Gus Potter

Very good advise given here from @saveasteading

That is a very good practical question! If you have a cavity wall and using twin beams under each leaf then you can use M16 or M20 threaded rod in the web. The rods need to go as close to the top flange as you can so the nut clears the root of the web. You get the web drilled and then align the beams so the holes line up. Weave the rod through and wind on nuts so there is a nut both sides of both the webs... then you fiddle about progressivly tightening the nuts. Now you can only do that if you have a reasonably wide cavity and beam flanges not too wide as you need to get a spanner in between the beams. OR you can be really clever and bolt the rods to the first beam with a nut each side of the beam turned up tight, measure exactly where the inside of the other beam web needs to be, wind on two nuts and turn them in opposite directions so they lock... a locking nut. Then the second beam can be slid sideways onto the rods and you put the last nut on. But all this needs good planning as there are probably props etc in the way. The other easy to do it is to put a flat plate over the tops of the beams and bolt that down to the top pre drilled flanges. The plate acts like a strut. The objective of both methods is to prevent the top flange buckling sideways. Rods can be a bit of a palaver but if you have set your mind on mitigating cold bridging rods work well in this context as their cross section area is a lot less than flat plates. I'm sure there are other ways to do this? but that is some..

Yes looks like you have some good soil to work with plenty spare capacity. You can get rafts (strip founds to a lesser extent) to work well below these values. Here is a thing for all. If you get a ground investigation done you may see the soil descriptions. Maybe written like this CLAY with sand or.... SAND with clay, silt etc. The word in capital letters denotes the dominant component of the soil. Now if we are working in soil that has a dominant CLAY content we are interested in the swell shrinkage potential of the CLAY as that is driven by proximity of say trees and where you live in the country. Up north it rains more so excepting trees the founds don't need to be so deep, but down south you need deeper founds as the drying effect penetrates deeper. Where you have a dominant SAND content we are much less interested in the swell shrinkage potential but very interested in where the water table is and where it might be in the future. The soil investigation may give us a bearing capacity of the SAND. Sand gets it's bearing strength from intergranular friction between the particles and this is driven by the density of the sand and what is above it adding load. But when the water table rises the water reduces the effective density of each sand particle so there is less friction. In practice if we start with a bearing capacity of a SAND type soil of 100 kN/m^2 but find the water table may rise to within the pressure bulb under the found we then often say we are losing half the friction between the particles so we will half the bearing capacity to 50 kN/m^2.

Yes spot on looks like good engineering. These are really important as if you have not followed the SE's instructions to the letter re the bolts you have cause to worry as the beam capacity could be reduced by some 40 - 60% as a guess..

Ok, thanks for that.. every day is a school day.

Post overlapping here. Good point about the Hornbeam. Have had a scant back at the ground report, seems to be a confined site and access. There could be a lot of ground water flow or negligable.. depends on the lenses of gravel / sand and the topography, water regime. But the elegance of trench fill is that even if 1/3 is rubbish you still have plenty gas in the tank.. where as piles.. especially screw piles.. taking lateral load.. does not float my boat. Also don't yet know how high the structure is that is going on top. But in the round I'm thinking trench fill, cantilever slab say 300 - 350 thick with 20m rebar in the top and associated anticrack rebar.. that will carry a good load from a house? My thoughts are to make all the stuff about the trees become a mute point, make any party wall agreement easier to negotiate.. mitigate risk as the site seems to be lower than the surrounding buildings. In Scotland the rules are a bit different but same principles apply. For me it's looking at the job in the round and not getting hung up on piles.

Yes agree but when the customers back is turned.. ? In some ways dabs are not that bad as it allows the dabs to dry more so when you get frost there is less water for ice crystals to expand?

Just a thought.. have not really examined all the detail but.. what about this line of thought.. You have a confined site, trees, it is in a bit of a hole, probable ground water and neighbours close by that could be "touchy". Good news is you have refusal at 2.6 m so lets say that is where we have something we can work off. But we need to know more about the ground water.. and how fast it will flow will you do trench fill. Could we do a test and use a sump pump? I would explore doing a trench fill 1.0 - 1.4 m in from the boundary. You look at the stand up time of the excavation, you are working in a safer zone (further away from the boundary and loads beyond the boundary / unexpected things that are more difficult to control) as not to close to the boundary so if things start to move you have more time to recover as opposed to getting complex by working right on the boundary. Also for example it takes you further away from the trees, primary roots etc and you have a "soft zone" to run all services around the outside. What you then do is cantilever your structural slab out to the boundary / where it needs to go and put the superstructure on the edge of the cantilever. We do this a lot when we are fitting a commercial building into a gap site. I have no objection to using screw piles myself but they are not so good at carrying sideways.. wind loads.. a good circular pile has more lateral bearing area against the soil. But I would alway look at the simple stupid first even if just to rule out.. like trench fill and a cantilever slab. Is this worth exploring for you?

