Carrerahill

I think I would be clearing your site of all top soil, ideally it will land about the height of the bottom of your old strip founds, then a base of hardcore compacted in 100mm rises to get heights then slab, however, SE will need to advise, it is just what I "think" might happen. I cannot see a slab would be going straight on top of that even if the trenches were not there. When we did our slab, we had to clear down to the clay - in our case about 24".

It looks like that stuff is just a hydrocarbon solvent. I'd probably brush it on with a stiff brush and work it in, however, I think you would need a heck of a lot of it given it appears not to be used neat then washed off. Ah, but there was nothing sexist about my post. I said, "yet it appears from observation" and my “generally” comment was based on manoeuvre statistics (Maycock 1995). For something to be sexist I must do one or more of 3 things. I did not stereotype (I made a statistical generalisation), I did not discriminate, and I did not show prejudice, my statement was based on observed situations and stats. The first venture into my, alleged sexism, was a question based on stats. This labelling of people for stating things accurately must stop, people apply labels all too quickly because they don’t really know how to define the label properly. Men are more dangerous drivers, this, from statistics on serious and fatal road traffic incidents, not a sexist comment a statistical generalisation! I cannot use this in my discussion as I cannot provide a reference, however, I believe in What Car magazine, there was a survey of men and women of all ages. It asked things like difficulty found when reverse parking into a bay, hill starts, confidence in motorway merging etc. A majority proportion of women admitted to struggling with hill starts and reverse parking into parking bays.

With the way energy prices are going... he would need a little reactor. Good shout though!

Get her an automatic or driving lessons. I don't get this, but why do women, generally, struggle with hill starts? Most people learn to drive the same way, (I say most as I learnt to drive in a dump-truck and tractor), they go and get lessons with an instructor, usually in a little lightweight diesel car. Both boys and girls are taught how to set off, yet, it appears that from observation, women have the biggest problems with setting off on hills (reversing, parking, getting through tight spaces...). It is said women are more gentle and careful, therefore, you would think careful clutch control would actually come more naturally to them. My mother in law is a terrible driver, actually totally awful, she panics and just goes for it once the panic is set in often doing quite mad things. No finesse, lots of throttle and will just gun it out, that is her coping mechanism, just brute force and ignorance. But seriously, 1 is her issue, 2 is warranted to an extent but why is it slippery? Moss or other vegetation type stuff? Or just the smooth finish? 3, OK - then try to park nose down so the doors will always swing open, should reduce hazard of crush, ensure young kids are helped with getting in and out of car. Could you, have the surface roughed up a bit, I don't know what the material is, but etching it a bit? Could you, break some of them out in strips where the car goes and raise them a little to add a grip zone. Could you break some out and add bands of something else. Cut out 2 tracks and add in something that compliments the paving but gives more traction like a concrete band or some other nicer material. Sorry, just thinking loud here.

I do not think it is a major problem, as it stands, think of the building that goes on in harsh weather and its fine in the end. My only worry would be letting it dry. If you have wrapped it all up in airtight membranes then therein lies an issue, you have trapped it all. I think I would try and open some of the roof structure/walls up and get heat and air moment in there to let things dry a bit. Even if, as painful as it seems, you need to slice the membrane then tape it back up again later. This airtight stuff is all good and well, but buildings must be able to breath and this indiscriminate use of airtight membranes and insulation and seals and all sorts can cause more issues than good.

Where is local to you? Mode eDIN system is over the top for a house (just left a site snagging walk round and funnily enough had a look at the eDIN system I had specified to see if it was commissioned correctly. No.). Can you post an example of some of the products and manufacturers. Also, with all due respect, and I mean this in the friendliest way, that is not a "lighting design". Yes it shows lighting on a plan and constitutes a plan of lighting, but that is something that an architect would throw on a drawing for building warrant. Has any of the lighting been calculated and lumen outputs and beam angles etc. considered etc. Regardless of the above, if you are happy with that and can pick some decent quality luminaires then go for it. For control, simple option is just light switches in the majority of spaces and a couple of dimmers for the living kitchen area. I would suggest, for the living room, depending on height of the LED strip (i.e. what it is built into) and the pendant tubes beam angle and output, your living room may be a bit under lit in some areas such as the couch, however, you may be like me and never really use the ceiling lights and rely on table lights, floor standers etc. I am not sure what the top 2, on plan, rooms are, downlights might not be best option depending on use.

I would parrot what has been said before and go with an inclusion in the glass, assuming you in fact did not hit anything. I had a glazed partition panel in my office break once, I was sitting in the office, only person in the office, when suddenly it just made a funny cracking noise and I looked up and the whole panel had shattered but still stood in place. It was the oddest thing. As you can imagine I was somewhat perplexed and with engineers hat on started to work out what happened. I noted the cracking appears to have a start point, which was the bottom of the panel about 150mm up from the bottom. The cracking fully radiated out from this point. I called the glazier the next morning who told me it would be an inclusion in the glass and it sometimes happened with toughened glass where a little defect is included in the glass which acts as a weak point. So if you were nowhere near anything when it broke, chances are an inclusion in the glass (debris/air) could have been flexed slightly and the molecular structure of the glass just lets go and twooshh! Hope your floor was not damaged. I found cleaning toughened up off a wooden floor is a very difficult process as you need to lift every piece up with a vacuum to stop scratching, but it fills a vacuum in no time! It is amazing the abuse toughened will take. I deconstructed a sun room when we were doing the extension and I took the 3.2m x 0.6m roof sections out, I was not too careful with them, and at some points they were bowed like a humpback bridge! In the end I broke them all up and made oversite concrete with them - I threw a concrete block down on top of them, it bounced off! I ended up going down and hitting the sides with a hammer which broke each one as a side impact will break it every time.

