LnP

If you don't want to remove the skirting and don't like the look of quarter round, you can get thicker skirting which goes over the existing skirting and has a recess to sit over the old skirting.

I shared some thoughts on the fluid mechanics and heat transfer aspects of antifreeze in the attached thread. It might explain why your required pump head doubles.... and the required power required might triple... not an expert but going back to first principles.

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... and I should have added, pressure drop (required head) is proportional to the square of the flow rate, so in the example above of increasing the viscosity and hence the flow by 50% would mean pressure drop goes up by 1.52 = 2.25, i.e. more than double the head required at the pump. ... furthermore ... the power required by the pump is proportional to the head and the flow rate, so in this example, the head has gone up by a factor of 2.25 and the flow rate by a factor of 1.5, so the power required will go up by a factor of 3.38. I'm a bit rusty on my fluid mechanics, but it seems to me that adding antifreeze is not a trivial decision.

A further thought ... quite often, self build projects require an F10 notification to the HSE - more than 500 person days of work. The F10 has to declare who the principal contractor is. Is each of your contractors going to submit a new F10 as they are the new principal contractor? Or will you argue that each contract is a new project and less than 500 days? Could be an interesting discussion if an HSE inspector arrives at your site and asks why you've not submitted an F10.

Not sure what you mean by different project sections. What are your sections? It sounds like you're self managing and will engage the various trades under separate contracts, in which case, are you really going to only have one trade on site at a time? Will your trades be prepared to be nominated as principal contractors? The best guidance I've seen on this is from the Self Build Portal, which the HSE point to in their web page on CDM and self build. If you're self managing, read the paragraph which starts, "The self builder acts as their own project manager, employing individual trades at different times." Long story short, you're the principal contractor. Unfortunately this guidance predates the recent changes with the Building Safety Act. If there's good guidance out there on how that applies to self builders, I'd be happy to hear about it.

Ah, so those things I thought were acorns are actually oak cones! 😉

Maybe. Apart from the reduced specific heat capacity, something which would need to be checked is whether the higher viscosity of the glycol solution caused the flow regime to change from turbulent to laminar. For good heat transfer in the emitters (e.g. UFH pipes) and the ASHP heat exchanger, you want fully developed turbulent flow. In fluid mechanics, flow regime is characterised by the Reynolds Number, Re. For fully developed turbulent flow, Re needs to be > ~3000. If you have a system which worked fine with water, and not with antifreeze, it might be because the flow regime has transitioned from turbulent to laminar giving a lower heat transfer coefficient in your UFH pipes and ASHP heat exchanger. Re is proportional to flow velocity and inversely proportional to viscosity, so if you've added 50% to the viscosity, you'll have to add 50% to the flow velocity to get back to the same Re.

CEO Designate RH Steve Baker, and he's going to take up the role full time.As his Wikipedia profile puts it "Baker argues Brexit presents an opportunity for more free trade outside the EU". His new employer has to hope he shows better judgement when it comes to house building. At least this development gets him out of politics. https://www.stevebaker.info/2025/10/homeatix-press-release/

I understand it depends on whether there are complications, for example in a conservation area, which would require specialist involvement. They're short staffed and failing to meet targets... like so many other government services. They publish statistics link here. For a new single dwelling it looks like the median time is 27 weeks unless there are hearings or enquiries, in which case it's longer. There's a "fast track" (ha ha) process for extensions etc.

The builder on a parapet wall I was having built forgot to install a cavity tray. I found out about it when the job was not yet finished and we had heavy rain and water appeared through the already plastered ceiling. We agreed he would fit a cavity tray - strip of DPM as described above tied into the mortar beds of the inner and outer walls, with weep holes. That meant dismantling the top 2 or 3 courses of brick and block along about 20 m of wall. It was his mistake but I nevertheless felt stressed dealing with it with him. But It was actually not as big a deal to go back and fix it as I’d thought. Dismantling brick and block is not that difficult, depending what’s above it.

I completely re-roofed my last house, all the tiles replaced, and I didn't talk to BC. I just checked the Planning Portal and realise now that I should have. When I sold it, nobody asked. I don't recall it being asked in the seller's questionnaire I had to fill out and it didn't come up in the survey.

I feel a bit the same way, but was encouraged by what Emma Pinchbeck, CEO of the Climate Change Committee, said in this interview on The Rest is Politics Leading. And the Climate Change Committee's Seventh Carbon Budget talks a lot of sense. Up to now Parliament has accepted the CCC's carbon budgets, but has not yet voted on this one. The framework for this is the Climate Change Act (2008) which was quite clever in the way it empowers the market to take advantage of changing technologies (with their changing costs) and avoided prescribing the path to Net Zero. At the same time, I'm coming round to agreeing with people who say we're better to target Net 5% or Net 10%, because the last 5 or 10% could be prohibitively expensive.