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Thanks all, much appreciated. Now to go and drill two holes through a dense concrete block wall!

Hello I want to fix my rafters to a ledger board. I’ve made a small bird mouth cut to seat the rafter onto ledger. This has the full 47mm bearing. Trouble is I’m looking at code complaint way to fix these without nailing or screwing too close to the limits. This is the diameter of the fixings within the distances of the end grain, edges, birds mouth angle etc. due to the rafter sitting high on the ledger I haven’t got an option to skew nail through the plumb (heel) cut. If I go in through the sides and down into the ledger I’ll be too close to the birdmouth angle. I was thinking either pre-drill and go in with a long screw from the top. 5mm directly down so it lands 25mm in the centre of the seat and into the ledger. Or use some kind of twisted restraint bar along the side of the rafter and twist to then hit the ledger. The downward thrust is taken care of by the wood to wood seat. It’s just uplift and connection. I’m assuming horizontal twist - although I can noggin in between to stop this twist and slide. Anyone with any firm knowledge on this situation please help. (Also - please don’t reply if you’re just going to say plumb cut with a hanger, etc) it needs the bird mouth for BCO.) Many thanks. Picture below.

It ends with third SE stating that wind posts are required.

I feel bad for desparately hoping for some proper rain in the South East. It's been painfully dry for months, and the couple of small recent downpours have not been sufficient to convince the mushrooms to pop up yet. I did find my first mushrooms of the year today though - oysters on fallen scots pine.

No, the laptop fan is ten times boiser.

Hi. Im a student in Ireland and am I completely a project on MVHR systems in homes and if they are of benefit . I would greatly appreciate any help that I could get . If I was able to find out : 1. What type of MVHR system you have ? 2. Is your house 1 or 2 storey ? 3. Cost of installation + how long ago 4. If you have seen any benefits so far ? If there is any more facts , figures or detail pictures that anyone could send me either that would be greatly appreciated . Thanks a lot for any help !

I have an Ecodan R32. Have you checked the heat source setting via the service menu? The "Heat Source" should be set to "Standard". If it's set to "Heating" that's wrong and needs to be changed to "Standard"

So perhaps a simple vent on one wall and a dMEV on the opposite wall? Exactly that, and in response to your Q 'are they noisy?' - I have Greenwood CV2's in 3 wet rooms and barely ever notice them. Yes, I don't sit on the bog as long as I'd sit in an office, but the fans emit, at their loudest, a gentle hum.

Interesting - mine came in at £6103 (CVC) for not far off a similar size.

Of course. But last year a forklift or excavator made 400mm indents through turf, so that will happen again, or worse. The weather prediction from the Pacific to here is very approximate of course. But for those of us with any weather dependent processes, it's worth pushing now.

I'd take it with a grain of salt. By all means do what you need to get the site sorted before it gets too bad but don't panic.

That's an impressive installation and it's good to hear you get good support from CVC. What I'm seeing though is that they are expensive. For my 280 m2 house CVC quoted £9071 supply of materials excluding the duct layout or commissioning for a Brink Flair. That included a 30% discount. Heat Space and Light quoted £7665 supply of materials including the duct layout and commissioning for a Zehnder.

We are hurrying to complete the weatherproof box, including guttering, before the rains come. The drainage needs prioritising too as we are creating a surge of water off the new roof that used to be spread around. The ground turns to battlefield conditions October to March in a normal autumn so this is a worry. El nino likely to cause wetter and warmer-than-normal autumn

So perhaps a simple vent on one wall and a dMEV on the opposite wall?

I went to town on mine, but when I installed the windows they weren't very airtight so all was good. Make a judgment on letting air in, you will need a fan.

I do intend for it to be pretty airtight. Would that change your advice?

Did you have to forego any areas of insulation in the outer walls?

Would you say a dMEV is noisy?

I'm not qualified to answer your question, but if I was going to spend hours working in a tiny office, with perhaps minimal ventilation in the winter months, for comfort & to keep the heating costs down, I'd get myself a CO2 monitor (about £100 - £150 for a good one, I should think) & I'd do some Googling to learn about this then monitor the CO2 levels, because even a safe, but elevated, level of CO2 can make you feel drowsy & kill your productivity.

+1. Unless you have gone to town on airtightness it will leak enough to keep a dMEV fan running on min speed happy. Get a Greenwood CV2 or 3 they are silent and draw almost no power.

Would Second hand do? I'm told our house was built with a timber shingled roof but it needed to be reroofed in tiles after 30 years or so.

