epsilonGreedy

Wet/Dry? That was my next question. I think a touch of moisture in the mix will help in the shaping of the outward bevel at the top of the cavity fill.

I have been looking at the various weights of whacker plates available, this is in preparation for my concrete garage floor pour 25 m2. I need to rise the height from the subsoil with 280mm of hardcore. I assume MOT1 hardcore is the right base. What grade/weight of whacker plate do I need for this job? At the low end I could buy an Evolution electric compactor that weighs 26kg for £182. Moving up to hire options HSS offer a light model that weighs 59kg and costs £24 for a weekend. https://www.hss.com/hire/p/light-vibrating-plate-flat-base The medium HSS whacker is 84kg and £48 for a weekend.

I was just obeying orders received in this thread. The weak concrete at 1:9 cement/ballast is for the cavity fill which is all below ground level and dpc. I mixed a strong mortar for my footing block courses as per NHBC technical advice which is where, as you say, damp/frost resistance is important.

I forgot to mention this is a specific condition applied to 4 plots when planning permission was granted.

The lorry should be able to back up to within 1m of the garage on the 150mm of 2" hardcore laid last autumn. The cavity fill at the garage door threshold will consist of a 3m run of strong concrete, not seen that documented anywhere but just seems like a good idea. My recollection from the foundation pour is the delivery chute can reach out around 2.5m. Good tip, I will leave a few meters of cavity unfilled incase my concrete floor maths is wrong.

The last posh hotel I stayed at had a new wall hung toilet but like you they incorporated a shelf into the wall for ease of access. I will fit Geberit later in my build because as a diyMax self builder I value a well documented design and fitting procedure. The access issue remains an open question, not sure if I want to add keyhole surgery to my growing list of DIY skills.

And so are competition and options. BuildHub sometimes feels like a single party state that should be renamed The Revolutionary Socialist Republic of Geberit.

About 8 months ago I posted a link to a long Skillbuilder episode covering a complete bathroom fitout. It seemed to have a commercial link with a Bristol supplier of non Geberit equivalents. My post drew critical fire because: Buildhub experts seem to have an instinctive dislike of YouTube experts. On BuildHub there is a deep belief system that the Geberit toilet is the most significant human invention since the wheel.

I agree when what chatting to the neighbour I coined the phrase "thermal poverty area" to describe the effect of this conservation officer. Overzealous control by a conservation officer could be damaging in the long term for a conservation area if home owners are squandering an extra £500 a year on heating a single glazed home. That is £500 that could be spent maintaining the fabric of old properties.

That it how it works here, just a friendly chat with planning before significant tree surgery. @JSHarrisis right about highly prescriptive limits on PD rights. I my case anything larger than a cloche to grow a couple of lettuce plants requires planning permission.

That how how it works in my village. Perhaps in the OP's case the older properties were used as a guide to define the outline area and Property B just ended up on that boundary.

This is correct and particularly relevant to older properties, for example one of my neighbours in a 100 year old house has battled with the conservation officer for years to be allowed to fit expensive wooden double glazed windows but the CO insists single glazing is essential to maintain the appearance. This very frustrating for the neighbour since he did not buy a special period property. However a newly built house should meet the occupants requirement for 20 years so no need for future planning battles.

Tell the friend the prior owner might have burnt a silly number of candles all the time. I have seen this before, the daft householder (Swmbo) was always burning candles and over a period of years I noticed the sooty elements in the smoke settled on the colder mortar joints. There was no cavity wall insulation in that 1998 house.

If the owner of property B I would be happy with this because I would be able to continue with a build based on the more relaxed conditions set prior to the new conservation area and long term I would benefit from the cachet of being located in a conservation area.

Did you use basalt wall ties as per the diagram?

Due to the flash flood risk I need an extra 2 courses of bricks up to damp and I would also like something to stop blown beads dropping down to the top of the cavity fill. I was considering solid insulation between top of the concrete cavity fill to just below damp. However if water does enter the cavity would it run down the beads and then pool on top of the hard insulation which I assume is stuffed forcibly in the cavity. One solution would be a cavity tray like yours however I am adverse to this idea in fear of creating a mortar moisture bridge. I your case with a 200mm cavity the risk is substantially lower.

