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Depends where you are our current mix from National Grid in NE Scotland is 80% wind and 20% solar at 2pm

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jul/09/great-britain-grid-operator-issues-another-warning-over-power-supplies-in-heatwave Interesting bit is how the French are having to curb the output of their nuclear stations due to the high temps. The same issue can also affect gas stations. And as the anti-renewable brigade never tire of mentioning, low wind conditions can coincide with heatwaves and drastically reduce the output of wind farms. Right now (1.30pm 9th July) wind is only producing 2.5Gw, about 10% of it's maximum and 1/3 the current gas plant output. Of course, there is one tech that correlates extremely well with heatwaves.... Solar, and that is currently pumping out 14Gw. My own array is powering my portable air con unit and the battery will continue to do that well into the night. Zero impact on the grid. In contrast to the challanges facing renewables in our winter peaks, solving for the likely summer peaks is much easier. Lots of PV, local and grid scale, lots of batteries, local and grid scale.

This is funny! I screen grabbed a shot for Claude to look at. Unbeknown too me my buildhub page was showing so it got to see my 'signature'. Here's what it said "The note "hoping some hair will grow around it" — if you mean you want vegetation/scatter around the feet to hide the leg-terrain junction, that's a separate feature (prop-adjacent vegetation scatter) I can look at. Want me to?"

like the Gateshead flyover in Newcastle, they are demolishing the entire thing. And closer to home, the National Glass Centre in Sunderland is about to get demolished, 25 years after it was built, pretty pathetic.

I think it said that the City was doing emergency work, because bits are falling off it into the road, and the whole thing could collapse. Imagine the desperate shenanigans taking place to divest the company responsible from wherever the money is. Meanwhile in Exeter we have a £31M school that's going to be demolished, having never been occupied because of the threat of collapse. The companies have gone bust, so the state pays more than twice. subsidence, missing bolts..... so who knows what else. Does nobody supervise these days? 3 years since built, so I'm surprised to have only just heard of /noticed the story.

Long lengths of solid metal duct around 125mm dia maybe some of it bigger. Noise attenuation between every room. Great if you don't want to hide it away such as an industrial look. Pretty pants otherwise without loads of pre-build planning to accommodate.

No doubt you're Welsh and the jury's out on the good looks 😉.... but I imagine you need to be an olympic wrestler to manipulate all that ducting into place. I recall your preference for radial systems but don't recall the reason. Might a branched system have been easier to accommodate in the building structure and to install? Or is it down to performance? Grateful for a reminder why you prefer radial systems. Thanks

Its all still a con tbh. You dont know what anything costs tokenwise even when you've done the task. They change the backend ( certainly in chat they do! ). 5 hr window can be quite 'loose'. Still! As AI compute gets cheaper we ultimately will pay less for better models. Perhaps they'll drop subscription and go fully paid API?. Imagine what fable 3 in 2 yrs time will be like!!!!. Mental now!

Interesting, I was looking at my usage stats and despite doing some fairly heavy work - I've only used about 25% of my weekly limit. What I did notice though is that I was using Sonnet 5 for the thinking and generating promps but in VSCode I was still on Opus, so I wonder whether that has got anything to do with it? What's interesting is that on Claude website about choosing model it says that Opus uses more of your rate limit but in VSCode Claude Code model selection, it says that Opus gets 2 x Sonnet usage. A bit confusing really. I'm going to give all of the models a little try but I don't think I've got anything complex enough to really test Fable right now. But maybe I'll think of something for my free Fable trial expires.

Agreed. When Proctors started marketing it the stated lambda was 0.013.Over time it changed to 0.014 and then to 0.015W/mK, where I think it stands now. PIR 0.022 (some say 0.021) and phenolic 0.020 (some say 0.019). I have not looked at the price diff for some years but it used to be v considerable. Looks like 14mm of PIR will equate. I know you cannot get 14mm, but Celotex used to make 12mm. One source says they no longer make it and others say they do. One source refers to Xtratherm's 15mm board. I used to buy 2 sheets of 12mm at a time and the carriage exceeded the material cost!

Current plant room design: Designs via CVC Systems, Oxon, supported and then installed by some good looking welsh fella: Ground floor First floor 7” wide service riser for 18x 92mm ducts for FF into posijoists. Then plaster-in ceiling outlets through, bar a few cheaper ones for where they don’t need the extra time/money. Basics of layout at the design stage gives me the number of ducts / outlets and then I just crack on basically, adapting to suit reality. Steels were designed in by me, many months before concrete went down, which makes life easier with penetrations where they’re needed; all considered to delete any boxing in or loss of GIA whatsoever. Tres bien 👌

Is it worth it, the k-value is not much better than PIR. Spacetherm is not real aerogel, it is, as far as I know, fumed silica in a blanket.

yeah my 1st time with calude token wise was fine. Next day I was going to burn my 5 hr limit in about 1 hour. Dropped it to opus medium always clear the context if new subject within project. This seems to have reduced my token burn a lot. Fable; yeah seen some things it's done - insane!. But I'm more than happy with opus 4.8 and what we've achieved - literally makes my jaw hit the floor!