Good question. My thoughts and a bit of tecky stuff. The capacity of the ground to bear the load is probably not a major concern. I think this hinges on the thickness of the hardcore you have underneath and what is below that. Monoblock is quite forgiving in that if one or two blocks move about you won't see it. But when you start using large format tiles they can protest. There are two things here to consider. Does the underlying soil dry out in the summer, say if you have trees near or just live down South. If the soil dries unevenly (say at the edges of the patio what happens? Is it clay that shrinks, chalk that shrinks much less or open textured gravel that is good in this context? Next is frost.. where do you live and how cold does it get and for how long does that cold persist. Persistant cold can result in quite a lot of frost heave in clay type soils, a bit in soft chalk and less in gravel. Say you have your new tiles.. they may well be laid on mortar dabs, then some hard core.. say all of that is 30mm for the tile + 40 for the dab (average) and 100 hardcore that is not succeptible to frost. That gives you 170mm before the heave potential ground. Now the NHBC require founds to be 450mm below ground level for frost heave for a house designed for a 50 year life span. But this is a patio.. what next? Have a look round and see what vegitation / trees you have. Are the roots going to be growing under the patio? If so they will increase in size.. cause heave and dry the ground between winter and summer, shrinkage and swell. Solution.. manage the garden. Frost heave. At shallow depth you can get differing amounts. But if you have say an open gravel ground, low / minimal ground water flow small ice crystals will form and then stop. But if you have ground, say a clay / silt mix that has a slow flow of water this allows the ice crystals to grow larger as they are fed by the water and cause a lot of heave. The solution to this is to provide drainage around the outside of the patio but not too deep as you don't want to suddenly do something that will upset the house founds. Normally we would never have bothered about this but modern patio finishes are now a big investment so they need a bit more thought. Hope this info helps.

Hello all. A bit of technical stuff and a few tips on self building an insulated Kore (say) slab. Yes spot on. For a bit of fun here is an bit more of an explanation as to why and what is more important (in my view) for insulated raft design and construction on self builds. Roughly the plate load test involves a stiff metal plate, usually 300, 450 or 600mm square, a jack and a strain gauge and a load gauge (ring). The plate goes on the ground, and you jack against something heavy. You can create a big cradle weighed with kentledge.. expensive for smaller stuff or you can use a 16 tonne excavator to provide the kentledge. Excavator is the easy way as you drive it about.. if you have the room. You start to jack measure the amount the plate sinks by at what load, plot a graph etc and from that you derive what is called the CBR ratio (California Bearing Ratio) based as a percentage value. The CBR value is a number that is often desired for highway design. In a domestic context we may want to know this if say we are building a few houses and the shared access is to be adopted by the Highways agency or for some reason the fire brigade have a particular requirement for access during a fire.. they need to know the access will not sink under the weight of a turn table ladder.. you would have to have an exceptional site for this.. but just to mention anyway. Another time you may need to know the CBR ratio is if you are doing piling, need a heavy rig and need to design a piling matt for the rig to safely get in and do the job. The piling Contractor will do due dilligance and often ask for this number especially if they are designing the mat. If you find you get stuck on this there is the option of proof rolling. Here we may run a roller with a dead axle weight of 5 tonnes over the ground.. if it moves about like pastry then we know it is not promising. Now a key thing about the CBR (plate) test is that it only gathers good information down to 300 to 600mm, much depends on the size of the plate and the ground you are testing. The pressure / stress the plate exerts on the ground is roughly the shape of a slightly extended (droopy) light bulb (incandescent). Lastly it is possible using some rules of thumb, charts to roughly convert the CBR value to a value that is roughly equivalent to how elastic a material is called the modulus of elasticity and this is good as we now have units that are compatible with our hard core, slab insulation and concrete slab above.. not quite but closer. But on an insulated raft we are probaly using an insulation 300mm thick on 150 - 300 mm of well compacted hardcore. These spread the load a lot so the underlying formation ground is much more evenly loaded. The CBR value is now not really that useful any more to us on BH. What is useful is the value the SE puts on the soil they see in the hole as this gives them the allowable (presumed) bearing capacity of the ground. Often you see a value of 100 - 120 kN/m^2 in decent clay soils. That value equates to you being able to put about ten tonnes per square metre on the ground with the expectation you might get some 15 -25mm settlement in a clay soil. Houses are designed to move about a bit. Now if we know the allowable bearing capacity of the underlying soil, know we are using good well compacted hardcore, know what kind of insulation thickness we need and roughly what kind of concrete slab is going on top we can then design all these layers for the loads. What 99% of the time drives the design (Kore etc) is the slab loadings (slab point loadings / spread out loads) and how these interact with the insulation directly below. This is the critical bit as it drives slab thickness, amount of rebar required and the complexity of the slab / rebar and that is one place where money can be lost. The SE then iterates the design to get the most economic slab by balancing rebar, concrete thickness, concrete strength, concrete shirinkage (movement joints, water bars if applicable) and the underlying layers of insulation etc. OK. Things some you can look / think about when doing an insulated slab to set you on your way for a good job. 1/ When you excavate out the ground to the level that you are going to start from.. called the formation level look after the virgin ground surface, be quick to get a covering layer on it if say clay or friable chalk to stop it softening in the rain / frost or drying out too much. remember that value of 100 kN/m^2 .. if you soften the top 50 -150mm that bit it will move later. The last time that soil may have seen daylight could be some 100k years ago so treat it gently. 2/ Lay your hardcore in thin layers 100 -150mm thick and get a good whacker. Take extra care at corners.. try and get the compaction even.. no soft spots but also no really hard spots. Hard spots can break the back of a foundation.. strip foundations can suffer in particular if you have say a big boulder that does not move. What you are trying to go is to create a platform that moves up and down in an even way. Rafts are less succeptible but never the less. 3/ Often you need to run drains under and that involves excavating a trench and back filling. The objective here is to try and backfill so the filling is about as squashy as the ground next to it. If you were to say backfill with a lean mix 10N concrete you create a really hard spot on a line that invites a floor slab to crack, if you chuck disturbed clay back in that has got wet you'll now have a nice soft line under the slab. Hope this helps someone.

