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Do you know the trick to see if the glass is coated? You shine a light (smartphone LED good for this) and look at the colour of reflections from each glass surface (four for double glazing, 6 for triple). The coated one will look a slightly different colour... This shows the coating is on the outer surface of the inner pane of my coated double glazing.

yes we really do! it's like overlooking a wildflower meadow. I've been informed that over the years as more flowers take hold the number of grasses should reduce so it won't look so grass-heavy.

the roof is full on now! bees are buzzing around and it gives great privacy in our bedroom from the neighbours house to the south as well.

Exactly, and you can design on this principle without having to get technical with rainfall and soakaway rates. It is a bit of an enthusiasm come bugbear of mine. You have land so this is relatively straightforward. Do you want to achieve SUDS because it is a requirement, or because it is s good thing? If the former then you do, or get someone to do, sums for you, then put in crates and hydrobrakes and so on a considerable expense, knowing that nobody will check the construction or flow off site. If the latter then it is often easier and cheaper, but don't tell the planners or bco. I have designed and built a 500m2 roof area plus parking with zero water to sewers where there was a perfectly good drain in the road. The area floods badly yet the planners allow 5litres/second per acre off site, and I wanted to prove that this was unnecessary. This results in much reduced rates as a bonus. The world didn't change but I was pleased with it. You do need land. The hierarchy is published, with green roof at the top, but that costs a lot. Then comes rainwater harvester, which I do recommend. Again capital cost but payback can be about 8 years. But the unscientific and cheap 'secret' is to put all the drains through porous pipes to soakaways, and have one or more lagoons or swales for whatever gets through. As Roger 440 says, the rain falls on the rest of the land as it always did, and so you are only dealing with your roof. Plus any hard paving but that is easy to resolve. If you can spread the rain in several directions to various soakaways and ponds it helps lot. 1. Barrels on each rwp. 2. various perforated drains in different directions. Take them through tree/bush areas where the plants will drink the water (not in winter) and the roots have broken the soil and encourage infiltration. Then don't call them perforated drains but 'infiltration trenches'. 3. soakaways and ponds at the ends. Infiltration trenches if flat will hold large amounts of water and have a very big surface area. 4. willow trees at the ponds. The final ponds will work best if big and shallow as there is a large soakage area, and a large surface area for water to evaporate from heat and wind. The final statement of your proposal is 'zero rainwater leaves the site'. As you are retaining all the water, it doesn't need complex analysis, just local rainfall figures.

When I first joined this forum in 2019 and started my research there were a lot of strong arguments for still using gas if you can connect to the mains supply. I believe they plan to phase out gas connections on new builds, but most of the legacy gas powered houses will continue for a long time. ASHP are good for domestic heating, but have some limitations for domestic hot water, long reheat times and the need for a large UVC. There are lots of old threads about energy costs, but recent events have dramatically changed most of these factors. We ordered our UFH pipes from Wunda and had the ground floor installed as part of the insulated foundation work. We installed the upstairs ourselves. We have a poured concrete first floor. We are not on mains gas, so went with ASHP. One very big advantage of ASHP is that they can be run in reverse and provide cooling, this was the premise behind the upstairs UFH.

This. Used the disc below. Perfect.

Just leave it, it holds together well. We got some carpet offcuts down but that's it.

Privacy, in the sense you maybe thinking of it, and as described in the policies of these companies, may not be the central point. In the modern dataverse there are loads of opportunities to join anonymised data together at the top - data science is getting very, very good at this. So the point is not to use your data directly, only the harvester can do that and only then in line with their policy {and of course local laws}, however once your data is anonymised there is complete freedom to exploit it and sell it on / share with partners. These third parties can do almost as much as the harvester, accept in as much as they don't have the personalised data for you - they will for many others, to add value to this data set by joining it with other sets they may have or have access to. When I am discussing this with students we often look at the weather, the weather for most parts of the world is publicly available so if you have a dataset that contains air temperatures (OAT) over a period, you do not need to know when the period was, you could have a good go at finding out where the sensor was, and when the readings were taken. All you need is to search through all the weather patterns across the world which with the right API is a quick enough job. You will probably find a whole host of matches, so you now need to filter those down to see if we can get closer to the front door and you have loads of opportunities there - not the least of which is the real personalised data you hold on your 'customers'. EG If you were the harvester of your data you have the additional opportunity to verify your classification algorithm of everybody else's shared anonymised data, because you know where the front door is for your organisations customer data. Once you have done that you can use the anonymised data from other harvesters to create value from the data in whatever way you can find. You may even be able to tell me how poorly calibrated by OAT sensor is! Now imaging being able to infer, perhaps not perfectly, the relative wealth / average age / etc of households by looking at the IAT/OAT delta in the data or directly at the energy consumption. Oh hang on perhaps only the electricity suppliers have that data - so could they join their data with others data to add value. Of course they can - Google it, oh hang on that won't help, you will get the answer their algorithm thinks is best, whatever best is, for you. HOWEVER - just because you are paranoid it does not mean they are not out to get you!

Yes, I did it on my build, from memory it was painless, just a few forms and a small fee. Ecology are brilliant! just give them a call or email.

Use one like @Temp suggests. You will be best stitch drilling at an angle as you will need to take off part of about 4 courses. I would not bother with a lintel.

