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Ha! Yeah I know! This all may come to nothing, but if you don't ask, the answer is always no 😃 Appreciate the advice, won't be chopping anything unless it's all approved first, cheers!

I *think* I’ve got it all sussed now

If the post sits on the steel I'd get some angle iron, 70x70x5 (as pictured) or bigger and use that. Self drilling screws will work instead af bolts if the wood packers get in the way. Through bolt the angle to the newel and tighten before screwing to the steel to make it a tight fit. Ultimately the newel needs a brace as high up as you can get one, otherwise it's a long lever on a pivot.

You would think commercial premises would be ideal candidates for solar PV. They operate mostly in the daytime so would be better placed to self use the PV generation than domestic users. One of the reasons I have heard for not doing so, is most don't own the premises, they rent or lease them. the landlord is not going to fund PV, it is of no benefit to him, and the tenant (business) is no more likely to fund it than a tenant in a rental house. And I bet the idiot DNO's make it difficult. they probably insist on expensive network upgrades even though it is clear most would be self used. And a 3.68kW PV system would not be of much use to the average supermarket.

Got it lads, the pump wont produce heat if the rooms are 22 degrees on the thermostats. We were trying force it higher just to check the rads but it wont heat the water much just a thing its set to seemingly, i called grant.

who made the stairs?, as the top tread or bottle, as we call it up here should be a good bit wider than the one you have. normally about 50-70mm but i would have ensured it covered the steel and was able to be fixed to the timber.

Hi did try to reply but buildhub was playing up for me? they're Aurora fittings. Au-MPROTL ip65

Something like this. This is the foot of the kid's spiral staircase. The timber is up off the ground by +6" 10/12mm thick galvanised shoe (had these made special years back). M16 stainless stud goes through the 4x4 post. I didn't have any long bolts so I made some by permanently fixing a nut to the stud. I "just" drilled through and fitted a stainless scroll pin. You'll note the white nylon washer between the stainless one and galvanised bracket. This done to isolate between dissimilar metals. The other side. All the bolt heads and nuts were once capped with white plastic caps. Most have disintegrated now. This the foot of the spiral staircase. It was a couple of inches off the deck but the soil / veg had grown up around it. Note how it looks a bit "rotten". We now print our own nut caps here. Could even do you an audio amp related nut cap shape! 😂

Yup. The plan is to take down the kitchen ceiling to access the underside of the roof and double up all the joists, before cutting any hatch, or putting any weight on the existing roof. Then keep the existing exterior intact (save for the hatch access) and deck the flat roof (on pedestals) with railings.

The RCCB must be doing it? Would just current measuring the earth return on the consumer unit not be a good proxy. Fluke have a good article on it https://www.fluke.com/en-gb/learn/blog/clamps/leakage-current-measurement-basics

You're going to have to get up close enough to touch it to be certain. If it's lead (which it doesn't look like to me) then you'll be easily able to gouge it and see a bright mark appear. If it's zinc a magnet will stick, otherwise it's aluminium. I think it's zinc.

Sample took a while to arrive. It’s very dark and very heavy (2.7 times heavier) compared to a similarly sized sample of Abodo I have. It’s also quite dear at £18,000 ex VAT for 208m2 which includes screws and fasteners but not battens which is £1000 dearer than the Abodo. It’s also very hard so I suspect quite an effort to install. I’m not convinced by the look although it could look stunning because it’s so uniform. I want wood to look like wood though.

F me ! Just spoke to them and got a sensible quote . Around 700 quid . Strangely enough the frame costs more than the glass ! Nice one @markc 👍👍👍

https://plasticsheetsshop.co.uk/product/clear-acrylic-gs-sheet-30mm/ Then laminate some plate glass to it with UV curing adhesive. If you just want light to come though, you could get a clear GRP sheet made up. Get the right resin and mat and it will look alright.

all joking aside, I wish I could help. we did originally have light wells planned for our basement with walk-on glazing at ground level but in the end decided that it was just too expensive and those rooms in the basement didn't need natural light so I never did any real research on the subject. good luck though, and I genuinely mean that. 🙂

Had a few bespoke pieces of glass made by Glassandstainless.com and they have been really good, wasnt walk-on and it was the right size.

Do you know a few choice words came to mind . I won’t type them .

