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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.

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 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.

And yes, that title is a nod to the wisdom of the Beverley Knight song. But it also applies to self building, methinks. [Health Warning: The following diatribe focuses on the 2% that’s not gone perfectly, and risks massively underplaying the 99% which has gone right. But maybe that focus is what makes selfbuild what it is, and why for normal people, it just doesn’t add up.] We are now in, living at no. 11. Well, not this exact moment in fact. Right now we are cooking in Flora the Explorer (campervan around which our garage was designed), parked on a cliff top on the Isle of Wight overlooking the English Channel. Being boiled alive (slight exaggeration) in a Fiat tin can is at least variety from being boiled alive (bigger exaggeration) in a new build. We moved in to a substantially but not completely finished house just in time to enjoy some heatwaves. How very fashionable. The decision to categorise the main bedroom fancoil as ‘to be done later’ seemed such a good idea when the choice was delaying moving out of the s@#*, I mean rental, and in my few rational moments I know that it was a good idea. If we had stayed the rental would have been much, much worse than no. 11 is. But if I’d had free choice I’d not have started our living in our new pad in a heatwave. Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda (henceforth SWC) put the fancoil in. It’s made a bit worse by our choice of sleeping in the west facing front (sort of) bedroom, which sits next to our biggest window, the one above the front door overlooking our stairs and hall. We passed part O with flying colours, so we now view the afternoon solar gain with incredulity at what a house would be like that didn’t pass part O. But every day is a school day, and the first thing we learn was that we could comfortably sleep in no. 11, even on a sofa bed, at temperatures which would have prevented rest at our last house. It’s hard not to attribute that to the life support (MVHR). The worst days at our last house were when the nights were completely still, and I’m guessing that meant higher humidity and CO2 levels. No more, not with life support. We are now in the habit of whacking the life support onto Boost n Bypass once the outside temp falls nicely below the inside temp. Even when we have the upstairs windows open it seems to help. To start with opening a window (in my mind) required kneeling to confess our sins and three Hail Marys, but I soon got over it. And whilst we still don’t have our fancoil(s) thats how we are managing the upstairs overheating. Downstairs is a different matter. Downstairs we have porcelain tiles throughout, gently cooled by Maxi the moody teenager heat pump. It has helped enormously and once we have a way of transferring some of the cool to upstairs life will be peachy, though it’ll likely be 6°C outside by then, given the current todo list. We’ve wrestled with Maxi to get it to a sensible working arrangement, and that work is ongoing. At the mo if we set the WC curve (no, thats not the shape of the toilet pan) so that the flow temp is set to 15°C Maxi bothers for about 20 to 30 minutes and then sulks for an hour or two. Following a call with the Energy Lab, the distributor of Maxi, it’s better than it had been as some of the settings weren’t sensible, but it must and will do better. Our tiles sit at 19°C to 20°C, which matches the return temp to Maxi after a few minutes of sulking. That makes for a noticeable improvement in downstairs temperature but it’s as low as we can get it without cranking up Maxi to full condensy by dropping the target flow temp loads. A work in progress which is currently delayed by The Energy Lab being about as responsive as I am when a glowing J asks when I hope to get the fancoil(s) in. SWC properly tested Maxi when first installed. Sigh. It has given us the ability to start the balancing process, which I think is a good thing. The downstairs bedroom and bathroom floors were colder than the rest of downstairs, enough to make it slightly uncomfortable in bare feet, so I’ve tweaked the flow controls on the manifold and that has helped. The downstairs bathroom is in the process of being renamed the paddling pool. We have gone for a sort of wet room shower and loo, etc. and it looks the business even if I do say so myself - it’s just that we didn’t realise how wet a wet room would be. That bloody great big rain head