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Now by now you should know that there is no way any of us that can take a punt on this. Post your geotech into, a site plan etc. You know the rules, the more info you provide the better quality response you'll get.

Welcome to the forum! If the loft is the only place it will fit, then installing it within an insulated but unheated enclosure is good. Your loft access trap also needs to be big enough to get it through, and you'll need good access for filter changes & other maintenance. And, although good MVHR units don't make much noise, I'd not put it directly over a bedroom if there was an easy alternative. If it will fit within the heated envelope - utility room, kitchen or elsewhere - then that would be preferable. No need for a heating loop unless you're planning to use it to feed a duct post-heater to top-up the air supply temperature. That's not often done except when the MVHR is used as the main source of heating in Passivehaus. BTW, if you've not already picked it up, add airtightness to your to-do list. It's likely to be the most cost-effective improvement you can make & it plays a major role in protecting the fabric of the building from potential moisture damage.

Reading a lot of these posts it's pretty clear that that many on BH don't have a high opinion of folk like me who design as a day job. I can see many professionals have lost their compass and are not delivering value for money and are not that good at running a business, hence the poor service delivery. I've been in the construction industry for over 40 years, 20 spent as a contractor running my own business' , did my own self build, really pretty much all by myself on the tools ( took me three years) then off to uni to be an Engineer, now for the last ten years I wear two hats as an Engineer and Architectural designer. Thus have a fairly rounded view of the in and outs of this. I can say that in the last 20 years there has been a race to the bottom, not just from designers, but also say the timber frame suppliers, ground works designers ( UFH and rafts etc) and designers who think that if they curtail their design brief, caveat it a lot the money is going to flow. But in the long term it doesn’t, as often the key to good business is repeat business, recommendation, even in the short term cutting you brief down often leads to problems, queries, design mistakes that just eat into your profit and leads to potential claims or Clients rightfully withholding money. Ok, lets look at some financials. The bottom line for a new self builder ( not someone who works in the trade with contacts) is the tendency to split each element into work packages, say foundations, timber frame and roof ect. Each package supplier takes the cream out of the job, leaving nothing for the self builder. Then you have planning and BC regs on top not least, that all adds to the cost. I work on a lot of projects where I'm involved holistically. I work very closely with the Client, not just as a designer but also do hand holding and participate in all of the design. Now to be blunt. Say for a self build the design fee is £10k. An experienced chippy ( joiner may cost you £250 a day, a labourer £150 as day, total 2.0k per week. All I have to do to wash my face is to save you a few weeks, just on the labour alone and I have well and truly washed my face! The pendulum is swinging back where folk are clocking that we need to "go back to the old days", but now you need someone like me who can cope with the modern code requirements for example, and the modern way of doing business., much less trust and more hard arse stuff. I get this kind of business where folk are happy to pay me a bit more as I can guide them, hold their hand and most importantly we all have fun, we do whacky designs that you only get to do on self builds! We also tend to avoid " work packages where we can, say from MBC et al and keep the cream to ourselves. This also often helps cash flow and gives the Client more control on day to day site activity. Now in the round if you want to make some money then try and find a designer like me that is local to you, with good contacts.

The easy option would be stick on plastic like this

Do you have access to the borehole logs? Just a statement that piling is required is of little use. Is there hard ground at 5m depth or 50m? How soft is the clay? Does only the structure require support but not intermediate floor areas?. That said, a starting point of "about 30 or 40k" lets you start on feasibility. But there are lots of piling techniques too. By considering that and the method of construction you could be saying "allow 20k to 80k". I've probably done about 20 piled buildings and often used a different method to that suggested in initial reports. But never for clay... yours must be very soft indeed. Any chance of seeing a borehole record? And what about the house? Big/small/ conventional or huge rooms, 1 or 2 storey?

