G and J

I guess my head is full of the notion of using cheap rate periods to charge a big screed in a house that has a very constant pleasant temperature, (until I light the woodburner lol). The idea that for months on end we never have to think about the heating settings is very attractive. Couple that with exporting spare lecky and thus having good running costs and for me that’s worth using my mental crampons to ascend the slippery learning curve.

I thought it was a flat £7.5k. Or did I dream that?

[ALERT - THEORY BASED RESPONSE SO NO DIRECT EXPERIENCE AVAILABLE - CORRELATE WITH ANSWERS FROM GROWN UPS!] I’ve been researching flat roofs for ours. My understanding is that you are creating a wet pocket, and that will rot your roof timber. If it’s a temporary measure to reduce how damp it gets over Christmas before stripping the roof maybe it’s a good idea, but I’m not sure. I wonder if your roof would be better left so moisture can evaporate into the building, as I wouldn’t think it would get out via the GRP at all. Better in this sense means taking longer to rot. If you throw a few bodies at it will it really take that long to remove and replace? If not why not forget the plasterboard inside, etc. and cover the joists with baubles and tinsel then give your renewed roof a happy new year?

Top dude! We’ll done, thank you.

So how can one wire one of these relays so the manual switch and the relay work side by side? Say for example a simple, single switch/pendant light.

And having said all that I spoke yesterday with a BCO and when I mentioned a slightly thicker screed for improved UFH/house temp performance he expressed the opinion that it wouldn't help. He has a 65mm screed and that's fine - "you won't notice any difference". (His airtightness is circa 3, so that may be a factor). Maybe this is another thread....

Forgive the crap drawing, but simply place the beams a brick lower, and use more stuff (be it insulation or screed) above it to make up the thickness. It may mean digging out more too, so beware of that as an unexpected extra cost. An insulated bnb is different in that the concrete blocks are replaced with polystyrene which gets more insulation into the same thickness, so the insulation sheet above the beams can be thinner for the same u value.

Forgive my ignorance. Am I correct in saying that I can add one of these devices into a standard wall light switch, continue to use said light switch manually, and in addition turn that light on and off using hone assistant?

I believe the overflow should be visible, i.e. through a wall to outside or maybe to a tunndish thence a waterless trap. If it’s overflowing you will want to know. Others might be different but our softener has a reservoir just sitting there. When regenerating that water mixes with supply water. We don’t drink softened water but the idea that my washing or washing up water is partly stuff that’s sits with a direct connection to drains/sewers isn’t nice.

Anyway, back to our posts about our errant neighbours. I really have calmed down now and hopefully got a bit more perspective. Yesterday I (G) felt like the bath spider. You know, the one that keeps falling back down however hard I try at climbing, all the time knowing instinctively that any time soon the shower will be turned on and I’ll be washed down the stinky rapids to oblivion. Every thing I tried to progress didn’t and I had some other non building worries on repeat too. So I was tired and emotional (but technically sober however unhinged) and had a rant. Will try not to let that happen again. I've carefully had a good look at the screw foundations of next doors illegal building (nice, balanced language there) and they are more than a metre from our boundaries. And looking at what they appear to be doing I see no actual danger to life or limb. OK I think the screw foundations will sink and the building is likely to eventually become unusable but that’s not a safety issue. So I stand back and think about our build which requires us to sell our house. And that sale is probably more likely if next door aren’t in a bitchy battle with our council. Yes I think it’s wrong and stupid of them to flout planning law and building regs but I need to focus on getting the house sold so we can build at our new location. But thank you for listening folks. My rant did help me get some sleep.

I suspect that that’s kinda like one of the neighbours next door to our new house assume/believe we will be in demolition and building. We’re trying hard at being planned, prepared, tidy, thoughtful, considerate and very effective. Time will tell.

🤔 we have a 6ft hedge, soon to be taller.....building circa 13ft....so hoping for a LOT of Spring growth😉

Yes, they put in a planning app and a Certificate of Lawfulness app in for exactly the same building before they'd even moved in Would be if they hadn't chosen to have it clad like a park home with brilliant white uvpc windows ......we are in farmland and of course they don't want to see it from their house, so they've put it right on our boundary It's on screw foundations and the materials/construction would suggest won't have structural integrity if lifted. Are we p......d, oh boy yes. Are we lucky enough to be planning our build...thank goodness...yes. Do we just have to get over it and hope it does less damage to our spring house sale 🤞 than the application did when we tried to sell earlier this year. There, I feel better already.

