Jeremy Harris

They won't usually pass a ramp that is portable or temporary in appearance, according to the friend mentioned above who made a weak concrete ramp. He was going to just fabricate a steel ramp (he ran a steel fabrication company at the time) but his building inspector refused to accept it, hence the use of concrete.

I did as suggested above, and built a gentle ramp up from the drive, around the side of the house to the back door. As there was then a 90 degree turn to get into the back door, I also had to add a flat wheelchair turning space right outside the door. The door also had to be Part M compliant, and the internal access route from it to the entrance level WC also had to comply with Part M. Doing this allowed me to have stone steps up to the front door from the drive, which look a lot better than a ramp. An alternative (not one I'd do, as I have a friend who's a wheelchair user) is to do as a friend in Yorkshire did with his self-build. He had York stone steps up to the main entrance, that were not Part M compliant. To get around this he covered them with polythene and then made a weak concrete mix ramp over the top. It looked pretty grim, but complied with building regs. As soon as the house had a completion certificate he just broke up the concrete ramp, revealing his unmarked stone steps...................

Around 8 or 9 years ago I fitted some bathroom units that came from Tesco (I jest not - they were on their online store). They were flat-pack, and damned good quality. Solid oak doors and decent carcasses, with soft close hinges. They made the bathroom a lot neater, hiding all the untidy stuff and giving loads of storage. I fitted a row that's a 300mm base cupboard, 600mm toilet unit, 600mm washbasin unit and another 300mm cupboard. Above that I fitted two, 300mm wall units, with a 600mm mirror between them. The shower mixer is fitted inside the base unit nearest the shower bath, and is a three way one, as the bath has a shower and a combined waste/filler. The advantage of having the mixer fitted in the base unit, with the controls on the side, is that you can turn the shower on without getting wet, plus the shower valve is accessible for replacement or maintenance (this proved to be very useful when the Victoria Plumb crap failed). In the new house I've done the same in both bathrooms and the downstairs WC, but this time used some units that were pre-assembled. They came from here: http://www.bluewaterbathrooms.com/ and seem to be pretty well made. I don't think we could go back to having stand-alone toilets and washbasins after having lived with built-in stuff for so long. Not only do you get loads of storage, it's also a great deal easier to keep a built-in bathroom clean and tidy. We don't even have an exposed loo roll holder; the rolls live in a cupboard by the toilet, out of sight.

Alarm data cables should be separated from power cables, so really need to go in separate duct. The concern is primarily interference, rather than electrical safety. It's also in the code of practice, not regulation, so it isn't actually mandatory, but nevertheless, for the cost of a bit of extra duct it's well worth doing, I think. Worth noting that data cables should ideally be in grey duct, power should be in black duct (in England and Wales, I think Scotland likes power to be in red duct). Again, within your own boundaries the duct colour isn't mandatory, but is good practice.

There's a sort of daft bit of standard stuff that goes on the bottom of the as-built EPC that you'll find very amusing when you get yours done at the end. Our chit has this bit of complete daftness at the bottom: Apart from the fact that we're right at the bottom of a deep valley, which makes a wind turbine a completely insane idea, look at the return on investment for solar water heating (something we already have via the PV array, excess generation diverter and Sunamp PV, anyway). Taking a mid-range indicative cost of £5,000, and a saving of £65/year (directly from the above certificate), it would take nearly 77 years to recover the investment, not taking account of regular maintenance, repair and replacement of parts......................... These certificates really are bonkers in so many ways.

Yes, that's all he did, just add his name and number to the FSAP file I'd created and lodge the certificate. In my view, there should be a way to allow self-builders to lodge their own certificates, as there's no real reason that an assessor has to do it, all the raw data is available on the worksheet for anyone to check at any time. Self-builders don't have much of a motive for trying to adjust the result, either, as I suspect most are aiming for better build standards, in terms of energy use, than mainstream builders.

You can do the design SAP yourself, building control will happily accept a design SAP from anyone, in my experience (mine were great about accepting my own design SAP, very encouraging in fact). I'd strongly recommend doing your own design SAP, not so much to save a modest amount of money, but because you will learn a lot more about the energy-critical aspects of your particular build, allowing you to focus attention on whether there are some easy wins. When it comes to the as-built SAP, again you can do the work, but the fly in the ointment is that the damned government won't accept anything but data submitted by someone who's never seen your house and has got all the data from you in the first place................ I found a SAP assessor that was happy to just take my FSAP file, add his name and number to it and lodge the certificate. He charged me £100 plus VAT for what may, possibly, have been half an hours work, but there was no way out of it. On the positive side, having modelled the house in SAP, my own simple heat loss spreadsheet and PHPP, I did gain a very good understanding of where the energy the houses uses/generate goes.

