epsilonGreedy

I could but then meaning might have been lost in the obfuscation. @Ferdinand's post was the software equivalent of saying here "I spent 20 minutes speed reading the material on a PassivHouse web site and concluded it is just a rehash and rebranding of what we have been doing in the mainstream building industry for 30 years".

Nope you still don't get it. There is a subtle difference between period purges of management as a gardener would prune a rose bush. Agile in software is about producing without a management hierarchy i.e. zero management until there is a demonstrable need for a minimum of inter team coordination..

= complete and utter failure to comprehend Agile. Those earlier project management methods you mention were from the Soviet phase of software development. The essence of Agile in software is to trust small autonomous multi discipline teams of between 4 and 7 people, to design and deliver incremental benefit to a consumer or sponsor who communicates direct with that team.

My 60 year old building adviser practices Agile without knowing it. "don't talk to me about USB enabled power sockets, let's pour the concrete first". Building a house is comprised of identifiable sprints and so is building control. The typical multi year selfbuild is living proof of why waterfall software projects hit trouble. Selfbuilders pursue a dream full of bells and whistles when instead they should aim for a minimum viable product. My opening blog post talks about a minimum viable house, that is agile in practice.

I think so. Many people who succeed in life do so under the umbrella of a large organization. Such people tend to excel at being highly effective cogs in a large mechanism. Their exposure to risk and uncertainty is incremental and often regulated through the career training programme of a long established trade body. IT is in a constant state of revolution and has no effective trade body because we are reinventing the operating manual every 5 years. This type of uncertainty attracts a different person who is excited by the challenge of the unknown. Selfbuilding is a voluntary adventure into the unknown.

Hello sailor I like the look of your buff bricks and so will my local conservation officer. If you knock down can I have them for my garage and fireplace?

Funny Story. I visited a local quarry today with a sample of sand in a bucket. My building adviser, who is a sand connoisseur, said it was good stuff "on the sharp side of soft sand". Three blokes in the quarry office needed convincing it was their sand and so they started pawing it like a panel of judges on MasterChef. Still not satisfied the chap in rough site clothing tasted a sample and finally decreed my sand sample had originated from his quarry, "we've got some chalk grains in our sand at the moment". The white grains in my sand were chewable like chalk.

I want to control the source of the sand though I do see your handling logic for the quantity being considered in the footings. I will enquire tomorrow if they ship their sand via local BMs. The quarry office was helpful when I popped in for a chat and they suggested sourcing my sand from Yorkshire if I want to bump my test mortar sample further along the colour scale from grey to a sandy buff. Once the blockwork has started I will have a load of profile wood boards and pegs to create a bund for the sand pile.

No, white cement above dpc for the buff bricks as it is a planning condition. Quarry price is £19 per ton plus vat but the catch is a flat fee of £54 for delivery on an 11 ton capable wagon. I just want to order enough for the footings and blue engineering bricks below damp. If I only order 3 tons the effective price is nearly £40 per ton, were it not for the mortar colour quandry I would order 10 tons to see me through half the build at an effective price of £25 per ton.

Mastercrete comes in weather proof plastic bags so maybe this dictates my choice. Bluecircle/Tarmac sell Mastercrete at a fair old premium about 20%, they must stir in some magic. I don't want to order too much sand before my final facing brick mortar colour recipe is finalized. One part lime + 1 part Rugby White cement + 6 parts orange sand is given a half decent colour match to my sample brick panel created by the plot seller. I was working on 100 blocks per 1000lbs of sand plus a margin because many of these blocks will be laid flat.

Put another way, I am about to order 25 bags of cement for the footing blockwork below ground and could save a few ££ buying standard cement. Also while on this subject would 5 tons of sand be enough to get me started? My local building adviser has recommend a particular sand from a local quarry which he described as being at the sharp-end of soft sand.

Quite, which correlates to what I have seen at some sites and could take the batts just below ground level depending on floor make up.

Did I make a statement to that effect? There is an intermediate zone below the dpc to around ground level where I have seen cavity batts used to perform edge of floor insulation to avoid a cold bridge. I do not like that usage approved or not.

Are you aware that the image you chose to illustrate your point comes from the anti radon portion of the Cavity Trays web site? www.cavitytrays.com = great site for an education on all types of tray scenarios.