It's a dilemma that lot of new folk encounter on BH.. Do I post stuff that I'm not sure about.. folk worry they may seem daft. What I can tell you is that you are on the right road to getting a lot of help here on BH. Not just on the design stuff but where to buy your materials and so on. I had a quick look at the plan drawings you posted. All good with dimensions. But as an SE / Designer I need to see the elevations you are thinking about. There are a lot of folk here on BH that are great designers. Some are actually Architects, Civil Engineers, Heating Engineers, Electrical Enginners, self builders / extenders the list is long so forgive me if I have not listed. Also I learn new stuff on BH every time I log on so we are all on a learning curve. M sugestion is this: 1/ Provide the elevation drawings. 2/ Put gridlines on your drawings so folk can say .. see that beam on gridline A1 suggest do this.. a lot of Architects don't do this.. but the good ones I work with do.. and just hide the layer in their drawings. It makes it easy on BH to identify what we are talking about. Also when I detail steel work it can relate to the grid.. time spent now will help later. Get the gridlnes into your head and that will make it easier when you are talking to the builder. If you can do the elevations then that will help to complete the picture for me and probably for other BH folk. At the moment I can't comment as I don't know what you are trying to hold up.

Good thread. But for the younger members from an "old crusty".. may save you money.. choice is yours. My thoughts and a bit of back ground. I worked at Torness Nuclear power station, and have designed stuff for the decomissioning of Bradwell Nuclear Station so apreciate the decomissing costs. Mostly now I do domestic stuff.. Part of my Masters was to do with the energy supply in the UK.. I started out as a local builder.. so did not go into Uni right away.. I also had a spell at designing farm buldings with 40 kW pv when the grants were good. Yes I was right into it.. how the grants worked and so on. Have to say one at least went on fire as the invertor did not do what was written on the tin. Lucky for me I was not in the firing line.. but it burnt well and no one got hurt. Yes, I'm near sixty but I still practice so have not quite turned into a fossil... and can't see me going woke any time soon. Anyway my thoughts are.. Marcro and from an SE / designer point of view looking to the future. If you are an environmentalist and into PV.. or any other home automation just to be blunt you have a living in a bubble. For the following macro reasons not least: 1/ China are becoming dominant to the extent that they are going to influence what happens in fifteen/ twenty say years time, unless they invade Taiwan.. then we will have much more to worry about. 2/ The stuff that we rely upon comes from mostly China and the "belt and braces" and most importantly hegemony that they have fostered. I also grew up in Africa and follow how the Chinese have weaved their way in that continent.. and some think the British Colonials were bad! 3/ All this stuff we are introducing.. electronics.. EV cars requires for example, mining and invites destruction of the environment.. 4/ Have you thought about getting replacement parts and how much these are going to be in say 10 - 20 years time? Remember washing machines don't last that long.. you MHVR is intrinsic to the house so should be able to preform in the long term. Do you honestly expect that you MHVR is going to last the design life of the house? You'll be lucky if it works for five years and each ear yoy need to change the filters.. Look folks you have to wake up and realise that while we are trying to save every extra penny in the UK other countries are shafting the environent and the global eco system we need to produce the "air we all breathe" You also need to recognise that you are buying filters, the running cost.. and inherant redundancy. Get your head round this. If you think strategically... The best thing we can do is to try and adapt our building systems to use the materials we have in the UK. We have lots of clay.. if we supported our Farmers and brick industry we could have bricks and wool.. good for insulation in the right combination. Also all locally sourced and provides jobs... I could list more but we have in the uk many of the things we need to protect the environment without haveing to ship in stuff. Look there is word that in the south of the UK they is Lithium for batteries.. in Scotland we have the wind to charge them up. Just maybe we could start to think.. hey... see in the south of the UK our houses are getting a bit to hot in the summer.. can we pinch ideas from Adobe houses that rely upon passive stack ventilation. Yes there is a bit in the building regs about this but if you think about it.. it's a controlable chimney. They do it in Spain for example just here BC don't help. Anyway.. kids need fresh air not filtered air.. just think about it if you are a parent. Yes you may think I'm off the mark here.. but see in ten years time when you can't find replacement parts for you MHVR and home automation other than from China. I'll get the last laugh.. if I'm still here. If not well you made you own bed. I have a house with UF and some nice bells and whistles.. but these come at a cost.. there is not a couple of weks that goes by when something does no break down.. You'll end up saying.. the house was great for the first month.. but there are loads of things not working and it is getting on my tits. When I go to see a Client I point out the good bits and the bad.. For example just this weekend two dimmer light units have failed out of about 16.. and that is in the first 18 months of installation .. and they have to come from China. I can fix this myself but what if you are not OK with diving into electrics.. how much is the spark going to cost you? To finish.. I'll appeal to your wallet. Do you think that having MHVR is a good or bad selling point? Can you demontrate to a buyer that it all works, what value is a Surveyor going to attach to it.. is it like a dodgy gas boiler... at least a gas boiler has a Gas safety certificate .. your MHVR just has.. cowboy written all over it!

You'll get great help here on BH and support. I'm an SE / Designer, do a lot of domestic stuff but can only really chip in a bit. What I can say is that the breadth and depth of knowledge on BH is astounding, and it's right up to date in real time. The great thing for me is that there are loads of folk just starting out and are working hard. One of the reasons I responded to you was that I felt that you have put a lot of effort into reading the regs and to get your design as far as you can. If you do post your drawings and thoughts your big problem is going to be how you digest the feed back you get! But if you can it will save you money and you may get something you may thought you can't afford at this stage.

Posts have over lapped will read yours now.

I would love to chip in more but need more info to give a reasoned response. You are right in that any vertical load bearing beam needs a structural support. You may not need the return masonry.. the buttress. If you can post your rough scheme and let's see what comments that generates. Then we can look at the whole thing in the round.. we can all have fun helping you and that will hopefully give you the info you need to move onto the next stage.. better informed. You'll get loads of info here on BH.. I learn new stuff all the time here.

