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Back by popular demand! (Well, one person asked.) I said the previous blog was my last. I lied. This bonus edition focuses our efforts to landscape the garden. Just before we moved in in February the rear ‘garden’ looked a bit like this: Fortunately, we’d stayed close enough to the build budget to have some funds still reserved for landscaping. It turns out that landscaping is expensive - similar costs to groundworks in our experience. Last year, while waiting for planning and itching to do something, we’d engaged a garden designer to help us meet some key requirements. We wanted to create a small garden with multiple planting and seating areas with level access from the house and wheelchair access to all areas. The designer came up with a design we liked - an interesting mixture of curves and angles, with planting and seating areas as requested. We ended up adapting this design to form the skeleton of the garden. In truth we were never likely to take any design without tweaking it but if we attempted the design ourselves it would have been very boring compared with the garden we now have. (We also ditched the designers planting list suggestion but Mrs P. was always going to have the plants she wanted, and why not?) One reason we had to adapt the design was that the fall in height was more than we planned for at 1.6m, and we only had about 12m distance to manage it given we wanted a terrace with level access next to the house. For comfortable wheelchair access I find it’s best to limit ramps to no more than 1:20 gradient, which implies we needed to fit in 32m of ramps in a 12m x 15m area. So the paths became a bit more meandering. Here’s my amateur attempt at trying to gauge shape and fall of the paths. Our excellent local landscape gardener Ashley Ralph (Ashely Ralph Landscaping - I’m not on commission!) started work in February to turn our amended plan into reality. Marking out was fun! This photo shows just how tight a space Ashley was working with. Cern Abbas Giant eat your heart out! Anyway... we needed quite a few retaining walls, which means a lot of trenches and footings. It rained a lot in February too, which added to the challenge. It would have been nice to achieve this with less concrete and fewer concrete blocks but I can’t think how that could have been done. Ashley, with Francis driving the dumper. The block walls were capped with sandstone copings and given a sand and cement render finish. We remembered to run some armoured cables and blue water pipe to allow couple of electric sockets and water taps. In the end we decided not to bother with external lighting even though we’d got planning permission approval because we rarely need it and are happy to use portable rechargeable lamps when we do. The paths and seating areas are in resin bound gravel; here are the paths edged in red setts then with and a concrete sub-base on type 1. Here’s the scene before the resin top-coat is laid but after the planting beds have had their topsoil put in. Troy's taken the idea of 'beds' too literally: For the terrace we used the external version of the internal 900 x 600 porcelain tiles we use throughout the house. The external tiles are 20mm thick rather than 10mm and have a slightly rougher surface for slip resistance. We used the same tiles for the front porch area. The walls at either side of the rear garden have drops of over 600mm so our building inspector insisted we put up ‘fall protection’ which we did using locally sourced cedar slats, fixed horizontally to posts ‘resin-studded’ to the walls. This doubles as screening from our neighbours and provides extra shelter and structure for climbing plants, so we were not too upset at having to do this. (The wider gaps at the bottom are deliberate here, to allow jasmine to grow through from the other side. Beer at bottom right is entirely incidental!) The final step for all that hard landscaping: the resin bound gravel surface. We think it looks great. It’s very smooth to wheel on and all the gradients are good too! For the planting beds we imported a fair amount of loamy topsoil to go over the existing heavy clay. Hopefully this will give a good balance with the underlying clay retaining water whilst the surface soil doesn’t get waterlogged. The beds are not enormous but it is going to take a lot of plants to fill them. That, and time to allow the plants to grow and establish themselves. Er… planting beds Troy! Obviously Mrs P. is in charge of the planting as I haven’t got a clue. The beauty of raised beds is that you can put the soil you want in them. One of the beds closer to the house will have sharper drainage and is going to become a Mediterranean garden. Another has been filled with ericaceous soil for acid-loving plants. I do know that we have some of our favourite plants already planted or planned, including roses: Nye Bevan, Claire Austen, Queen of Sweden, Champagne Moments, Donahue; also various peonies, hydrangeas eryngiums, achillia, lavenders… and lots of others. But plenty more planting opportunities according to Mrs P. - I’d better check that budget again! Well, that’s it for this bonus edition garden landscaping blog. A big thank you to Ashley and Francis for all their incredible work building our garden, and to Mrs P. of course for great plant choices, all that planting, and green fingers. After all, what is a garden without plants? That’s definitely it now… …until the epilogue maybe. Ben

Block and beam? No! Ground bearing slabs. A decision that has given me sleepless nights and resulted in some serious hard graft. We had 60 ton (that’s what we were told 🤔) of Type 1 MOT delivered and had to then proceed to get into the bays and levelled up, before compacting it. The brickie was an arse as he should have stopped building and said “get your hardcore in and laid”. His work was rather shit, so I knocked some of it down to enable me to get a dumper in distribute the piles to make levelling it quicker. Building control were fine with me using grano dust as the top layer. This compacts nicely and gives a much harder surface than sand. Below are a few pictures. Hoping to get everything finished by tomorrow. I’ll breath a sigh of relief that it’s done and dusted.

We're first timers in our sixties, renovating a 200 year old Gloucestershire property as our last home. It's very basic (no central heating, damp) with a stone centre, brick semi-added pre 1860 and s 20th C. extension at each end. Removing the plaster and some ceiling my wife has revealed questionable [cough] building techniques which explain some of the cracks and a patched up Inglenook which we plan to restore. Early days but we have a builder and architect for a garden room style extension. We have lots of ideas and plenty of time, but of course not enough money :-) If you've done anything like this by all means tell us we're barmy, it just say hi. Met a couple this morning and got chatting about this, and they recommended this forum highly. I'm learning so much useful stuff from others offline and online. For others I can recommend Mastodon (a non commercial social network - no ads or algorithm getting in the way). Posting questions there has been a great help.

