Carrerahill

If you halved the population of the globe tomorrow, current pollution issues are solved. We were at somewhere around half the current global population sometime in the 1960's but using heaps of coal and oil to and fuel the world, and generally didn't have a clue about the pollution many of the industries created, they were not regulated the Thames was a dumping ground so on and so forth. You cannot say 1 person created the same amount of pollution as 2 people do today and make that argument stand unless you consider the reduction in pollution generation. Simply put. If my grandfather drove 12miles it took him a gallon of dirty lead filled petrol, if I drive 12 miles I reckon it takes me 1/3 of a gallon of much cleaner fuel. So yes he polluted far more than me, but had they had today's tech...

Many of the smaller cars just will not last reliably past a decade and that is the ICE versions with traditional technology. So these manufacturers are cramming brand new tech into these little town cars for as cheap as they can and we are expected to believe it will last well. The batteries may survive but will the rest of the car? They still have to contend with all the other issues cars suffer from.

The problem with most things in the world is actually over-population. Solve that and all the other problems will go away by themselves!

Do I assume correctly then you are buying a Tesla Model 3 or something of that ilk, you are buying from the luxury end, most people will drive Leaf's and Zoe's and what-not. I drive a large estate, a large Saloon and an old Defender, the two cars are flagship models, one petrol and one diesel - I sit in traffic and almost 95% of the cars around me are small cars - your car will sit in the top hierarchy of vehicles. The Zoe's and Leaf's and what not including the similar model ICE versions are all, just now, tax free, or very cheap. Why - there are far more of them, doing the miles than the bigger cars that actually pay to be there. With any luck your high price tag vehicle will last well and give you excellent service - the mass produced small car won't.

Good work, probably very tiring work - if a little unnecessary. I don't think I would have spent all that time getting it to that stage, you would have saved a lot of time just having them all in one go with the chainsaw.

Indeed, but they think they should get free charges because they are "green". They also don't pay road tax but still use the roads. So now they are considering toll's - so those of us still paying road tax will get hit twice! Just tax electric cars. Totally ridiculous they get free tax because their pollution has been deferred or relocated to the nearest coal burning power station. They have tyres on the roads, they use the infrastructure, they should pay for it.

Indeed things are shipped, but I am simply reminding people that this "green vehicle" has a high carbon footprint before it even comes into existence as a car, just like any other! Many of us understand how it all works, how things end up in our house or on our drive, how the fuel comes to be in our tanks, but most don't. I know a woman who is blissfully unaware that her EV is frankly just as polluting as my car for the first however many 10'000's of miles (she won't keep it past 3 years either, so arguably she never enters the benefit stage) but my car has a large-ish petrol engine, so she can't see past that. I am looking forward to getting the chance to explain it all to her. Reports vary too yes, but if even if the claim is say 50% accurate, that is pretty good and required very little additional effort to make it happen - EV's I just see as a disaster through the additional infrastructure and waste associated with installing it. I make the 10 year comment based on the fact that many cars made today won't be reliable in 10 years, you must bear in mind that many cars are not the well built Volvo's and BMW's and Merc's and Audi's, most cars on the road are little soulless boxes made of cheap steel and poor quality parts. Take many of the little EV's, their petrol counterpart hardly makes it past about 7 years let alone being a good reliable car at 10 or older. My point is, what happens to a 9 year old EV which needs a full new battery replacement? At 9 years old people will not spend £1000's on repairs unless the car is a higher end model or a pristine example someone just wants to keep for as long as possible - I can see plenty of them scrapped and who, for the foreseeable, will want an old EV car? Let's suppose you find a 8 year old EV with 75,000miles on the clock for £2500.00 - it might need a full battery replacement soon - so, do you buy it knowing you may need to spend big on batteries - or have to keep paying a battery lease on a car you bought for cheap. Possibly not, so many of the early EV's will be scrapped young and never be green. Yes I am sure the time will come when all batteries will be the same modules and we can go to Shell or BP etc. and simply pull out your battery packs, slot new ones in, pay for the electricity and drive off - much like Calor gas bottles they are checked before refuelling and can be maintained so they always stay good, but until it is this simple, and hopefully economical I think EV's will cause more issues than solve. What is interesting is that cars are becoming more and more efficient, but at the same time more and more powerful than it's 30 year old counterpart, manufacturers keep making them faster and with better acceleration, had they just maintained the sort of power that was available 30 years ago in a similar car but used new engine technology we could easily see far lower fuel consumption figures again so really we are solving a problem by creating more and throwing more money and tech at it all. My wife has a VW, when we first got it I looked at having it tuned, one of the tunes available was an economy tune, the figures still kept the 2.0 diesel in it's power class but certainly shaved a little of the 0-60, top speed and HP - but it was still about 2 times more powerful than a similar sort of saloon from 1990!

