MikeSharp01

Welcome and what an amazing opportunity. We are stuck in the South East but spend about 6 weeks a year in Scotland which we love. Best of luck and I look forward to seeing your progress.

Do you have any pictures of the internals of your so treated Rationel windows? Think the other half might be coming around!

Just spoke to other half and suggested a commission - she is off surfing.

Adusted spacing is standard roofing practice for tiles, even the interlocking tiles have built in wriggle room. Roofers do it in both, sometimes three planes.

Agree but wood has a lot less embodied energy and it looks like we won't have Ali clad so best possible on that aspect. However great chunks of the build has Ali facias so the windows reduce it not eliminate it! Anyway we shall see what we shall see at the weekend!?

Love the idea of stained glass on the two obscured glass windows required as a planning condition of our build. They have specified a grade but I recon the BCO would be happy with a good stained glass. It will have to be ' attached' somehow to the passive house windows but I can see a way to achieve that.

From my perspective the mitre thing is close to pure prejudice on my other halves part but there are a couple of other reasons. She feels that UPVC has too much environmental impact and the sections can be deeper. I am working on it. Off to build it live in Maidstone on the weekend where we will make our final decision.

Brilliant, might run this past the other half and she if she might accept it as it would bring Rationel to the front of the price queue provided the filling was not too great a cost.

We are at the point of choosing now and my other half won't have UPVC as the corner joining (mitre) on the inside offends her so we have to have wood or Ali on the inside, one thing to remember about UPVC is that you can paint it with the correct prep and paint on the inside if you don't like white, Sandtex (and many others) have a primer on top of which you can put any of their colours you like. This would be the cheapest option, although painting might be fiddly on the internal glazing bars etc, and you can change the colours as you please. If we didn't mind the the mitre it would have been the way we went as you can have Internorm (studio), not much doubt about the, quality and any internal colour. Of course you could go for Rationel at a lower price and still have the internal colour over white.

Upvc / Ali clad wad about 10% cheaper than wood / ali on our Internorm quote. The only difference is the internal finish and slight construction differences. Rationel were cheaper, GBS (Green Building Store) do wood only but still offer wood internal finishes I think.

Yes but is he still; alive / complete / uninjured / married / without 'scared for life' kids .....

Welcome. Sounds like a fun project.

Yes that is an idea, some thoughts from me - needs refining I suspect. Just get a USB / blue tooth controlled motor inverter that will set the speed and provide all the current / power feedback you will need. Then two pressure transducers in and out, Once the pressure difference is reached back off the power (speed) and until it holds steady then measure the airfow. Thinking about it you might be able to calibrate it by running the fan into a sealed, guaranteed, box - will probably need to be quite large or turbulence might be a problem, then measure the pressure difference and get the fan power back to stable desired pressure difference then take the power reading. If the house is sealed once the pressure difference is reached the difference from the power reading taken above will be proportional to the leak area. If you drill holes in the sealed box you can see just how big your leaks are by matching the power readings for known hole sizes (areas). (PVT so keep the temperature stable.)

So, if you keep it clean - filtered, it won't need cleaning? I wonder what the implications are for the system if the filters reduce the flow and you cannot balance supply / extract without decreasing the supply area to match the resistance of the filters, will this not lead to an increase in overall flow rate, and associated fan speed to achieve the air changes and won't that increase running cost and noise to the point where cleaning is a better option. Just wondering - too much coffee - still hyper!

Sorry Joe, just got to this in a break from bending Rebar! Yes its the joint at the top that is the problem. I was going to CNC cut several plates to go either side of the web to create the joint but its impossible to work out where the failure will be, although destructive testing might get to it, because the web is OSB the plates are Ply and the nails are nails, as the load is applied eventually the plate will start to turn, in trying to keep things in place, and will start to load up the flanges at the foot & head of the joist and the joint between the web and the flanges is not designed, or even contemplated, to be loaded up in this way, steel joists are all one material and so don't have a problem. If you glue the plates then the failure moves to the web itself just below the end of the plate because, essentially, of the turning action and the point loads it induces in the web and the associated flanges. In the end after looking at this for a long time, I was at first reluctant to believe the joist companies, and running my thinking past academic structural engineers of my aquaintance I gave up and accepted the ridge beam - ho hum. It adds about £500 to the roof cost for us.

