Jeremy Harris

I've had a quick scan, some data is reliable, some far less so, as it's from pressure groups. Taking the least reliable first. When Australia acted to place bans on wood stoves in first one area, and now, I believe, other areas, this followed studies that showed a higher incidence of disease related to air pollution in those areas. This pressure group (so treat the data with due caution) have made some comparisons that are on the high side, such as suggesting that wood stoves emit around 1000 times more PM2.5s than car exhaust (personally I'd question that): http://woodsmoke.3sc.net/health The Launceston study ( http://menzies.utas.edu.au/news-and-events/media-releases/2013/reduction-in-air-pollution-from-wood-heaters-associated-with-reduced-risk-of-death ) is quite compelling, though, as it seems to show a pretty strong causal link between wood burning stoves and disease, high enough to be statistically relavant for sure. As a cautionary note, the local environment there tended to produce higher levels of low level air pollution than areas with a different topology or weather patterns. This abstract from the British Medical Journal is clearly written by someone who is anti-wood smoke, but nevertheless there are some snippets of decent data in there (pity you have to be a BMJ member to read the whole paper: http://www.bmj.com/content/350/bmj.h2757/rr-0 One quote from that has clearly been chosen to stand out: There's an interesting paper from Norway, all the more interesting as Norway has a long history of burning wood and has, along with other Scandinavian countries, done a fair bit to improve the way stoves combust more efficiently, and in ways that produce less pollution (basically it comes from the the rocket stove principle, make the burn as hot as possible and never restrict the air supply to reduce heat output ): http://www.miljodirektoratet.no/old/klif/nyheter/dokumenter/25042013(PM emission factors wood stoves_Rapport_Final_64-65).pdf

Sadly not. You can filter out some of the harmful particulates, but the cost of the very fine (sub 2.5µ) filter, plus it's size and the need to very regularly clean it or replace it, would be very high. Even that would not remove the smell, which is the main nuisance factor. AFAIK, no one offers filters that are this fine, the finest intake filters are currently a lot coarser that this and intended to filter out pollen, which is typically around 10µ to 100µ in diameter. I believe the current finest filters aim to catch only some of the 10µ stuff, using the inherent "stickiness" that pollen has. Typical woodsmoke and car exhaust PM2.5s are not very sticky, so need fine filters.

It was from data gathered on particulate and other harmful emissions as a part of the Australian wood burner ban, IIRC. I didn't keep links to it but will try and pin down some definitive sources later. As an aside, our MVHR has had to be turned off three times over the past week. The combination of cold, still, nights has meant our valley has filled with woodsmoke from open fire and wood burning stoves. Leaving the MVHR on resulted in the whole house being filled with smoke..................

