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Block and beam? No! Ground bearing slabs. A decision that has given me sleepless nights and resulted in some serious hard graft. We had 60 ton (that’s what we were told 🤔) of Type 1 MOT delivered and had to then proceed to get into the bays and levelled up, before compacting it. The brickie was an arse as he should have stopped building and said “get your hardcore in and laid”. His work was rather shit, so I knocked some of it down to enable me to get a dumper in distribute the piles to make levelling it quicker. Building control were fine with me using grano dust as the top layer. This compacts nicely and gives a much harder surface than sand. Below are a few pictures. Hoping to get everything finished by tomorrow. I’ll breath a sigh of relief that it’s done and dusted.

the reason for that is simply an economic one Iran petrol stations for 40 years before i retired and the cost of tank replacement and new pumps is too expensive for alot of the owners 80k+ for a new tank 10k for each new pump and with a profit margin of less than 3% £160per litre and dealer gets 5-7p top line before any costs -- it comes to a point where it is economically unviable to up grade a petrol station i made all the profit from the shop ==not selling petrol --so unless you have a good shop through put --then selling fuel is a waste of time and every time the fuel price goes up you have to find more money to fill the tanks when i started a load of petrol as about 2k now it is 60k-- and you will only get that dead money back when you close up and sell last tank load so unless you have a through put of over 6m litres a year fuel sales are a waste of time there has never been any credit for fuel sales -- pay by bank draft same day or at best with 7 days you will wait for 2 weeks at least to get your money from the credit card companies and they take half your profit with card charges so to operate a 6m litre site you will need to have money for 160000 litres -what you have in tanks -- your payment for last load and money coming from credit card companies you will need at least £300000k plus your shop stock value -- to operate and that not even allowing any costs for replacement of equipment or staff etc .etc and the loss by evaporation from your tanks -- 1-2%-- which you have paid fuel duty +vat on so would I ever consider going back into fuel sales --no way -- the profit fuel companies allow you has always been pence per litre immaterial of price which is why you see very few if any company owned sites all are dealers --they sold them off years ago to mugs to run that is also why you will not any new petrol stations being built--numbers don,t add up

We're first timers in our sixties, renovating a 200 year old Gloucestershire property as our last home. It's very basic (no central heating, damp) with a stone centre, brick semi-added pre 1860 and s 20th C. extension at each end. Removing the plaster and some ceiling my wife has revealed questionable [cough] building techniques which explain some of the cracks and a patched up Inglenook which we plan to restore. Early days but we have a builder and architect for a garden room style extension. We have lots of ideas and plenty of time, but of course not enough money :-) If you've done anything like this by all means tell us we're barmy, it just say hi. Met a couple this morning and got chatting about this, and they recommended this forum highly. I'm learning so much useful stuff from others offline and online. For others I can recommend Mastodon (a non commercial social network - no ads or algorithm getting in the way). Posting questions there has been a great help.

You are not thinking holistically. The CO2 cost for burning fuel in an ICE car also needs to take into account the CO2 cost of extracting, manufacturing, and shipping the fuel to petrol station, the emmissions cost of spillages, emmissions during filling up the car, etc. Add to that the low efficiency of the engine in using the fuel (60% is wasted heat and friction) and the fun fact that you can only burn it once. Think well-to-wheel, not vehicle mpg and you will start to see the logic of studies like this. Even when burning FF, electricity generation efficiency and minimal transmission losses make it far more efficient. The most profligate EV (Ferrari, Maserati, ancient Enfield Electric) will still use the 'fuel' with +80% efficiency of conversion. And, unlike ICE, you get some of the expended energy back when you brake or go downhill. Add in that the valuable minerals in car batteries and drive systems will be recycled (+99.6% recyclability of materials, plus reusing Lithium from existing batteries saves more energy as it is already purified). I heard an expert from a mining company say that within 20 years, most battery and magnet materials used in vehicles in the future will come from the circular economy rather than mining extraction. The amount of CO2 used in the manufacture of an EV will be less than that to create an ICE vehicle within the next decade. Unfortunately none of this helps me. I drive less than 2500 miles a year and my diesel car has such low running costs in the grand scheme of things (insurance and TAX would both be higher on an EV) and the upfront cost of buying a second hand EV is too great. The second hand value of my car is probably less than I pay for insurance and fuel each year! I would dearly love to have an EV, but will only be affordable if I'm given a freebie, or a government grant/scrappage scheme that allows me to buy a very used EV

You have basically taken a passive slab and killed all its benefits. You have no continuity of insulation. Take a look below, you can follow the insulation in the floor and up the walls. The slave takes the structural loads the block work sits outside the insulation. Your Marmox block works but is an expensive bodge.

Nice fella at the garage near work extended the stopcock key. Asked how much, don't be daft he said, wonderful that some folk are just so nice

Hiya. You are absolutely right to raise this point, which is valid. I use my own name on BH, a quick search on the internet will show that I run a design business. I was attracted to join BH as I felt it was non commercial. Initially I never mentioned that I do this as a day job, but as time passed I felt I could not bring my knowledge and advice to bear effectively without actually saying I do this as a day job. In light of that I wrote to the moderators and asked for their advice. I definitely don't want to get banned from BH as I enjoy sharing what I know and helping folk. I see your valid comments were possibly prompted by my response to @LnP. I spent some time earlier today just chatting on the phone with him. Once piece of advice I gave him was that he should employ a local Engineer and provided reasons why he should do this. However, occasionally once in a while members chat with me they write to me formally and ask if I will undertake their design. This is arguably a breech of BH rules, which is why I asked for moderator advice. I'll leave it at that for now as the moderators may wish or not add to my response.

Any decent carpenter / kitchen installer will take the hinges off, clamp the units together exactly aligned, and then screw through with 30mm countersunk wood-screws (not the thru-connectors) so the hinges hide the screws. Note: for 15mm carcasses use 25mm screws, and only use 30mm for 18mm.

Forgot to put an update on this!!! It FAILED spectacularly. Building control refused to sign it off on many counts which was the only sensible outcome. P.S. for those who thought it was acceptable and those that are watching and still build like this, don’t come to Shropshire , substandard workmanship isn’t acceptable here 😎. For those that were helpful and constructive I thank you 🤠

I recommend all, especially critics, to consider standing for their local parish or borough. We need you. Then report back on whether it was easy, well rewarded, selfish: or hard work, not or barely rewarded, or public spirited. Or to stop criticising all councillors, politicians and public servants.

