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Hectic day on site today, so just one pic for now showing side by side panes with one tinted to around 50% and the other untinted. Takes about 3 minutes to tint to this level and about 5 minutes to fully tint (which blocks about 96% of the solar gain). More pics tomorrow.

At the other end of the price spectrum, I have just paid £455 including delivery for a 5Kw ASHP from ebay. I'll let you know in due course if it was a bargain or not....

Hi all, first may I say what a great forum with loads of great advice. I currently live in a large bungalow, on the London/Essex boarders, that still has a wide plot beside it (partly occupied by a double detached garage). i extended the bungalow several years ago to give me the size that I needed at that time, but it's never really 'floated my boat'. I'm now thinking of developing the side plot to get my 'ideal' home. No doubt I'll be asking a fair few questions in due course, but I thought I would introduce myself first.

Rename the file .txt Upload it, with the instruction to rename it correctly (.xls?) before trying to open it.

@NSS, that looks really well. Dog's Gonads in fact.

Yep, it's pretty expensive, but we got a substantial discount for being the first residential customer in the UK. Not sure how easy it would be to retrofit as you need to run cables from the IGUs, zonal switches and a light sensor back to a control panel. Oh, and I should add, our frames are Internorm but those being fitted with the SageGlass were supplied unglazed.

I do like your build. Looks really nice. And now you can run round the house naked

@dpmiller, @JSHarris, @jamiehamy, @Peter M, @Onoff, @Bitpipe, @Crofter, @Temp, @Barney12 and all of you: you speak in tongues. Piccies, gimme piccies of what you's all gabblin' about; please!

Laco Slic-tite is superb. I use it on steam air and gas and it's pretty impressive stuff. A bit messy perhaps but seals up every time.

Welcome and good luck with the project.

It was the builders suggestion, the ones that build my frame, to make the window openings over size and line them with rigid insulation to reduce any cold bridging. It really was simple, make the openings too big, fix 20mm Celotex strips around the sides then fit the windows. fill in any gap left with expanding foam. I later tidied up the packing detail to fit a continuous strip of ply packing, and countersunk the screws into the fixing plates Then the airtightness membrane wraps around and gets taped to the window frames

The details specification for the new smoke clearance system doesn't seem to be easily available, or at least I've not yet been able to find it (I'll keep lokking). The system we had on the office and lab building that was a part of my last programme before I retired, didn't have an fans. There were smoke exit louvres on a structure a bit like a pyramid, on top of the roof, over the main atriums of the building. These louvres were automatically opened in the event of the fire alarm going off, and the ground floor fire exit doors also automatically opened. The natural internal chimney effect created a really powerful updraft in the building, drawing clear air in from ground level and letting the smoke escape from the top of the internal atriums. Thanks for the kind words, I've spent a few tens of hours over the past week trying to gather data on what most probably happened, using a causal analysis method that an acquaintance, Peter Ladkin ( https://causalis.com/10-about/20-people/), developed some years ago. We were both involved in looking at the cause of a fatal accident, and I thought his Why-Because methodology was pretty powerful. I've used it a few times since, when asked to look at accidents by insurance companies, but this tragic fire was a good excuse to apply it to a big accident, with lots of events, as it's a very powerful way of sifting out non-causal events, and weighting the probability of any event being in the primary causal chain.

Thanks @JSHarris for that very thorough and persuasive analysis. You put the media to shame!

