epsilonGreedy

I think the elderly neighbours have arbitrarily decided they morally own the road verge & hedge on my side of the public road because they have been mowing and pruning it to their own preference for some years before I purchased the plot. The County level highways officer confirmed from his maps that ownership is straight forward, the country owns 1.1m of verge then its my plot. He also mentioned the often quoted 1m verge rule is just hearsay, it can vary a lot and will be determined from their maps when there is a dispute. The main challenge is how to communicate these essential facts to the hard-of-thinking living opposite. The underlying issue is they are still spitting feathers over the original planning decision 3.5 years ago which they consider the greatest act of Government malfeasance since the Crown beheaded Mary Queen of Scots.

This is a good point. How long does it take an amateur brickie to lay 9 blocks along a 4m run? 50 minutes possibly. Moving the trestle staging to the next 4m run might take 20 minutes all while the mortar mix is going off.

I was in a similar position and have found two solutions. My self build neighbour has loaned 4 large trestles which is about right for a 4m run. The platform is 4 planks wide which feels secure. I am using these on the minimum height setting at the moment and would not consider them safe at the max extension height. If I were to buy my own it would be the medium model on offer at that large mail order scaffolding business near Hull. I will need to buy some shorter planks soon because the 3.9m ones on loan mean I cannot use the trestles on shorter walls. My second solution came from observing a pro brickie team on a neighbouring plot. They used upturned milk creates for the first course of blocks beyond floor reach these were easy to kick along a block & beam floor. In place of a milk crate I purchased one of these which offers a 2 block gain in height say up to 8 blocks high depending on the weight of the blocks = Youngman Large Professional Platform sold by Amazon. Edit: Here is the link https://www.amazon.co.uk/Youngman-312898-Large-Professional-Platform/dp/B005CP592C

Agreed, that Draper trestle looks like a piece of over-designed toy town Meccano. I am using an equivalent to the proper builder's trestle linked in the quote and they feel sturdy when laying blocks at 2m. I would not be happy laying blocks much higher on a trestle platform. The OP might want to review my thread on a similar subject:

It has been a new and interesting experience for me. Prior to buying this plot my most contentious neighbourly dispute occurred when someone refused to pay a full 50% of the cost of a fence repair. The elderly ones believe the council has authorized them to prune my hedge which apparently I do not own because the village owns it. They cannot identify the council official though apparently his is nearly 7ft tall. Trying to establish the council's official position on this matter has involved speaking to multiple officers at the district and country level. They are generous with their time on the phone but nothing definitive apart from the country highways chap who said we would not intervene unless there was a distinct hedge overhang above the tarmacked road. I routinely snip the hedge back in the summer out of concern a stray bramble might injure a cyclist and I want to avoid a 3rd party claim on my self built site insurance.

1m as in 1 metre. A single meter can be important when an angry septuagenarian is conducting a multi year protest against your planning permission through boundary incursions.

In one of your appearances on the House Planning podcast the episode is summarized as your guide on how to avoid using an architect. Elsewhere I recall you participating in the thread which dismisses architects as "house artists". Two of the defining ingrained opinions of this forum's old hands is a cultural belief that architects and the NHBC are inherently bad. I have given up posting links to authoritative NHBC technical guidance documents because of the derision this triggers. Back to this thread. The pro architect clearly demonstrated the limited validity of your opinion and your response to being debated into a corner was a spiteful public warning targeted at him. Your post should be subject to review at the next FMG meeting to assess whether your post warrants censure. You probably feel this way because you construe any challenge to your opinion as a hostile personalized act. One thing that distinguishes amateurs from professionals is that amateurs over extrapolate general beliefs from very limited personal experience. I believe I am as good as an NHS GP in diagnosing tennis elbow and recommending treatment because I suffered from it. I would not however set up as clinic to treat sufferers because I know I might misdiagnose bone cancer. If I did offer an opinion about tennis elbow on a forum and a pro GP chipped in and said "actually it is a bit more complicated" I would not then proceed to post a public warning targeting that GP.

This morning I had a lengthy conversation with a County Council highways officer about a daft dispute with elderly neighbours who have decided to thin my boundary hedge which involves them crossing the road from their house opposite. He was able to consult his maps to confirm the public road verge is 1.1m wide from the tarmac, then he described the complicated history of road highway mapping in the UK including a country wide correction instigated by Ordnance Survey. Apparently OS decided the whole of the UK was misplaced by 1m(metre) on a north/south axis but not all county highways maps have been updated to reflect this 1m shift.

