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@jimmyharris80can I just advocate a couple of design ideas for you to consider/further feedback. If you were able to compromise on the seating area at top of staircase, you could vault you ceiling there from ground floor. That would be a wow factor. Yes you’d lose your library / seating area but you have a massive study in a big house. We have a seating area at top of our staircase and nobody sits there. Stuff just gets dumped on the chairs eg laundry basket. Also keep your downstairs hallway large, you won’t regret that in a busy family home. Sometimes creating space, as opposed to more rooms, can make a house feel bigger. Make sure you put the best staircase joinery in that you can afford. Re your brickwork. Have attached a pic. You have big gables/lots of wall, that could easy take a bit of contemporary brickwork design. Cheap to do I presume and could add a real top end design feel, if you like it. Don’t go high with protruding bricks though, if you have kids Wire the three downstairs rooms D,F & G for future interchangeability as offices, lounges etc. if you do change uses makes things much easier. Just swap furniture depending on future need. I’ve had a wee look at your original house design you mentioned. Though you changed design for budgetary reasons, personally I think the new design is much, much stronger. I took forward to see how your project progresses.good luck.

Anthony Dyer has now put parts 2 and 3 of his review on YT worth a watch if you haven't already , he is saying November for battery control on the customer portal

All you have to do is imagine yourself as the mouse. Where Mickey can invade, rodent barrier. Simples. You can keep the little blighters out, but it requires effort an attention to detail. Same ethos for airtightness, where you study where a ‘molecule of air’ would travel to infiltrate your airtightness measures. It’s enough to make you lose a day just thinking about it, but try explaining this to a builder and he will have you certified. “They” just don’t get it…. I do try educating, but it’s a bloody uphill struggle.

Go with what your electrician recommends, sounds like he’s belt and braces

2 core or 3 core ..? I use these guys now as the old supplier I had closed down https://armouredcable.net/armoured-cable/35mm/35mm-2-core-armoured-cable.html Why 35mm out of interest as that’s good for 180A - 25mm would do 140A which is more than adequate for a house and the voltage drop is 6.5v on that distance. It would save you £100..

Try the national wholesalers or specific electrical in your area. like CEF, Edmundsons etc

I might be wrong, but it sounds to me like it's 100mm rigid PIR packed in tight as 97mm doesn't strike me as being a manufactured item. Is there a bigger story behind this?

It's almost guaranteed have a vastly different external pressures with any kind of wind as seen above. It might be a nightmare to balance.

His house is definitely bad for my mental health.

May help, even if it is Scotch.6.B+-+Worked+examples+of+U-value+calculations+using+the+combined+method++.pdf

I got a farmer friend to bring his fence post knocker around Think that’s the technical term Talk about saving time and effort He made fast work of 55 posts

@TimCx I’m using these Analox ones. No complaints so far (and the price on that site I linked is very good but no idea if it’s a good site)

Decided to semi ignore you @Nickfromwales . Ordered rubber flange thing but gone with weld for now as it hasn’t turned up yet . Where the waste pipe enters the tank is a rubber flange - so can cope with some movement . Mega size fitting for weld to 110

+1 It should drape down into the gutter but doesn't need to be very long.

Yep in a house it’s fine but this is a caravan technically and it will only have say 70-100mm of insulation at best.

I’d use 12mm ply on the inside and paint that as a finished surface - will provide the racking strength plus it’s a single membrane.

Are you expecting the cladding to provide the racking strength? That frame as it stands has NO bracing whatsoever. If just clad in say plasterboard inside and timber planking outside, it would fall over like a pack of cards in the first gale on an exposed site. You need to think what are you going to cover the frame with to provide the racking strength, could be OSB or ply and could be on the inside or outside or both. Then the cladding is just that, something to keep the rain out and plays no structural part. Choose the cladding either on price or for the look you want.

Nothing really to fix it to, trim it back and/or bend it down into the gutter

The pdf I attached, states that it is a by pass valve, it's not a blending valve. It's there to give a min flow rate, so if one or more room thermostats have switched of the manifold actuators the pump still has a flow path. It would have been set during commissioning, so hope you recorded it's position before moving things about. It needs to be part open.

I very much doubt a tin skin will add any more strength than wood cladding correctly installed. There are certainly way less fixings involved in a tin skin. Who is making the claim, it will be stronger with a tin skin?

Depends what you use it for but tin can be noisy in the rain. Full clad will be even more noisy

yes do not think it will be difficult just time consumming

25mm x 50mm battens and counter battens for us. allowed us to fully fill the rafters with insulation as the 50mm air gap was above the Roofshield. all confirmed ok with the BCO.

I called into two BMs this morning Both admitting that things had slowed dramatically while I expect that site work will remain busy for a while Extensions and diy projects will slow to a trickle

We're really happy with our internorm aluclad 3g windows and weren't too pricey. The quality is fantastic and they were able to make full 2400 tall tilt and turn windows and patio doors, which nobody else we spoke to could do. Got them from Feneco in Coleraine... They are OK. A few issues took a LONG time to sort out. There's another supplier in Fermanagh in think. We also got prices from Baskil, were a bit less than Feneco for aluclad, but didn't do the bi-folds or 2400mm high doors and windows we needed.

