Drellingore

Thanks for the very detailed and considered thoughts, @Gus Potter. This insurance malarkey sounds a lot more complicated than I was expecting... And I don't know why I was expecting it to be simple! We need the public liability insurance for the Grand Designs film crew. I think getting that in place as a separate item, and then giving the overall package more thought is the way to go. We do have an architect and an SE involved, so hopefully that makes things easier and the exposure smaller.

Anyone got any recommendations for folks that can provide only public liability insurance for a barn conversion site? Protek are asking for a list of stuff that's longer than both my arms and my legs - like estimated costs to rebuild the 18th century barn back to its prior state. They're refusing to separate out the public liability insurance, which I need by Wednesday 20th ideally. Instead they want to quote for all aspects of insurance. When I've done this for my IT consultancy businesses, some of which had their own offices, this was a trivial box-ticking exercise and I'm pretty sure was just a matter of filling an online form. Are any of y'all aware of someone that makes it this simple?

I went down the route of getting a licence for about €1k, and it's a reasonably complicated app for which you need a lot of data - if you've not got the data to put into it, you won't get any value from it. I used ChatGPT and Gemini Deep Research to infer values for moisture curves and the like. Our architect and I designed a build-up to model, and it passed - yay! But then I changed the colour of the external wall and it failed. Then switching the orientation from north to south went from one failure to 48. There are a lot of things that I think I can do better myself, and this isn't one of them. That, or the build-up we're proposing really is terrible.

Because I've already done it for him.

So I've told him that I'm not paying the remaining 25% of the fee because the deliverables contained significant undisclosed errors. Am I being unreasonable?

Does Penny ask you to punch a lot of people? 😆

If you care about the pennies, the pounds look after themselves! Or something.

We think it'll be fine - the hemp block is apparently more water-permeable than wood fibre for the same U-value. It's a shame I can't do it on the free app, because getting additional confidence would be worth paying the price of an hour of ChatGPT guiding me through the process. I'm not sure that peace of mind will be worth a €1k software licence though!

Ta @MikeSharp01! Can you make a recommendation of the folks you used? I'm going to ask the architect to ask the supplier if they want to contribute towards the cost, seeing as the information will be useful for their future sales and marketing.

I don't suppose anyone here has a copy of WUFI Pro and would be willing to run some calcs for me, would they? The architect wants to use hemp block as part of the build-up for some flint-and-lime walls. The manufacturer doesn't have WUFI data available, so we were going to run the calcs ourselves to make sure we won't ha ve a problem with condensation. Only problem is that the free version of their software doesn't allow you to specify custom materials, which means I'd need to pay €1k for a year-long license when it's only a quick job that needs doing.

I'd be inclined to agree with this, but in this instance you're not allowed to see the PHPP model itself unless you also buy a licence. So this calculation is normally 'behind the curtain'. Removing them drops the heat demand by 6kWh(m²a), or about 28%.

Case in point: when doing SAP calculations, I just noticed that the Passivhaus consultant appears to have accidentally added over 100sqm of extra walls that don't exist to the property...

We need a 'tin hat' on a 27Lx10Wx8H metre building. Good point!

Is it normal for trades like scaffolders to offer cash discounts? Coming from the world of enterprise, it seems a bit dodgy. I've never withdrawn £20k in cash before...

There's a few reasons: You get a letter so suppliers can say "as featured on Grand Designs," which allows you to negotiate discounts Suppliers don't want to look bad on national telly, so give you better treatment If we Airbnb the second building, then we've just got a free advert on national TV It'll be nice for the kids to be able to watch and one day hopefully show their kids The barn is a non-designated heritage asset, and so it'll be nice for future generations to know about this stage of its evolution It's much less work for us than trying to self-document the journey as a vlog or something The wife works in interior design and interior architecture, so it'll be great promotion for her career We used to watch Grand Designs when we first got together nearly twenty years ago, thinking "I'll never be able to afford to do that." So it's kinda nice being able to say that now we've 'done it' (obviously assuming the project succeeds!)