Jeremy Harris

I think a lot of the "include absolutely everything" in surveyors reports is driven by the need to cover the surveyors backside, in case there is a defect that he/she was unable to actually detect, but which might be there and show up later. It does waste a lot of time, and cause some unnecessary anguish for buyers, but without it I'd guess that some buyers might go after the surveyor if they bought a house and then found problems which had not been mentioned in the survey. There's also, I suspect, a bit of profiteering going on sometimes. When we sold our old house, I had all the key things done pre-sale, so as well as tidying the place up, replacing an old (but not leaking) flat roof, I also had the boiler and gas installation serviced and safety checked and inspected and tested the electrical installation, really just for our own peace of mind. I made sure the buyer's surveyor looked at all the warranties, safety chits etc I had for work done, when he did the survey, but I didn't mention that I'd inspected and tested the electrical installation, although had he looked he'd have seen that I'd put a label on the CU giving the date of the last inspection (which was a week or so earlier). He still recommended that the buyer get her own EICR, gas safety checks, boiler service etc done, and suggested companies to do this work. I suggested to the buyer that she could save the cost of the EICR, as I'd provide one, using the data I'd already got. She decided to follow the surveyors advice, which was fair enough. As it happened, the gas safety check company was the same one I'd used, and they were pretty honest, and told the buyer that they'd just done a check on the property and unless there had been any very recent changes there wasn't much point in her paying them to do another one. The electrical contractors were simply unbelievable, though. They charged her £384 for a four hour EICR (so over £700/day just for labour) and suggested that the cost to bring the installation up to current regs would be around £1,000. They wanted over £700 just to change a 6 way CU (materials cost ~£70 - £80, labour less than a day), and that was 99% of the work, as they'd have swapped out the 16mm² tails for 25mm² ones at the same time. Not at all sure where the other ~£300 was going, as they'd not flagged anything else in their report. The buyer passed me a copy of the EICR she'd had done and it was more or less the same as the one I'd given her, but only two C3s, one for the 16mm² tails, one for the absence of RCD protection in the CU (I'd flagged the cooker switch and outlet as a C3 for being slightly too close to the gas hob). I'm pretty certain that there was some sort of tie up between the surveyor and the companies he recommended, as the electrician who came out to do the EICR told me that he only did EICRs, and that most of them were as a consequence of surveys from the same surveyor.

I wish I'd thought to do the same, and heel in a few dozen spares. Where I've filled in some gaps the hedge is now a bit uneven. I also found that with the mixed native species hedging, some grow a lot faster than others. In our case it's the field maples and wild cherries that have established a lot faster than the hazel, hawthorn, wild rose and blackthorn. The wild cherries, in particular, see to grow at a prodigious rate when established, and need far more pruning than the others. I'd be tempted to leave them out of the mix if ever planting a similar hedge in future.

Be interesting to see if there is a difference. We were given some unwanted seedlings, a bit smaller than the bare roots we had delivered, and they did a great deal better. Might have something to do with them being local, perhaps, so already adapted to our soil.

Our experience of planting a few hundred 600mm bare root mixed native species hedging was that they didn't do much the first year, but took off after that, although we did have a few losses. Cheap as chips, though, and very well worth getting in now, if you can. I think part of our minor problem was putting them in a bit late (late January) when I think that, ideally, they should have gone in by the end of November.

Just measure the depth in the fitting from the step where the pipe/insert sits to the outer face of the fitting with the collar and grip ring off and use that distance to mark the pipe (or push the pipe in and mark it). Slip the collar and grip ring up the pipe, making sure the grip ring doesn't score the pipe (I like to hold them open slightly when sliding them on). Push the pipe into the fitting until it's fully home, then slip the grip ring and collar down and tighten. Doing it this way avoids the risk of scratching the seal area on the pipe by pushing it through the grip ring when it may be a bit tight, and also means the grip ring ends up being abutted to the O ring retaining flange, so when the collar is tightened the O ring gets compressed on to the pipe slightly before that flange bottoms out on the end of the fitting.

Ours is pretty quiet. Hard to tell when it's running unless you stand right next to it. No advantage in putting it on the warmest side of the house, as it takes heat from the air, so the warmth of nearby walls etc makes no appreciable difference to performance. Ours is in the shade on the North side, tucked away out of sight, and works at a higher efficiency than given in the spec most of the time.