shower jobby feels great when showering but oh boy, the water distribution! I think we can get away without a sign indicating which is the deep end, but for some guests we might need to sand bag the door. Some friends of ours came to dins recently, they have a nice big downstairs shower wet room with a bloody great big rain head shower. No doubt that was part of the subliminal thinking route to choosing them ourselves. During the inevitable tour (we are in huge danger of continuing to be self build bores for years to come) we shared our concerns regarding the paddling pool. “Oh yes” they happily said “we never use ours, far too messy”. Humph. SWC asked them methinks. And you can guess how good a nicely cooled tiled floor is at drying out. But there’s a ‘learn’ even there. We’ve discovered that the floor dries out much better if the door is left closed. The mechanism seems to be that the undercut forces the whole room to be ventilated, whereas if the door is open, which is how I automatically left it when it needed to dry, the moving air goes through at a higher level and the floor stays wet. Who knew? (Everyone with life support, probably!) Anyways, all that misses out all the fun of getting from our last post to here. Maybe that would be a good thing, but if you don’t have a strong constitution, look away now…. Last time I happily reported that we had dug our trench to connect our poo pipes to the sewer, and we’d found the capped off sewer, and the levels all worked. Happy days. Till the next step. In theory all we had to do was uncap the sewer, put the last few meters of pipe and a manhole in, and then bury the whole shebang. In theory. In practice when one of the groundworkers popped the plug out of the sewer we had a bit of a foul fountain. Quite a bit in fact. He was so shocked he literally just stood in the hole with his mouth open (yes, literally), whilst I and his workmate screamed at him to get out. He did, but he was rather messy. I threw a block into the trench and pushed some soil in to limit the aromatic expansion. It subsided with about 8’ of swarfega consistency sewerage filling the trench. Lesson: it’s not happy days till the hole’s filled in. I knew our sewerage run was old and wasn’t on the Anglian Water sewerage map. I didn’t think that mattered. Wrong. Not on the map means not maintained. We are the second from the end of a run of perhaps 5 houses on an ancient spur running to the main road main sewer. There had been reports of the drains backing up in the past (danger sign no 2 I missed), and I knew from my water level that the whole run was very shallow and had little fall. Danger sign no. 3. In the year the sewer was capped off the debris that had sat in the pipe for decades had collected lots of gooey solids and was apparently only letting liquids through. If a few more months had gone by next door would have noticed it backing up, but we hit the jackpot timing wise and many linear meters of pipe’s worth of thick sludge finally saw daylight. It took a week to get the whole run blasted out and the stuff that came out was horrendous. We had excellent service from Anglian Water, they even dug out and took away the by then remaining solids from our trench, before spraying many litres of disinfectant. Then work could resume. It delayed some things by a week and made site access a nightmare as walking a plank over septic ancient sewerage is not for the faint hearted (or the sensible). I’ll remember that long after I’ve forgotten the excitement of seeing the bathrooms tiled, or the downstairs porcelain floor tiling grow daily, or the test lighting of the woodburner, or us exporting lecky for the first time. Yet in many ways things like those or the posh Lino going down upstairs or the Pax wardrobes sprinting into shape or the furniture going in and looking just right or many, many happy things are far more important than the wrinkles. Over a relatively short space of time the shell of a house got coloured in to start to resemble our home. Making one’s self stand back and notice current status, let alone daily progress, is a skill that will always ellude me. When there are others on site (old fogey repeating himself yet again warning!) my time disappears in a whirl of checking and answering questions and tea making and organising and tidying up and ordering for other days and and and…. and I get nothing done myself. Except that is getting something done but it doesn’t feel like it. Bits of kitchen and utility room arrived and got fitted, painting got done, internal doors finally arrived many weeks after they were due and