Hi all, We've had our old white soffits and fascias replaced this week with UPVC Oak. Our old white soffits were 550mm and were vented (25mm continuous cut outs toward the outer edge). The roofer doing the work has told me they just don't make them that deep in UPVC Oak, so has told me we'll go with a Hollow board soffit instead. Visually I think it looks fine, but obviously not vented. I enquired with the roofer about sufficient ventilation, they said they'd add fascia vent strips as an equivalent ventilation method. However now installed I can see the membrane droops quite low and could be blocking those strips.... again i've enquired, roofer said not a problem. But figured better to get a second opinion on here before the scaffolding all comes down. what do you think? Cheers Ged

In my day job I sometimes ask AI for it's calculations for a bit of fun! A lot of the time I find it's completely wrong! I checked a beam design against AI and found it to be a factor of ten out, on the unsafe side. One of the bits it missed was the destabilising loads ( an unrestrained load applied to the top flange) loads, the lack of adequate lateral restraint and the support conditions, all that lead to is being miles unsafe. Now AI aggregates information, you could have ten undergraduates all uploading their student projects and AI thinks.. this is right, but it's dangerous bollocks! There is good reason for BC to reject you! If you want to use AI to generate calcs then you have to be competent enough to make sure it's not rubbish. By all means use AI to do the donkey work for you, but unless you know what you are doing, have the knowledge to understand what the calculations mean then you are an idiot!

Hi everyone. So, here we go, we are in the midst of renovating a 1890s bungalow and are wanting to fit an mvhr system pretty soon. At the moment we've put in underfloor heating. Heatpump. Insulation etc etc. My question is about the mvhr unit itself... Would it be a good to sit it on its own heated concrete plinth/slab in the roof? Or should I forget that idea and just install a loop directly in to the unit? Or both? Or neither? Would it be a good idea to 'build' an insulated room around the mvhr unit itself? Because of where we are at with the renovation then I can pretty add what is needed as I go along. It wouldn't take too long to add strength to the joists, add an extra heating loop to our underfloor heating manifold specifically for the mvhr unit. Good idea? Terrible idea? Any insight, or other ideas are most welcome. Cheers.

You can ask for this to be more 'in depth', so they charge more for the investigations and remove as much ambiguity as is practicable.

+1 !

All looking very neat and tidy, and a great gang of spreads there by the look of the finish "I am a little behind updating the blog" Chop chop, lol

I'd use some uPVC D section, say 50mm wide (tall) as a maintenance-free skirting board, to regularise these offending areas, and bond them on with CT1, plus then seal the LVT to the uPVC with the same. That'll be A1 squire

We say "Marmox", but we really mean insulation tile backer boards, but we've gotten lazy lol. I only say to wipe them down with a lint-free wet cloth to 'decontaminate' them; removing surface dust etc. If you'd like to sleep better you can apply a 50/50 mix of SBR/water and the skim will stick like shit to a blanket. My advice would be to install a stop bead against the window / door frame to prevent that edge fraying, plus it makes for such a far better finish (line) for the plasterer to 'go to'. @BadgerBodger take note of this for yours

Some of it is just me opening my mouth to change feet lol, but if you take a horse to water and the bastard thing won't drink, you sometimes need to 'massage' its scrotum with a cricket bat for the drinking to commence

Thanks for sharing your experience @Spinny. It’s not just you & @saveasteading – this would drive me mad too. I had a similar (or you might say opposite) concern when I was doing a single wall, in Carrara tiles, in a bathroom at a previous house. These are natural, so every tile is different, of course, but Iooking at some installations of Carrara tiles that have their flows of grey veins butting up against adjacent tiles with the flow going off at 90 degrees or so looks really unpleasant to me. It’s too random. For my installation, I unpacked all my boxes of 300x300 tiles & fiddled around for a good amount of time, setting them out on the living room floor, to get all the flows going in one direction, with all the whitest tiles on the right top corner of the wall & the tiles with the most grey in the opposite corner at the bottom. The tiler followed my instructions perfectly. The results were well worth the additional effort. I too think the tone of @Nickfromwales' comment was absolutely fine – NFW devotes so much of his free time to posting very useful advice, we really ought not oblige him to spend even more time devising a warm & fluffy translation of whatever he wants to say, before every opinion or piece of advice is posted.

