Jeremy Harris

About 90% of our insulation is cellulose, really just chopped up old newspapers turned into fluffy fibres, so 100% recycled. It's hard not to use things like EPS and concrete, but in the house itself we only have EPS where we really had no choice, as the load-bearing insulation under the passive slab. Likewise, our 100mm thick passive concrete slab almost certainly has very little more, maybe less, concrete than a conventional strip foundation. The only really low concrete system I know of is the Segal system, but that comes with the penalty of needing more underfloor insulation in order to achieve the same sort of low heat loss in cold winter weather, where the undercroft temperature could be a fair bit lower than the ground temperature. Not hard to overcome, but needs a bit more floor build up.

I can see that my weekend is going to be taken up trying to work this out. On the plus side our house has a SAP EPC of A107, and an EER of A107 (minus 0.9 tonnes CO2/year), and is clad with larch grown 6 miles away and milled 3 miles away. On the minus side the frame timber came from Scandinavia, was built into frames in Cahir, Tipperary, Ireland, then transported here, the 300mm EPS under the slab came from Kore in Ireland, the recycled plastic "slates" came from Canada and we do have quite a lot of concrete in our retaining wall, and a bit in our passive slab. Other positives though, are that we are water-cycle neutral, in that we have our own borehole and dispose of our effluent via a treatment plant to the stream alongside. We do generate around 50% more energy per year than we use, though, and I worked out that our negative CO2 emissions equated to the CO2 sequestered by around 40 mature trees (more than would fit on the plot), plus around 50% or so of the energy my car uses comes from our own PV system. Be interesting to try and see how many years it will take to recover all the energy and CO2 that went into building the house.

I've never understood the rationale behind the move towards the South and the depopulation of the North. I can understand the original reason for it, the decline in manufacturing and heavy industry, which was focussed in the North and NI, but I cannot for the life of me understand why, when the UK economy switched from manufacturing to a service industry basis companies didn't set up in the North, where practically everything is cheaper. Nowadays, with a lot of the service economy not needing people to work from a fixed office base there's even more reason for encouraging revitalisation of the North. We both absolutely loved the 5 years we spent living and working in Dumfries and Galloway, whilst although not really "the North" (it's about the same latitude as Newcastle, IIRC) there was a sense of community spirit, friendliness and general high quality of life, that we've not experienced anywhere else we've ever lived. If it wasn't for (increasingly fragile) family ties that drew us back South, we could very comfortably have tried to build somewhere in the Rhins of Galloway, and feel right at home. The fly in the ointment, at the time we were looking around, was the spectre of IndyRef, and the stories we were hearing from friends around Portpatrick that were selling up and moving South of the border as they felt certain that the Indy's would win and there would be an economic meltdown, with associated persecution of anyone seen as being English. Some were seriously upset, as they'd lived there for decades, yet suddenly found a minority of Nats behaving pretty hatefully, evenly violently, towards them, and they feared that property prices would crash and they'd be stuck living where they weren't wanted any more, so a fair few just moved South, as a precaution. Of course their worries never really materialised, but I can understand their fear. You only need to wander into Stranraer late on a Friday or Saturday night to see the darker side and how bad it can be. We never saw that just a few miles away in Portpatrick, but we all knew it was there amongst a tiny, but vocal, minority, waiting for a bit of drink to bring it to the surface. The main problem is the government in Westminster that seems totally incapable of looking outside the boundary imposed by the M25. We even feel that here; many people locally do the daft, 1 1/2 hour each way commute into London to work, utter and complete madness.

Thanks folks. That's a bit of a bugger, Dave, having to wait yet another year. There's a staggering difference between the market up there and the market down here, it seems. One of the things that's really stressed me out has been the constant flood of people viewing the house, asking questions etc, let alone the fiasco over the sale that fell through.

Well, another update. The house is sold again, subject to contract, another cash buyer with no mortgage. We're happy, have got the price we wanted, and hopefully this transaction will go through OK. The current prospective buyer has seen the covenants and isn't bothered by them, so now we just have to go through the paperwork again. Thankfully it looks like we can re-use much of the paperwork from last time, so it is likely that the pace of the sale will be governed by the buyer's solicitor. It's also possible that they may be able to save some time by purchasing the searches from the previous buyer - that may well knock a couple of weeks off any delay. Fingers crossed that we don't hit another hitch - this house selling lark really is a damned stressful business.

I had this problem with some "stainless steel" bolts I bought for the shed. They also went rusty, not massively so, but enough to look unsightly. I believe there is a lot of really rubbish Chinese "semi-stainless" steel around, particularly with things like this. A friend has just had a similar problem with some "stainless steel" hinges he bought and fitted to lockers on his boat; they've actually rusted up so they barely move now, and that's mainly on fresh, or at the most brackish, water.