No one knows for sure, as there seemed to have been several factors. For those of us running the forum on a day to day basis, things were a bit challenging, as the forum owner and only administrator really didn't seem that engaged in running the forum, or getting the forum software to work well. There were constant problems with varying and inexplicable permissions between the members of the mod team, and every time a permission was changed it seemed to create other, unforeseen, problems. The result was that none of the mod team had the same permissions, and none really knew what permissions the others did or did not have. Nevertheless, I think we ran it pretty well, but there was a major problem with dealing with spammers, as there were virtually no anti-spam measures to weed out new members, and added to the varying permissions mods had, it depended very much who was online at any time as to how effectively we could deal with the many spammers that tried it on most days. It all came to a head when one new member read an old post, found that the thread it was on was locked, and so had a pretty nasty rant on someone else's build thread. I moved that post, after discussion with at least two other mods, and put it in the previously closed thread. That had the effect of reopening that thread (no one knows who closed it in the first place, as far as I know, I just know who started it and the content - it wasn't me). The new member couldn't be locked out, as none of the mods around had the permissions needed to stop him posting. I played tag, hiding offensive and defamatory posts as soon as they were made, whilst trying to stop the new member from posting, both by email (I knew full well who he was) and by PM.. At around 10:30 that evening things calmed down, the inflammatory posts stopped and I went to bed. Overnight, the new member sent a tirade of emails, threatening legal action etc, to me and several others, and when I didn't reply (because I was in bed!) he started copying them to the forum owner. The next morning (a Saturday) I read all this lot and rang a friend of mine, now a judge, but who had been a barrister I had worked with in the past. I disturbed him on the golf course, copied him all the information I had and asked if there was any real legal problem. I should add that the closed thread that caused the problem related to a man who had been imprisoned for building related VAT fraud, had set up several failed building companies and who I knew had claimed to be an associate of the new member that had been causing all the trouble (he came to visit our build, with a potential client, telling me that he was working for the new member, someone that, at that time, I trusted). I obtained a detailed legal opinion, saying there was no credible legal issues at all, and that it was, in effect, all hot air, emailed it to the owner of Ebuild late on the Saturday morning and had an odd response. Ebuild was closed and my membership was suspended. TBH, I couldn't work out what was going on, so I tried to contact the Ebuild owner again, and was, in effect, told to F off and not try to contact him again. Ebuild came back, but after a great deal of thread editing. Anything related to the name of the new member (who was not running a UK business and was not building houses, despite claiming that he was) was edited out. One victim of this was an Estonian window manufacturer, who shared the same name as the new member. They were very irate and emailed me demanding to know why all mention of their windows had been edited out. I tried again to intervene, and was ignored. I could no longer access ebuild, many threads were now in tatters, due to some massive editing undertaken over the weekend (pretty crude find and replace, so not at all focussed). One of the mods of ebuild had a massive misunderstanding about what had happened, put two and two together and came up with five and went off on his own series of rants, which didn't help. Lots of people were trying to contact the owner of ebuild to ask what was going on, and after a couple of days the owner just got fed up and decided to close down the pretty broken site and leave it read only (it remains pretty broken now, with none of the attachments available). We can only guess as to why the owner decided to close it down. My view is that I'm convinced he'd lost interest in it a long time before (I'd been a member since around 2007) and this latest hassle was the straw that broke the camel's back. It gave the owner an excuse to close down something he'd lost interest in and didn't have the time to support, without seeming to be at fault. All the founder members here know exactly who really acted to kill ebuild, and also know that on that day he'd been sacked as a sales rep for a well-respected builder that some here have used. Having emailed him a lot that evening, I'm convinced that as well as losing his job drink may well have been the fuel for what took place. Later I did uncover a great deal more information about what I can best describe as him being a bit of a fantasist. He certainly fooled me, and a few others, but not out of malice, I'm sure, more out of naivety, I think. Others that have met him like him, as I did, but would, I think, agree that he's probably the sort of individual who does over-state his own achievements and may well be seen as a person to be used by those, like the VAT fraud chap, to their advantage. A sad story, that's still lingering on, as I have proceedings currently in court about hi continued misuse of photos stolen from me and misrepresenting our own build as his work.

Just tried from a machine that's unknown to Ebuild (put together after Ebuild went down) and its OK. It's still 403'ing from the other machine (on the same LAN) so that does rather indicate a browser fingerprint block. All seems a bit daft, but people on the internet do daft things with monotonous regularity.