I would go galvanised. If you think about it Catnic and Keystone for example cold formed steel lintels are galvanised. Also they are probably over some nice door / windows.. the last thing you want is to spoil the effect. SE wise.. external steels.. lintels for example can cause big problems if corrosion sets in.. it lifts the masonry.. not good. Now galvanising comes at a cost. You can try and use special paints / treatments.. but avoid on a self build.. you find it's load of practical trouble. To do a good job you have to have the tools to prepare the steel to accept the coating. Here is a thing.. you can drive down the galvanising cost. First let's say you you live in.. Oxford.. your steel fabricator may have a choice of steel fabricators and they will have a choice of galvanisers. Some small.. some large. The big galvanisers have 6.0 m long or more galvanising baths. The smaller ones 4.0 m long.. they do say a lot of gates for farmers. Now if you have a 4.0 m long bath you can dip an 8.0m beam.. they dip one end at a time... called double dipping.. normally not good in a social context but good for us on BH! But I think you'll get the best price from the smaller galvanisers as the big baths are for big jobs.. not the self builder. If you live in Scotland then your choice of local galvaniser's is limited., you can send it down south but you have the extra transport cost. You'll need to be a double dipper if you have long beams. Now let's say you have a big house with a 9.0m beam, rules you out on getting competetive quotes from the small galvanisers. But you then say to your fabricator and SE.. can we split the beam into two or three? If you do this you need to have beam connections.. but that can work in terms of cost. For a bit of fun.. your big beam may be over an expensive set of bifold doors that are sensitive to deflections. If you start to splice the beam then the connections can move if say you use 16mm ordinary bolts.. they get drilled in 18mm hole. Thus you could get potentially 2.0mm of slip. Some SE's say bolts need to be high strength friction grip.. needs the right tooling and expertise.. comes at a cost and your local builder will not be keen and add on a bit to the price. It's not really the price.. builders and fabricators don't want the hassle. A practical way is to say.. lets build the structure, load up say the roof.. get all the deads loads on the thing we can.. get the SE round for a look. If I'm doing this.. for a bit of drama.. but also recognising that we are using the cheeper ordinary bolted connections that can slip I get a heavy hammer and give the steel whack., some times ( not often) you get a bang and it shifts.. but that is the bolts bedding in. It's also a great way of heading off the really keen SE / BC checker. Now we can measure up for the glass etc. Often we look to keep deflections over bifolds say to less than 4.0 - 8.0 mm .. nice to know that you have addressed some of the potential bolt slip.. and it gives you ammunition if the glass door folk start to argue later on if the doors start to stick.

Fantastic.. it's great fun, sometimes frustrating but sounds like you are putting a lot of thought into it and reading up, reading around and expanding your knowledge. You'll reap the rewards of your efforts. The best thing you can do is to post what you have in mind in terms of conceptual design. Don't be embarressed if you think they are rough looking (you want to see some of mine!) and you're not under examination. If you do this you'll get loads of help, ideas and suggestions.. then you can pick out the best bits, discard the ones that don't suit. For all... here are two key points: Many two storey modern houses have big open plan spaces on the ground floor and big glazed openings. While this is ok and can be designed for SE wise if you don't want to break the bank then there are a couple of things (not least but start here) that you want to aim