got fitted, and in odd moments late each day and at weekends I got to do stuff myself, including some plumbing. Doesn’t feel like plumbing in many ways as there’s no flux or burnt fingers involved. It’s more like Lego. Cut the pipe to length with glorified scissors, select the correct bit, click, realise the mistake, swear whilst taking off the incorrect bit, click on the actually correct bit, turn on the water and wait for the drip that doesn’t appear. So simple it’s almost surreal. I’m used to electrics just working, perhaps because it’s my background, but with plumbing it’s almost like I need to find and fix a leak to feel comfortable. In my mind the time leading up to us moving in is a big mix of memories with few distinct bits, but between J and I we kept things just about under control enough to get ready to move in, meaning J kept an overview in the form of lists of the bits we needed done. Vital. One big milestone was commissioning the life support and the dreaded air test. I built a nice strong stand for the Zehnder unit as otherwise it would have been hung on the block outer skin of the downstairs bedroom wall and we were convinced the hum would keep guests awake. Good news if like me, one doesn’t like guests, but apparently not a good thing. So when I turned the system on I realised it was faulty as it wasn’t running. Only the air was moving but it was just so ridiculously quiet, so actually it was working. (SWC gone and stood next to a working Zehnder to realise I could have saved myself time and bolted it straight to the wall). It defaults to a lot higher flow speed than we needed, and even then it was nice and quiet. So after commissioning it’s wonderfully invisible, apart from the odd shaped vent thingies in the ceilings. Works brilliantly at clearing the steam from the one little shower room we had working to move in with too. Very happy. The air test was not quite such a happy thing, however. Over and over again I was told I’d done everything needed and we were bound to be fine. Rolly, our chippy, had never seen such an airtight build and he knew we’d be super airtight. If only. 1.65. Bugger. During the first test, after a false start where I’d left a 40mm waste pipe uncapped giving us a 5, it was identified that I had a sodding great big leak at or near the base of my internal soil stack. I just knew I’d have a problem with our flat roof and the junctions thereof so I put lots of time into that. That was all fine. I absolutely knew that the entry point of the 15 MVHR ducts into the house would be a problem so I put time into that too. All fine there too. I knew from what I read on here that my Heath Robinson DIY loft hatch would leak. Nope. I thought I’d taped to death the DPM round the soil stack. We all know what Thought did. The DPM forms the bottom of our airtight layer, being taped everywhere (or so I thought) to the VCL. I knew all along we should take time out to test the airtightness. I even borrowed a leaf blower to have a half baked go at it using our loft hatch to test airtightness. But I never took a day out to do it. There was always something else that needed to be focussed on at the time, the silly and arguably unnecessary air test can be done later. Only it never was. SWC cubed. The leak appears to be near the bottom of the soil stack but as it’s all but encased now in studwork and plastered plasterboard so where the actual breach is is impossible to tell. I went nuts with the Passive House Systems airtight and insulating foam but it made no difference at all. There’s little leaks in the external doors but nothing like the one near the soil stack. I’m guessing we are looking at a hole about the width of an index finger. Perhaps something a single piece of tape could have sorted. Who knows? But does it actually matter? Well, there’s a good question. I’ve not rerun Jeremy’s spreadsheet and in truth the horse has already bolted. And if that means Maxi is actually slightly undersized for -3°C outside then at least we do have the woodburner and we could always invest in a little fan heater. But as you can imagine, I am royally annoyed with myself. The house is shaping up to be a really nice home to live in. The garden is coming along a treat. We love living in that location. That’s the 99% I need to focus on. Maybe writing this interminable blog is part of that reconciliation, and I know it will happen, but I’m still really, really, really annoyed at myself. In case you aren’t familiar with the song I’ll share one particularly apposite line from it. "Shoulda woulda coulda" are the last words of a fool. Sigh.

