Reiver

I know the efficiency is poor, but I still think there's a place for them if you have an efficient house and hence demands are low, particularly in the NW where wind is usually much more plentiful than sun. The main stumbling block seems to be reliability at a decent cost.

It's a shame no-one seems to make a decent small helical blade Darrieus VAWT ? Not only do they seem to be able to work better on roof top mounts as they can utilise the updraught, but to my mind they look really cool, maybe even beautiful which I can't personally say about normal HAWT's even though they do produce good clean energy.

Ouch!

It's a fair project that, but you're lucky to have that spot - I love Lochcarron and will be back up there as soon as Mrs Sturgeon allows. It's somewhere I'd very much like to live - hope the hotel survives the current crisis, I've had some wonderful mad nights in there!

Thinking about the physics of this a bit more, it might be a good idea to contact your preferred lift vendor and get a base spec.from them as the required strength could vary a lot depending on the design of the posts: if they have biggish "spreaders" to distribute the force then the torque on the mounting from an unbalanced load will be a lot less than if say it's just a 500mm square plate, and the requirements for your base will follow. By friend Big Nick had one installed a few years back and the first thing the guy did was to drill some test holes in various places in his workshop floor. He wouldn't install it where Nick really wanted as there was only 5 or 6" thickness concrete there, and so it got put somewhere else where there was 10...11" IIRC. FYI, the 200mm figure Tony gave me was based on a 6m x 12m slab and being able to carry/work on a small van.

Thanks for the video @scottishjohn - very informative and I love the almost complete absence of PPE ?

Yes, I've seen them in a couple of the systems. And the guy at Insulhub said that provided the numbers were big enough you can get Isotex blocks with chamfered ends to suit your radius.

Thanks for the input lads, it's good to know that work can continue without long waits. Trevor

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My pal Tony who is a "proper" CE said off the cuff that 200mm would be a bare minimum for a "working" garage, & I've heard tell that really you want 250...300mm in the immediate area (a metre or 2 front and back I guess) around a 2 poster in case you get a badly unbalanced load which can put serious torque on the bottom fixing. If in doubt a 4 poster speads the load much more evenly and is more forgiving in terms of the base. OK, they're more expensive, but you might recoup the cost on a thinner floor.

Following the advice of @Conor and @Russell griffiths on my curved wall insulation issue, I'm looking at ICF (I like the reinforcing aspect too) and I've spent 2 or 3 days looking at the different types. Given that this project would certainly be built in somewhere which is quite North and West and mountainous (=seriously crap weather) minimising build time to roof-on seems to be a good idea. So the question springs to mind as to how long you have to leave between pours to let the concrete set please? - does it have to be the normal 28-ish days to full strength?

Borrow or better still get yourself a terrier or a sausage dog - they'll sort them out and you'll have years of fun with them too.

Can ICF be "bent" that tight? The inside radius would be something like1.2m - it's a tower for a spiral staircase BTW.

Thanks for the suggestions - I will go investigate and price up.

So on my mad project idea (pics to be posted when I have accumulated enough info to do a reasonable 3D rendering) I have a couple of curved section cavity walls, which will need insulating obviously: ideally to at least 125mm if my sums are correct. I'm thinking that EPS beads are the most likely answer, but are there any other technologies that could work I wonder? FYI one section will have a radius of approx 1.5m to the insulation, the other about 2.7m.

Aye, well it might have to be that if funds won't stretch, it would also be quicker and easier to put up that way too I guess; build the shed first, then you have a store/shelter/welfare unit to work from for rest of the the project. It all depends on the cost which is my task for spare time over the next month or so, as well as learning about the various methods that could be used to build it. Blockwork with an old fashioned render is an obvious one for the tower, but are there other options I wonder?

I'm Trevor and hail from Cumbria - where for once it's not raining ??? I've been looking for a property to buy round these parts or up into Scotland for a couple of years (currently renting) but finding somewhere with the facilities I need (which include at least 800 ft2 of outbuildings for workshop space and a bit of land) at an affordable price in the right location is proving problematical - the pressures of 2nd home ownership and planners seemingly giving permission willynilly to convert any outbuilding into residential do not help. So a pal of mine said "why don't you build summat yerself? - you're a bright lad" That was immediately discounted and stuffed to the back of the cupboard as it sounded like like a lot of hassle, but now partly out of necessity and partly out of curiosity I'm sort of coming round to the idea; at the very least I'm going to investigate it as an option. First of all I looked at the straightforward option: buy a wee croft with PP, put up a "kit" house + a steel framed garage/workshop/store for the farming bits, pretty straightforward, could start on that tomorrow as I know a suitable plot that's up for grabs. Then the inevitable happened as words like "normal" "easy" and "straightforward" don't seem to sit well in my life. It kind of started subconsciously a year or two back when I looked at buying Inverneill House down on the Kintyre peninsula, rather liked the idea of living in a tower. Tower house life may well be in my blood as my mother's family were Carruthers, well known Border reivers back in the day and of course living in those times such a spot was kind of a necessity. Then more recently I came across Kilmartin castle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilmartin_Castle) a very pretty little spot but lacking in the outbuildings. Then purely by chance seeing a little thumbnail down the bottom of a page I came across this spot: (https://www.struttandparker.com/application/files/9014/6350/7107/INV160039.pdf) - it had sold a while previously but showed that building a tower house with modern materials was well feasible. And instead of having the big hall with the fancy flags, that'll be the workshop/man cave (I have a large CNC router to accomodate, so it needs to be big!). So I'm looking at costing up something like the RH 2/3 of that spot only biased towards sustainable, low CO2 living, so there'd be solar and maybe a vertical axis turbine on the tower? And I'd like it to be maybe a bit more true to the historical precedent with the groundfloor windows a bit higher up and everything a bit more irregular. It'll be fun looking at it anyway! edit: sorry the links aren't linking - doesn't seem to work.