures and remains workable. One easy way is to use what we call an air entraining agent, similar to Fairy liquid (never add Fairy liquid to any concrete of mortar mix, it's dangerous) , the bubbles of air make it more workable. Modern concrete mixes use other chemicals and agents that make the concrete more workable (basically lubricate the mix) but without reducing the matrix strength. You mention SCC (self compacting concrete) this is often also referred to as self levelling concrete. But the big problem with SCC or other self levelling mixes is that they need to be handled by experts that do it day in and day out. They can very quickly "turn on the novice" within a matter of minutes. If they turn on you then they are totally unforgiving! My advice is to look at a basic concrete mix with a bit more water, what we call a higher slump. Phone up a few suppliers, tell them what you are trying to do, your labour limitations, the weather you expect and the size and type of slab you are laying. If you make the right approach nine times out of ten you'll find folk itching to help you out! In my day job as an SE I often design quite "whacky stuff" I have a good basic knowledge but often find myself phoning the experts on a particular product to see where and when we can safely explore boundaries of design. I do check what they tell me, but I'm long past the point where I feel embarrassed to ask for expert advice, or just ask a daft question. If it's ok for me to do it then it's ok for you to call up a few concrete suppliers and ask for help? You have nothing to lose but a bit of time. You need to reflect on what you are doing. It's ok to take one step back to make two forward later.

I've managed to get all of the eaves and rafters to play nice with each other. The plane of the battens either meets the edge of the brickwork, or steps in a little. This would work OK for the eaves and first course of plain tiles. A bit late in the game I thought to try and squeeze in an over fascia vent. The vent itself is 25mm tall and if it's fixed to a 19mm batten it creates quite a kick up. I haven't come up with a way to secure the vent to the brickwork without the timber. The gap in the image caused by the kick up looks huge - it's probably 12-15mm. How much kick up is too much?

BR requires a mains powered fire alarm with battery backup

Claude not being so good today. Causing more problems than it fixes. Adding and removing without my knowledge...

Indeed!

Probably the same as all the others I'd imagine.

Couldn't think of the chemical name. Gorilla glue isn't the same. Tiny tube that likes to stick your fingers together.

cyanoacrylate Loads of brands, your local corner shop will have it, don't think it's gorilla glues thing though. They focus on urethanes and pva I think. I would go for cyanacrylate as its a very thin glue line and fast. Gorilla glue foams and might produce a less nice join.

Like the cyanide based stuff? Might get a tube of Gorilla Glue, seems well thought of.

Super glue

What do the manufacturers install instructions say? You can always install 10 year battery version of the detector, then you need no services

Upstairs we need to install smoke detectors on the walls as there is no service void in the ceiling. We have a small area of the flat ceiling as the first floor is mostly in the pitched roof space, so fitting the detectors to the top of the vertical wall would be in the space where smoke would gather first anyway. Has anyone done this and achieved BR sign off?

Bit of a kick in the balls, when I was screwing up my plaster in grill it cracked a bit of. Not a chance I'm buying another for £70 a go, so what adhesive is best for this to stick the bit back in before I scrim tape and multi over the ceiling? CT1? plasterboard adhesive? 1 step forward, 2 back as per.

Thanks for all the replies. @Nickfromwales I'll strike him off the list for our ashp then! I'll make sure to have it tee'd off before the control group for the ground floor appliances as checked and they can all take in excess of 5.5bar according to their respective manuals. First floor I have a hot and cold water manifold so will leave these as balanced coming off the control group as most are mixers.

I've never used SCC so perhaps others can advise of any special measures. I.m guessing here, but perhaps a length of 2x2 would be handy to persuade it all the way to the far corner. Any shuttering will be prone to leakage as will gaps in plastic. Have you a plan for the surplus and the washout location? Wherever you tell them to put it, it will keep flowing! If it is like pumped screed, it is like water until suddenly it isn't. ripples won't matter at all but getting it level +/- 3mm is well worth while.

a modest aircon unit in the living room, and obligatory solar on the roof?