do. Try and avoid a layout that results in the roof loading landing over / near the middle of the big glazed openings unless it is spread out. With big open plan spaces you often have a floor (maybe another?) above that may need to have long spanning joists thus you may need to split up the joist span with a transfer beam.. try and avoid transfer beam end loads landing over glazed openings. You can do it.. it just cost more as you need to control deflection. Also big openings reduce the amount of solid walls you have to stop the building moving sideways as per next point. This other key point is what we call lateral (global / overall) building stability.. we need to design the house so it does not move sideways in the wind. This is different from "buttressing" covered in the regs for small buildings. Yes.. if you add up all the small buildings guidance bit you could well end up with every wall being structural.. and then find that non of it works anyway in terms of point loading from transfer beams and global lateral stability. The above said you are on your way (well done you taking the time to study) by recognising that the individual wall panels need to be braced to stop them from buckling sideways, out of the vertical plane. The buckling effect is commonly caused by two things.. the fact that the vertical load from above does not sit directly over the centre of the wall and by addition of wind suction / pressure loads. And you have movement joints.. it's quite complex to arrive at a reasonably economic solution and all this changes depending on the type of construction.. masonry, timber frame, SIPS, ICF. Roughly concrete blocks shrink after laying and clay bricks swell over a long period of time. But both move about depending on the temperature. Generally I get nervous when a block wall gets over 5.0m long.. and if I was designing using a traditional English clay brick I would not stretch it to 9.0 m without a movement joint on a self build unless I new exactly what brick you were using and had control over the mortar. Basically it's self build and the brickie may be hand mixing so there lies the risk. Good point.. at the right time you can detail this.. you let the lintel slip at one end and put a small movement joint above. Now that has made me think.. You are right.. but both the English and Scottish regs are kind of giving rules of thumb, small building guidance... maybe also called deemed to comply.. if you do this and provided there is nothing "odd round about" it will be ok.. maybe.. In terms of the regs in this context a lot of them were written a long time ago.. call it tacit knowledge but also a lot of thought has been put into it.. by some clever folk.. and each reg has to be read in conjunction with all the others. They also get updated so let's take them as current. My thoughts on the 6.0m thing is that beyond that you may get a lot of defection in say a joist / steel beam. That causes the end to rotate more.. the guidance assumes a simple support at the joist / beam ends. The rotation introduces (springs to mind) two deterimental effects. The first is that it shifts the centroid of the bearing closer in span.. thus you get an eccentricity of loading on the wall.. introduces a bending moment which masonry is not ameniable to... it can significantly reduce the load bearing capacity of the wall. The other one is that if you are using timber joists (if you could get them to span that far as you say) then you'll get concentrated load and crushing of the timber. Or if using steel you need to check for crushing at the inside face of the block.. well you don't as you design the steel beam to deflect no less than say span / 360 (12mm is a also good number... but not over glazing) so you reduce the beam end rotation and the problem goes away. Yes keep posting and loads of folk will chip in.. then you will be in the best place to make informed decisions as to how to spend your money.

