rh2205

We have some ready made still bagged paving primer left over, will that be good enough as an sbr equivalent & I will add in some more opc as a 1:1?

We have one loose honed sandstone slab & no spares, it was laid on a full bed but from tapping it all over one corner is a little hollow, & knocks ever so slightly when stepped in this same place, we have tried to lift it with hooks wedged between the joints & turned underneath, this worked on another slab so we could relay properly, but this one won’t budge so isn’t as loose. We have no spare slabs and don’t want to smash it out, honed sandstone isn’t a rustic finish so can’t lever it either with a spade without it ruining adjacent slabs, can anyone tell me the best mix to pour into the 5mm joint as a slurry to try & fill this hollow & get it to hold more solid before grouting, I wasn’t sure whether to use plastering sand as might be a bit finer as a 1:1 mix with cement, only have sharp sand currently. I will tape & protect all the nearby pavers to prevent staining. We did primer them & just need the best suggestion/tips for fixing this one remaining issue.

We have an ASHP with a twin rotary compressor, do I just not understand compressors as I thought that was neither reciprocating nor scroll… we haven’t noticed any obvious standby use, but I’m going to do a more thorough recording over next few days as I try not worry myself with the finer details!

Just to add on this on the driving rain index of exposure east anglia/middle England is the lowest rating so I guess we count as very sheltered so maybe that’s the difference. This is all anecdotal of course, you must be in the most exposed area or similar? So maybe some more usage from others in similar areas would help with the reality check.

I think the worst thing is I went into the process knowing about energy efficiency vaguely from a couple of short free workshops I’d done on retrofitting years back without fully appreciating how complicated a retrofit was at the design stage so it was a half baked attempt to make the house better based on cost (hence leaving the 120sqm uninsulated slab) if you don’t actually have someone who knows what they are doing and actually checking the building can do that in real life you are screwed and then as I went along I started researching detailing myself & could see all the mistakes but realising it was already too intertwined with the design to correct half of it. We are 245sqm detached, it’s an oversized half house half dormer assymetric roof, with 3.5m ceilings upstairs. SE facing on the large glazing side on the longest profile of our 16m long rectangular house, very flat farm land round here and not coastal or in the mountains so I guess sheltered?

Cold roof with PIR 150mm, first floor walls are PIR EWI of 70mm on timber frame first floor extension with 70mm PIR between studs, 49sqm of aluclad 2g windows. Existing masonry downstairs walls had grey eps beads filling 50mm cavity & 100mm grey EPS EWI. As you can tell we didn’t have an architect who really knew what they were doing with the insulation (and it was actually the structural engineer who specified the EWI on the first floor extension to deal with the structural fixings so it could of been a disaster!!), we specified the EWI on the lower walls but pretty tied in by the time we figured it out from this website and what was happening on site that it wasn’t actually a warm roof he’d specified on the drawings!! There was no end of cold bridging mistakes from various steels & poor window detailing/builder meddling, plus the mashing together the upper floor with existing structure & even the downstairs EWI had a pretty big issue in the end because our dpc is not the same height across the original house so EWI insulation got raised one brick. We had plasterboard throughout in particular to hide the reoccurring cracks downstairs & the walls weren’t purged first so I very much doubt our house is anywhere near passive air tight though we personally spent a long time taping all the new build insulation at night once we realised our plans were that terrible and our builder was that average but I can’t blame him if not specified. We have standard fans for ventilation & trickle vents. We left the uninsulated slab untouched & added oversized radiators to accommodate the 45C radiator temp (again we made this decision & sized the radiators because by this point we realised no one gave a crap how well your house works), we keep the water temp the same on the 300L cylinder but only heat once a day, we haven’t run out of hot water before and we heat the house to a slightly cooler 19.5C, the heat pump got set up wrong so the immersion heater never comes on (noones been sick yet & our toddler prefers warm bath water to drink every day no joke). Seasonal performance factor is 4.49 on our Grant aerona 3 heat pump. In a different life I would of done about 30 things differently but we were poorly prepared but on the heating front it’s miraculously not been a total disaster but I guess we also heat house to a lower temp & don’t heat as much water which we are fine with. Probably our biggest problem is my husband requested air con in the summer 🤣. Again I have seen all these things could of been corrected with planning. So with that in mind our build was not great on the design front so it must be more to do with the heat pump COP and how often we heat our water & the house temperature?

