Leaderboard

Leaded solder is certainly duller, and dullens quite quickly, after soldering and cleaning the joint initially. Anyone who wanted to establish the use of leaded solder wouldn't struggle tbh, but I doubt if the question would ever be raised, ( or that the BCO would actually give a shit ). If you TOLD them that you've used it that's a TOTALLY different thing, so keep quiet, lie, or use lead free. Simples. TBH, I now prefer soldering with lead free, but hated the stuff when it was first made mandatory. As Jeremy has said its a pita to adjust, but with me soldering literally thousands of joints I've soon forgotten about the differences. As terry said, forget trying to sweat ( solder ) a copper tail to a lead cold mains with lead free solder. You must use leaded for that and then you realise that leaded solder is far easier to form a 'shoulder' with, often referred to as a 'wiped' joint. If you REALLY want to split the atom here, you could happily use leaded for everything other than the drinking water eg all the heating and Ufh / ashp etc as the lead will be 'contained' to the sealed systems separately and away from human consumption. You've got more chance of being hit by a comet than dying of lead poisoning from soldered joints in a domastic install. What a load of bollocks. .

Bugger me I only want to build a wall,

With so much hot air in circulation I wonder that any insulation is needed

As I understand it, if the stove manufacturer states it only needs a 12mm hearth, that is all you need to provide. I see plenty installed on just a slab of stone sitting on the wooden floor.

Your more likely to get swamp gas than radon on your plot

Summer Showers Sorted:

@JohnW I think I have a copy of @Alphonsox costings spreadsheet in work will dig it out for you tomorrow.

Timber batons would be the best bet IMO... Stack a few 4.8m batons on top of each other, bore out your holes. Thread them through and add some spreaders to stop the batten sagging. Count yourself lucky you don't need to do a full cage:

A friend of mine is building a large model railway layout and used loads of the off cuts to build scenery. He said it was easy to sculpt the hills that he then covered with plaster of paris.

A quick update. I've added a wet 0-6 bar gauge to my home-brew pressure test setup and connected up my DCW manifold and cranked it up to 7 bar. One advantage of breaking your system down into separate subsystems if that you can assemble each on the bench and test properly before installing in place. To be honest I had a 28mm dry joint so its lucky that we did this. The problem was that the end of the 28 pipe had a shallow ding in it that I hadn't noticed -- goodness knows why -- but the result was that the end feed solder had a dry bridge, and this caused a joint failure that I needed to redo before the 7 bar test worked. The main fill will be where the 28mm endstop is to the left and the 15mm below will ultimately have a draincock on it, but it is currently a pressure test point. And this is the manifold in position. Not quite as neat as Nick, but it will do Compare this to the photos on the original post. I blame Jan for it being slightly crooked.

I was able to see Slemish from my bedroom window as a kid.

I have bought all sanitaryware and fittings from online plumbers in Germany. A lot of electrical switchgear from online electrical suppliers in Germany and Belgium. A Brink MVHR unit and and Hybalans ductwork from Builders Merchant in Holland. I have access to a VAT number so they very kindly ship with 0% VAT. My bank has very low currency charges so I pay by direct transfer and avoid surcharges from scredit card companies. Clearly theres a bit of risk, but for higher value goods manufactured by European companies, I would recommend it. Without fail the customer service is good. In the scheme of things, its probably saved one percent of the build - I just find it galling to have to pay double in this country just because the goods have crossed the North Sea of the English Channel. Note: there are some German manufacturers whose goods are priced similarly in the UK and Germany - two examples are Hager and Miele.

@TheMitchells Planning Resource maintain an interactive map here: http://www.planningresource.co.uk/article/1212817/community-infrastructure-levy-maps You will probably need to do the free registration option. They also have an entire site section and blog about it. To read some things it may help to add "cache:" before the url to get the Google cache copy. Ferdinand

+1 A good deal of that is perhaps about fixed and variable costs, where the fixed element may be 75% (picking a number out of the air). Ferdinand

@Russell griffiths I have found the Vesma calculator to be the most useful of those available, as most of the others are from commercial companies as a semi-marketing device, and often require registration or are more detailed in the particular area. http://www.vesma.com/tutorial/uvalue01/uvalue01.htm If something is missing from the list, you can probably usefully substitute a similar material (ask here if you need advice). Ferdinand

