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I was generalising. I makes no difference as you should know. The condensate seal trap works the same way. It does not matter if it is internal or external to the boiler. The fact is that if water backs up in the rain water pipe it's going to piss out inside the house big time and wet all the electrics for example. . Of course it triggers a cut out of the boiler but where does the over pressure from the rain water pipe go then. If the rain water pipe backs up then the pressure head is at gutter level say that is 2.5 to 3.0m head. In the round the thing stinks. This sounds like a bit of a straw man argument. Are you serious? A Pressure relief valve into a condensate pipe? Can you explain in lay terms?

The condensate drain doesn't really work like this. The condensate pipework is technically part of the boiler flue, so it has a 75mm condensate seal trap built into the boiler. In the event of freezing the condensate backs up into the the trap, and then into the boiler heat exchanger and triggers an ignition lock out in the boiler. Depending on the manufacturer's instructions, the condensate drain may not require an air gap where it connects into the drain pipe. Unless the system has a UVC, it's unlikely to use a tundish as there will be a blow off pipe for the pressure relief valve. This should be directed to the outside, or a suitable drain. There's a chance the installer here might have installed the prv into this condensate drain pipe in which case it would need a tundish, but I'd wouldn't expect BG to do something like this - usually they drill a whole and stick a 15mm copper pipe through. Only a couple of manufacturers, like Viessmann have a combined prv and condensate drain, which is again unlikely with BG installations. Best thing to do is for @Babybirddog to call Gas Safe to start a complaint, sending over a picture and then ask for an inspector to come and have a look at the whole installation - basically start the call with a nice question about whether it's correct or not. Then contact BG armed with Gas Safe info. With Gas Safe they will only allow the home owner to submit the complaint. The last one I had was when a customer of mine, an elderly lady who was mostly chair and bed bound, asked me to come and service her boiler. When I tested gas operating pressure with the gas fire running it was below the safe minimum for the fire. I asked her when the fire had been installed, and got the full story on a crap installation that included badly laid out coals which meant the gas fire wasn't combusting correctly either. The installer hadn't registered the installation with Gas Safe. I called them but they wouldn't accept my complaint as a Gas Safe registered engineer even though I told them the installation was unsafe. Sadly, whoever did it, didn't! It could have been a sub-contractor too.

Hiya. To provide a bit of context, much of my initial SE training and Masters research was on portal frames. I know enough to make a contribution on this type of design. Here is my offer. You can call me on the phone on 0771 308 1597 for a 15 -30 min chat. It's free for BH folks! This forms part of my pro bono work that is good for my soul, my primary qualification is in Civil Engineering, you work for the public. Text me first so I know it's you. I'm pretty deaf so sometimes miss calls. I use my own name and can be easily found on the internet.. I get some interesting calls and offers, these range from "massages" to lots of "financial" offers and other "stuff" that actually breaks up my day, hence me filtering calls. The section sizes you quote might be dependent on your eaves height, wind loading and the types of finishes. That the best I can do for now.

Ok @Nickfromwales and Karen. To expand, my mum is 95. The following happend to my neighbour. The rainwater down pipe got blocked and the water backed up. The water then flooded back up the discharge pipe, over flowed the tundish inside, soaked the electrical fuse box, soaked the floors. Karen. You are right on this. If you need some help then happy to chip in with a draft text to support a complaint as I'm sure @Nickfromwales will also do.

7 meter span, stanchions are 254 x 147 x 30, trusses are 203 x 133 x 31, haunches are nearly one meter long, SE goes crazy with some things and not with others, cross bracing on stanchions states 50mm x 5mm flat bar and roof bracing 48.3mm tube, it’s all about liability and everyone afraid to sign things off unless everything is over the top, steel frame was going to cost me £8800 plus vat plus delivery with this weight of portal frame, when I priced it before same as ag spec it was £3200 all in, I may have to move the garage so it’s one meter from boundary but then it is closer to my house..

I agree how on earth can this be justified. Now they might say well ok we are following the gas regs we have the right tun dish inside so the over pressure is discharged. Putting my SE hat on I'll say if that pipe freezes you can't have water pouring into the structure. Now the building regs support my statement. It's a disgrace. Between you and I @Nickfromwaleswe could make hay with this compliant! And to do this to a person of this age is appalling. My own view is that there needs to be a bit of punishment element to discourage others. The way you actually win this argument is to use a technique that I deploy against say the NHBC for example. You might have a valid case for saying it's a structural safety issue. Then your case will get elevated up the chain. The structural issue is that if the pipe freezes water will potentially get into the structure and cause structural damage. You might argue that it might stain your flooring..but that is subjective, but as an SE if I argue the safety case they start to maybe wake up and smell the coffee. Karen, be persistent. What is happening here is gate keeping, they deny, delay, defend.

