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If the op calls and tells them that the installer has installed the flue through an airbrick and left a great big hole round the flue, plus the 2m odd length of flue extension is hanging off a zip tie rather than any flue brackets, it will trigger an inspection at the very least. Gas Safe will get hold of the installer and tell him to meet them at the property where they will go through the installation. They will also, in all likelihood, ask him to go demonstrate the commissioning process step by step whle asking him questions about what he's doing and why. They might then also want to visit a number of his other installations. If the installation shows that products of combustion are coming into the property from the flue then in all likelihood, he will be RIDDOR'd and then he gets into a very stick mess. I know someone who was RIDDOR'd following a customer being admitted into hospital about 8months after a new boiler installation for alleged carbon monoxide poisoning. Investigations were very thorough and he was found not to be at fault - it was the gas hob installation - but he was asked to modify a couple of parts of his installation. You can report questionable gas work online here: https://www.gassaferegister.co.uk/gas-safety/concerns-reporting-illegal-gas-work/report-gas-work-concerns/ or email them,or call them. FFS, actually, a room sealed boiler is one where WHOLE combustion system is sealed from the room. But here's the definition from the Gas Safe (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998: "room-sealed appliance” means an appliance whose combustion system is sealed from the room in which the appliance is located and which obtains air for combustion from a ventilated uninhabited space within the premises or directly from the open air outside the premises and which vents the products of combustion directly to open air outside the premises" Therefore if the flue isn't sealed correctly, including through the wall, it is no longer room sealed. I am gas safe registered btw.....

Perhaps something like these interlocking blocks. Once the foundations are done you don't use mortar except perhaps for the top layer.. https://www.marshalls.co.uk/commercial/product/retaining-wall-series https://www.marshalls.co.uk/commercial/product/freestanding-wall-series

The HH detail looks pants for both durability and heat loss. I would get very liberal with some high quality fluid applied sealant externally to those blocks, take it right down below the level of the floor insulation. Remember water must do down and out. Then get some XPS or high density EPS and secure it outside the foundation blocks and sill plate. Finally get a proper insulated aluminium sill like those used for EWI and hook it under the bottom of the window bedded in some suitable sealant. Ooze it out and scrape away the excess to completely fill any gaps. Render the outside of the insulation or glue on some slates as impact and rodent protection. A gravel topped French drain to finish should keep the water and splashes at bay.

Apologies for the late reply, been a busy few days!! Yes, a single t&e cable for each towel rail and UFH back to the cabinet. Generally in the UK everyone uses ring mains for socket outlet power circuits and radial circuits for others (e.g. oven, shower, lighting, immersion etc etc) Don't know how true this is but on an electrical course a few years back the trainer told us that ring mains are a peculiar british thing, having been conceived in the 1950's as a way to provide power outlets using less (and thinner) cable than radials as copper was in short supply. Before that all circuits were radial and I think pretty much we are one of the few, if not the only, country that does it this way.

You want to avoid any dampness hanging about. Even galvanised steel will rust to nothing if constantly damp. So yes, fix to battens with an air gap

Must admit I only know about house building, nothing specific to huts etc. But they are facing the same conditions so I'd be wary of diverging too far from what works on a house, unless the space and weight cannot be tolerated. You absolutely will need a drainage void behind the outer cladding. Even if no rain penetrates, you will have condensation. I suppose vertical tin straight on to the OSB could work but it's not ideal. I take it you'll have a breather membrane in there too? If you can afford another 50mm of wall thickness, you then want vertical and horizontal battens to provide a fully drained void.

Thank you saveasteading. I will use a more decorative stone/brick/block or sleeper. That is a given from Mrs. rowingzeus. I like the idea of stepping it back. I reckon my (our) decision will be made when I've dug out more soil and dug out the old footing but it sounds like I must use a membrane and drain/weep holes for whatever we choose.

If you want the painted look, you don't really want an oily wood. Definitely have a decent overhang and gutters on the roof to protect those walls as much as possible. If you go with tin on the walls, I would definitely use a 90⁰ angle strip up the corner. Just keep it neat, e.g. 50x50 rather than the chunky stuff you'd use on a roof. There will be a drainage void and breather membrane behind it anyway so a little driving rain getting through won't be the end of the world.

Our recent timber purchase was heavily researched. Best price Caley Timber at Inverness Airport and they don't mill their own. I think they deliver anywhere in the Highlands.

