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ProDave

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Everything posted by ProDave

  1. ProDave
    As a business, if you want to use Parcel Force infrequently, use senditnow.com That's a subsidiary of Parcelforce but at a much cheaper price than the standard parcelforce prices. I used to use them a lot when I was selling stuff on ebay. You book it on line, they come and collect from you. I can;t see why any business can't do that infrequently for H&I orders.
  2. ProDave
    The scaffold link tells me this is a private video.
  3. ProDave
    I paid less than half that per roll from SIG so look again. (I bought 65 rolls) Delivered on their own waggon, one with a forklift truck hanging on the back to unload it.
  4. ProDave
    Feel free to start asking questions about treatment plants etc.
  5. ProDave
    In the case of my old digger = "cheapest howdens kitchen"
  6. ProDave
    Hi and welcome (back) glad you found us in our new home.
  7. ProDave
    Interesting. One of those was my thread where I arrived at the detail I now have. The other concludes you don't need to ventilate a warm roof and I needn't have bothered.
  8. ProDave
    That picture above seems to show what you do if you have the felt above the counter battens, Then the vent strip can go under the support tray. That won't work if you have the membrane on the sarking and then the counter battens, which is why i have the vent strips on top of the support tray. The bottom of the membrane gets sandwiched between the tray and the vent strip and then the flapping edge I cut off with a knife. Thinking more, that picture is reallty a detail for a cold roof, where you want to ventilate the whole loft space and it doesn't matter where the air gets in, as long as it gets into the cold roof space. I am talking of a warm roof where I only want to ventilate the small gap between the membrane and the under side of the tiles or box section roofing, so there is nowhere else for the ventilator to go but above the membrane.
  9. ProDave
    It's not uncommon to get a still, cold, sunny spell here in winter. Open the back door and the air is warm and the ground is frost free. Open the front door on the north side and it's like opening the fridge, and there's permafrost building up where the sun never shines. There is one road near here that I avoid in winter. It's in the shadow of a hill so never gets any sun for nearly 3 months of the year, never gets salted, and that can build up a really thick layer of ice that stays for weeks. There is a huge differene here between north and south sides. Granted when it's blowing a hooley from the west it will make no difference.
  10. ProDave
    Related to this, the easiest for me would be to put them both through the east facing wall. It would be harder to do, but part of me says to put them through the south wall as the air there is more likely to be warmer. Likewise the worst place to put them would be through the north facing wall as that's much more likely to suck in very cold air. Or am I talking nonsense?
  11. ProDave
    Yes that old chestnut. Fire door to go between the house and the adjoined garage. So needs FD30 or preferably FD60 rating. But the house is warm and air tight, the garage, although insulated will be a cold space and draughty (partly due to the building regs requirement for ventilation) So what I want is a good, well insulated, well sealed door that's fire rated. An internal fire door just doesn't cut the mustard. Howdens do some of their exterior doors with a fire rating, but they don't quote U values and it will just be a timber door in a timber frame and I doubt it will have much in the way of sealing so probably hardly any better than an internal fire door. Any suggestions? this seems to be a "gap" in the market.
  12. ProDave
    It's that strip above the eaves protector and the membranne This is the detail for my sun room. The box profile sheeting (mocked up with the spirit level) won't quite touch the ventilator strip. The eaves filler for the box profile roofing will fix (probably with glue) to the top of the ventilator strip. I'm not yet sure how you ventilate the ridge of a box profile roof.
  13. ProDave
    I can't see exchange rates as the cause for higher UK prices. The item still has to get from its factory in whatever country, to the UK and is therefore subject to exchange rate transactions. If anything, going via a third country could add another exchange rate transaction and commission, so logically that ought to be a more expensive option, not a cheaper one. The transport one also bugs me a LOT. A lot of couriers charge a big premium to ship something north of Glasgow / Edinburgh. It has been the cause of many lost deals, when a particular supplier will not even entertain the idea of using a different courier that does not charge silly money to deliver here. They are so stubborn, that's the courier we use take it or leave it, so I usually leave it. One can only conclude they have plenty of business without us in the far north.
  14. ProDave
    Perhaps the law has changed? We had to go the 0% credit card route about 7 years ago, when a certain bank that uses a dark coloured horse as it's logo shafted us and having verbally agreed a small extension to a small mortgage, when it came to do the paperwork they had "tightened their lending criteria" and we no longer qualified for any mortgage with them, let alone a small extension to the one we had. This was after we had paid the deposit for new windows and doors so a 0% credit card became the best way to finance it. The T&C then definitely said payments went first to paying down the 0% ballance. If they were the last bank standing I would not give them, the pleasure of any of my banking business again, having been a trustworthy loyal customer for 30 years before they shafted us.