After our experience back then, I've deliberately been a bit nosey around building sites, and it seems pretty common for construction standards to be pretty lax. I think I know the main reason, it's to do with the amount of money some of the big builders are prepared to pay tradespeople. They expect to pay labourers rates for skilled trades, and end up with the bottom of the pile people who couldn't pass muster working for themselves or a more discerning employer. I've gone so far as to walk around a local part-complete estate nearby, that was only approved on the basis that the houses be built to the old Code For Sustainable Homes Level 4. That implies inspection of every house, unlike the usual system where only one house of a particular type is inspected and the rest are assumed to be the same. I walked around with a thermal imaging camera, on a cold evening before Christmas. The results were shocking. Every single completed house was leaking heat like a sieve, there was missing insulation evident all over the place, including one house where the entire first floor wall at the front had no wall insulation at all. Thermal bridges were all over the place, some almost certainly air leakage around door and window apertures. I discussed what I'd seen when out and about (before I walked around with the thermal camera) with our building inspector, who I'd got to know reasonably well during our build. He reckoned that probably around 60% of new homes didn't comply with Part L of the regs, and, from the tone of his voice, I got the impression that he was quite concerned about it. There's nothing that can be done by building control, whether LABC or a private company, as big builders are allowed to build the majority of their houses without any inspections at all. It seems to hit the news now and again, almost always when a newly moved in resident realises that the heating bills are way higher than they thought they should be. I saw one investigative TV programme some time ago that followed such a story, and one or two unhappy new residents have posted their thoughts around the web. However, the bottom line is that the majority of people who move into a new house just won't bother to complain about, or probably don't even notice, the poor thermal performance. As someone said to me when I was having a bit of a rant about it a couple of years ago, people buying new houses are far more influenced by the kitchen and bathroom bling than they are by the Energy Performance Certificate.

Js has hit the nail on the head. The reason for all the questions is I will probably end up building the frame myself or at least buying a standard frame and improving on it. Last week I was on a site where two houses are going up,I decided to be nosey and go and have a poke about, from 200m away they looked like a fairly cheap frame 150mm studs with some Kingspan stuffed in, well on closer inspection I was horrified with the build quality, I didn't say anything and chatted with the lads putting it up, I asked a few questions and told them I was about to submit my planning and was just doing some research. They both chuckled and said they wouldn't buy one of these, they're crap. When you are dealing with a company with Swedish links in its name you would think you were buying a quality product, how wrong you are, be careful out there. Just as an add on, both these houses have a build cost of over £500,000 that does not include land price. I was concerned so much I have even thought of trying to find the purchaser to warn them.

Thanks for bringing us back to the subject. In your original post, you said that you were considering two methods of wall construction both timber frame both with external timber cladding: the single and double stud wall constructions. The double stud wall construction technical, usually using a Larsen Strut design has only come into popular use after BRE 433 was first developed and even the 2006 edition which is the one that I have doesn't even discuss it. So what this boils down to is do you want a number to plug into a SAP calculation to keep your building inspector happy in which case take the advice that Martin (@Sensus) and Ian (@ADLIan) gave and go with that. However, Jeremy and I made the assumption from your OP that you actually want to understand the difference between the benefits of the "double stud wall" construction. Perhaps addressing your original Q was a mistake on our part. But at a high level, my summary is that: A single wall construction will typically have a U value of ~ 0.25 and a decrement delay factor of <3 hrs. You are also critically dependent on quality control during manufacture since poorly fitted insulation will allow air circulation within the panels with a severe degrading of the actual U-value achieved. There is a some risk of material cold bridging in the frame A Larsen strut construction will typically have a U-value of ~0.12 and if filled with blown cellolisic filler have a decrement delay factor of much > 24hrs. The blown filling technique is far less prone to voids and consequential bridging. The first approach will give you a warm house that you will still need to heat with a conventional central heating system on all floors. The latter (if you get the other system components right) will give you a house that you will only need to heat a couple of months a year and will essentially act as a single zone, so no central heating system is really needed, though you do need some method adding say up to 1 kW during the mid-winter months. Jeremy and I both have a twinwall house so we are talking personally about our experiences. Martin is professionally an architect, Ian is a SAP assessor. Perhaps they can use their expertise also to address your original Q from their perspectives: what are the pros and cons of single wall vs twinwall construction?