Yep. AFAIK the way you decide a tax is progressive/regressive is to see what overall percentage of income the tax takes, not the headline rate. If the tax takes a greater percentage of income from poorer people then the tax is regressive and there are likely better ways to extract the same amount of money. (assuming you want either a income neutral tax or a progressive tax). I like the nordic idea of fines being a proportion of income vs our system of fixed penalty. Seems much fairer. A speeding/parking ticket for a minimum wage person is much more impactful than for a millionaire. In my system none of this gets taxed. Income taxes are higher to compensate. Capital gains is significantly different (if it exists at all). The richest people in this country often pay the lowest tax rate (not raw £) of everyone because a lot of their income is from capital not work. Remove that difference (in the main) and you get some very interesting results. (I'm not saying my proposal is an easy sell -- I believe it would seriously reduce bureaucracy but would also disadvantage a lot of the richest and the white van man tax avoiders who tend to have a significant political influence). Almost all taxable. As it is today (or rather as it was when I last looked a decade or so ago, rules may have changed). My last company gave me all sorts of benefits but also paid benefit in kind tax on those benefits as if I'd earned the money directly. Leather? Alloy? For a work van? No. More seats can be justified. If providing a service and the luxuries are for the use by clients then that's potentially different. I'm not sure of the existing rules here but setting rules in this area is not different from what we do now. Businesses have to deal with this already, my proposal doesn't change that. Sure. But council tax is worse. And maybe I should have said 'property tax' rather than land tax. (I'm very much not a fan of a land tax in our current system and it has issues in general, however, I gave it as an example of something that might be needed in this new theoretical system for it to be cohesive, there are likely other options too). It doesn't but it's not meant to. She has an income (likely mostly structured as capital gains rather than income tax). Tax her at the income tax rate. To me this is much more of a hidden tax. I'm generally against frictional taxes. Far prefer to have simpler, easy to understand, in your face taxes. If everyone (even idiots) can understand the taxes and understand that everyone pays them then social cohesion will be higher. Not done the maths, but if you remove the ability for rich people to pay less taxes by structuring their finances differently then I expect the headline tax rates go down. In summary, what I proposed, is not a summary of all taxes, but a reform of a subset. In my thinking it eliminates a lot of paperwork for the less weathy (<£1million) and smaller companies while preserving flexibility for incentives where needed (though the overall system is thought of as a way of reducing overall costs and therefore the need for incentives). One thing I didn't mention before is that there would have to be a limit of transfers between personal accounts (normally tax free) and transfers to cash (if it still exists in this system).

I think that has been tried out. You get issued with a monthly currency that becomes worthless at the end of the month. (expletive deleted)ing stupid idea. Bitcoin is limited to 21 million coins (until it isn't) and a new coin is issued about every ten minutes (I think). What would happen if a digital currency was fixed volume from the start i.e. a crypto£ had 4 trillion issued tomorrow (so close to the value of a £ that is currently in circulation at the moment). There is an economic theory that money has to keep moving (what the 2008 banking crisis was about, in part). Money in Circulation, or Money Supply, if fixed may have some strange side effects, but not really sure what they would be (maybe Monopoly is a good example).

🤣 Isn't that analysis based just a testament that poor people don't have much spare money? (I'll ignore zero rated vat for now) Poor person earns 1k a month and spends all of that on stuff that is 20% vat - has paid £200 in vat ie 20% of income Rich person earns 100k a month and spends half of that on stuff at 20%vat - has paid £10,000 in vat ie 10% of their income This forms a core part of the argument for lower vat rates (or even zero) on certain products Poor people spend a lot more of their income on food, energy etc than rich people so the argument goes well should lower rate it. Likewise kids clothes and other things Nobody would claim vat on mink coats, gold watches and diamond tipped canes is a regressive tax on the poor. But if we lower vat on food, that means we lower the tax on fillet steaks, caviar and fois gras. Then we have the difficulty of restaurants. Charging vat on restaurants but not food, but where is the line between a restaurant serving meals and a shop selling food? If a pizza in a restaurant is Vat is a frozen pizza you cook at home vat free? What about a pizza base, block of cheese and a jar of topping? Take away? It all gets complex fast Your simplification already has multiple get outs and exemptions .... What is a personal benefit? Is having physio a personal benefit or good employee care? Is providing tea and coffee in the break room a benefit or good practice? Does your work van need leather upholstery, a second row of seats and alloy wheels? If you are a plumber probably not, a taxi driver then definitely but what if you are a builder who has 3 labourers? I am skeptical of land taxes because when it was conceived in the 1800's USA land was through basis of all wealth. You farmed it or mined it or did some thing that needed space or it's proximity. But now alot of our economy is unteathered from land. Google probably owns less UK land than lidl yet has orders of magnitude more revenue and profit. How does a land tax capture JK Rowlings value and income? I have wondered about inflation as a tax. Government issues currency and the purpose of tax is to drain off that currency so we don't have hyper inflation If the government didn't tax anything and the money entering the economy was larger than the goods and services in that economy we get inflation. So taxes draw off that extra money. Inflation is basically the thing that adjusts the fiat money to the real economy. And it's bad because it destroys savings and makes you stealth poorer. But what if you drew the extra money away as a very small % of transactions- basically a card fee. As there is a link between volume of transactions and GDP the two would scale together. It would be like every £ issued is slowly wearing away with each "use" (transaction). Ironically not a million miles from steamy teas suggestion 🤣.... Though the (I think) critical difference would be the "tax" would be on every single transaction and being very small (I don't (now what level it would need to be to work and if that level would{d be so high as to stop it working). This would make cash (which doesn't "wear out") very attractive. But maybe it could work as a digital only currency. People are very comfortable now with bit coin and the like that has never had a physical existence.