In fairness I wasn't referencing those type - this is the on the street version that will not be affiliated with businesses. It's all very well having them attached to M&S at a shopping centre etc. but that is not where the bulk of road traffic exists. We need hard city infrastructure. Many commercial properties will no have the capacity for fast chargers. I just don't see 2300 a day going in.

Charging points probably take quite a few days to install (when all required utilities and trades play fair) - there is the civils, dig-up the pavement up, lay in electrical duct, electric board need to connect up to something (or electrical contractor needs to connect into a suitable DB for example inside a shopping centre etc.) then it needs to be installed, commissioned, and the ground reinstated. 2300 a day would require 2300 crews a day - this is not happening. Also, what grinds my gears is the carbon footprint to install these, no one ever considers that, all the waste of roads and pavements being dug up and spoil carried away and then new material trucked in - these processes must be made greener. We must adopt the European way of doing things and go for more setts and slabs - they lift them, remove the sand/MoT do the repairs, put the material back in, compact it and relay the same setts and slabs. It takes one 2-3 man crew on 1 van 1 day to do a full repair start to finish. Very little waste. Then there is another issue, if all these charging stations were to go into service the grid would collapse on day 1. Guaranteed, there is only enough energy generation capacity to cope, when demand increases fossil fuel plants ramp up first, nuclear plants take a little longer due to processes and the current state of the plant. A friend of ours is a nuclear systems engineer for EDF - he works mainly at Hunterston but travels around many of their sites - usually 50% of there reactors are down for maintenance, Hunterston B only just restarted after over a year of downtime for safety concerns and is only allowed to operate until 2023 (assuming the cracks do not get worse or something else fails). So really electric vehicles just move the pollution issue somewhere else. We were also involved in a project to design LV distribution and swithgear for a new retail area below student accommodation, builder was trying to get a good BREEAM rating and some green award from the council so they wanted to put in loads of charging stations. When we submitted our connection calcs to Scottish Power we were told there was no enough supply locally and to allow it they would need to run a new HV cable and site a new substation (which they requested was in the new build). When we did the maths, worked it all out, we unanimously voted to remove all but 1 and came up with other options to obtain good green accreditation. There was a report last month which calculated how much more environmentally friendly an EV was - compared to a similar ICE vehicle driven the same miles (it was about 100,000miles) it would take 10 years for the EV to come out on top! 10 years! They will be scrapped by then. It was suggested that running an ICE vehicle for longer would work out cleaner than an EV - I can believe it. The batteries are made from lithium mined in Chile and Bolivia etc. it is then shipped to China, made into batteries then shipped all around the world - the locals in these places are in trouble with their health and the ground is being contaminated something rotten as the brine pools leech into the groundwater. You will also have noted from the media or fuel pumps that fuel is now badged B7 or E5 - diesel and petrol respectively, which is the maximum bio-diesel/ethanol. When running at or near allowable content the result is reduced carbon dioxide from the equivalent of 1,000,000 cars (UK Gov Source so easily reduce by 10%). Whole thing is a farce and the politicians don't understand the technology or science to realise they are pushing something just as damaging or indeed more damaging than the current option.

Yes that is it, that will almost certainly be your soil vent, assuming is is directly above the pipe in the kitchen/bathroom etc.? That is what I was wanting to know indeed, if you had anything penetrating your roof, so it will pass through the roof and on your roof you will have a funny looking tile or a piece of pipe sticking through it. The issue is probably with the flashing piece around the pipe, it looks like a big rubber grommet with a hole through the centre which the pipe will pass. Over time they harden and the seal fails. It may of course be something else like a tile has slipped and the water is running under it etc. but the issue would appear certainly to be related to the soil vent. Remedy would be to get up someone up there to look at it, a roofer would be who I would call (well no that is a lie I would do it myself) - you could attempt it yourself it is not difficult but it is high and dangerous and requires the knowledge of roofing and flashings to get it fixed well, but with all due respect, I get the feeling you are not a DIY/technically minded person so you may just create a bigger issue. Time to call the roofer.