My view is that I think we can manage the loss rate fairly well. This forum provides a pretty good filter that unintentionally sifts out the dreamers from the realists. I have more than a sneaky suspicion that the Ecology BS read this, as well as many others, as it was noticeable how quickly the Ecology reacted when there were a few posts here commenting on the fact that their newly introduced, Passivhaus approval only, policy quietly and quickly died. Lending for committed self-builders is very much a different market to general house purchase lending, and that itself is not as high a risk as some believe. The major problems are scale and sensible management. I can see that there is a need for relatively small loans, at an affordable rate, to allow self-builders to complete their homes, and this seems very much a niche market, one that is not profitable enough for the big players, in part because of their high overheads and set up fees. I think there's a way to approach this along the lines of a credit union, which allows a feel for the trustworthiness of any saver/investor to be assessed gradually. I can't believe that it isn't possible to set up the modern equivalent of a not-for-profit mutual benefit society (what used to be called a building society), without too much hassle. Yes, we need some people prepared to take a risk initially, but once established, and as long as we are careful to control the rate of growth, there's no good reason I can see as to why we should run into problems. The US sub-prime lending problem in the US was down to the greed and stupidity of lenders who didn't know or understand their clients, nothing more. Those are factors that are pretty easy to control if the investors and the borrowers are already known to each other and in a trusting relationship. I'll quote an example (and I do not believe for one moment that I'm in breach of any forum rule, or giving away any confidences, by doing so). Last week, most of the Forum Management Group, the bunch that voluntarily set up this forum and initially funded it from their own pockets, decided we should meet up for a chat and a meal, partly to discuss forum business, partly as a social function to celebrate what we happen to believe is a worthwhile achievement over the past 18 months or so. No funds from the forum were used at all, everyone paid their own costs, but it was clear that we needed to book accommodation en-mass, book a meal en-mass and that some members had unreasonably high travel costs compared to others, no matter where we chose to meet, and it seemed fairer to try and amortise costs so we all paid out roughly the same amount each for travel, accommodation, drinks, food etc. All these issues were resolved on the basis of trust, by people that, in the main, had never actually met each other (we set this forum up via lots of emails, a temporary forum plus a couple of conference phone calls). AFAIK, everyone has been refunded their up-front accommodation booking cost or excessive travel cost expenditure, by this simple process of trust. It seems to have worked OK, as far as I know. OK, this was just a few hundreds of pounds, but the principle is essentially the same. Potential borrowers would be people we, as a collective group of potential investors, know, albeit only on line in the main. Potential investors would also be the same. I know right now that there are people here that I would trust implicitly to pay back a loan, and if I had the funds I would be more than happy to lend to them at preferential rates. I doubt I'm alone, either. It doesn't take much to form a far better view of character via a forum like this than any bank or building society would ever hope to obtain.

When some people take a dislike to me, for whatever reason, it seems they can go to extraordinary lengths. The extreme animal rights vitriol that I got from a supposedly anonymous source (who forgot to hide her IP address and email server details............) was a good example. Must have taken her hours to get that worked up and full of hatred to go to such lengths, for several days. The daft thing was that I was every bit as much in favour of protecting animal rights as she was.

Tried that, didn't work, either. What did work was viewing from a different machine and location, using a different ISP. Interestingly, this solution also works through a VPN too, so it's not IP address related. Somehow, Ebuild has identified the machine I was using (which is the one I used to use before it was taken read-only), despite me having spoofed my IP address with a VPN and despite there being no Ebuild related cookies stored that I can see (and anyway, browsing via a private window in Firefox should isolate that browser session from any cookies stored in the normal browser window). I suspect it's either just one of those oddball things, or it may be something related to browser fingerprinting. The latter is definitely used by data correlation companies like Facebook (they have owned up to it, I believe) and almost certainly also used by Google (who haven't owned up to it as far as I know, but I'm damned certain they do it, too). Browser fingerprinting effectively strips away privacy settings on most browsers, and can bypass some user tracking settings (unless they are savvy enough to know about it and the ways to thwart it - not always that easy, as it usually runs via script within the web site page). The nuisance with browser fingerprinting is that you can install anti tracking, anti location finding stuff, and clear your cookies regularly, yet the damned website will still know who and where you are because of the browser fingerprint.

Interestingly, that link 403's for me. I wonder why? I used to be able to view the old Ebuild archive, but it seems that now I cannot, as it still 403's when I try and go directly to the base URL. I just get the classic message: "Forbidden You don't have permission to access /topic/12078-anyone-heard-of-peer-to-peer-lending-for-self-build/ on this server. Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request." when clicking that link, which suggests that even view permissions have now been withdrawn for me. Not sure how he's doing this, as I have no Ebuild cookies set that I can see and have tried going in via a VPN, so it looks as if I'm in the Netherlands, just to look like any other anonymous surfer, and I still get a 403.