And yes, that title is a nod to the wisdom of the Beverley Knight song. But it also applies to self building, methinks. [Health Warning: The following diatribe focuses on the 2% that’s not gone perfectly, and risks massively underplaying the 99% which has gone right. But maybe that focus is what makes selfbuild what it is, and why for normal people, it just doesn’t add up.] We are now in, living at no. 11. Well, not this exact moment in fact. Right now we are cooking in Flora the Explorer (campervan around which our garage was designed), parked on a cliff top on the Isle of Wight overlooking the English Channel. Being boiled alive (slight exaggeration) in a Fiat tin can is at least variety from being boiled alive (bigger exaggeration) in a new build. We moved in to a substantially but not completely finished house just in time to enjoy some heatwaves. How very fashionable. The decision to categorise the main bedroom fancoil as ‘to be done later’ seemed such a good idea when the choice was delaying moving out of the s@#*, I mean rental, and in my few rational moments I know that it was a good idea. If we had stayed the rental would have been much, much worse than no. 11 is. But if I’d had free choice I’d not have started our living in our new pad in a heatwave. Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda (henceforth SWC) put the fancoil in. It’s made a bit worse by our choice of sleeping in the west facing front (sort of) bedroom, which sits next to our biggest window, the one above the front door overlooking our stairs and hall. We passed part O with flying colours, so we now view the afternoon solar gain with incredulity at what a house would be like that didn’t pass part O. But every day is a school day, and the first thing we learn was that we could comfortably sleep in no. 11, even on a sofa bed, at temperatures which would have prevented rest at our last house. It’s hard not to attribute that to the life support (MVHR). The worst days at our last house were when the nights were completely still, and I’m guessing that meant higher humidity and CO2 levels. No more, not with life support. We are now in the habit of whacking the life support onto Boost n Bypass once the outside temp falls nicely below the inside temp. Even when we have the upstairs windows open it seems to help. To start with opening a window (in my mind) required kneeling to confess our sins and three Hail Marys, but I soon got over it. And whilst we still don’t have our fancoil(s) thats how we are managing the upstairs overheating. Downstairs is a different matter. Downstairs we have porcelain tiles throughout, gently cooled by Maxi the moody teenager heat pump. It has helped enormously and once we have a way of transferring some of the cool to upstairs life will be peachy, though it’ll likely be 6°C outside by then, given the current todo list. We’ve wrestled with Maxi to get it to a sensible working arrangement, and that work is ongoing. At the mo if we set the WC curve (no, thats not the shape of the toilet pan) so that the flow temp is set to 15°C Maxi bothers for about 20 to 30 minutes and then sulks for an hour or two. Following a call with the Energy Lab, the distributor of Maxi, it’s better than it had been as some of the settings weren’t sensible, but it must and will do better. Our tiles sit at 19°C to 20°C, which matches the return temp to Maxi after a few minutes of sulking. That makes for a noticeable improvement in downstairs temperature but it’s as low as we can get it without cranking up Maxi to full condensy by dropping the target flow temp loads. A work in progress which is currently delayed by The Energy Lab being about as responsive as I am when a glowing J asks when I hope to get the fancoil(s) in. SWC properly tested Maxi when first installed. Sigh. It has given us the ability to start the balancing process, which I think is a good thing. The downstairs bedroom and bathroom floors were colder than the rest of downstairs, enough to make it slightly uncomfortable in bare feet, so I’ve tweaked the flow controls on the manifold and that has helped. The downstairs bathroom is in the process of being renamed the paddling pool. We have gone for a sort of wet room shower and loo, etc. and it looks the business even if I do say so myself - it’s just that we didn’t realise how wet a wet room would be. That bloody great big rain head shower jobby feels great when showering but oh boy, the water distribution! I think we can get away without a sign indicating which is the deep end, but for some guests we might need to sand bag the door. Some friends of ours came to dins recently, they have a nice big downstairs shower wet room with a bloody great big rain head shower. No doubt that was part of the subliminal thinking route to choosing them ourselves. During the inevitable tour (we are in huge danger of continuing to be self build bores for years to come) we shared our concerns regarding the paddling pool. “Oh yes” they happily said “we never use ours, far too messy”. Humph. SWC asked them methinks. And you can guess how good a nicely cooled tiled floor is at drying out. But there’s a ‘learn’ even there. We’ve discovered that the floor dries out much better if the door is left closed. The mechanism seems to be that the undercut forces the whole room to be ventilated, whereas if the door is open, which is how I automatically left it when it needed to dry, the moving air goes through at a higher level and the floor stays wet. Who knew? (Everyone with life support, probably!) Anyways, all that misses out all the fun of getting from our last post to here. Maybe that would be a good thing, but if you don’t have a strong constitution, look away now…. Last time I happily reported that we had dug our trench to connect our poo pipes to the sewer, and we’d found the capped off sewer, and the levels all worked. Happy days. Till the next step. In theory all we had to do was uncap the sewer, put the last few meters of pipe and a manhole in, and then bury the whole shebang. In theory. In practice when one of the groundworkers popped the plug out of the sewer we had a bit of a foul fountain. Quite a bit in fact. He was so shocked he literally just stood in the hole with his mouth open (yes, literally), whilst I and his workmate screamed at him to get out. He did, but he was rather messy. I threw a block into the trench and pushed some soil in to limit the aromatic expansion. It subsided with about 8’ of swarfega consistency sewerage filling the trench. Lesson: it’s not happy days till the hole’s filled in. I knew our sewerage run was old and wasn’t on the Anglian Water sewerage map. I didn’t think that mattered. Wrong. Not on the map means not maintained. We are the second from the end of a run of perhaps 5 houses on an