Our build was on fairly good ground. For an insulated passive slab we only needed to excavate down 200mm over the whole area of the slab, +10% (I think) and lay compacted layers of stone down. The insulation went directly on this, then the steel was tied in, along with the UFH pipes, and the slab poured and power floated smooth. 4 days work for a ~85m² slab: http://www.mayfly.eu/2013/10/part-sixteen-fun-and-games-in-the-mud/

kW is a unit of power, so the measure of the maximum output at any instant that the system can deliver. With generation systems it's common to add a "p" as a suffix to indicate that this is the peak power, not the average power, or the power on a dull day. The kWp figure is the absolute maximum that the panels are likely to be able to deliver under their rated conditions. kWh is a unit of energy, so power delivered over 1 hour. Power is generally a less useful way of describing a system, in much the same way as it can be for cars. Using the car analogy, the maximum amount of power available determines how fast the car will go, yet most of the time cars are driven at speeds that are much lower, so many might be more interested in how much energy they use, i.e. how many miles per gallon can the car achieve. DNOs are mainly interested in the maximum power that a system can deliver to their network, though, as all they are bothered about is whether their cables, transformers etc are able to accept the maximum generated power whilst staying within limits for the local grid voltage. The maximum "bang for the buck" isn't determined by the peak power, but by the amount of energy generated over the course of a year. Matching the positioning of the panels to the times when the house uses most energy may give a better outcome, in terms of value for money, than having a system that generates more peak power, but over a narrower window during the day.

It looks like yet another of the many devices that claim that creating an electromagnetic field around a water pipe changes the chemistry. There's very limited evidence that these scale reducing devices may have some, hard to measure, effect, but they cannot actually soften the water at all. The water that comes out of one of these has to have exactly the same concentration of calcium ions (and every other element/compound dissolved in the water) as the water that went in, as there's no way that this can be changed by such a device. The only way to truly soften water, as in remove calcium ions and replace them with sodium ions, is by using an ion exchange softener. You can change the properties of hard water to make it less likely to form hard scale, by using something like phosphate dosing, which many find works well enough. You can go the whole hog and remove all the extraneous stuff dissolved in water by using reverse osmosis, but it's expensive, both in terms of initial cost and ongoing replacement of membranes and pre-filters. There's a long thread here somewhere with some pretty heated discussions about some of these devices that claim to soften water. Might be worth digging it out and having a read.

Looks like air bubbles to me. Also looks as if the resin was sticky, perhaps curing too quickly, and was sticking to the roller, which then pulled the mat up, creating the air bubbles.

The pressure pipe I used was this 16 bar PVC stuff :https://www.pipestock.com/pvc/pvc-pipe-metric/pvc-pipe-16-bar Looks and feels much like the US stuff, but PVC rather than ABS. The solvent weld stuff is much the same for both PVC and ABS usually. The solvent is usually a mix of either tetrahydrofuran or cyclohexanone and MEK. It used to have acetone in, but I think the switch to MEK may have been because it's slightly safer. Not much to choose between MEK and acetone in terms of the way they react with PVC or ABS. If thinking of thinning out some solvent weld that's dried out a bit, it's always the tetrahydrofuran/cyclohexanone that evaporates first, so adding MEK makes the stuff weaker. MEK will soften PVC/ABS but won't dissolve it fully, the tetrahydrofuran/cyclohexanone is there to do that.

Yes, with a primer more often than not. I managed to buy some of the stuff when I was jointing 25mm PVC pressure pipe, but it's not readily available here, which is a pity.

All I've ever done is give the mating surfaces a wipe over with a cloth damped with a bit of acetone, which both cleans the surfaces and also slightly softens them, making for a better solvent bond. The nuisance is that UK solvent weld adhesive isn't like the US stuff, so it's not that easy to see that you have a good, even coating, so a bit more care is needed to ensure that both surfaces are coated.

Here is the latest version: Heat loss calculator - Master.xls

Some of the blown in fluffy stuff is known to absorb water. IIRC, there have been cases where water driven in through the outer skin has caused it to get saturated with water. EPS CWI is fine, though, as it's both free-draining and pretty water resistant. I'm not sure if they still use the fluffy, fibre, stuff any more, as it got quite a bit of bad press a few years ago for contributing to damp problems.

Was the roll of mat dead dry?

Not quite. The cause of the cost over run was initially the nearly a year of delay caused by the borehole problems, so no water on site. That meant we paid out a fair bit more of the planned budget in finance cost, which then meant me doing more of the work myself to save labour cost, and that in turn took a lot longer which meant spending even more on finance. It got to the point towards the end where the only materials we could afford were from whatever I saved from my pension each month. Someone else has mentioned that cash flow is critical, and it really was in our case. We had an asset (our old house) plus some locked up savings we couldn't get at, plus the VAT that we knew we'd get back at the end (about £10k or so), but they aren't much help when you're trying to get the house finished. As soon as we were finished and had the VAT back, together with having sold our old house, we were fine, much lower monthly outgoings and our savings pot replenished.

