AliG

Hi Ross, I must have missed you on Ebuild, I have just started my build in Edinburgh in Colinton. Good luck. Where are you building? Alistair

I can't really think of a system that will do better than SIPs in terms of U-value to wall thickness, especially if you want a brick outer skin. Usually with a SIPs wall you are looking at a 25mm service cavity plus 12.5mm plasterboard on the inside. A fairly standard buildup would be 100mm brick, 50mm cavity, 140-145mm SIP, 25mm service cavity and 12.5mm plasterboard, so around 330mm depending on the specific SIP panels. I think you might struggle to get a SIPs manufacturer to agree to a less than standard cavity as it might not be allowed in their BBA certificate for the warranty. A wall like this would have a 0.19 U-Value. Not spectacular, but not bad. Much as people can obsess about it, the difference between 0.16 and 0.19 is likely to be less than 5% to overall energy use. If the design allows no services on exterior walls then you can lose the service cavity and use a 170mm panel which would bring the U-value down to around 0.16. Kingspan do a system using their 172mm panel and 25mm brick slips which would give a 0.16 U-Value on a 275m which wall including service cavity. Much as people would want the lowest U-Value possible, in a single story house the roof and floor will be relatively more important for insulation. You could probably get the roof down close to 0.1 assuming there are no restrictions on thickness there. To some extent it is a matter of compromise if the 325mm is an unavoidable restriction.

I feel your pain Jeremy. I have found a guy who cuts the grass 18 times a year for £200. We have around 300 sq metres in total, it is quite the bargain. Next door just went the whole hog and replaced their back garden with astroturf! For a couple of years I also had a robowmower. A Friendly robotics Robomow RL 800. It actually worked extremely well. The main drawback was it doesn't collect the grass but cuts it into very small pieces which should mulch over time. Ideally you would combine it with scarifying once or twice a year. The great thing was you could just go out and leave it working, but it wasn't fully automatic, you still had to get it out, start it up, clean it etc. Eventually, however, the battery went and it was outrageously expensive to replace, it was also getting a bit unreliable. I might have bought another one but they seem to have increased in price. I think I paid £600 for it, mostly they seem to now cost over £1000 now which is what I pay for 5 years of cutting.

Hi Everyone, I was all excited that work was starting and about to post when the other site went down! Anyway, finally work has commenced. There is a house to demolish before I start work on the new one. As I suspected the disconnections of gas and electricity have taken way longer than they should have and so they have been working around the house for a few weeks and done the interior strip out. Gas is disconnected and electricity is supposed to happen on Friday. Let's hope so. I bought the house I am demolishing in August 2014, I though I would be moving in around now! We are looking at roughly a 52 week build from here. My wife has been driving past the site pretty much every day. I am not sure that she can keep that level of enthusiasm up! Anyway the delay has allowed me to alter the kitchen plans and work on redoing my current bathroom ready for selling. A big thank you to the guys for getting the new forum up and running so quickly. Well done

I used to have the largest Flymo with grass box. It was a pain as it got very heavy and hard to manoeuvre as the grass box filled up. I realised that a cheap wheeled electric mower was probably a better bet. Ultimately I think wheels beat air for ease of movement. I then moved on to Bosch Rotak cordless mower. It made a massive difference, you can mow in half the time without a cable, obviously a petrol mower has this advantage, but this is also quieter, lighter and doesn't require trips to get petrol. However, it was somewhat down on power versus a corded mower and so if you left the grass more than two weeks and it was long, thick and wet it would struggle. It was probably good for an area up to 250sq metres. The battery did give out after a couple of years and they aren't cheap to replace. Thus i would recommend cordless if you have a modest sized lawn and cut it regularly. In the end I decided that over the years I have spent so much on gadgets that it wasn't much more expensive to pay someone to cut the grass and they never miss a cut so it is always tidy.