Lack of investment. Most of those big sheds will be owned by big firms, big firms are usually owned by shareholders, assets change hands, businesses are bought and sold. If I own 50% of a business who plans to use funds to invest in the business I might decide, well if I can get 5 more years out of this and sell up then I'll be sorted why would I let them spend x amount on PV - sad truth. It takes long term investors and future thinking for big businesses to get things like this. Most of these older big sheds are pretty rough inside. I did a site survey of the M&E services of a shed for a £365m turnover (with high margin before anyone comments) company, the place was a pit, a total pit, lighting was from the 80's, place was literally manky, H&S almost didn't exist, I was almost hit by 2 forklifts being driven round blind corners at high speed, a single peep peep on the horn being the safety measure. Holes in the roof, I walked into the site and had 100% access without any checks, no manned security, a few poor girls in a disgusting office. Upstairs things were maybe better, the line up of Bentleys and Land Rover's told the story really. I am also involved in new build sheds from time to time, often the developer will not want to spend a single penny more than they need to. Different game but similar deal, housing developers will put in the bare minimum to comply. We got SAP calcs in which stated each flat needed 0.45kW per flat to comply. We proposed a 500W panel per flat, contractor reduced it to a 450W panel because it was £25 a flat cheaper. Personally I would have filled the roof, but what benefit does the developer get? They don't give a stuff. We have another national client who owns and builds for its own use up and down the country, no PV going on the roof even though their buildings have heavy electrical loads. No PV needed, they comply because they have a CHP. Architect said, oh lets cover the roof in PV - client, "Oh do we need that to comply". If not, it is not going on. I think maybe things will start to change, but sadly I think the PV market has now turned and prices are increased, there was a general downward trend in PV prices, not now.

Not the best detail to fix to but the job that has been done is terrible and will never be solid, as mentioned before it should have been taken down the side and through bolted or a spigot welded to the beam flange, and newel slotted over (boring a big deep hole in post is awkward but not that difficult).

Even retro fitting, if the newel post had been notched over the steel, you would have a half thickness newel post going down next to the steel that could be screwed through from the adjacent wooden joist. Floor up time I am afraid. And if you have cut the bottom off that newel post flush with the floor, a new newel post as that one is too short now.

Sounds like the air hadn’t been bled out of the upstairs heating properly? Turn all the rads off except the one nearest the heat source, bleed that rad and top up the pressure, then see if that rad gets warm / hot.

I have coined a phrase recently - I am not a structural engineer but... it looks alright to me. What kind of rails are you planning? It might affect the outside edges. Please feel free to use "I am not a structural engineer but" in any situation where you give an opinion even though you don't actually know what you are talking about.

Wot @ProDave says, if I were to fit the post to that steel I would weld a substantial steel tube (300mm long) to the steel and bore into the post bottom to sit tight over the tube, fix with countersunk nut and bolt right through.

Sory but it is fitted completely wrong. I can't see how it will ever be solid without ugly brackets on the outside? surely that is not what you want? It is normal for the newel post to be set into the top of the stair stringer when the stairs are made, and then the newel post is notched, in the same way as the top of the stairs, so it sits over the header. If the header is the steel, and you say the newel post is only partly on the steel, this would work. Indeed made like this, even the top stair is formed around the newel post. Whoever built and fitted the stairs has done it completely wrong, it needs to come out and be fitted properly. These are the top of my stairs (without handrails yet when this was taken) the newel post is set into the top of the stair stringer and is completely solid. The front edge of the newel post is notched out just like the front edge of both stringers so it sits over the header and part of the newel post hangs down below the ceiling downstairs.

I can’t see the top pic ? Assuming there is 2 and not just a big white area.

Depends on panel orientation rather than ridge/eaves direction as large roofs are very low pitch. Lower edge of PV panel to wind will cause a down force, upper edge of panel to wind will produce uplift

cheers and, yes, it's going in a GRP cabinet. sounds like a fair compromise between cost and quality. I was thinking that either the Lewden or the Contactum would be the ones to go for as a middle of the range type unit.

Panels on the roof would also add to dead load and could significantly increase snow load. Portal frames are generally designed to bare minimum loadings to reduce build costs.

Wind getting underneath!

