MikeSharp01

My guess is that weather compensation will be done by an AI that uses history and other factors to work out what and by how much to compensate. This is already working in some large commercial businesses.

Sounds like a bargain, I guess the materials are somewhat open ended but it still feels good - where are you?

Welcome to THE forum for people like us. Someone will be along shorty who can answer IIRC you need to get your CIL exemption sorted before you start.

Hmmmmm - you definitely need to find a solution for this otherwise any damp will rise into the walls. You may be able to inject a DPM chemical into the blocks this is done on older houses where no DPM is present. Have a look at what is out there that might be DIYable.

Is the tank steel or plastic? If there are signs of woodworm you need to get the whole roof checked unless you have evidence that it has already been treated. 18mm will spread the load across 400mm without deflection even for a plastic tank and 150mm joists is deep for loft joists but 37mm is quite narrow. Can you lift the tank? If so you could put some cross members under the ply to spread the load across more rafters but given it is supported now and as long as there is no evidence of bulging in the room below replacing the boards with ply should work OK.

Welcome to THE forum for people like us. Although we live in Kent we know Stirling well - and were there in May wandering about old haunts, hope you can find a plot that suits you.

Welcome to THE forum for people like us. 18 years of renovation sounds like a real passion, I did one over the last year with / for our daughter and that was enough for me! New build is another matter though as there is very little going backwards (Stripping off plaster, tiles, chasing out to move cables.....)

Yes but maybe be think / count to 10 before posting here until you are over the worst of it - you may live to regret the pictures! EG NEWSFLASH (Pardon the pun) "Pocster 20 million followers / voyeurs!"

A passive stack is probably going to be a good thing as it will allow cooling of the whole house. What does the cross section look like? If the loft area is not subject to the MVHR system then the door undercuts will do little to help cooling as the hot air will all gather at the top of the space. You can get automatic louvres which could work with the window in hot periods to let the air out above the doors and the opening rooflight will help the whole house cool down even more if you are able to open windows low down in the house when needed.

But make sure the architect understands your thermal aspirations as it is dead easy to design a building that won't match them - IE Window sizes and orientation, form factors etc.

Only in big picture terms, you need to show how each detail works and find the values to plug in yourself (or your architect / PHPP Consultant does).

Yep can't argue but wonder what it would be at 60MPH average?

eeeeeeeeeeeeeek! (Would a better solution be to exchange the car or the journeys)

Gas pliers for me, I find they don't lock at the size you set them and / or end up being too wide to span with one hand so you have adjust them over and over.

I was looking for one of those a few weeks back but no one had any stock - did the job with my reciprocating saw.

Is it just the surface lamination pulling away or is the worktop plywood and de-laminating internally?

Welcome to THE forum for people like us.

Might be a start, but rather a long road - just pay the £3m and be done with it.

Was it ever thus? Perhaps the former system gave an illusion of control to the 'little' people while the people who are prepared to oil the wheels from the top down, take a look at almost any (and I mean any) newspaper front page today (07.11.2021), and you will get an inkling of one of the, many many, things that are happening. For instance: (Sunday Times) pay £3m and get a seat in the house of Lords. Buy a peerage and your letter will be answered very quickly if sent to planning thus denying time for others (more lowly) to have their queries answered QED. (Your solution then is just to pay £3m and your problems will be solvable.) It is a systems thing, allow a change somewhere - give inordinately more power to a few, and it has effects throughout the system including taking any sort of control away from the many. I am sure that you will know that all systems create their outcomes perfectly - IE the current configuration of the system makes things 'exactly' as they are. These coupled to the general cutting back of funds to local authorities and your perfect, even standpoint dependent, storm is created. Looked at that way one can be forgiven for seeing the power grab / balance that has been somewhat deliberately camouflaged, and is often wholly and wrongly excused - in my view, by COVID.

or "congratulating themselves on having sold the public sector such a wonderful system"

Have you tried dealing with your internal intellectual / emotional challenges so as to get some headspace to 'just let it rest' and / or put down a marker - letter to the local paper copied to planning authority and the relevant officers professional bodies (CIH / RTPI) setting out your concerns, so you can return to it later, with incontrovertible evidence you raised it, when things ease, and then move on. Either, or other similar, would have the effect of reducing your stress around the matter and allow you stress about something else - those wardrobes for instance, and neither is an admission of defeat just a regroup.

We did have to compromise on the site to build where we wanted to but we still have 150m2 house and a 30m2 garden room with 460mm thick walls (340mm of insulation). The PV is all on the garden room (worst case is tiny amounts of shade at one time of year), we have enough wood burners here at millstone manor to know we didn't want one in Whitstable, just Jackie and me really - and we get on just fine (mostly) but room for the kids to visit together if they want, we have laid in gas pipe but will not have gas as we want rid (dont we), not yet fitted sound insulation but the layout means that its floors between bedrooms so I need to pack it tight - but it should be better than 100mm walls do you not think. We designed out the tank because of the grief JSH described on his path from conventional thinking to Sunamp - so we will be with @ToughButterCup on that one. We have also chosen ASHP as our space heating solution, UFH with three towel rails and I am working on designing out any sort of buffer tank. I have not purchased the ASHP yet as I am waiting for the promised, by HMG, price drop when everybody has to get one - no really don't need it cluttering up the site. Just got to get a very quiet one as it will run mostly over night on E7. I won't hijack this thread by asking for recommendations (we need only a 6Kw device anyway)

Making that center finder on the bench would be a massive pain owing to the chamfer CNC only or 3D printing. Still new generative design techniques come up with parts you can only make with additive manufacturing (3D printing) perhaps as the path to casting, injection molding or some such. Photo Credits: Autodesk

We are on oak logs from a local pro tree fella this winter, not unusual, and we season them, after splitting, for a year in our woodshed then stack them by the front door ready for use. Next years are being delivered tomorrow. If we have to fell a tree here we always log half of it and leave the other half as log piles to encourage the wildlife. Outside temp is 7.6 right now but think it will be a bit cooler over night, one log burner running very low.

The effects will get to us by a roundabout route when parts of the world become very difficult to inhabit and the people there start to migrate to more temperate zones.