MikeSharp01

@Nickfromwales Interesting - when I put my gas pipe underground - the flexible stainless stuff, I was intending fitting it in a 65mm duct so I coulD ventelate it at the meter end which is outside the air tight envelope. I was intending to leave it floating in the duct, about 15m long, so the gas safe installer could push and pull it to satisfy themselves that it was OK. Would it be better to find a gas safe local to come and observe the pipe being installed in the duct and then buried?

It is a great resource - will be interesting to see how long the UK data remains upto date after March next year.

Were the people that did it CSSW or not?

My friends and I use these all the time. They are now used on real railways as well as the miniature and narrow gauge stuff I get up to. The oldest ones are now well over 10 years and although the colour has faded they take everything thrown at them by way of weather but are a disaster if you drop burning coals on them as they burn wonderfully.

Sorry - who is we, cos might like some laminate faced plywood in kitchen - sometime next year!

Agree @Fredd does seem to be taking the proverbial but it is clear that it (cannot determine gender of Trolls / not sure how) knows a thing or two and in a roundabout way is telling us the tricks the big boys like to play to win in their terms. Not sure if you have been watching the BBC programme about the new estates in Oxfordshire but it is instructive of a number of reasons why the housing stock is a. Where it is, or rather is not and b. who is being sucked in by primeval desire to own a home that may have been constructed using the techniques we are learning from @Fredd. Just my pennyworth.

More computers than went with all the Apollo missions put together, but perhaps fewer than are, as we correspond, flashing through space in the confines of a music playing sports car - wonder how they get the royalties back to the Bowie estate - and it will be in a 1 billion year orbit on the wrong side of the road, now that's what I call panache.

Good thinking / advice @Fredd sadly in our case we had a ridge height criteria to meet and then once you deduct the internal heights then we end up about OK but we will have to do some landscaping around the slab to ensure we have clearance to the DPC.

Interesting point @Fredd but it misses the essential point that most ecocentric self builders have much longer term goals. In our case we are thinking of our possible great grandchildren's environment where the house we are building is still paying back 100 years from now. I appreciate that the design lifetime of timber frame might be questioned but 100 years seems not unreasonable and you might expect much more than that, perhaps an order of magnitude, if you look at medieval timber framed buildings still standing.

Why? I guess it is because profit today is better than the same profit tomorrow. If so it has perhaps lost its connection with many economic models and approaches which can work for slower builds and makes several assumptions about motivation behind the build.

I like it, and Yurt I am not sure.

First one was (is) very bad so did the survey instead.

Welcome - will get to your survey when I have finished reading this pile of dissertation drafts I was presented with this morning, I thought I had retired, and these refectory sandwiches are worse than ever.

@FerdinandI agree that services have a role to play but we are too reliant on them and we need to hold the balance and turn it back a bit.

Nope but I have every faith in your ability to do it - however as everything is connected to everything else I guess we could speculate that there must be a way to get from your question to our take on the topic.

So only 1553 posts to go.

yep ... I was there!

Sorry - sorted now.

Curious, don't you think, that HMG allow this to happen - still, anybody would think 'the people' were not important or that they do not understand that real wealth comes from creating 'stuff' rather than servicing 'stuff'.

Sorry @recoveringacademic I am confident it was not. But having read a lot of such research it seems that its very contradictory, it all too often relies on definitions of expertise that are to say the least debatable and sometimes try to encompass the idea that anyone can become an Olympic champion and / or that such a champion is the height of expertise. Given that 50000 hours is nearly 6 years and you can only practice for 12 hours a day you would need 12 years of very solid work to make 50000 hours. Then given that the youngest Gold medal winner (female) was just 13 she would have had to start her regime at the age of 3! Furthermore, just getting into my stride, I think we might be able to conjecture that not everyone has the attributes required to be an Olympic champion which follows on from @JSHarris's post above. I guess this all means that I am happy to accept research conclusions but only in the scope of the head of the pin they attempt to dance upon and I still think you can learn 'a' skill in 3 months assuming you were ever capable of learning it - IE you have the attributes needed, in 3 months of dedicated effort.

Beware large gifts as they can come with tax implications if you fail to keep breathing for a further 7 years. See HERE PS Welcome to the FORUM.

Here we go again..... to close this 'how many hours does it take to be an expert issue' off I think we can rely on the 'some people never learn' and the 'how long is a piece of string' sayings of yaw that sum it up well and add "You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along." Eleanor Roosevelt and remember that experienced people spend most of their energy avoiding doing, or carefully managing, anything dangerous.

That's odd. The geometry of the sag seems to limit the possible outcomes either: 1. as the ridge sags the ends of the rafters must move out, or 2. They slide up the ridge board or 3. they get shorter or 4. they buckle longitudinally to shorten the end to end distance. As 3 seems implausible only 1, 2 or 4 remain, 1 is ruled out by your observations so 2 and 4 are left. If it is neither of them then the only other explanation, 5., is that it was built that way! Intriguing or what?

That sounds too hash as sociopaths exist in all walks of life in my experiance.

For it to sag like that the rafters must be moving over the perlins and / or the wall plate are the perlins / wall plate bulging out at the 100mm sag point? If they are then the problem might be bigger than you think.