There was a report about buffers, was not posted up by me. But I think I downloaded it. hot_water_cylinders_buffer_tanks_heat_pumps.pdf

Often you see this type of cracking. The cracks down the wall seem to be of uniform width.. suggests at the outset shrinkage say of concrete blocks / render rather than settlement. If it was settlement then often the crack wiil be of a different width top to botom, not always, but that is a common feature. But .. where the roof meets the existing wall the crack seems to continue in the existing elevation? That raises a few questions as you would not expect to see this. @James traversPost more photos if you wish of what you have round about and if you have been slapping out walls... doing the open plan thing.. I wonder.. if you have an old house and slapped though to make the opening to an extension with good solid founds ..have the existing walls settled as you have added load locally to the old bits of wall either side of the slapping when you put say a beam in.. Look really closely at the crack and try and figure out what has moved down or up relative to the other interface. Look at the rest of the house wall and put your "Columbo" hat on. Have you had a really dry spell and the old building has dropped a bit more than the new extension? Don't always assume that the new extension is moving.. a good extension with "well" designed found tends not to.. but add load to an old found and the existing wall locally loaded for example by a beam over a slapping could well move a lot more than you think.. start at 15- 25mm for a shallow footed old building found in certain types of ground (clay) a bit less on sand / negligble on rock ! Help ma boab you may ask 15 -25mm .. but old buildings move a lot! That kind of movement is well outside say NHBC / BC tolerances but old houses are a living thing. If you build a modern extension with stiff founds that stays still these kind of cracks occur as the old building is moving about relative to your solid extension. Don't always assume that your new extension is the problem. It can be that it (extension) stays still and it's the house that moves up and down. And there is the rub.. BC want an extension built to be bomb proof with no account as to how you marry this into an old structure that moves up and down with the weather as it further ages.

700mm is an uncomfortable access route, door will have to open inwards and yes it needs to be a full spec fire door and frame. Unless you are ok with an industrial looking steel door and frame then you will have to bite the bullet.

Take care not to get your backside burnt. It's easy to do 😀. On topic, I think that a lower priced steel one may be a better option - someone here may know of a smaller or more wholesale supplier. TBH I'm not sure if a wooden door liner will cut it, unless you have that explicitly from the person who regulates it Ferdinand * I'll edit that title in a minute.

Maybe, but only if you know in hindsight that they are not turning up with them. You pay them a four figure sum to connect you expect them to do the job property - this is down to sheer incompetence.

The UK has the LNG terminals that Europe currently lacks and there are ships queueing up to off load, any surplus is being fed to Europe via the gaslines. Some of these ships are being turned away so it does make sense to use Rough so these ships can offload instead of being sent elsewhere. A request to allow pressure on the gaslines to Europe to be increased allowing more flow has been requested which would also be beneficial.

This thread is quite an interesting conversation. I'd like to explore what we think "Eco house" means, in the context of the riverside house posted up by @CharlieKLP. There's a separate issue about woodburning being sustainable, which I'll do on a separate post if I pursue it. Basics first. The house posted up is called Backwater, and is fronting a 'lagoon' at Wroxham. Address: Backwater, Beech Road, NORWICH, NR12 8TP. Linky. I'm happy putting that there as it is off their own holiday rental website. The Planning App is here, but the buggers at the local council have taken the docs off the web, and it would take an FOI to get them. (Update: double bugger, the session expires.) This is the site before the development, from the records on Rightmove. It is the one with the boat. They bungalow-gobbled the site for £342k in 2012, which seems a fandabidozi buy. It is 142.1 sqm floor area. The EPC is here, and it is recorded as GFCH so I just don't believe the new one is off grid for gas or electric without direct evidence, based on likelihood (open to correction). It's architect calls it "in a largely off grid area". I hope to God it is the EPC for the old one, as it is an F - and I can find no published info for the new one (was an EPC required to be lodged in ~2015?). And this is afterwards. I'd punt on it now being about ~250 sqm due to partial 2 storey and the rather fatter footprint (which looks like a normal 'you can increase it by X%' rule). Eco-House? 1 - I think Eco House is the most wiffly-waffly term of all of them, which is why it gets used in windy virtue signalling. ISTM that it must mean something different from what it meant a decade ago, and now I think an Eco House should at least be carbon positive and able to demonstrate that in N years it will have recaptured all the emissions used in building it, and be significantly energy efficient to run in ongoing terms (if you like call that an EPC of >100). 2 - This house is 7-8 years old, so I would not expect it to meet that. In addition it has a honking great woodstove and apparently no self-owned local wood supply. I have no data on the heating / cooling systems, and the EPC value. 3 - The absence of solar PV suggests to me that it is not *that* sustainable in my terms above. 4 - Yes, it is beautiful, but imo that has nothing to do with whether it should be called an Eco House. And I think I would love to stay there, but at a couple of K a week I would take the full 8 people. 5 - I think two aspects of Eco House we have not addressed are: a) What about space usage - can a house that uses say double the average UK floor space per person be called Eco or Efficient? b) I question whether a second house for a family can *ever* be Eco or Sustainable on the basis that no one ever *really* needs more than one? Surely Eco is also a lifestyle rule of modesty and simplicity? What do you guys think? Ferdinand