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 🤠

Hi everyone - I'm Tim Newbie selfbuilder here, in the early stages of planning our self-build project in South Wales (But currently living in Bristol). Looking to build a family home to passive house principles, and avoid any Grand-designs style crises during the process! Excited to be part of this forum, which is a great source of info! I look forward to picking your collective brain more as we make our design choices and progress with the project.

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.

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.

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....

It is worth pointing out that we started the transition to low carbon generation nearly 2 decades ago. Apart from some very small scale wind farms, hobby PV and a bit of hydro, we had virtually nothing. Since the we have added 55 GWp if wind and solar. Now the name plate capacity if RE cannot be compared directly with thermal generation, but it contributed close to 40% of our generation. It also contributed to our pumped storage as well. I have not looked at storage capacity in a while, but must be close to 1 GWh now. I cannot see any reason why we should not hit 90% low carbon generation by 2040, except if there is not the political will to do so. I think the political will is there, we tend to hear the naysayers more because they are the vocal minority, the majority says nothing. I am going to repeat what I said about cost. Wind and PV are the cheapest forms of, and it is coming in bold , NEW generation. It is not competing with the same contracts as legacy generation.

It depends! But here is a rough outline of how we go about designing steel fire protection. The following is in the context of the self builder, not multi storey, multiple occupancy structures. Ok, the process / theory is.. roughly this. The starting point is to understand how steel behaves when it gets hot. Someone ask me / others a while back.. why does my oven not start to melt / distort when I cook a pizza hot? The above is what we call a fire curve (SCI, Steel Construction Institute data ). There are different fire curves. They vary depending on fire loading (how much and what types of stuff can contribute to a fire, how "intense and rapid" the heat delivery) but the above is one we would refer to in a typical domestic self build. You can see that up to about 350 Celsius the steel maintains much of its strength, which is why your oven does not "melt" and fall to bits. After that the steel strength starts to plummet. When we fire protect steels as @saveasteading says This is correct. All we are doing it to stop the steel from getting hot enough, then soften too much, and thus not carry the loads on it for the time required by the building regulations for example. Now we can either select a geometry of steel member and make it very heavy such that there is so much mass of steel that it does not get heated quickly enough to soften to the point of failure. In lay terms. If we had a solid round bar of steel say 150mm in diameter it has a large cross section area compared with the exposed surface. This is what we call the heated perimeter / cross section area ratio (Hp/A), the Euro codes have slightly different way of presenting but they mean the same. They are presented using the ratio Area / Volume, A/V. But if we have the same cross section area of steel and weight in an I shape (a universal beam) it has a much larger surface area and thus will heat up much more quickly and thus lose strength more quickly. Now we ain't going to be using solid 150mm diameter steels. What we could look to do is is insulate the steel. This could be by way of fire proof plasterboard or intumescent paint. But also we could build the steel into a masonry wall and maybe have only one side exposed to the fire on the inside of say a garage. Or we could have the steel built into a floor that in itself insulates some of the exposed faces of the steel. Below is a screen shot of a table that shows how we need to consider the exposed sides. They key here is that the lower the section factor the slower the steel will heat up. The section factor changes depending on how many sides of the steel are exposed. But to go back to what @Great_scot_selfbuild asked., which was how heavy does a steel need to be so it does not need fire protection? The info below is taken from Corus literature 2003 as an easy generic example. The bottom line (Hp 61m^-1) is of interest to us here in a domestic self build. Using a design temperature of 550 deg you can see that the bottom blue line hangs in there, all other things being equal for 30 min. So let go back now and find a steel section with a section factor of lower than 61 m^-1 to try and get a handle on how big a column needs to be for example. A 203 x 203 x 86kg/m is a candidate if it has three sides protection (section factor 60), but that is a heavy steel. You also need to handle this safely on site. Ok let's see how a box section compares. Ok we can get down to 60 for three sides exposed protection.. not much difference. But if we reduce the sides exposed the numbers get a lot better. I've not shown them here. That main remaining key bit is what we call the load ratio mentioned above as 0.6 ratio. When we design a beam / columns or pretty much any structural member in your house we design for the normal expected loads. The self weight, permanent loads and the imposed ( live loads, people, book shelves etc) but in a fire we recognise that the floors, roof etc are probably not going to be fully loaded with people for example during a fire, the permanent / self weight load is still there. So we can make a reduction in the load if a fire occurs. Its based on probability and the loads that could be reasonably expected in the case of a fire. We call this an accidental load case and the safety factors get reduced for example. If we designed everything for the worst case buildings would be too expensive to build! The load ratio is the load (stress generated) during a fire compared with the ultimate capacity of the member. Often we design beams to be restrained by say a timber floor.. but if this has burnt away we can't count that. To conclude: The above I hope, gives you all a bit of insight into what we need to do / think about to design steels for fire. The take away is that sometimes it works using a heavy steel to avoid the expense of fire protection. The design can become much more complex if bolted / welded connections need to be taken into account. This kind of design consideration is a bit complex if you've not done it before, it's not common bedtime reading! It can be a tricky subject once you get into detail, something that many Architect's, BC officers are also not too familiar with. But it's a fundamental part of producing a safe design. My objective in writing is to try and help BH folk gain a bit more knowledge so you can ask and phrase any questions you have to your designers from a lay person perspective. You make a good point. Yes steels expand in a fire and will change shape and distort the surrounding structure, to the point it often has to be later demolished. The objective is that the building hangs in there so it does not fall on the fire brigade, set light or fall onto a neighbouring building not least.