Are you just after recessed LED strip channel, with a diffuser over the front? If so, then there are lots of suppliers around and it's all much of a muchness. The stuff has a slide or click in place diffuser and will accept a range of LED strip, from just various brightness and shades of white through to colour changing strip that can give you a wide range of lighting colour options (if that's your thing). The recessed track is just an alloy extrusion, that comes in various lengths, but can be fairly easy cut to size or length butted together to give longer lengths. No particular reason to buy the alloy track and diffuser from the same place you buy the LED strip from either, unless it makes sense price wise. All depends what you want to do, but this is the sort of standard LED strip track that's available: Fix on the surface channel: Recessed channel: or there's a whole range of different permutations of fancy stuff for LED strip here: https://www.led-supplies.com/aluminium-channel-for-led-strip/

Also worth bearing in mind that if an application is refused you normally get a free resubmission anyway, so you could use an application as a way to get pre-app advice that was binding, if you wished.

Looking at it again, it looks like there is an optical illusion in the earlier photo, and that the mitre is really exactly one tile wide.

I'd take full advantage of that, then, as presumably, being free, you can have several goes until you get some advice that both you and the planner are happy with.

Here, if you want an informal phone call with a planning officer before you've submitted an application there's a £90 fee to be paid. No contact at all is allowed until you've either paid the pre-app fee or paid the planning application submission fee - they simply won't allow phone calls to go through to planning officers without either of those two criteria being met. Anyone that still has access to a free chat with a planner is in a fortunate, and most probably minority, position.

There's usually a charge, last time I checked it was £90 here, even if it was just a five minute chat with a planner on the phone. Not sure how much value pre-planning advice is, TBH. It's not binding, and will probably only tend to tell you things you can find out anyway by reading the local planning policy together with the NPPF. The only thing it's probably really any good for is if you're planning to do something that's borderline with regard to local planning policy or the NPPF, in which case it helps a bit to get a feel as to how the planners might approach it, specifically what they may use as reasons for refusal. Worth remembering that there is supposed to be assumption to grant PP, UNLESS there is something specific in the local planning policy, or the NPPF, that precludes that. It's easy to believe that there is an assumption against granting PP, though, from the way some planners (particularly planning committees) tend to behave. I'm inclined to think that if you think there may well be some doubt as to whether you would get PP, then you're better putting the pre-app fee towards a decent local planning consultant's fee, as the chances are you'll get far better advice from a planning consultant who knows the local area and policies well than you may from a planning officer giving non-binding pre app advice.

Normally, with a gravity-fed system, the kitchen cold tap won't have been gravity-fed (as gravity-fed water from an open tank is not potable), so it would have been fed directly from the cold incoming main, via the stop cock. If you've had a pressure reducing valve fitted, as a part of the conversion from a gravity-fed system to some other system, such as an unvented hot water cylinder or even some types of combi boiler that don't like very high pressure, then there will be a pressure reduction; as @ProDave says, usually to around 3 bar. 3 bar is still pretty high, and more than enough to get a tap to create quite a splash, so that makes me wonder how much plumbing has been changed and whether anything like flow restrictors were previously fitted to some taps in order to make them more controllable. If so, then the chances are the plumber may well not have known of their existence, and now you have a reduced supply pressure the flow restrictors may no longer be needed. There's also the possibility that any isolating ball valves on taps may not by fully open. At our old house I deliberately had the kitchen tap isolator valves kept partially closed to act as flow restrictors and stop the tap splashing (we had around 6 or 7 bar water pressure there). Simplest things to check are: Did the plumber fit a pressure reducing valve? If so, are any isolating ball valves on sink taps etc fully open? (slot in line with the pipe is fully open, slot at an angle to pipe is partially closed, slot perpendicular to pip is fully closed)

Checkatrade, and the others, seem often to be more commonly used by those who either can't get work by word of mouth, or who are just starting out and haven't yet built up a customer base and reputation. My experience of them on the one occasion I used them was that the trades person concerned was a useless rip-off merchant whose work was positively dangerous. I ended up re-doing all his cable terminations to make them safe, then asking the electrician we had in for the main house wiring to unofficially test all the other blokes work that I'd tidied up (we already had a waste of space Part P chit for it) just so I could be confident there weren't any other flaws lurking around.

Sounds good to me. My concern was that with the first grilles I bought, the total grill area barely matched the duct area, and when restricted further by the plastic mesh insect screen it was around 30% or so smaller in area than the duct, even though it was designed to fit a 150mm diameter duct.

