MikeSharp01

Thanks all... Can see my way through it all now. On another matter.. I know what you mean I was held up by one in my local supermarket yesterday

Thanks Jeremy, the french drain idea is a good one and also means that I don't have to put a vermin barrier in the peripheral pipe at the ditch end so I can probably get away with putting a percolation path to the lower end of the ditch and not worry too much about backing up because that will clear / be cleared fast enough not to be a long term problem. We are on stiff clay and so once the water gets in a hole it stays there unless I pump it out or await a prolonged period of sun and then it evaporates. As the ditch is used by all the houses on our side of the road as drainage it is kept reasonably well clear as nobody wants to flood their property and the person with the blockage gets the first of the overflow! Thanks for you thoughts.

I am just setting out to finalise some ground works and have realised, I guess I could have worked this out, that bottom level of the crushed stone base for the passive slab will be slightly below our existing drainage outlet which is a ditch we have running across the front of our property that takes the ground water away, slopes down about 200mm across the width of the property (1 in 60). Now comes the hard part, for me, as I am not sure exactly how these peripheral drains function - other than the obvious, because they are perforated so water goes in and out at will they are only any good for rapid transport of water when the localised water table gets above the drain invert. If I don't need to let the water out and its just a mechanism for distributing water build up under the slab then I have no worries. If I don't need a slope on the peripheral drain, IE its just a path for water above a certain level to get out - it will be perforated after all, I can just about get it out into the highest part of the ditch. If I need a slope I can get a very slight one and take it to the other end of the ditch. However, in either case, if the ditch blocks it will back up water under my slab - not ideal. If I must have a good slope then I am going to need a soak away into the clay, more of a pool than a soak away, which the BC guy has already said he would probably allow to overflow into the ditch so I am back where I started. Any thoughts anyone?

Ok Terry that makes sense but are you still planning to increase the sun amp count or stick with the pair you have?

Hi Terry. Really interesting read but I cannot help wondering if your worst case scenario is driving you towards a costly system. What percentage of days /minutes of the days will this worst case occur and how can you pay back the investment over what the putative 40Kw a combI / existing Sun amp pair could supply. It will take three people in the house to make the scenario work, one of them has to be washing up and they have to be synced up. Does this often happen in your home? It would be cheaper to throttle back the kitchen sink if the showers are running.

is it being deleted or moved? you don't want to get someone else to do it because the flak will come back to you anyway and as your surrogate has no direct link their need to be gentle and supportive is small and so very risky for you. If you have a formal dispute you will need to mention this when you come to sell I believe. Does the original scheme, that was done wrongly, need to be brought back into the frame and the whole thing reworked so everybody is happy. In the end your approach perhaps needs to be conciliatory but firm. Conciliatory in the sense that you will do all the work required plus give him some choices as part of the change, timings etc, and firm in the sense that it will be done because its was in the planning and highways agree. Whatever you do don't make it look to him like he missed something - it should read, spoken or written, as if he knew this was going to happen. So (never start a sentence with so) perhaps something like 'Can we get together do work through thoughts and ideas together on completing the changes to the parking layout in the close from the planning requirement (pop quote in). We appreciate that there will be some disruption but we are keen to do all we can to be a good neighbour. Please let me know when a good time to talk might be (give contact details).' That should trigger him realising what the problem is is but you are clear that it has to be done and have been open with him. So when you do talk he will know what has to be done and will work with you. If he doesn't you may then need to get heavy but at least you tried. Hope it helps - good luck.

When you send in a demolition notice you are obliged to send the statutory undertakers notice so they can take amy action they need to I guess you did that but didn't do water as you did not need to. Building control also have a duty to do this. Looks like BC did not spot that the water was not supplied and just wrote to them out if habit. When the water company could not tie this up with a communication from you they reacted think that is somewhat reassuring in the sense that their system worked even if it was triggered by a BC error.

Assuming the staircase failed beyound its design parameters, if not them designer / SE / constructor / installer will be liable, and guests were not told that no more than N people could be on the stairs then Yes because they did not risk assess the possibility of an overload. Even if all 15 of them jumped up together they should not have been there together. It is an example of the Roman legions breaking step when crossing a bridge I guess it's probably not the dead (no pun or insult intended thats just what its called) load that's the problem. All that said it will come down to a bunch of barristers firing expert witnesses at each other.

If you are worried about loosing wall / roof U value then perhaps do as we have done in our design In our design. We are running in the wall and ceiling (also vaulted) in a couple of places and have designed to box in the duct with PU sheet, and fill around the ducts with the same frametherm fill as in the main void. This way we maintain the U value of the wall / ceiling as the PU is that much better than the frametherm. It will be fiddly on site but at least I can present the therm model to the passive house certifier if its a problem for them.

