Gus Potter

Plus 1 to that. Once you take into account the build sequence then agree second option is more practicable. I know you have just asked about the inside but can you just check the weathering detail on the outside? This is a critical detail for longevity. Ask your Architect if they know whether the Larsen truss has been designed so both the inside and outside flanges require structural support. @Dunc Does your cladding require ventilation behind, always worth checking the fire protection detail around doors , windows and at the wall head if this is the case.

The FMB is a trade association, by subscription. Make of that what you like. This is good you have seen other work, but check that was not for a relative. Check Face book and other social media for suspicious connections. Don't assume all builders are there to rip you off, many are good honest hard working folk. Just browse and if there is a rat you'll likely smell it. A fatal mistake here is to fall under the builders "charm".. you like them but don't want to uncover bad news. Be brave and grasp the nettle. You don't have to tell them you have checked them out! If you struggle on social media then get say your kids , nieces and nephews etc to check this stuff for you, they will do it in a fraction of the time! Do more due dilligence. Check companies house if they are limited. See what other links the directors have. If not limited then this can be an advantage. If something goes horribly wrong then sometimes you can chase the builders own personal assets. Check to see where they live, go to the land registry and see if they own the home (in Scotland this cost me £3.00) and how big their mortgage is. Check to see if they hold it in joint names. You can't chase easily (and nor would you probalby I hope) if the house is in joint names and you end up putting a family out their home. If vat registered then you can check their registration. If not vat registered then you need to ask them why. If their turnover is that low then how do they build houses? Once you have done this kind of due dilligence then you need to sort out a contract that is fair to all parties. To finish on a light note. I have posted this kind of stuff before. Last year a Client engaged me and told me they had followed my advice and done the full due dilligence on myself! I thought... well at least I passed and if you want to dish it out then expect the same in return!

Agree, your statement is however cleverly worded, what you say is generally accepted as correct. But you are making a straw man arguement. Have you explored the potential of the Rosebank oil field? That is because we keep shutting them down. Have a look at what Ineos have been doing for many years in Fife Scotland. One reason it did well in the past was because it used sweet Brent crude oil from the north sea, more plastic and base chemicals, less heavy crud ( the crap) that is expensive to get rid of. No it won't in the grand scheme of things, anyway if we make the tax system attractive it's the oil and gas companies that will fund it. If we give them the same security as we seem to hand out willy nilly to the wind folk this should be welcome. It's accepted that to develop say the Rosebank field will take 10 - 15 years. Again here you are making the straw man argument. Even the development will create well paying jobs in the UK. It has less nasty stuff in it that is bad for the environment. I'm not saying this is not achievable, but it will be very much less achievable over say 30 years if we don't develop and maintain our oil and gas industry and collect taxes to fund it. As an Engineer I think you are economically naive. There is a reason for this. Brent crude is what we call a sweet oil, it has lots more useful and valuable compenents and less rubbish in it. That is why you often see it as the bench mark oil price. We have down the list a bit WTI (West Texas Intermediate) which sells for less. Then you have the stuff the Middle east sell. Again you are making a straw arguement as you are comparing apples with oranges. We have some of the best and most valuable oil off the shores of the UK. Again you just can't see the woods for the trees, mention Reform and some folk just can handle it. Is that the best you can do? But see that gas.. it does not magically come out the sea bed ready for use. It needs processed and use made of the other components. If you really are worried about the environment then we should be spending money developing our own access to sweet crude oils just 80 miles off our shores. We take them and process them responsibly. So please can you dispense with your straw man arguments as while some may fall for that type of deflection I won't.

Hang on here before you chuck in the towel. It's quite usual to find no membrane or bituminous felt under an old slate / clay tiled roof. Can you post some photos so we can have a look at what you have from the inside and the outside. In a new build yes, but when we are considering old buildings and upgrading it can actually be an advantage. The old traditional roofer ( 100 years ago) did not have access to felts and membranes so they gave their slates / tiles more head lap. We can use this to our advantage at times as the roof is really drafty, every cloud has a silver lining!

Agree a bit of air can cause havoc. One way to purge this is to shut off the other loops and open the air vent. You'll need a bucket and a few towels to catch the water. Give it a good go and don't forget to top up the inhibitor once you have finished.

Ok that is settled. First paragraph. The UK oil and gas energy resource is not "fininite" in terms of the next 50 years. There is plenty! It's just that the UK tax system makes it less attractive to extract. If we use our own resource that satisfies and mitigates your point of despot regimes, blatent abuse of human rights. Cut off their money! That is why we need to be relying on the West of Scotland oil and gas fields and fracking. Schiehallion, Loyal, and Foinaven fields. This gives us national energy security in the short to medium term and delivers well paying jobs and income taxes etc from that. . The money we get from this can then be used to drive towards zero carbon emissions. If we just import oil and gas we are paying the Arabs instead, for no benefit to ourselves. You have to remember that us Brits are great innovators, we can't do that if we have no cash! Unfortunatly we have the Greens in Scotland who don't know what a woman is, so we have much doubt about their ability to make evidenced based decisions on the oil and gas industry which impact on all of the UK. You see they can control this through the planning system not least! One of my pals is an SE who is working on this, the actual design of the rigs and how you extract oil and gas in deep water and then get it to shore. It's also to do with the quality of the oil. Much of the oil from the Middle east is a bit crap to say the least and really churns out some nasty stuff during the refining process. Ok, fair enough. But this is a typical response from lefties, mention Reform and you are far right. I mention them as an Engineer. Tice and Farage have said in their speaches that they recognise that they don't have the strength and depth within their party to run the country. But they have said that they will second people from indusrty, Engineers, Doctors to support them where they are weak. Take some time and listen to some of their speaches before you come back for a second time and ask me for evidence. In the round though I think we are of the same mind. Here you make a good pragmatic conclusion. Lastly is ok to disagree!

