jack

Sorry, I misunderstood your earlier comment. MVHR does transfer moisture in the way you're talking about. It delivers fresh air to living areas, and pulls air from areas such as kitchens and bathrooms, including moisture in those rooms. I don't know what HRV is that's different to this: wikipedia thinks HRV and MVHR are synonyms.

Moisture is only transferred in a so-called enthalpy MVHR. When used alone, MVHR generally means just heat recovery. Enthalpy units are rarely used in the UK.

I don't know, the default settings have always worked fine for me (virtually all non-photographic images I post are captured this way). Have you zoomed in as much as you can in AutoCAD before snipping? It seems to capture at the screen resolution, so capturing something small will result in fuzzy edges once expanded, for sure.

Piece of the proverbial!

I use something called "Snipping Tool", which is part of Windows from Windows 7 onwards. I have it in my task bar. When you open it, you just click "New", and the Snipping Tool window disappears. Once you've selected the area you want, you can either save it as a file (for import to BH), or copy it to the clipboard (for pasting into, eg, PowerPoint, which is what I use for annotation). It does have some basic drawing tools, but I find PowerPoint better for things like arrows and text.

Welcome to the forum - looking good!

Have you had a trawl through the planning portal? Try and find some local applications that have been successful and see what sort of covering letter they've used. To be honest, I think a properly done design and access statement has far more impact. I'm not saying you can't benefit from a well written cover letter, but I think it's marginal, and possible requires your story to resonate with the planner (they're human!), which I think may be a struggle if you're developing for profit. Another thing to spend time on now is getting neighbours and other potential objectors onside. They're the ones that could, if enough of them act, get the matter called into committee.

Welcome to BuildHub, great to have you aboard.

Snap - MBC's handiwork: Got slightly wobbly after several months, but added a couple of battens and some screws and it did us until the build was finished.

The main issue is that the wall it would go on is a very dark grey/green colour, so I'd need to paint anything like this to conceal it. There's also the issue of noise from the TV room escaping into the hall, although admittedly we don't have a home cinema or anything like that.

Not a bad idea, thanks, as long as it can be concealed.

I had considered hiding heat-producing equipment like the games console in a cupboard that had an MVHR extract, but that didn't really work out for the space we had. In any event, it's only the TV and console (which we use a DVD player and streamer) that're on most of the time we're in there, so I'm not sure how much better this would have been. Additional ventilation into that room would likely have helped alittle, as would comfort cooling via the MVHR (something I may well add in future). Even something as simply as a ceiling mounted fan might have been useful - I've considered retrofitting those in the bedrooms, although I'm not sure there's enough head-height for safety upstairs. For us, most likely we'll just get a nice fan to put in a corner for the worst days. I'm constantly telling my kids to keep the door open if they're using this room, but it always ends up closed. Not sure why - they're the ones making all the noise!

There's your problem right there. You should have attached them with a suitable adhesive!

The overheating effect isn't so noticeable in our house, as it's very open plan and has a decent volume with concrete floors. The one place we really feel it is the TV room, which is small and carpeted. We can't sit in there as a family with the door closed for very long in summer.

Jeremy, I don't follow why you're willing to prepare an EICR and/or pay money to upgrade a CU on a house you're selling. If I were a potential buyer who didn't know you, I'd consider this behaviour concerning, as it definitely isn't what civvies do in this scenario. At best it looks like you're desperate to sell, which might encourage a late, lower offer. Offering to prepare your own EICR, in particular, is something I'd counsel against. Again, to someone who doesn't know you, I think this would look highly suspicious, plus I don't think you want to be the one in court arguing about your competent person status in the (admittedly highly unlikely) event something goes wrong. If they want an EICR, why not just tell them that you're happy to give someone access to prepare one? That's what people without your background (ie, most of us) would do. If they're committed to buying and this is just a formality, offer to allow them to upgrade the CU at the same time to reduce costs. To me, that sounds like the behaviour of someone confident that there're no problems with the wiring (and perhaps you can then give them your background and explain to them why you know it'll all pass except for the CU). Just my thoughts - I appreciate that others will have a different view.

