Jeremy Harris

I haven't done a test like this, but I have some offcuts of strand woven bamboo in some rubble bags, that are waiting to go to the tip, so I'll take a bit out and dunk it in a bucket. Ours is similar looking to the middle sample above, I think, "14mm thick, Solid Natural Strand Woven 142mm Bamboo Flooring", supplied by the Bamboo Flooring Company.

From just random observations, the house temperature has reached about 23.5 deg C, cooling back to around 21 deg C overnight. The MVHR is on bypass a fair bit of the time, and was running in active cooling mode during the later part of the day. The slab seems to be sitting at around 19 deg C, and has been cooled a couple of times - the slab cooling comes on when the house exceeds 22.5 deg C. I'll have the data for June at the end of the month, as the logger records data in monthly chunks to a USB stick now. I need to look at adding a way to pull the data out mid-month to look at it, perhaps. The outside temperature peaked at 31 deg C yesterday afternoon.

Leaving firmware wide open seems commonplace on Chinese products, I think, and stems from the way that Chinese companies freely copy each others products - the concept of intellectual property rights in China is pretty loose. I recently bought a cheap (£12) Chinese WT3020F minirouter, and found that there was a hard coded admin account with a well-known password, that allowed Telnet access to the device firmware. It took a few minutes to flash it with OpenWRT and customise it for what I wanted. The Chinese manufacturer in this case has made most of the information to do this readily available, as they had copied it from another manufacturer, anyway. The same goes for the Chinese wireless IP camera I was playing with yesterday. It uses a standard SoC board, that has a µSD card slot on it. There was no information at all on the camera, and nothing to suggest that it had an internal recording capability. Half an hour of poking around revealed that it was dead easy to add a µSD card inside the unit and enable motion recording. The system firmware is Linux-based, and you can pretty much configure it as you wish, but there's no mention of any of this from either the supplier or manufacturer.

I agree that they are a competent company; I had a long conversation about trying to find a way to integrate an Ecocent into our house when I was still at the early design stage, and chatted to them at Swindon about it as well. I also looked at the ASHP unit they had running outside, and it seemed OK. One issue I did have was that their documentation was not great. Some had elements that had been copied from other manufacturers installation manuals (Genvex for example) and there were a lot of figures that were hard to put into any form that allowed a comparison with other products. Certainly some other manufacturers have manufacturing plants in China, a great deal of Apple products are made there, for example. However, controlling quality when importing from Chinese manufacturers that are not under the direct control of a big multinational company is damned difficult. I've a friend who makes custom bicycles, and most of the components are made in Taiwan or sometimes China, and he is constantly fighting a battle with suppliers over quality. He agrees a specification and price, then finds that the manufacturer changes the specification and offers a reduced price, after shipping the goods. In China this is considered to be good business practice - price matters more than sticking to a specification, and a supplier gains face by offering a lower price than agreed. To try and overcome the problem, he now employs, part time, an ex-pat American living over there to inspect every batch of parts before they are shipped, just to be sure they are the right specification. I'm sure that ESP try their best to control quality, but they are a relatively small company, and I suspect they are dealing with the same sort of issues as my friend who makes bikes. It's a manageable problem, but there is still that long term support concern. When the Chinese OEM decides to change the design, because one of their big customers demands it, then there is a very good chance that support for the previous design will just disappear. This happened to me with a Chinese lathe I bought from a UK supplier, who badges it as his own product. The Chinese company changed the design of the cross slide, without telling him. I ordered a replacement from the UK supplier and it was completely different. The UK supplier then opened up several crates in his warehouse and found that all were to a different design. At that point we had a bit of a falling out, and the only way I managed to get my lathe fixed was to find the Chinese company (called Weiss, not very Chinese sounding!) and ask them to help. They managed to find an old stock cross slide and ship to to me, but it was a lot of hassle and the lathe was out of action for several months. As long as people are comfortable with the trade off between price and possible long term support issues, then there's no problem. I regularly buy stuff from China, and accept that there may be little or no effective long term support; I'm happy to just bin anything that breaks or attempt to repair it myself. One advantage is that you can buy just about any spare you want from China, if you can track down the OEM, and are prepared for the delay and a bit of hassle.