Sorry I didn't mean to sound sarcastic. I was referring to the following trades who are not used to having blockwork in their service runs and get a bit hammer happy. It depends who we are building for. All of my clients use posi joists and some ask for the gaps to be blocked up and some don't. The ones that do insist that the pipe and cable runs are drilled through the blockwork avoiding damage. As property developers None of them use MVHR and none of them have ever used a wall plate beneath the joists on intermediate walls . I'm not saying it can't be done only that we have never done it. It is just as easy and with the state of timber these days it's more accurate to build them in blockwork.

It’s been over a year since we got our completion certification and we’re still mopping up tasks in the garden and generally cleaning up. It occurred to us that some aspects of the discovery process of the build may be off use to others on BuildHub. It’s too hot in here: Thermal modelling limitations. Our thermal modelling done as part of the design stage SAP suggested we had minimal thermal gain problems. However we suspected that thermal gain from our east facing windows would be a problem and indeed it has been. The first action we took was to put on a solar film on the outside of our east facing windows. After some research we opted for Johnson PD75 which claims to reduce thermal gain by 40%. It cost £1,170 so seemed like a good place to start. Well, it may have helped but by mid May it was clear it was not enough and we would need something more. We looked at air conditioning units and decided we would retrofit some. We hadn’t planned on this and the thought of messing up the clean lines of the build and the pristine plaster work did not appeal. Purely by chance it turned out that the false wall in our bathroom built at the request of my wife and much muttering from me (who needs somewhere to put a wine glass while your in the bath) was a saviour. It meant we had a service void from ground floor to second floor in which to route pipes to the internal units. We contacted Mr Harris and he kindly lent us the pump gear required for installation testing, so far so good. We identified the units with the best energy efficiency only to discover you are not allowed to purchase them without having confirmation the installation will be done by a certified F-gas installer. We wanted to do the main parts of the installation ourselves and just have the F-gas engineer do final test and connection. Sounds reasonable but we had a lot of difficulty finding anyone. Mr Harris came to the rescue again and recommended Artech Air who were unbelievably helpful. We ended up with two Midea Blanc units, a 2.5 kW for our bedroom and a 3.5kW for the open plan living area. Result – bliss, and a very reasonable bill for £1,800. In the long term they will add to the comfort of the house all year round. On a slightly different subject MVHR summer bypass. It sounds perfectly reasonable, don’t heat the incoming air form the outgoing air in once a set temperature threshold is reached. The incredible heat of the last month has made us completely rethink it’s use. If the air inside the house is colder than the outside air, then cool the incoming air ie you don’t want to bypass the heat exchange. Also when it very hot between 9:00 and say 20:00 don’t run the MVHV, there is plenty of air in the house and we certainly never felt stuffy. We set the MVHR scheduler to do this for us. Similarly in winter it goes off at 22:00 and back on at 07:00. PV We didn’t put any PV on when we built, the house should need such small inputs it simply didn’t make sense in carbon or cost terms, or so we thought. Two things changed our minds, the air conditioning and we bought an EV. Doing anything more than 4kW is a pain as it involves more certification and silly cost items like Southern Electricities £300 fee for observing testing on equipment that was already certified on the MCS database. Again we had not planned this in so it was a retrofit...grrrr. Very annoying as we were pretty smug about having thought through the whole build. Fortunately our standing seam roof made it as easy as it could be to fit panels and hide all the wires. With the panels added we are still in surplus on the air conditioning units, not cooling for free as we had to pay for the panels and inverter, but no additional utility cost. Bye the way this was done before some nameless psychopath started a war and energy prices rocketed. The house now sits at a very comfortable 23c while not drawing any energy from the grid. We even have enough surplus to charge the EV between 10:00 and 15:00 on sunny days at a very slow 6A. We also opted to put in battery storage which we ordered in February and has only just arrived, it should have been 8.2kWh but in the delay they manufacturer introduced a 9.5kWh version for not a lot of extra money. We’re not up and running with the battery as the manufacturers decided to change the inverter battery connection cables with the new model and there are no cables shipped with the battery. I must confess I found it very hard to see the funny side of this. House wiring We did this ourselves and got it tested and certified, but made no provision for an EV charger, inverter and PV. Fortunately we did put ‘Routabout’ access points into our floor intended to allow access should anything go wrong. We also have loose lay flooring which has made the four times the utility room floor has