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That doesn't even happen for gross incompetence with lives lost. To me, the PI I had to pay was firstly an assurance for every client, and secondly it was in case of any inadvertent error by my business or a sub-contractor or engaged specialist designer. It didn't occur to me that we, or anyone, might be incompetent... ie only do what you know and do it well. Part of the training is to appreciate all aspects and know enough that you don't dabble. Eg a surgeon doing hip surgery knows a lot about cardiology but doesn't dabble with heart surgery. Fundamentally a dabbling and overconfident builder or a rogue designer probably goes out of business after a very big mistake, but some poor client is left with the consequences.

What is the context? What is being connected? Materials, and why you are concerned?

Absolutely nothing wrong with a dMEV system, what maintenance, there is none? The trickle vents are controlled by a membrane that contracts or expands to variable moisture levels, zero inputs from anything else. The fans are commercial available bathroom fans. Greenwood make a nice one, but many others available. Way less maintenance than MVHR. Zero faculties needed, fit it walk away. That cannot be said or MVHR as you need to change filters etc. Same as any other house, I have owned around 10 houses, no one has ever told me anything about maintenance ever. But as said above dMEV, what maintenance?

Replacement seems likely, but clay pipes are pretty robust so it will likely only be a localised replacement. At least they didn't tip it down an internal drain... A bit bleak :) I'm sure the end result will be worth it!

Have a look here, they may have something that floats your boat. https://www.ejot.co.uk/ If not on their website use that old thing called the telephone and give them a call.

This is elegant at first glance. It might float your boat.. but I honestly despair at times. You write a lot of good stuff John but what about say a young couple that come to buy your house. Will you make them aware of any potential maintenance issues? Now you may have all your faculties at the moment and I'm sure you think this is your forever home, but when you get less "sharp" and need folk to maintain your house who may be less dilligent.. what then? I totally get that your house is your hobby.. but in my day job I need to give Clients best advice. That includes protecting their asset. I do love you technical grasp and hope you don't mind me taking a more general view.

This is an important question. To address this I go back to the HSE act 1974. This was a vital piece of legilation as it made breach of the act a criminal offence. Jumping quickly ahead we had the CDM regulations 2015 which in part also reinforced the statutory stiffness. In other words it means you can't go about desinging or carrying out work if you are not competant to do so. In the UK It's got little to do with if you are a chartered member of x, y and z. All that does under UK law is to help you demonstrate competancy. Competancy can be demonstrated in different ways. The law is a good law as it is all emcompassing. There are many Engineers and Designers (lots of these work for and are involved in Contracting where we are looking for experience and competancy) they are not chartered but many also have a deep understanding of boots on the ground Civic responsibility. So no, being Chartered does not make you better or more qualified, it just shows you have attained something, through a process that demonstrates your competancy. That is the law. I refer to a well known goetech book, its the go to bible. The guy that wrote it was a director of a massive Scottish Structural Engineering Consultancy.. he had an HND in Civil Engineering, he wasn't a chartered SE or anything. But many well known Chartered Engineers were glad to get a mention. The reasoning behind the law was to capture all the tom, dick and harrys.. say dodgy plumbers and moonlighting "Architects" or tech designers, builders that thought they could do design that were desinging stuff that was unsafe to build or later compromise the safety of a building. The actual problem is that the law as it stands is not being enforced. All the tools are there that would allow our courts to send people to prison for statutory breaches of the law. Next is the Civil Law aspect. Now to practice well you also should to hold indemnity insurance. If you employ anyone then you must have employers liability insurance as that is a statutory requirement, public liability insurance is an optional extra. PI insurance is also and extra believe it or not! Technically you can practice in the UK with no PI insurance! It's totally irresponsible but some who moonlight do so.. I hold 2.0 million PI insurance as an SE and Architectural designer which is a lot more than most small Architects and small SE's for example. My cover is wide ranging. So what needs to happen is that the law as it is stands needs to be enforced for everyone that does any kind of design work. We need to see some prison sentences dished out from the local plumber right up to the Architect and SEs when they put folks safety at risk.

Aye and no. Below is a good photo of a small turbine base.. I'm the (expletive deleted)wit on the far left. Doing the corporate stuff but thinking.. this is not maybe that good for the enviroment and creating jobs as puported.. But I've got much better looking as I've aged, taller also! Every cloud has a silver lining. I can't remember the output of the turbine, tall from memory, but not that big, just a farmer getting some extra income. I think you can see it from the M8 motorway in Scotland. What it does show is the amount of rebar that goes into something like a modest wind turbine base. It's practically there forever pretty much. It does as the more you increase the height the larger the base needs to be to resist the dynamic wind forces. It's not just the over turning effect it's the constant variation in dynamic loading. Mother earth does not often appreciate this kind of "vibration" and load change. We need mass concrete.. when poured it gets hot! It cracks and shrinks and curls up like fury and part of all that rebar you see is to control that cracking and curling effect. If you put a pork chop in a frying pan it often curls.. same to some extent happens with concrete. Technically concrete has two dominant forms when it is cast. One is plastic shrinkage.. that is when the chemicals in the concrete are busy creating the concrete we see.. this can apply to raft floors in self builds. The other is drying shrinkage, less dominant in turbine founds in say CLAY soil.. but in SANDS in England drying shrinkage is a consideration. Drying shrinkage is probably the dominant factor in self build rafts / screeds and so on. If you look up the construction videos of the Hoover dam this is well explained about how you need to control the heat in mass concrete. Now you don't have to be an SE to figure out that wind turbines are maybe not as eco friendly as at first glance? Below is the bit in the middle that the concrete ring sits onto.. to which the nice bit of steel turbine gets attached to. That's the bit you see above ground. Now it's almost impossible to upgrade a turbine base.. unless the tax payer is footing the bill. In that case it all hands on deck for a great design fee.. all paid for by the public of course.