I have used Estimators Online and they give a decent breakdown of estimated costs. For a house they charge £225 plus VAT. Handy as a sanity check and to send out to merchants etc. I also send to contractors sometimes as a guide only.

might be a bit itchy

Just for comparison we've just face-fixed our vertical Adobo (Radiata Pine) cladding with stainless steel nails and nail gun. There are six nail holes showing per board in this pic if you zoom in. A nice quick way to fix - and it has a fine sawn face rather than planed so nailing fine plus sits recessed under deep soffit so quite sheltered.

My guys had no bother getting the channels flat on the shallow depth ceiling section. It was a mix of concrete slab, timber joists and steels. I think the key is to pick you lowest spot to set your ceiling depth so you've a bit of flexibility with fixing the channels. You've also got a fair bit of freedom to where you put your fixings. I know there was one bit where they couldn't fix so the doubled up the channels, i.e. 300mm or 400mm spacing at the section.

I've more lasers than make sense to be honest (no sharks with lasers on their heads though). I bought a cheap rotary laser from China (see red one below, £175 at the time) but I wouldn't recommend it as it had an issue straight out of the box. I was able to fix it and have tested it's accurate. Like with a spirit level, it is important to know how to regularly check this sort of device as you don't want to find out later that there is a problem. When I have done surveying I have repeated the process twice with the rotary laser in two different places and checked that the sets of readings agree. As I am a massive geek, I have also used homebrew RTK-GPS for surveying which works nicely for plan, but not so well for elevation. There are various non-rotary 3D lasers that have a pulsing feature. The pulsing allows you to use it with a detector when light levels and distance are too great to see it by eye. I've never used the glasses which could help under that situation. I have a Huepar one which supports the pulsing. I've never used that feature, but at dusk or in the dark it throws the laser a very long way. I thought this laser was good enough to by a second one when I smashed the first falling off a ladder. I got it from Amazon for £160 but it's now £145 (https://amzn.to/3mSTxaV note that's an affiliate link but doesn't cost you more).

Yes, but will still leak heat to the side. Gus is correct and this theory requires a very large area. The ground at the perimeter will lose heat more quickly , simply as it is a shorter distance. So if you have a big footprint then you might insulate the perimeter more than the centre. Also you can add vertical insulation to the perimeter down to about 500mm as the ground is not very cold below that. Slab economics in simplistic terms. On flat and strong ground use ground-bearing. On a slope or on poor ground use beam and block. (Or if your selected builder can't do slabs well (and most can't) then B and B is a pragmatic choice.

Sand pit?

Give Marc Gibbs from Mayflower Mortgage Brokers a call. I have found him amazing with self build options. Just about to complete on our self build mortgage (mid-build)

Great comments from all. Interesting to read all the views. For the budding loft converters a few observations. As a designer your starting point is to establish what folk want out of their conversion, what will meet their primary needs and then, aspiration. Next is to get down to brass tacks. You have planning constriants; ridge height, eaves alterations, what you can project from the roof.. dormers or Velux or in some conservation areas.. mme. From a BC compliance point you look early on at how you get a stair up and fire protection. A critical dimension is to see if you can get the clearances for the stair in terms of head height. Lastly you have a look at what kind of headroom you can achieve in the rest of the proposed converted loft. If your Clients are all six foot six plus then you need to say.. hey you are quite "blessed" but you ain't going to enjoy this even if you comply with the regs. On the other hand you can be "blessed" if you are of shorter stature. Everyone on BH is blessed! Next you delve a bit more into how you may insulate, do you need to replace the roof, get any drainage to work and so on. You look for booby traps that could burst the ball. Now have a look downstairs and where you can support load by means of load bearing walls. What are the Client constraints... do they want to live in the house or move out say. This then gives you a flavour of what to explore structurally. Once you have got this basic information you open your SE tool box and see what will work best, not just in terms of pure structural design but also what will best fit the local contractors. Good design is also about designing something that is elegant and buildable at a reasonable cost. That is the art of structural design. Next you iterate and go back to the Architectural side of things and this lets you design Architecturally in the knowledge that what you are doing has a sounds structural footing. Now you may then want to use Glulam beams..maybe an oak ridge beam for a feature if you have enough height, use sistered joists, steels, cold formed steel.. sometimes very little structural "extras" are required and this feeds into the Architectral design. which is the bit you see at the end of the day. In summary your starting point should be as above and as each attic and floors below are often different it is almost impossible to say "this is the way". If anyone wants some pointers then the best thing to do is to post some sketches thah show for example the span, height to the underside of the ridge, walls below. Rough it out on a bit of A4, take a photo and post. Don't worry if they look a bit rough.. you want to see mine! Lastly while some materials may best on paper to use.. say steel, glulam, cold formed steel the design decisions can be driven by the type of builder you have available. Say you know a great joiner that buys a lot of wood and gets a good price. You may want to play to their strengths and use Glulam that they can buy using their regular account, rather than steels that they may have to pay "punters" prices for. At the end of the day this can work out cheeper for you.

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Do you really like that look out of your bedroom window? To me it looks like you need to run the lawnmower over it?

I strongly recommend learning the principles of levelling. I don't mean you have to use an optical level, but you should know how they work. Laser levels are doing the same thing I used to ban lasers because everyone thought they were infallible and so everyone used them and mistakes were many. I have given up banning them as nobody except me seems to be able to use an optical one. But what do you know, this week we have a block wall that is 8mm different on 2 parallel walls 5m apart, even though the bricky used a laser. Not a good start for a timber frame.

AKA Rampant Rabbit. Got a used one for sale, anyone interested.