Hi, thanks for the reply. It can be confirmed that the bco did not enter our land to certify the work because we e-mailed them to ask how they gained entry and they emailed back to say they didn't and that it was an 'external' examination only!!!!

Get it in preservative treated quality and it won't rot or be eaten. Then look at detailing to protect the sawn ends.

Or a nibbler as @Iceverge mentioned. Our new build has wrinkly tin roof and cladding on the 2 storey part. The professionals who were contracted for the work used nibblers. Lidl actually had both battery and mains nibblers in the middle aisle earlier this year. I bought a mains one which were on offer before the battery ones. It's actually quite hard to go in a straight line, so best to use a guide clamped on, especially across the wrinkles. The corners of our build have right angle profiles but I guess you could bend the tin round. EJOT do a fastener which has a smaller domed head instead of the big hex heads on most fasteners - these would look much better on a smaller project like yours. They will colour code them to any RAL colour. Simon

Look at wickes website ( I suggest it because it delays does prices) and you see shiplap at £34/m2. That is per small bubble before discount incl vat. Your quote is3 x that despite thd quantity being decent. Try someone else. You could go to wickes and save £2,000 of another merchant amd save more. Remember that the overlaps require extra material. For value, I would choose tanalised pine.

This is a catalogue of failures at all levels of the project. The obvious fact is 8 square metres of additional brickwork is going to weigh a lot more than the same area of glazing and the original foundations have started moving under that additional load. Digging a trench a pouring additional concrete alongside the foundations is not underpinning. Underpinning is digging deeper under the foundation and pouring extra concrete underneath to make the foundations deeper, and for obvious reasons it is done in sections allowing time for each section to cure. And building control seem to have been negligent not ecen entering the property to look. As to who is too blame, collectively they all did it wrong. Which one to put it right? I don't know.

Beautiful location. Strange as it may seem, take a look at Falu Red - an original paint from the copper mines in Falun Sweden. In several regions, it's the only colour you're allowed to use in rural settings and it strangely blends in very well. It also protect the timber in harsh conditions but lets it breathe. With Falu red you can use softwood. We've used locally grown Cedar for our current house due to planning (it's silvering very nicely) but I would definitely build a timber frame house finished board on board with Falu red one day - reminds me of my second home and upbringing. Here's a gallery: https://falurodfarg.com/inspiration/bildgalleri/

We are going board on board Scot Larch from Russwood treated with Sioo:x to get that driftwood silver look uniformly as quickly as possible. It’s the thing I am most looking forward to doing in the next few weeks. It’s not cheap but it is lovely.

Interesting, when I bought direct it was less than half the cost of the BM stock. And I didn't want to use the BM stuff anyway because it was (aesthetically) too chunky for my small build. Always shop around.

Despit As it happens, our team is cladding the garage now. Using larch in standard sizes, vertical board on board. They bought this from a local bm, who buy in rhe timber, comfortably beating direct purchase from the mill. But fair to say it was part of a large timber order. I love the colour an would prevent it, bug they prefer the grey ageing and gradual decay.

I have a hot water recirculation loop because I live in a bungalow and there are long pipe runs from the hot water cylinder in the centre of the bungalow to the bathrooms at one end and the kitchen at the other end. It's a bit of a luxury because the hot water in the pipes will lose heat no matter how well you insulate them. I run my recirculation pump for just 5 minutes every hour which means that the water out of the hot taps is immediately tepid at worst. To have a recirculation loop you need a tank of stored hot water. It makes no difference whatsoever how that hot water is heated so, if this is your issue, mention of an ASHP in the title is a complete red herring. To have a hot water recirculation loop you need both flow and return pipes for the hot water and a pump to circulate the hot water around the loop. It has to be a special pump that is WRAS certified for use with potable water. If your plumber did not install the return pipes then a retrofit would be very awkward. However the only adverse consequence is that you may face a long wait and have to run off a lot of cold water before your hot taps run hot.

