Ferdinand

WHich then puts you into potential conflict with the Council, when their officer tries to decide whether it is lifestyle condensation, lack of ventilation, penetrating damp etc and whose fault it is. And the Officer may have been on a 2 or 3 day training course to learn how to evaluate, assess and enforce the HHSRS which is a Health and Safety Standard supported by about 500 pages of docs which will take that long just to read once, covering everything from trips and slips to asbestos to electric installations and damp. Then if the officer does enforce, it may be and informal demand to do things a LL does not have to do in law, on a timescale shorter than it takes to book a tradsman locally - though they may be open to reasonable discussion. But if they send a formal notice the admin fees a start at about £400. And then it will have to be declared on a license application, which may mean a condition to have a professional manager, which will top slice 12-13% off the top of the turnover for all properties, which for normal rentals may be nearly all the profit ! F

PErhaps model your water usage potable vs non-potable eg do you have a big garden that needs water to get a scientific gut feel. Or replace the swimming pool with a natural swimming hole filled with borehole water... ! Ferdinand

Perhaps compare borehole cost to solar PoV plus a Sunsmp.

What type of soil? LEvel of water table? Consider an untreated borehole for the build now and garden later, and a posh one if it becomes viable later. Can you do a simple one, and treat above ground fitted as a stage 2? F

Good points Jamie. Can anyone comment on whether Sue Roaf should have made clear that she is a former Local Councillor in Oxford, involved in I think the ruling party. I don't know the detail of committee procedures at Holyrood. I see that more as affecting her status as an independent witness rather than the particular affiliation, since her views may be affected by that affiliation. Up to 2007 I think. Ferdinand

WIth your brother is that just that the knowledge needs to be general knowledge not specialised knowledge, and is down to education. Some people struggle to make a Yorkshire pudding or a pancake or a chapatti, and I wonder how many of the experienced male members of the forum would know how to apply a lipstick or an eyeshadow competently rot themselves, or walk in 3" or 4" heels. AGree with most of that, which is the joy of fabric first, and the Achilles heel of the Sustainable Homes System introduced by Mr Brown which was just too complicated. BIll of Ockham rules ! There is a certain advantage to making off switches difficult to reach, eg in the case of trickle fans or bathroom fans. For the new kitchen/ damp proof course I was rabbiting on about before my trip to Oz (the current hotel have given me a duplex suite with a living room!) I am actually wondering about painting the walls behind the cupboards with one of those humidity controlling paints used in metal sheds fro an extra damp buffer. On the Tesla, Aeroplanes use autopilot all the time of course. I think the thing was that the driver was being a bit of a bonehead and he may qualify for a Darwin Award, as he was relying on a camera going into the sun and it didn't detect a white lorry. I think I am right on that. I can see ways to fix that, which might be as simple as a black outline on the lorry. Ferdinand

Can I request that anyone submitting comments to the Parliament consider posting them here Cheers, F

I think it is fair to say that Roaf is criticising the passive 'approach' ie fabric first / air tightness / very high Insulation / low thermal mass / ultra low energy requirement, and that thinks it is embodied in recent changes to building regs. I think the general opinion here is that changes to building regs go nowhere near a realistic attempt to introduce passive principles thoroughly, and perhaps go 25-30% of the way before such a characterisation could be made. I think the principles are embraced by most here, but that there are thought to be some quite serious weakness, not including the probable Passivehaus Institute desire to certify that all housespiders in an official PassiveHaus have exactly 8 legs of proven identical length. God help them if Shelob turns up. Things that may be done differently include heat management via water circulation in the slab, and variations on the MVHR systems, and I think here we pay much attention to the issue of solar gain and potential overheating, and the detail of heating systems - ph favouring something electric in the MVHR if I recall. I am sure there are other aspects. TBH As a community of practice by people running small projects we are ahead of the official researchers in some aspects. Ferdinand

My project layout designer used a CAD plugin to Fuzzy the lines to make it look hand drawn. No longer available I think. Gone to the useful programs trashcan in the sky along with Lotus Magellan and Gorilla.bas . Old drawing boards should go to art or fashion students, who will use them. Ferdinand

