jack

Welcome, looks like you'll fit in fine

Agreed there's nothing at all wrong with the Pi! I love Pi! Absolutely. I'd never for a moment suggest going and buying something new when you have something perfectly useful sitting there ready to go. I was specifically responding to Steamytea's comments about the difficulties of getting a Pi to run reliably for months. In these "embedded" type situations, there's a lot less to go wrong, stability-wise, with a microprocessor that isn't running a general purpose operating system. That's basically the end of my understanding (I hesitate to use the word "knowledge"!)

Pardon my ignorance, but wouldn't something along the lines of an Arduino would be more suited to this kind of long-term task? (Not saying PeteW should have gone and bought one just for this task since he had a Pi sitting around - I'm more asking in case someone comes along and is inspired to try and do something similar).

Welcome! We have an MBC house with a completely flat roof south of Farnborough. We have 400mm of cellulose insulation and there's no way you get enough heat through that to cause overheating. Do think carefully about roof structure. In the end we went for a cold roof with cellulose. If doing it again I'd go for a warm roof, possibly with rigid insulation. I'd also consider going for fibreglass rather than the high tech German EPDM/modified bitumen system we went with (although that's largely driven by dissatisfaction with the way it was installed)

I agree. However, this is something I know MBC are aware of following a spurt of growth in the last couple of years. Unless something's changed in the last few months since I spoke to one of their senior guys, the actually reduced the number of teams they had late last year and slowed down taking on new work. I don't know whether they'd reached a point where quality was actually suffering, but I was heartened by the fact they were addressing the issue proactively while their reputation was still good.

I had the same reaction as Nick - if not spam, at least an unusual posting of a link to a commercial blog in a first post. I let it slide, but mainly because I'm scared of confrontation

Yes, I remember the post. Just making the point that there may be more to it than being on sand. I don't doubt that what Hilliard specs will work - my limited understanding of this type of system is that it's pretty robust, and there may be several ways of deep-exfoliating the feline.

Interesting. We're on almost 100% sand and he specced no fines.

I think we're pretty relaxed about genuine recommendations from long term contributors like you Vijay.

If you go for railway ballast, make sure you specify the cleaned stuff (I think they steam clean it). The stuff we got hadn't been cleaned and it was a bit greasy/grimy in parts. Unfortunately, it was delivered and laid on a day I was at work, so it was too late to complain at that point.

This sounds a bit like what we used to do when it was too hot to sleep in Australia - move to the lounge, which was the only airconditioned room in the (largely uninsulated, timber framed) house. This is basically the same idea, but with insulation. And yes, the house was ice cold in winter (this is in Sydney's far western suburbs, which are hotter in summer and colder in winter than central Sydney).

We're still under some sort of hybrid site/buildings insurance. We're trying to get our completion certificate by Christmas. Until that's issued, we can't get normal house insurance.

I tried once. We had a couple of specific areas where we wanted some ideas and help. We took the guy through the house, showed him the problem areas, told him we were on a tight budget, and gave him links to our Pinterest light boards. He came back after two weeks with £9000 worth of light fittings for one of the areas. It was very nice. I never contacted him again, and he, quite wisely I thought, didn't pursue us for part of the few hundred quid he'd suggested the whole process would cost. I don't doubt that working with the right lighting person would be absolutely awesome. The problem is getting someone who can do something interesting without immediately reaching for coloured LED strips in cove lighting (fair play to you if that's what you like - it's clearly very popular - it just isn't my cup of lapsang souchong). One thing we've done in some of the public areas of our house is use wall lighters. We found some modest, relatively reasonably priced lamps that provide enough light to see by while giving, we think, some atmosphere. The other thing is to consider using 5 amp circuits and/or home automation to easily allow the use of secondary lighting such as lamps and wall lights. Personally, at night the last thing I want on is downlights, so in our house, they're secondary lighting in most rooms!