Used 25% of it only started 10 minutes ago!.....

Oooo Fable 5.1 - now I can burn tokens even faster for sure!

It probably depends on the business type :) Micro-Entreprise, Entreprise Individuelle, SARL (Société à Responsabilité Limitée), EURL (Entreprise Unipersonnelle à Responsabilité Limitée), SAS (Société par Actions Simplifiée), SASU (Société par Actions Simplifiée Unipersonnelle), SA (Société Anonyme), SNC (Société en Nom Collectif), SCS (Société en Commandite simple), SCI (Société Civile Immobilière), SCP (Société Civile Professionnelle), SCM (Société Civile de Moyen).

For a Passivhaus you are make stuff complex. Just do the towel rads with electric heating elements, then you can use them for the 70% of the year you won't want the heating on. You can then run the heat pump at 26-28 degs.

Well this got super off topic. But as a master of asides I will join in! *ducks* Sales tax/VAT is quite a regressive tax so I'm not hugely in favour. I tend to think that in a digital age (where most transactions are done electronically) we could radically reshape our system. Make bank accounts be marked with a flag that denotes the type of account (I'm sure this already exists but I mean a UK wide standardisation and make this flag part of the transaction). Hugely simplifying, an account can be owned by a person or a company(*). Payments from a company account to a personal account have tax deducted at the time of transaction at the rate of that taxpayer (based on annual income). Other transactions are tax free. It is illegal to derive personal benefit from a non personal account (similar to existing benefit in kind rules). Payments to/from foreign (unmarked) accounts treated as payments to personal account and taxed (allowance for international agreements for tax free transactions to jurisdictions with compatible laws though clearly starting with zero). Possibility of claiming tax back in exceptional(*2) cases. Mechanism for refunds automatically refunding the deducted tax (basically need to enter original transaction ID at time of refund, or request refund using online banking that is then confirmed by company). Likely need an annual land tax also, but these two taxes can cover a wide range of existing taxes. Exceptions and incentives can be created but they are created on the basis of having to claim the tax refund, rather than having a lower tax bill. Claims should be digital and easy to claim (possibly directly through the online banking transaction record). (*) there may be more categories with special rules but they should be limited (*2) exceptional sounds wrong here, there are going to be many cases where you want to claim a refund, but the key is that these are rare overall given the total number of transactions Edit: companies would still have some additional taxes in some industries (carbon tax?) and need to file tax returns in many cases. But amount of work involved significantly reduced. Individuals much less likely to need a tax return. Individual (automated) tax refunds possible on specific transactions avoiding need for end of year return.

Are you proposing *only* to tax wage payments to individuals? Ok if I work for a shop and they pay me £1,000 a month I pay £400 of that to HMRC What if I form a company that provides my labour to another company? Is that taxed? That company pays me a wage of £1 a month and I pay 40p to HMRC. The company provides a house, car, clothes and food for me for free.

Yes. Why would that be a problem? Yes, but the prices of goods and running a factory would be reduced. Also, the taxes would only be claimed on the workers wages i.e. like income tax is now.