Sorry I don't mean I am personally hoping the English and Welsh get these wind farms and pylons in the numbers we have been "given" in Scotland. What I am saying is while for so long England in particular has banned them, they have instead been built up here so the good folk of England who largely make the rules, have not seen the blot on the landscape that they are, and if the good folk of England don't see them, they obviously think they are good.

To an extent, outside of a very small number, none of us, no matter how well read are able to be experts on any particular topic, so we have to take our views from those who we see as experts. I have not read all of the source material, conducted my own experiments or submitted my theories to scientific challenge so any assertion I make is potentially a call to authority. The same is true for the other side of the argument. All any of us can do is weigh the situation in front of us, which seems to be following a common playbook. First - deny. Next, obfuscate - its not anthropogonic etc. Finally, fatalism - we cant do anything anyway. Some things are clear however: It is hot. Much hotter than when I was young, and hotter every year. There is a physical mechanism for this heat being caused by C02 emissions Modelling and predictions of the C02 effect are matching reality If it is C02 and if we don't do anything we are in for a very bad time If it isn't C02, and we reach net zero, we are in for a pretty good time still It does make me laugh (cry) when people blame renewables for high prices. The UK spent at least £75 billion on supporting energy prices just during 2022-23 due to gas prices. It is also the case that renewables knock out the most expensive conventional electricity generators, so the wholesale price of electricity is reduced by renewables, which gives the impression of a subsidy but the reality is the reverse - https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2025/oct/wind-power-delivers-ps104-billion-net-benefit-uk-consumers I do get frustrated with people who just raise problems like there will never be a solution. The nature of progress is you don't always have all the answers, if you never started a journey unless you knew how it could be done then nothing new would ever be invented. It is also a demonstrable fact that renewables are more suitable from a security perspective. More distributed generation, less reliance on critical things like pipelines, LNG facilities and so on - we're literally right in the middle of 2 wars that are being defined by attacks on energy infrastructure. Really?

I am quite happy to do a design for you…..please let me know if I can help…..

If your drawing say 2 off 8x2 I agree with @Oz07 do that, no need to over think it. By the time the 2 pieces are all joined together and fixed in place they aren't going anywhere.

I have been looking at this seriously recently the conclusion is unless you can spend 70k or more on one its a total waste of time although they say these cheap vertical units they are rated at 5kw /10kw -- that is maximum theoretical output before any losses etc and you need to be in winds of 25mph + to get close to that and then the cost of a suitable mounting pole and foundation most of these small units you will be lucky to ever get more than 1kw from them -and do we believe the life span - I do not--its basically an electric motor on its back spinning 24/7 so I have decided better to have some more ground mounted solar panels up in the high level waste garden If I do anything --which will face south-separate invertor coupled to my 17.5kw battery stack as my main array on the roof faces S/w and get little output once you get later in the year because of lower sun angle and little till late morning -- but once the sun gets at them -- i can see 11kw+ so the idea is to fill in the morning and as they face south will also carry on all day another 5kw of panels -- still waiting on costs to make final decision but although I have lots of wind it would never pay back in my life time with a smaller wind turbine so for anyone not in a very windy position it will never work

Inside turn for us. Can't be bothered fiddling with a key to lock doors from inside. (if I had to the key would remain in the lock) If the weakest link to entry is breaking a triple glazed glass unit, you are not doing bad.

