Carrerahill

It costs an absolute fortune. If you need tanked fuel go for oil. Issue with gas is you are at the mercy of usually 1 or 2 suppliers and the monopoly they run. I know loads of people who really really hate their off-grid gas supply and the headaches it causes.

You seem to know a bit about this stuff - I have an incoming MDPE pipe under my current kitchen - I recall from the last time I was under the floor that it changes to a 22mm copper to go up through the floor, then stop cock. My kitchen is moving to the extension so my plan is to connect a new piece of MDPE to to the original MDPE and run it under the floor to the new kitchen and then redo the stop cock and reconnect the rest of the house which will make for a neat install and no stop cock in a soon to be office/den. So does that sound reasonable? Also - I need to run a pipe out to the garage, should I come up on main stop-cock, then Tee back out of that, another stop cock and then MDPE back out and under the floor to the duct over to garage. Or could I Tee off from the original MDPE - 1 to kitchen for house supply and 1 to garage. I could always run that pipe along under the floor and have a stop cock to garage under the floor in the hall cupboard, so if I wanted to isolate garage I could lift a hinged trap and turn it off, or do I just run a supply to the garage and have a stopcock where it enters. The only downside to this is the only way to isolate the supply from house to garage would be from pavement - however, that is the case with the house pre-stop-cock anyway so does it matter...

I think there has been a bit of a glut over the last year or so as there has been a huge amount of infrastructure work done. Local authorities went a bit mad after the bad winter and started resurfacing roads like there were no tomorrow.

£60 a wagon round here - that would be a 32tonner - £1.88 a ton! £40 for the fines from the road-sweeper which dosed with used engine oil or diesel makes a brilliant running surface!

Possibly in some, to be honest the minority of situations, but I can assure you road planings are still very much available. Where resurfacing works are being done, the planer strips them into a 8 wheel tipper and they get taken for "recycling". Recycling can mean anything from using them as fill elsewhere to using them to make new tarmac products... the fact is the recycling strategy involves plenty of them being sold. Arguably road planings have always been recycled as they never went to landfill and were always used for something - even if dumped temporarily in a vacant site etc. until they were used. Where a road is being resurfaced they want the old stuff out and the new stuff turns up to be laid, they are not going to re-batch it on site unless the project is frankly on a massive scale. On bigger civil projects it will be used locally if it can but the majority of the time it is taken away.

2.5tons? That doesn't sound enough at all. Hardcore is £12-25 a ton depends where and how much you buy it so if it was 2.5tons it would be £30-75. Find some road resurfacing works and buy a truck load of road planings. £60 a load seems to be the going rate.

Just been through this with Kingspan and Quinntherm with the same roof make up. 50mm ventilation is a must - which is why I now have insulation under the rafters too as I could not fit it all in-between them - mind you, it's better as it removes cold bridging!

Foam - depends where the duct comes from and goes and if stuff got into can it end up in your house etc.

You are not having much luck! I'd come and help you for the weekend if I was closer (but I would want you to come and help me the following weekend) 2 people achieve more like the work of 3 individual workers they say. I am sure we need to start pulling resources around here!

What are peoples thoughts on the exact sand, I have have 20 odd answers on this. Plastering sand, is it a must? Building sand and sharp sand seem to be used - so just what is the answer here. I have rendered some columns and a brick build coal-bunker in building sand and cement and that was probably 15-19 years ago - it's fine. The column I did is fine too. I know building sand is fine, and using some mortar as a bit of a render where you maybe make a bit up too much and "fix" something it goes on very smoothly, but it works...

Snowcrete is just white cement, it is also stronger, but I understand that is a function of the manufacturing process of a white cement rather than intended. If you google render mixes you get literally 10's of options. I am going to go for 5:1 but may add lime to and go 6:1:1. I just did a scratch coat last night using: https://www.enewall.co.uk/surerend-base-coat/ It was ODD stuff to mix, the water literally just ran over the powder and it took some mixing until it started to blend up - it was like the powder was coated in wax! I am therefore assuming there is some sort of silicone waterproofer or something in it. Worked well, oddly although a fine powder it had some 2-3mm bits of grit through it which just made a nucence of itself. Checked it this morning and seem solid and I'll get the final coat on to it this weekend with some luck - not sure what though! I think it will be their magnoila top coat with a white/off-white chip. For the back of this same garage I am going to do as @ProDave says and use a sand cement (snowcrete) finish as I will never see the back of the garage and I just need a good solid surface with no maintenance.

I am a partner of an engineering consultancy so I have access to CAD etc. Autocad LT (light version) is about £300 per annum and the full version is £1350.00 per annum. It takes a while to learn, I think the easiest way to learn it to use it and find all the problems and then discover the solution. CAD is one of the most powerful pieces of software I can think of and I reckon most people only use about 10% of it's capabilities. The thing with CAD is that although it has lots of pretty buttons, everything is command driven, hammer in a couple of letters or a word and you have a tool or function that there isn't even a button for. Ideally you need a mentor. Everything you learn from guides is great, until you load a drawing that comes in with UCS on a 18.3° rotation and a wonky looking cross-hair! It's at time like this you need someone next to you to help. I was lucky that when I started out in consultancy I sat next to our teams CAD technician - on day one I knew how to draw a line and a circle and a rectangle! By pestering him for about a year while on the job learning I reckon I became an above average CAD user for an engineer. Mainly because everyone just sent stuff to the CAD department, but I used to do all my own drawings and publish my own drawing packages as I saw it as a faster process - i.e. direct from my mind and straight onto the screen, others would mark drawings up on paper and issue them to him... didn't see the point. It paid dividends too, when I moved firm it transpired their CAD knowledge was very poor. I was able to help take that business from being CAD newbies with very basic drawing templates and no automatic data take-off or legends to fully automated CAD drawings and standard auto fill title-blocks etc. An option for you would be to pay a 1st year architectural student or something to provide basic draughtsman services. As I say, if it's a 10min job then I will do it.