Hi Joe. We had the same problem as we originally specified a I-joist portal frame - essentially they cannot calculate the shear forces in the joiner plate against the web - or rather they can but the manufacturing method would be critical and the joists are not built to be reliably calculated in this mode. Both the joist companies looked at and the SE and came to the same conclusion. I have done some tests and I tend to agree that its hard to get a reliable strength. Someone sent me off to find a steel portal structure that did not extend the beam depth in the centre down to take account of the 'flattening forces' and I couldn't find one, so have to agree with today's technology it cannot be done in I-joists. Putting in a ridge beam means that the load is not transferred across the roof but down onto the the beam in the middle and down at the walls. In a traditional trussed rafter roof the whole thing is trying to flatten out and its stopping that where the ridge joint and associated calculation comes in. Add a ridge beam, itself supported by uprights somewhere, supporting the ridge and that problem goes away. (Edit: Although there is still a small component of force pushing the wall out)

Try polyurethane adhesives. I have Stuck cement roof tiles to EPS., to do the same job you are doing and that works plus I have stuck upvc, roughened the upvc first, to wood with the same stuff so it should work as it sticks to both.

You probably need to budget around £25K @£1000 per square meter but could go up or down. UP if you have difficult ground, employ an architect, Structural Engineer and include additional kitchen / bathroom areas. DOWN if you have easy ground, can design it yourself, can do a lot of the work yourself (WAY DOWN) and its just an open space with only electric points and simple lighting. Your actual location will also be a factor.

Looks like somebody burying a price increase with brexit and in at least one sense they might be right, in 2016 the pound as 1.4 against the Euro, now it is 1.17 so thats about 16% difference (now/then) or 19% (then/now) and assuming they pass on all the exchange rate adjustment BUT in early 2014 it was 1.2 did we see a big price drop in 2015-2016 and the price is just settling back to what it was in 2014 - did we heck?

The answer is mass production - if you can build a ford focus, with all its components, and sell if for under 20K you can gear up to make houses in the same way, mass production combined with mass customisation. If you want something more flexible you just need to look at house building robots and or 3D printing (see HERE for an example). Manual production has always been one of the key drags on better building. I was in a meeting with one of our biggest housebuilders and suggested that they fund some research into a bricklaying robot. The look I got was, to say the least, withering. The response was, in polite form, - there is no room in our industry for such things. (that was 2012) In 2014 we saw THIS and in 2016 THIS some interesting insights from the founder of company. It won;t be long though... Wi Fi wall switches will cut wiring and so it goes on. AUTOMATE or DIE and get the humans doing the higher order stuff. (PS I think we can automate accountants already, just no finance director will sign off on the development!)

Likely that you will have to take steps, our neighbours have such a system and the advice they were given means that they have to keep the recordings safe for a period of time and if anybody, driving / walking / riding or cycling by asks they have reasonably to be able to show them anything they have that identifies them, two years nobody has asked.

His argument is that these wall represent the only cross racking in the building as it is essentially an open box with two ends. He has specified OSB on inner and outer of the I-Joists and his calcs do show that 50mm spacing is critical to ensuring it has the correct stiffness (100mm does not pass the stiffness test). It may be slight overkill but if I do as he has specified I cannot be wrong if something does go wrong.

I dream of spending time on my backside, nice cosy little office, my own kettle, now its a frozen site office to grab a quick coffee, same kettle, and back to it on site, think I sit down for about 2 hours a day - mostly on buildhub or the CAD programme looking up / updating drawings. It was cold today - worse tomorrow.

I think I have to get one, the SE wants some of the internal boarding, racking support, nailed every 50mm I think there are 150m of board join at 40 nails per meter, thats 6000 nails in that bit alone! To think I had thought I might use screws to hold it all together - so much more civilised than nails!

In a couple of weeks I will be starting the first part of the framing and think I need to get my grubby - clean your nails before making my supper Dad, hands on a nailer. A friend has recommended these which he has. I think they look good but I am not sure, any thoughts.