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I'm surprised you haven't had more contributions on this thread. There have been in the past some people on here who might be able to answer but I guess they aren't around ATM. Not a lawyer but I think in general the bigger, better reputation, firms charge more. If they are a bigger firm they can handle bigger cases and therefore people with bigger wallets and thus don't want to lower their fees for smaller stuff. Going to a smaller firm (even one man band) might not be a detriment if you are dealing with someone who has fairly specialised knowledge in your area of concern. But if they are more of a generalist and you need a specialist then you would be at a disadvantage. So question is does this describe the difference between the firms? Have you asked the more expensive firm why their price is so much higher? (Not haggling, but asking them to justify the price). In terms of the £1600, that sounds about as low as is reasonable given this job is maybe a little unusual. Doubt the above is anything you haven't already thought about but maybe it triggers some more useful conversation?

Seen stuff on the millimetre wave drilling technique before. Seems like a really cool technology. Glad to see they are still moving forward and don't appear to have hit showstopping issues yet.

Maybe I'm an optimist but to me the hardest problem you have to solve here is to get everyone to agree how to move forward. In a way, winning the appeal for insurance would help a lot with that as it will take the details somewhat out of your hands and into the insurance companies. Still, while you wait for determination there well worth getting the SE in to do a proper assessment (which should be easy to agree).

Depends what fill you use. I thought I'd seen people talk about fill that was a mix of concrete and other lightweight products, so the overall weight might be relatively limited. Especially if you are replacing the steels with a solid floor.

I think our legs are being pulled

No! Do not throw a blanket over any of them! 🤦‍♂️ Battery should have free air circulation space around it. Much safer for the battery to be too cold than too hot.

Not unlike a petrol car or lawnmower. If your installer was happy to put it where it is then I wouldn't worry about it. Modern home batteries are very safe. Much safer than petrol and safer than the high density lithium ones used in long range cars. (Cheaper cars are increasingly using the safer batteries because they cost less but store less power for the weight). Modern EVs have an awful lot of safeties built in so its ok. You might find some people arguing that you shouldn't do high power charging of EVs inside but you won't have a fast charger at home. (Battery fires usually happen due to either damage, or overheating during charging (either due to pure temperature or because the charger is doing something wrong)

I think that's broadly right. For me personally though, for the few hundred quid it would cost I'd still favour getting an SE in to look around and see if they can see anything of concern (not just this particular floor given the other issues you've had). Obviously if the SE has concerns a more detailed investigation would cost more but a first visit look around won't be too pricey.

Support is dropping a bit yes. But last I checked there is still a strong majority in favour of net zero policies. But if you look at the news (even left wing sources) there is increasing noise about how the public have turned against net zero but it's not held up by polling AFAIK.

My mental maths says this could be even thinner. B&B flooring usually has a small crest in the middle due to the prestress. If laid with blocks then some of that will come out, but with EPS theres not much weight to take it out. So if the crown is 10mm over the room and now the depression is 27mm, you could potentially have a thickness of less than 40mm. @sisturix suggested that self levelling might have been used in the past to correct earlier defects. If so, then the thickness of the slab might be worse, or this is evidence that something moved since it was done. What would be the impact if one of the prestressed beams wasn't bedded at the ends properly and one end failed during the concrete pour? Is the slab with reinforcements sufficient to not care? The skirting board being all over the place and levels around the edge of the room being off doesn't seem great. Having said that if the floor feels solid jumping up and down on it, it probably is.

Well that's an unpleasant situation to be in. My sympathies. This is the strongest argument for getting a professional in, primarily to look at the floor but also to look at everything else. Deal with everything while you still have a warranty. There were various things wrong with my place that I could have had NHBC deal with but didn't because I was dealing with the property manager of the block (leasehold flat) and initially thought the fixes were easy and now I can't. If you've already found so much wrong, what else is there?

I think the most likely explanation is as Nick suggests but personally I think I would want someone with professional insurance to put that in writing before accepting 'full and final' settlement. If something has shifted underneath that slab then it'll cost a lot to fix. (I assume a 75mm reinforced slab should really resist bending, but if it's sloppy work how do we know it's actually 75mm?)

If I was in your situation, I'd want to get that independent SE opinion now both because it will provide some protection against getting fobbed off but also if there is a real problem, a professionally written claim with specific demands will almost certainly speed things up.

Yes it's a good question and unfortunately there isn't much around (at least not in terms of 'here is a publication that fully meets these standards'). Even sources that often have good journalistic content often depart from those standards when covering some topics. Pretty much most high quality journalism is now behind paywalls which makes it worse. It's much easier to rule out some publications as unreliable than it is to rule them in as reliable. So for me now I tend to look at news less. I have a highly curated set of social media follows and tend to use those as a starting point when they link to articles. Then you have to think through each article on it's own merits. No easy answers though and I'm sure it's why society as a whole is spending so much time arguing about things rather than moving forward and making things better.

