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Harumph..... If proof were needed here it is @Russell griffiths I am indeed a welding God after all! So there. Let that be a lesson to ya! (We all gotta start somewhere)

I would cut a patch larger than affected areas, clean area and prime stick patch on with stickaflex or ct1 smear around edges and smooth off with a paintbrush dipped in appropriate thinner, prime and paint over the whole patch. Go to pub with money saved from all those bent twisted welding rods. Ca Ching. if you remember my original answer to your dilemma regarding the container roof you will recall I recommended STICKING a patch on. So if you had followed this advice you would now be a.

I know the question was aimed at TF, but if anyone is looking to insure an ICF build, i've just insured with Churchill, £160 for the year Inc full accidental.

OK, ok, ok, I'm the first official braille welder.... Who can say that they are an official braille welder eh? You? Nahhhh, See.

Is that in Braille!!

I'd be ashamed if I put that up. I'll post it to you though as an official BH trophy IF you can show me (on BH) that you can weld any better. Stick welder, any old bit of angle iron.... Weld the words Welding God, you may within the rules use any stick welding kit, any welding rod any angle iron grind off any black bits Prize? Recognition of The Honour and the Glory of welding something well. And @PeterW will buy you a pie.

+1 intelligent insurance. We have timber with render and ICF basement. I purchased the policy through topcashback, if memory serves right the questions guided me through the construction types. The quote this route was a bit cheaper than going direct to them, plus I got about £30 cashback a few months later.

I've gotten Hager from here before: http://www.gil-lec.co.uk/circuit-protection/consumer-units-accessories/hager-consumer-units-accessories

Admiral... I've got the diamond cover on my mums place as it does all the emergency call out etc and they offer combined with car insurance at a 20% discount from memory....

Nationwide cover them, as do most of the mainstream insurers as the construction method is common these days. When they ask about walls and roofing, it is the outer cladding they are (usually) referring to. Essentially if you have part timber clad and part masonry, and a part flat roof, as long as its 50% brick and 50% tile you are fine.

I'd just corrected my original post. Here it is, Intelligent Insurance: https://www.intelligentinsurance.co.uk/

I've just taken up a policy with Intelligent Insurance. The price was so competitive that I'm wondering it it's too good to be true... Edit: Sorry, Intelligent Insurance, not Intelligent Finance.

Knowing how poor most tradesmen are in regards to insulted and sealed houses, I would concur that you either need to give them a good briefing, and supply them a roll of airtightness tape to fix any punctures, or do all the drilling yourself.

It's on your LPA website - which is likely to be a Council or Local Park authority. They have somewhat varying search facilities. It will come under something like "Search all Planing Applications", and you can go via a text box search specifying Road, Post Town, Postcode etc, or get into the Map Search and find your area, which should have some way of identifying planning applications. There should be some form of tickboxes which let you specify the data to be displayed such as eg Planning Records, Planning Records 2017 etc. Once you have the area highlighted there should be details displayed when you mouseover or click. That should give you a link to various Planning Applications, which you bring up, or in a new tab/windows by CTRL-CLICK or RightCLICK. Then you read those looking for Ground Conditions Reports or similar, Decision Notices, and Officers' Reports - the last are the summary by the Planning Officer. Ferdinand

Exactly . 's war I'm gonna do baby.... What an excellent idea

That's the only problem with this forum, too many geniuses in one place

Six years ago, we had a casual conversation with an architect friend about the fact that we'd like to build our own home. Taking the resulting vague, non-committal "hmmmmm" as rampant, unbridled enthusiasm, we started looking for plots. First thought - our very own back garden. It was massive, a pain in the arse to garden, and it would be free! Back garden plot Pros: - Free -Less gardening Back Garden Plot Cons: - On a notorious flood plain - Not actually where we wanted to live On balance, we binned that idea. But not before paying the first of many fees to the local council to be denied planning permission. It was at this point that my out-of-control addiction to giving money away to the local council (or anyone, actually) began. Second up was a plot in an outlying village, about 2 miles from the place we actually wanted to live (but couldn't afford). Lovely plot. (someone else's front garden, giving them the classic double whammy of less gardening AND extra money to spend during the leisure time they'd have gained by not gardening) Local village plot Pros: - Nice road in semi-posh village - Little school - Pub - Services on site - South facing Local village plot Cons: - A LOT of trees - some with TPO's - Not free - Still not where we REALLY wanted to live - Quite small This was a tough one. We knew that we'd never get a plot in the dream location, but was it a compromise too far? Whilst we were swithering about plot 2, an unbelievable opportunity came up, right in the centre of our dream location. Dream plot Pros: - Where we REALLY wanted to live Dream plot Cons: - Lots - Who cares? - No money for the rest of time Needless to say, we went for it. So, that's how we ended up with an inaccessible plot, complete with a ransom strip owned by someone else, surrounded by a million overlooking flats in the centre of the medieval town. Next up - how we got access to the plot (hint: expensively) and fulfilled my need to give away some more money to the council.

We're filming for his ch4 programme, so I'll ask him the next time he's up!