This is interesting we just did a refurbishment with slightly higher insulation on walls than BR & nothing on slab, use radiators throughout. We have used 1684kWh on ASHP in 10 months on heating & hot water. I’m expecting it to hit 1750kWh worst by year end. I initially thought the meters were wrong but actually our entire 2adult 1toddler household is averaging 11kWh a day all in. 245sqm… what are we doing that’s so phenomenal or does Eastern uk bask in way more sunshine which makes a large enough difference for a comparatively poor performing house that hasn’t been air tested?

What do you think the structural engineer will suggest? The small section of brick parapet is getting rebuilt, nothing actual structural she gets severe driving rain in her location, should of seen what happened to the pointing previously & even with the pointing being redone probably still gets a bit of wind driven rain damp on the most exposed side of house (downsides of living with such great views). Anyway these are side issues not related to the roof. This is the insurance paid replacement option - Lay 2 layers of Technotorch underlay and 1 final layer of Icopal high performance charcoal Technotorch felt including edgings and upstands. For those that might know about specific systems.

My mums entire roof ripped off in Eunice. House is very exposed 20m from sea 3 storey flat roof 1970s house on south coast facing the water. In the last 10 years two other storms have partially damaged her roof one with half being replaced and another with a leak so the other half of the top floor ceilings collapsed, clearly budget insurance contractors didn’t pay off in this instance as she knew the half replacement from a dodgy contractor through the insurer was probably part of the issue. She is obviously getting quite anxious with the frequency & is looking whether a different material might help, with the latest incident she gets a whole new roof including new boards but it is like for like cost for asphalt from insurer. For an extra 2.5k she can get a Scott Bader GRP (approved installer 20yr warranty) Including matching up stands/edging. With any new roof they are using 18mm smart ply osb to replace roof boards first the asphalt option also comes with a 20yr warranty & is fully covered by the insurance and this time she has gone through someone she knows who does exceptional work. If I’m honest this latest incident also partially pulled off some concrete cladding & the batons which then pulled off a metre section of roof parapet, maybe there is no helping her situation!! Any benefits to switching to GRP & paying the extra now or is this another recipe for disaster or maybe I should tell her to just switch it to a warm roof & put her money into that vs the GRP change.

Actually scrap the foundation EWI our cills won’t work with it and we aren’t going to pull out all our doors now, I think if we do a brick and a half the drop is about 200mm from internal floor as I’ve just measured which we can live with so then its just whether the linear drain is the best method to minimise damp risk. Hopefully our lawn has sunk a bit since being levelled…

I know we should have mouldy skirtings anyway from the EWI issue haha, but these seem fine so far this winter but then maybe the filled cavity has helped… or we could go digging crazy and try and put in a small amount of foundation EWI in before we do this work if that’s further likely to negate the risk of damp. But I don’t think we are willing to budge too much on the patio levels as our large garden has already had levels adjusted to meet this patio level

We can live with 1 brick below dpc and the floors are set at dpc level. Is a linear drain or pea shingle the least risky as I don’t think we can move to a step option so we will have to hope for the best. That means the patio will be just below the silver door strip on the image.

So we have 3 fairly big (one huge) opening on this face I don’t think we can make a feature out of steps! The EWI is set 100mm above dpc (I know this is totally wrong but it one part of the house dpc was set at a different level due to an extension).

So we wanted to bring the patio to about 50mm below the DPC and was thinking of using an aco drain (or linear drain). We can’t change the cavity tray the building works are done plus it sounds pretty costly on an existing house, we had initially considered painting some dpc stuff on the brickwork with a 100mm wide pea shingle channel but then didn’t think this would be as effective at preventing damp as a linear drain. One of my relatives just had a damp survey (admittedly on a older property with solid walls) and the surveyor said do not reinstate with a french drain but use a linear drain as they often cause damp and lead to more water sitting against the wall (their ground levels are already raised and cannot change them). The garden slopes away from the house. So will an linear drain lead to more likely chance of damp than pea shingle? I mean I guess this work isn’t recommend but our EWI insulation is overhanging by 110mm so maybe the splashing thing is quite low risk on the brickwork below that is exposed? I should add if we can’t bring the patio up to 50mm below dpc along the back of the house (we have a lot of not very far away from each other patio doors) then it will mean quite a drop when going outside as it’s already 150mm as it stands if we go with 50mm below dpc. Should add also our 50mm cavity is filled with eps beads, maybe the overhang with the EWI and the number of openings makes this level change all very low risk.

