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Ummm, the title confused me. At first I thought you were talking about insulation outboard of the frame/OSB. But I think you are looking at insulation between the studs of the frame and inboard of that. I think the 120mm PIR in a 140mm stud is about an air gap next to a reflective coating. So better insulation overall than full fill PIR. I am biased. I hate PIR with a passion. Used it under our floor a bit and regretted it. Should’ve made sure I had enough space for polystyrene only. We used mineral wool in our frame and another layer inside. I may be kidding myself but I now believe it’s a nicer job to do and nicer to live in. The only place PIR looks good is on a spreadsheet.

I don’t hold with the ‘do everything yourself or it’s not a self build’ concept. That house wouldn’t be there without you and yours. You’ve shaped it and made it happen. Feel good inside and try and remember not to bore your friends and family too much lol (I, G, fail royally on the last part!)

Is that a normal request?

Typically I think 140mm studs are filled with 120mm PIR due manufacturing tolerances, then we lined with another 40mm. I'm sure there are other rockwool/cellulose options you could look at with 300mm to play with. A 50mm cavity between frame and outer skin is required if you have masonry I believe. Mixing insulation will probably need some sort of condensation risk doing to avoid a dew-point in the wrong place.

building walls, but at least I can't see over them now. I would love to meet up. I nearly came to yours Geoff last week when I was in Woody, but ran out of time. I had a lovely visit to Alans, very envious of everyones progress

22mm. Impact is DeWalt and just one speed, it often gets a bit speedy. Wonder if I can use one of those drywall type depth restrictor bits. Probably being overly cautious but the thought of all the work required to sort out a hit pipe under this lot, doesn't bear thinking about quite frankly.

Finally got an update to say they will only look at my claim after I send them a copy of the house insurance...

Hi we are currently at foundation stage and having to rework our drainage design, mainly as we demolished an existing bungalow and wanted to use the same connection. In hindsight we should have Doug a trial hole to existing connection and worker falls backwards however we relied on some old drainage plans which turned out to be a few 100 mill out leaving us with a very tight fall or having to raise the finished floor level by 300mm to gain the fall. we had a review with our building inspector who decided shorter runs under the building to get the fall to work. i have attached the image and the blue lines are our new proposed routes. ideally I wanted as much of the drainage outside of the building as possible but looks like this isn’t possible. Any thoughts or advice positive or negative would be welcome

To break his arguments down by section 1. He makes the mistake that declining N.Sea production is a choice - it isn't the rate of decline is slightly modifiable but not to any significant degree. We are arguing over the green line or the red line. He also makes the mistake that our high gas and electricity prices are due to us deliberately running down our production. Aside from my point above, they are high due to the high price of gas and the international price of gas is not changed by the UK output. The price is set by the international markets and those are (nominally)supply and demand. Even at best, our output is too small to change the international price. It should be noted that the rise in electricity prices and gas prices was very closely correlated in 2022 because a much larger proportion of our electricity came from gas. In 2026 the rise was much less direct because less of our electricity comes from gas. He talks about the supply chains for renewables being dirty and having emissions. This is a variation of the landman rant (and the "EV's will never pay back the carbon used in making the battery" argument before that). Study after study shows wind turbines, solar panels and EVs are all net negative for carbon well within their lifetime. It also ignores the carbon and pollution from fossil fuel extraction as a comparison. 2. He talks about "what happens is the gas prices fall?" Well, they will eventually for a while,until the next crisis. Then they will fall again until the next crisis and so on. So far we have had 2 massive "once in a lifetime" shocks in the current decade -that we are only half way through... Does anyone want to bet Trump doesn't do something stupid I'm the next 2 and a bit years. What would happen to oil prices if the world's largest oil producer suffered massive political instability? Say a the kind caused when a leader who loses an election tries to cling to power using a paramilitary police force or even elements of the armed forces.... Who wants to say that is fantasy land? 3. He seems to get mixed up on the cost of capacity. With renewables capacity is a more statistical figure than gas plants etc. With ccgt plant the peak cavity is easy. Just an engineering question -"that plant, at full chat, will produce 2GW of electricity." With renewables there is a theoretical capacity - what if everything was perfect, but that's only a few % of the time. A better question would be "what is the 95% available capacity" ie the level it can produce 95% (or whatever arbitrary figure you want) of the time. So my 11kwp solar array has a 95% figure closer to 1kw (during daylight obviously). Essentially we will have to dump a load of capital into building these assets. Once e have built them they will provide cheap energy for decades. Or we could kee the capital and dole it out to buy oil and gas as we need it. That's our choice. Right enough for now....

