Alan Ambrose

Thinnest cement board then which will give the fire rating? 6mm I’m guessing. £16 a sheet.

Sounds BS to me. Ask them for a copy of the standard or reg?

I’m guessing NZ? FYI Mine water could heat thousands of Welsh homes: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0l867k70p8o Between. 10 & 20C though. That doesn’t sound so encouraging .. according to PHPP my average ground temperature in 9.6C.

I have a similar-ish problem - both the PTP and the SuDS rainwater will be draining into a non-flowing ditch which is now a covered culvert. I was planning on joining them at an inspection chamber just before the culvert.

I walked past a kind of modernist design in Nudura at the weekend near Middleton. Half-completed. Looks like a self-build but I don't remember it mentioned on here.

@marshian - that counts @DIYHacker kidding me? We're in Witnesham and another BH guy here lives in Otley.

Probably doesn't help any, but I'm leaning towards a transit, preferably with a high roof ... and getting all the aggregates delivered.

Call me dumb, but the PD won’t actually be designing anything in that case?

Whereabouts in Suffolk are you? We may be winning the county race 😄. We have: me, @LSB, @GaryChaplin, @zzPaulzz, @Nick Laslett, @G and J, @JohnnyB Apologies if I've missed anyone.

Well looks like they have found a useful niche...many thanks.

>>> I found EA good to deal with directly in the past both for advice and site visits. Jeez, I'm on 18 weeks and reading their acknowledgement letter more carefully it says: "Your application should be allocated within 6 months..." !!! FFS. This is for simple output from a treatment plant to a ditch that the rest of the neighbours are using.

That’s interesting re safescope - do you have a sense what they will actually be doing?

>>> the chat bot is talking sh*te Yes, for a random lvt: https://s3.amazonaws.com/a.storyblok.com/f/231903/x/e64b397b14/amtico-signature-technical-specification-sig-ts-20240731-12-en.pdf it says: 0.014 m2K/W (underfloor heating suitable) - for a thickness of 2.5mm i.e. conductivity of 0.18 W/m·K, u-value of 71. A random web site ( https://www.vcalc.com/wiki/thermal-conductivity-of-porcelain ) gives porcelain as 1.5 W/m·K and porcelain flooring tiles are 12mm from memory, so u-value of 125. i.e. not a lot of difference in the scheme of things and they're both v good thermal conductors in building material terms. The big deal with chatgpt et al is that there is no deductive logic there - in fact no logic at all. I'm tempted to suggest that is similar to the quality of your salesman. If it finds the word 'Alan' close to the number '125' often enough it will be happy to conclude that most 'Alans' will be 125 years old. Ask him to do the above calculation to verify his thoughts?

>>> the process of getting planning permission could cost more then a cheap shed The cost of householder PP is £258, so I'm thinking the OP is thinking of something not a million miles different from this: https://www.screwfix.com/p/shire-6-x-8-nominal-apex-overlap-timber-shed/644TJ Given this will last 5-10 years max, @DevilDamo are you suggesting the OP needs to apply for PP every time he wants to replace it? Even if it is identical to the last one?

PV panels are often fitted with little screens on the side for exactly this reason. You can probably find some to retrofit..

I think if the old shed didn’t collapse in the last century, and the old one didn’t look crazy different to the new one … then you’re just ‘replacing the old one’, which is fine. I think I might just do this and see if anyone objects. If you’re in a conservation area, I might be a bit more circumspect.

Welcome. You’ll find nearly as many opinions as subscribers here. And boy do we like to drift off the subject of the original question.

Mostly bollox. For UFH, it’s useful if you have good insulation below and good thermal conductivity above - think tiles, lvt etc. You can use e.g. solid wood flooring, but it’s more of an insulator, so slower to warm up. Amtico and most ‘R11’ is pvc, so fairly thermally conductive. The ‘cost to hear a house’ is a function of the overall wall/roof/floor u-values, you would need the whole build up to tell. Actually, I revise my opinion - total outrageous salesperson BS. Ask him ‘what u-values would we be looking at’ and see him flounder.

Of course, you could add another 100mm of insulation and use the 25mm battens.

+1 to try out on something close to the material you're going to use. Try and round the head and see how hard it really is. Also, you don't have to use any of these drivers like The Hulk. A bit of gentle finesse, feel the torque and back off the power if you hit a knot or something. Proper pressure along the axis of the screw helps a lot as well as high quaity bits.

Don’t see why not. Worth drawing out to make sure you have all the ventilation, vapour barrier, drainage, critter guard, drip edge etc details right. Does the increase work ok with your eaves detail?

>>> why would i want an expensive architect plus a structural engineer and someone else drawing all the required drawings IMO you want an architect for ‘magic’, SE to make the judgements and calcs on construction methods and techniques and a detail person to worry the insulation, damp, ventilation, rain screen, BC regs etc. Anyone can do the drawings if they understand what they need to draw. That could be one person or four, or more. Maybe a planning consultant too.

>>> our house was 150mm too high Yeah, that's also interesting - measuring from GL? Officially, I think that can be the highest GL near to the building. But what happens when you scrape the topsoil off - the obvious GL vanishes. And ... actual GL from to some datum isn't specified on my planning docs - or on any I've seen. As I'm pushed on levels for drainage, my SEs suggested pushing up the obvious GL (and therefore FFL) by 0.4m. Who knows?

And heras is OK? Would both be OK before planning is officially granted?

Yeah, it’s an interesting question. How accurate do you have to match the plans? To +-mm? No that would be silly. To +- cm? Also mostly silly - complain to a brickie that he’s out by a cm? I don’t think so. To +- 10cm then? Seems reasonable. Same question also applies to ground levels, ridge heights etc - although ‘flat ground’ (depending on the size of the area) could I think vary by 20-30cm, and still be ‘flat’. These are my guesses anyway.