epsilonGreedy

There are engineering bricks of varying quality out there, the default blue engineering brick from my BM has 3 oversize vertical holes running right through the brick, as a percentage they might be 30% air. A solid concrete brick (my brickie called them brickets) feels more substantial, having said that I received one pack of concrete bricks that rusted. It was later explained to me that these are made with a cheap clay with a ferrous content.

Building materials and techniques do not remain constant as the shift from traditional screeding to flow-screeds demonstrates. Some character opened an account here last year and told us he was a pro builder who was going to offer advice on flow screeding. He was recommending 35mm or 40mm flowscreed with UFH embedded! There is a natural bravado in the industry to continually push limits until things start failing. Take batch mortar that is sold on performance criteria rather than mix proportions. The end result is new build houses being demolished when the mortar is discovered to be ridiculously weak. But does it crush and so subside at the bottom on an irregular surface as being discussed in this thread? The answer is maybe hence your recommendation to start with the sacrificial EPS layer. Yes the passiv slabbers are happy with their 300mm of bouncy insulation riding on a hardcore base because they top that with a substantial 100mm reinforced concrete/UFH raft. What concerns me about this thread is that different building techniques are being mixed i.e. rough-base, thick insulation raft capped with the thin-crust screed without reinforcement.

I did a catch up on this whole thread this morning and concluded there was a range of advice being offered. My suspicion is that the next UK wide building scandal is cooking here as the industry explores ever thinner flow screeds with UFH embedded. The thing that keeps me awake at night is the thought that PIR does not rebound from compression unlike the more elastic and bouncy XPS and EPS. Is it possible that PIR will crush and settle a bit on an irregular base leaving 50mm of flow screed hanging over a small void? Then add in the inherent fault lines caused by UFH pipes and I begin to worry that these thin-crust screeds will start behaving like tectonic plates riding on a mantel of bouncy raft of insulation.

This is my interim plan. One of the BuildHub forum myths is that ASPHs are no more expensive to install than a gas boiler. This is based on a few forum leading lights who sourced their barebones ASPH units off eBay and installed themselves. The ordinary self builder who has not created a passiv house will have to overspec the ASHP to avoid frosting problems and the all too typical woes of an undersized ASHP which gets us to a starting price of £7k. Then those not up to speed in DIY ashp installs will encounter premium labour rates for installing exotic eco technology.

I would say you were a victim of bad software. The same happened to me when insuring a car. While getting a quote online I notice I had transposed the plate year from 16 to 15 which just happened to be the same model of car owned by another person up in Scotland. I noticed my error corrected the reg number and purchased the insurance. Four months later I got pulled over by a police for not being insured and then endured a week of stress trying to convince the police and my insurer I had never owned the car in Scotland. I suspect the quotation web site reverted to the erroneous reg number due to some back page handling software error.

Now I am more confused ? Prior to your first post in this thread I thought a few window cill related cold bridges won't have much effect on overall thermal performance because the 1.5 m2 of window cill cold bridge area is small compared to the overall 200 m2 of wall area. Then you warned that cold bridges can have a large influence on thermal performance in a passiv house and even though my house is a long way short of passiv standards I speculated that maybe cold bridges radiate cold spots outwards much further than their actual material area. Anyhow this morning I used an independent u-value calculator online and found that 170mm of concrete (the cill) + 30mm PIR + 100mm light block gives a u-value of 0.55 which is better than a double glazed window.

The D49 in your 100mm floor indicates there is a concern about the support offered by 300mm of EPS. Since the starting point for the OP is 70mm UFH slab what is right for that situation?

This thread highlights the varying degrees of faith people have in the strength of concrete screed sitting on different thicknesses and different relative spongy behavior of insulation sheet types.

As seen on TimeTeam?

Hey this sounds like a fun new project, there is even an Amazon page for that. https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=water+divining+rods

Oo-err that much! I will have 12 sash windows with an average cill width of 1m x 0.1m high I need to get a provisional SAP calc done, I know @PeterWhas previously expressed surprise I don't have one. I am beginning to think my private building control inspector has put me on "as built". So time to talk to a SAP calc expert and get an idea of the thermal performance delta between conventional cills that do not extend back into the cavity and these specials for sash windows. The problem with a cold bridge is I guess that they drag down the temp of surrounding building fabric hence the heat loss is greater than that implied by the internal surface area of the components that creates the cold bridge.

It would be fascinating to see that actually work, can the technique be self taught? How to create a meaningful flow of water is another issue because the drain only takes water when another attenuation pond overflows in peak wet weather. If it did work how convincing is such evidence be should the case end up in Court?