Environment Earth is heating up faster than at any time in its history To understand where climate change is heading, we have to look at the planet’s distant past and appreciate the disturbing uniqueness of our situation, says Bill McGuire Bill Mcguire24 July 2026 http://localhost:56805/wp-content/external_image/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubmV3c2NpZW50aXN0LmNvbS93cC1jb250ZW50L3VwbG9hZHMvMjAyNi8wNy9TRUlfMzA2MjUwNjQ2LmpwZw__.jpg Rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are trapping more heat Bill Gozansky/Alamy As Europe bakes in what could be its hottest and driest summer on record, the rapid transformation of our climate is harder than ever to ignore. But how much hotter will it get, and what will that mean for life on Earth? To get a picture of our future, we can either use computer models or look to episodes of rapid climate change in the geological record. While models are invaluable in terms of tracking where our world may be heading, peering back into deep time provides unrivalled information about cause and effect; about how the climate has changed in the past and what the consequences were. There is no guesswork involved, as the evidence is all laid out for us in the sediments and rocks, in the ice sheets and in the remains of ancient life. Looking back in time also helps us to put human-caused global heating in context by making comparisons with past episodes of rapid temperature increase, and when we do this, the news isn’t good. It isn’t so much the degree of heat that is the issue – our world has been much hotter than it is today for much of its 4.6-billion-year history – but the speed of change. Perhaps barring the immediate aftermath of the dinosaur-obliterating asteroid impact 66 million years ago, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have never risen as quickly as they have in the last couple of centuries. Even worse, nowhere in the geological record is there evidence for the average temperature of our world climbing as quickly as it is now. This means 10 times faster than during the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, which marked extreme hothouse conditions 56 million years ago, and at least 20 times faster than at the end of the last glacial period. Judicious analysis of past climates also permits us to recognise potential analogues for where our world is heading in the decades and centuries to come. Over the last 50 million years or so, the planet’s climate has followed a broadly cooling trend, which we are now rapidly rewinding – a process, if you like, of prehistorification. Deciding how far back we will end up is still within our gift, but it is a given that our grandchildren will grow up in a climate different to any experienced during the tenure of human civilisation. Modelling studies suggest that if – and it’s still a big if – emissions peak by 2040 and then fall quickly, we will rewind the climate clock 3 million years and bequeath to our descendants a Late Pliocene climate. Then, atmospheric CO2 levels were much lower than today, at 330 to 400 parts per million (ppm), but the temperature was between 2.5ºC and 4ºC above the pre-industrial average, and sea level 15 to 25 metres higher. Pliocene conditions could start to appear in the continental heartlands as soon as the 2030s and spread out from there. If we fail to rein in emissions fast enough, or if natural feedback effects drive more heating than expected, then a further rewinding of the climate clock back to the Miocene becomes more likely; to a time 15 million to 17 million years ago, when CO2 concentrations, at 400 to 600 ppm, were a bit lower to moderately higher than they are today. At 6ºC to 8ºC above the 1800s, however, the temperature was far higher than expected for such CO2 levels, suggesting the involvement of other heating factors that we don’t yet fully understand. Sea level was maybe 50 metres higher than it is today. But this may not be the end of it. The current high rate of heating documented by satellite observations and borne out by Earth’s rapidly escalating energy imbalance implies that rewinding the climate clock back fully 50 million years remains within the bounds of possibility, eventually reprising the blistering heat of the early Eocene hothouse. Such conditions would make most of our world uninhabitable for humans, and severely test the capacity of our species to prevail. As the Persian poet and mathematician Omar Khayyam observed almost 1000 years ago: “When I want to understand what is happening today, or try to decide what will happen tomorrow, I look back.” They are words that serve us well as we contemplate our future climate, and that we ignore at our peril. Bill McGuire is professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London. His book, The Fate of the World: A history and future of the climate crisis, is published by HarperNorth. Related Environment This El Niño will be the hottest by a huge margin The super El Niño now developing in the tropical Pacific has a 90 per cent chance of becoming the strongest in 150 years, breaking global temperature records and unleashing extreme weather Alec Luhn23 July 2026, updated 27 July 2026 http://localhost:56805/wp-content/external_image/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubmV3c2NpZW50aXN0LmNvbS93cC1jb250ZW50L3VwbG9hZHMvMjAyNi8wNy9TRUlfMzA2MjI1Mjk2LmpwZw__.jpg El Niño events are linked to dry weather in Australia, which can lead to devastating wildfires such as those in 2019 SAEED KHAN/AFP via Getty Images The planet-warming super El Niño now developing will almost certainly be the strongest ever, breaking the record by an unprecedented margin. Out of hundreds of simulations by 14 forecast models, 90 per cent predict the tropical Pacific will reach a sea-surface temperature anomaly that hasn’t been seen in 150 years of observations, according to the California non-profit organisation Berkeley Earth. It is expected to peak at 3.6°C above average, far above the 2.75°C record set in 2015-16. Zeke Hausfather at Berkeley Earth says this is one of the few times a climate forecast has truly shocked him. “Even the median of all the models expects we beat the record by 0.8°C,” he said at a media briefing on 23 July. “If this does end up occurring, it really would be record-shattering and unprecedented.” El Niño happens when easterly winds weaken in the tropics, allowing water they’ve pushed into the Western Pacific Warm Pool to wash back towards the eastern Pacific. Rainfall shifts eastward, weakening easterly winds further in a self-reinforcing feedback loop. Although it’s a natural cycle, it delivers a jolt of heat on top of 1.4°C of global warming, setting off extreme weather around the world, according to Berkeley Earth. Already, this El Niño is revving up faster than any previous event. Sea-surface temperatures in the central-eastern Pacific have reached 2.1°C above average, vastly outpacing the 1.6°C increase seen at this time of year during the 1997-98 El Niño, the previous record-holder for speedy development. This “explosive onset” has already put the event in very strong or “super” El Niño territory, only a month after it started. And once you consider that El Niño doesn’t peak until late autumn or winter, it really does look like the world is facing a “Godzilla” El Niño, the name given to those that increase temperatures past a rise of 3°C. Within a few months, the huge swathe of warm water across the Pacific will heat up the rest of the world. Global temperatures in 2027 are likely to reach 1.7°C above the pre-industrial average, smashing the record set in 2024, when temperatures were 1.5°C above the average. The El Niño is coming on so fast that there’s even a chance 2026 will break that global temperature record first, as some have predicted. As a result, the 20-year temperature average will likely exceed 1.5°C by 2029, failing the goal set by the Paris Agreement, said Robert Rohde at Berkeley Earth in the briefing. “We’re already over 1.4°C, so there’s very little margin left,” Rohde said. Different regions will see different extreme weather. Densely populated southern China could experience heavy rainfall in the spring and summer, raising the risk of flooding on the Yangtze river, forecasters have warned. The 1997-98 super El Niño caused flooding on the Yangtze that killed more than 3000 people. The north-eastern US tends to face drier conditions during El Niño, while the southern US gets wetter, which can unleash mudslides in places like California. Australia tends to dry out, raising the threat of bushfires like those seen during the “Black Summer” of 2018-19. India, southern and central Africa and parts of Central and South America all face drought risks, which could push up the price of commodities like rice, coffee and chocolate even in less-exposed countries like the UK. “We might get lucky and have smaller reduction in rainfall in Africa or India, but generally… the damages scale with the strength of the El Niño,” said Hausfather. Strong El Niño events also cause harm to ecosystems, such as widespread coral bleaching, which is expected this year as well. While some research suggests El Niño events are getting stronger, other studies disagree. What is clear is that the impacts will get worse as global warming accelerates. “It’s something we need to start preparing for today and make sure we have systems in place to deal with drought conditions,” said Hausfather.