We just used bulk bags, which all the excess concrete and washout went into. Excess water drained out of the bottom.

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

It is subjective but firstly is your whole frontage brick, may make a difference.... We only have a plinth, (9 at highest where ground slops at back of house) so we chose high contrast mortar that "matched" the cladding. If it had been the whole house, would have been too stark for us, and maybe the planners. Having said all that my vote would be nit no.1 (too warm), no.3 if your looking for high contrast, no.4 if you want it to "blend"

For me this is a interesting challenge to design a solution. I appreciate that you find it far from interesting and it's a worry. Stage 1: One option I would be inclined to look at first is to install another beam or beams below the ones you have if it turns out they are so heavily corroded they are well below capacity. Remember we would look initially to design these for the latest loadings prescribed in the design codes. The following is based on using a trick we deploy when we are needing to support say a large opening in a historic building or repair steels, more applicable to you. The existing beams have a point of support on say the main walls. Thus in the round we know these are the strong and proven points. It's a reasonable starting assumption the walls locally will have pretty much finished settling in and around the existing supports, thus we want to put our new point loads at these positions. Let's say, as we don't have much information that the beams are supporting the ground floor flat but also an internal spine wall that runs up the building and it turns out there is a fair bit of load. It make the challenge more interesting. This is in a bit of reverse order. How do we calculate the loads and do some other thinking. Well the loads are easily calculated once we know the building layout, floor and roof span directions. From that we can calculate the forces on the existing beam/s. We would want to split these between permanent loads ( dead loads from the materials) and imposed ( live loads) from people, furniture, snow roof load etc. Next we would want to have a look at the existing corroded beams, try and identify their section properties when new and as they are now, corroded. We can then make a reasoned guess as to what their original design strength was and what it is now. The extra thinking comes for example as one obvious question is why has it not fallen down to date? Have the beams deflected a bit too much and shed load elsewhere. Remember a building does not often fall down until it has exhausted every alternative load path. This is what SE's often call redundancy, which helps stop what we also cause disproportionate collapse, like the domino effect. We would want to get a handle on this before we access any confined space. Any Engineer is going to want to do a pretty comprehensive dilapidations survey. This heads off any "adventure’s seeking to take advantage, but it also protects the honest residents if some further cracking occurs during the works. In summary stage one is doing some fag packet calculations, a survey and from that we can get a feel for how the building is "working". Stage 2: Again not quite in the right order but it easier to hold the narrative. Lets say we can install beams under the existing, then do some bolting etc to support the loads, maybe by stiffening the webs of the existing beams or by using other simple plates / angle sections. This means the new beam/s load the supporting walls in the same place, proven to have worked so far. The big thing is that there is a good chance you won't be able to get the new beans into the basement in one complete length. Thus splices will be required, which tend to flex a bit. Also critically the new beams won't take up the load unless we pre deflect them. For them to carry load the building would need to settle onto them.. high probability of cracking as we move up the building. There is a technique we use on historic buildings where we get the new beams in with a bit of clearance and then jack between the old beams and say the top of a new beam to pre bend the new beam so it takes up the load. We have calculated the loads so have a bench mark as to how much we need to jack / pre bend. We are only talking mm here so we would use say dial gauges. In practice what we do is jack it a bit then run up stairs and see if cracking is starting or if existing cracks are opening up, doors starting to jamb an so on. This takes time, it's not a one day job! Stage 3: As above and in reverse order. The new beams often need to rest on a new padstone below the existing one spreading the load from the existing corroded beams or we need a spreading arrangement. This is partly a detailing and practical thing. But once access is gained with a fair wind usually there is a way of applying the load to the supporting walls in the same place as the existing beams are. Again simplistically we just trick the building, it's sub structure into "thinking" nothing has changed above. But this is not an exact science and 99% of the time some minor movement will occur and that has to be communicated to all parties. Comment: Infilling the basement or sifting the loads to a different place invites lots of potential settlement problems and so on. You would need to investigate the basement floor and the soil under which is going to be less consolidated than the soil under the main load bearing wall for example. Construction safety is going to be the driver here in terms of a structural solution. I would look to have at least head height clearance for folk to work. Two means of escape from the basement. Make sure we have a good ventilation strategy during and after the works, avoid any welding, use of volatile paints etc and make sure there is compliance with all the regs relating to working in confined spaces. In summary it may turn out that the SE solution is not complex, it will likely need a diligent / experienced and well supervised Contractor. The hard part is herding the rest of the cats, project administration and agreement of where the liability lies etc. This goes along way towards explaining why many designers don't want the hassle of a project like this, the design fee has to be attractive not least.