Hmmm - since when has not having an avatar been any less of a statement than having one

Not sure Jeremy but I think that I have said before that if our vote actually allowed us to change things I am not certain we would still have it! Essentially the problems faced by our elected representatives are usually outputs of complex / chaotic soft systems. This usually means that, for most, change (often described as progress) becomes the art of ensuring that any unintended consequences are hidden from view at the outset and happen, as they undoubtedly will, elsewhere or at a time when you cannot blamed for it. Most of our representatives are not able to think things through to a sound conclusion because they are constrained by what Edward De Bono described as 'Unique Rightness' where you can only pick solutions from those you already know. Our job should perhaps be to help people think things through in an open minded gestalt that uses deep understanding of the interactions (causes & influences) within the systems to identify root causes where interventions might most profitably be focused.

a couple of builders that reckon our house would be "impossible to build".. Just shows you how unthinking the average builder is as they don't seem to understand that something that has been done, albeit not by them, is by definition removed from the 'impossible' catagory.

I suspect that part of the problem with people ignoring the energy consumption is that it's probably the 3rd or 4th cost of running a home. So rent / mortgage, council tax and perhaps insurance come above it and for some people things like the family enterainment package might even eclipse it. Not to mention the family car. Sadly we won't get the person on the Clapham omnibus to focus until energy gets expensive enough to be worth saving sad really.

Hi Lizzie. Somewhere I have seen a research article / presentation that shows a timeline of weathering for a variety of woods. There is a guy called Ivor Davis who is a bit of guru and has published widely. It is sometimes a bit heavy but you get both barrels - try here as a start: http://www.woodknowledgewales.co.uk/files/Cladding Design Performance and Installation - Presentation by Ivor Davies 2012.pdf Found this picture here.

Get a second hand industrial machine as if you want to rip through (or across) 75mm timber you will need a couple of Kw at least, few skil type saws will go upto 75mm anyway and when you tilt a table saw (or any saw for that matter) over the depth diminishes so if you want to cut 75mm at 45 degrees you will need about 110mm of blade depth, so at least a 305mm blade I suspect.

Great windows, who is the manufacturer?

@recoveringacademic Is this bluff, double bluff or just guff ... are we in danger of creating the impression that the big house builders need to be defended by the little ones - you and me, or were you poking some fun.... trouble is pretty soon nobody will know what is fake and what is not.

I suspect you would need to look at their annual accounts to get a true picture, my guess is that the land profit (IE rising price of their land bank) is taken each year as part of their asset register and written down or up, but it could be 'handled' in a number of ways on their books. I think that means dividing the profit by the number of houses built is at best approximate because they can 'adjust' the way the undeveloped land bank value is treated to suit their needs.

If fitting a generator as backup make sure you have VERY good over voltage / phase control in place. Last time I was involved with a generator the over voltage failed and did £60K damage to much of the electronics plugged in at the time. Took a year + to sort with the generator contract insurance.

Perhaps I am over thinking this but what would be difficult about creating a 50Hz signal for the inverters to use as sync. Presumably it would not need any power behind it so could be quite simple. Depending on how far off grid you are you might even be able to extract it from the eather. ? (and / or tie it back to a GPS derived clock.)

Yes I tried that one but I had no immediate effect. However we seem to be having some mind changes as the full drawings of the all timber system will soon come back and I think they will be to bulky for us, the sight lines change as you go from inward to outward opening as you go down the bulding and neither the other half or the architect are going to like the look this gives so suspect we will have to look at another system anyway. Ho Hum.

I tried this here but gave up, lost the will to live, looks like it should work.

We are building in a cul-de-sac, straight off a big-ish A road, with no turning place for lorries with more than 4 wheels or a long bed. So every order so far has been accompanied by a simple instruction set asking the drivers to reverse into the road, off the A road, easy to do there is plenty of room / width, and to load our shipment on the drivers side if we are responsible for off loading. I reckon about 50% of the deliveries have one of both instructions ignored even though they are usually printed on the delivery ticket! So we end up reversing an artic out into an A road or watching as a bold driver thinks there might be a place up road, about a mile long, he and sometimes she can turn round. No amount of telling them that last week a SMART car was unable to turn any further up and they still give it a go. Eventually I hear them bleeping past in reverse and wonder how they will get on without a lookout into the A road.

If they have a Farrari then they can perhaps afford to have it scratched, round here they are more worried about people putting their sticky fingers on it while taking selfies, but the more interesting question might be where will they put the muddy wellies / walking boots & damp clothes, when they return from their safari to their Farrari.