I must say that if it means application details are easier to complete to LA satisfaction then the AI approach sounds like a win all round.

To drag back to the original topic. The article about the solar farm was emotive (as all anti ones are) invoking the loss of "prime" land that was actually not particularly prime. The second article made the "gotcha" observation that renewables do it always produce at their peak output.... Not news and built into the calculations. This is why we need considerably more peak capacity than our nominal maximum. This is the calculation every one with solar panels makes. I have 11kwp of panels on an 9kwh inverter feeding a house that runs about 500w continuous and peaks at maybe 7kw if we really try. Why have I got so many panels? Because it means they produce enough to power the house even in sub optimal conditions (most of the time) It's the same with our national capacity -we will prob need something like 2 or 3x our nominal peak demand, so north of 120gw peak. Will we ever see that demand? Hopefully not! But it means that the system will still be able to provide a significant amount of our national demand even when operating at 20, 25% of maximum

I think progress is progress by whatever means. @JohnnyB ?

You could fully fill with 140mm pir between studs and line internally with 50mm pir, held on with 38 x 50 battens to create a service cavity. You could put the 50mm on the outside but you will need different wall ties and another layer of breather membrane etc. You will need about 30mm cavity to the brickwork. If the timber frame co quote for the insulation it saves a lot off faff and mess on site.

The author ignores the enormous hump in the blue and orange line that occured during the COVID epidemic but absolutely didn't show excess deaths from COVID.....😁 But @Spinny to address the graph fully you need to understand what was done They took all the previous years (usually omitting COVID)and effectively produce a smoothed average. If you visualise a smooth line running through *the middle* of the bundle of lines that's the baseline. You then look at the number of deaths in the target period Vs that theoretical baseline -as you can see the 2026 line is towards the upper end of the "bundle" hence there are "excess deaths". The difficult but is to differentiate between excess deaths that are abnormal and excess deaths that a normal (ie natural variation). Clearly the COVID lumps were abnormal (🤫) but the heatwave deaths, much harder to call. It is highly likely there were excess deaths, there always are when it is hot or cold. It's likely that there were more excess deaths as the temperature for hotter. But the exact number, to a corpse, will never be known.

And now I've written that I fell I've fallen (again) into the trap of talking in detail about something that doesn't warrant the time. The article is written from such a biased perspective in obvious bad faith that engaging with it is just falling into the trap of giving it more credit than it deserves. This line is implying climate change is false, the heatwaves didn't happen and people didn't die from those non-existent heatwaves. It's a case of 'believe what I'm saying not what you are seeing/experiencing'

@Spinny I'm really not sure there is any point in engaging further. You claim the article is exposing lies, when all the Met Office are claiming is that they have made estimates. If the article was focused more on something like 'Met Office estimates of heatwave death toll use deceptive methods' and actually showed the methods were bad then that may be different. But that's not what the article does and to be clear I don't think there is any evidence presented that the estimate is significantly wrong (I'm not saying it's right either - it's too soon to tell). The graph showing the ONS death toll is a lagging indicator, it takes time for reported deaths to make their way through the system so a graph that shows less deaths last week than same time last year doesn't prove anything. You have to wait for the data to come through. I've seen plenty of criticism of 'excess deaths' over time (same thing came up during covid). It's a difficult measure and the way it's used in the scientific community doesn't exactly match the way the lay-man understands it but again the article doesn't engage with that. I can't provide links or anything to backup the following but I have read various long and detailed explanations and critiques of this in the past and my conclusion from this reading is that excess death estimates we see are generally in line with reality.

It is even worse when you lie to yourself, and then believe it.