It's also a fact, at least in my experience, that older people have more time on their hands and/or are more willing to stick their noses in. A gross generalisation, of course, but looking at the history of planning in my immediate neighbourhood before we submitted our own planning application, it was striking how few objections came from those below around 50. There's a generational aspect to this, of course. Unsurprisingly, older people tend to have different tastes to younger people. That said, I do delight in telling those in the 60-80 age range who complain about our "modern" house that the Barcelona Pavilion was built before they were born! If you need evidence of cluelessness and nimbyism, just look at the quality of planning objections that tend to be received from the general public

I don't subscribe to relativism, but "gut wrenching modernist box of the utmost vulgarity" seems subjective to me. I like (some) modernist boxes. I think some are vulgar. I think some people manage to build horrendous houses despite sticking pretty closely to the design palette of what's already in place around them. I'd rather have the full spectrum of reactions: houses I love, houses I loathe, and everything in between. Basically, I'd be happy to have more houses built that I hate if gives me the opportunity to feel joy about some of the others!

You're in exactly the same position we were, even down to your architect's advice. Your architect isn't located in a small market town on the Surrey/Hampshire borders is he? We took to the view that we were going to be here for a long time, so we needed to get to know the neighbours anyway. We were therefore careful not to just be turning on the charm for the purpose of getting planning - our plans for the house came up now and then in conversation, but only when it was a natural part of whatever was being talked about. The elderly couple who were in bungalow before us had been here for something like 50 years, so lots of people in the neighbourhood knew them. It was really interesting learning about the history of the house and the people who lived here for so long. And then we bulldozed it.

Bang on. If I see one more boring rectangular box with hung clay tiles on the top half because it's the "local vernacular", but with the cheapest uPVC windows you can buy, I'll scream. They seem to fly through planning around here.

Agreed on the older tools. Even so-called decent brands like Bulldog have become woeful over the past few years if reviews are anything to go by. I'll vouch for the Roughneck mattock though - my god it's a productive bit of kit.

We've had a few thinly veiled criticisms of our house from one or two neighbours who don't like "modern" houses, but I genuinely couldn't give a stuff.

The main potential issue for me is that if there are enough objections, it gets called into committee. While you should, in theory, not be any worse off, I suspect it'll be easier, cheaper and less stressful if you don't get the planning committee involved. If they get it wrong, you have to appeal, which is more money and time, even if you're in the right. So basically I'm all for reducing objections as a general principle. I posted something on this general point in the last few weeks. I'll see if I can dig it out over the weekend, but the essence of it was to be careful about being too open with your neighbours about your plans. The last thing you want to do is try and keep everyone happy by listening to their feedback on your detailed plans, then realise it's literally impossible to keep everyone happy because they all want different things. Then you've by definition seriously annoyed one or more of them by not implementing the feedback you asked them for, so they object. I think it's better to gradually get them used to the idea of development in a social context, then slowly allow the general to become more specific over time. By the time you submit your planning application, everyone around you more or less knows what's coming and there are no surprises. We got a bit lucky, but this was the approach we took and we had no objections to our plans to knock down a small bungalow and build a large, very modern two storey house with three times the floor area!

Underfloor cooling is usually cautioned against due to fears of condensation. If you don't cool it down so much that there's a condensation risk, you'll be fine.

I personally think it's hugely important. We in theory have slightly better than building regs levels of insulation (although I do have my doubts about how some of it was installed when I wasn't present) and I'm not at all happy with the levels of sounds insulation that's resulted. If doing this again, I'd up the amount of insulation, use resilient bars everywhere, and ensure that all the installation and detailing was perfect.

Yep. It's about decoupling: less surface area = less energy transfer. Probably some minor amount of energy absorbed in the bar itself (which will be even less in the "top hat" style), but decoupling is the major factor at work here.

Here're a few: http://bit.ly/2cPUaNw The reason you need all the other stuff is that different elements are better at different types of noise and different frequency ranges. I wish we'd spent more time on this - I'm surprised, for example, how much noise from our TV room leaks into the bedroom above it (which thankfully is only a spare room).