ancient spur running to the main road main sewer. There had been reports of the drains backing up in the past (danger sign no 2 I missed), and I knew from my water level that the whole run was very shallow and had little fall. Danger sign no. 3. In the year the sewer was capped off the debris that had sat in the pipe for decades had collected lots of gooey solids and was apparently only letting liquids through. If a few more months had gone by next door would have noticed it backing up, but we hit the jackpot timing wise and many linear meters of pipe’s worth of thick sludge finally saw daylight. It took a week to get the whole run blasted out and the stuff that came out was horrendous. We had excellent service from Anglian Water, they even dug out and took away the by then remaining solids from our trench, before spraying many litres of disinfectant. Then work could resume. It delayed some things by a week and made site access a nightmare as walking a plank over septic ancient sewerage is not for the faint hearted (or the sensible). I’ll remember that long after I’ve forgotten the excitement of seeing the bathrooms tiled, or the downstairs porcelain floor tiling grow daily, or the test lighting of the woodburner, or us exporting lecky for the first time. Yet in many ways things like those or the posh Lino going down upstairs or the Pax wardrobes sprinting into shape or the furniture going in and looking just right or many, many happy things are far more important than the wrinkles. Over a relatively short space of time the shell of a house got coloured in to start to resemble our home. Making one’s self stand back and notice current status, let alone daily progress, is a skill that will always ellude me. When there are others on site (old fogey repeating himself yet again warning!) my time disappears in a whirl of checking and answering questions and tea making and organising and tidying up and ordering for other days and and and…. and I get nothing done myself. Except that is getting something done but it doesn’t feel like it. Bits of kitchen and utility room arrived and got fitted, painting got done, internal doors finally arrived many weeks after they were due and got fitted, and in odd moments late each day and at weekends I got to do stuff myself, including some plumbing. Doesn’t feel like plumbing in many ways as there’s no flux or burnt fingers involved. It’s more like Lego. Cut the pipe to length with glorified scissors, select the correct bit, click, realise the mistake, swear whilst taking off the incorrect bit, click on the actually correct bit, turn on the water and wait for the drip that doesn’t appear. So simple it’s almost surreal. I’m used to electrics just working, perhaps because it’s my background, but with plumbing it’s almost like I need to find and fix a leak to feel comfortable. In my mind the time leading up to us moving in is a big mix of memories with few distinct bits, but between J and I we kept things just about under control enough to get ready to move in, meaning J kept an overview in the form of lists of the bits we needed done. Vital. One big milestone was commissioning the life support and the dreaded air test. I built a nice strong stand for the Zehnder unit as otherwise it would have been hung on the block outer skin of the downstairs bedroom wall and we were convinced the hum would keep guests awake. Good news if like me, one doesn’t like guests, but apparently not a good thing. So when I turned the system on I realised it was faulty as it wasn’t running. Only the air was moving but it was just so ridiculously quiet, so actually it was working. (SWC gone and stood next to a working Zehnder to realise I could have saved myself time and bolted it straight to the wall). It defaults to a lot higher flow speed than we needed, and even then it was nice and quiet. So after commissioning it’s wonderfully invisible, apart from the odd shaped vent thingies in the ceilings. Works brilliantly at clearing the steam from the one little shower room we had working to move in with too. Very happy. The air test was not quite such a happy thing, however. Over and over again I was told I’d done everything needed and we were bound to be fine. Rolly, our chippy, had never seen such an airtight build and he knew we’d be super airtight. If only. 1.65. Bugger. During the first test, after a false start where I’d left a 40mm waste pipe uncapped giving us a 5, it was identified that I had a sodding great big leak at or near the base of my internal soil stack. I just knew I’d have a problem with our flat roof and the junctions thereof so I put lots of time into that. That was all fine. I absolutely knew that the entry point of the 15 MVHR ducts into the house would be a problem so I put time into that too. All fine there too. I knew from what I read on here that my Heath Robinson DIY loft hatch would leak. Nope. I thought I’d taped to death the DPM round the soil stack. We all know what Thought did. The DPM forms the bottom of our airtight layer, being taped everywhere (or so I thought) to the VCL. I knew all along we should take time out to test the airtightness. I even borrowed a leaf blower to have a half baked go at it using our loft hatch to test airtightness. But I never took a day out to do it. There was always something else that needed to be focussed on at the time, the silly and arguably unnecessary air test can be done later. Only it never was. SWC cubed. The leak appears to be near the bottom of the soil stack but as it’s all but encased now in studwork and plastered plasterboard so where the actual breach is is impossible to tell. I went nuts with the Passive House Systems airtight and insulating foam but it made no difference at all. There’s little leaks in the external doors but nothing like the one near the soil stack. I’m guessing we are looking at a hole about the width of an index finger. Perhaps something a single piece of tape could have sorted. Who knows? But does it actually matter? Well, there’s a good question. I’ve not rerun Jeremy’s spreadsheet and in truth the horse has already bolted. And if that means Maxi is actually slightly undersized for -3°C outside then at least we do have the woodburner and we could always invest in a little fan heater. But as you can imagine, I am royally annoyed with myself. The house is shaping up to be a really nice home to live in. The garden is coming along a treat. We love living in that location. That’s the 99% I need to focus on. Maybe writing this interminable blog is part of that reconciliation, and I know it will happen, but I’m still really, really, really annoyed at myself. In case you aren’t familiar with the song I’ll share one particularly apposite line from it. "Shoulda woulda coulda" are the last words of a fool. Sigh.