A key benefit of triple glazing is that the inside air temperature next to the glass will be a few degrees higher than it would be next to a similar double glazed unit. If you have underfloor heating, then the closer that temperature is to the target room temperature, the slower the convection currents are in the room. Which creates a more uniform temperature gradient from floor to ceiling, so you don't need the thermostat as high (which is where there's a cost saving). It also removes condensation risk even when temperatures drop well below zero. However, if you don't have UFCH then the first of these benefits goes 'out of the window' as you'll have significant convection currents anyway. And if you do have UFCH + well-specified double glazing (argon filled, low-e, good weather seals, well-insulated frame), then the temperature gradient can still be very good. In short, it's preferable to choose double glazing in a well-insulated frame, rather than a triple glazing in a standard / poorly insulated frame. Uw is the best guide for that.

Health The shock revelation that light bulbs are wrecking your metabolism Since the 2000s, our light exposure has changed drastically as we make our buildings more energy-efficient. Now, we’re discovering how this may mess with our mitochondria, contributing to diabetes, dementia and more By Graham Lawton 10 August 2026 Red light is missing from much of our lives Emanuel Santos Take a flashlight – the one on your phone will do – turn it on and place the pad of your index finger over the bulb. See that red glow? You might think it’s something to do with blood, but you’d be wrong. It’s photons of red light bouncing around inside your finger, looking for somewhere to land. This simple experiment is a doorway to one of the most profound and surprising biological discoveries of recent years. “Light is a nutrient,” says Bob Fosbury, who was an astrophysicist at the European Southern Observatory before he turned his attention to the biology of light. That’s obviously true for plants, which use light to make carbohydrates. But it turns out it’s also true for animals and fungi, all of which exploit light in a hitherto unappreciated way. All living organisms – including us – are solar-powered. Sunlight has long been understood to be critical to life on Earth. But the fact that light is also used to oil the wheels of metabolism is only just, er, coming to light. Long wavelengths, which come from red and infrared (IR) light, are particularly beneficial for creating energy, and are readily available from sources including sunlight and incandescent bulbs. But changes in lighting intended to help save energy have inadvertently deprived us from this crucial supply. The irony is that just as we have discovered the benefit of red light, we are unintentionally starving ourselves of it. How modern bulbs starved us of red light The story begins in the early 2000s with the widespread adoption of two now-ubiquitous energy efficiency technologies. The first was the light-emitting diode (LED), which largely replaced energy-guzzling incandescent bulbs. Although this change helped conserve energy, it had other unforeseen consequences. The second was window glass that filters out IR, designed to prevent heat leaking into or out of buildings. Together, these dramatically narrowed the spectrum of light we are exposed to indoors, an environment where most humans spend up to 90 per cent of their time. “We lost about 95 per cent of the spectrum,” says neuroscientist Glen Jeffery at University College London. “Suddenly, without warning, boom, the long wavelengths go. And that’s a problem.” For the vast majority of human existence, those long wavelengths of light were unavoidable. Daylight is rich in visible red light, which has wavelengths of about 650 to 750 nanometres. It also emits vast and invisible (to us, at least) quantities of IR, which extends out to about 2500 nanometres. People who spend much of the day outside are naturally exposed to these long wavelengths, even when fully clothed. When long-wavelength light hits a human body, it sails through clothing and penetrates deep into tissues (short-wavelength light such as UV, in contrast, is absorbed by clothing, which is why covering up helps prevent sunburn). Red and IR are also abundant in moonlight and in the glow of a campfire. Indoor light, too, used to be full of these wavelengths, either from sunlight streaming through windows or light sources such as open fires, candles and oil and gas lamps. The invention of the electric light didn’t change that, as the spectrum of an incandescent light bulb closely matches that of the sun. But the adoption of energy-efficient lighting and windows robbed us of longer parts of the spectrum. Glass that filters out IR obviously blocks that portion of sunlight, and while LEDs throw out a lot of visible light, they produce nothing beyond about 750 nm. “LEDs are completely dark in the infrared,” says Fosbury. Scott Zimmerman, founder of the lighting company Silas Inc. in New Jersey who collaborates with Fosbury and Jeffery, calls LED light “ultra-processed”, an analogy with ultra-processed food. The combined effect of ultra-processed light and modern glass means that the average human today receives much less long-wavelength light than their ancestors did. Campfires, as well as candles and incandescent bulbs, emit red light ClassicStock / Alamy Stock Photo At the same time, conditions such as obesity, type 2 diabetes, dementia and early-onset cancers are on the march. The usual suspects for this are poor diet and lack of exercise. But according to Fosbury, Jeffery and others, these are only a piece of the puzzle; another reason, perhaps the principal one, is red-light deprivation. “There’s not a single cause, but I do increasingly think that light is the most fundamental and dominant one,” says Fosbury. “And it’s probably the easiest one to solve.” To understand why light is so vital, we have to go back in time again, to the Soviet Union of the late 1980s, where, at the USSR Academy of Sciences in Moscow, a biophysicist called Tiina Karu was experimenting with red and near-infrared light as a therapy. She discovered that they were useful in wound healing and pain management and wondered what the mechanism was. Eventually she hit on energy metabolism, specifically the pace at which mitochondria inside the body’s cells produce a molecule called ATP. Red light, she found, accelerated this process. Karu’s work never found a wide audience, mainly because she came from the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, according to Jeffery. But she was right, and today red-light therapy is everywhere, used to promote wound healing and treat skin conditions, hair loss, cognitive impairment, chronic pain, osteoarthritis and much more. The evidence of its efficacy is patchy, but growing, according to John Mitrofanis, a neurologist at the University of Grenoble Alpes in France. There is much debate over the correct doses and wavelengths, but researchers are in agreement that its effects are mediated by mitochondria. The key to this is the electron transport chain, a complex and highly orchestrated metabolic process that takes in energetic electrons and passes them down a chain of proteins, creating ATP in the process. ATP is biology’s principal energy currency, analogous to cash in an economy. When a cell needs energy to perform a task – say, building new proteins – it uses ATP. When mitochondria are bathed in red or IR light, the electron transport chain runs a little faster and more ATP is produced – a process Fosbury calls “photometabolism”. The exact mechanism by which ATP production is accelerated remains a point of contention, but what’s certain is that diseased cells are often short of ATP, so a boost can make up the deficit. That, says Jeffery, explains why red-light therapy is beneficial. It also explains why taking away red light can be harmful. Jeffery points out that all life on Earth evolved in an environment rich in red light and IR, but humans now mostly live in one stripped of those wavelengths. The result is more sluggish ATP production. To add insult to injury, we have also flooded our indoor environment with shorter wavelengths in the form of blue light from screens and LEDs. Blue light inhibits ATP production by slowing down the electron transport chain. Lose, lose. The effects are insidious. Fosbury likens long-wavelength light to a vitamin and calls the effects of