Ed Davies

Here's my understanding, corrections welcome: 1) Septic tank: does anaerobic digestion. Produces output which needs to go to a reed bed, leach field or whatever for final treatment. Discouraged in this day and age; you can keep an existing one but likely can't put in a new one. 2) Treatment plant: does aerobic digestion so needs some means to get oxygen to the wee beasties doing the digestion which can be a pump blowing air into the soup or some other method. Output should be clean enough that it can in theory be discharged straight into a watercourse but SEPA, at least, want something else in between to do a bit more treatment if something goes wrong.

For the avoidance of doubt, as the lawyers say, rainwater from the roof doesn't go into the plant.

Activity spaces can overlap with each other and with the manoeuvring space needed for entrance. The door swing can overlap the activity spaces but not the manoeuvring space. https://www.gov.scot/publications/building-standards-2017-domestic/3-environment/312-sanitary-facilities/ 3.12.3. “a manoeuvring space that will allow a person to enter and close the door … clear of any door swing or other obstruction” “an activity space for each sanitary facility, … These may overlap with each other and with the manoeuvring space noted above. A door may open over an activity space, …”

Lidl 1 kg powder extinguishers, £8.99. Decent but not stunning price, but if you're like me and have been meaning to get some since the thread about them last autumn but not quite got round to it it'd be a good prod to actually do it. Got two this afternoon, one to live in the house I'm staying in and one in the van for possible use on site or maybe other circumstances.

I doubt he's right. It's a building regs matter, totally separate from planning. You could get planning permission for a house which can't be compliant with building regs; that'd be your problem.

My BCO came across some of my posts on GBF just searching for other building-related stuff. Since you only moved in over the Christmas break (didn't you? ?) and have booked the inspection for the temporary habitation certificate as early in the New Year as you could I really can't see them getting excited about it. If you were taking the wee wee, living there for months, they might be a bit annoyed. Maybe you'll get a letter reminding you you shouldn't have or something. Most likely they'll just be happy to start charging you council tax, possibly wanting to back date that.

wget -S Will give a log of redirections and the like. E.g., here's this forum redirecting from http to https: wget -S http://forum.buildhub.org.uk/ --2019-01-07 15:58:09-- http://forum.buildhub.org.uk/ Resolving forum.buildhub.org.uk (forum.buildhub.org.uk)... 46.32.255.36 Connecting to forum.buildhub.org.uk (forum.buildhub.org.uk)|46.32.255.36|:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently Date: Mon, 07 Jan 2019 15:58:09 GMT Server: Apache/2.4.18 (Ubuntu) Location: https://forum.buildhub.org.uk/ Content-Length: 325 Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=100 Connection: Keep-Alive Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1 Location: https://forum.buildhub.org.uk/ [following] --2019-01-07 15:58:09-- https://forum.buildhub.org.uk/ Connecting to forum.buildhub.org.uk (forum.buildhub.org.uk)|46.32.255.36|:443... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Mon, 07 Jan 2019 15:58:10 GMT Server: Apache/2.4.18 (Ubuntu) Set-Cookie: ips4_IPSSessionFront=it512r8lf5au7lp3d8tc6oprc0; path=/; secure; HttpOnly Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate Pragma: no-cache Content-Length: 181840 X-XSS-Protection: 0 Connection: close Vary: Accept-Encoding Content-Type: text/html;charset=UTF-8 Length: 181840 (178K) [text/html] Saving to: ‘index.html.25’ index.html.25 100%[==================================>] 177.58K 864KB/s in 0.2s 2019-01-07 15:58:10 (864 KB/s) - ‘index.html.25’ saved [181840/181840] Post your link here and I'll reply with a redirect log like this if you like. Better to have it and not need have a use for it than vice-versa.

Actually, it was @JSHarris that said that; I just quoted him but I might have said something similar. In my case I want to avoid a vent stack by the house as I don't want one inside for thermal bridging reasons and to avoid roof penetrations and there's no vertical wall nearby to put an outside one on. Nearest vertical walls would nearly double the length underground pipework which seems silly.

If there's nothing on the screen at all at any time during the startup process then the fault is most likely with something other than the disk, which indicates that getting the data off via a caddy is worth a try. Other thing I'd try, just to be sure, is booting off a USB drive or CD (e.g., the XP install CD if you have one). But with the screen totally blank I wouldn't be hopeful.

I did my gable ends in Protec TF200 partly because I'd seen it on other houses around here left exposed for a long time without apparent harm, at least as seen from a distance. So the VP400's a definite candidate for the roof. What membrane was yours, @JSHarris?

As I see it, there are two issues: a) if any breather membranes are at risk when they're laid from a combination of wetting and freezing then that indeed needs to be widely known and taken into account in planning a build but, much more importantly… b) the point of breather membranes is that they survive if they get wet (due to leaks in the roof material over them or condensation on its bottom) and the tops of roofs are very liable to freezing so you have to wonder if there's a possibility that these membranes will fail in the long run even if they're laid in ideal conditions and covered quickly. That's assuming the problem is actually freezing when wet. The plural of anecdote is not data, etc.