Hi everyone - I'm Tim Newbie selfbuilder here, in the early stages of planning our self-build project in South Wales (But currently living in Bristol). Looking to build a family home to passive house principles, and avoid any Grand-designs style crises during the process! Excited to be part of this forum, which is a great source of info! I look forward to picking your collective brain more as we make our design choices and progress with the project.

Stop trying to reinvent this job. sealing around the service pipes is easy. you do not try and cut a hole in the membrane and seal that to the pipe. cut a 300mm hole in the membrane, poke it over the pipe, then cut a 600 mm square of extra membrane, cut a 120 mm hole in the centre, poke it over the pipe and tape it up, then tape your patch down to the main sheet. easy, each pipe penetration will take 15 mins max. why buy two membranes to do one job. if your finish concrete is rough the pir insulation won’t give a monkeys it will just deform to the shape of the slab when it has 15 tonne of screed on top of it.

This is just getting ridiculous now. Don't you know you're suppposed to have disaster stories, compromises, rogue workers, and budget failures? 😉 You and you're wife must be so happy and proud - deservedly so; you've done an amazing job. Love the terraces, and as @MikeSharp01 notes, we at least deserve an update once the planting has settled in, just so we can be a little more jealous than we already are. 🤣 Love it! ❤️

Lift the 5a one as much as possible, then same for the socket to see if you can hide this. Plasterer was shite, decorator equally as guilty. Just unbelievable that this incredibly low standard of work could have escaped the 80’s and still be so prevalent today in 2026. I bet neither of those two tossers houses look like this. Utterly embarrassingly low standards from these people. The ‘fix’ is to remove the outlets, PVA the openings, apply EasiFill and allow to dry fully, then sand and paint, then, repeat if necessary, and paint. If you have a PM then send the bill to them.

I was recommended a screed company, I was told they are absolutely shit hot, I met the main man and he knew what he was talking about, I asked about screed curl at the edges and covering the screed to slow down evaporation. he said it wasn’t necessary. so I did some more reading and asked a few questions. they did the screed, an hour after they had gone I hosed it down with a very fine mist spray, I then covered it in polythene and also covered all the windows to stop the sunlight coming in. the result is I have the flattest most level screed I’ve ever seen. you need to satisfy yourself how it should be done, and any short comings in your opinion you need to make up. buy the polythene and install it yourself or do you due diligence and insist on a curing agent. if you think they are good why do they not want to cover it ?

Flanagaj, I think maybe you are trying to be a builder without being a builder. I write with sod all experience except my own troubled extension. We ended up having to ditch a bad builder and then decided (as we had a dry shell by then and good alternate builders were not available for 18months plus) to continue by bringing in trades to get to completion. It is not an easy process because unlike a proper builder... 1/ You do not have a little black book with several good contractors for each and every trade - people you know from experience are capable and you can work with. 2/ You do not have any real clout with trades because for them you are a one off customer - a few £k's or £10k's of business - builders will be known sources of regular business 3/ Some trades people may be wary of a novice builder, or sometimes take advantage. 4/ You lack deep knowledge and experience of your own - of trade specifics, trade tendencies, what to watch for, how to specify a job These things do make it difficult. Finding good trades can be a lengthy process where the only proof is in eating the pudding. These things affect timeline enormously, you can never call in a favour from someone, no one will ever call you looking for work, you are potentially the job that gets delayed in favour of others. For your slab specifics, do you have a concrete mix specification defined that is what they are going to meet. My SE sepcified the mix for us. And where you don't have a contract only a price/purchase order/invoice then I would suggest always emailing to ensure you have something in writing which defines your requirements. In case of dispute at least you then have something more than verbal conversations and a price. You can even then write down what the contractor has told you verbally about the job, answers to your queries, etc. But try and get someone you can talk to, I've always been able to talk to my SE or Architect or the QS that dealt with closing my original builder contract, to get bits of advice or a site visit.

Why can't everything just be moved under the sink? Don't think I've ever seen any plumbing, water or waste behind the actual machines. Yes you lose the cupboard space, but so be it. My machines have a recessed section at the bottom so pipes can travel past it without interfering with the space. For what it's worth I did that in 2 places on the opposite sides of the room in my gaff, no regrets.

To add, if you do just decide to DIY something and there is an underlying structural issue that then reappears later, you may be invalidating the NHBC insurance (or at least giving them a lot of ammunition for an argument) and exposing yourself to much higher costs down the line.

To break his arguments down by section 1. He makes the mistake that declining N.Sea production is a choice - it isn't the rate of decline is slightly modifiable but not to any significant degree. We are arguing over the green line or the red line. He also makes the mistake that our high gas and electricity prices are due to us deliberately running down our production. Aside from my point above, they are high due to the high price of gas and the international price of gas is not changed by the UK output. The price is set by the international markets and those are (nominally)supply and demand. Even at best, our output is too small to change the international price. It should be noted that the rise in electricity prices and gas prices was very closely correlated in 2022 because a much larger proportion of our electricity came from gas. In 2026 the rise was much less direct because less of our electricity comes from gas. He talks about the supply chains for renewables being dirty and having emissions. This is a variation of the landman rant (and the "EV's will never pay back the carbon used in making the battery" argument before that). Study after study shows wind turbines, solar panels and EVs are all net negative for carbon well within their lifetime. It also ignores the carbon and pollution from fossil fuel extraction as a comparison. 2. He talks about "what happens is the gas prices fall?" Well, they will eventually for a while,until the next crisis. Then they will fall again until the next crisis and so on. So far we have had 2 massive "once in a lifetime" shocks in the current decade -that we are only half way through... Does anyone want to bet Trump doesn't do something stupid I'm the next 2 and a bit years. What would happen to oil prices if the world's largest oil producer suffered massive political instability? Say a the kind caused when a leader who loses an election tries to cling to power using a paramilitary police force or even elements of the armed forces.... Who wants to say that is fantasy land? 3. He seems to get mixed up on the cost of capacity. With renewables capacity is a more statistical figure than gas plants etc. With ccgt plant the peak cavity is easy. Just an engineering question -"that plant, at full chat, will produce 2GW of electricity." With renewables there is a theoretical capacity - what if everything was perfect, but that's only a few % of the time. A better question would be "what is the 95% available capacity" ie the level it can produce 95% (or whatever arbitrary figure you want) of the time. So my 11kwp solar array has a 95% figure closer to 1kw (during daylight obviously). Essentially we will have to dump a load of capital into building these assets. Once e have built them they will provide cheap energy for decades. Or we could kee the capital and dole it out to buy oil and gas as we need it. That's our choice. Right enough for now....

It is worth pointing out that we started the transition to low carbon generation nearly 2 decades ago. Apart from some very small scale wind farms, hobby PV and a bit of hydro, we had virtually nothing. Since the we have added 55 GWp if wind and solar. Now the name plate capacity if RE cannot be compared directly with thermal generation, but it contributed close to 40% of our generation. It also contributed to our pumped storage as well. I have not looked at storage capacity in a while, but must be close to 1 GWh now. I cannot see any reason why we should not hit 90% low carbon generation by 2040, except if there is not the political will to do so. I think the political will is there, we tend to hear the naysayers more because they are the vocal minority, the majority says nothing. I am going to repeat what I said about cost. Wind and PV are the cheapest forms of, and it is coming in bold , NEW generation. It is not competing with the same contracts as legacy generation.