Bit surprised with the focus on fire safety you'd get any concession on this one. Maybe they thought you'd slim down sweating while waiting to escape? 50mm is more than a fraction, I think you might struggle to get that past a BCO. There's no point being able to climb halfway out of a window but jammed on the cill. Maybe if it's picked up on (or you're on the larger side anyway) you can look at whether it's easy to make the stairs a protected corridor instead?

They couldn't give 2 (expletive deleted)s mate.

British Gas are just shite on toast, and their forte is ripping off pensioners. Be lucky if she got a Worcester, more likely they've gone bottom shelf and fitted a glow-worm. The above is exactly what I would have drawn if someone asked me to sketch a typical BG condensate arrangement. Just shocking. I went to one pensioner that had become another victim, and as they hadn’t brought a ladder, above 2m around the side of the house, the copper gas pipe just wasn’t clipped, literally flapping in the wind. They put a combi in and left the old boy with a manual mixer shower, so he was getting scalding hot water from it; you can’t leave anyone infirm with a non-thermostatic shower fed from and instantaneous hot water heater. List of this goes on and on, from what I’ve seen over the years from BG. Great adverts, even better sales-people, then the most dogshit plumbing you’ve ever seen.

Historic bricks vary a lot in size, but that is the attraction. If the brickwork is essentially non load bearing then your options expand a lot. But BC might ask about their frost resistance. If they are particularly permeable then they may ask for a bespoke DPC type detail. It's horribly frustrating at times as a designer , especially when trying to recycle materials and do the right thing environmentally.

Call your SE and they may fix your dilemma. Why do you think the steels are oversized? What you are doing is actually quite complex and fraught with difficulty in terms of the fire design. Your SE is best placed to help.

Ah, perhaps not a sensible assumption - it seems that your GPT (LLM) is not telling you about the self attention (is all you need - where all these machines spawn their approach from) 'quadratic bottle neck' it is trying to manage in helping you. If you double the context you effectively quadruple the compute needed to handle it so stuffing your context window with the problems you created with the last stuffing is effectively melting the planet and means that 5.6 won't sort a 5.5 generated mess because the whole thing is an exothermic reaction of sorts (compute runaway) . It creates problems and in trying to sort them it creates 4 times the problem unless you can tail the context back at every step - not easy because you a creating something which is growing. You will have already found that bigger contexts have interesting effects on the attention between tokens, it starts to weaken the connections between them - the LLM effectively has a weaker grip on the whole context. You can help by reiterating important stuff in the context / prompts (teachers will know all about the power or reiteration in learning situations). You can read more here.

Yeah, that's not great. It should be fully insulated and the insulation should go all the way through the wall. Just resting like that isn't good either. I would personally probably have 2 clips - one just after the bend as it exits the wall and the second before it enters the down pipe. Also, wtf were they thinking with the black? Just looks crap. Not very good standard at all and enough to question the rest of the installation, frankly. Get them back to sort it out as it doesn't comply with the regs or with the manufacturer's instructions on condensate drainage for a start. They should know better.