Beelbeebub - have you even read the Daily Sceptic counter article I provided a link to above ? Do you know what the point is ?

@JohnMo and @Beelbeebub, all fair points but I recommend you read the piece by Dieter Helm I linked to and I'll be interested in your thoughts about his arguments.

I mean I read through it and there wasn't much wrong. Personally I would have used less precise % given the inherent uncertainty in these methods. I wouldn't say "39%" i'd say "around 1/3" I wouldn't say "59%" Icd say "over half" But apart from that there want anything controversial - I mean we broke multiple records are saw exceedingly high temperatures even for August and Europe saw even worse. We would be daft to ignore this event even if we escaped it.

@IanR My criteria are cost, speed of installation and simplicity. Energy efficiency performance is interesting but won't be a deal breaker. I was speaking to AFT recently, before their decision to cease trading, and they were not interested in installing, a change from the past. They did however provide some very useful information about expected installation costs, and the name of a local ground works company they had had good experience with. I was definitely interested in going further with them, but sadly that won't now be possible. That's a useful list in the post you linked to, thanks.

Sorry what do you base "it's a lie" on? Obviously it's impossible to compare the counter factual of no heatwave, but the practice of looking at what the expected death rate in June would have been in most summers and then looking at the actual death rate to compute a difference is fairly well established. It's some for every major public health intervention. For example the recent news about the drop in cervical cancer deaths amongst girls due to HPV vaccinations was done by a version of this method. We do the same when a report comes out about how many extra deaths are caused by a cold winter. Your entire rant rests on the notion that the met office statement about extra deaths is a deliberate untruth on their part. If the number is calculated using mundane regular methods we use for every other similar situation then your entire point collapses. Extra deaths caused by an unusually long hot spell is exactly the sort of information the met office should be providing.

Rain screen would be brick (ground floor) and render (above)

What you are doing there is criticising the language, but you seem to have nothing much to say about the numbers discussed. The author is angry because there has been a very clear effort made to mislead the public. To claim thousands of deaths from the heat based on an estimating approach which is clearly wrong is misleading. One might ask why the people claiming and getting press coverage of their 'estimate' are doing so ? Might it possibly be that they are themselves motivated to create public fear because they want the public to clamour for net zero. ? Here is the Met Office statement... https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us/news-and-media/media-centre/weather-and-climate-news/2026/more-than-2700-excess-deaths-estimated-in-england-and-wales-during-may-and-june-heatwaves It is a lie. Truly the Met Office is lying to the public, publishing false statements, writing news stories which are propaganda lies. These then get picked up and circulated. What is the end result - that many people glancing at the news get told once again to be very afraid because surely soon by implication their own loved ones will be fried to death. Why is the Met Office which is a government agency with funding from our taxes putting out lies and propaganda aimed at influencing us ? They should be confining themselves to making well evidenced scientific statements of fact. Not issuing false political propaganda. It is precisely these behaviours that cause more and more people to doubt and turn away from the narrative that there is an anthropogenic climate emergency. As someone once said... If you have to be persuaded, reminded, pressured, lied to, incentivised, coerced, bullied, socially shamed, guit-tripped, threatened, punished and criminalised. If all of this is considered necessary to gain your compliance - you can be absolutely certain that what is being promoted is not in your best interest. If those organisations were interested in publishing information in a balanced way, they would of course put any numbers they give in context. Joe public hasn't got a clue how many people die each day. Is 2700 (itself a lie) a lot or a few ? But it is propaganda and giving context would reduce its impact by being honest - so that is omitted. The exact same tricks were used during covid when the BBC started publishing daily covid death figures with no context - '40 people died with covid today'. Sounds bad doesn't it - don't tell the public that 1800 people die every day. Sorry but we cannot have these organisations lying to us. I don't want my kids living in 1984 - and right now that's a bigger risk than climate variation. Can I look forward to your critique of the Met Office statement ?

For my project (blocks/cavity/blocks), I do wonder whether it might be worth building in little "windows", using concrete lintels, for the the MVHR input & exhaust ducts. This strategy deals with the problem of a load of core drilling dust & debris sitting on the tray at the bottom of the cavity, as well as one less specialist to organise & pay for.