Ed Davies

Surely the TF company contracted to achieve a certain level of airtightness. Why would you allow them to cheat on this?

Like @Moonshine, I did my own drawings for the pre-app then got an architectural technician to do the main planning and building warrant drawings. I did a 3D sketch for illustration in the Design Statement part of the full planning application and a few drawings at the end of the building warrant process (cross section of the roof which the BCO hadn't understood fully from the original submission plus sketches for the rainwater harvesting system which hadn't been detailed) when I'd dropped the architectural technician out of the loop. Knowing what I know now I could probably do most of it myself but at the time I started, no chance.

Didn't you convert your system to S-plan, didn't you? Knowing that might help somebody who knows what they're talking about say whether that jumpering would be a good idea.

I agree the rules are overly broad, but it's worth remembering they're not primarily for the occupants of the house (who'd get a ramp built if it was needed long term) but mostly for visitors.

There isn't a prohibition in Scottish regs for timber ramps. My house design has a timber ramp - no problem. What they are sniffy about is people obviously putting in something temporary which will be ripped out (presumably, if they don't know it's going to be replaced by something proper, not that I've head of any like that before this).

Welcome @Da-Dad. With this sort of query it's well worth saying which country you're in. Building and permitted-development regulations for Scotland and Northern Ireland are very different from those in England and Wales and E&W differ from each other a bit.

Steamy's talking about his specific case here and what he says is generally true but doesn't apply to sites where the high cost of a grid connection is reflected in the price. In other words, starting completely from scratch you need to include the extra cost of buying a site with a relatively cheap grid connection in the balance against the cost of batteries, etc, needed for off-grid.

You could just ask them directly how much a cubic metre weighs, when I've had deliveries the drivers knew roughly. Trouble with guessing is they'd probably deliver 20 tonnes for £235 or not much more, delivery is a large part of the cost.

Ah, yes, didn't notice the little bits of brown and black peeking out of the sheathing.

What cable has/had red and blue wires like that? Is red used for anything in modern colour codes?

Also worth checking Amazon. Got quite a lot of my stuff through them, often cheaper than any I could find on eBay.

Can't an open-loop system operate on a circulating pump by treating the loop as a syphon? Obviously not over 10 metres but for a metre or two above a lake that should be easy enough to set up, I'd think. Might have to periodically pump air out of the top of the loop but that shouldn't be a problem - automatic air vent at the top with a valve to close off the outlet side.

Yes, if you pick the LXT models (which almost all the newish stuff is). I have SDS drill, combi drill, circular saw, jigsaw, multitool, angle grinder and impact driver all sharing the same three batteries. Makita would be impossibly expensive if you couldn't share the batteries. Sanders, reciprocating saw and one drill (Ryobi, as it happens, for use in a drill stand) are mains powered. As I have no mains on site I use either an invert running off my van batteries or a Lidl 1200W inverter generator when I need to use those.

So 20% VAT on domestic fuel, too, I hope. Oh, maybe that won't happen.

Wikipedia is very good for searching for .thing, often works well for county-code top level domains and file extensions. It's a playlist file: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLS_(file_format)

Yes, I'd guess so.

There's not an awful lot online about the BT Home Hub 4 setup beyond repeats of the BT manual which is very basic. There is this screenshot though: http://screenshots.portforward.com/routers/BT/Home_Hub_4/IP_Addresses.htm which indicates this sort of thing is configurable. Look in the DHCP Table tab, I think. Or maybe the Devices tab. Some routers allow (prefer/require?) you to configure static DHCP addresses outside the dynamic range (192.168.1.64…192.168.1.254 in that screenshot). Others insist that you configure addresses only within that range in which case @JSHarris 's strategy of putting them at the top of the range is a good one.