deprivation “21st-century scurvy”, a nod to the disease of vitamin C deficiency that killed and sickened tens of thousands of sailors in the 18th century. Like scurvy, it creeps up on you. “It’s something that accumulates over a period of time,” says Jeffery. It isn’t just the general benefits of being outside, but red light specifically that is proven to have benefits. One of the symptoms of 21st-century scurvy is elevated blood sugar, which, if left unchecked, can progress to type 2 diabetes. This is due to the slowing down of the electron transport chain, which burns glucose as its primary fuel. A couple of years ago, Jeffery showed that a 15-minute burst of red light blunts the blood sugar spike after a large dose of glucose. He has also done real-world experiments in windowless, LED-illuminated offices at University College London. When he added long-wavelength light from a dimmed incandescent bulb, he found that the office occupants had lower blood sugar, on average, than their colleagues labouring under pure LED light. “Their mitochondria are being kick-started by the red light,” says Jeffery. A study published in January found something similar; researchers at Maastricht University in the Netherlands exposed 13 individuals with type 2 diabetes to 4.5 solid working days of LED light in an office environment, then 4.5 days of natural light in the same location. The participants’ blood sugar control was much better during the daylight days. Jeffery also has concerns about other diseases and health problems usually associated with ageing, especially neurodegenerative conditions. One of the causes of these, he says, is mitochondrial dysfunction, which is effectively induced by red-light deficiency. Clinical trials have found that near-infrared light can slow down age-related cognitive impairment. A recent study of almost 88,000 people in their sixties found that, over the course of eight years, those who spent more time in daylight were significantly less likely to develop dementia, though the underlying causes of this relationship aren’t yet fully understood. Mitrofanis, meanwhile, has shown that red light can prevent Parkinson’s in a primate model of the disease. Cancer and cardiovascular diseases, too, have been linked to a lack of daylight. When dermatologist Richard Weller at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and his colleagues analysed data from more than 400,000 adults in a yet-to-be-published study, they found that people with higher habitual UV exposure – a proxy for sunlight exposure in general – were less likely to die from cancer and cardiovascular disease. Indeed, says Mitrofanis, the success of red-light therapy may simply be down to correction of a red-light deficiency. “Maybe all this is doing is rescuing processes that have gone awry because we’re inside all the time, getting illuminated with blue light.” The fact that longer-wavelength light speeds up energy production isn’t a happy accident. Fosbury and Jeffery argue that it is a design feature of living systems. Life, they say, evolved to feed off this once-abundant resource to maximise the efficiency of ATP production. “Life on Earth has evolved for 4 billion years in sunlight and it’s adapted exquisitely to the properties of sunlight,” says Fosbury. This greenhouse is flooded with pink LED lights, which emit red wavelengths Getty Images/Westend61 One of those adaptations is the ability to harvest and store photons. “The body literally is designed to absorb as much as possible in the infrared,” says Zimmerman. The amount of light energy we take in every day is staggering, he says. “Sunlight is the number one energy input into the body. It’s at least twice, if not three times, as much as food.” Once sunlight enters the body, it scatters, bouncing off cells and organelles repeatedly – perhaps tens or hundreds of times, says Fosbury – until it hits a molecule that can absorb it, dumping energy in the process. This scattering means that a photon of red or IR light remains inside the body for much longer than it would if it passed straight through. This is what you see when you press your fingertip to a flashlight. The photon’s final destination is somewhat random, but occasionally it is absorbed by a component of the electron transport chain. Scientists are currently evaluating whether water molecules in the mitochondria are key to converting light into energy. When they absorb energy from a photon, they vibrate faster and lubricate the passage of electrons down the chain. Remarkably, says Fosbury, each step in the chain requires the electrons to overcome an energy barrier of roughly 0.75 electron volts, which is almost precisely what a photon of long-wavelength light delivers. Without the supply of red light we evolutionarily developed for, we’re getting far less energy. Seeking out more red light exposure Fortunately, the solution to this modern-day scourge is simple: recharge your light battery whenever you can, either with daylight or an incandescent bulb. There are red-light therapy devices, but some of these are overpowered, which can send cellular energy production into overdrive and lead to inflammation. Of course, exposing yourself to sunlight also carries its own risk. But clothing and sunscreen help block cancer-causing UV, while letting red and IR through. For people stuck in modern offices, Jeffery recommends buying a light fitting with a dimmer switch and putting it on your desk with an incandescent bulb in it – if the building managers will let you. “Even when it [the incandescent bulb] is very, very, very dim, it still produces a vast amount of IR,” he says. There’s no specific magic wavelength and so a red LED light would likely be better than no red light at all, but nowhere near as effective as full-spectrum red light from incandescent light bulbs or the sun. A London hospital has created an outdoor ward King's College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust What would really make a difference, says Jeffery, is a change in attitude among the people who design and manage modern buildings. The pursuit of energy efficiency is laudable but has unintended negative consequences. And in any case, energy efficiency need not be sacrificed. True, incandescent bulbs are extremely inefficient as a source of visible light, producing mostly infrared, aka heat. But the energy consumption of a heavily dimmed incandescent bulb is no more than an LED, so there are no extra costs – and shedloads of savings in the form of a healthier workforce. “We can do masses for public health just by bringing back the long wavelengths of light you’re being denied in your office environment,” says Jeffery. “There’s a real need for change,” says Alistair Nunn, director of science at the Guy Foundation in London, which supports research on quantum biology and its applications in medicine. “At the moment, everybody’s going down this road of ‘let’s get lots of LEDs’, but it’s not doing us any good at all.” Low on energy? A new understanding of rest could help revitalise you There is a state of relaxation that few of us spend much time in, but which comes with profound well-being benefits. With healthier ageing, reduced risk of disease and feeling more energised all on offer, here's how to get there There are signs of institutional change, with – appropriately enough – hospitals at the forefront. Studies have shown that infrared light in hospital wards leads to improved clinical outcomes, including shorter stays. And it has long been known that inpatients who have access to daylight are discharged sooner, on average, than those kept in windowless rooms. Now, some hospitals are taking action. Jeffery and his team recently did a light survey of the critical care unit at King’s College Hospital in London. “It’s a beautiful building, but there’s absolutely no long-wavelength light in there,” he says. “I said to them, ‘obviously I’m concerned about your patients, but I’m concerned about your staff too.’” The hospital managers took heed and, in May, opened a new six-bed outdoor ward on the roof. Two other London hospitals are considering outside space for their critical care patients, says Jeffery. “I think they’ll follow because they can’t afford not to.” And even if you aren’t a patient in a critical care ward, you can’t afford to risk 21st-century scurvy through a steady diet of ultra-processed light. “You can live your life without red light,” says Jeffery, “but you cannot live healthily without it.”