I'm finding this concept of wet + freezing = ruined membrane interesting. Perhaps any follow up of the thread meander could be on a thread I made earlier:

Though it was me that brought up perimeter insulation, I'd agree that replacing the floor with an insulated one would probably be preferable if it's feasible. Just had visions of you having to rip out your recently done kitchen. But it would leave a big thermal bridge down through the walls into the cold ground unless the underfloor insulation is well connected to any internal wall insulation you do.

Yes. People also use a candle or something to produce some smoke to see what's happening.

Or sloping outwards. Angles of repose, and all that.

A few people have made their own blower door or window inserts. Not difficult with an electric car radiator fan, a 12V power supply, bit of OSB and some sticky-back plastic. Obviously not calibrated to measure the actual flow rates but very useful for depressurising [¹] the house to then use a smoke source to trace air movements. [¹] or pressurising though that's less helpful for finding leaks.

Perimeter insulation goes downwards round the outside of the house, maybe a metre or more into the ground. The idea is that heat doesn't escape from under the floor sideways. So long as water isn't flowing, even very slowly, through the soil under the house it should give you a warmer ground reducing your heat losses downwards a lot - once that soil has warmed up. Sometimes it's done vertically down the outside of the foundations. On older houses without foundations it probably needs to slope outwards so was not to undermine the walls. A question with your extension would be whether you go the whole way round the house or what?

My understanding of ELV wiring colours: Brown - polarity not connected to earth (usually positive). Blue - other polarity which is connected to earth (so ELV but not SELV). Grey - other polarity also not connected to earth (so SELV). Any corrections to that? So if they earthed those blue cables elsewhere (making it PELV or FELV rather than SELV) that'd be OK, but I suspect they don't. But this is all getting pretty picky, frankly. Power over Ethernet would, I imagine, typically be SELV but uses blue and brown (and blue/white and brown/white) - I doubt building control is ever going to tell people to rip that out as non-compliant. Edit to add: in summary, my understanding is that ELV colours are the same as LV, first power voltage not referenced to earth is brown (like line or phase 1) then the next is grey and presumably black if there's a third one, but they'd need labelling by that point, whereas a power voltage referenced to earth (like neutral) is blue.

I think it's OK. The top boxes in each pair seem to be these: https://power.sager.com/hlg-150h-48a-2525351.html Mains to 48 V DC power supplies. Presumably SELV though all the spec says is UL approved for wet applications. This datasheet does say: “ISOLATION RESISTANCE: I/P-O/P, I/P-FG, O/P-FG:100M Ohms / 500VDC / 25 / 70% RH”. The lower boxes seem to be quad dc-dc DMX drivers so won't have mains voltages though the iDrive name seems to be used for multiple boxes none of which look exactly like this. Presumably the DIP switches on the left set the DMX address. Or maybe they're some other protocol than DMX but something similar. Whatever, they presumably feed off the 48 V input. So the only voltage above approx 48 V will be the flex from the switched connection units to the power supplies which will, of course, be double insulated.

Any idea what the ground water under and around the kitchen does? What I'm wondering is if there's any possibility of perimeter insulation doing any good. The slope down on the left seems like good news from this point of view. The slope up on the right, less so. Edit to add: the slope down on the left would at least make drainage of any insulation easier.

This'll be my approach: all wiring for sensors and outputs back to one or two positions then control from there. So, as @jack says, replacing the control system would be possible without digging up wires but still a major project. Personally, I'd regard wall switches as separate sensors and wire them separately back to the central point(s) and interconnect there. Then it's fairly easy to change them so lights are controlled by different switches or whatever. How much does another reel of 1mm² cost?

I won't derail this thread, but I did have a look and did a quick program to see what was happening to the humidities in each direction of the MVHR. Not terribly conclusive as the RH data is so noisy but I'll write a note about it, probably a separate thread here would be best, I guess.

Haven't listened to the programme so no idea, but usually when an economist or the like talks about “productivity” they mean profit or turn over per worker rather than number of blocks laid in an hour or whatever.

For anybody who cares, it's: Silicone: the rubbery stuff. Silicon: the hard crystalline semiconducting element. Silicone is made up of silicon, oxygen and other chemicals in much the way rubber is made of carbon, oxygen and other chemicals. Sand is also made up of mostly silicon and oxygen though with less other chemicals and in a rather different structure. So it's silicon chips but silicone tits. A few years ago I bought some 3M “silicone carbide” sandpaper from a box store. Only noticed when I got home but happened to have a beer that evening with a recently retired fairly senior 3M manager so mentioned this, wondering if it was counterfeit or whatever. He popped off an email to his ex-colleague, the head of consumer products, who checked up and found that, yes, embarrassingly 3M had got the spelling wrong themselves.

Winter-time off-grid electricity costs around £30/watt, maybe a bit more. IIRC, the Biopure uses 50 W even if you get the non-low-energy version and run it all the time so that's something like £1500 to £2000 extra. I'd rather spend that extra money on more PV than on a passive treatment plant as it'll give me spare power for the other ¾ of the year. That's what I'm planning, too: Biopure, AAV in loft, only vent on the treatment plant. Useful to know it works OK. Thanks.