I assume the bathroom pipework you speak of is just a vent for the soil pipe, that is easy really, just work out where it will be in the bathroom and ping it up to where it needs to be, given you can put 2 no. 45°'s in the loft you could also set it to be about 500mm from where you think it will be, maybe higher on the roof, fit the weatherproofing seal and then connect onto it when you are ready. The WBS is maybe not so easy. If you knew which stove you were going for then you could work out the flue position then find the location by dropping a plumb line down, might need to drill holes though. If you really do not have a clue where it will go then you will just have to leave it and clamber up onto the roof at some point. You could always have a short diagonal section in the finished article, if you really want to get it in now and just guess a location.

Yes, right, I see what you have done. 12-24VDC input drivers/power supplies.

Constant current or constant voltage? If the former, are you taking 24VDC into a little CC driver before feeding the luminaire?

What do you mean by centrally switched LED lighting?

There is (now a "was" for me) some mileage in this if for using PV generated and battery stored power, I looked at it. I essentially have 3 PV systems, 1 on the shed, 1 on the garage 1 on the house. They are all grid-tied just now. I was thinking of putting a 20A 24VDC charge controller on the garage system and using it to charge a fairly inexpensive leisure battery array, then I would run 24VDC into the house and have some 24VDC lighting, thinking being I would have created a little off-grid lighting system. Sized correctly, even in Scotland, I should never run out of battery capacity. Great free lighting. With a little imagination other things could also be tied into this system. However, after much deliberation I decided that the better long term infrastructure plan was 2 consumer units, an on grid and an off-grid. Feed the off-grid from an inverter, and add loads to it that the batteries can cope with, as the battery storage becomes more affordable I would move more and move loads over to the off-grid board until I was fully off-grid. At that point the old CU just becomes redundant. This I was saw as a smaller investment, a futureproof one in my eyes, and it lets me just stick to conventional 240V loads - it also allows me to do an automatic mains bypass on the inverter if battery voltage was to plummet.

I cannot really see what you would tie into this realistically. Most systems that require low voltage will generate their own bus. @joth discusses some very specific lighting controls things which any controls circuits would generally have and having some LED on a 24VDC PSU doesn't quite constitute low voltage infrastructure. I had considered a 24V supply to my living room, and some other rooms for some 24V DC lighting that could run directly from a solar charged battery circuit to give me some off-grid capability but I am just going to put my money and efforts into a off-grid 240V system. Even had I proceeded with my 24V system it would have been very home made. I design building electrical systems for a living and cannot see the benefit of a low voltage infrastructure outside of specialist environments. The Engineer article really discussed the DC micro-grid that would be formed between PV panels, inverters and batteries and datacentres are a whole different kettle of fish given IT has heaps of power supplies, so why not ditch them and just run DC buses, but very very specialist. The paper you link to is very typical of, usually South Asian students who write these frankly absurd papers on really random things for their thesis. The ideas are very much based on a shall we say, less mainstream proposition. Other things to consider, SELV DC will require heavier cables, everything you bought would need to adhere to some sort of SELV convention, even if you had 4 things in a room that were ultimately SELV DC, you would find that probably they all range from 5-28V for most things, so you would still need voltage regulators and then to convert the appliance you bought to run on your DC supply. I suppose you could wire your house like a caravan and buy caravan appliances and lights?!?

Simple, looks good and suits your property & surroundings.

That all looks like a right pig. I can think of a few things I would do, but what about, extend the notch on the back plate so the rod can drop down and under the porcelain, so the sink sort of sits on it then use a big square washer with a rubber gasket behind it, nyloc nut, torque it up, you get clamping force and some under support, a blob of CT1 may do no harm as well.

Bankers not understanding Construction industry I guess. Nothing new!

.. and they just tend to explode without actually burning unlike the firework that is the Li battery. I once shot a mobile phone lithium battery pack - fireworks and funny smoke!

I am just thinking a 4 inch concrete slab, brick/block on 3 sides, maybe 900mm tall, depends on batteries, mine will be rack mount units and about 8U high so that works, then a big double door on the front. So all in all it will be about W1200mm x D900mm x H900mm internal space.

I am thinking of building a little block kiosk. Dress it up with some cladding or something.

Got it now. I misread the comment as being possible doubt of the rod holding, my mistake.

I think Celcon do a 750Kg - I read it in one of the journals, less cement used, higher strength and lighter were the key points.

Given Gus is an SE...

Construction in this case is far superior, if you knew Gus you would know this and the key here, is the fixing method I would say. These shelves are probably designed to go onto all sorts of walls, including stud and PB - in which case they probably rate the shelf on weight bearing capacity of a PB fastener into a 12.5mm PB wall. I have some here that claim 17Kg a point. So they will then further de-rate it to eejit-proof it.

I made some. I built them in MDF and CLS. I build a fully screwed and glued CLS frame, that was fixed to the wall with chemical anchors, then I built slide over covers in MDF which I could prepare and spray paint in the garage, these simply slid over the frame and then I caulked them to the wall which is technically all that holds the painted MDF "cover" to the frame. I sat my brother and my son on them to test it - going no where. If I was doing it onto a TF wall I would probably remove a section of the plasterboard and fit a timber directly to the studs before a copy of the above.

I see the trusty Merc trying to get in on the action there!