BIG POINT from George.. Use strong boys with great caution! The below is not how it should be done.. I stopped this job.. and went for emergency dead propping just to stop it falling down. The props and strongboys you see are not just holding up the outer skin of masonry but the inner leaf which supports the roof and also the first floor joists were spanning onto the inner leaf. The bottom of the props are sitting on the patio slabs.. I had investigated the ground and the soil below the slabs was as soft as putty. Designed a full propping / wind bracing scheme for the slapping including diagonal wind bracing and the internal propping to hold up the inner floor. Client engaged builder off their own back as they were the cheepest. Builder ignored it all (my proping design) and went for the above. I was actually surprised that the building had not fallen down / cracket to bits by the time I got there. Note the "juanty prop" second from the right.. and the STRONG BOYS rated at 340 kg as @George When I challenged the tosser builder he said.. I'm insured! Very glad to say no one got hurt.

That's a lot of tough questions! Ok my thoughts. Well you are at least 1.0m away from the boundary so that eases the fire boundary conditions which opens up the opportunity for a light weight cold formed steel frame or a hot rolled steel frame. Next is your budget and your expectations. A lot of folk think a garage should be like a house.. yes it needs to stay up as long as a house and be safe but in the main it's an unheated building and not occupied.. I'll come to the cars in terms of keeping them bonish dry in a bit which is different. Assuming the garage is 8.0m wide and 12.0m long then it becomes hard to make modest masonry work without piers, wind posts and so on. Much also depends on your eaves and ridge height.. that is a big driver. My first thoughts.. you have cars so maybe have practical skills so would be comfortable around a hot rolled steel portal frame and an attention to detail.. be able to measure! Two gable frames with a central frame, purlins between. Floor slab.. well you can do what is sometimes called a tied pad found for these small buildings.. here the DPC / DPM is not continuous but if you treat this as a workshop / garage, pour and compact the concrete well then to all intents and purposes the concrete is waterproof.. that is where the savings lie for example! A tied pad found has a slab that has the pads under the columns cast at the same time. Best thing to do is to post some sketches of what you are thinking about and we'll all chip in. If you are storing classic cars then you really have to stop dripping condensation from the roof. Normally we use a default of 40mm PIR on the roof in an unheated building. Depends on your location but if more up North or say in Linconshire the maybe 60mm PIR is a safer bet. In the round though need a bit more info to contribute constructively. Things that would help.. eaves height and what temperature you want to store the cars and work in when you have time off. Then we can play.. what about an engine lift / hoist?

That's a red herring. What you probably have is that they have have not landed the flooring sheets over a joist and where the have they have not put in noggings.. basic bad workmanship. It seems to me that they are pulling the wool.. ask them.. what does the strong back do structually and what load is it carrying? How does the strong back influence the preformance of the floor sheeting? The Eggar spec says all sheet ends should be supported. My gut feeling is that to save money the have not landed the flooring sheet ends over the joists to save on noggings. If you are geting noise from the pipes.. they probalby have used the wrong brackets.. maybe fixed hard to the timber so when they cool down and shrink the cause a creaking sound. If you want then post few more photos.

Hi @Conor If that is glass above the small detail you have posted.. it looks a bit suspect.. the method of connection.. Post more detail.. if you want to avoid disappointment and want to keep folk safe. It looks to me like neither your SER Engineer or the glass folk will take responsibility for this.. so it is down to you to understand the issues of what is quite complex to design. To put it in a nut shell the glass folk test on a stiff test rig to verify the safe loads... what you have detailed is a mile off so you glazing won't pass muster and you SER Engineer will bail out.. read their fine print! I recommend that you nut this out before drilling any holes. It may be that you can regig the detail to make it better and for less work! If you want fesse up and provide the manufactures' connection details and load tables for the track I'll chip in to give you a bit of advice on how you sort this out., not just for you but for all on BH. Also your detailing.. bolt clashes and buildability.. it may be that you are using say Tekla or Revit where you are getting a depth of view rather than a true section.. it all looks a bit crap on the screen shot you have posted!

