Jeremy Harris

A friend used this when refurbishing his house in France, where it seems that pretty much all internal studwork is done in steel. I was pretty impressed, as it's quick and very accurate. The walls were also pretty soundproof compared to timber stud walls, something that surprised me, as I expected them to transmit more sound. One thing I did notice was that it seems to be the custom in France to run all electrical wiring in flexible conduit. With the steel stud system this seemed to me to be a very good idea, as it kept the cables in place and also provided abrasion resistance where the cabling ran though sharp edged holes in the steel studs.

The flexible duct linked to is primarily for use underground and through slabs and walls, not internal or external use as conduit. Polyethylene isn't very UV resistant, so whilst this duct is fine when buried, it may well degrade if used as conduit that's exposed to light. Plastic electrical conduit (as distinct from duct) is usually made from uPVC or sometimes ABS, so that it can be solvent welded.

What's on the ground and first floors? If I've understood things correctly, your photos show what's in the basement, but the hearth referred to is on the second floor, which indicates this building has four floors in total (basement, ground floor, first floor, second floor). Is that right? As @PeterW has said, this needs to be tackled from the top down, as structurally the chimney stack outside will be supported by all the brickwork in the floors below usually (unless it's built off a thick wall, or external to the wall with a buttress down to basement level). Before knocking anything out in the basement I think it's important to do some investigation in the floors above, to determine where all the structural support is coming from.

It's a reference to some of the pretty useless, and IMHO dangerous, voltage indicating screwdriver/probe things with a neon light inside. They are very poor indicators as to whether a circuit is actually dead, as they will light up with a very small induced current. Equally, they may not light on a live circuit if it so happens that the person holding the thing happens to have picked up enough of an induced field to lift their body potential within about 60 VAC of the mains supply. The dangerous bit comes when people rely on these things to check whether a circuit is dead, as they can give a false indication. In my view they should have been banned from sale to the general public years ago. They can sometimes be useful if the person using the thing is connected to a known to be good earth, but even then I don't wholly trust the things.

600mm is about the "standard" cabinet depth for non-island wall units, so there are a lot of work surfaces available around that depth. For stone and stone composite materials there doesn't seem to be a standard width as such. 600mm is too narrow for an island, IMHO, I'd say around 900mm to 1000mm is probably as narrow as most would want to go. Most kitchen appliances are designed to fit into a 600mm depth OK, including the pipe connections at the rear. The exception is washing machines, that are often a bit deeper and end up projecting slightly from a 600mm deep slot.

I found the more complex Japanese toilets mind-numbingly complex to use, especially when they didn't have an English translation for all the controls. I did like the washing feature though, although I can't say I ever got used to the blast of air from the drying function. The other things that was less than ideal in the middle of the night was the little tunes some of them play. Apparently the idea is to mask any embarrassing noises. Frankly I'm inclined to think that having music coming from the toilet was more embarrassing. The large pool of water is a mixed blessing, in my view. It helps keep the pan clean, but increases the problem of splashing, so works best if a "everyone has to sit down to pee" policy is enforced. We've found that a D shaped toilet (European style) with a near-vertical rear internal face, seems to be self-cleaning to some degree, certainly better than a standard UK style pan. Best feature by far is to just add a shattaf spray. Not only is it a lot more hygenic, but it also works well to clean the pan if need be. I'm a great fan of these things, and cannot understand the British obsession with using loads of toilet paper.

I can empathise with your feelings. Part way through our build my father in law died. We were both hoping he'd live long enough to see our house finished, but it wasn't to be. I did put a small memorial to him, and my late father (who died back in 1972) right up at the very top of our house:

I'm seriously thinking of buying a 3D printer now, and looking around it seems that you're right, the Creality Ender 3 does look to be good value. Having been reading up as much as I can on these things over the past few weeks, it seems that there is a pretty large user base for the Ender 3, and consequently the few issues that seem to crop up have what look to be fairly easy workarounds or fixes. I have a couple of jobs for it that will, if they work OK, pretty much cover the cost of the printer. The first one will probably be a couple of ABS holsters for my car charge point cables. These are around £25 - £30 just for a pretty simple bit of plastic: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Remote-mount-IEC62196-charging-holster/dp/B078HMRFLN Be interesting to see how the printer copes with ABS. From what I've read it should be able to print with it OK. I'l start off with PLA, though, just to get a feel for how the thing works. I need to make up a couple of custom project box enclosures, too. With luck it will be easier to 3D print boxes with display apertures than mess about milling out holes in a standard plastic enclosure.

I've tried cutting a left over bit of 20mm Silestone. A carbide tipped saw wouldn't really touch it. A diamond blade on a Dremel cut it OK, but I'd guess you'd need to use a diamond disc cutter to slice through it cleanly, used wet (it doesn't seem to like being cut dry).

The manufacturers quote a solar gain reduction of around 90% for the ones I've looked at. If I had to guess I'd say that an awning is probably more effective than a blind or shutter, as there's no semi-closed air gap to heat up, although it may well be that the Venetian style external blinds are well enough ventilated to not allow much heat build up behind them. There may well be some re-radiation from the rear of the blinds, though. An awning or brise soleil would have the advantage of providing very good ventilation underneath it, so may well reduce solar gain a bit more. The other advantage of an awning or brise soleil is that the windows can be opened easily. A roller blind or shutter would only allow inward opening or sliding windows to open, and inward opening windows aren't that common here (not sure why, might be related to historical weather tightness concerns).