@CC45 They only go through resellers. A TS would give you a single cylinder solution, but if you go that way you would be better off slightly larger so you don't have to heat it quite as hot as you normally would. They can be sized pretty close to the demand tbh but then need to be heated to higher temps ( close to 80oC) to get the sustain, and cylinder heat losses become problematic at those temps. Going larger means you can run at a lower set temp, lower standing losses, and a bigger thermal battery to charge off Pv, which are advantages I'd favour even though I knew I'd never otherwise 'need' the additional volume. Pv via an immersion would exceed the set temp ( say 60oC ) and roof the TS out at around 70-75oC, so any excess would be stored in this redundancy aka headroom. An UVC would have to have the immersions set lower ( so less headroom to store Pv ) as they're not designed to be sat that high in normal service due to regs on safety for the max temp of DHW available. TS's all have factory supplied blending valves ( TMV's ) on the DHW outlet to control max DHW temp to the outlets to allow them to be run much hotter, so that's already covered by the TS design. A buffer would only be kept warm during the heating seasons and would otherwise be cold, but the UVC would be warm / hot near enough 24/7, only losing a certain amount of heat between being topped up to the set temp every timed hot water event, so if your going to keep a cylinder warm / hot / warm anyway then I'd prob go for a TS. Pv would obviously maintain the upper temp range of an UVC during the day regardless of the DHW time clock settings, so another reason maintaining a larger cylinder wouldn't be so much more inefficient. A TS is basically an instantaneous water heater, so you'll get better DHW production too as a TS heated on demand by a boiler will give nigh-on constant high flow DHW, much like a huge combi, whereas an UVC will drain DHW off faster than the coil can replace it, even more so with the smaller kW boiler. That could be mitigated against by choosing and oversizing an UVC but then still leaves you with no buffer. For sizing, add the two stated volumes together ( buffer and UVC ) and your at 350 litres or thereabouts anyway so a 350-400 litre TS would be best ( if low temp storage and Pv is factored in ) or 250-300 litre if just the boiler is being allowed for the heat source and deffo no Pv. Do you think it's likely you'll ever have Pv? It's quite critical info when deciding upon a design / sizing etc. A TS of this size could have 2 x 3kw immersions fitted, one above the other, so if you wanted to further reduce ( summer overheating ) standing losses you could, in the summer, divert Pv into the upper immersion set to a lower temp, and then, in the winter, divert Pv into the lower immersion set at a much higher temp when space heating is also required. A simple seasonal manual changeover switch would facilitate that for just a few tenners. The tappings can be specified upon ordering the cylinder, but yes, indepenadant sets for the rads and Ufh on the mid section of the tank will be required. For the rads you'll have to blend the flow to get 'safe' temp water to them or they could be get uncomfortably or dangerously hot, however that's quite easily achieved by just fitting a TMV across the flow and return tappings immediately before the radiator circuit pump. Then you can user define the surface temp of the rads and get them down to a manageable temp which is a very handy feature. For eg; If you go for an UVC and rads + Ufh then your plumber would likely set the boiler flow temp equal to or higher than the cylinder stat set temp ( say 60oC ) so as to get it up to temp quickly and get the stated volume of DHW vs size. The downfall with that is the boiler flow temp would then dictate the surface temp of your radiators, so in a well insulated house they may well get way too hot and cause discomfort but you'd have no means of attenuating that ( basically the same reason you'd need the TMV on the rad pump off the TS as just mentioned above, but then you'd have such control ). With an ashp I'd rbe commend the two tank setup, but with gas I'd go for the TS. This all sounds quite complicated when delivered quite concentrated in this breif, but it's actually quite straight forward. Make the physical side of the install and the operating disciplines separate and it becomes more digestible, but fitting a system you can fine tune will give more efficiency long term IMO so is worth the extra consideration at least. Nuts and bolts :- Boiler to TS controlled by the cylinder stat for max boiler efficiency per 'burn' Internal TS DHW coil for DHW production ( via supplied TMV ) will run 2 showers simultaneously with ease Ufh off dedicated tappings direct to manifold ( with supplied pump and TMV ). No secondary pump required for flow between the TS and the manifold Rads off second set of dedicated tappings ( via customer supplied TMV and additional pump ) 1 x 2-port motorised valve on each flow to stave off unwanted convection heat circulation when there is no demand. 3 in total, 1 for boiler, 1 for rads circuit and 1 for Ufh circuit. Hows that for breakfast reading ?

There's no definitive answer, and leaving out the internal VCL and relying on decent workmanship to seal the PB is damned risky, unless you know for sure the relative vapour permeability of the whole structure and the quality of the workmanship. 99% of water vapour transmission is usually from outside, provided there is a decent and effective internal VCL, and the golden rule is to maintain a gradient of vapour permeability from inside to out, with the least vapour permeable layer inside and the most vapour permeable layer outside (or adjacent to a ventilated external cavity). As houses are built to better insulation standards, then vapour control becomes far more significant, especially if there are structural layers within the walls and roof that may be subject to damage from interstitial condensation. Some of the big manufacturers have got this detail seriously wrong in the past, and even a year or so ago one of the major SIPs companies was still going up the learning curve with regard to the safety of their floor to wall detail, something that they changed in the light of further analysis (and following a few strong hints from several here, when we were on the other place).