You are entirely correct - and they certainly do do this sometimes. I would say, in all honesty, I rarely find a locked-down drawing. A long term project we do for a major UK retailer involves getting drawings of all their sites, we probably get drawings in from scanned line drawings dating back 30-40 years to PDFed CAD drawings from whatever the facilities team can find for us and drawings are from all sorts of sources - I think so far I have maybe come across 2 or 3 out of around 800 sties. The layers are almost always flattened when PDFed but they only help the person working on the drawing, by the time they are printed off or PDFed again it makes no difference to the appearance of the drawing if the whole thing sits on a single layer 0. It just makes editing difficult if it is major.

Health and Safety has gone mad, but health and safety around the erection and use of scaffolding is very serious and much be adhered to. That is not mad H&S, mad H&S is the BS we need to put up with with so some idiot can stand and tell us how to walk into a plant room and then issue us with a certificate while extracting £200 for the privilege!

Are we talking a couple of walls and a window - 10 minutes work or multiple walls and windows and taking into consideration all the relevant details that may need tweaked - couple of hours? If it's a 10 min tweak, then mark up your paper copy, send me that and the PDF (or if you have the DWG file even better), and assuming it converts OK I will change them.

How minor are the changes you need done?

I hate to tell you this, but I bet the architect just took the original PDF's and just converted them to CAD format - tweaked some line-weights and added their own title-blocks and charged you for the privilege.

Just full the ".dwg" format drawings for CAD or whatever software they may have used. Assume just standard CAD drawings and not 3D models etc.? Also, do you have the drawings in PDF format? If it was me I would just take the PDF's and convert them to CAD and not bother paying them for them. Assuming you have already paid for their services they are now just being thiefs and making you pay a premium as the realise you are going elsewhere now.

Can you not use foil backed plasterboard?

Thanks. Next question. I know Dave, you used wooden flooring over yours, I would like tile in the kitchen, but may use a laminate product - if I go tile - how do you make up the floor above without the tile grout cracking and tiles lifting from expansion cycles? I am setting the joist height this weekend (i.e. building the dwarf walls etc.) so I need to bottom out my full makeup or I may end up higher than the rest of the house.

What clips did you use to attach UFH pipe to the OSB? The ones in the kit I am about to order look like they are designed to be pushed into PIR.

I think I would still use something like an 80x80 - 40mm is a little narrow. 2mm to 3.2mm wall thickness would do well. Being from a farming family I have seen fences come and go, from 3x3 stobs to 10x10" posts and telegraph pole strainers and there is a knack to installing a good fence that lasts. The best ones are well planned and prepared and can last 60 years. If you cap the post top and bottom it will sweat in the cold with nowhere for the moisture to go, let's say you welded the caps on today, humid, warm (read able to hold more moisture) summer air trapped in the tube, and let's even say you have the caps welded on to pressure vessel standard - by the time the cooler nights approach the moisture will fall out the air and condensate on the inside of your post - rot starts and this moisture will just cycle as the temperatures change - hot day it will rise to the top, then condensates at the top and runs down the tube, so the rot goes on and on. Now let's say the same scenario as above, but the caps are welded on with gaps and pinholes through the welds that air can be sucked in through on a cold day it will do exactly the same as above, only difference is the moisture may drive out in the hotter months bringing in fresh cool air loaded with more moisture every night. It is like our roofs and solumns and cavity's: ventilate well and have plenty air movement. So what you do is set the post on top of a decent layer of hardcore, this means that the moisture can drain out and have vent holes top and bottom - if you order the steel and do this yourself I would just take a stepped drill through them to make about a 20mm hole - personally I would have a fab shop make them up, weld and galvanise them. Paint is fine if done well - but the inside walls always remain a weak point as they are difficult to coat. If you want to paint, then give them a really decent de-grease with thinners or pre-paint wipes, scotch the steel then degrease again before hitting it with a good primer, zinc chromate stuff (they use that on the subs) then I'd use a 2K sprayed paint or a single pack industrial paint, I have tins of shipping container paint which is really good stuff. Tough as nails. Powdercoat is OK but powdercoat forms a film over the metal it doesn't actually "stick" that well - a single scratch or knock and the whole coating is compromised. Chemically bonded paint is far better which is why cars a painted with a wet paint system.

Right perfect. I will have a look. Thanks!

What was your skim product(s)?

I am going to do some wood stove down time maintenance and I want to sort the inglenook - it is currently done in board which has cracked and looks a mess. I am going to pull the stove out, remove all the board and render it. There also appears to be a draught through one of the boards so I am not sure what that is about (chimney is full of vermiculite around the liner so cannot see if being a chimney draught - but maybe). So the render will also act as a better seal around everything. Been looking at options and have come up with a lime render as a good choice. I am thinking 1:2:9 portland/lime/plastering sand - or just lime and sand - I was also tempted to add a dose of black tinter to it, if it drys a dark grey or black that would be fine - maintenance free. Can anyone who has done this sort of thing before please comment - the good thing is that the render will have until probably late September until it is intermittently used, then full time by mid to end of October so the render is going to get to dry out well if I do this soon. Another option is tile - anyone know about this option? Thanks.