To add, if you do just decide to DIY something and there is an underlying structural issue that then reappears later, you may be invalidating the NHBC insurance (or at least giving them a lot of ammunition for an argument) and exposing yourself to much higher costs down the line.

You are well within the warranty period and this has the potential to be an expensive repair (could also be relatively cheap). Get a structural engineer who is used to dealing with warranty issues to have a look and give an opinion. If they think it's a big/expensive issue then they can write a detailed claim to NHBC and get the ball rolling. If it's not a major issue then can propose the fix. @Oz07 is right that these floor usually start with a crest rather than a hollow. Though they are expecting to move a bit when weight is applied. But going from a crest to a hollow seems a bit much to me (an amateur).

Does it have to be wood fibre? Can you get some mineral wool/rockwool boards at the right thickness just for this area?

I should add, that I think you tend to need a thicker wall section to make blown in cellulose work. Like Mineral Wool cellulose is not as insulating on paper as PIR. It tends to be used in higher performing homes anyway where the thicker walls allow serious insulation values and easy installation (also very very good sound insulation).

I think that tends to be seen as the gold standard for a timber frame house. Easier to build and install so long as you have the right installer. @Nickfromwaleshas someone he recommends every now and then. But companies selling a 'package' will want to do things they way they usually do them. Anything else will cost more because it will be more complicated and costly for them to accomodate.

Doesn't someone here work for a wood fibre company? Maybe @sgt_woulds?

Mineral wall has better sound insulation too so leads to a quieter house compared to PIR.

And now I've written that I fell I've fallen (again) into the trap of talking in detail about something that doesn't warrant the time. The article is written from such a biased perspective in obvious bad faith that engaging with it is just falling into the trap of giving it more credit than it deserves. This line is implying climate change is false, the heatwaves didn't happen and people didn't die from those non-existent heatwaves. It's a case of 'believe what I'm saying not what you are seeing/experiencing'

@Spinny I'm really not sure there is any point in engaging further. You claim the article is exposing lies, when all the Met Office are claiming is that they have made estimates. If the article was focused more on something like 'Met Office estimates of heatwave death toll use deceptive methods' and actually showed the methods were bad then that may be different. But that's not what the article does and to be clear I don't think there is any evidence presented that the estimate is significantly wrong (I'm not saying it's right either - it's too soon to tell). The graph showing the ONS death toll is a lagging indicator, it takes time for reported deaths to make their way through the system so a graph that shows less deaths last week than same time last year doesn't prove anything. You have to wait for the data to come through. I've seen plenty of criticism of 'excess deaths' over time (same thing came up during covid). It's a difficult measure and the way it's used in the scientific community doesn't exactly match the way the lay-man understands it but again the article doesn't engage with that. I can't provide links or anything to backup the following but I have read various long and detailed explanations and critiques of this in the past and my conclusion from this reading is that excess death estimates we see are generally in line with reality.

Really thread drifting... It's unfortunate that this term encompasses such a wide range of people. Plenty of idiots using it as cover for awful stuff but some good independent researchers really digging into things that traditional media no longer has the budget for (but used to be a big part of their modus operandi -- eg BBC Newsnight). Every journalist that got let go due to budget cuts (ad driven revenue collapsing) starting their own substack really not helpful to a healthy media environment. It reveals plenty of money to fund journalism but spread extremely inefficiently. Only example I'm aware of that breaks out of this is Jim Waterson who was let go and started 'London Centric' a substack but instead of just being a him thing, he started hiring others and has turned it into an interesting local paper with proper investigations.

While 'journalist' is a broad term and applies to just about anyone writing stories for newspapers/doing tv news/etc. For a lot of the last century Journalist has meant something more specific. Someone who writes following journalistic ethics, aims to report unbiased, factual information. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism_ethics_and_standards Unfortunately, that does seem to have faded in recent years and most of what people call journalism now is at best what I would call reporting and much more is closer to mere opinion. This is unfortunate, we would all be better off if the bulk of journalism we encountered day to day was of the form that followed strict ethics. I tend to focus my news reading on those sources which are clearly trying to follow those standards and actively avoid those who reject them. I don't regard any publication or author who don't follow journalistic ethics to be journalism. I want my news to seek truth, cite sources, to accurately quote statements (rather than selectively quote just the bit that agrees with viewpoint of the article), etc. The Daily Sceptic is not that, it imitates that. Based on all the threads we have had here in the past on similar topics I doubt spending an hour dissecting an article would reveal anything that hasn't already been covered many times. But I will briefly highlight two things: 1. The whole article is seething with bias and loaded language, to the extent that if you'd been living in a climate controlled box and hadn't experienced the recent heatwave you'd think we hadn't just lived through a period of time where records were falling repeatedly and by significant amounts. 2. The whole premise of the article is that the reports of 2700 dead were false. But this is not what they claimed at all. They very clearly say they estimated that up to 2700 may have died. That is not the same as finding 2700 dead people. It goes on from there and someone with more patience than me could write a very long critique but I have said enough, I don't see how saying more will make any difference.