There you go, how easy was that! Ok to kick this off what is your opinion on nett zero? Here is roughly what I think in broad scoool terms, call it that for now. 1/ The world is an unfavourable place. We are actually lucky in the UK that we have not had a war that has really threatened out soil since 1945. I'm an SE but was trained primarily as Civil Engineer, we have a duty to the public to secure our infra structure for the next at least 50 years and dams above cities for 100- 200 years. 2/ Nett zero in the UK serves to destabalise our economy and reduces our ability to innovate. 3/ You have got yourself into a funk because I mentioned Reform!

I'm not sure if I want to engage with you as I get the feeling you are not technically minded. If you want to use abbreviations then use your abbreviation, put in brackets what that means so the rest of the folk on BH can understand and easily follow the discussion. Do that first, plain English is required at all times. To wet your apetite for discussion I'll make my case as an Engineer who has a Civic responsibility, you might find that interesting?

I think you made the right descision to step away from this. However the seller may sort it out and come back to you. At the end of the day they took your offer seriously. You wanted to by the place / fell in love with it? They have two or maybe more choices, realistic ones are: 1/ Wait for someone daft to by it. 2/ Smell the coffee, sort it out and do a deal with you. They may well come back to you as if they thought you were not serious they would have binned you earlier as a purchaser. Technically yes. But this is what we call an accidental load case. If we designed everything based on this accidental case then the cost of building would become excessive.

Perhaps read more widely.

Ok what I can tell you is that I have designed as an SE a few insulated rafts over the years, once you get down to the engineering there is no ideal world, there is a trade off between engineering cost and satisfying the window suppliers " best performance". Building houses is an art where you have to make informed compromises. You have to recognise that if you go for the best value it will dictate everything else you do and that can come at and often nasty hidden cost. If you pair everything down now when doing you basic costing it will come back to bite you. The best advice I can give is to think about who might build this for you and sound out MBC on their caveats on the ground conditions, if you need steels and so on, point loads from the structure etc. MBC are by all accounts good at what they do but they will charge you for every extra! be that funny loads or funny geometry of you house. Also, sound out local Contractors, they may tell you, keep it simple and stupid, spec stuff we can source easily, and we will deliver an air tight structure. Oh and on a light note. If you are a doggy person then leave an unheated bit in the floor so your dog goes there for respite! UFH is not good for dogs!

Interesting thread. When I was a young lad I worked at Torness, nuclear. When I went to uni at 40 my degree project submission was on nuclear and compared that with other energy sources. I got an understanding on how the western system is skewed, basically by politics and realised that is a price you pay for democracy. Cf how they work in China, no democracy, their energy policy is driven by engineers with a remit to make as much money as they can for the system, the populase come last. Later I did some design for the decomissioning at Bradwell and I revisited what I had learnt. In summary, UK policy has been driven by totally the wrong people for decades. As someone said earlier, if your vote actually mattered they would take it away from you. Reform UK at the moment. They seem to be the only party that are going to get professionals into sort out out energy market and policy, we have tried everthing else and it has failed. We need to take radical steps to safeguard our energy security not least.

Hi Don. Admire the effort you are putting in, you will be rewarded. Jeremy Harris is an icon on BH, I've learnt a lot from his posts. His spread sheet is a good aid, a great tool to use as a sense check. I've opened up the spread sheet to see what inputs you are using. I do a quick sense check, mainly to see if the numbers look ok and where you are pushing the U values to think.. how much is this going to cost, get a supplier and so on. Your inputs are screen shotted below: So to compare with the Scottish target U values, which are quite stringent but will serve you well if living further down south. The objective of my comment is to get you to think.. how much is this going to cost us to build, get local contractors interested in competing for you job and, can we spend our money in a better way. I wonder, where did you get the values you are using for your inputs? and can you post some details on how you are going to construct the basic elements of the fabric. The U values for the glazing look a bit optomistic. Best to be pragmatic and conservative at this stage to avoid disappointment later.

Hiya. A few observations. Your temporary propping looks potentially dangerous. There is no bracing to the props and the needles appear to be not able to carry the roof load, never mind any internal floor load. It may be the way the photo is taken, but please, contact your SE tomorrow or NOW, DO NOT believe your BUILDER or BC! Your gable wall is not braced so any shift in the temporary load could shove the gable wall out (all it needs is 25 - 50 mm) and that leads to an excessive / uncontrolled collapse. From the photos I see this look dangerous. The prop and the needle on the right side of your photo will be carrying a lot of load as the lintel over the first floor window will be shedding load towards it. Seriously, please get your SE out to the job as this could be massivley unsafe! BC are NOT Structral Engineers and often won't understand (justifiably) the nuances. You are potentially taking your life and family in your hands here! I don't make such comment lightly. Get your SE to not just check the temporary works but also the building sideways stability in terms of what you are building. Are you sure this is what the SE is telling you and do they know, what you are actually doing on site, and if you have deviated from their design in any way? Please take my advise. Any SE is going to help out here if there is a safety issue.

Yes, treat all this with a big pinch of salt, check their fine print. You must look at their technical spec, the range of moisture content, expansion edge gaps and so on and make sure that the way you want to live fits. In other words, say you bail out to Spain in the winter and turn the heating low.. or rent it out and folk dry their washing!