It depends! But here is a rough outline of how we go about designing steel fire protection. The following is in the context of the self builder, not multi storey, multiple occupancy structures. Ok, the process / theory is.. roughly this. The starting point is to understand how steel behaves when it gets hot. Someone ask me / others a while back.. why does my oven not start to melt / distort when I cook a pizza hot? The above is what we call a fire curve (SCI, Steel Construction Institute data ). There are different fire curves. They vary depending on fire loading (how much and what types of stuff can contribute to a fire, how "intense and rapid" the heat delivery) but the above is one we would refer to in a typical domestic self build. You can see that up to about 350 Celsius the steel maintains much of its strength, which is why your oven does not "melt" and fall to bits. After that the steel strength starts to plummet. When we fire protect steels as @saveasteading says This is correct. All we are doing it to stop the steel from getting hot enough, then soften too much, and thus not carry the loads on it for the time required by the building regulations for example. Now we can either select a geometry of steel member and make it very heavy such that there is so much mass of steel that it does not get heated quickly enough to soften to the point of failure. In lay terms. If we had a solid round bar of steel say 150mm in diameter it has a large cross section area compared with the exposed surface. This is what we call the heated perimeter / cross section area ratio (Hp/A), the Euro codes have slightly different way of presenting but they mean the same. They are presented using the ratio Area / Volume, A/V. But if we have the same cross section area of steel and weight in an I shape (a universal beam) it has a much larger surface area and thus will heat up much more quickly and thus lose strength more quickly. Now we ain't going to be using solid 150mm diameter steels. What we could look to do is is insulate the steel. This could be by way of fire proof plasterboard or intumescent paint. But also we could build the steel into a masonry wall and maybe have only one side exposed to the fire on the inside of say a garage. Or we could have the steel built into a floor that in itself insulates some of the exposed faces of the steel. Below is a screen shot of a table that shows how we need to consider the exposed sides. They key here is that the lower the section factor the slower the steel will heat up. The section factor changes depending on how many sides of the steel are exposed. But to go back to what @Great_scot_selfbuild asked., which was how heavy does a steel need to be so it does not need fire protection? The info below is taken from Corus literature 2003 as an easy generic example. The bottom line (Hp 61m^-1) is of interest to us here in a domestic self build. Using a design temperature of 550 deg you can see that the bottom blue line hangs in there, all other things being equal for 30 min. So let go back now and find a steel section with a section factor of lower than 61 m^-1 to try and get a handle on how big a column needs to be for example. A 203 x 203 x 86kg/m is a candidate if it has three sides protection (section factor 60), but that is a heavy steel. You also need to handle this safely on site. Ok let's see how a box section compares. Ok we can get down to 60 for three sides exposed protection.. not much difference. But if we reduce the sides exposed the numbers get a lot better. I've not shown them here. That main remaining key bit is what we call the load ratio mentioned above as 0.6 ratio. When we design a beam / columns or pretty much any structural member in your house we design for the normal expected loads. The self weight, permanent loads and the imposed ( live loads, people, book shelves etc) but in a fire we recognise that the floors, roof etc are probably not going to be fully loaded with people for example during a fire, the permanent / self weight load is still there. So we can make a reduction in the load if a fire occurs. Its based on probability and the loads that could be reasonably expected in the case of a fire. We call this an accidental load case and the safety factors get reduced for example. If we designed everything for the worst case buildings would be too expensive to build! The load ratio is the load (stress generated) during a fire compared with the ultimate capacity of the member. Often we design beams to be restrained by say a timber floor.. but if this has burnt away we can't count that. To conclude: The above I hope, gives you all a bit of insight into what we need to do / think about to design steels for fire. The take away is that sometimes it works using a heavy steel to avoid the expense of fire protection. The design can become much more complex if bolted / welded connections need to be taken into account. This kind of design consideration is a bit complex if you've not done it before, it's not common bedtime reading! It can be a tricky subject once you get into detail, something that many Architect's, BC officers are also not too familiar with. But it's a fundamental part of producing a safe design. My objective in writing is to try and help BH folk gain a bit more knowledge so you can ask and phrase any questions you have to your designers from a lay person perspective. You make a good point. Yes steels expand in a fire and will change shape and distort the surrounding structure, to the point it often has to be later demolished. The objective is that the building hangs in there so it does not fall on the fire brigade, set light or fall onto a neighbouring building not least.

Sorry I don't mean I am personally hoping the English and Welsh get these wind farms and pylons in the numbers we have been "given" in Scotland. What I am saying is while for so long England in particular has banned them, they have instead been built up here so the good folk of England who largely make the rules, have not seen the blot on the landscape that they are, and if the good folk of England don't see them, they obviously think they are good.

To an extent, outside of a very small number, none of us, no matter how well read are able to be experts on any particular topic, so we have to take our views from those who we see as experts. I have not read all of the source material, conducted my own experiments or submitted my theories to scientific challenge so any assertion I make is potentially a call to authority. The same is true for the other side of the argument. All any of us can do is weigh the situation in front of us, which seems to be following a common playbook. First - deny. Next, obfuscate - its not anthropogonic etc. Finally, fatalism - we cant do anything anyway. Some things are clear however: It is hot. Much hotter than when I was young, and hotter every year. There is a physical mechanism for this heat being caused by C02 emissions Modelling and predictions of the C02 effect are matching reality If it is C02 and if we don't do anything we are in for a very bad time If it isn't C02, and we reach net zero, we are in for a pretty good time still It does make me laugh (cry) when people blame renewables for high prices. The UK spent at least £75 billion on supporting energy prices just during 2022-23 due to gas prices. It is also the case that renewables knock out the most expensive conventional electricity generators, so the wholesale price of electricity is reduced by renewables, which gives the impression of a subsidy but the reality is the reverse - https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2025/oct/wind-power-delivers-ps104-billion-net-benefit-uk-consumers I do get frustrated with people who just raise problems like there will never be a solution. The nature of progress is you don't always have all the answers, if you never started a journey unless you knew how it could be done then nothing new would ever be invented. It is also a demonstrable fact that renewables are more suitable from a security perspective. More distributed generation, less reliance on critical things like pipelines, LNG facilities and so on - we're literally right in the middle of 2 wars that are being defined by attacks on energy infrastructure. Really?