Can we please separate out P2P lending from crowdfunding? The two are totally different concepts, and I fear there may be confusion here between them. Crowdfunding Crowdfunding is solely a means of raising capital, with no absolute obligation on the recipient to pay anything back at all. It is primarily used to provide investment for start-up companies, where initial investors may receive a reduced price product in return for their investment (assuming the company gets off the ground), and more recently has been adopted as a way of raising non-refundable donations for specific charitable cases (like sending a person to another country for medical treatment not available in the UK). It is not a lending or borrowing scheme in the usual way we would understand such a thing, and anyone who invests in a crowdfunded project has to treat it like any other high-risk investment or donation and not expect to ever get their money back. There are exceptions, but this is generally how crowdfunding works. In terms of self-build and renovation, I can see a place for crowdfunding a start-up company that has come up with a product or service that looks to be beneficial to self-builders. I cannot possibly see how crowdfunding could be used as a substitute for a lending scheme, like a conventional mortgage or loan. P2P (Peer to Peer)lending and borrowing P2P is a means that allows usually small investors to invest money at an agreed rate of return to borrowers that they choose. It's a logical extension of the principle of informally lending a friend some money for a time and then getting it back, with the difference that P2P almost always carries some interest with that borrowing, although often far less than that charged by conventional lenders. P2P also allows groups of investors to amalgamate a number of small investments in a single project, but this is the only similarity with crowdfunding, and is, I think, where some confusion may result. The key difference is that with P2P there is a formal agreement that the investor will get their investment back after a defined period of time, plus an agreed level of interest (usually, there are schemes that operate within Islamic law that get around the issue of interest, as interest is haram in Islam). In my view, I think we need to dismiss crowdfunding, in the context of individuals who are self-building or renovating and looking to borrow money. What we should concentrate on are P2P models, how they operate, how the agreements are structured, what the typical investment return should be, how the organisation of investors and borrowers is arranged, and, most importantly, how the law and financial regulation applies to such agreements that are made outwith the normal regulated environment of the banks and building societies. I don't want to make an issue of this last point, as we already have schemes, like car personal lease plans, that similarly fall largely outside FCA regulation, so it is not, in my view, a show stopper.

Yes, I think providing a space to discuss possibilities, advantages, disadvantages etc is an ideal function for a part of this forum. Whilst I agree with the basic sentiment, I fear that if the forum was to venture into providing some form of crowd-funding organisation then it would need a lot of careful consideration. There are a lot of potential pooh traps waiting in the finance sector. Personally, I think that P2P lending and borrowing is a very much better match to self-build and renovation. Crowd funding is primarily about new products or charitable fund raising, whereas P2P lending and borrowing is about ethical use of money to allow people to invest with a better understanding of what they are investing in and for borrowers to have a closer relationship with those investors. This aligns very much more closely with the aims of this forum than crowd funding, IMHO.

I managed to source second hand Heras fence panels, complete with clamps and bases, for £15 each from the local hire firm, including delivery. They periodically have a clear out of the ones that are a bit tatty, have splashes of paint of concrete on. When I finished the build, I sold the panels for exactly the same as I paid for them, with the bonus that the person who bought them took them down and carted them away, included in the price. The clamps are the weak point, and I added ropes and cable ties to make them more secure. I also did the L shaped trick to make an entrance, with two panels hinged on clamps and some wire wrapped around to stop the clamps coming too loose. I secured the gate with a bit of heavy anchor chain and big padlock. Even in our sheltered location the fence did need bracing. I roped it to a couple of phone poles and also drove some angled stakes into the ground and tied those to the panels. I found that you do need to go around checking the clamps, as the fence does get moved from time to time and the clamps come loose, or go missing. I did buy a box of spare clamps and bolts as we lost quite a few over the course of a couple of years.

I posted the plot on the crypto currencies thread:

That's exactly how I feel, in a nutshell. I know that once we've sold the old house, and paid off the small mortgage we will have replenished our savings pots. In my case, I've been eyeing up a new car, but will still have a fair bit of savings that will be looking for a good home after that's paid for. The interest rate is almost academic, given the current savings rates available. I would far rather risk some in helping to fund someone else's build for a year or two, than have it sat in a bank or building society. The big question for me is how to do it. I know nothing about P2P lending, other than that it's essentially unregulated and so not covered by the FCA. That doesn't bother me particularly, as I wouldn't be willing to invest more than I would be happy to lose, and anyway I happen to think that the vast majority of self-builders are likely to be a very low lending risk (a conclusion I think that the Ecology building society, unlike some others, has also reached).