Having heard the interview, he didn't say that it was illegal, he said that he thought it might be banned here, when told by Andrew Marr that it was banned in other countries. In fact its not banned here at all (yet), so this seems to be another case of the media playing fast and loose with the facts. What a surprise..................

Have you looked at MBC twin stud? They use pumped cellulose insulation (recycled newspapers), the details are here: http://mbctimberframe.co.uk/

It would be for me, too. I did take a risk when buying our Glowworm ASHP, because Glowworm seemed to have pulled out of the market, but the price was good and I looked upon it as an acceptable risk, thinking that a well-established company like Glowworm would almost certainly be able to provide legacy product support. As it turned out, the risk was justified, as the unit is really just a badge-engineered Carrier, and Carrier are the inventors of these things, have been in business for a century or so, and still make the same base model, so spares are not going to be a problem for the foreseeable future, I think.

Although it's a bit more expensive, I've been impressed with the rooms where we used Dulux Durable emulsion. I've washed marks off those rooms a few times now, whereas the rooms painted in the other finished have needed touching up where I've tried to wash marks off.

Yes, that's the original architects detail (it's where I got it from earlier in this thread). At some point both the cladding specification and the insulation specification seems to have been changed, but that change seems to have been made with approval, as Harley Facades referred to the aluminium composite cladding on their (now deleted) web pages. The aluminium composite rain screen was almost certainly cheaper than the zinc; currently zinc is around $2500/tonne, aluminium alloy around $1500/tonne. In addition, the aluminium composite panels may well have been significantly lighter, so giving an additional possible cost saving on fasteners. I can't believe that the aluminium composite was substituted for the originally specified zinc without some sort of sign off, probably by three or more parties. Whether they considered the altered fire risk I don't know, but from what's been revealed or uncovered so far I doubt they did.

It's almost certainly Chinese, or been made from mainly Chinese sub-assemblies, I suspect, so getting hard info from anywhere other than ESP may well be difficult. I've found that searching around on the Chinese sales sites, like Aliexpress, for images of units will often show whether something may originate from China, as there often seem to be a large number of different outlets for the same looking product. The control board is made by Carel Electronic (Suzhou) Co Ltd, in Suzhou, China, for example, which is a good clue. It may well be fine, but I suspect you'd be relying on a single source of support, spares etc, as support from the Chinese OEM may well be challenging.

I'm pretty sure there's no PD for listed buildings, as my in-laws tried to put a small shed in their garden and had to get consent. I'm not sure if this is universal, or something that was just local to West Sussex, though.

It depends on the CCTV viewing requirements. If it's just viewing a single camera, then that's only around 4mB/s over the connection to that client software; if it's viewing more than one camera then it depends which video stream is selected - usually there is a hi res and lo res stream available from each IP camera, with different URLs, and for multiple cameras being viewed on a single screen there's little merit in using the high res stream, as it will be cropped on the display anyway. The lo res stream from an IP camera (often 640 x 480) doesn't use a lot of network bandwidth. As long as the hi res streams can get to the NVR OK, then that's all that really matters, I think. There also seems to be a difference in bandwidth not only depending on the encoding used, but also whether the streams are viewed using UDP or TCP. I found that UDP was a bit unreliable, so forced TCP, but that slows things down a little bit. Admittedly, part of my problem is that that I'm playing with WiFi IP cameras, ones that are pretty sluggish at that. I have one in bits in front of me right now, to try and see how I might improve it. Interestingly it has an on-board µSD slot, that doesn't have a card in it, so I'm going to do a bit of playing around.

Our decorator used a thinned white emulsion base coat on all the bare plaster everywhere, then applied two further colour coats on top of that.

