jack

The way power tools seem to develop, it's possible they may be worse!

Personally, I'd try to find the extra money for the Makita (my personal preference) or Dewalt. One way of reducing the cost is to buy them without batteries and get a well-reviewed 4Ah clone battery from ebay. I did that four years ago and the battery and tools are still going strong. When buying things like drills and impact drivers, I've tended to buy the cheapest brushless version. Two good sites for discount tools are FFX and ITS. I've used both with good results.

You see these all the time in France. Maybe try one of the big French DIY places online?

Tends to be PIR I believe, largely due to better performance for a given (often height-limited) thickness. EPS tends to be used under slabs in raft constructions where a separate screed isn't used, largely because of its durability in that application.

Interesting. Our wooden cladding (Siberian larch) has weathered fairly evenly east, south and west. The critical thing seems to be rainwater - you can see a diagonal line down within the deep overhangs showing where rainwater reaches. Sunlight by itself doesn't seem to cause very much weathering - I suspect you need a combination of UV (breakdown) and rain (to wash away the breakdown products) to get the full effect. In addition to higher temperature swings, is the side that's weathered most for you more exposed to wind and rain? I can't remember the orientation of your house, but vaguely recall that the front faces south-ish(?)

There's a gap planned between the horizontals.

Ha, several cross posts at once! Thankfully everyone's saying the same thing...

What does your planning say/show? That's what controls finishes.

Try the birds-eye views (all of them) too. Amazing the range of different visual information that's available between Google and Bing.

I think ours are 700. The little bit extra makes a difference imo.

I don't really share pics of my house on t'internet, but they look something like this (albeit with horizontal larch cladding, and with the windows/blinds recessed about another 400mm inwards): In the white-painted brick sections of the house, they're set back about as much as in the photo above. As shown in this photo, you don't need to close the blinds completely to get most of the benefit. I prefer them slightly open like this, and only close them when it's very hot and the sun is directly on them, and at night. I think they look "elegant", as you put it, but our house is extremely modern, so I think it works. I can't see how awnings are a replacement for some sort of per-window solution like blinds or roller shutters in all but very limited areas. There are about three places in our house where some sort of awning might work. One of those is outside a big south-facing slider, but the height of the slider means that the awning would need to be huge to keep out the spring and autumn sun. We're lucky to have a tree that provides some shade in this area, so for the moment we don't have any shading treatment on that opening. The other two points have 1.2m overhangs due to balconies above them, so already have a decent bit of solar control. They also have blinds, which helps on summer mornings (they're east-facing). I can't see how awnings are a solution for first floor windows, windows along the side of a property or street-facing windows. If you don't much like the look of blinds, that's fine - just leave them fully retracted (they're invisible) unless you actually need them.

They're the company I've been looking at for the retrofit. Happy to hear anyone's experiences with them.

Ours are extraordinarily good at keeping the sun out. We have several large west-facing windows with external (uninsulated) aluminium venetian blinds. When they're down, there's no perceptible radiant heat, even with the western sun beating on them on a hot day. I don't doubt that some heat gets by, but it isn't particularly noticeable. Even fully closed, there're 5-15mm gaps at the sides, plus the holes for the guides and small gaps between the slats themselves, which I'm sure allows some of the heat between the window and blind to escape. Another thing is that they're quite useful for privacy. We very rarely retract the ones at the front of the house, because they help stop people seeing in. Something I didn't expect is that we quite like the look of the house when the blinds are down but open. They add to the look of the house imo. One thing they aren't at all good at is blocking out all light. On east-facing windows particularly, enough of the early morning sun in summer gets through the gaps at the slat edges, and even the holes for the guides, to make the room noticeably bright from very early in the morning. We mistakenly made no provision for recessed internal blockout blinds or curtains, thinking we wouldn't need them. This is the main disadvantage of this particular type of blind imo (that and the fact they provide literally zero security, since you can just lift them up like ordinary venetian blinds.

Ours aren't Gaulhofer, but the detail is probably similar. This is what we have where the house has brick slips on render board over a timber frame with cellulose insulation, and external venetian blinds:

Do you have any vertical sections through your windows?

I'll be interested in the answer to this, as I have two windows that I'd like to retrofit something like these to. Doesn't the French supplier have tech drawings they can give you?

Short answer: no. While I love hifi and home cinema, I just couldn't justify the extra costs of doing properly. That said, were I to build again, I'd spend more time on soundproofing the TV room and probably make it a bit bigger. I did put speaker cable into the walls, but only for 4 channels (on the assumption that wiring for a subwoofer and centre channel could be hidden behind furniture at the front of the room). Still haven't wired anything up - time and money yet to be allocated!

We have a 5.4m slider, and to be honest I'd rather have gone for a pair of wide French doors in the middle with horizontal windows along the rest of the space. In our case, such a large window drastically limits our options for furniture placement. That may not be an issue for other layouts.

We use floor cooling downstairs during really hot periods, so for us stack cooling is all about bedrooms. We have a large centrally located electric skylight. Opening windows in the bedrooms does result in some air movement via the stack effect, but it feels to me that cross-ventilation is much more effective unless there's no air movement at all. It very much helps to open the windows as soon as the temperature outside drops below the internal temperature. Insects are the main issue with this strategy, and if I were doing this all again, I'd include retractable insect screens on the bedroom windows.

Our entire downstairs is open plan, with a 2.4m wide hallway straight through to the kitchen/dinner from the front door (which is a metre wide and 2.5 metres tall). There's almost no draft or heat loss if you open the front door. However, I think that's largely because the house is so airtight that there's nowhere for air to go. If you're planning to build airtight, I suspect it won't be a big issue.

Must be worth a DMCA complaint to the host company by now?

Scratches very easily and stains like a mofo (at least the white stuff we have on one surface does). So much for it being the requested maintenance-free, hard-wearing option for beside the sink!

"Compression" in this context is waveform compression rather than data compression. Look up "Loudness War".

Aside from the practical difficulties and risks of using such an explosive substance as a fluid fuel source: https://www.roadandtrack.com/new-cars/car-technology/a25712588/why-dont-we-burn-hydrogen-instead-of-gasoline/ See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_internal_combustion_engine_vehicle

It's more that I'd consider providing additional cable to give more flexibility for locating things that need it. Classic example is the kitchen. We always resisted the idea of a kitchen TV, but installed an aerial outlet, power and 2 x CAT 6 cables in the most likely location in case we changed our mind. We did change our mind, but now that we think about it a little harder, I'm not sure that the current location is ideal. There's actually a better place, but no cables of any sort near it, so we're stuck with the original location. Same with our music streamer/radio. We've ended up moving it somewhere in the kitchen that makes a lot if sense, but only because there's a small side table there that we hadn't planned for. We now have to use wireless, and unfortunately this is at the very end of the house furthest from the wireless router. Fine most of the time, but it cuts out when the microwave is on! Again, there's no CAT cable anywhere near this new point. Of course, you can't predict where you need this sort of thing, and you need to draw the line somewhere. If I were doing this again I'd probably aim for two cable drops to each of the two most likely areas in each room that's likely to want an AV source. I have four CAT 6 cables behind the TV and another four where the small TV is in the lounge, and that seems to be more than enough at the moment.