It looks like that would be difficult to fit whilst maintaining reasonable vapour and air tightness, as there doesn't seem to be any seal around the tape. Probably better to run a cable through the wall, as that could be sealed up well.

I've been looking around this afternoon to see how big/small some of the external blinds can be (we don't have much depth to play with). This cross section of the thinnest roller type external blind I could find seems pretty typical (not been able to find any sections of Venetian type external blinds yet, though):

I stayed in a house in Portugal, when doing my seaplane/amphibian rating, that had white metal (aluminium, I think) roller shutters built in to the external lintels of all the windows. They just slid up into slots at the top and were barely visible when fully retracted. I was really impressed with the way they kept the heat out during the day. I could lower them all first thing in the morning before heading out to the airfield and the house would stay cool, even without the AC being on. I really wanted to fit something similar, or, perhaps, wooden shutters, to our build but the planners weren't happy with the idea at all. I've seen some external fabric roller blinds that look as if they may be a smaller and neater solution, and one that I might be able to hide away somehow in the cladding above the windows, perhaps. I'm not sure just how durable a fabric blind will be outdoors, though. The other challenge will be getting power to them, but I may be able to run the SELV supply needed up behind the cladding, perhaps.

That was my thought, too. At max load that 40 A supply is going to make the room very toasty, with over 9 kW of heat going into it from the equipment.

The issue with bifolds is that the geometry of the door fastening system means that it's really difficult to get enough force on the seals to maintain adequate airtightness over time. Usage isn't really the issue, as the seals are in compression all the time that the doors are closed. The best way to see the issue is to look at how the seals are compressed with bifolds, particularly, the means of applying closing force at the intermediate hinged sections, as this is the primary weak point in the geometry, as there is nothing at this point to directly pull the sections either side close to the frame.

Depends entirely on the heating (and, perhaps, hot water) requirement. You need to work this out, then you can see what size is needed.

Back when I was in a band in the late 60's/early 70's, our Transit had a row of ex-airliner seats behind the front seats. IIRC we picked them up from RAF Northolt, some years after the infamous Pan Am 707 landed there thinking it was Heathrow. To take off again they had to strip everything out of the aircraft and leave it behind, as the runway at Northolt's a fair bit shorter than Heathrow. One thing that I saw had changed, when flying into Northolt many years later, was that they had painted a large arrow on top of a gasometer on the approach, with the letters "NO". They were an abbreviation for "Northolt", but I think everyone who's ever made that approach has thought they were intended to "just say NO" to any commercial pilots making another mistake...

Looks very similar to ours, but a bit cheaper. The crates and packing look identical, so if I had to guess I'd say they are probably from the same place originally. The filling will wear down slightly after a few years, but that just gives a nicer texture to them, in our view. We have had a handful of holes appear, where the has been a cavity just beneath the surface that's broken through after a while, but I had some left over cream grout and have just been filling the holes with that as they appear. Seems to do a good job, as it's hard to see where I've made these small repairs.

@Onoff, those photos remind me a bit of Crocodile Dundee: "That's not a fossil, THIS is a FOSSIL" ...

If you have trickle vents and no MVHR then yes, airtightness can be a bit OTT. If you have MVHR, though, then airtightness becomes far more important, so much so that any leaks, such as those that will always appear, sooner or later, as bifold seals stop working, will make a significant impact on the total heat loss. Ventilation heat loss in a house without MVHR will always be pretty high, so whether a bit of leakage makes much difference is debatable. Our house loses around 220 W of its total heat loss of 1600 W in cold weather from ventilation losses, but if it was less airtight, had trickle vents and no MVHR it would lose around 1,500 W to ventilation from a total heat loss of about 3,000 W. Having good airtightness and MVHR just about halves our heating bill.

As an old friend of mine was fond of quoting "gravity is what stops walls falling over" (his hobby was dry stone walling).

Just let the MVHR do it's thing. Seems to work very well, and keeps the air in the house cool and fresh in summer.

Anyone spot one of my section drawings that I annotated up for building control in tonight's show? Blink and you'd have missed it! (yes, it was very briefly shown on a desk in the MBC factory in Gloucester, and yes, they did ask me if they could use it, ages ago)

Yes, we've stayed there two or three times. The lake's been transformed with thousands of trees and a handful of log cabins, all sat apart in their own secluded spots in the woods, at the edges of the lake, complete with their own hot tub, jetty and boat. Great place to stay in mid-winter, too.

I tried this, but they demanded a $50,000 deposit from me before they would even look at whether there was any breach of copyright. The owner of the company that's abusing my copyright (and, in my view, fraudulently presenting our build as if it was his work, when it wasn't) refuses to remove the images, and has been refusing to acknowledge my take-down requests. As the domain is registered in Ireland, the only way to proceed seemed to be to go through the European courts last time I checked. As I've now got dual nationality, I might try and see if I can get the Irish authorities to take action. Last time I got wound up about this I was still just a UK national.