I am quite happy to do a design for you…..please let me know if I can help…..

I would have done a design for free!

I was interested also, so I had an internet search. Compared to one of my units (Titon HRV), see images below. Heat exchanger size on the Rega is very small. Insulation between air streams almost none. Casing insulation almost none. Just about as basic as you can get - maybe and most likely poor performance as a result. Fan motors on Rega mounted in the steelwork, Titon mounted within the insulation, giving better noise attenuation and vibration dampening. Electronins away from where any water could collect etc etc Rega unit Titon HRV unit

Depends what you’re doing, of course. But, we tend to use (for a timber frame build) 3 x sets of bought in sawhorses with sheets of 18 or 25mm ply on top. No vice, maybe the occasional clamp. We’re largely cutting sheets of ply and C24 at this point. Not much use for an mft yet. A tool strongbox for somewhat nickable tools, some wire shelves for non-nickable tools and supplies (these are both undercover now) and a 20ft container for less used tools, fixings etc.

Just looked back at our gas and electricity bills in 2023, we had £89 Direct Debit for gas and £180 for electric. Since then I have added more solar and a battery. Plus we now get export payments. Plus got rid of boiler and installed an ASHP. Battery and additional solar cost me around £7500. Fully installed. But current DD is a total of £52. Instead of paying normal rates for electricity I pay 10p per kWh, can only do this because I have a battery. So in simple terms I am saving £214 monthly, or £2568 per year. Nice round 3 years pay back on the additional solar and battery. And an added bonus, this month via Axle VPP, have earned an additional £20 directly from having a battery. So taking this into account in the the above, now pay back becomes 2.7 years.

The impact we can have on our own lives, especially as self builders is pretty big. Some of the first things that come to mind are 1. Designing in good passive means to heat protection. Lots of insulation with good decrement delay. Limiting glazing, espically in bedroom's. Appropriate shading. 2. Active colding, even a fused spur and a short 70mm duct will allow an A2A unit to be installed at a later date. 3. If opting for batteries get a change over switch to cope with power outages. 4. A store of water, even a rainwater butt will allow toilet flushing if the mains is cut off. 5. Raising the floor level well above current food level. 6. Shuttering for windows is something t.o would like to have e done. Maybe PVC rollers but even a stack of appropriately sized OSB sheets stacked in the garage would offer a a lot more protection than glass windows from extreme weather.

Not to the detriment of the functionality A lot of "cheap" designs have fresh supply vents almost immediately above doorways of bedrooms etc, and near zero air flows across the room. If you need to have a long run, and want quiet operation, you simply double up on the ducts. This is something sewn into the heart of the build fabric, with near zero chance of 'putting it right' retrospectively. It will also be on 24/7/365 for the rest of your life there, so maybe not somewhere to cut all of the meat off the bone Buy a good quality Brink unit from Air-Haus.co.uk, oversize it(!), and make sure to install proper attenuators on the supply and extract ports for super-quiet operational sound in the rooms.

It's easy. You can certify it yourself with an anerometer and a spreadsheet. I think there is an MVHR design sheet floating around the forum somewhere. Tl;Dr, make sure your duct runs are as short as possible and your diameters are as big as possible.

Nonsense argument. 🤦‍♂️. ”Disabled visitable”, “Disabled adaptable”, or “Disabled persons home”? Do you expect a wheelchair bound visitor to your home to be able to reach your oven isolator? A disabled persons home would be built around their own, stated, specific needs, such as @Benpointer. Apologies for terminology, I’m never sure if I should be saying “less-abled” or other. If the home owner is 5’ tall, the electrician should suggest things to suit their stature, much as this week I have asked my (non 5’ tall) clients if they’d like to accept my suggestion that we raise the vanity units by 30mm to suit their ‘tallness’. If you told said 5-foot nothing lady she doesn’t need wall units in her kitchen because she’ll never be able to reach them, I’d expect her to punch you in the bollocks, without bending down, and then go get a step stool out for you to sit on until the pain subsided. .

Now you need the will to live these days. I don't do this regularly (primarily as an SE) but for one reason or another I end up representing Clients that are making a claim on their warranty. I've done this for the last 15 years or so. I spent some 20 years as a building Contractor before that, cutting my teeth and learning how devious folk can be at times. In some ways I'm a poacher come game keeper. It's not part of my core business, I do it as it's good for my soul and I don't like to see domestic Clients getting taken advantage of. That said, over the last 15 years I've recovered on behalf of Clients a few million quid. The amount of money is less important, for me it's about justice and holding folk to account. What I've noticed in the last few years is that some of the warranty providers are more and more sub contracting out to Claims handling services. 25 years ago lots of the warranty providers withdrew from the market. At one point there was the NHBC and Zurich pretty much. Now we have lots of new entrants.. and it seems to me that there is a bit of a race to the bottom. The terms and conditions are a bit of a minefield for the unwary. There is a common case where they initially come over all friendly but then tell the Client they need to employ an SE like me at their own expense to provide a report. This happens even if the Client has provided photographs that clearly show there is a problem. It has come to my attention that they (Claims handling services) are ramping up the; deny, defend and delay tactics.. always been the case but recently I've noticed that they are cherry picking part of my SE reports and trying to fob the Client off. Even to the extent that they will quote part of a paragraph of my report.. which totally changes the context. Often young folk just can't afford this so they throw in the towel. It's a disgrace. Now this may be a genuine lack of understanding .. or a deliberate intent to defraud the Client. I'm happy for them to dig themselves a hole as often when doing a warranty Claim I'll turn it into an HSE (safety) issue. This makes folk personally liable and risks the HSE getting involved.. a big black mark if you are a warranty provider. My question is. Are folk finding Claims handling services helpful or not when you think you have a case for making a Claim.