  15. ProDave
    Attention to detail is the one that gets me. That really costs nothing apart from time. My neighbour is having built what he hopes will be a low energy home. He has cut some corners like only having 2g glass in his rationel windows, and not having mvhr so trickle vents and extractor fans. But while I have been working in there wiring it, I have felt it was never as warm as it should have been. It didn't take long to realise (pre plasterboard going on) that a draught was coming in all around the windows. The windows had been fitted direct into the timber frame with no visible means of actually sealing them to the frame. In the end I felt compelled to mention this to the client as I didn't want to see his house being built with a "plasterboard tent" with cold air behind the plasterboard. I don't know if that got back to the builder and he actually did anything to seal the windows.
  16. ProDave
    If using a 0% credit card, transfer your ballance, then put it in a drawer and DO NOT use it for general purchases. That's because any payments you make go first to paying down the 0% balance, so if you just paid off what you spent in a month, that balance would not go down and you will be charged interest on it at the normal higher rate.
  17. ProDave
    It was even easier for me. I had been using Screwfix before they launched plumbfix and electricfix, mostly buying electrical stuff,. so when they launched electricfix they simply asked me would I like to join? and that was it.
  18. ProDave
    Screwfix do their "trade" versions known as plumbfix and elecrtricfix that give you a few percent discount and a monthly trade account. Plus you can use the trade entrance if you go to the shop and get free coffee. You usually have to prove you are in the trade so not that easy but some self builders might manage it.
  19. ProDave
    Yes as Jeremy says, SEPA have exactly the opposite view to the EA. At the start I even measured the flow rate of the burn (which turned out to accord with their official figures) and worked out the dilution rates but the original answer was a firm NO and it was SEPA that suggested the filter mound system. And yes it is a lesson learned that if you take to long, building regulations can change and what was okay, is no longer allowed. Discharging to the burn is the simplest and cheapest option so I am very pleased that is what we have ended up with. The filter mound would have used about £1000 worth of graded sand and would have left a "hill" in the middle of the garden, and needed a pumped output on ther treatment plant.
  20. ProDave
    I didn't compare. I went for the recommendation of what was best and proven to work with the wood fibre cladding. For my entire house the render materials, that's all the render and all the corner beads, bottom beads, window beads etc has cost £3662 excluding VAT (I have paid the VAT and will reclaim it at the end of the build) That was sourced through a local low energy house builder so some big bulk discounting there. I looked at buying the materials myself and the best price I could find was £5K I don't like to say bad things about other render systems but my plasterer has used another well known render system and says it has big problems with cracking. He has never had that problem with the Baumit stuff.
  21. ProDave
    I only wondered as a lot of people that have floated / polished concrete leave that as the finished floor.
  22. ProDave
    Yes I know this topic very well. We have a burn through the garden, originally SEPA said no to discharging to the burn, so I ended up designing a filter mound system and that is what planning passed. When it came to the building warrant, I suddenly found building regs had changed and the area of land I could put a filter mound on had shrunk, and was no longer big enough. For a while I had no drainage solution = no house, until SEPA changed their mind and said "why not discharge to the burn" Problem solved and we are now proceeding but it was a VERY worrying period. Aparently SEPA only allow discharge to a watercourse as a "last resort" and we had reached that last resort stage.
  23. ProDave
    I fully agree that building regs need to be improved and enforced, but how? The Code for sustainable homes tried that but it failed and missed the target. I have a relative who is a builder and he built a house to CFSH level 5. He said it was just a ridiculous paperwork exercise having to record when the workers had a lunch break and where they went for lunch. I am not sure if he was joking when he said he had to record how many times they flushed the site toilet. There was more emphasis on providing a bike rack to park a pushbike than ensuring the insulation was fitted properly.
  24. ProDave
    Yes it's a lime based render system. No problems at all so far. We have used LESS materials than estimated so far. Base coat is called MC55W and is mixed from a powder. As it starts to go off, a fibreglass mesh from a roll is pushed into the wet render. Next day a primer called DG27 is painted on, it's a bit like PVA. Then the top coat called Silikon top is applied, that comes pre mixed in tubs. You can get different colours and different textures. Temperature has to be above 5 degrees for 3 days after application. No problem at this time of year, even up here.
  25. ProDave
    We are using the Baumit.com render system, marketed in the UK under the "lime green" name (which I think is a very confusing name as peiople expect that to describe the colour) I know from talking to the plasterer today that it can be applied to EPS so should be okay for an ICF build. Here's some pictures of it on my blog http://ardross.altervista.org/Wilowburn/let-the-rendering-commence/
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