I agree, it does seem to be just wrong to say that a product is illegal, when there seems to be no evidence that this was actually so. There has been some clarification of Philip Hammond's statement, and it now seems he was referring to EU regulations. He's still wrong, I believe, as I'm near-certain that we haven't yet subsumed the Eurocode requirements into our building regulations or approval requirements. I know that compliance with the relevant Eurocode may be accepted by building control, as I did this with our retaining wall (it was designed to Eurocode 7), but I'm not aware of there being a requirement for compliance with all the Eurocodes in the UK, yet.

I think it's a general principle that Heritage/Conservation Officers are a law unto themselves, difficult to deal with, often irrational and generally a PITA! For light relief, this story involves our build. Towards the end of the build, I was asked if I would give a continuing professional development session for some planning officers, building inspectors and the conservation officer. The latter had opposed the fitting of solar panels built in to our roof, something the planning officer over ruled. The first to arrive was the conservation officer. His first comment to me was that he was so glad that he had insisted that we not be allowed to fit solar panels, as the house looked very nice in the local setting (it's very visible from the lane). I suggested he go back outside and take a look again (we have 25 panels in the roof). He came back in, saying that he hadn't noticed them, and had he known they would be so unobtrusive he would never have objected................

@Ferdinand, it does seem as if there is a fair bit of work going on to make a lot of the information that was on the web about this project hard to find. It looks very much as if one of the first actions by all those involved was to remove as much data from the public domain as possible, and that alone makes be suspicious. On a separate point, Philip Hammond made a curious remark during an interview this morning. He stated that the materials used in the cladding of Grenfell Tower were "illegal". I doubt that many would disagree with the view that their use in this application should not have been allowed, but the term "illegal" is very strong language, coming from such a senior figure. AFAICS, the materials themselves were not illegal at all. They seem to have had the approvals required by law and the applicable regulations, even if those approvals, and the design and implementation of the cladding scheme itself, were very deeply flawed.

It's generally a bad thing to get a record of a refusal on file; we had several previous planning permission refusals for our plot and they were all read out, in detail, at the Parish Council meeting, plus all those who were asked to comment on the application were informed of the planning history, which is not a good thing. Once there is a refusal on file, everyone reviewing any new application will do so with knowledge of this, and that means you're starting from a worse position. Parish Councils are often ignored, as are a lot of the comments from local residents, often because the points raised aren't valid planning policy issues. If the Heritage Officer (substitute this for Conservation Officer in my last post - different areas have different names for the same job) has opposed the application, then the Planning Officer will usually just go along with this; it's one reason why getting advice from a Planning Officer before doing something like this is often fairly worthless, I'm sorry to say. I think your best bet is to withdraw the application, and try to see if you can get the Heritage Officer to agree to modifications to the design. This may well be a real struggle, as they start from the position that the only thing they will agree to is no change from the current setting. A good, local, planning consultant may well be able to help, too. Often they know all the people involved and their personal likes and dislikes, and can manage to get things through that others can't.

@Ferdinand, yes, if you know the base URL of the site, but when looking for all the reports on sites within the construction industry, this does mean a lot of digging around, looking for 404'd pages, then searching the Wayback Machine using the URL of the 404'd page. To add to the problem, not all the taken down pages return a 404, most have been re-directed to the main news pages of the sites they were on.

You have two challenges, the listed building issue and the planning consent issue, and both are intertwined. The primary one is that, because it is a listed building, anything constructed nearby has to be in keeping with the external view of the building and must not, in the view of the officer who looks after listed building conditions (often the Conservation Officer, rather than the Planning Officer) detract from the setting of the building. We have a G II listed building opposite our plot, and the general rule here is that anything built within 100m of a listed building is subject to close scrutiny, and this meant I had to jump through a lot of hoops to gain PP, even though I was the other side of the lane from it. Sadly, Conservation Officers can be a law unto themselves, and there is a very wide variability from one region to another on what they may agree to. In theory, a Planning Officer can over rule a Conservations Officer's recommendation, but in practice this doesn't seem to happen very often (we were lucky, our Planning Officer did over rule one recommendation by the CO). I think your best bet is to engage with the CO, and try to discuss what the concerns are over detracting from the setting of your listed building home. They can be difficult to deal with, in my experience, but if you can get the CO to agree something, and make a recommendation to the Planning Officer, then it seems more likely that you will get PP. I would withdraw your current application, to avoid getting a refusal on file. You get a free re-submission, so use that after you have discussed things with the CO and got an idea of what his/her concerns are. Finally, there is no such thing as precedent in planning, so there could be a monstrosity inches from your listed building, but that makes no difference at all to the way your application will be viewed. It seems unfair, but that's the way the system works.