I will have beam & block floors so the floor screed pour could be much later when the roof is on. The pour of the ground bearing garage floor will happen sooner but I had assumed that this grade of concrete would be too good and too expensive for cavity fill particularly if I follow other advice received here ( @JSHarris and @PeterW ) to purchase fibre reinforced concrete in place of rebar. Time for me to price out a cubic meter of home mixed lean cavity fill concrete v. upping the garage floor concrete order quantity. 10mm washed ballast is £21 per ton or (21 * 1.6 * 0.9) for 1 m3 = £30.24 7 x 25kg bags of cement @ £4 = £28. Then there is bulk delivery at £45 for the small 11 ton lorry. How much do I need for my footings... House 55 linear meters of 100mm cavity blockwork two blocks high but I need an extra min distance margin below the base of a floor beam and the top of the cavity fill minus the outward chamfer to direct cavity dribbles away. Cubic meters of house cavity fill = 55 x 0.1 x 0.4 = 2.2 m3 Cubic meters of garage cavity fill = 38 x 0.1 x 0.2 (one course of trenchblocks) = 0.76 m3 Which means I need 3.0 m3 of cavity fill which equates to 3 x 1.6 x 0.9 = 5 tons of ballast = £150 delivered loose with some left over for the lean mix base of ground bearing garage floor slab + 21 bags of cement = £84. So at the end of the day 3 tons of lean concrete mixed on site = £78 per ton = not a lot less than regular concrete. However I will be mentally and physically maxed out coping with my first garage slab pour hence no time to rush around filling the cavity with the extra premixed concrete. I cannot find an online price for fibre reinforced concrete?

Ok 10mm washed ballast it is. The quarry has a samples shed where customers can have a touchly feely experience with the 50 or so aggregates they sell. Was that £25 for a 1 ton bag delivered?

Ok that sounds like a modeled decrement delay. Now I am trying to picture how that is applied when the house is actively heated and the outside wall temp peaks at say 10 and the inside is maintained at 20 until the heating goes off at night.

Ok. So when people here quote a whole-house decrement delay are they referring to average air temperature in a central port of the house?

Wow that is quite a revelation, I had idly assumed the floor slab was the dominant heat capacity component of timber frame. Coupling your observation with the @JSHarriscalculation of 1.6kw per degree for the plasterboard and assuming the same for the floor, then a mid sized house should not leach more than 1kw of energy per degree delta overnight to prevent chilly mornings.

I learned something there is that the formal definition of decrement delay? I thought @ProDave was saying he can barely detect any decline in temperature overnight. Using the 50% fall definition the decrement delay of my static caravan is less than 3 hours.

I arrived at the same conclusions a few months ago when looking at the Anglian Water installation guide. My interpretation is that if freezing temps can penetrate 700mm down into the ground then there is a similar risk of freezing temps penetrating the same distance horizontally under the house footprint. With thicker levels of floor insulation coupled with a ventilated suspended floor void I feel the greatest freezing risk is where the pipe emerges from the oversite soil up to the underside of the floor. The same Anglian Water guide recommended 75mm insulated ducting, so that would equate to standard 22mm pipe insulation. In practice I get the impression these standards are applied loosely by the building trade. I had a partially insulated 25mm mdpe pipe running overground to my static caravan all winter and experienced the occasional splurt of frosty slush coming through an internal tap. I suspect these regs originate from a era before plastic mains pipes and are scaled to the worst case scenario of an unoccupied unheated house during the winter. Even so I am complying with all the rules because otherwise I would not sleep well during cold winter nights.

Could someone confirm the ingredients of lean mix concrete for below ground wall cavity fill? I understand the basic ratio is 1:3:6 (Cement/sand/lumpy aggregate). Is that soft or sharp sand? And what about the lumpy portion, 10mm or ballast, round/sharp... so many options. Here is what I can order from my local quarry: 0/2mm softsand 0/4mm sharp sand 0/4mm plastering sand 0/4mm Dust granite 1/4mm horticultural grit Screened fill sand 0/10mm Washed ballast 0/20mm Washed ballast Type-1 granite 1" down limestone 1" clean limestone All of the above come in at under £30 in VAT per ton loose.

Well in that case, crack on and follow the path of least paperwork, you can submit the slate to metal roof NMA later in the build. Check out discussions here about the Nulok slate roofing system as it reduces the amount of slate substantially which should help with the revised figure you submit to the bank.