I'm a bit confused as you are jumping about a bit. I'll be happy to chip in but can you repost separating the surface water from the foul water. It seems to me that they are two different things? If you are in an EA Zone 1 that is to do with your foul water.. surface water is a completely different animal. Your starting point here is to understand your site the size of the house and the plot size it sits on.. and that gives you some figures to start with. You'll maybe need to put in a bit of legwork here but may well save you in the long run. If you want a good answer from BH that could save you money then you need to give more info.

Good spot asking that they (wind posts) seem small.. you have a feeling something is a bit off? You have just demonstrated one of the first steps in competancy.. if it looks wrong it probably is! So for all on BH.. if it smells like.. "off" to you then start asking questions! Hope you can glean something from the following general explanation and adapt it to your particular design. I simplify things a bit but the intention is to convey the basic principles, still a long story though! also forgive my spelling and grammer. Ok to start let's say you have a masonry external wall that has a typical window and a door in it. The window is in one room and the door in the other. Between the window and door you have a masonry wall (internal wall) that ties into to the external wall. You may want to take away the internal wall to form say an open plan space. As the internal wall is bonded to the external wall you lose the benefit of the internal wall stopping the external wall moving out / into the garden. The internal wall is acting as what we call a lateral restraint... to stop the external wall from moving in and out. Or you may just have a big long room with a window and a door on the external wall. But the window only extends so far down from the ceiling so you only have a relatively short bit of slender masonry between the window and top half of the door frame.. but change the window to a full height door and now you have a much longer column of masonry between the now two doors. Generally masonry columns can in theory take a lot of vertical load provided the load goes straight down the centre of what we call the neutral axis. For ease of explanation imagine you have a square post or rectangular column. The neutral axis is in the same place as the centre of gravity.. lets just say it's the centre of gravity. If this was the only thing that happens we could be knocking holes in walls with glee and leaving slender masonry columns and all would be ok. If you think about it you may jack up your car, put a concrete block under it and dive underneath or sit a heavy greenhouse on a concrete block? The block does not crush.. but jack the car up 1.0m and pile the blocks up you can see they may wobble/ coggle and buckle sideways... called a lateral failure.. the blocks don't crush they buckle sideways and will be able to carry a lot less load than their compressive strnght load. But in real life the roof loads and loads from say first floor joists / roof truss don't act directly over the centre of gravity of your newly created column and thus they also cause a bending effect in the masonry.. the column wants to bow inwards or outwards as the off centre load causes what is called a bending moment in the column. If you take a ruler and support the ends and push down in the middle with your finger then when you bend the ruler the bending "force" is called the bending moment. The bottom of the ruler stretches (tension) and the top is in compression. If you were able to compress the ruler at the edges end on you would see that it also wants to bend a bit in the middle.. and this genrerates what is called often an eccentric bending moment. Now masonry is good in compression but we avoid creating any tension in the mortar beds as mortar is broady speaking only meant to take compression. In summary when you create a masonry column you need to know where the roof and floor loads sit in relation to the "centre of gravity" of your new masonry column. Next the wind loading: When the wind blows it can create suction or pressure load on the doors / glass. The load on the glass goes to the frames and this gets transferred to the surrounding masonry.. often the new column, unless the window manufacturer can show that their glazing system truly spans from top to bottom and does not load the column. Ask the question. If you get an answer then please report back. Most windows and doors have brackets up the sides.. they must be transferring some horizontal load to the column? This wind can make a huge difference as it can really introduce a significant horizontal loading to the column. All of a sudden when you check this new column for the wind loading it fails by miles and I mean by miles! .. as it's now taking suction pressure loads from the glass. OK what do we do now? One simple way is to calculate the vertical load from say the roof / floor joists and check the masonry column for that only. If there are lots of off centre loads from above we work out how much bending effect they are causing in the new masonry column. Next we work out how much wind pressure suction is acting on the glass and what bending effect this causes in the new column. We look at how the window / door frames work. We introduce a vertical "wind post" that carries the wind horizontal loads and the bending effect from say the roof and floor joists not being over the centre of gravity of the column. We then design the "wind post" to carry the sideways horizontal wind and eccentric bending loads from above and make sure the post is connected to something solid at the bottom and top. We decouple the problem into downwards loads and sideways (lateral) loads. Lastly we recouple the wind post and masonry. We can design the wind post so that it may carry the sideways loads but if in doing so it bends by 10.0mm in the middle then the masonry will also have to move by 10.00mm.. as the wind post is connected to the masonry.. not good! In practice what we do is to look at each bit of the design and say.. how much can we let the wind post bend by (which usually determines it's size) without cracking the masonry and finishes. If you look up the data that the wind post manufacture's give on their wind posts.. they are a bit.. vauge! A lot work on horizontal deflection of height / 300 /360.. some less some more.. but they then introduce a big caveat.. which is it's.. up to you to check the rest.. and your glass etc! Say you have a 2400mm ceiling height... 2400 / 300 = 8.0mm horizontally. Now if we were to bend a masonry column by that amount horizontally.. you doors also .. may complain. If you want to be realistic then design on height say of H/750 to 1000.. also remember that there will be some stretch and play in the fixings so you'll get some extra movement here.. 2400 / 750 = 3.2mm or less. Now you can calculate how much the masonry joint will open up on the outside / inside and if it will recover and not let the water in (crack the render).. Remember though that wind post don't always have to be steel.. I do plenty that are made of timber wind posts as this lets you tailor the job to joiners that you may already have on site. @LSBTo finish. Hope this helps you on your way. It's a bit long but if still stuck then post some elvation drawings and a bit more info.