NHBC should employ you to write their technical bulletins. This stuff is much simpler to understand as an historical timeline of ideas rather than a point in time absolutist statement of right and wrong. Now for some over the horizon thinking. What would be wrong with no ground level cavity tray, independent dpc's in each wall and blown beads that have fused into a lattice at the very bottom of the cavity below ground level? One conclusion I have come to is that I do not like the idea of cavity batts sitting in the cavity within 6 inches of ground level, above or below dpc.

I think I have erred with my first few VAT reclaimable invoices. The plot got planning permission with a group of 4 properties under one address. However my plot's postal address is on another road because it faces a different way which is significant for deliveries. I have used a mixture of addresses to date. Will this cause trouble later?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbQf_YHd6a8 They recommend a Strong-Tie by Simpson.

If I go for aerated thin-joint block this has inherently good airtightness according to the blurb. First floor joists can be hung from hangers that are cemented into slots routed into the block hence no airleak. Floor to wall, not thought about the ground floor, had assumed the overblock membrane lapped to the inner block dpc was effective. I have not read about ground floor to wall air-tightness being high on the worry list in my previous reading. No trickle vents, MVHR instead. No letterbox, going to fix one of those parcel delivery boxes into a garage wall. Wall to ceiling air tightness is a significant unresolved question and so are ceiling lights upstairs. Door frames and window frames are a design headache for another day. Wall sockets will be within the block airtight envelope.

Ok but this does highlight the disparity between your notion of a proper house and industry norms (this is before we descend to blatant shoddy practice). I am trying to follow a build route that is better than industry standards but avoids the high-end £££ deluxe builds of many here.

I think he is expecting a boost from an air source heat pump. Anyhow I am not planning to buy his house. Hang on one hour ago you told me to read the part L building standards, I did and found no reference to your claimed 0.11 floor u-value requirement. I have no intention of aiming for 0.30, I was just demonstrating I had actually read the document. I know you are talking general sense on this subject, there is no need to deliver common sense so provocatively. A few days ago you decreed that my block & beam floor was a signature of crap low-end building team.

Why would the government's own official building regs standard quote a limit if this would lead to an automatic fail? The standards docs says a significant better figure is likely required to achieve overall conformance. We have been discussing 100mm as a minimum which delivers about 0.16, hence the builder in question cannot be damned as a cowboy. My default 120mm delivers 0.14 and 140mm bumps this up to 0.13. If my walls are comprised of full cavity beads, aerated blocks and 25mm of PIR lining the inner block wall my guess is that I will meet thermal requirements. Anyhow it is time to prove this mathematically with the @JSHarris spreadsheet.

When discussing batts v. beads with a brickie team they claimed batts were better because mortar drops were caught as you mention. In contrast they claimed with an end of build bead fill there was nothing to stop mortar drops building up on cavity ties below. When sounding out my building adviser about this process he wrinked his nose in disapproval and said using batts to catch mortar drops works fine during good weather but on other days dropped mortar can squelch down into the batt fibre and create a moisture conducting matt. My adviser said he would loan me his custom mortar catch traps that are moved upwards daily as the inner blockwork catches up with the facing brick height. I don't know who to believe any more, the building trade seems to operate on bravado, superstition and witchcraft. Right now I feel like following my own intuition providing it does not transgress building regs. I will: Fit blown bead insulation at the end of the build in warm dry mid summer conditions to ensure good circulation of the beads in the absence of cavity moisture. The above ground dpc will be implemented as two independent courses and thus beads will settle low in the cavity to provide anti cold bridge insulation to the beam & beam of the suspended floor. The inner wall dpc will be lapped with the above block floor membrane. Thin-joint inner blockwork will reduce total wall mortar usage by 14% and so reduce the chance of wall-tie mortar bridges.

Don't mention the war, Brexit or that plug in the bathroom.

We must be picturing different situations because in my build I am wondering why an air gap would not be as effective as a dpc fitted as a tray. Given a level site why is a tray dpc preferable to two independent 100mm dpc's in each wall?

Because it catches dropped mortar above dpc. When such a lower damp proof course/tray is level (as it often shown in technical diagrams) there is obvious potential to create a mortar bridge. See another thread where @Brickie describes a bricklaying process to sweep out dropped mortar on a daily basis. An incline in the tray makes sense but gravity would not counteract capillary action upward to the inner wall should a bridge form. The incline is there I understand to direct condensed moisture or rain driven seepage outwards.