I have a Beam & Block floor and am hoping to screed soon. I have 230mm of insulation going in, it's all here on site. The Beam & Block is grouted and fully dry. The grout has "cracked" in places, but just superficially. There are gaps in places at the perimeter to the subfloor. Should these be sealed? I have 4 soil pipes and a blue 110mm water pipe duct coming up through the floor blocks. Do these need to be specially sealed in any way at Beam & Block level? The soil pipes are plain ended and currently plenty long enough, should I solvent weld socket couplers in the insulation level to remove the joint that faces the wrong way or just live with the plain pipe ends and worry about connections later above the floor level? Do I need to consider air-tightness in the way to DPM is installed and terminated onto the Nudura walls? PIR upstand yes or no? The screed is likely to be Cemfloor at a thickness of 50-55mm, containing UFH (yet to be installed of course). Any tips or words of advice to limit my inevitable procrastination would be massively appreciated.

It's dreadful stuff to work with. Do you have it yet? It emits a really weird powdery dust that feels horrible on your hands and that powderyness will stop anything reliably sticking to it. I used it to insulate the outer 2 faces of a pair of steel corner posts. The posts were onwardly flashed with an aluminium trim which would hold the insulation in place. I simply taped a breather membrane over the top of the Spacetherm, all the way round the post with foil tape to hold the insulation until the trim went on. You'll struggle to adhere it in any meaningful way unless you buy their cold-bridging strips, which are enclosed in some sort of polythene and can then be glued/adhered to stuff. As an aside, Proctor will deal directly with you and they were, for me at least, the cheapest source.

Ahhhh, thats nuffin ..... 🙃 OR Take your pick. Exactly, @saveasteading I'm so glad - in retrospect - that our two disasters were dealt with by a properly professional company. Because they discovered more incompetence and rectified it - and here's the kicker ... for less than the original company were attempting to charge me. They were going to take me to court for non-payment, until I sent them the security video evidence. Its an ill wind that blows nobody any good To your point @saveasteading: I wonder how the repair in the first post was financed?

Thanks. Yes it will have a pump. Thanks everyone for all the input. Much appreciated! Sounds like I don't need to worry about the depth of the tests, so will go forward with the quote.

The building failing in Manhattan. A failed column and lots of temporary support. The developer describes it as a "construction mishap". More accurately it looks like a total bodge without site scrutiny. Is that a steel column, made from bits, with a ticky tacky plate pinned on as a junction? It appears to have failed at top, middle and bottom (classic year one engineering fundamentals), which suggests to me... be very scared about the whole building.

If you go for the semi rigid radial ducting as recommended by @Nickfromwales, in a timber frame with metal web joists, what do you need to do regarding planning the duct runs. Assuming you're going to buy the kit and organise the installation yourself. Can you get duct layouts done? Who does that? Thanks

I'm finding Sonnet 5 works out more expensive than Opus due to the number of tokens it's using (for coding). Not impressed with it TBH. Now Fable, that really is something else!

So this was a test to replace the existing soakaway for an existing septic tank? The advice to replace it with a treatment plant is good, and it sounds like it needs a pumped solution due to the sloping ground and possibly high water table (or just saturated ground from the poor existing soakaway)

Thanks for all your responses so far. To answer a couple of questions, I believe the reason for going deeper was to do with checking the integrity of the existing septic tank. The perc results were poor, and the holes actually gained water during the test. The garden itself is tiered, with the house sitting lower than where the tests were conducted by about 1 ft The solution proposed was to install a treatment plant, which will pump any liquid after treatment to a soak away on a higher bit of ground. I was happy with this solution, but after the feedback from other drainage companies im not sure whether this solution is based on an inaccurate test in the first place!

Was it sloping, so needed to be below ground <1m at the boundary? Odd that no detail exists from their fees proposal at least?

You’re never alone, just everyone looking at this is like folk watching a rollercoaster; but the thing needs to slow down or stop so we can get on, 🤣. I’m bat-shit crazy with work coming in from every angle, so have just been a spectator between glasses of Sauvignon. Hic.

You're back! My loneliness is over!