For all.. you can do a lot to help yourself..here is some old scoool stuff that should save you money .. get it right. I live in an ex council house that is in a terrace. The mains supply off the street is 3/4" (~22mm) and that one pipe serves all three houses. Now the static pressure say at 3.00am in the morning is 4.0 bar just say as we are all in bed.. When we all get up in the morning and start turning on the taps.. we don't have anything like 4.0 bar as soon as the flow starts . Once the flow starts we have loses due to every bend in the pipe.. so this idea of having 3.0 - 4.0 bar static pressure is bollocks.. you need to know the pressure combined with the flow rate at the point of delivery.. if you don't then you could waste a lot of money. To put it another way I could supply your house with 8 bar in a 10mm pipe at 3.00 am.. akin to a heavily furred old lead pipe where you have chalk soil. But try and fill a bath.... the laws of hydraulics means that as soon as the flow starts the static pressure drops.. often like a stone.. and so does the flow rate don't take my word for it do your research. That is why we have accumulators for mains water if weneed them. Maybe we should all go back to looking at the basic hydraulic equations and understand what we are talking about before we splash the cash? Folk say 4.0 bar at the street.. yes fine if you have a modern 25mm alkathene pipe under say 50- 75 m run. The first thing you do is ask when assessing any supply is to ask.. what type of supply do I have; is it metered and what type of restriction to flow applies in terms of pipe diameter (and bends in the pipe) and at the meter. Next test the static pressure at 3.00 am and and then again at 6.00 - 8.00 am .. that is when folk bath their kids..get up in the morning.. use your judgement on where you live and how you want to live. Get a bucket of known volume and test the flow rate at 3.00 am and at 6.00 - 8.00 am To nail this down put a pressure tester on the line when you are filling the bucket.. now you know flow rate and pressure when the water is running. Now you at least have some ball park figures on how the water supply to your house behaves.. Give this data on what you have measured to your heating plumbing Engineer.. otherwise.. up to you I suppose. If you don't know how the water gets into your house and how it behaves when you turn on the tap how are you supposed to make an informed decision when selecting the right system for you and spending thousands of pounds? Gather this information and you are on your way to getting you plumbing right at the right price. I know it sounds like a bit of hassle but if you gather the basic info yourself you'll at least know if folk are trying to sell you a pup?

Yes if a load bearing wall. Even if it was load bearing then the odd stud 10.0mm out of alignment can be often sorted SE calculation wise...takes a lot of effort to prove but often it is not a show stopper.. unless we are in dispute with say the NHBC in which case all that gets cast up.. as follows For all.. A bit OT fun.. but if that stud was on an extenal wall and we were having a chat with say the NHBC we ask.. hey we know the stud is fine for axial load (downwards load) but it's bowing in or out.. if out we want to inspect the cavity width cavity to se if it is below 50mm.. if out we want to check that the wall ties have sufficient embedment.. if we find we have a non complince then we have a structural safety issue and now we are pushing at an open door to win claims against warranty providers. Otherwise just finish the wall..put the furniture in. Hang a picture.. if you can see the bow after that report back.