Good morning and welcome, at 3 feet high and stable (looking) ground behind it the wall doesn’t need to be anything special. Laying bricks is an art form, blocks much easier and sleepers even easier. Cost wise, blocks cheapest followed by sleepers and brick most expensive. Brick and block needs a good foundation, sleepers will happily sit on some gravel or hardcore for drainage. Any wall needs water to drain from behind and out at the bottom or at the ends. Build the wall, dpm (damp proof membrane) sheet behind and back fill with 6 inch or so clean gravel between wall and soil.

my nortgage rate in the 80,s was 18%-- it was the big fall in rates that alowed house price to rocket punished those with savings , to the point where normal repayment mortages have dissappeared . and its almost impossible to fet one where you cab pay off lumps when you want. we need to head back to theses -but mortgage companies don,t want you to pay it off --just keep taking the interest on fixeddeals + then stuff you when it runs out even the few banks that used to do a conbined currebnt account=mortgage have gone -which gave you the option to heep paying off nits as you go banks want you in debt forever , which helped me to be able to buy my mega plot at a good price --cos I had real money

We got some nice Douglas Fir from Logie Timber last year.

I went to my nearest sawmill and they made up planks to my spec (100x20mm from memory). It was very cheap, about 75p/m but that was about six years ago. At that time, it was quite a bit cheaper than the wriggly tin, per m², that I ordered around the same time. The tin wasn't the cheapest possible, it was 0.7mm plastisol coated and the m² price included fixings and flashings. So you could possibly get tin a little cheaper if you went for 0.5mm galv finish without the extras. And I believe wood has shot up in price too.

yes you do, your mortgage yes it is, because your mortgage will (eventually) go up. It will go up much more than any other thing you will have putatively bought on finance, because a person’s home is their most expensive possession, so finance outstanding on a home is typically much greater than any other debt, say on a car, TV or credit card. (Putatively, because I know you don’t buy goods on finance.) of course it did. If your largest non-discretionary outgoing is your mortgage repayments, and so if/when those go up, that tightens available cash for discretionary spending. Job security, albeit related, is a C separate issue. With rates going up more quickly now, it is more likely we are heading for recession, so people will be more concerned about job security and that will be a further reason to spend less.

Russwood is beautiful. It slso has a sort of cedar pencil smell when new. Rather expensive. They will not provide specific lengths so you get a random mix of lengths, albeit all multiples of 300mm. You can use any spruce or larch from a local mill or bm. Scottish timber isn't specially strong due to the fast growth. Out local mill said they could only compete commercially on special sizes. So I would buy from the local bm, fix it to board rather than battens so that there is zero warping, and stain it to choice with the best stain. Use oak colur for protection and gloss and to retain the original colour. Any other colour to your taste. If you don't stain it, it will turn grey, which the planners may favour, and not kast do long.

We also have no UFH, fan coils or A2A upstairs. We didn't plan for any of these because, in theory, the overheating risk with fully automatic blinds everywhere was extremely low. The reality though is that overheating risk is based on <25C and night flushing. But, up to 25C isn't comfortable and during a week-long heatwave, it doesn't get cool enough outside to flush out hot air. We find that the first floor heats up due to three reasons (excluding solar gain) - Through the fabric of the building - Humans - MVHR. (If the average house temperature is 22C and outside it's 37C, your MVHR unit is injecting air at 25C if your MVHR is 80% efficient). To cool down the first floor to an ideal temperature we'd need to cool the ground floor to <20C probably, which then becomes uncomfortable downstairs. We did install an MVHR post-heater as a backup plan and it does makes some impact, but it primarily stops MVHR from heating up the first floor rather than providing any kind of active cooling. In order to try to use it to actively lower the first-floor temperature it needs to be run on boost and left on all day. In this scenario though, part of the cooling power is wasted on cooling the additional incoming air that you wouldn't be cooling if you weren't running MVHR on boost. I knew MVHR post-heater was minimally effective from the beginning, but I never realised that the cooling power from post-heat and fan-coil units was not at all comparable because one is cooling incoming air on boost and the other is cooling exiting room air.

For those interested, I took another look at figures and clipped the data to where solar gain overtook heating demand which gives two months worth of data: Modelled gas heating demand for that period was 2662kWh Actual gas consumption was 640kWh The ASHP consumption was 372kWh That means every 1kWh the ASHP consumed offset 5.4kWh of gas This is likely to be accurate/an underestimate as I tried to push the ASHP for maximum gas offset meaning the house was on average 1°C warmer than the regression fit data 76% reduction in gas heating usage from a single multisplit unit Assuming a boiler efficiency of 90%, that gives an estimated CoP of 4.9, though this was in the March-May period so will be more favourable than mid-winter performance. Still, it compares well with the stated SCoP of 4.2 Even accounting for "lost export" on Flux's high rates, that means the unit has repaid 20% of its cost in 2 months (~30% of the heating season) - not bad at all No more data until the next heating period, though I'm interested to test the cooling performance over the summer.

because recession is here.