I am that plumber. During my renovations I had my washer on a hose that was about 5m long, absolutely no problem for like 3 years. Obviously not best practice but it certainly worked.

No. Insulate the room, and ventilate it, but “throw a blanket over the battery”?!?!?!? NO!

I (G) did hours and hours of working through options for wall build ups. Drove J, the architect and a lot of buildhub dudes mad with my endless ‘what ifs’. In the end the conclusion surprised me. Getting the most wall insulation is not paramount. Adding insulation underfloor and in the loft is easy. Improving airtightness (don’t get me started) is massively more important than absolute wall u value. Glazing further undermines the benefit of excessive wall insulation. So then decrement delay (ask a nearby grown up to explain that one) and sound attenuation become the driving factor. Had I known what a bugger PIR is to work with I’d have factored that in too, but I didn’t back then. Frame batts (not roll as it falls out) is nicer to work with too. Just don’t push too much in. And don’t ask me why unless you’re wearing ear defenders lol

I will get to procedural vegetation honest. Had a sphere to drive over terrain working i.e. physics remap as you move so effectively infinite also. But the sphere bugged me. Trying to procedurally generate something decent was always poor - like the original face attempt. So, bought a rigged and animated model to use! But also I got excited about procedurally generated creatures so invented creature lab! - some quite funny!, needing work of course. But AMAZING!

Where things are at... https://youtu.be/nl__O_QGIR4?si=G_CGnPuO8etvYzmV

Every windfarm is cleared (or not) by MOD. Much overstated, see any research on the topic. Not specific to wind. They are going regardless. North sea is a declining basin and fewer fields are cost competitive. Oil can be sold regardless of whether it is used in the UK - see Norway! Blade factories in Hull & IoW. Vestas Nacelle factory coming to Scotland Monopile fabrication facility on Teeside JDR Cables at Hartlepool, multiple Prysmian cable factories We probably make as much of wind farms as we do oil and gas facilities. Piper alpha?

We knew our new house would be very well insulated and air tight so the heating demand would be low. Our rational response to that was to only put UFH on the ground floor because bedrooms should always be cooler and heat rises. Now we are thanking our lucky stars that our ASHP can cool, I wish I had put UFH in the bedrooms. During the current heatwave our ground floor is lovely and cool: 22c / max 24c, that coolness doesn't reach upstairs except via the MVHR mixing. I think if I had my time again I would put UFH (or rather Under Floor Cooling) in the bedrooms to aid sleep during heatwaves.

That's only applicable to ToU tariffs. If you want no extra charges use a flat rate tariff. ToU tariffs are an option, you make your choice and then live by it. Our battery takes us through the expensive periods. Never use grid energy unless in a cheap period - until I mess up things, which happens to everyone.

You need a stove covered in soapstone and a low capacity to slow everything down. After the first year lighting ours twice and melting, we tried the second time the following year. But now only add one small log at a time, turn the air down to lowest setting to still get a clean burn. Now that log lasts maybe 1 to 2 hours, the heat spreads across the whole house, 2 logs on the coldest day is more than enough. NO it leads to depressurisation of the house. You cannot install a WBS in a house with MVHR safety, unless it has primary and secondary air from outside. It is something the OP needs to think about and plan for. Where will they put the air duct, took us an age to find the correct stove

That's the problem, isn't it? I keep on having to hold back as every time I have an idea I'm far too tempted to create it, and then get sucked in! The landscape looks nice!