@Dave Jones So there is no way to achieve this it would be like a 250mm drop from the flush floors inside if we used 150mm below as bench mark. We were hoping to bring it up just below dpc to get the drop nearer to 150mm. We have some very wide bi parting doors and I don’t see how a step would work. Just to add it’s a refurbished 1960s place.

We have some sandstone paving we are laying, we are also building up the threshold to be more in line with the DPC so there isn’t such a drop from the patio doors, as such we were thinking of putting in some kind of aco drain to prevent damp, is this the best way or is there a cheaper/easier to install alternative to this option? Do we literally just set this aco drain in concrete once we’ve hopefully got the right levels? The house is 16m wide so it’s quite a wide patio!! Probably making it even harder for novices to lay correctly.. Any tips or pointers most appreciated as whilst we might not start until the weather thaws a little now we do want to get everything we need ready and have a bit of a plan on how the hell we do this.

You’d realistically need irrigation for a green wall, hardly sustainable, though there are lots of different climbing plants to suit shade/sun (planted in ground below that can give this affect & don’t worry they won’t structurally damage your building). Green roofs however go for it! In our area if you’ve got a flat or near flat roof it must be a green roof anyway, better for all the bugs, as well as preventing small rainfall events straight going down the drain (which by virtue always carry more particles helping to ruin our rivers with too many suspended particles)! https://greenrooforganisation.org/gro-information-videos/ You might find some useful resources here as a start point as they probably have the best industry guidance so far.

I can report back that everything has been resolved without cutting? just took the twin wall adaptor off slid the stand and stove along the glass contructed all the bits & slid it back in using the extending part to lift it into position, luckily the adaptor was the thinner part and gave the clearance to do this and I decided a scratch on the glass was the least risky option. Now the next issue, it’s not burning amazingly not sure if that’s the weird weather or our place isn’t drafty enough or the conifer of unknown moisture content I’m using!

@Nkoru yes that’s the one we used, it does have to be the builder who claims it though so it’s not like self build, that worked for our circumstances though as didn’t want it to drag on. Our house is basically like a new build though because we removed so much of it and added a first floor.

Hmm weird, I bought the twin wall from the same place as you… (I read your old post a long time ago when putting in the twin wall and it was cheaper there still), but oddly if the vitreous pipe went inside the twin wall that would surely mean any flue pipe liquid could run out of it, the sections I have means that the vitreous pipe is always on the outside even where it connects onto the twin wall. And yes I think I will see if I can loose any male end but it seems to slide quite far down into the stove body so might not work.

And just checking @ProDave are you saying you cut the twin wall? Or the vitreous flue? I’m just wondering if there’s another way I can bodge this so you can’t see our bad efforts. I just know we can’t cut male ends which is always the bottom end of the pipe (the section that’s always hidden) and supplier of the last section of flue stressed this too which makes sense based on the meccano I’ve just done.

So anyway just so it’s clear I need to cut 10mm off the top of the long vitreous pipe you can see in the photo to get it installed. Now I’ll start with 10mm because it will probably need 15 attempts but I’ve got an extra 220mm of error to play with as the adjustable pipe can extend this much

So yeah the most painful thing of this whole saga is the black pipe you can see in the photo of the gap had been 10mm further away we could of got the adjustable section of pipe in and then slide it up onto the twin wall!

@ProDaveI have an adjustable piece which goes in between the gap and the twin wall you can see, I couldn’t buy the right size, 500mm was too short 1000mm too long, twin wall was installed ages ago and is not moveable now. The adjustable pipe slides down into the longer section of pipe you can see as far as the end where it widens to connect onto the twin wall, I can’t cut the hidden male end on the long pipe going into the stove because it needs to be the end which reduces that goes in the stove according to the manufacturer which also means I couldn’t buy a brand of pipe that has more different lengths as it doesn’t have the right reducing end detail at the end of the pipe for the stove.

Issue is in the title we need to cut our black wood burner flue so it can fit and it will be on show, damn. I’ve got an angle grinder with some kind of diamond blade in that I can’t get off (neighbour said they used this to cut their aluminium door letterbox so I’m hoping it’s sufficient), is this really going to work to get a straight clean finish on a black pipe ??? Any Other ideas?