What do I use when it's a cost thing? Aluplast Ideal 4000 (Double) Aluplast Idea 8000 (Triple) Alternatively I would look at Rehau, Gealan or Salamander.

Hi all, I'm Sepehr. Been lurking here for a while and finally signing up properly. About 3 years ago we knocked down an old bungalow and rebuilt from the ground up. Being able to plan the wiring and infrastructure from scratch rather than retrofitting meant I could go a lot further with the smart home side than most people manage — cabling, sensors, lighting and heating control all designed in from first fix, running on Home Assistant. The automation side turned into a proper hobby rather than a one-off job — it didn't stop once the build finished. I'm still tinkering: writing automations, adding presence detection, playing with dashboards, chasing down the odd flaky Zigbee device, that sort of thing. It's the kind of hobby where there's always one more sensor to add or one more automation to refine, and I've learned as much from breaking things and fixing them as from getting it right first time. Learned a huge amount along the way about the building side too (a lot of it from lurking here, if I'm honest) — insulation, airtightness, first fix planning, all the stuff that isn't obvious until you're actually doing it. Happy to chip in on the smart home / automation side where it's useful, and looking forward to learning more from everyone here on the building side.

So feel free to have a chuckle to yourself, but the SCC pour went really well and the stuff is absolutely amazing. Slabs level to 2mm. What didn't go well and this was partly due to a lack of information available and me not appreciating the associated risks of trying to pour slabs in weather that is so hot, was the curing. Slabs unfortunately look like crazy paving. Curing agent was applied, but when it states "immediately after finishing" they don't mean dappling and when the concrete is still fluid. Cemex also advised that microfibers should be added, but then somehow didn't adjust the order (yes! I should have double checked) so that didn't help. Having A252 mesh has probably saved me from having to condemn them. But I would still recommend this can be done as DIY. So long as you can use a laser level and set up screed levelling tripods, then you will be amazed at how flat and level you can get slabs just by using a dapple bar. Just be careful of doing it in hot weather, as SCC has low water and a high cement content so not as forgiving as normal concrete. Note - I purposely didn't dapple a shallow pass on this slab as the finish from the first pass was perfectly good enough for below PIR As to pouring the remaining slabs. Well. I'm too nervous now. Especially, given the weather and previous attempt. Was considering using Hessian and water curing, but even then I am unsure. It's 15c at 8am when I poured and by 10am it's absolutely roasting and probably 26c VID-20260801-WA0007.mp4

Yes, and they're great. All ours came from https://www.bucklandtimber.co.uk/ They'll design and supply all junctions and fixing for you too.

You maybe took as long to write the above that it takes to make 20 of them. For the cost just buy some pipe

I can confirm that the advice I got from Gus was helpful, and the more so because he does it for a living. I'm sure the administrators are well able to spot when people are on the forum motivated by commercial interest rather than collaboration.

I think it’s first and foremost the responsibility of the self builder (in our cases at least) to design stuff that looks right in its place. Some peeps seem to feel it’s an exercise in getting as much over on the planners/neighbours as possible, which I think is a shame. I know it’s an ‘only rain at night’ type of notion but trying one’s best to build in harmony has got to be the best starting point. But I recognise that we need planners to limit the unharmonious.

I've now reached the happy place of 'offer and acceptance' for my subject-to-planning offer which in Scottish legal parlance means that we have a bargain and timescale agreed. I wanted 12 months to complete planning, the seller offered 3 and we compromised on 9. So I now have until April next year to get the planning I am happy with before I have to pay for the plot and take ownership of it. We've also agreed that if my application is stuck in the planning process through no fault of my own the timescale will be extended to reflect that. I'm not looking for any comments on this regarding legal safeguards just now thanks. This may be a little simplistic, but in my mind there are four possible steps to the planning process: Pre-application enquiry Planning permission in principle (same as outline planning in England). Full planning Building warrant I've opted to skip step 2 as I think I should be ok to move straight on to step 3 once I have a positive pre-application enquiry response. If you've any thoughts or advice on that then I would be interested to hear it. As you can hopefully see from the photo it is a gorgeous plot in a beautiful part of the world. The image above shows what will be the view from my future house. I feel very excited and lucky to have this opportunity.

Thanks everyone. Probably overkill but it's done, onto the next thing. Happy Sunday to you all.

I like the idea of a two tier pricing system for essentials like lecky and water. I guess for me the concept that everyone deserves a fair basic allowance at a reasonable price is a very good one. The idea that the wealthy can disregard the scarcity of resources, thus pushing up unit costs for other users, is an uncomfortable one. So we charge wasteful/profligate users more for their usage above their basic ration and that pays for the required top up infrastructure rather than charging everyone for it. Goodness knows how such a pricing system would work but I’d vote for that.

Yes it was a straight question. I was just asking as I design insulated rafts as part of my day job. Some of the stuff I do has a lot of my intellectual property built in. I'm happy to share some of my knowledge on BH, just don't want folk ripping it off whole sale for commercial advantage. As an offer if you want to have a chat on the phone then give me a call on 0771 308 1597, text me first so I know it's you, I'm also a bit deaf! We can chew the fat for a bit, happy to chat with you for up to an hour.. and you can pick my brains for free. If you want to take up my offer then send me some drawings and so on first. These of course will be kept confidential at my end. Great approach. I enjoy teaching and informing Clients. I find it a lot of fun actually. My starting point is to listen to you find out what you know and don't, then fill in the gaps in your knowledge and explain what often can be quite technical things in terms a lay person can understand. The objective is to give you enough information to allow you to make informed decisions. This sort of thing gives me a bit of a refreshing break, from drawing details / to structural calculations etc. once you have designed your first few hundred beams the novelty kind of wears off. You still have to concentrate though. In my day job I do this when pitching for business. If you inform a Client and explain the issues, how you might deal with them, highlight the things they may not have thought about, put forward other solutions, buildability cost and risk then it makes it hard for your competitors, you set the bench mark. If my competitors come in at lower fee rate, the Client is often now aware of what constitutes value for money. It works most of the time but some Clients are really stupid / just don't listen and go with the lowest price without valuing the service, ongoing support etc They will also then go with the lowest builders tender and end up nine times out of ten getting truly ripped off.