Here is a bit of a good news story. There are two common ways of fire protecting steels. We can box it in with steel angles and say Fire Line plaster board or we can paint with intumescent paint. But BC often ask up front for a specification on the paint system. I wrote this morning to Rawlins Paints the following: Dear technical Department. I'm seeking assistance with a paint specification for steelwork fire protection and certificate / data sheets for a building warrant submission. Attached is a drawing showing the proposed steelwork. The project is a single story domestic house extension with a pitched concrete tiled roof in Scotland. The requirements are: 1/ Level of fire protection required 30minutes ( short duration). 2/ Section sizes are 178 x 102 UB19 S275 or S355 and 152 x 89 UB16 S275. 3/ The load ratio for the 178 x 102UB 19's is 35% and the load ratio for the 152 x 89 U16 is 50% 4/ Exposure to fire: Three sides are exposed; bottom flange and sides. The top flange has a 145 x 45 timber wall plate shot fired to it to support timber rafters. 5/ The beams are orientated in the vertical plane (top flanges upper most), loaded vertically downwards about their major axis. 6/ Quantities:The steelwork lengths are shown on the drawing. 7/ Steel design code is BS5950 part 1: 2000 8/ Exposure to weather: All steelwork is within the weatherproof envelope of the building. Thus dry conditions. No chemical exposure is required. 9/ Application of paint is to be on site, ideally brush applied. This can be done before fixing of the wall plates. By the close of business today I had a paint specification and an undertaking to supply the certification certificate provided we use their product of course. That is a fantastic service! Now for folk on BH. I'm putting these steels in awkward places, thus to box them in is going to be very labour intensive and that is very costly. On a technical note in item 3. I refer to what is called the load ratio. The steel sizes on this project are sized on how much they deflect in service. That stops cracking in ceilings for example. But in a fire we just want to make sure they don't fall down. The load ratio is the load on the steels in a fire compared with the steel beam ultimate strength / buckling strength. Long steel beam design is often governed by buckling, it twists and distorts first. That is why we tie floors into the steel beams for example to prevent the twisting in normal use. But during a fire that contribution can get lost as the floor / roof can burn away to the extent that it stops restraining the beams. Thus the load ratio is based on the strength of the beam when say part of the restraining floor or roof burns away in less than the required fire protection time. But even so using a paint system can be very cost effective. If a beam is not fully loaded up to it maximum capacity during a fire then the intumescent paint system can be of real economic advantage. To explain roughly. If a steel beam is loaded up to it's maximum capacity then it will fail at a lower temperature. A beam can still carry a bit of load at a higher temperature and that is where the load ratio comes in. The paint acts like an insulating blanket that slows the rate the steel heats up.. and that gives us the fire duration requirement we see in the building regs. The above it intended to give you a bit of a template if asking about intumescent paints.

I am in the process of fabricating my portal steel frame garage, architect has mentioned that due to being more than 30 mtrs square and being about 600mm from the neighbouring boundary it needs to have minimal fire rating of half an hour, I was planing to clad with 40mm PIR insulated sheeting but this just falls under the 30 minute rating, purlins are steel and UB’s are twice as heavy as they need to be but that’s engineers for you, does anyone know of anyone that can supply insulated cladding with rockwool instead of PIR or maybe have another solution such as a cement board between cladding and purlins, any help would be greatly appreciated! TIA.

Davy McComb, McComb Steel, near Ballymoney, very helpful, lots of beams sitting in his yard already shotblasted and primed…

Hi, I am after some advice. Just been to visit my 92 year old mother. Didn't realise that British Gas were replacing her boiler. All the internal stuff looks OK but a bit concerned about the condensate drain that has just been placed in a downpipe branch. Not fixed just resting in there. Ignore blue cloth, protection from stripping paint. Thanks. Karen.

Fair comment and accepted.

This is very well stated. It's part of Scottish humour, "ma sides are bursting". That means I'm chuckling a lot having read this, enough to hurt myself. One part of the meaning is to say that profit is sanity, turnover is vanity. A corollary could be the way a Yorkshire Farmer conducts business.

I have a roof terrace at the back of my new build. Next to the terrace I have a rooflight providing light into the deep plan space below. The issue I have is that I both don't want and am now unable to put a gaurdrail up along the edge (upstand is only blockwork and is not all waterproofed). However I understand from Part K this required. I am going to enquire about making the glass 'walk-on' but have a feeling it's going to massively increase the price to the point I cannot afford. Anyone experienced similar and keen to know how you got over this?

Cheers Ragg - most useful Out of interest, does anyone have any manufacturers or models i should consider or avoid? For me, this will be invaluable when speaking to an installer - if they pick a quality firm/device then i'll know they are potentially savvy. It'll also help me decide what options/setup i can request

Ditto our builder 20 years ago.

I suspect the BCO may want a ball 450mm in diameter to fit through it. Not literally (that's not in the regs) but by measurement. We have a window a fraction too narrow but the BCO allowed it provided we fitted a thicker more fire rated door to that room.

Google says.. Minimum Dimensions: Both the clear opening width and height must be at least 450mm. Total Area: The clear openable area must be at least 0.33m^2. If you make the opening width the minimum 450mm, the height must be at least 735mm to 750mm to hit the area required. Height: The bottom of the openable area should be no more than 1,100mm (1.1m) above the internal floor level for safe access.

I've been mulling the £400-500 Makita 18V first fix one that does 90mm nails.