My personal example with RdSAP was our own house (our old one). As an exercise in learning to drive FSAP (not hard to pick up) I decided to put the numbers in for our old house. We'd added extra loft insulation, cavity wall insulation, new'ish double glazing, a condensing gas combi boiler and I'd made my own blower test rig and used it to find a lot of the air leaks and seal them up. It came out with an EPS of D, not bad for a block and brick bungalow with solid floors, little wall insulation and no underfloor insulation at all. I offered to give the estate agent my FSAP file, or the printed off worksheet, so they had realistic base data. Instead whatever data was put in RdSAP gave the house an apparent EPC of C, which has to be garbage, as I know full well that it would be pretty difficult to get it up to band C, without major work.

The problem is that it's a government-created scheme that has no real teeth and which is pretty easy to circumvent in the real world. A walk around any big development will see gaps in insulation, absent cavity closers, poor airtightness detailing etc, it's normal, and will all be covered up so no one will ever see it. I made a point of looking closely at two large developments near us, that I pass most days. The build quality for all the hidden stuff isn't great, and last winter I went around with the thermal camera and that showed large areas of missing insulation, or air leaks causing parts of the outer envelope to be heated from inside the house. I'm not the only one to have commented on this, Paul Buckingham wrote a paper here: http://www.aecb.net/publications/we-must-change-our-disgraceful-approach-to-build-quality-or-wave-goodbye-to-energy-savings/ and a follow up article here: http://www.aecb.net/still-taking-disgraceful-approach-build-quality-waving-goodbye-energy-savings/ that shows that poor build quality is still commonplace. In defence of energy assessors, they, of course, rarely, if ever, see the houses they are assessing. They have to assume that they are being given accurate data. Whilst an sampled audit may possibly spot things like the wrong type of windows or doors, or missing loft insulation, it will not pick up 90% of the hidden defects within the structure - there is plenty of evidence to show that these are many and varied. Ideally, energy performance should be a great deal simpler, especially for second hand homes. I've long thought that the RdSAP is a complete and utter waste of time and money, as it almost certainly bears little resemblance to reality, and can so easily be "adjusted" (and it is "adjusted", I've personal experience!) to give a result that makes a house look "better" in a set of sales particulars. It would be far better for sellers to be required to provide the last couple of years worth of energy bills, as at least that gives a more accurate estimate of the house energy usage.

My experience was that our drillers didn't bother to file the log with the BGS, even though they are supposed to, and it was included in the standard spec. The lady I spoke to at the BGS said it was very common for drilling companies to not bother to send them the logs, and was happy to email me the forms so I could file the details of ours. I couldn't give a lot of detail about the strata, because I wasn't there all the time, plus there was a certain amount of error about the depth............... However, I did my best, so now we are on the BGS map: http://scans.bgs.ac.uk/sobi_scans/boreholes/19993639/images/19993635.html

Might be. Here's the link to the interactive map: http://mapapps.bgs.ac.uk/geologyofbritain/home.html Click the top button "Borehole scans" and zoom right in at your location and you should see if there are any recorded nearby, and be able to read the drill logs if they've been made public, and if the driller filed them (they are supposed to, but ours didn't, I submitted the log to the BGS myself).

When I was a small boy, the house we lived in at the time had a large brick built air raid shelter in the garden. It was dug into the steep hill at the back of the garden, so was almost completely underground, except for part of one wall at the front, with a sort of labyrinth entrance (presumably to limit shrapnel getting inside). We lived around 1/4 mile away from the Martin Baker factory, which I would guess is why the shelter was built - Martin Baker may well have been a target during the war. A friend and I found the wreckage of a crashed aircraft buried in the woods nearby, and managed to dig up an old gun and loads of ammunition (around .303 calibre). the brickwork in the exposed wall of the old shelter wasn't in great condition, and we managed to make a small hole at a mortar joint, just big enough to stick one of the rounds in. The game was to stick a live round in the hole, then chuck rocks at it until we made it go off, with the bullet ricocheting around the inside of the shelter. Needless to say, the loud bangs attracted attention and we both got marched off to see the village policeman, and hand over all the ammunition we'd collected......

It is just simply supported at the ends, yes. This programme can model cantilevers, but not a beam constrained at both ends. I used to have a finite element programme that could model 3D structures with constraints, as an add-on for AutoCad, but I seem to have lost it when my old machine went down.