Yes Spinny, that is all in place and nothing overhanging or over looking windows. Pro Dave, the owners are in their late 80’s and we think that at the moment they are just going to leave it!!! The issue then I suppose will pass to the next owners but it will be un unmortgageable so will potentially massively reduce its sale value…… might buy it myself should this be the case 😂

I’d go for a minimum of 250L for the UVC, possibly even 300L, so you can heat it far cooler (50-55°), so theres less latent losses snd more volume to store off peak energy or diverted PV etc. 200L is very small for an ASHP even if it’s just “the two of you”. You’ll need a second, smaller duct for the car charger for data / comms and to bring the CT clamps to the meter; if the meter is at the boundary then you need to work out where the CT clamps need to go and duct accordingly. Rigid BT56 duct is the only duct your’e allowed to use for telecom, which they usually supply you for free. Assuming the exported heating is for keeping you warm in the outbuilding, consider a large fan coil out there so it’ll cool and heat (remember that it’ll need a condensate drain); note: fan heaters give almost instant heat (and cool) vs a radiator.

Listen to @Nickfromwales. Believe me, you will save money. My Brink 400 was a little less than £2k on his advice. Which reminds me, and on the subject of thanks @NickfromwalesIf i forgot previously a huge thankyou for the tip.

Lift the 5a one as much as possible, then same for the socket to see if you can hide this. Plasterer was shite, decorator equally as guilty. Just unbelievable that this incredibly low standard of work could have escaped the 80’s and still be so prevalent today in 2026. I bet neither of those two tossers houses look like this. Utterly embarrassingly low standards from these people. The ‘fix’ is to remove the outlets, PVA the openings, apply EasiFill and allow to dry fully, then sand and paint, then, repeat if necessary, and paint. If you have a PM then send the bill to them.

I was recommended a screed company, I was told they are absolutely shit hot, I met the main man and he knew what he was talking about, I asked about screed curl at the edges and covering the screed to slow down evaporation. he said it wasn’t necessary. so I did some more reading and asked a few questions. they did the screed, an hour after they had gone I hosed it down with a very fine mist spray, I then covered it in polythene and also covered all the windows to stop the sunlight coming in. the result is I have the flattest most level screed I’ve ever seen. you need to satisfy yourself how it should be done, and any short comings in your opinion you need to make up. buy the polythene and install it yourself or do you due diligence and insist on a curing agent. if you think they are good why do they not want to cover it ?

Flanagaj, I think maybe you are trying to be a builder without being a builder. I write with sod all experience except my own troubled extension. We ended up having to ditch a bad builder and then decided (as we had a dry shell by then and good alternate builders were not available for 18months plus) to continue by bringing in trades to get to completion. It is not an easy process because unlike a proper builder... 1/ You do not have a little black book with several good contractors for each and every trade - people you know from experience are capable and you can work with. 2/ You do not have any real clout with trades because for them you are a one off customer - a few £k's or £10k's of business - builders will be known sources of regular business 3/ Some trades people may be wary of a novice builder, or sometimes take advantage. 4/ You lack deep knowledge and experience of your own - of trade specifics, trade tendencies, what to watch for, how to specify a job These things do make it difficult. Finding good trades can be a lengthy process where the only proof is in eating the pudding. These things affect timeline enormously, you can never call in a favour from someone, no one will ever call you looking for work, you are potentially the job that gets delayed in favour of others. For your slab specifics, do you have a concrete mix specification defined that is what they are going to meet. My SE sepcified the mix for us. And where you don't have a contract only a price/purchase order/invoice then I would suggest always emailing to ensure you have something in writing which defines your requirements. In case of dispute at least you then have something more than verbal conversations and a price. You can even then write down what the contractor has told you verbally about the job, answers to your queries, etc. But try and get someone you can talk to, I've always been able to talk to my SE or Architect or the QS that dealt with closing my original builder contract, to get bits of advice or a site visit.

Why can't everything just be moved under the sink? Don't think I've ever seen any plumbing, water or waste behind the actual machines. Yes you lose the cupboard space, but so be it. My machines have a recessed section at the bottom so pipes can travel past it without interfering with the space. For what it's worth I did that in 2 places on the opposite sides of the room in my gaff, no regrets.

I have just been chatting to a mate's partner. They where banging on about Overseas Aid and we need to stop it. If we stopped OA then our Navy would have been ready to send boats to the Gulf. I asked them how much our Military Budget was, they had no idea, asked what the OA budget was, again they had no idea. Then they blamed the Boat People, then the Muslims, then the two tier policing, ended up blaming the local council for not sorting out a pothole in their road. I kept saying that they are reading the wrong newspapers and they need to look up some numbers, rather than spout an opinion. The response to that was 'listen to me, listen to me' When it got to the government not allowing for more drilling in the North Sea, I had to say 'you don't keep up with the news do you.' These (expletive deleted) are allowed to vote, and it is not going to be for Bin Face. So rather than spout opinion about a subject, get some data, then come back and state your case. If you don't, you are just spouting opinions, and as this thread has shown, the opinion spouters refuse to find any data, in fact it is worse than that, they expect others to find it, then say the data is wrong. That is the policy of time wasters and internet trolls.

To add, if you do just decide to DIY something and there is an underlying structural issue that then reappears later, you may be invalidating the NHBC insurance (or at least giving them a lot of ammunition for an argument) and exposing yourself to much higher costs down the line.

Update I think this would be better:

We have 3 passive approved triple glazed electric Velux windows in a vaulted kitchen ceiling. Noise is not an issue for me or my wife. None in bedroom though, a small one in the hall just outside bedroom, again noise not an issue.

Building Regs Part L gives a minimum requirement based on a hypothetical window size. However the standard just rules out the worst performers and is easily beaten by windows with a solid timber frame. It's also not very helpful unless your windows happen to be that size; windows with a lot of glass or a lot of frame would have a significantly different values. Which is why, for a proper comparison, it needs to be calculated per window using the manufacturer's data (some may calculate it for you): Uw = (Uf x Af + Ug x Ag + ψg x Lg) / ( Af + Ag ) where: Uf = frame U-value Af = frame area Ug = glass U-Value Ag = glass area ψg = Psi value (thermal bridging) of the glass-edge spacer* Lg = perimeter of the glass *I should have mentioned the importance of this - it's the spacer that keeps the 2 panes of glass apart. Cheap windows use aluminium spacers that are very conductive; good windows use low-conductivity plastics that significantly cut the condensation risk at the edge of the glass. For an illustration of what can go wrong, see this post:

Having owned property of similar age and condition I don't see anything that would greatly concern me. The house probably has minimal foundations, brick corbel plus maybe 100mm concrete if you're lucky, but has lasted over a century including a mix of exceptionally dry summers and very wet winters with what look like minor cracks. I think it's worth getting an SE to look at your specific concerns (the left E pic most notably) but I'd be careful not to get pulled into a lot of expensive remedial work for limited benefit by the first less than scrupulous builder you speak to.