Thanks, @Ferdinand, the KCTMO info isn't to hard to find, it's mainly other stuff, like the information from suppliers and main contractors that's a bit of a challenge. Some of the sites had rather un-friendly URLS, often just a sort of random string of alphanumerics, making finding a particular topic or subject a bit challenging.

As aside about IP cameras, the bit rate seems to vary a lot between different types. I have a humble 25 fps 720p IP camera that streams at about 4 Mb/s, which is silly, as that's as much bandwidth as a 1080P camera at 50 fps should use, with decent compression. It's hard to tell from the specification of a lot of these cameras just how good the compression is, and what the real bit rate is. It doesn't take many cameras streaming at 4 Mb/s to start eating up LAN bandwidth, and it's one reason why I'm looking to run IP cameras on a separate LAN from the rest of the stuff in the house.

I've found Leyland to be consistently pretty good across their whole range. Avoid the Screwfix and Wickes own brand stuff, I found it to be pretty dire.

Yes, I've been searching the Wayback Machine, the problem is finding the original deleted page URLs, as searching the Wayback Machine without them isn't that easy, as some of the pages don't have a "friendly" URL. I've copied a lot of the original pages from KCTMO, Harley Facades and Rydon, plus a few news sites that had reported on this project. As an interesting aside, the project manager for this project seems to have no internet presence at all now, which seems odd. It's pretty much mandatory that major public sector projects are managed in accordance with PRINCE2, and that the project manager for this project should have been a PRINCE2 Practitioner, and I'd have expected them to have passed either IPMA Level C or Level B (I had to have IPMA Level A to manage a £200M construction project). The majority of those working in non-sensitive areas, including local government and its associated bodies, have some form of public profile, via Linked In or whatever, yet I can't find anything at all about the qualifications and experience of the project manager who will have been responsible for many of the key decisions in this refurbishment. Not sure what conclusion to draw from this, but the most obvious may be that the project manager wasn't formally qualified - that would fit with my limited experience of local authorities..............

I'm generally a fairly reasonable person, but sometimes things happen that get make me very, very angry, angry enough to start shouting and swearing. I've spent a lot of time today trying to uncover information and copy websites as they have been taken down by those who may well bear some responsibility for this fire. Most of the deleted websites have just gone, with no explanation, the URLs just "404". This one is the one that's made me angry, because it's so obviously disingenuous, given that the residents are all calling for more information: http://www.harleyfacades.co.uk/page/grenfell-tower-626 In case they take it down (again), this is what Harley Facades, the company that supplied and fitted the flammable facade to Grenfell Tower, are now saying:

Sorry, Simon, it's an in-joke here that Ian (@recoveringacademic) had a great deal of hassle and cost from having to deal with a large population of Great Crested Newts on his site.............. My guess is that the deep trench foundation that's been called for is just a lazy way out by whoever specified it. You can look at using a raft foundation, with hardcore beneath and a reinforced steel ring beam under the wall, as that would mean a lot less excavation and use a lot less concrete. Our house is built on an insulated version of this system, and the photos in this blog entry: http://www.mayfly.eu/2013/10/part-sixteen-fun-and-games-in-the-mud/ may give you an idea about the depth of concrete and amount of steel reinforcement needed (you probably don't need the thick insulation we have). Our house is built on clay, but it is a fairly hard clay that isn't subject to heave. However, it is possible to mitigate for a poor soil to some extent by increasing the depth of sub-base under a slab, as this spreads the imposed loads out at 45 deg from the edges of the slab, into the underlying ground, which reduces the bearing load on the soil. Sub-base is generally a fair bit cheaper than concrete.