I should have made a You Tube video. It was all undoing plastic clips, unplugging connectors that would only go one way, removing five wires from a terminal block and then reversing the process, plus some button pushing to get the DSN set.

In some respects it's little different to the old Code for Sustainable Homes energy related elements. One site near us had a planning stipulation that it had to meet CFsH level 4 (IIRC), but frankly it's a joke, as the developers may have complied on paper, but that is the very estate where I walked around with my thermal imaging camera a year or so ago, pointing out how crap they were, with large areas of missing wall insulation, no insulation at all in the dormers, large areas of thermal bridging around the doors and windows (that I suspect were really air leakage), etc. People living there are reporting energy bills that are more than double those estimated on their EPCs. I can't really see how any planning stipulation to build to a better standard would be enforced, as we can't even enforce current building regs at all well.

FWIW, I replaced the main board in our Vaillant 831 EcoTec some time ago. Board was around £120, IIRC and replacement took at the most 30 minutes, and that was for an amateur who had never changed one before and had to read through the second level diagnostic instructions as I went to make sure I programmed in the correct DSN number, to programme the board to work with the EcoTec 831 (they use the same main board for several different models, so it's supplied un-programmed).

Looks like it will do the job. You could possibly increase the mesh size a bit to get less airflow restriction if you wished, and still keep out most flies. Work out the area of the holes in your grille, than use the openness factor of the mesh to reduce the area caused by the mesh restriction and compare it with the cross sectional area of your ducting. Ideal the total effective area of the grille and mesh always needs to be greater than that of the ducting.

The problem with aluminium is when it's in contact with itself. Stack two sheets together outside and it will corrode quite badly in the anaerobic zone where there in close contact, particularly if it's also damp, This will be exacerbated if one bit of aluminium is anodised and has breaks in the anodising, for example where there are screw holes or areas that were punched out after anodising. Stainless mesh will be fine, and almost certainly won't harm the aluminium sheet. It you are worried about it, then space the aluminium cover sheet off the mesh around the edge with some reasonably thick (say 2mm) double sided foam tape. If it were me I'd not bother with this, as I've banged enough stainless rivets into aircraft aluminium over the years and never yet seen a corrosion problem. If possible, don't choose "marine stainless", 316, but use 304, the standard grade. This isn't that far away from 6063 aluminium architectural alloy, which is what the plate will be made of, and won't cause a problem.

No to brass, but stainless should be fine. Stainless and aluminium aren't that bad together, copper or brass with aluminium are. You want stainless woven mesh, coarse enough to keep out larger flies but not so coarse as to cause any significant flow restriction. You can buy small pieces on ebay easing enough, just search for "stainless mesh" and make sure it'e the woven stuff.

The other AAV is an Automatic Air Vent, often called a bottle vent, which has an internal float and valve to let air out but keep water in, like this one:

We had a nuisance parking problem at our old house. We own a wide strip of grass verge, that was originally here as a visibility splay, before the drive was moved, so now could be a part of the front garden. However, it's the other side of a double rendered block wall with an established hedge between the two walls, so would be a bit of work to move the boundary fence/wall/hedge out to where it should be. People were parking on this, usually transit-like vans from workmen, and three times our drain cover (that's in the middle of this verge) has been broken. I tried putting up signs, to no avail, so made up some concrete bollards, by just pouring concrete into cheap buckets. They've worked a treat, and didn't cost a lot. IIRC, each bucket holds about 18kg of concrete - enough to make the bollards heavy enough to stop them being casually moved.

Sorry, I've managed to screw up the menus on my blog that have the direct file downloads. Not sure what's happened, but it looks like the database has somehow got corrupted - anyone that knows how to fix Wordpress when it's broken would be useful! What's happened is that I deleted the old menu entry and upload, uploaded the new file, tried to create a link to it, but it seems that the link won't work. I've FTP'd into the site and looked at the files, and the file I uploaded isn't showing, neither is the sub-directory that Wordpress thinks the file is in. All very odd, as when I look at the details for the media file it points to a non-existent URL http://www.mayfly.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/08 "file name". There isn't even a "2018" sub-directory showing, just the 2017, etc ones, all of which look OK. Anyway, to get around the problem for now, attached is the current version of the heat loss spreadsheet, renamed as a .txt file to allow the forum to upload it. Just save it then change the suffix to .xls and it should open OK. Heat loss calculator - Master.txt I shall carry on trying to work out how to repair the Wordpress database...

My BCO accepted that the vent in the treatment plant, combined with the AAV on top of the stack, met the requirements. The foul drain run is vented to atmosphere via the treatment plant vent (same as a septic tank vent in effect) and the negative pressure issue is dealt with via the AAV on top of the stack.