[Deleted my reply, as this is just getting silly now.]

You sure?

Repeating (and adding emphasis to) the quote from my edit made before you replied: "Always start the drum rotating before loading. Do not load a concrete mix into a stationary drum. Starting the mixer with a full load would be difficult and would strain the drum shaft." So can you do it? Sure, it's your mixer, do what you like. But the manufacturer says you're not supposed to do it, there are clear risks associated with doing it, and (as explained by @Russell griffiths) you don't have to do it, so... why do it? And will you pay for the repair of another member's mixer when they follow your guidance and something breaks, bends or melts?

To you, perhaps, but this thread will be seen by others in the future who may find that and the remaining 72% of his contribution useful when read in conjunction with your own contributions. Non sequitur. His point isn't that a small generator can't drive a mixer, it's that there shouldn't ever be a need to start a full mixer. That fact has clearly eluded you, since you acknowledge that you do restart a full mixer. The instructions that came with the bell mixer I hired said that you should only ever add materials to a moving mixer, and should avoid restarting the mixer when full. [Edited to add:] Found belle mixer instructions: "Always start the drum rotating before loading. Do not load a concrete mix into a stationary drum. Starting the mixer with a full load would be difficult and would strain the drum shaft."

Yes, but I'd known him for months by that stage, and trusted him completely. We didn't bother with accounts for electrical stuff, as we did a bulk buy for most stuff up front, and it was just bits and pieces after that. It was usually just a matter of him buying an odd thing locally at the last minute.

We had this with our electrician. In the end I just used to give him my credit card to go and buy things in my name!

Welcome to Buildhub! A couple of quick points. I'm also within Waverley council. I haven't been keeping close tabs, but you may be aware that their revised neighbourhood plan was rejected by (I think) the planning inspectorate a couple of times over the last few years. As a result, there was (and may still be) a situation where only national policies applied, which apparently made it harder for Waverley to knock back planning applications. Also, there's a lot of pressure to increase the number of houses being built in Waverley. You may be aware that Dunsfold (the old airfield) was one option for building a large proportion of those houses. I don't know what impact this might have on an application for a new plot in this general area, but again, something worth chatting with a planning consultant about. Finally, I think I read recently that Waverley's planning department was coming under some pressure due to the number of appeals they were fighting and losing. Again, worth trying to find out more, because if it's true, there's likely to be some immediate pressure to be more forthcoming in granting permission. Whatever the situation, it's definitely worth a chat to a local planning consultant. There's a firm just across the road from the planning office at Godalming who a couple of people we know have used with success. You get a free up front chat, which can be very useful.

I don't think there's confusion, but I agree it helps to have the different requirements set out explicitly. In general that may be true, but I'm less convinced about relying on it in areas that are less easy to access. The two areas I've had cause to open in our house (due to the roof leaks and while installing trims for our balcony fibreglass) have both had voids in the cellulose. In one case - and admittedly it's in a really awkward bit of wall - there was a void perhaps 100mm deep, most of the width of the wall, and stretching along nearly half of the width of the window under the cavity closer. Worse, the cavity closer had to be adjusted at short notice when the windows were being installed, so only had a very thin bit of OSB that definitely didn't seal very well to the frame in the area outside the window. Overall, if this region was relying on cellulose for airtightness, it was in trouble! I stuffed the area with some leftover rockwool I had lying around and sealed it up carefully before covering it with the fibreglass trim.

Jeremy, do you have a separate internal membrane in your build-up? I could be wrong, but I thought MBC went through a period of using taped OSB (or perhaps it was VapourBlock or similar) without a membrane. Whatever it was, I believe they found that it wasn't reliably airtight enough, so went back to using a membrane not long before doing our frame. I also read a discussion in (I think) an Irish LinkedIn post about OSB around the same time, where it was concluded that it definitely could not be relied upon for airtightness by itself. I seem to recall that the conclusion was you'd probably be okay, but there were no guarantees.