As @torre the premade ones are so much better than the off the shelf jobs. I've used them before wouldnt mess about any other way on 150mm cavity construction. To answer your actual question they are stable enough for the brickies to build in as they go. You may find for doors they will set a profile or straight edge up the reveal also.

This is all so yesterday evening, the technology has moved on. You are using a bicycle to find a partner in the next village, the rest of us are using an app to find several all over the country. Technology Could a new approach to AI finally deliver artificial general intelligence? AI chatbots can describe reality in words, but don’t truly understand cause and effect in the real world. Now, a fresh kind of machine intelligence that does just that is emerging Daniel Cossins3 August 2026, updated 6 August 2026 http://localhost:56805/wp-content/external_image/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubmV3c2NpZW50aXN0LmNvbS93cC1jb250ZW50L3VwbG9hZHMvMjAyNi8wNy9TRUlfMzA2Njg5MTI5LmpwZw__.jpg Andrea De Santis What happens when you knock a glass off a table? Ask ChatGPT and you get a step-by-step explanation: how gravity accelerates the receptacle along a “parabolic trajectory”, why it could shatter “if the impact generates stresses greater than the material can withstand”. Ask my 3-year-old daughter and she’s less bothered with fine details: “It go smash and water everywhere!” When it comes to the future of artificial intelligence, the difference is instructive. The large language models (LLMs) powering today’s chatbots are trained on vast swathes of text to predict the next word in a sequence. Unlike little Adeline, however, no LLM has ever actually knocked a glass off a table – or thrown spaghetti at a wall, or driven a scooter into a pond – and that may impose a fundamental limitation on their capabilities. This, essentially, is why some researchers argue that what we need to take AI to the next level isn’t ever-larger LLMs, but “world models”: systems that learn through observation so they can simulate the consequences of actions in the real world. Read more A golden age of maths is dawning and mathematicians are freaking out World models have rapidly become AI’s next frontier, attracting huge buzz from industry and business thanks to their promise in autonomous robotics. What makes the world-model approach especially intriguing, though, is that it also ostensibly offers a route to artificial general intelligence (AGI), or machines with human-level reasoning that can be applied across a range of tasks. The problem is that it is tricky to parse substance from bluster. The term “world model” is confusingly elastic, for starters – for some, problematically so. It has become “a kind of shorthand for all the things that current AI systems can’t do well”, says Melanie Mitchell at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. It is unclear exactly what these systems should model, never mind whether internal representations of physical reality will be sufficient for the kind of generalisable intelligence that means my 3-year-old intuitively understands what happens when she swipes a glass, even if she can’t say why. To make sense of world models as they apply in AI, it helps to understand the concept’s roots in cognitive science. AI researchers themselves typically trace it back to 1943, when psychologist Kenneth Craik wrote that the human mind “carries a small-scale model of external reality and of its own possible actions”, allowing us “to try out various alternatives” and “react to future situations before they arise”. http://localhost:56805/wp-content/external_image/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubmV3c2NpZW50aXN0LmNvbS93cC1jb250ZW50L3VwbG9hZHMvMjAyNi8wNy9TRUlfMzA1OTUxMzA0LmpwZw__.jpg Human minds have world models that enable us to predict what will happen next timsimages/Alamy That idea has evolved in the decades since, most notably with the theory of predictive processing. This posits that perception – possibly even consciousness itself – relies on the brain constantly generating predictions about the external world and updating them in response to incoming sensory data. But the point remains. “The key idea is that intelligence involves building models of the world in our heads so we can simulate outcomes and avoid costly mistakes,” says Josh Tenenbaum, a cognitive scientist and AI researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “So ‘our ideas die in our stead’, as Craik put it.” It doesn’t take a genius to see why that has piqued the interest of AI researchers. LLMs have proved astonishingly capable, and they can certainly give the impression they understand things as we do. But language is a description of reality, rather than reality itself, and their lack of direct experience means that even the most powerful language models struggle when it comes to “understanding” physical phenomena in the real world. Read more Why I have changed my mind about AI and you should too LLMs often perform poorly when they are asked to reason about spatial concepts and things that might happen in the physical world, says Mitchell. “If you’ve ever uploaded a map to one of these models and asked it questions about it, you’ll know that they will often have a lot of problems with reasoning.” Indeed, in a 2024 study, when researchers trained language models on a database of turn-by-turn directions for taxi trips around New York City, they found that the system could provide reasonable routes from one point to another – but failed miserably when asked to take the odd detour. The reason why is that the LLMs have only descriptions of journeys, and therefore lack the sort of mental map that allows us to imagine what would happen in different scenarios. And navigation is just one example. LLMs demonstrate similar shortcomings in any scenario where you need to simulate the physical world – safely loading a dishwasher, say, or folding laundry. “They’re not designed for it, which is why people are interested in alternatives like world models,” says Tenenbaum. http://localhost:56805/wp-content/external_image/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubmV3c2NpZW50aXN0LmNvbS93cC1jb250ZW50L3VwbG9hZHMvMjAyNi8wNy9TRUlfMzA2Njg5MTgzLmpwZw__.jpg Andrea De Santis Probably the most influential proponent is Yann LeCun, a computer scientist at New York University and, until recently, chief scientist of foundational AI research at Meta. His argument, first made in a 2022 paper, is essentially that if we want to build truly intelligent systems that can reason, plan and act effectively in the real world, we need world models. “I cannot imagine we can build agentic systems without those systems having an ability to predict, in advance, what the consequences of their actions are going to be,” LeCun told artificial intelligence forum AI House Davos in January. And the key to that, he reckons, is systems that learn the rules of the world from observation. The idea has caught on. In December 2025, LeCun left Meta to found AMI Labs, raising just north of $1 billion to build world-model systems. A year earlier, Fei-Fei Li at Stanford University in California started World Labs, with $230 million of investment, to develop AI with “spatial intelligence”. Many of the established AI firms, most notably Google DeepMind, are now also actively pursuing world models in one form or another. The reason for the influx of money is primarily the promise that world models hold for advancing robotics (see “What are AI world models good for?”, below). However, it is early days and the existing prototypes are modest in their applications. With Marble, for instance, World Labs has built a system that generates coherent 3D scenes from text prompts. Similarly, DeepMind’s Genie 3 creates convincing interactive virtual environments – “snowy mountain at dusk”, say – in which you can move around for several minutes and even prompt events like rain. http://localhost:56805/wp-content/external_image/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubmV3c2NpZW50aXN0LmNvbS93cC1jb250ZW50L3VwbG9hZHMvMjAyNi8wNy9TRUlfMzA1OTUxMjc1LmpwZw__.jpg Google DeepMind’s Genie 3 creates worlds that users can explore from text-based prompts Google DeepMind In both cases, the companies describe their systems as “world models”. But Marble is really a 3D video generator and Genie 3 a video-game simulator, albeit one producing simulations in which agents could plausibly act, observe consequences and learn. Arguably, a proper world model would be something that exists inside an agent such that it can predict the consequences of its decisions, imagine the future and plan ahead before taking actions – and that is what DeepMind is pushing towards with its Dreamer 4 system, released in September 2025. It learns an internal predictive model of its environment, training mostly on data from the video game Minecraft, and uses that to train an agent that repeatedly “dreams” the consequences of possible actions to improve its behaviour. “The biggest difference [from Genie 3] is that Dreamer 4 is an agent, not just a world model,” says Danijar Hafner at DeepMind in San Francisco, who leads the Dreamer 4 team. “It predicts actions and improves them through