been up no drama. Providing access to fix and change is something definitely something that should be done early not as an afterthought, when we put the traps in we had no idea how useful they would be. Fixings and fastening Our build is ICF and while it’s great in may ways it does present some interesting challenges when it comes to mounting anything on the walls. The ICF system we used came from JUB and has a very tough vertical nylon strip every 150mm about 30mm from the internal surface. With a course thread screw you can hang things like TV’s but not heavy stuff cupboards. For heavy items it’s a case of drilling into the ICF concrete core 75mm internals and 170mm externally from the ICF surface. This makes for a significant cantilever, internally this is fine you just use big fastenings. Externally the problem is two fold, 1700mm cantilever and you don’t want any thermal bridging, this makes using big fastening as real no no. We ended up using four fastening types: Internally we used cheap and easy to use concrete frame fasteners for heavy stuff. For lighter stuff on plasterboard we used GripIt fastenings which do the job remarkably well. The largest size claims to be able to hold 70kg, but I wouldn’t trust it with anything like that. Externally we use Fischer ‘Thermofix’, expensive and not available in this country. Fischer say they don’t sell enough here to make it worth there while. It seemed lost on them that we were buying from Germany along with every other UK user of the fastening. For light external fixing we used pasta twirls supplied by JUB. Useless for anything heavier than a letter box. DIY cabinets We found we couldn’t always source ready made furniture that was the size we needed. Some friends run a bespoke kitchen business and pointed us a site “wood online” who make up panels to your specification complete with edging. Using a ‘Pocket hole’ jig and these panels allows you to create you own furniture simply and quickly at a fraction of the bespoke cost. We also found some very neat panel clips for panels that need to be removed for access. Garden We finally got round to sorting out the garden. It’s small, just 11m by 5m and like a lot of self builds it had been used as a storage area (dumping ground) during the build. As we’re getting on a bit we wanted to make it low maintenance and low water. Raised beds and a patio area seemed to fit the bill. As the house is a contemporary build and we wanted to the garden to complement the house which is white and two shades of grey. For the patio we have used 600 x 600 porcelain tiles for ease of handling and laying. Getting a patio right is not the easiest of jobs and I was not looking forward to. With the patio base prepared, materials were order, tiles on Tuesday followed three days later by 5000kg of limestone chippings. Of course it just happened to be one of the hottest weeks on record…returned the rapid set tile cement and bought standard set. This still went off at a frightening rate. Trying to get a large are flat and true is not as easy as it sounds even when you’ve done all the preparation. With the first slab set to the correct run-off the other tiles were laid using it as reference. Despite our best efforts to get it right, the first tile was just off and as a result by the tile the 8th tile in the row was reached we were using a significant amount of tile cement, about 10mm deep. The four 20kg bags of cement that should have done the whole job disappeared quickly and another 7 bags were required to complete the job. The hoop and wedge helped keep everything flush and the result is perfectly acceptable. Lesson learnt, do buy the expensive laser measuring and levelling gear at the start of the build, it’ll pay for itself many times over by the time you finish. I’ll know for the next build, however my wife may well threaten divorce if I mention the idea….

About the same as a 55" OLED then, but without the action scenes.

I’ll PM them

I can recommend getting one of these first https://www.screwfix.com/c/tools/tape-measures/cat831176

Massive NO to the Pod Point for me. I can't tell you how much trouble I've had with their public chargers (mainly the app forgetting that I've claimed the session and then refusing to release my car). The last time I was forced to use one of their chargers, it refused to disconnect. In the end, I had to change the max charge setting on my car to force it to break the session. It took me over 20 minutes to think of this solution, so I had to buy a lot of expensive electricity that I didn't want or need. Unbelievably, they no longer have a phone number you can call for help, either. I sent them a message via their (very difficult to find) contact form when I couldn't disconnect and it took them over 24 hours to reply. That was event though I'd selected the "I can't release my car" from the drop-down in the contact form (which would seem like an urgent issue to me!) I don't believe there's phone support for their home chargers either, but check. Also, take a look at the online reviews about support generally.

I had a mate who worked for McKinsey. His job was to consult with manufacturers and work out if any of their components were better quality than they needed to be. So if a product was sold with a 3 year warranty, he would work out which components would last longer than that and identify appropriate cheaper substitutes so that they would last just a little bit longer than the warranty period. A couple of weeks was ideal.