Nope. Needs a building control application first, with support from an architect or architectural technician (the latter will be cheaper and simpler). Then, you reach out to a few 5-6 reputable local builders for estimates / quotes etc and come back here with the results for us to see who's good / bad / ugly. ONLY use a builder who will take you to other jobs, let you meet other customers, and avoid the cheapest quotes!

Skips: I hate them. Specially this one: after ten years at this game, the last one (maybe) And I love them (other peoples). The day before they are picked up, I dream about them. Sad Bastard ======================================== Monument to ten years toil You hold the decade carved from sleep, Heavy tax of muscles, laughter, cash, and tears. Buried in your belly, dark and deep, Miscut rafters from the early days, Hardened mortar from a novice phase, (I know how to mix mortar now) Are stacked like layers of a lifetime spent. Each rusted panel of your hollow frame Has watched us age, yet stayed the exact same, (apart from the rusty bits) A silent witness to a spine well-bent. Ten winters bit our hands upon this ground, Ten summers scorched the dust into our skin, While every spare pound that our pockets found (well some of it was found down the back of someone else's sofa) Was swallowed by the walls we stood within. Now blueprints yield to final, finished stone, ( well cladding aksherly) And you receive the scraps of what has grown, ( to be fair some of it was rotten) The final clearing of a warrior’s field. Go ride the lorry down the tarmac track, Take all our toil, don't look back, For out of waste, a home is finally sealed. Still not signed off. Stuff it. Ain't gonna sell it anyway Little Miss Muffit. ( her from the LPA) Now other peoples skips - I just love em.

Number one. Not just because the more grey colours seems to contrast with the block, and overpower the eyes (this will lead to your eyes looking more at the smaller surface area of the wall and be distracting, rather than the feeling the blockwork is the wall, and the mortar just s supporting role) But because there are green tones in the first that will age better. Over the years this will allow nature to grown alongside it in a complimentary way. If you intend an ultra modern gravel and slab surrounding design, then fair enough, but anything growing next to the grey would seem like a weed in a lawn and out of place. (just purely my opinion and feel free to ignore)

It is subjective but firstly is your whole frontage brick, may make a difference.... We only have a plinth, (9 at highest where ground slops at back of house) so we chose high contrast mortar that "matched" the cladding. If it had been the whole house, would have been too stark for us, and maybe the planners. Having said all that my vote would be nit no.1 (too warm), no.3 if your looking for high contrast, no.4 if you want it to "blend"

My Amtico fitter was outstanding. It is all he does and he is so good that he limits his quote area When he installed our >100sq m he trimmed every single plank on two sides at a 45 degree angle to stop the "glue squidge" problem. This was absolute genius and I cannot fault the quality of the install. I had some very fixed ideas about how I wanted it laid but all his "suggestions" were the exact right ones in hindsight. I have laid Amtico myself in a previous house and I got the "glue squidge" problem and a line where two plywood boards butted together, I was still pleased with my efforts but a proper professional makes a huge difference in quality Regards Tet

Glass set down into CT1, excess evident. Excess wiped away when wet, with lots and lots of baby wipes. Apart from the rising internal corner and the internals of the niche, all of this ensuite was a near zero silicone finish. All observing minimal grout at junctions, clear CT1’d with anything excess removed, and still looks 👌 (imo). You can just about see where the colour matched silicone diminishes on purpose before meeting the floor tile, so the change isn’t so obvious.

I (G) did hours and hours of working through options for wall build ups. Drove J, the architect and a lot of buildhub dudes mad with my endless ‘what ifs’. In the end the conclusion surprised me. Getting the most wall insulation is not paramount. Adding insulation underfloor and in the loft is easy. Improving airtightness (don’t get me started) is massively more important than absolute wall u value. Glazing further undermines the benefit of excessive wall insulation. So then decrement delay (ask a nearby grown up to explain that one) and sound attenuation become the driving factor. Had I known what a bugger PIR is to work with I’d have factored that in too, but I didn’t back then. Frame batts (not roll as it falls out) is nicer to work with too. Just don’t push too much in. And don’t ask me why unless you’re wearing ear defenders lol

A polite note to all: I have said earlier in this thread about direct insults, which will be moderated and removed from public view. Buildhub T&C’s have been updated for this exact reason, and are available to (re)read at everyone’s leisure to ensure that we all function admirably on here. https://forum.buildhub.org.uk/terms/

OK. Fire first. If a building near a boundary is on fire then it must not be allowed to spread to adjacent buildings or materials. We assume an empty plot will be built on. So the wall on that boundary must stay standing even if the rest of the building is collapsing and trying to push or pull it over. So, let's stick with steel portal frames. The turning forces in a collapsing building are huge and we have a very chunky column fixed down very robustly. Beneath that the foundation also has to be over a big area to resist turning. That is a fixed base. Again to confuse the staff in the warehouse by staring.. you will see that the column is chunkier on that wall than on one facing the car park. On a gable wall everything is lighter. Where it isn't a fire wall, the portal column can be skinnier at the base, with few bolts and the foundation is also much smaller, only taking vertical loading. That is a pinned base. Not usually literally pinned but sometimes they are. On a 30m span shed the boundary foundations might have 5m3 of concrete each, and mustn't cross the boundary, while the others have 2m3 or so. it's all money. My business used tapered columns (and rafters) for best value, and they were thin at the bottom to deep at the top, except on fire walls. The depth of section mirrored the forces. The fire wall cladding is fire rated, and the columns usually need to be protected too. That's all a bit messy and bitty but I hope makes sense.

