Alan Ambrose

>>> Have a bought a dud I'm not clear - did you buy a part-completed house or have you built it from scratch? If still building suggest you need 'while building self-build insurance' rather than 'completed-home insurance'. Mine is from Protek.

Yeah, happy for anyone to come along to mine - maybe along with a visit to @LSB who isn't very far away I think? Getting more interesting, but still probably a bit dull, oak frame started going up today which was a bit of fun:

Someone should tell National Gird to let UKPN know - they sniggered when I said I would like 3P into a kiosk.

Yeah, but the general factors - PV farms & windpower in remote places grid-wise and lumpy new datacentre consumers are still challenges that affect both. There was a Stanford professor who was forecasting super-cheap electricity coming along real soon now based on the economics of PV - is that out of the window now?

My analogy is this: an enormous amount of money, time and energy has been spent since the '80s trying to squeeze bits down a copper wire. It works, it isn't pretty and it doesn't work that well. Fibre is much simpler (ignoring the splicing tech) and it will probably be possible to improve from 1 Gbps to 10 or 100 without changing the fibre over. Similarly, we can power and sort-of dim 3V or 4V white LEDs and 2V coloured LEDs from 230V. Cheap dimming and voltage dropping from 230V is kind of nonsense. It works-ish, but it sure ain't pretty and it's probably not possible to improve it much. So, in the long term, low voltage DC is the way forward, especially given that LEDs are low power and thus low current (well compared with incandescent). Do we need low voltage lighting circuits? Well do we need heated seats, sat nav & phone connections in our cars? No we don't need them, but we sure want them. One advantage, I think, is that 'extra-low-voltage DC' doesn't fall under Part P.

Anyone heard of / used Glazing Deluxe / Paul Elliott to source their windows? I saw these guys yesterday at the London Homebuilding show yesterday. They claimed they were consultants and able to get better prices by going direct to the window manufacturers.

I can’t believe that @Pocster had passed this one up.

You sound a bit alarmed, but actually it could just be the roofer being a bit professional. It looks like he has determined at some time that the original trusses were not strong enough and beefed them up. Better he did this than not, yes? Was your original roof a bit out of whack? Is the new roof much heavier? How old is the original? Suggest, if in doubt, call in an SE to check. Or ask the roofer, very politely. Some of that roof is 100 years old or older?

I know there are differences between the US and UK markets, but I think it does give some possible scenarios for the UK: Complicated behaviour but price is trending upwards quite quickly, also grid limits are having a big impact: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/whats-happening-to-wholesale-electricity Big commercial consumers are being aggressive about trading in the power market themselves: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/meta-pushes-power-trading-ai-142646215.html Does that mean the domestic consumer is increasingly vulnerable?

@jimseng - possible to say a bit more about your set-up? Are these all radials sitting on some central relays or controllers somewhere or directly switched by standard switches? How’re you supplying your 24V - individual din rail transformers? What kind of cables are you using? Did you feel you had to run these separated from any mains cable?

Thanks @JohnnyB for taking the time to show us your build. The Hempcrete detail was particularly interesting. How nice to be next door to the cricket club

@Kevan Marshall that’s great, congrats.

Will be there .

Or a QS?

A new SAP assessor maybe?

I think the reality is that groundworks is a often a rough and ready process - maybe on a fine day with the right team it isn’t, but on a bad day or with a less skilled team it just is. 1/2 an inch is a good tolerance in groundworks, anything better is probably uneconomic. It is upsetting to a certain kind of person and I’m one of those. I have internal drainage out by up to 200mm in horizontal position and the same in invert level. And I suspect I have not discovered all the faults yet. I wish I hadn’t trusted my groundworks guys and looked over their shoulders more. Will it result in impossible-to-fix problems - probably not. Has it cost me much extra time and effort - definitely yes. I’ve resolved to buy a total station and do my own detail layout for the ‘next build’. My surveyor is good but a total station to use to check a position or level any time I want would be better.

Suggest buying a small bit of each material and, say, tapping it lightly with a hammer to simulate a stone hit. Acrylic can be cut by your local laser shop, polycarb by a cnc router shop or both materials by hand with a jigsaw on slow speed (to stop it melting and gumming up rhe blade). Or an online place like cutmy.co.uk. Or a hand saw.

Acrylic is a bit brittle if it’s going to get any wind on it, polycarb is much tougher.

@G and J ah sorry to miss you, was at a memorial lunch today. Try to take Sundays off anyhow . It’s all getting a bit tense as we have some prep still to do and the frame guys are tipping up next week. Sure you were at the right site - I assure you I spend about an hour a day trying to remember where I last left some tool or some fixings or somesuch. Impressed you took some time off.

Well I hate to bring the original article up again, but... The list of biggest carbon emitters seems sort of interesting to me - the usual suspects, and a bit simplified - presumably it's not so much the fossil fuel companies themselves but their industry and customers.

Here’s a new detail: land registry plans are only approximate and cannot be relied on - see the Land Registry website for more info.

Can I ask, who’s planning on coming to @JohnnyB ‘s on the 18th? i.e. next Thursday.

Climate change is a fraud? Who are these people financing the cult and what are their motives?

>>> I doubt the people checking the cil liabilities look at the plans, just the answers you put on the form. Not convinced about that - I had some to-and-fro with my LPA's CIL people before we agreed on the number - there's some detail in the rules e.g. areas under stairs etc.

For the first time, scientists have quantified the causal links between worsening heat waves and global warming pollution from individual fossil fuel and cement companies, pushing the boundaries of extreme weather event research in multiple surprising ways. The new study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, looks at a far more expansive series of heat waves than previous research. It also incorporates the causes of climate change into the calculations. Instead of looking at one or two localized extreme heat events, the new study encompasses 213 heat waves around the world from 2000 to 2023. It finds, not surprisingly, that heatwaves became much more likely and severe during that period, largely due to the burning of fossil fuels. Between the first and second decade that the researchers investigated, climate change made the heatwaves climb from being 20 times more likely to 200 times more likely, according to lead author Yann Quilcaille, a climate researcher at ETH Zurich. Scientists trace heat waves back to individual fossil fuel companies, with potentially sweeping courtroom implications | CNN Carbon Majors Entities