All Activity

Hear,hear! It just makes houses even less affordable to buy and encourages vehicle ownership and thus further damage to society and the planet.

He's underneath looking up! 😉

We now know where @Pocster's walk on glazing went

For paint stripping old shutters and mouldings in my recent house build I found a two handed Bahco scraper was by far the best method. One hand applies weight to the blade while the other hand just pulls. The blades are tungsten carbide and changeable. It's amazingly effective. Much quicker far less unpleasant work than sanding or chemical stripping too. Don't know what it would be like working the tool at head height on beams as it'll be hard to get as much weight onto it but it would be worth a try.

Just had an excellent roofer do our slates and lead. Its all in the "code". Flashing is typically thin stuff code3(?) and ours was done with multi overlapping very short sections <400mm. The valley is much larger and required code 7 to do it in 4 steps of circa 2m each - code 6 or 5 would have required more steps with the inevitable consequence of getting very wide at the high point.

Don't forget over the next 2 - 3 years prices will increase dramatically due to the Trump factor and oil. So, easy if these values work now then they won't be the future. Also, don't underestimate how hard it's going to be doing work evenings, holiday and weekends, what about your family. So, double that time.

Axle bids in numerous energy supply / demand control markets. They'll only pay out for grid events in the time windows they "won" the bid to supply energy into. Which may not be the window of peak demand on a given day, if someone else (e.g. a good old gas peaker) won that time slot. Similar for octopus, except octopus also have their own internal market balancing supply and demand for their own customers. From Gemini: Key Markets Where Axle Energy Bids Wholesale Markets: Bids aggregated battery and device flexibility into the day-ahead and intraday wholesale power markets (utilizing frameworks like CoP11 asset metering). Balancing Mechanism & Reserves: Manages real-time and near-real-time supply and demand balancing for the national grid operator. Capacity Market (CM): Contracts assets for availability to discharge or turn down during periods of severe system stress. Local Network (DNO) Flexibility: Bids into regional distribution network operator flex auctions to manage local grid congestion. Demand Flexibility Service (DFS): Coordinates short-term peak demand and export response events for households. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

I think the tray is a good idea i have some leftover air tight membrane so will be trying it. I'd be wary or using dpc its not very flexible I don't think you'd get a great seal around it.

After further research, that is what I have also concluded. Given the likely shrinkage, it makes sense to do the final sealing one it's water tight and nicely dried out inside.

With the amount of good flexible liquid coatings available I think I would forget the pain of the Tony tray and just paint around the joists when it is all up and the roof is on. you could spray airtight paint around them and that would get every nook and cranny.

Electrician planned it all really all cable runs to led strip is flex as a bit of it is 5 core for colour change strip, I think white only requires 2-3 cores cable is relatively cheap take everything back to a central location, no need to hide drivers in cupboards or under kick boards. Robus is the make of the controler units. if I was to build this again I would not bother with 75% of what we installed, never use them, spend most night with a couple of table lamps on. do you actually need lights in cupboards lighting up some old shite tea set the wife was given. and for the life of me I don’t know why anybody thinks lights under the plinth in the kitchen is a good idea. I think I could have scrapped about £2000 worth of pointless lights we installed.

I can't find any record of what I used in my bathroom 13 years ago, but it lasted about 11 without any need for maintenance and was getting splashed daily. I had it on the, ceiling, walls, plywood shelves. I suspect if you avoid the cheapest noname ones you'll be fine as I doubt that there's a lot of variance in what's being offered. The reason I'd put at least 1 coat everywhere on the inside of the unit too is because otherwise you end up with a sealed outside and breathing, highly absorbent inside of the cupboard. This is a recipe for wood warping. Having the wood fully sealed might not be ideal, but it's a lot better than having half of it sealed and half open to moist air (even with a fan you'll likely get high RH shocks. The only problem I see with sealing the whole thing is if you get a major leak that finds its way into the wood and the wood then can't really dry out because the surfaces are no longer breathable. FWIW, my parents went for an IKEA-style unit with a glass top under the sink in their bathroom years ago (against my advice) and it only lasted about 4yrs before the moisture and splashing had it delaminating and rotting. I've used yacht varnish (Le Tonkinois) on sapele sills in the past and while it does a stunning job highlighting the wood grain, it did not last half the life of the bathroom paint.

Ok, not in that one, but it is here http://www.tonyshouse.readinguk.org/tonytray.pdf

@Russell griffiths - I’m planning a similar set-up. Any other tips / detail / gotchas you can tell us? What app & dimmers did you use? Any pics? Also, what physical controls? And, if you don’t mind, what cable? Strikes me that’s a lot of cable to run, but so be it.

Where? Not in this dwg, unless I am missing it.

@Roger440 That’s interesting. This was old oak beams? Any photos?

Thanks, can you suggest some and I'll take a look. I don't mind paying quite a lot for good quality paint as I know you often get what you pay for It is for a bathroom with bath and shower, but hopefully humidity will be under control due to extractor fan

Get a copy of the Calder lead guide, very useful booklet. probably available online.

Doubt that very much, never seems to occur at exactly the same time as Octopus, maybe there is enough infill during Octopus peak, then all the smaller batteries have run out of energy. I do know that grid voltage is always pretty low during Axle events by us, so electric is in short supply. Don't really think about it much, Predbat generally exports for most of the 2 hours anyway. But today we have loads of solar, and 2 hours free energy from Octopus from 1 to 3, and export rates care generally good all day, what's not to like.

I am going to be fitting the floor joists later this week and was always conscious that it's one area prone to significant issue when it comes to the air tightness test. I have read about the 'Tony Tray' method and that certainly seems like a more reliable option than the joist end caps which still require a diligent brick layer and given we have different width joists, will probably be a faff to source. It's a brick/block/full fill build up and was thinking that using DPC will suffice? Is there any reason why you need to lap the DPC down the face of the internal blockwork. So long as you have a full mortar course here, then air leakage will be negligible and you could trim flush with the wall? I also see the term 'breathable' mentioned, does that mean that I should not use DPC and should use another product?

I checked with a local mate who's on Agile outgoing and in the area covered by Axles map and his rate peaks an hour earlier than Axles event. Seems odd to me. I guess it could be a test to see the export response they get with lesser influence from those exporting in time with export TOU peak prices?

Does it depend on Code? I did my code 4 lead step flashing in 1m lengths with 150mm overlap. There is a diagram in building regs if I recall showing minimum waterline (min 65mm) etc. Chased into bed but still needs pointing. One of those jobs I’ll get round to one day… Patination oil to both sides before fitting (seemed easier). Don’t recall seeing anything in regs for horizontal but doesn’t mean there won’t be one. Also not sure I’d expect it being any different for horizontal lengths (only 100mm permitted for pitched roof would probably revert to 150?)

To be completely honest, with hindsight I wish I'd done something like that for my kids in the garden and sod the pp. I got as far as this. They had loads of fun in it. TBF there was a dead tree there originally with a wooden platform. Things just...mushroomed.

She don't look 12 in the photos, more like 15 ? I imagine it took some time to build. Perhaps she is an Architect by now.