iterative self-improvement, using planning and [imagined] trial and error.” The power of this approach is apparent in Hafner and his colleagues’ demonstration that Dreamer 4 can figure out how to collect diamonds in Minecraft, a complex task involving thousands of different actions – gathering resources, crafting tools, navigating the landscape – without being shown how to play. “The system has to understand its environment and generalise, because each new episode starts in a randomly generated world,” says Hafner. That is an important step, not least because this is precisely the kind of world model that could facilitate autonomous robots capable of folding laundry, say, or loading the dishwasher. “I think it’s going to solve robotics,” says Hafner. “What’s missing now is execution: data, compute, scaling. But we have the recipe, so, like with language models, it’s about scaling and details.” Read more The AI expert who says artificial general intelligence is nonsense Who would bet against DeepMind, given its impressive track record? After all, its researchers have won a Nobel prize for work on protein folding. But while Dreamer 4 demonstrates that agents with internal world models can reason and plan, it leaves a deeper question unresolved: what exactly should these systems learn about the world, or, more specifically, at what level of detail? And this has become a key fault line in the field, with two distinct approaches emerging. Many of the existing strategies are attempting to generate predictions on condition of action, as the researchers put it, by reconstructing future observations as faithfully to the training data as possible. But LeCun reckons that is the wrong approach, or at least not the best. His argument is based on the fact that humans don’t mentally simulate the world in any great detail, and certainly not pixel by pixel. When we imagine a glass falling from a table and smashing to pieces, for example, we don’t predict the position of every shard of glass, every water droplet. Instead, LeCun argues, we run highly compressed models that capture only the aspects that matter. This why LeCun advocates for a different tack, which he calls joint-embedding predictive architecture (JEPA). In this framework, world models infer abstract representations of what is relevant for reasoning, planning and action. “Generative models try to reconstruct pixels, whereas JEPA learns in a latent space and only predicts what is useful,” says Randall Balestriero at Brown University in Rhode Island, who has worked with LeCun on JEPA-based world models. “It ignores irrelevant details and focuses only on what matters for the agent.” LeCun and his investors appear to be betting that the JEPA approach will offer a swifter route to real-world applications, largely because it requires less training data. The most concrete publicly available demonstration of this technique so far is a system called V-JEPA 2, released by Meta in June 2025. Trained on video inputs, V-JEPA learns by masking certain regions of footage – obscuring a moving ball, say, over multiple consecutive frames – and repeatedly predicting not pixels, but abstract representations of what was hidden to learn a compact internal model of how the ball moves. What LeCun and his colleagues have shown, then, is that their system can model the causal structure of the physical world without having to reconstruct it in detail. Which isn’t to say that JEPA is necessarily any better than generative world models. Its advocates argue that it will be, of course. “Without abstraction, AI systems will stay limited to narrow tasks,” says Balestriero. But V-JEPA 2 is yet to clearly demonstrate that its abstract representations are sufficiently meaningful to enable an agent operating in an open-ended environment to reason and plan. “The biggest missing piece is the question of, how do we know that the abstraction is actually useful,” says Balestriero. “This is where there is a huge amount of active research right now, to understand: what do you capture, or how do you encode something very rich about the world that is useful for planning downstream.” Hafner, for his part, isn’t convinced that more compressed representations of reality are better. “Yann is right about many things, even if maybe he expresses them more controversially than necessary, and the JEPA approach is very promising,” he says. “But I don’t think that representations should be compressed and tiny. Ultimately, you want to learn strong representations, and what we did with Dreamer 4 [which trains with pixels but predicts in abstract space] is incredibly robust.” http://localhost:56805/wp-content/external_image/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubmV3c2NpZW50aXN0LmNvbS93cC1jb250ZW50L3VwbG9hZHMvMjAyNi8wNy9TRUlfMzA1OTUxNDI1LmpwZw__.jpg Some tech investors say that world models will be an effective way to power humanoid robots Wang Jiang/VCG via Getty Images More broadly, it is also far from clear at this stage if any of the world models in development – whether they learn and predict by reconstructing the world in high-fidelity or by inferring abstract representations – will ultimately be enough to get us to AGI. Now, it’s fair to say that AGI is another elastic term, and that claims about world models as a route towards it exist on a spectrum, with some of the most ambitious suggesting that learned simulations of physical reality could become the foundation of generally capable reasoning agents. When it released Genie 3, for instance, DeepMind insisted world models are “a key stepping stone on the path to AGI, since they make it possible to train AI agents in an unlimited curriculum of rich simulation environments”. Indeed, Hafner argues that “if you have systems that are able to represent the rules governing the world, then you’re approaching something like AGI because that’s understanding, that’s a key part of intelligence”. For his part, LeCun talks about them as a vital component of broader systems, rather than the whole story. And yet it is worth exploring the extent to which the kinds of world models in development would approximate human intelligence, because it can reveal what else might be required. Hafner says the most immediate requirement is temporal abstraction – that is, being able to reason not just about what will happen in the immediate future, but as things continue to play out. “You cannot just simulate everything at a sub-second, frame-by-frame level, because humans do not reason like that,” he says. “This is one of the open frontiers.” Tenenbaum goes further. Human world models aren’t just engines for predictions, he says, “they are much richer than that”. Human reasoning depends on various forms of causal abstraction and hypothesis-driven inference – not to mention models of other minds – which together allow us to flexibly recombine knowledge across different situations. “A key open question in all this is whether scaling up these world models will recover that richness, and my view is that it likely won’t,” says Tenenbaum. Mitchell makes a similar, if slightly broader, point. “I think the ability to have a kind of compressed, simulatable representation of aspects of the world is very important, and this notion of world models is probably going to result in useful improvements,” she says. “But I think there are probably lots of other aspects of intelligence that matter.” http://localhost:56805/wp-content/external_image/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubmV3c2NpZW50aXN0LmNvbS93cC1jb250ZW50L3VwbG9hZHMvMjAyNi8wMy8wNDExNTc0MS9TRUlfMjg3ODAxODkyLmpwZz93PTkwMCZoPTYwMCZjcm9wPTE_.jpg A very serious guide to buying your own humanoid robot butler You can now buy a humanoid robot housekeeper for less than the price of a second-hand car. But before splashing out, there’s something you need to know Another limitation of AI systems today, says Mitchell, is a lack of metacognition – an awareness of their own cognitive state, of what they know and don’t know, and how uncertain they are. “Is that fixable with a world model? Well, it depends what kind of world model, obviously,” she says. “But I’m a little worried that the notion of ‘world model’ is going to be used as the term for the difference between what we have now and ‘AGI’.” All of which suggests that world models as currently conceived may well be necessary for human-level machine intelligence, but not necessarily sufficient. Indeed, while it looks increasingly likely that they will be powerful and genuinely useful in robotics, and possibly scientific simulation too, it is far from a sure bet that they will replicate the way world models work in human cognition, never mind human-level intelligence more broadly. “One of the big misconceptions is that intelligence is a single thing, that there is a single world model in the brain,” says Tenenbaum. “What we actually have is the ability to run many different models depending on the context, task and goal.” Ultimately, then, the task of replicating what my 3-year-old daughter’s brain is capable of when it comes to modelling and predicting the physical world – even if it doesn’t stop her knocking glasses of water off the table – is not one to be underestimated. What are AI world models good for?