As a single 2.9m length, with no centre support, then it's not really up to it. The numbers (for 20kg distributed evenly) are: Average shear stress = 0% Peak bending stress = 71% (not OK, as there's not a big enough margin) Maximum deflection at the centre of each side = -0.154m (the centre will bend down by around 154mm under this load) Adding a centre support makes it OK though: Average shear stress = 0% Peak bending stress = 9% (OK, the margin is over 10) Maximum deflection at the centre of each side = -0.0048m (each side will bend down by around 4.8mm at its centre) with a centre support and 50kg distributed evenly: Average shear stress = 0% Peak bending stress = 22% (OK, the margin is over 3) Maximum deflection at the centre of each side = -0.012m (each side will bend down by around 12mm at its centre)

As I had the programme open, I've just run the numbers for 22mm stainless steel water pipe, both with and without a centre support. First, with a centre support: Average shear stress = 0% Peak bending stress = 11% Maximum deflection at the centre of each side = -0.0056m (each side will bend down by around 5.6mm at its centre) Next, with a centre support but with the load increased to an evenly distributed 490 N (50kg at 1g): Average shear stress = 0% Peak bending stress = 27% (OK, the margin is over 3) Maximum deflection at the centre of each side = -0.0141m (each side will bend down by around 14.1mm at its centre) Finally, a single 2.9m length of 22mm stainless water pipe, with a 196 N (20kg at 1g) evenly distributed load: Average shear stress = 0% Peak bending stress = 86% (unacceptably high) Maximum deflection at the centre of each side = -0.18m (the centre will bend down by around 180mm under load) My view is that using 22mm stainless water pipe, with a centre support, would be best. It's readily available in 3m lengths, you can adapt stainless pipe clamps as supports, and it would be OK even with the worst case of a 50kg distributed mass hanging from it, with a reasonable margin and acceptably low deflection.

OK, I'm on a machine with BeamCalc running now. Starting with the 10mm solid stainless steel bar mentioned, assuming 316 ("marine grade" stainless steel), an evenly distributed load of 196 N (20kg mass at 1g) over a length of 2.9m, with simply supported ends, then we get the following figures: Average shear stress = 1% Peak bending stress = FAIL (exceeds allowable material bending stress with no margin or SF) Maximum centre deflection = -1.871m (this is how far down the centre would bend if loaded like this and if it hadn't failed under the bending stress). Lets try the same bar but with a centre support, so we now have two simply supported beams with the load evenly distributed on both. Only one half needs to be analysed: Average shear stress = 0% (it's too small for BeamCalc to worry about) Peak bending stress = 51% (still too high, there needs to be a margin of at least 2, preferably 3 or 4 for something like this) Maximum deflection at the centre of each side = -0.0585m (each side will bend down by around 58.5mm at its centre) For sake of another example, say a length of standard 15mm stainless water pipe was used, with a centre support: Average shear stress = 0% (it's still too small for BeamCalc to worry about) Peak bending stress = 29% (acceptable, the margin is a bit over 3) Maximum deflection at the centre of each side = -0.0223m (each side will bend down by around 22.3mm at its centre) So, I reckon that a bit of 15mm stainless water pipe would be just about OK if supported in the centre. If you wanted to have a bit less deflection and a better margin, then you could look at using 22mm stainless water pipe. I'll leave BeamCalc open, just yell if you want me to run any different section through it, it only takes a few seconds.

Not UK legal, and should never be sold here on a new appliance. It should have been supplied with a fitted UK fused plug. You can cut the lead off and fit a 13A plug, fitted with the appropriate fuse, but the onus is on the supplier to have done this.

The thing here is to increase the area moment of inertia. Forget about the tensile or shear strength, it's irrelevant in this application. Choose a material with a high Young's Modulus (i.e. any type of steel over aluminium, or better still carbon fibre) and then choose a section with a high area moment of inertia in the axis of the applied distributed load. Hollow sections or I beams are far stiffer than solid rod for a given mass. I can run something through BeamCalc as soon as I'm back on my Windows machine if you want (BeamCalc doesn't work well on Linux/Wine).