Where things are at... https://youtu.be/nl__O_QGIR4?si=G_CGnPuO8etvYzmV

I've done a few buildings ( schools and factories) on steep slopes. My principle has been to build a platform at the higher level, then a conventional framed building on top. That keeps it simple and vastly more economical. No basement as you get into a different level of complexity and risk.( digging into the ground, waterproofing, stability, access) So that is conventional strip footings ans walls up to level . Then beam and block or precast planks make the surface. You are then out of the ground and on a solid surface. With a raft you have a big hole to dig then work in. If the slope is steep there is potential differential movement of the ground. If the slope is extreme then you can perhaps have a natural extra storey or part of one. Worth mentioning perhaps that in a couple of those jobs the original designers had assumed the dig and raft technique or retaining walls and mass fill to make a platform. I met one during negotiation and discussed the principles, and he was simply surprised at the cost difference, not being a contractor. Beam and block then a conventional kit above is my suggestion.

I got an answer back. From a bot it would appear but it was a pretty much instant response: "Good afternoon, Regarding your question about running two Indra Smart Pro chargers on a single-phase supply: yes, this is possible with each charger using its own CT clamp on the same incoming meter tails for independent load curtailment. On a single-phase installation: - Each charger can independently monitor the total load on the supply using its own CT clamp and will adjust its charging rate as needed to protect the main fuse. - Each CT clamp should be installed at the main supply, before any junctions, and as close to the main cut-out fuse as possible, with the arrows facing the grid (incoming supply). With this setup, both chargers will independently perform load curtailment based on the total current measured by their own CT clamps, so there is no requirement for a dedicated multi-charger load-sharing configuration in this scenario. If you have any more questions or would like help checking your planned setup details, just let us know and we can escalate this to a human agent for you. Thank you for contacting Indra Renewable Technologies Ltd. Best regards, Indra Renewable Technologies Ltd AI Agent"

Welcome. @Nickfromwales comes from down the coast in Wales.

You need a stove covered in soapstone and a low capacity to slow everything down. After the first year lighting ours twice and melting, we tried the second time the following year. But now only add one small log at a time, turn the air down to lowest setting to still get a clean burn. Now that log lasts maybe 1 to 2 hours, the heat spreads across the whole house, 2 logs on the coldest day is more than enough. NO it leads to depressurisation of the house. You cannot install a WBS in a house with MVHR safety, unless it has primary and secondary air from outside. It is something the OP needs to think about and plan for. Where will they put the air duct, took us an age to find the correct stove

If there’s no solids going down it I don’t believe it needs to be 110mm pipe, you could drop to the 80mm version or even 50mm depending on run length and rodding access. I would go with hiding a smaller diameter pipe in the insulation level, insulate all around the pipe and put a chicken wire reinforcement over the pipe in the screed.

What a belter of a photo! Now funnily this serves as a good example, all be it on a smaller scaler, as what not to do if self building or extending your house. I make some points. It's debatable. Technically to me it looks like a Universal beam, if you look at the flange width cf the web depth.. it look looks a beam, a column is more squat in profile. I can see from the photo the beam has buckled perpendicular to what seems to be a heavily loaded transfer beam at ceiling level. My gut feeling is that either the designer has made a massive cock up in calculating the loads on the, now call it a column. More likely is that they have not understood the top and bottom connections. They may have designed them as pinned, but then inadvertently introduced a stiff connection or some off centre loading ( called an eccentricity) that introduces a bending force in the column and not spotted it. This extra bending force reduces the capacity of the column to carry load. But on the other hand the Contractor may have thought they know better and just gone off and done their own thing. My experience of Contractors / project manager is mixed, I used to be a Contractor myself. Some think they know it all, some are arrogant in the extreme (pride comes before the fall) some are sensible enough to just make a call to the SE, which I now am. Now the photo is of a big building, heavily loaded. But when I design houses, wall slappings for extension etc the loads are much less, but I design with much smaller steels, thus pro rata they are doing just as much work. The design is lean. But if you listen to your builder without checking you are taking a big risk, don't be swayed by bravado, a builder telling you they know better. At the end of the day if the builder changes the design in any way and something goes wrong their insurance won't cover it, and possibly your home insurance won't either. It also critically unsafe. My advice is, if you want to deviate from your design drawings then call the designer, just lift the phone! IT'S THAT SIMPLE

Hi All, Excited to join the forum – I hope you don’t mind renovation projects as opposed to a proper self-build. Mrs and I are in the final stages of buying our dream home (1950s bungalow) & just waiting for the paperwork to be finalised by the solicitors – they seem to be taking 5 weeks to do what AI can do in 5 minutes. Good news, the house was so run down, it was within our budget. Even better news – the home report is mainly “2”s, so there’s several years of fun work for me to do to get it into top condition. Bad news – while I have extensive fine woodworking skills, and can do some basic electrics & plumbing, I’m pretty much a newcomer to major home repairs. We’re still in a bit of “what have we done” phase. As a matter of priority for phase 1, I’ll be looking to fix the pitched roofs and repair & replace a couple small flat roofs (porch and bay windows). Trace any leaks & moisture spots. Then consider insulation & window replacement and radiators replacement – so I’m prepared for winter. Any internal decoration works will have to wait for phase 2 I guess, but there’s a major re-wiring on the cards, with a view of getting a modern consumer unit installed within a couple years of moving in. There’s also a (likely) single skin extension that the Mrs wants to eventually turn into a bedroom and there's a garden to overhaul. Phase 3 would include a garden room (I’ve built one from a kit before but will likely do a scratch build this time) and maybe even a garage roof terrace if things are going well. Apologies in advance for daft questions.

That’s mostly just down to using good quality thermostatic showers vs ‘manual’ mixers. Decent ones will work with quite erratic flows and temps, so I always advise my clients to spend some money on such daily drivers.

I didn't until someone here pointed me towards design / install instructions that said you could, so researched further. And indead you can and the output per year is actually better than 2x MPPTs as they run longer at best efficiency point. But strings need to be identical, as in number of panels, mounting angle.

Doesn’t ’appeal upheld’ mean you won the appeal? you need to make your plan smaller and listen to advice lol

Not a blog, but a few words would be interesting. Then in a year you can reflect on those notes and realise everything is fine really.