Our investigations were that having more than 50% cladding on a timber frame house limited options. (We haven't pursued as we were researching for the eventuality we needed to sell in the future to someone who was going to take a mortgage or we decided to take a lifetime mortgage (yes we are getting to that age!), neither of which are what we are planning but never say never). Is it possible to tweak your design? In the end we've reduced the cladding and gone block skin for the ground floor.

Our new next door neighbour put in for planning permission for a building to house one set of aging parents in their garden. That was refused flat, it was completely outwith anything likely to pass. They simultaneously put in a certificate of lawfulness to formally recognise that the same building was legally a caravan or moveable building. It arrived today. It’s a panelised, single storey, flat roofed timber framed building on screw foundations. It’s as moveable or temporary as any other modern estate house. So I’m left scratching my head as to how this can get through building control. I think it’s getting on towards 100m2 internally with two bedrooms. It’s well within a metre of our boundary yet appears to be principally made of combustible material. It’s on medium elasticity clay built over where they cut down a mature tree a couple of weeks ago. When we built they made us go down 3m in the same circumstances for strip foundations. Their screw foundations are about 1.5m into the ground. I would be very surprised if they had applied for building regs, so I presume they are either ignoring the rules or they are under a building notice (which in fairness I don’t understand). My belief is that they do have to comply with current building regs. Can I quietly check if they are under a building notice? If under a building notice do they get inspected? And if so is it automatically the responsibility of the local authority? Until today I assumed they would be craning in a ‘static’ beloved of many seaside caravan parks, that could abd would be craned out again when no longer needed. But this is a 140mm studwork based timber framed bungalow avoiding all the planning requirements, and maybe, all the building regs too. What best to do to understand how legal this thing is?

I believe the calculation of the gain will be simply sale price minus costs. i.e. costs means the total of all purchases and fees and contracts. I also believe that your own time and effort will be costed at zero. The fact that you built a house equivalent to some notional value if purchased as is is irrelevant. Sorry. The good news is you are only taxed when you’ve made a profit and it’s only a percentage of that profit. Other countries are worse, I’m told.

Return temp is effectively, I presume, a weighted average of all rooms served by the UFH. So if you have a fire in one room do the others then suffer a temperature drop?

So if the woodburner or solar gain is heating the room the return temp will be high enough to stop the ASHP pumping? If so will the return from overheated rooms effectively redistribute heat a little to colder rooms?

I’d like a few lights to be automated so they can come on and go off at set times. If those lights could also be wall switch controlled I’d be pleased. Our current hive system is like an app controlled old fashioned wireless thermostat for the oil boiler heating and hot water, but we won’t need such function with an ASHP plus solar and suitable tariff. Maybe app based target constant temp setting at the very most. But we’ll need timing and boost control for the bathroom UFH electric mats. I guess the bedroom fancoil will need a stat in the room for cooling, maybe for heating on rare occasions. Hmmm, maybe there’s more to control than I realise…..

When I googled home assistant the first thing I saw was a Raspberry Pi so I freaked and took another tablet. On my second look I’ve found a home assistant green which looks like it’s a hive home hub equivalent. Is it?

Well I’ll go back to the bottom of the class then lol So, while I’m in learning mode, one of those two with a plastic T and chrome thumb taps must be the cold feed. I’d have expected a service valve or something to isolate the boiler but maybe there’s one inside the boiler. What’s the other one with the plastic T then? Hot water out or heating flow or return?

Can you post a diagram of your foundation/beam and block detail?

Our Worcester Bosch combi had a filling loop built in, operated by a plastic key thingy that lived clipped into a snap on panel. I can’t see on that pipework where a filling loop would connect.

It’s kinda rude to call someone’s gender fluid child ‘it’. I’ve got used to thinking of they and them as ok in the singular. Took a while though.

Let’s not be too binary folks. Life is more fluid nowadays. It’s taken me ages to get used to but I’m getting better at using ‘them’ and ‘they’.