I am in the middle of a boundary dispute which involves the position of an original open drainage ditch that has now been piped and covered over. It would be helpful to establish the route of the pipe under the ground. Is there a surveying gadget that can find the route of the drain that can then be marked at ground level? It is a surface water drain and probably buried no more than 1m under ground.

I understand that cold bridges are a bad thing that can drag down a building's overall thermal performance but I would like to know whether cold bridges are an independent pass/fail item of inspection. Can a building control inspector refuse to give a newbuild a final sign-off because of a cold bridge or must a building's overall thermal performance derived from the final EPC score? I do not have a problem at the moment but the type of window cill I order will influence the degree of cold bridging at windows. I would like to fit a special type of artstone window cill that reaches back 70mm into my 100mm cavities. This will provide a nice support plinth for my sash windows that will be inset a full break reveal i.e. tucked behind the facing bricks. These cills are 100mm high unlike the industry standard 150mm, so this reduces the cold bridge area somewhat. To compensate for the reduced cavity depth at the cill I was planning to insert 30mm of PIR foam sheet between the rear of the cill and the inner block wall. If the R value of PIR is (guess) about twice that of a U37 cavity batt then the effective cavity insulation at the cill is still about half that of full fill U37 cavity batts.

That was my first thought. In practice I don't think most people act with such sophistication.

Being polite did not work for me, I should have opened the dispute with a salvo of solicitor letters. The older the neighbour the more cautious I'd be. My boundary problem relates to a filled in drainage ditch, there was a hard natural boundary feature that was removed. The LR plans still show both sides of a now piped and covered ditch. My plot should extend to the far side of the ditch.

I was waiting for a multi tool vote because so far I have not found an excuse to buy one. Thought I might need a special masonry blade.

Thinking ahead to the eventually sash frame fitting, I would prefer to take it slow and steady. When the sash windows go in I will need the jaggy brick face down to a smooth finish with less than a 2mm discrepancy or enough that the final external bead of sealant will cover.

I offered to do this but my brickie declined saying it would be too complicated juggling another stack of specially measured window reveal half bricks. He did trim some of the window openings by running his full size Sthil petrol saw vertically down the cavities of the finished windows but he could not reach the top bricks due to the blade diameter, also it was the end of the day, he was tired and I could see little errors creeping in as he tried to steer the blade. So I called it a day.

I am refitting some OSB window blanks to keep the weather out and need to trim a few 100 irregular facing bricks on the cavity side that are currently preventing the wood blanks fitting closely. Before anyone questions the competence of my brickie the bumps on the inside are due to the English Bond courses (a heritage look) that required 1000's of bricks to be cut in half and then laid 90 degrees to a normal brick. At the window apertures these half bricks create a jagged edge on the cavity side. When I finally get around to fitting wooden sash windows with a full brick reveal these cavity facing brick courses will need to be near flat but in the first instance for the OSB blanks fairly flat it good enough. The wooden blanks are only 35mm oversized each side hence I just need to chisel/grid back slices of brick 65mm high x 35mm wide x 5 to 10mm thick. I think my options for this brick trimming job are a 4" grinder or a multitool with a special blade.

Does anyone know the latest situation with the private members Bill that got to a second or third reading in Parliament? My understanding is that it is unusual for a private members Bill to get that far and that pre Covid there was a realistic chance the Bill would have become statute law in 2020. For those not up to speed on this, the Bill would force neighbours in dispute to accept an independent assessment of a boundary dispute before a case becomes eligible for Court proceedings. This is relevant to how I handle my boundary dispute.

What is the earliest date the neighbour raised a dispute over the position of the boundary hedge?

Thanks. If EPS is traditional expanded polystyrene that when viewed close up can be seen to be comprised of fused together cellular nodules of polystyrene, do the other floor insulation materials (PIR and XPS) pose a similar danger?

I am going to create my first run of traditional boxed eaves this month and I am debating whether to place the order with my regular Builders Merchant or source something of higher quality from elsewhere. The guy behind the "Restoration Couple" vlogger channel on YouTube has done a similar job recently and he opted for "tight grain redwood" fascias about 1" thick. Previous advice on here has been to use treated timber and I will follow that advice providing the linseed paint I plan to use is compatible. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wh3khEAlOnU&list=PLH911xvwsOXYJwhOaj2HQJ6c5kfXbPxeW&index=11 So back to my question, are there different leagues of timber suppliers?

Perhaps they offer a cheaper remote service where they overlay digitized LR plans with Google map satellite surveys to produce their report. Their web site gives the impression they are a traditional full service land surveying outfit, such a service will require on the ground measuring and hi-tech mapping.