I had a 25mm MDPE pipe running 22m to my static caravan last winter. It was uncovered in shallow trenches or overground with no ill effects. The static caravan taps spurted icy slush on a few mornings following a cold night though I think that ice originated from the caravan's own piping. Locals have warned that last winter was mild. At the time @JSHarris advised the good thermal conductivity of water coupled with a stable ground temperature of 8 degrees tends to counteract local freezing points in MDPE. In another thread I posted some water pipe sums that show a couple of toilet flushes will draw subsoil temperature water through 25m of exposed pipe.

Just fibres, no rebar. There was some confusing advice offered in prior threads on this forum, my advise is that if the concrete slab needs extra strength hen rebar is the solution. Metal fibres are a fringe solution and not applicable in a garage floor slab, plastic fibres offer marginal reinforcement with perhaps some resistance to surface cracking. In the end other factors nudged me towards a thicker than usual floor slab, the pour was about 80% thicker than standard.

Ouch! No we had professional input in the forum to a specific request and we now know that advice was sound in the circumstances of the questioner. Your advise was unsuitable because it was clouded by your previously described dislike of architects. Post Grenfell I am surprised you would champion a culture of blind-faith delegated responsibility in public sector procedure.

My architect was too busy or too important to consider creating building control diagrams so he directed me to a firm of architectural technicians who knew his local heritage style. The architectural technician was happy to proceed even though the original architect was one of the few remaining "quill & pen" based practices hence the architectural technician had to recreate the new diagrams without a digital file. The fee was £1350 for an l-shaped 1500 sq ft house plus garage. They are distinct professional disciplines which should be happy to cooperate.

Thanks, useful photo detail there. It looks as though your Lintel is an I beam steel and it was about 50mm below the full bedded 4" x 2" timber wall plate. I could raise the lintel seat height to do something similar but need to ensure I leave enough headroom for a Horman sectional door motor to hang from the roof joists. Things are complicated further in my case because I hope to add a facing oak goal post outside of the inner block wall. The details are starting to hurt my brain.

My garage door aperture is 2.7m which I believe implies the steel box lintel bridging this will be a full block or 3 brick courses high. Here is a product page supporting this assumption: https://keystonelintels.com/product/boxk-100 If my lintel sits at 9 blocks + 1 engineering brick high and the garage is 11 blocks high, this would leave two regular brick courses above the lintel along a 3m run. This intuitively feels insufficient to me for a part of a building subject to flex from roof loads and the large aperture. Would I be better off raising the garage wall above the lintel to wall plate height with chunky box section carpentry?

Since reading your post I have been looking at glass bricks online, previously I thought they were thick bottle-green lumps with poor light transmission. These look promising: https://glassblocksdirect.co.uk/product/clearview Four will create my porthole window for £10 though the white mortar at £21 for a full bag distorts the over call cost plus another £17 for delivery. My window will be about nose height in the gable wall of the brick lean-to with about 6 courses of regular facing bricks above, which raises a question about whether a lintel is required above the glass bricks in such a lightly loaded situation.

The garage end of my outbuilding incorporates a brick lean-to shed 3m x 2m. This is an architectural embellishment that breaks up the shape of the main garage rectangle. The lean-to shed is accessed internally from the garage and is otherwise windowless, hence the only natural light will be via the main garage door when open. At the last minute I have decided to add a very small south facing window 1 block wide and two blocks high at eye level, think small sky light in the wall. The wall has a 100mm cavity with facing bricks. My self build neighbour suggested buying the cheapest small window from Wickes and customizing the masonry aperture to the purchased window. Cheap windows are surprisingly expensive. My Plan: Form a 450mm square hole in the wall. Create a wooden frame from 200mm x 35mm softwood using my mitre saw at 45 degrees. Fix frame with a 60mm reveal in the facing bricks to keep it out of the weather. The frame will act as a cavity closure ( no cavity insulation planned). Fit single pane of glass the old fashioned way with wooden bead and putty. What could go wrong?

10 degrees! That sounds like balmy luxury ? The internal static caravan temp was 7 degrees this morning and Swmbo is still stating we should get through to the end of September without turning on the bottled LPG central heating.