I think a well-managed P2P scheme is an excellent way to be in far better control of your investments than using ANY recognised financial institution. Like many, I've been bitten (three times) by financial institutions making contractual promises and then breaking them: First the endowment miss-selling scandal (I did get back about 60% of our loss after 12 years .........). Second time was a few years ago, just before I retired, when RBS openly lied to me about the nature of some investments I'd asked them to advise on (in writing) and make for me. I had specifically asked for zero-risk investments, as I knew I wanted to draw the money out for the self-build within around 3 to 4 years and didn't want to risk losing the money - they invested in stocks and shares, something that I'd specifically told them not to do, and they charged a whopping commission up front, without telling me. That took the best part of a year and a complaint to the FSA (as it was then) to get them to refund the investment, plus interest, plus their commission, and, to be fair, a small "good will" payment (I still changed banks the next day, though). The third time was when we wanted a small mortgage on our old house to help fund the new build. Santander agreed, we paid the arrangement fees, had the valuation survey and received the written mortgage offer, with terms. A couple of months later, when I went in to start to draw down from the mortgage account they told me they had arbitrarily cancelled it, as their lending policy had changed recently. Four years later and I'm still battling to get back the arrangement and valuation fees from them, again it's in the hands of the regulator (now calling themselves the FCA). The argument against P2P lending/borrowing is that it can be outside the regulatory powers of the FCA. Frankly, based on my experiences, I'm not at all sure that is a significant issue. There have been unregulated borrowing schemes running amongst the Jewish and Islamic populations here in the UK for decades, and they seem to generally work OK. A well-focussed P2P investment/borrowing scheme, say aimed only at self-build, is probably no greater risk than dealing with a bank or building society, in my view. It's easy to focus on the negatives and risk, but with lots of small investors lending to someone of a like mind, and who understand what the self-build financial roller-coaster can be like, it doesn't seem to be a very high risk to me. I would be very interested in making small investments to fund self-builds when we have our money back from the sale of the old house. Not only would it probably give a better return than the banks or building societies (not hard) it would give great satisfaction that the investment was contributing a little bit to someone else's self-build dream.

Makes sense to just add a delay relay, then . Easy enough to add, you'll need a suitably protected mains supply for it, the switched supply to the boiler and a suitable delay relay and box. If you get a small DIN rail box (the smallest are the ones intended to house double pole isolator switches) and then fit something like this: https://www.rapidonline.com/finder-80-01-0-240-0000-time-delay-relay-timer-1-changeover-contact-ip20-50-5328 with a blanking plate over the unused single module space you should be OK. If you don't have a suitably protected switched mains feed for this, you could add a 6A MCB in the same enclosure, run a spur from the boiler supply in 2.5mm² (assuming that the boiler supply is rated at more than the relay rating) just to get protection plus a means of independently turning off the over-run relay if needed.

Sounds an interesting idea, I'd be in. On the subject of money for retirement, my late father in law gave me some advice when I was given the opportunity to take early retirement and didn't have a lot of time to think about the consequences (retiring at 58, so no state pension for 7 years and an indexed linked pension of 51% of my then salary). He'd been a senior captain with British Airways, and an RAF fighter pilot before that, so had two main pensions, neither of which were the maximum they could have been, because he'd had a break between leaving the RAF and becoming an airline pilot for a few years, where he'd accrued no pension whilst he was getting a licence, ratings etc. When he retired his income was about the same as mine. Post-retirement, his pensions added up to a bit less than 3/4s of mine. The first thing he said was that when you are retired your outgoings drop. He couldn't explain it all, he just said that he'd noticed that a lot of his day to day minor spending had reduced a lot. I noticed exactly the same thing, and it's significant, at a guess it accounted for a saving of around 5% less casual expenditure a month. The second thing he said was that the effect of tax and national insurance is such that halving your gross income does not halve your net income, or come close to it. In my case I retired on 51% of my former salary, stopped paying NI, as I had enough qualifying years, so saved another 8% or 9%, meaning my pre-tax pay was already close to 60% of what it had been. I then found that the effect of the variable income tax rates, plus the tax free allowance meant that in reality my net income post-retirement was over 70% of the amount I'd been getting when working. My guess is that a lot of people will notice the same sort of effect, where their income needs drop after retirement. I think a fair bit of it is the sum of all the incidental costs associated with working, like commuting, work clothes, refreshements at work or when travelling, etc, and they all add up every month.