Para 3 of her first contribution I think she is fundamentally wrong on how much energy can be saved in even existing buildings with proper work, perhaps 75%, and how much of a contribution can be made by solar panels (in Scotland FFS !!!) . There is also a strong element if the various Greenies - GP, WWF, FOE - needing to take up ever more extreme positions driven by their political position. They CANNOT recognise as a matter of fundamental identity if a solution is reached, as that would be self-liquidation. Ferdinand

Roaf (please let her have a big tough dog so the normal summons process can be reversed) made her name with The Oxford House here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_Ecohouse That was 1995 and I am not sure about the numbers. Pre-passive, and I am not sure how mant PHs there are in Scotland to provide a 'plague' of problems and an evidence base. There are no witnesses at all who actually build houses. Ferdinand

Yes, but the wrong sort of planner would not like it :-). There was an episode of The Avengers which is perhaps a good but unwelcome analogy to whichever side is on the receiving end. They were put into a human version of one of those rat mazes with all the doors. A Planning battle can be about closing the correct doors first before the other person closes your doors. When we did our Planning App the PC had a resemblance to one of those Barristers who enjoys winning the process battle. I have seen similar motivations in organisations specialising in Obtaining grants. I don't know if anyone remembers the programme Garrow's Law about the Regency innovative Barrister. That caught the sense well. But then the client or the architect has to be the General. Ferdinand

Hmm. Can you argue that you will have a right to add EWI to an extra 200mm in all dimensions in future to demonstrate that the Council controlling the size to that extent now is ludicrous? ie you can build a Building Regs minimal house now with thinner walls and larger rooms and get to your better walls with large rooms by that other route, so to stop you doing it now is silly? Or have I spent too much time with Planning Consultants?

If there is genuinely no record of size in the Council files (go through the Plannjng File next time you are there) then I might well chance my arm on a site like that by a - creating a dimensioned version of the plan with sizes a little larger, for my files. If there is something buried somewhere that emerges if you have built the walls and plead ignorance enforcement us vanishingly unlikely. or b - treat the volume calculation as internal volume, unless there is some exact stipulation somewhere that says otherwise. Or talk to them about extra insulation as suggested. Ferdinand

AS an alternative to print/scan, you could do a screen grab / paste and print that to PDFs. Free tools are available for all of that. Ferdinand

Two further comments. 1 It was quite common for tracing paper to rip in two if taped onto a drawing board in too humid an atmosphere as the air dried. 2 The last paragraph of Sensus' post is what I call the HOG requirement. There is value in Hoary Old Gits who have been round the block. Ferdinand

ON your original example, I think that that could be made to go through, but if it was eg close to a boundary then pressure on the planners would make them enforce on it. eg if you were close enough to my boundary that the 'error' was going to make it impossible for scaffolding to be put up on your plot in future without encroaching, I would make a significant fuss. But I would need to act sharpish, because the probability of enforcement would reduce as the build progressed as the cost to remedy / consequences of error would change. One of the purposes of consultants is to provide the knowledge as to which liberties can be taken in each context. Ferdinand

I think there is error and there is error :-), and there are liberties and liberties, and not all are created equal. For example, there was someone posting some time ago whose house was not quite where the Council expected it to be as they were measuring iirc from a boundary and the boundary line was unclear. I think that could be argued out as a genuine error / tolerance due to the General Boundary Rule, and that trees and fences can move. But if your room suddenly turns out to be 1ft larger than expected inside because one wall has moved to the limit of tolerance one way the other has moved to the limit of tolerance the other way, I think that you will struggle to convince the Council that this is "error". It would not be credible because there would - should - be a dimension on your plan, and a credible mistake would be to move all of the walls in the same direction and keep it the same size. I am sure there are always errors and mistakes you can 'not notice', but verisimilitude is important - it has to be a credible and consistent set of mistakes. In this case you would have been expected to have the overall size of your house being what it says on the plan. OTOH I have seen plans go through Councils with no dimensions on plans, or drawn to be possibly misleading in a way which will encourage the Council to say yes. I know a house which is extended to the boundaries on both sides, and I were I the Council would have been questioning. To me the application plan looks ambiguous as to where the boundaries are, so a rushed Planner may well have made an incorrect assumption in their haste. The corrugated roofed cottage Sensus quoted was a good example ... The Council missed that the material had not been specified, and seem at that time not to have insisted on samples which would have been a check. Even now I am sure that people get away without actually submitting samples, and just build it, then when considering enforcement the difference is such that they let it go. And it may be that your mistake could be one of those that causes a real problem, and you may be made to put it expensively right. Alternatively you can just go over the line and hope that no one notices, and that happens all the time. But if caught out, it is a fair cop. Ferdinand