Well, it's Friday night and this thread caught my eye. How many books have you actually got? I haven't sat down and done any math on this one as my main thought was that my dad has a lot of books, a lot of them. My sister also has a lot of books currently on bookshelves on a floor that's been around for nearly 100 years now. There's never been a problem with floors coping with the load from the bookshelves, even in the last place where my dad had them in a loft converted into a library. In my current house, the SE didn't design the floor according to minimum BR load requirements, but to a higher standard to reduce deflection, which in theory is going to mean the capacity to deal with a greater load. I'll report back when I get my library out of storage and onto the bookshelves ☺️ If my very rusty engineering brain remembers correctly, this is only one way of calculating your loading which is in effect the resultant force of the load. However, this is a simplified approach. For a uniformly distributed load you may need to think as if it's pressure against the surface which would calculate the pressure over an area - think for example snow load. In this instance you'd be looking at load per unit area, or in more simply terms load per unit length. This way you get a better idea of the distribution of the load which is more accurate because in your case, you wouldn't in reality see the resultant force on one joist with less or nothing on the others. But also, because the floor structure ties the floor together your loading will be distributed across a wider area of the floor than just the joists below the bookshelf - try walking across a load of joists without noggings, then add the noggings, and then add your osb/chipboard floor and in each case there will be a very obvious difference in the floor's behaviour and how it feels underfoot. Like @markc has also clearly experimented, I've driven and used a mini digger on a floor with only 4inch joists. But maybe I've had too much beer....

Not unless I am getting senior lecturer wages again. One bit of advice for free, heat and ventilate.

Absolutely. However, I just wanted folk to know the process is not difficult for the layperson to do themselves.

I’ve done the claim myself, recorded the invoices on a spreadsheet. Very easy and simple. HMRC’s guidance notes are surprisingly clear and easy to follow about how to go about the whole process and the claim form straightforward to complete. In fact this part was the least stressful thing about doing the self build!

Give Matt a shout @ http://www.ecoglaze.ie

I'm wondering if@zoothorn really understands the relationship between temperature and humidity? I'm sure @SteamyTea will have given him a thorough education on it. It's really straightforward though. In an extreme practical situation, a meter simultaneously showing RH and temperature is going to be dripping with water if it shows 100% RH. It means that the air is fully saturated and the dewpoint (a temperature) will be the same as the ambient temperature reading - whatever that might be. Anything less than 100% RH will have a corresponding dewpoint at less than the ambient temperature shown. The lower the RH, the lower the dewpoint. If the meter is in a room which feels to have a comfortable ambient temperature overall, there will inevitably be areas that are cooler. If the dewpoint is lower than the surface temperatures in these places, the ambient water vapor will condense on these surfaces. You can play around with temperature, humidity and dewpoint with any suitable online calculator like this to see what happens.

I just watched this weeks build, a big house on a farm in Derbyshire. Not much to mention about the build, but what I took from this is how broken the planning system is in the UK. Something like 20 failed planning applications in the past. All he wanted to do is build a farmhouse on his 16 acre small holding adjacent to all the existing farm buildings. If the present planning system will not allow that, then imho the system is broken. You would have thought this would be allowed perhaps with an agricultural tie? The only way around this was to build a section 79 "outstanding" property, which ironically probably means the site now has a much larger house built on it that would have happened if we had a sensible planning policy.

Older versions of BS 5250 on condensation always showed a VCL at ceiling level with loft insulation. In the latest version (2021) the VCL is omitted in diags but referenced in the text as an AVCL. I questioned BS on this sudden change in building physics and as Mr Punter says the main concern is mass air movement though openings/holes in the ceiling. For the cost and for a belt and braces approach I would use a VCL or duplex plasterboard.

I’ve been installing both for decades and would always use a foil back board (Duplex) under any loft area Some building companies do Other's don’t bother I’m not why it’s not a building requirement to have some sort of vapor barrier But it isn’t The strange thing is A vapor barrier is always in the bill of quantities for social housing

Why not just remortgage the current house and release the funds based on affordability, then do the mortgage switch / move when you finish the new build ..? You'll need to tell them (Santander) at some point that you’ve annexed off part of the garden as it could affect the value and the LTV but I expect their bigger issue will be affordability on the extended loan facility first.

This obsession with old rads needs to end, now.... Who the heck wants their old rads? Mostly they're scratched up, badly painted, undersized and full of sludge.

It is very helpful and inspiring to get this level of design. Current and future.

Well spotted. The design suite doesn't have granite and sandstone. Or these interesting cracks and asymmetries. The inside spaces are all 'rendered' too which is great especially for those not so familiar with imagining spaces.

This is something Loxone really pushed and I couldn't agree more. Other than hitting TV mode, I rarely open the Loxone app more than a couple of times a month (usually to manually adjust some light levels up). All light and blinds switches are just simple retractive switches, with no touch screens or anything complex.

About 30mm by the looks of this hole: I just cut out a plasterboard panel to access the eaves of our garage extension upstairs room to establish a cable run for our solar PV installation next week. Good to see the builder didn't tape the PIR to the wall plate and rafters 🙄 Nor did they extend the PIR between the bottom chord and the timber that closes the top of the intermediate cavity wall below. Anyway, a mouse has been running around in the floor space and has had a go at making an exit tunnel to the soffit. He shouldn't have given up - he only had another 120mm to go 😂

That’s the kick-ass stuff I use to do swimming pool setups. You have learned well, my young crapprentice, and hopefully it’ll only be the knowledge that sticks

I knew where you were going with it, don't worry. Very unsporting what with me being blind and inebriated! 😂 My being sober and sighted might have given us another 5 or so points I reckon. Might have edged to 3rd place.