The problem is they can create a slight burnt smell in a room due to the exposed element. An oil radiator would only exacerbate the thermal lag problem so I will look into a panel radiator though I have not used one before.

This is a depressing insight. The heat loss is modest, heating up fresh air could be an equivalent cost but this issue of warming up the building from a cold start is a major consideration. So heading out to a thoroughly chilled down outbuilding office for three hours of work during a frosty evening would cost about £0.25 to counter heat loss and possibly £1.00 to warm up the structure. Hmm time to rethink the building fabric which is just a block & beam floor at present. PIR backed plasterboard would help thermal boot up lag I hope.

Wow that high! I previously knew that air change heat loss was a significant factor in a building with half decent insulation, now with these figures I can see it is a major consideration. Given 31.5 m3 of volume x a conservative 2 acph x 20 degrees x 0.3 = 375 watts just to heat up the fresh air. Ouch. Edit: @JSHarrisestimates later in the thread that trickle ventilation would be more like 0.2 to 0.3 ACH hence more like 45 watts of heat loss.

Not sure because I have wandered off piste with the garage design as it has morphed from a double garage into an outbuilding. Probably 100mm of a solid PIR insulation sheet. It is a suspended block and beam floor and the Kingspan u-value calculator gives 0.15. One external door = 1.6 m2 The area will be a bit under illuminated with about 1.5 m2 of non fancy double glazing, the main window will be a wooden sash so best assume minimum building regs performance. As there will not be MVHR in this outbuilding this is something not yet considered, probably two trickle vents in the windows at either end. Thank you for this. The floor is suspended hence a greater heat gradient. I am hoping this will be mitigated by one 5m long wall being internal to the garage with an open cold loft space which will I hope be a few degrees above outside temperature. The "office space" is also divided 60/40 to create a small utility space with a chest deep freezer which will emit a few watts of heat into the area.

I am thinking ahead to what electricity capacity my garage/outbuilding will require in order to keep the office warm. The building is single story, detached and the office part of the garage is built to nearly the same standard as the brick/block cavity main house. According to my maths just 200 watts will keep it warm with the temperature at freezing point outside. To simplify the ball-park maths let's assume: The floor, walls and ceiling have a u-value of 0.2. The room is 5m x 2.5m and 2.5m high = total surface area of 50 m2. Temp difference is 20 degrees (c). If a u-value of 0.2 = 0.2 of a watt of heat loss per m2 per degree of temperature difference then: 50 m 2 x 0.2 x 20 degrees = 200 watts or much less than I thought. I will probably hook the heater up to an Amazom Alexa power switch which will allow me to say "Alexa heat the office" 30 minutes before heading out to do some work, which would be better than a timer switch scheduled for good intentions to work that never actually happen.

This is incredible. Those new target fabric figures represent a near doubling of insulation in the all the major components of a house. In comparison the jump from 2001 to 2013 regs was a raising of insulation targets by just 6%. Your table is showing targets rising by 80%. Something does not add up here because your table would show that with a stroke of the legislative pen the Government mandated Passiv new homes for all.

Ok so in 2016 TER/DER effectively overrode the much quoted 2013 thermal standard by a massive margin. Those differences in u-value are huge, nothing like an incremental raising of targets after 5 years. Would I be correcting in thinking that TER/DER indirectly results in a mid band B or better EPC score? I thought some of the 2016 era building regulation changes were scrapped at the last minute. Does anyone enforce TER/DER?

The sequence of events was. I purchased a plot with planning permission in the middle of a highly regarded village subject to conservation area design restrictions. The heritage design approved for my plot was the outcome of a bitter local planning process and there is no realistic chance of any exterior changes, even the front door colour is a planning condition. Given the relatively small'ish house size of 1500 sq ft, a ridge height limit, Georgian sash windows and zero chance of PV there is little opportunity for a substantial revision to the thermal design. Although much maligned on this forum, a faithful cheat-free implementation of minimum 2013 building regs equates to a home that performs better than 80% or 90% of British homes. The annual heating cost differential for a minimum 2013 regs build and the Passiv standard for my size of home is about £500. I hope to close the gap between 2013 regs and Passiv by: Setting myself an air change target of 2.0. MVHR Exceeding a typical 2013 reg specifications house by 10% for roof, walls and floor.