You'll be creating moisture just through breathing every day, so I'd fit a dMEV with a humidistat and maybe provide an inlet vent opposite depending on how airtight it is.

Analysis and Environment Can we really reverse global warming after overshooting 1.5°C? A UN report says it’s possible to get global temperatures back down to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century, but many researchers regard this scenario as highly unlikely By Michael Le Page 2 September 2026 Fossil fuel emissions are likely to push the world past 1.5°C of warming Blossey/imageBROKER/Shutterstock The world is likely to overshoot 1.5°C of warming within the next few years, a report by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) acknowledges. However, it says it is still possible to cool the planet back down to this level by the end of the century. Can it really be done? It isn’t impossible, but it certainly isn’t the most likely outcome. The goal of limiting the increase in the average global surface temperature to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels looked implausible even back in 2015, when it was adopted as part of the Paris Agreement. The UNEP report can be seen as an “official” acknowledgment of what many have been saying for years: that it is now certain that we are going to blast right past this limit. But some aren’t giving up on the target. There are no good outcomes if we remain above 1.5°C, says Inger Andersen at UNEP. “Even if we exceed 1.5, let’s be very clear: that 1.5 target is still the goal. But now we need to approach it differently, from above.” Much of the report looks at the consequences of overshooting 1.5°C and the need for adaptation to cope with the severe impacts this will bring. “We will see increased food insecurity, increased water insecurity, impacts on human health – physical and mental – danger to our homes and our infrastructure,” says Debra Roberts at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, one of the authors of the report. “This will lead to the loss of livelihoods and certainly lives.” The world isn’t prepared for overshooting 1.5°C, she says. “Therefore we have to advance our adaptation and development strategies to deal with those higher levels of warming, the greater range of risks and impacts… Adaptation needs to be transformational to allow us to plan for a changing world.” There will be no going back to how things were, says Roberts. “Some losses will be irreversible, which means returning to 1.5 doesn’t mean we return back to the same world we left.” But what exactly should we be preparing for? The report focuses on a scenario in which rapid emissions cuts and massive-scale removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere result in a return to 1.5°C of warming by the end of the century. But achieving this would require limiting temperature rises to no more than 1.8°C, says Roberts. Beyond this, there will be cascading effects from all the irreversible changes that make it much harder. However, restricting warming to this level requires a halving of global emissions by 2035, says report author Joeri Rogelj at Imperial College London. That seems highly unlikely given that emissions are still rising worldwide. In addition to emissions cuts, the scenario envisaged in the report also requires carbon removal on a truly gigantic scale – enough not just to balance out hard-to-tackle emission sources, such as farming, and achieve net zero, but to go well beyond that to remove around 10 gigatonnes of CO2 each year. That compares with current emissions of around 40 gigatonnes. This means scaling up carbon removal by a factor of around 100,000, says Reto Knutti at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, who wasn’t involved in the report. Cheap forms of carbon removal, such as planting forests, can’t be scaled up this much because there isn’t enough land. Direct air capture could be scaled up, but it is really expensive, he says. Knutti thinks achieving this is technically and financially possible, but not politically plausible. “We should be honest when we talk to policy-makers and the public that this is not the thing to plan for,” he says. “I think the plan should be to adapt for at least 2 degrees, if not more.” James Dyke at the University of Exeter in the UK is even less optimistic. “There are still no credible plans for large-scale carbon dioxide removal,” he says. “Human societies must adapt and prepare for a warmer and more dangerous world that will persist potentially for centuries.” Konstantin Weber, also at ETH Zurich, points out that among the latest emissions scenarios that will be used by climate modellers, only two imply a return to 1.5°C before 2150. The scenario based on current policies suggests warming of around 3°C by 2100. Until recently, overshooting and returning to 1.5°C was no more than a scientific thought experiment, says Oliver Geden at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. Now it could become the “official” plan B for 1.5°C. “The overshoot concept may turn out to be no more than a way to mask ongoing failure,” he says. But even if getting the temperature back down to 1.5°C isn’t likely, we have to try, says Weber. “We have to give it a shot. There’s no real alternative.” “Now is the time to double down on climate action, not to give up on it,” says Andersen. “Every fraction of a degree avoided, every year by which overshoot is shortened and every adaptation action taken will save lives, protect ecosystems and reduce economic losses.” Topics: Climate change

I’m doing that, but also asking here to find out what others have experienced first hand.

You might find something in powder coated aluminium. There are companies that do aluminium cladding for columns etc that might have something or make something bespoke.