Phone Scottish water and they will send somebody out to sort it.

It’s just a pretty crap valve all round. Having to use a screwdriver firstly, and then having to guess if it’s exactly ‘off’ vs passing slightly for another. These just do 360° spins vs the tap type valves which have positive stops to tell you you're fully on or off. The internal bore is tiny, and they are quite noisy if you've got good water pressure. Any bypass should have the same bore / lpm capacity also.

@David Cooke there are other anomalies too. I'm designing for myself in this instance, and there is lots of ground. I'll make up my mind when I see in the trenches and test the porosity. A balance between the codes and my own opinion. But if I was designing for someone else I would follow the codes , including taking the more cautious options, because 1. I don't want to have to come back to sort it. 2. There is professional liability. 3. What if it didn't work and esp if it overflowed into adjacent property? With some clients I might explain, and share the risk/ benefit. With others I'd take no chances. As @Gus Potter and I established, the regs take precedence but as professionals we would see that they had probably miswritten the regs and that the intention is clear. Also as professionals we can decide on what is best. The regulations are actually the little green bit at the start and the rest is suggestions based on research. Our drainage field is into what was once commercial orchard. I'm expecting the percolation to be very variable, depending on old drainage and voids created by roots. An average would be meaningless if the percolation numbers are say 40s/mm and 120s/mm. What I expect to do is put in the smaller area of trench but have scope to extend it. For the record I have established that all groundwater will eventually end up 800m away downhill in a stream.....which we could pipe into direct technically. So we are really doing SUDS in slowing down flow and flooding. BUT if a bco wanted proof they'd expect it to follow the regs.

@David Cooke great post for spotting this. For the record @saveasteading CEng asked me for a second opinion on this as he had also spotted conflicts and wanted to sound me out. I can't take any credit for his astute discovery. @David Cooke both of us are interested in how we address this. I won't say any more just now as the credit has again to go to @saveasteading for spotting this anomaly. It's not just an anomaly, it can potentially lead to a significant increase in size of the drainage field. as you say David. . which is very expensive or if you don't have the space can be a major show stopper. I'll leave it at that for now and let @saveasteading to flesh this out for you when and if he has time.

Doesn't really matter what you or anyone else likes, your wife wins - sorry it's just life, or live with the throwback for the rest of your life living there. But I agree with the wife choice

Are you letting it go silver? Have you viewed final "colour" with mortar as well? Image of our attached just as eg. Took us a while to choose whole "package"

My Amtico fitter was outstanding. It is all he does and he is so good that he limits his quote area When he installed our >100sq m he trimmed every single plank on two sides at a 45 degree angle to stop the "glue squidge" problem. This was absolute genius and I cannot fault the quality of the install. I had some very fixed ideas about how I wanted it laid but all his "suggestions" were the exact right ones in hindsight. I have laid Amtico myself in a previous house and I got the "glue squidge" problem and a line where two plywood boards butted together, I was still pleased with my efforts but a proper professional makes a huge difference in quality Regards Tet

Amtico Spacia are the cheaper brand and the planks repeat more often than its more expensive sister-offerings You are also hampered by the laying pattern you have chosen. (IMO) Straight patterns show up repeats and duplicates more obviously. This is one of the reasons we chose a herringone laying pattern for our Amtico Spacia. Over time and especially as you fill your room with rugs and other furniture the repeat highlights will become less noticeable Regards Tet

Not nonsense - £104 billion from 2010 to 2023 - https://journals.uclpress.co.uk/ucloe/article/id/3584/ The fact that bills continue to go up is obscuring the fact that renewables have mitigated that rise. Its not immediately obvious, but a very simple and obvious concept when you first see it: Renewables displace other generation (obviously). That other generation would have been more expensive than the generation that wasn't displaced (again, obviously) So we just need to net off the "subsidy" of those renewables against the expensive generation they displaced £104 billion saved QED.

Our Amtico supplier/fitter provided the information when asked Our choice is both heavily patterned and embossed with a wood grain pattern. The format is 5 tiles (individual)in a 450mm square, so although there are repeats they are way less visible than they could be. Even then a couple of tiles were removed and repositioned during the process. At the end if the day they are not wood, and were bought with long term practicality considerations as well as aesthetics. Photo shows the initial laying out process (after the floor had ply and leveller) If you are really unhappy is it too late to change design now? Better that than live regretting it for the next ? years

Wera do a pz2 bit that has a collar on the bit holder so you can’t sink them in past flush.