Fischer fastenings for the lot, about £75 a box for 90's. Good nails, they take a lot to bend, but will then take a hell of a bend, I see a lot of framing nails simply shear off when you are violet towards them, indeed plenty also just bend too, but any of the SS nails I used to temp nail stuff during the TF build took a hammering to undo - to the point I switched to some 75mm galv's for temp work as they came out easier. The 35's I got for my fence 2 years ago are galv and holding up well, but a temp fence during the build was dismantled last month - I could loosen the bottom of the board and pull it upwards, almost all the nails sheared. The metallurgy there suggests they have been hardened and left brittle or too high a chrome content in the steel etc.

I concur with Starcky! I went 400mm on my extension floor (total overkill) but it is SOLID! I like it. It would take a concert grand and a concert audience! I also consider lifespans, older houses have lasted very well, when things do go a bit wrong like a joist rots out they don't suffer the same because it was all so heavy duty. Which is why for the sake of an extra bundle of timber joists per room I think it is well worth it.

It's dry! I have removed plenty of rusty nails from timber. Also, they were far better quality, the "nails" would be made from wrought iron, maybe even bronze and made by Nailors. Not the little 3.1's framing nails we use these days. My 1960's house has some proper nails in it, my childhood home and still my parents house, built in 1902 has nails through 9x3.5" joists which are about 6mm in dia. There is a known issue with cheap fixings and poor quality causing building issues. There was a house builder just outside Glasgow, built some TF houses about 20 years ago, the nails were just cheapy steel nailgun nails. There was a design flaw to some aspect of it, cannot remember, moisture in the walls or something, anyway, in almost all the houses this particular wall started to look "odd" on inspection the fixings had rusted and in many cases just sheared. My BC drawings spec stainless-nails for everything. Cost a bit more but at least I can hopefully count on them! Do not underestimate the importance of an appropriately selected fixing for a given situation and it's longevity.

I would use this under the lead: https://www.roofingsuperstore.co.uk/product/flash-vent-boxed-in-3m-roll.html Not designed for this exact purpose but think it wold work.

OK - do you have anything on your roof? Like a piece of pipe sticking out, or a roof tile that looks odd - like it has a raised bit and a slot to the bottom etc. Or even better, can you find your soil pipe in the loft space, does it emerge up there above the bathroom? Tell-tale sign of this would be if the pipe-riser continues up through the bathroom or within a partition wall etc.

No - it's a water pipe. Only need to worry if you are actually working on oil or gas lines or the appliances themselves. I could go and install a whole DHW/CH system right now and only have the gas man do the gas and the flue - in fact, I could lay in the pipes, solder them together but just not connect at the gas meter or the appliance - gas fitter does that and does the pressure test and at that can certify your work - many would not do this for obvious reasons but it is not illegal.

No - that sounds like madness - if the tile did rely on a FG coating beneath the tile then frankly the tile would not be fit for purpose at that pitch. 12.5 is an annoying pitch, it's there, one exists, but it's low enough that most tiles are not suitable. Make sure you do use a good quality membrane under them - that just means that if there is any really bad driving rain that makes it up under the head-lap it will be dealt with by the membrane, also make sure that you add a lifting fillet or use an eaves protector tray (total pain to fit gutter though so fit brackets first if you can) so that any water cannot pool in the low point formed where the roof meats the fascia. At least at 12.5 it will hardly exist but I always form roof edges to ensure water cannot pool - something I cannot say about all roofers. I would also increase the headlap slightly beyond spec.

I agree with this wholeheartedly with what @Declan52 said. I have been building little walls and structures fairly successfully for 20-25 years, and last year when we kicked off the building works with the garage I approached a brickie and got him to work - he worked FT for a firm so did it for me on weekends on his own (my whole build has been like this - he was good, very good so I was happy for it to take significantly longer) so the deal was I would labour for him. I told him just to order me about and I would get on with it. Most of the time my setup time only took an hour or so with a top up every couple of hours so not too bad. On day one I was clearly versed on how to best setup block and brick for the brickie and how to make a really nice mortar by the mixer load more or less by eye. Not rocket science but how he wanted the site setup made a lot of sense to a pro doing a large structure and meant he only had to move a foot or two to grab block and lay it. The mortar was also laid out on boards spread along the wall - I have always used a bucket or barrow and end up moving it along with me which actually just costs time and hassle. Then the actual brick/block laying, I watched him lay 1000's of blocks and when doing lintels and things I helped. I learnt so much just by watching, little tricks to lift a block up above your head and place it in square and level by basically balancing an edge on your thumbnail and holding the other end with your hand - daft things like that. About a week after he left I needed to build a small wall maybe 5 blocks high, I kid you not, I was so impressed with my work I didn't want to have it dry dashed and was sad to see it all covered up. It was the straightest, most level block work I have ever done and I can attribute the vast improvement to watching and learning on the job and that was only over about a 12 months period when he has been on and off our site. I would honestly happily build a garage now - the cost would be the time for me, it would take me much much longer. Imagine what you could learn doing it constantly.