More likely it'll change on rebooting the router. When the Pi is rebooted it'll ask (via DHCP) the router for a new IP address. Most routers keep a list of IP addresses they've allocated to particular hardware (MAC) addresses and try to give them the same address again each time they boot. Obviously, though, when the router is rebooted it'll lose that list and just restart allocating IP addresses to devices in a cast-in-order-of-appearance manner. Two ways round this: 1) Just configure a static IP address on your Pi, best outside the range of addresses your rooter dynamically allocates. 2) Set a static IP address for the Pi's hardware address (actually the hardware address of your USB adapter) in the router. Personally, I go for method 2 because: a) I've then got a single list of IP addresses for everything (laptop, netbook, phone, Pi, telephone adapter, …) and it's a one-stop shop if I decide to reorganize my network. b) If I take my laptop and netbook elsewhere they're already set up to get their address via DHCP on other people's LANs, which is the polite thing to do. Time to go explore your router's internal web site, methinks.

A layer can be, by any building standard, airtight yet still be vapour open enough to be put on the outside of any reasonable construction. For example, the Protect TF200 Thermo I have on the outside of my gable walls has a water-vapour resistance of 0.45 MNs/g which equates to a vapour permeability of 2.22… μg/N·s. AFAIK, most membranes just resist gasses, they're not picky whether the molecules they're stopping are H₂O, O₂, N₂ or whatever. 50 pascals for an hour over an area of 1 m² equates to 50×3600 = 180 kN·s which, multiplied by the permeability would let through 0.4 g/m²·h. Air has a density of around 1.2 kg/m³ so that would be an air leakage rate of 0.000333… m³/m²/h. Somewhat less than 0.6 m³/m²/h so, if you can seal it up tight, that membrane while quite breathable and suitable for being on the outside of the building would make a perfectly acceptable airtight layer. More practically, Tom Foster has been designing houses with the airtight layer being the OSB sheathing. With careful control of the brand of OSB used (there seems to be wide variation in the airtightness and vapour permeability of OSB from different suppliers) and thorough gluing of the joints (as he seems to achieve with use of the right builders) that seems a very good approach to me; combining the windtightness and airtightness layers in a bit of the structure well clear of marauding sparkies and plumbers. It's good that you can do the airtightness testing and any correction required very early in the process, as soon as the house is weather tight, while things are still easily accessible. Also, you get to actually test the windtightness, something that's not normally done. That outer layer can be airtight enough without being so vapour tight that an inner vapour barrier (which would then be a de facto airtightness layer) would be required.

Why?

I have 150×22 sawn treated sarking which will have mineral wool immediately below. When I argued that all of the mineral wool on the outside would be within 75 mm of a gap and mineral wool is pretty vapour open my BCO was happy to accept that ventilation below the sarking wasn't needed. There will be ventilation above the sarking and the breather membrane, of course.

I played with walk throughs a bit in SketchUp for early versions of my house design. I can't say I found them terribly useful and I didn't bother by the time I was converging on the final design. Maybe if you're trying to understand somebody else's design it would be more useful. Dunno. 3D modelling of construction aspects, on the other hand, was very useful to make sure I understood the structural engineer's drawings.

90mm of Frametherm sounds a lot more comfy than a static. 2.4 × 2.4 × 6 box has area 70m². 90 mm of 0.035 W/m·K material has a U-value of 0.39 W/m²·K so the heat loss coefficient would be 70 × 0.39 = 27.3 W/K so for just freezing outside, 20 °C inside that'd be 546 W plus a bit for ventilation heat losses. Assuming mains is available that really shouldn't be a problem for ocassional use.

Remember this is for a Scout group, they're likely to be using compasses so don't want too much iron in their bodies. ?

Right, but @readiescards is asking how to interpret that half-lit reading in the context of their circuit not working. First thing I'd do is test the pump controller on its own in a known-good circuit. If it seemed to be working OK then the next hypothesis I'd look into is that the pressure sensor is leaking electric current somehow so the pump controller isn't ever properly off so doesn't trigger when it's switched on.