As Nick says, the gravity feed to the tank will take away any residual hot soak. The only reason for having a pump over run built-in on a modern boiler like a combi, with switched heating and hot water circuits, is because the main heat exchanger has a very low water volume and the water in it could boil (or come close to it) from residual heat soak if both the burner and the water circulation stopped at the same time. Even if it didn't boil, the water may well exceed the temperature at which which scaling starts, so keeping the heat exchanger cool extends the life of the boiler.

The best feeling I had was when we had no mortgage. However, it was easier to borrow in order to finish the new house than try and do it as and when money came along. I didn't like the idea at all, but it was really the only sensible option, and although it went against the grain to borrow money at our stage in life, it was relatively painless, not too costly, and relieved a lot of money worries. I still don't like having had to borrow money, on principle, but I've learned to live with it.

Bugger of a situation to find yourself in, Dave. If I had some spare cash (sadly I don't) I'd gladly offer you an interest-free loan so you could carry on with work. Declan's idea of a mortgage is a good one, especially if the amount needed is modest compared to the value. Some building societies are still offering interest-only mortgages for a limited period (often 5 years), so it may be worth looking into.

Very roughly the performance will be around 4.5% worse that predicted. Down in the noise, really, but interesting, because at the time that Celotex claimed a lambda of 0.022 it was lower than any of their competitors who were selling near-identical PIR foam insulation, so it probably helped gain them market share.

Just to be clear, the plants being grown were industrial hemp, the tall stuff grown for making rope, coarse fibres, matting and as a biofuel. In terms of species, it was cannabis sativa (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabis_sativa ), not the narcotic, cannabis indica ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabis_indica ). Growing cannabis sativa is perfectly legal and it is still grown as a cash crop in many places. The Royal Navy (and its predecessors) relied upon it for all of the rope for warships for a few hundred years. I have an elderly sailing friend who still has his boat rigged with hemp rope, as he personally feels that it handles better than synthetic ropes. Personally I think that has more to do with his hands being like polished leather than anything else..............

We have 300mm of warmcell in the walls (twin stud, so near-zero thermal bridging) and 400mm in the roof (it's a room in roof design). The wall U value is about 0.12 the roof is very slightly better than 0.1.

I bought two no-name ebay Makita-clone BL1830 packs well over a year ago now, and have hammered them hard in the Makita lawnmower (that takes two BL1830 packs in series). As far as I can tell they are every bit as good as the genuine packs from Makita, just around half the price. The same goes for the replacement NiCd packs for my old Makita 14.4V drill/driver. I bought two "Masione" brand packs about 3 years ago and they are actually better than the genuine Makita ones.

Back when I was a chemist for a short time, one of the experiments I had to look after (overnight) was measuring the CO2 uptake of hemp, being grown in a sealed chamber, under artificial light. We were using C14O2 in the "air"" mixture in the sealed chamber, so we could measure the uptake rate by simply taking small leaf samples (via an airlock hatch) periodically and measuring the C14 to get a good indicator of CO2 uptake rate over time. As almost all all the carbon in plants comes from the CO2 they extract from the atmosphere, this was a reasonable way to measure conversion efficiency. Hemp was used because it's a fast growing commercial crop (or was still back in the 1970's, when we were doing this) that supposedly had a fairly high conversion ratio. IIRC, we measured a conversion efficiency of a bit under 3%. Take away the energy used in producing fertilisers, pesticides, harvesting, processing and transport and I strongly suspect that the efficiency would be barely more than about 1%. The key to solving our energy problems lies not in inventing new forms of generation, in the main (although a fusion generator would be nice) but in inventing efficient long-term energy storage. The best we can do at the moment, in terms of whole life cost, is probably pumped water storage, like Dinorwic, but there are so few locations that lend themselves to pumped storage that it's not really a practical solution. It'll be interesting to see how the new Tesla battery system in South Australia works. The main problem I think is that it's likely to only have a relatively short life, ten to fifteen years maybe, and the storage capacity is pretty small.