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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.

Does anyone know where to measure a window opening from when calculating what's a viable escape route from the first floor? We have 500cm from front window edge to open window (top hung) but only 400cm from edge of external cil. I can't find any concrete language as to where the opening should be measured from to pass building regs. Many thanks,

UPDATE: ITS ALIVE😅😁 I purchased a different USB drive, because when I read some of the reviews on the first one they made me think it was possibly the USB drive, as I looked under a microscope at all the capacitors etc. and tested them and none looked blown etc. anyway. Great result - the newer USB drive works like a dream, all files are there, I have a replacement motherboard coming so hoping that I can just plug in the SSD and it will boots as a PC.🤞 but for now the files are safe, and I have ensured that Google Drive is backing them up....

I used 16g SS pins through a Hikoki. Initially to pin the cladding as a temp measure before final fixing with visible SS nails. Cladding company spec'd the nails. There's a section of gable that's been left for over 12mths now, waiting for me to get around to it, and the pins are still holding fine. Not sure I'd trust them long term though. Timber can move around a lot.

Some good suggestions here. Hadn’t really thought about solar panels but well worth an extra couple stored in the garage when buying 36 anyway. Naturally there will be some spares left over from slates, bathroom tiles, flooring etc. I think the stuff that would have a bigger visual impact if had to change them. If fitting MVHR I suppose it’s worth buying extra filters at time of purchase rather than 5 years down the line. Obviously the list could be large but dedicating a space in the house that you just built way bigger than you needed (nearly always) shouldn’t be a problem and extra spend would be tiny in relation to overall budget. Its all another reason for me not to go fancy on smart switches, wireless stuff etc, great while it works but when it doesn’t and needs replacing, nightmare. A light switch should be just that. The only thing that should be remote is your TV 😂

Usually do it for a tenner

Thanks for that @Nickfromwales they look really interesting.

You’d do 1 and 4. £20 on it.

Just observe a reasonable bending radius and it’ll be fine. Stopping and starting with fittings causes a snag, so one continuous piece, joints in a perfectly straight section only, if needed, and get a 6mm nylon draw rope in it when you lay it.