The aggregates supplier said similar re: 6N and fines. Will investigate further.

Ours is nearly 200m² on a single floor. If you are looking at anything near that cost I won't thinking again. If our target airtightness had not demanded it (Scottish building regs) I would have gone dMEV or MEV. Very little in it, heat loss wise. dMEV demand based system Wet rooms, Greenwood CV2 one in each room including kitchen. Or central MEV with humidity activated terminals and constant pressure fan in MEV unit. Automatically and smartly do boost it needed, run at a very low flow all the time. From eBay look at around £40 each, for Greenwood CV2 fans, almost silent, draw almost no electricity, zero maintenance. No trickle vents in wet rooms. Dry rooms, trickle vents that is humidity activated (can include acoustic damping if you need) around £60 to £120 each. Can be through wall or in window. How it works, day time, bedrooms not used, trickle vents almost fully closed. Downstairs rooms have people so the vents start to open in response to rising humidity, fans draw the air across the room, through corridors and out the house. At night the effect swop, now bedroom trickle vents open and downs close. No-one in house, all trickle vents go to min opening. As with MVHR you have internal doors under cut around 6 to 10mm

stress over time on the fixings etc -so they dig it up and start again

Materials are £10k and install £6k, the house will be just over 200m2 across four levels one day. Plenty of work to get there though.

It's a shame I'm living in the bloody thing, I'd love to be able to use aerobarrier I'm going to have to try and do it on a floor by floor basis, I think. Once the basement is done I'll move onto the ground floor and strip it all back, that might provide an opportunity to do what I can do, test and then if needed, get aerobarrier in to do their magic.

only if i sold osme -wind men get money when the turbines are sitting doing nothing --thats the difference

Looking for thermally broken fixings that stop cold bridging, I used some hammer in nails that went into a large rawl plug and had a plastic cap on the nail, but i wasnt that impressed with the thermal break to be honest. Anyone use some they were happy with? Thanks carl

Are you saying this was poured down the drain as a way to clean up at the end of the day and dispose of the excess goop? If so......................what a cock.

Are you able to use AeroBarier? just needs the house pretty empty and a lot of covering up furniture, and robust masking off all floors and flat surfaces. Got a masonry refurb down to sub 0.2 ACH before xmas!!!

My first quote 6 years ago was £10k - bonkers. Ended up DIY and spend around £2k

Cheers, I'll take a look at that. I got a quote back today, seems expensive.

Yeah, I'll need to be looking at lots of airtightness details internally if I can't do anything externally. I'm not doing this on the cheap so it's definitely going to be airtight when I'm finished.

I still find this a harrowing scene.

Ha! 😁 No but I did have to "bunny suit up" amd wear a dosimeter for working on the lab and go through a radiation scanner on the way out each shift. Was an interesting job.

I suppose anybody who wants wind turbines to be built and for the electricity they produce to be affordable. CfDs reduce risk for the generators. Without them, generators would be asking higher prices for their electricity to reflect the risks they would be required to take on. Yes, it does stack up, hugely. The parameter you need to look at is the life cycle greenhouse gas emissions, measured in grammes of CO2e, per kWh of energy produced over the life of the asset. Results as follows (median values of the assets they studied): Coal: 1004 g Natural Gas: 458 g Solar PV: 53 g Offshore wind: 18 g Onshore wind: 12 g Nuclear: 6 g (Clearing the Air, Hannah Ritchie, data source UN Economic Commission for Europe, 2021) According to Drax Group who operate the Lanark and Galloway run-of-river hydro schemes, located in south-west Scotland, it generates 126 MW. Yes, that's nice but it's not going to get us far in the energy transition. The latest allocation round for offshore wind (AR7) procured 70 times that capacity, 8.4 GW. So what? The embedded CO2 in the blades is taken into account in the above life cycle numbers. It's just a waste disposal issue. Same or worse for end of life fossil assets, many of which contain far worse materials - asbestos, mercury and other heavy metals, spent catalysts, etc.

If you were contracted to produce cakes for wedding, you produced them and the customers courier couldn't make the lick uk because their vans were all busy - would you want to be paid? I suspect yes. The curtailment payments are due to the grid not being able to transport the contracted for power - which is a separate issue that is being addressed - and happens to gas (and once upon a time coal) plants as well This is false. The meme was popularised by the series "landman" where billybob Thornton goes on a (wrong) rant about wind turbines. The carbon payback for wind turbines varies from 6-18months. The bases vary depending on ground conditions but typically 100m3 per MW - so between 100-600m3 per turbine. But concrete is not unique to wind turbines. Hinckley C has over 40,000m3 in just one of the two reactor foundations. The turbine blade problem is real but more a function of composites not yet generally being recycled. This is changing but the current best practice it to recycle the blades by grinding them into particles and (you'll like this) using them in concrete..... 😁

If in doubt, suck it. (Never say that to SWMBO) Available from NASA - makes a good conversation piece when entertaining dinner guests.