Ian, I agree, but during the early stages of trying to get your head around which supplier to use, which build method, etc, it's useful to at least have some understanding as to how the basics of insulation work, before going to the extent of seeking proper values using the BS and BRE 443. As an example, when we first started planning our build we knew, in broad terms, what we could afford and what we wanted to achieve in terms of performance. I also had a basic set of drawings of the house, with no construction detail. I went around at least a dozen frame suppliers to get price and performance data, and found it very, very hard to be able to compare any of them. The final straw for me was visiting a small development being built by one supplier and seeing first hand that the specification they had quoted wasn't being followed in practice by their workers (missing insulation, no cavity closers around windows, problems even getting through the BR air test etc). It was a thoroughly demoralising time. It was then that I decided I needed to try and understand the relative importance, to us, of each element. Doing some basic research (and a lot came from the BRE) I came up with overall U values that would meet our heat loss target, but then learned about decrement delay, and the impact this has on practical comfort level. I ended up going around the whole loop again, and approached a sub-set of suppliers as a "slightly more intelligent" customer, with the intention of trying to find out, as best I could, who really understood what they were offering and who didn't. If I'm honest, I was very disappointed with the majority of the suppliers I took the time to drive fairly long distances to talk to. I ended up with two potential suppliers, both offering similar overall thermal performance in terms of heat loss, but one offering a very much higher decrement delay solution. The only way I got to that point was by a hard slog, and digging through mountains of misleading information, including some from insulation suppliers themselves (try ringing one of them up and asking for the specific heat capacity of their insulation, for example!). Only a handful of insulation manufacturers could provide specific heat capacity or decrement delay factors for their materials. In the end we chose our supplier on the basis that they met our performance spec, offered a lower risk build, by including the insulated foundation system, the fact they had a high decrement delay build system and that their price was OK. I'd be the first to admit that our requirements were just that, our requirements. Everyone doing a self-build will have differing needs, and differing priorities, so what worked for us may well not work for someone else. Finally, I'd just like to reiterate that if I offer something in the way of advice, it should be read in the context of my experience, which is designing and building ONE very low energy passive house. I'm not a professional in the building industry, I had only a DIY level of understanding when we decided to self build around 9 years ago now, and I'm entirely self-taught over that 9 year period when it comes to specific building-related stuff. The only slight advantages I had was having a lot of time to study (I've been retired for 6 years now) and having a reasonably good understanding of physics and mathematics, and I have to say that often the latter has created a bit of controversy, particularly when some suppliers don't seem to understand basic physics and quote data that is highly questionable!

Hi All. For those of you I haven't had the pleasure of speaking to yet, I'm planning a self build but during the day I'm chief technical at a fairly large manufacturer of windows/doors/glazing based in London/Herts. A few of you have PM'ed me with glazing questions so I thought it best to make a separate thread for sharing any info. If anyone needs help with technical details, specification, getting trade prices, e.t.c. fire away. My way of giving back for all the great construction advice I've already received here.

We imported our MVHR/A2AHP from Denmark and saved over 40%, plus we reclaimed the 25% Danish VAT from HMRC OK, so you can do it. The problems are really around any taxes or duties that may apply, the fee payable to clear customs and the transport cost, but there are still savings to be made. I also bought some of the borehole stuff from the USA, as it was a fraction of the price there, and even with shipping and duty/tax it was still cheaper. Again I could reclaim the VAT in the same way, but not the import duty. I think a few here have bought from places like Germany, where it seems that things like kitchen and bathroom stuff can be a fair bit cheaper, and I know of one person who hired a van to drive over and buy a few thousand pounds worth of stuff in Germany and bring it back here, as that was cheaper than shipping, plus he got to see what he was buying before purchase.

But some of us are cash poor, time rich, so I will hapilly spend a couple of hours to save £10

I fitted a venturi shower about five years ago because we had similar problems. It does require soft water to prevent the internals getting furred up but it has worked well up to now.

It's fairly easy really, done it loads. If you have a set of profile boards at either end of the footing mark a line on here where the reo has to go in. Between these marks pull something taught. Either a brickies line or fencing wire, you can now push your reo in giving it a good wiggle up and down to get a good secure hold, if you put a paint mark on the Reo you will know how far to insert it. You can tie it back to the line or just sort of balance it against the line while the concrete sets. What at I think a lot of people are guilty of is overthinking things, you are not building the space shuttle this stuff is used by groundworers on a building site in the mud and rain, as long as you are accurate to about 50 mm you will be spot on. Remember when that concrete has set it is very easy to bend them all nice and straight so they line up with the next stage. CAUTION. Buy some plastic caps to go on top of the exposed reo. A poke in the eye or falling on one could be nasty.

Not sure about Scotland, but here you can't even officially run cables yourself anywhere that they can't be seen for inspection by a competent person, as things like cable grouping, going through insulation and proper support of cables are all a part of the regs, so subject to inspection if you go down the DIY route. Given that there's normally a requirement to fit some form of acoustic insulation between floors and in stud walls, and given that acoustic insulation will almost always be pretty good thermal insulation, cable sizing has to take that into account for any run of cable in insulation; there's a cable size thermal insulation correction that needs to be applied depending on the length of cable within an insulation layer. In a new build it's safe to assume that pretty much all the cabling running in the floor/ceiling void will be effectively running in insulation. Our build has 200mm of acoustic insulation in the ceiling/floor void and 100mm in the stud walls, for example, so almost every cable ended up having to have the derating in the regs applied, as practically every cable in the house ended up in an insulated void somewhere.

If you know someone who would buy his house he would be there in a shot.

Spent most of my childhood summers in Newcastle at shannaghmore. Welcome and good luck.

Welcome @JohnW I am one of the NI contingent on here. I'm in dromara and hoping to get started within the next 6 weeks or so. Good luck with your build.

Good luck with the build. Newcastles a nice part of the world (lived there for nearly 20 years). Hopefully you can add some views of the mountains into the house design.

Think more widely on that one...nice drive, day shift, whiskey, nice sleep, big breakfast. One more half shift, home for tea. Might be the best two days ever!