It can be finessed in some ways. Eg you can do what you want on it for I think 28 days a year without needing change of use. Your best bet may be an informal chat to your PLanner or another LPA without identifying the place, or the Planning Aid people at RICS? There are many threads on this over at the gardenlaw forum. Ferdinand

It is actually more interesting than that. There are other factors at work, eg: 1 - urbanisation is now 85-90% my estimate. In 1930-1950 it may have been more like 60% So in many places the rural population will be much less than before, which is why graves often more haven't had to be reused That is despite an increase of maybe 40% in the pop since the mid century. I Cannot prove it but the rural population of eg Norfolk may still be less than it was in say 1400. An extreme case but an interesting subject. 2 - now only fewer people are buried. THink about all those crems built in the baby boom era, and most churchyards now have an ashes' area. ALso of course we have all those green funerals etc. 3 - much of the population growth is in non Christian religions, where arrangements may be different - though Planning may be affected on occasion. 4 - and of course the CofE has itself declined in percentage of population as adherents, though there is still a lot of folk loyalty. 5 - and there is a statutory right to close graveyards and hand them over to the Local Authority. Always tempting at Health and Safety review time for small congregations. A REALLY interesting story I ran across the other day was when the Channel Tunnel people dug up medieval graves with JCBs in St Pancras. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/2516907.stm Interesting diversion: http://www.bbc.com/autos/story/20160906-plague-pits-the-london-underground-and-crossrail Ferdinand.

I think Persimmon will cave in that issue, because reuse and deepening of graves of that age is entirely routine, and the CofE has its own planning system for ecclesiastical matters. The alternative to their proposal is essentially cost free, so they only have goodwill to bargain with plus the loss of any development value to the extra bit of land which will be in the viability spreadsheet and vulnerable to having its value reduced by the church implementing Plan B if they drag their feet. In fact you cannot in law lease a grave for more than iirc 100 years. That is certainly the case for ashes in a columbarium as the chap with the Long Barrow in Wiltshire found out. http://www.thelongbarrow.com/about-the-long-barrow Persimmon are really leveraging on modern squeamishness about dealing with death. F

Yes. Something built with modern, and perhaps local, materials in sympathy with the locality (which might be pink render in Lakeland) IS the local vernacular. The issue is that Planners interpolate the local venacular from the past. On S106 etc, you can never overestimate the cynicism of large developers or disbelieve their financial arguments sufficiently. The larger they are, the worse they are. I have alluded occasionally to the housing estate plot we have just sold on the old family small holding. We put in a Unilateral Declaration which is like an S106 but you don't have to negotiate as painfully, in line with local requirements to get PP. The developer that bought it has just applied for a new PP with zero S106, densification increased significantly, and a lower affordable housing burden, on grounds of 'viability'. Bearing in mind that the sale price of the land with outline was well under 10% of the GDV, and it is a relatively easy project, I think someone is trying it on a little. I reckon they may get 1 out of 3 of those. Ferdinand

15" is a waterproof newt barrier. But I guess they could swim in in a 16" flood.

MOre seriously I wonder what the potential is here? I would estimate that there may be in the low 10s of thousands of residential moorings in the UK, if that many and including marinas. I would guesstimate 2k moorings in London, which may suggest 15-20k nationally. I wonder how many opportunities there are? Ferdinand

THat is presumably one of those where it was better to be a supplier , if I recall the episode and the budget. Though I suspect that London prices would mitigate the unamphibious machinery being flooded through climate change appearing a bit early etc. Amphibious may be the ones for that 25% contingency. But yes ... Fascinating project. Ferdinand