Doesn't sound unreasonable for use in cold conditions, TBH. I've seen hotter mixes used before now, usually by people who just want to speed a job up and aren't too fussy about quality. If the resin was a bit warmer than the roof, I wonder if that may have had the effect of pulling moisture out? Not sure, TBH, but the GRP roofs I've done (years ago) were done during the summer, in dry weather, and the problem we had with one of them was stopping the resin curing too quickly. It was a matter of mixing it and immediately empting the bucket on the roof, spreading it out, to try and stop it warming up and curing too quickly.

Catalysed resin will get very hot in a bucket, I've seen a bucket catch fire before now, just because of the exothermic reaction. My guess is that the bubbles were caused by moisture, possibly coming up from the substrate. May have been that the surface of the substrate was dry, but there was moisture trapped within it. The slightest hint of moisture can be a real bugger with polyester/vinylester layups. Over-catalysing resin that wasn't very cold may or may not have made this worse, @SteamyTea may know, as it's a fair time since I've used polyester/vinylester resin systems, pretty much everything I've done in the past twenty years or so has been with epoxy.

When I looked at SIPs, I was concerned that adding internal insulation might create a potential problem with vapour permeability. We had a debate on this, which involved a chap from Kingspan, I think, on this forum's predecessor. The consensus was that a layer of vapour permeable external insulation was a safer option. IIRC, this was the method chosen on a GD show some years ago, where standard SIPs were externally clad with woodfibre bats. Seemed a reasonable option, as it improved the U value a bit, didn't create a potential vapour permeability problem and increased the decrement delay a fair bit. The other issue I looked into at the time was the thermal bridging within SIP roof panels, as at that time, they used internal timber rafters that created a significant thermal bridge between the skins.

And your wife will be pregnant...

I found that SAP over-estimated our heating energy use by a factor of about 1.5. Whether that's just the way SAP works, or because we're in a relatively sheltered location, which tends to be a bit warmer than is typical for the area, I'm not sure.

I'd planned on our build costing ~£1200/m², but knew we had a relatively high risk in getting out of the ground. I mitigated that risk, at a cost, by agreeing a firm price contract for the ground works, installation of service trenches and the sewage treatment plant, and the construction of a large retaining wall. Our costs were fixed up to the completion of ground works, and known upfront, which I found less daunting (accepting that we paid a bit extra by taking this approach). That gave me the confidence to project manage the rest of the build, which went reasonably well. Costs did creep up, not because things really went badly wrong (although problems with our borehole delayed us for nearly a year) but because we decided to upgrade some of the internal stuff. Opting to use solid oak for all the internal joinery (stairs, skirtings, architrave etc) tripled the material cost for all that stuff, some of the choices in the kitchen went over the budgetary estimate, too, as did making a late change to the type of MVHR system, based on the very hot weather we had during the initial ground works. We ended up coming in at £1380/m², so about 15% over budget, but that doesn't include all the work I chose to do to try and offset some of the cost. I ended up doing all the plumbing, heating, hot water, MVHR, kitchen, bathroom and most of the internal joinery myself, as well as laying flooring etc. That saved a fair bit of money, but did delay the build a fair bit.

That's pretty much my view, too. One of the nicest houses on GD (IMHO) didn't have acres of glass, it just had very cleverly positioned and shaped windows to frame particular viewpoints. Those views seemed much more impressive when framed through a cleverly shaped window than they would have done if the whole wall was glazed.

I agree with @PeterW . If anything, I suspect a GSHP will have a shorter life, at least between repairs, as it uses an extra circulating pump to move brine around the collector loop. A GSHP also has ongoing maintenance costs that an ASHP doesn't, because of the need to replace the brine periodically (which is pretty expensive) and the need to inspect the brine filter(s). I know of a couple of GSHP installations, and both have been very costly, both to install and to maintain. There doesn't seem to be much of an efficiency improvement over an ASHP, either, AFAICS. One issue is that, although a GSHP operates with a very slightly lower ΔT, this only really gives any advantage when the outside air temperature is lower than the collector temperature. So a GSHP may run more efficiently than an ASHP when the air temperature is lower than about 8°C, but will run less efficiently when the air temperature is above about 8°C. Mean winter temperature in much of the UK may not be much lower than 8°C for around half the heating season, so a GSHP may well work less efficiently than an ASHP then. The cost comparison for us was pretty compelling. I originally planned to install a GSHP, but the lowest installed price, with me doing much of the installation work, was going to be around £9k. I purchased and installed an ASHP for about £2k. The GSHP was predicted to run at a COP of ~3.6 overall. Our ASHP runs at a measured COP of 3.5 on average. The RHI payments (which we didn't bother with) were going to be £84/year for 7 years, so not worth having for the additional installation premium we'd have had to pay to get them. The difference between the actual ASHP COP and the predicted GSHP COP would take a couple of hundred years or so in energy cost savings to recover, plus we'd have had to pay for the GSHP servicing, brine changes, etc, which would alone have cost more than the energy savings.