That fits well with everything I've looked at and researched about this fire. There are many issues involved, each of which on its own may not have been a major hazard, but when combined they created what amounted to a "perfect storm". The insulation seems to be Class O rated for spread of fire, making it apparently suitable for use on an external wall of a building with multiple dwellings. The same goes for the aluminium composite panels, they also seem to have a Class O rating. The problems that I've found, just from a few hours of digging around, seem to be: - The insulation fire resistance rating doesn't seem to have taken into account the effect of the ventilation gap, and the consequent chimney created between the insulation and the outer rain screen cladding. - The openings in the building don't seem to have adequate, if any, fire stops, so a fire coming out of a window was able to set light to the material on the outside of the building. - The window surrounds and cills were made from PVC, which may have provided the initial fuel source outside the building that allowed the fire to penetrate to the insulation and cladding system. - The PIR RS5000 foam gives off flammable gases when heated, and when combined with a source of fire that was directed and funnelled up behind the rain screen cladding, this created what amounted to a large blow torch burning upwards, with a very strong updraft from the chimney effect. - Once the fire was established behind the rain screen cladding, the thin inner layer of the rain screen aluminium composite burned away, exposing the normally sealed-in polyethylene foam core. This then added further fuel to the fire, allowing the temperature to increase to the point where the aluminium itself started to burn. - At this point, the fire was probably incapable of being extinguished by any appliances that were available. The fire spread vertically at such a speed that it quickly got above the reach of any appliances. Additionally, once the aluminium was burning the fire would have been hard to suppress with water alone. - The high temperature on the outside of the building breached the windows to the other dwellings, allowing the fire to penetrate inside the building. Apart from the combination of design and material specification failings that created the fire risk, there also seems to have been major failings in the fire safety assessment and planning for the whole building. I can find no reference to any fire risk assessment made after the cladding was fitted (the last is dated 2015, before it was fitted). The building control register shows the status of the building as "Completed, Not Approved". There are several stories from residents of the fire alarms not working. The evidence from escaping residents also indicates that the supposed new smoke clearance system for the stair well failed to operate, as smoke in that area, and on the landings, seems to have been the major cause of loss of life, by stopping people from escaping. The fact that the management company still believed that the building was "fire proof", and that they were still giving advice to residents to stay in their flats, shows that there was a major failure to properly assess the changed fire risk. All told, there seems to have been criminal negligence, by several responsible parties, as this was far from being an unknown risk - there have been many facade fires over the past few years, enough for anyone undertaking a project like this to have had the external fire risk near the very top of their risk register.

A useful tip for chuck keys is to tie them to a bit of thin bungee cord, the stuff that's around 5mm diameter. That way you can still use them OK, but the bungee pulls the key out of the chuck as soon as you let go of it.

I'd second that. I acquired a very old, but massively constructed, industrial pillar drill many years ago. It had been thrown out because it didn't have a no-volt switch, just a rotary switch on the left hand side. I bought a no-volt switch contactor box and fitted it to the front of the drill and I've been grateful for the big stop button several times when things have decided to go whizz about.

If you think you will need to let go then you perhaps should have clamped the vice down, much the safer route anyway. Essentially you have to be sure the drill will break before you do, if you are not sure bolt it down.

Cast resin joint. Cheap and impermeable.

Our windows were fitted in openings deliberately made 50mm bigger in both dimensions. The frame opening were first lined with 20mm PUR insulation and any remaining gap then filled with expanding foam.

Just this today 60 squids of fun Cheers @Onoff

I was chatting to someone the other day who said the very same thing. His cunning plan is getting involved in the mens shed movement up here, the aim being that any workshop equipment not wanted by family would pass on for the collective benefit of like minded individuals.

I would rather just sell up and move than have one. If you have a basement, look at a small pump station which can handle solids. Quieter and more reliable, but need to be sunk down.

I went in on Monday for some milk, Just milk, I came out with 3 sets of Alan keys, some screwdriver bits, some pickle topped pork pies (very nice), an electric cool box, a crate of bottled water, a chocolate brioche loaf (also very nice), a desk bell, some round playing cards, a router and a pot of coffee. I had to stop at Tesco Express on the way back to get the milk that I forgot

You don't know what you are missing. We only recently got a local Aldi and it really is an eye opener. It's almost as if they back the lorries into the store and just push it all out. Almost worth a special trip I would say. I can guarantee no matter what you go in for you will not come out with just that