The problem with Victoria Plumb is that a lot of their stuff is at the very budget end of the market, and so a lot of people looking for a keen price may well be attracted to them (I was, back when I refitted our old bathroom). For those looking to cut costs, the budget Victoria Plumb stuff can look attractive, and frankly the majority of customers won't know what's decent quality and what's not when it's new. There were no outward signs that the stuff I bought were iffy, but it was very noticeable when I replaced the basin mixer tap and shower mixer later that the proper brass replacements were a LOT heavier than the nasty chrome plated shit metal stuff. In our case, the bath was pretty flimsy, and it was pretty clear when I was unpacking it that it was likely to flex a fair bit. The internal acrylic finish was OK, and it already had a thin fibreglass external reinforcing layer, with a bit of ratty chipboard glued on the bottom. As I had a gallon or so of resin, plus a roll of chopped strand mat, it was pretty easy to just add a load of additional reinforcement to the outside, including fibre glassing some plywood bracing. Because I did this with the bath upside down, on a flat surface, it stayed nice and square. It wasn't at all cost effective; I'd have been far better off buying a better quality bath, but it was quicker and easier than trying to ship the thing back for a replacement. To add a bit of balance, Victoria Plumb do stock some half-decent stuff, at a higher price, so they aren't inherently bad. They are just competing on price at the bottom end, and I've no doubt that other budget suppliers are selling much the same quality stuff at that price. When it came to our new house, I stuck with well-known brand names for the taps, shower, shower tray, etc. The one exception is the bath, because I know that neither of us will ever use it, it's for guests only. I just chose a middle range enamelled steel bath that was the right size, as frankly you can't really go far wrong with a steel bath, it's always going to be a lot more rigid than a plastic one.

Remember my borehole problems? I uploaded the video, showing the shortcomings, to YouTube, but kept it private. I sent the link to the company, saying that either they settled or the video, with their company name on it and a narrative stating the tale of woe, would go public. The managing director drove around to see me within 48 hours and settled the claim in full...............

We didn't bother, hasn't been a problem at all, the system has been sat at 1.5 bar for a couple of years now, and never seems to change pressure at all. given the inherent stiffness of the pipe, and the fact there are no joins in the slab, plus the fact that the pipe is fitted to the reinforcing fabric as the last job before the pour, so is not at any significant risk of damage, I'm not convinced it's worth the bother of pressurising it before the pour. We didn't have the ability to do this, anyway, as we had no water supply on site at that time, and I couldn't be bothered to make up some sort of jury rig for what seemed to me to be a near-zero risk. Not very likely, as all that steel is pretty weighty, as is the EPS itself.

Ours has a metal grill on the outside, and the filter itself is made of some form of fibre that has an embedded fine wire mesh in it. I'm not sure what the fibre is, but it may well be some sort of treated paper. It has to be treated to deal with the humidity changes. Some MVHR units use treated paper for the heat exchanger plates, I believe.

I had an interesting experience a few years ago with a Waitrose (part of John Lewis) product. My other half had bought a sort of art deco style wall-mounted soap dispenser and wall mounted tooth brush glass from them, chrome brackets and top of the pump and frosted glass dispenser and glass. A bit over 2 years later, the soap dispenser failed, with the very sharp (and badly internally corroded) moving part cutting the palm of my hand (badly enough to need a couple of stitches). I took it back to Waitrose, not because I wanted a replacement (it was out of guarantee anyway), but because I was concerned that there was a design failing that could result in more injuries. The problem was that the nice chrome pump was made of mild steel, believe it or not, so that corroded away until all that was holding the thing together was the chrome plate. When this failed it exposed extremely sharp broken edges, so was a safety hazard. They were very concerned, and to my surprise called a manager down to talk to me. Within 5 minutes I realised that his main concern was whether or not I was going to sue them for the injury. My insistence that they had a product design defect, and should look at taking these items off the shelves until they had reviewed the failure I'd experienced fell on deaf ears. As soon as the manager realised I wasn't interested in suing them he just wanted me out of the store, with no acknowledgement that they would ever investigate the item. About a week later we received package from John Lewis, with a replacement soap dispenser etc. The design was identical to the one that had failed..........................

Yes, the smell of a neighbours bonfire can get pulled in, but there's no visible smoke, just the smell. It's happened once, and by pure chance the Parish Council asked people to stop having bonfires a week or two later, because there had been a significant problem with smoke building up in the valley and causing a nuisance (I wish the Parish Council where our old house is were so pro-active..........). The result is that I've not had any experience of smoke coming in since then. I can say that the MVHR does clear any smell of smoke pretty quickly, though. I think the best strategy would be to turn off the MVHR if there was a particularly smelly outside event, a bit like you might shut windows and doors ordinarily. When the pong has gone, turn the MVHR on again. Having no ventilation for a few hours isn't going to cause a significant problem.

In our case it's effectively encapsulated in the garage roof, as it's between the ceiling and the 18mm T&G OSB floorboards above, cut to fit between the 220mm deep ceiling joists. The garage is more of a workshop than a garage, and there will be other far more flammable stuff in it a lot of the time. It's detached, and at the opposite end of the plot to the house, and well away from any neighbours, so if the worst came to the worst then any fire would be isolated. There's no source of ignition near the insulation, either, as all the wiring is surface mounted in conduit, inside the workshop itself..