It depends on the quality - filament style LED arrays are more for GLS replacement LED lamps - almost all of these have a crude LED driver, or simply a current limiting circuit with no rectification and often fail before the LED's. None of these products would be suited to a workshop anyway - no one would really choose a GU10 or B22d or E(S)27 fitting for a garage or workshop although I am sure in domestic applications an old light will be re-purposed - in which case bite the bullet and run an incandescent lamp in it. Proper LED products of good quality and indeed a proper product designed with an LED board in mind (not a retro-fit situation which are dire) often utilise a propriety LED board such as the Tridonic Talex boards and a matched Tridonic driver the output will be DC therefore there will be no flicker obviously. If you go down to a local wholesaler, Ed's, CEF etc. and ask for a LED fitting, the chances are you will end up with a fairly cheap (maybe not in terms of what you pay mind you!) LED fitting, still with a whisp of sea air on them, which have recently come in from the far east. They will have a crude on board driver or a very very crude little driver usually potted with no information on them. Commercial life - often as short as 8 months - domestic garage not being used often - potentially 20 years. Here is an example of decent quality (yet not the best) LED lighting suitable for workshops and warehouses and are fitted up and down the length of the country: https://www.whitecroftlighting.com/products/indoor/industrial/ - note their ACL Industry - that is an example of a non-corrosive. I have these in my garage, 8000 & 10,000 lumen versions: https://www.zumtobel.com/gb-en/products/amphibia.html?&GUID=55A35931-A196-4728-9559-BE773F1B00C3#AMPHIBIA PC Wide Beam - they would run to about £245.00 each from a wholesaler - however these were left over from a mock-up of a plant room for an NHS trust approval session. Issue is the most basic product from the likes of Whitecroft in this range is probably £150.00 - however, that is small change to a school or warehouse etc. who need a product to go in and run 12-24hours a day for 10 years while burning 30w.

No, it's a type of luminaire often used in plant areas, damp/dusty or potentially impact zones, tunnels, shed, garages, warehouses and sites. It's good on sites where dust and mechanical impact may be an issue - was more of an issue when we used T12/8/5 lamps but the luminaire style is still very common. Made entirely of non-corrosive materials, often all plastics - sometimes metal with paint finishes but not common. The 180° diffuser also helps with ligt distribution and on good model incorporates a micro-prismatic or Fresnel optic to aid in light distribution while reducing glariness such as is found on opal diffuser models.

Depends how many rooms you need to light. Luckily I have access to lots of lighting samples that we get given for approval on projects etc. by manufacturers. I like linear LED products, the stuff I use is more designed for offices and commercial spaces so it is quite decorative but a 2m long LED product with 6000 lumens works fine regardless of the pretty package it is in! I also use non-corrosive LED battens. You can pick them up cheaply enough, at the end of the build install them in a garage or shed or something, or if you end up with loads tell people on here about them and they may sell for someone else in the same situation. Just wire them up to a temp lighting supply or if you have power just use plugs on them.

Air then!

It is to stop entanglement of those escaping or fighting fire. Cat 5 could sure hold you back if it was caught around your oxygen cylinder!

Indeed, and to be honest tray is way OTT in many commercial applications to be honest, the number of times we see tray spec'ed and indeed installed for a single piece of SWA to be fixed to it. You cannot even claim it is for expansion as most of the times the situation has no clear scope for future expansion. I was involved in VEing a project back in my early days for a major project, saved them 1.2million by sizing the cable tray correctly.

Not the OP - his architect, that is what I am saying, we would, as in my firm, if there was a breach of copyright or use (there is even a disclaimer on our title-blocks). I am not suggesting the OP would do it to his neighbour but I would have the architect act with a tip off, it also would not get that far - rarely does - however, it was not clear how they were being used by the OP and it sounded like he was submitting them to use for his own benefit. In fact the whole post is somewhat confusing now as there is now a comment that it was the planning authority (by submitting them to the authority the have rights to use them - limited, but rights) that was using them so really I don't understand what is going on.