The Great Escape

I have just been watching the local television news. Several people, including some children, have died in a house fire. Actually this time it was some flats, not a huge high rise but high enough so that the people were killed jumping from the windows.
There can't be many people who haven't imagined themselves in a burning building but how many go one step further and make provisions for their escape? It would seem, not many and my evidence for that is simply the relatively low number of escape ladders sold. When I went looking for a suitable roll out escape ladder for my loft conversion my builder's merchant told me that they had never been asked for one. This despite the fact that they sell any number of fire escape roof windows. The purchase of the means of escape window fulfills a legal requirement but the Building Regulations say nothing about where you should escape to. They might as well say 'Climb out of the window and plunge to your death'.

The notion is that you escape to the roof and hang around there until the fire brigade or a neighbour comes with a ladder. The building is designed to give you half an hour protection but this has proved to be a generous estimate in real fires. Building don't always burn the way they are predicted to burn in a laboratory. Clearly in the case of these people in the flats they had run out of time either because the building burned too fast or the fire brigade were not fast enough. Now I have every faith in all our emergency services and honestly believe them to be the finest, most professional in the world but I have seen them struggle to get up my road with cars parked on both sides. It is very difficult to get a fire engine up here and if we assume that they had a traffic free journey across town they may still have used up 15 minutes from the time they got the call and how long had the fire been burning before they were called. Even if the half hour is accurate by the time they arrive and get their ladders off they might be cutting it a bit fine. So if you were in that fire with flames licking your backside would you jump to almost certain death or wait to be burned alive?

The ladder cost me £80.00 and apart from a little practice run for my son it has sat in its red box under the window gathering dust. Long may it remain there.
The practice run was perhaps unnecessary but it was fun. When my son wanted to move up to the attic bedroom I told him that he couldn't go there unless he could use an escape ladder. He was only nine years old but I got him to roll the ladder out from the window, climb out of the window and down the ladder to the ground posing for photographs on the way. If he had fallen he might have been killed or maimed but he has good self-preservation instincts and a steady nerve.

For all I know he might have used that ladder more than he should have. Perhaps to escape to the disco when he should have been studying for GCSEs. The people who make the rules say that there is more risk in trying to escape down a ladder than there is in staying put and letting the experts give you that famous fireman's carry, but I would at least like the option of escape if things got too hot. It always pays to have a plan B.

Yet in all the loft conversions I have carried out over the years there is only one person who has ever taken me up on the option of a means of escape ladder and that person is my nephew who I had plenty of chance to nag. So what do other people think when they see a news story about people jumping to their deaths from burning buildings? Probably that it will never happen to them. The cemeteries are full of people who thought that.

The Real Thing

I have just finished putting in a Clearview wood burning stove for a customer. Lining the flue is a dirty job because it must be thoroughly swept first to stop the residual soot from corroding the new stainless steel liner. I bought the stainless steel liner from fluesystems.com. It is sold by the metre so the first thing is to make sure you buy enough. You aren't supposed to join lengths.

A lot of builders shove stainless steel liners in and, on the face of it there doesn't seem much that can go wrong. But it pays to read the small print. Stamped in tiny letters (and I mean tiny) on the flue is the word 'up' and an arrow. This is easy to miss but it is important. The double skin flue is wound in a spiral and the inner stainless steel spiral has a smooth edge and an exposed edge. Imagine wrapping tape around a pipe. If you brush your hand one way you catch the exposed edges,if you rub it the other way you are going with the flow and the exposed edges sit flat. If condensation or tar starts to run down the inside of the flue it needs to run across a smooth surface to prevent the tar catching in the joins. If the liner is the wrong way up, the tar will catch in all the tiny ridges and the chimney will need sweeping more often, perhaps twice a year. If it isn't swept, the liner will eventually catch fire and that may well be the end of the liner. A stainless steel flexible liner may withstand one chimney fire but probably not two.

Personally I prefer solid sections of pumice liner which are far more robust, but fitting these is in anything but a straight chimney is a much bigger job. You have to cut out the brickwork at the bends and it's difficult not to make a mess. In an occupied house it isn't worth the upheaval.

As I put the finishing touches to the slate hearth the householder was itching to light the stove and the kids came down to sit by their first real fire. They were delighted with it and in my experience of having a wood burner of some kind for 30 years that delight doesn't stop when you become an adult. There are few building jobs I do that result in such an enthusiastic response from the customer. I can fully understand why many people think that a home is not a home without a real fire, even though they may forgo the pleasure to save themselves the work and mess.

Personally I would be very reluctant to live in a home without a fire and a solid fuel stove is the most convenient and efficient real fire there is. It hardly ever needs to be cleared of ash and the fire is contained and controllable. But it isn't all about the heat. There is a life there, a whole cycle of expectation and development building up from the first match lighting the paper and kindling right up to the roaring flames and then dying down again. I have heard people say that they light a fire for company. That is a strange concept but I know what they mean.

You just don't get that with a gas fuel effect fire. They are completely predictable. You turn them on and they burn at the same rate until you turn them down or off. Like most simulations it holds out all the promise of the real thing but delivers nothing of the sort.

The other aspect that is missing is cutting the wood. There can be no better workout on a winter's day than a couple of hours spent chopping wood and rather than pointless running on a tread mill or pumping weights it is productive end result. To see my wood store with a nice neat log pile tucked away to dry gladdens my heart. If you feel sluggish and the winter days are dragging, chopping wood in the open air is the cure. There us more than a touch of Zen in the process. To be successful in the art of chopping, you have to perfect a firm, but not frantic, rhythm. You also need concentration (what poeple now call focus). If you don't envisage the axe going all the way through then it is likely to get stuck. Visualise success and the wood will split neatly in two. I believe that golfers say the same thing about their swing. The work doesn't end when you hit the ball.

If you like the sound of this wood chopping malarky but don't have a wood burner fear not, you can chop for me (think of me as your personal fitness trainer) and while I sit in front of my fire you can enjoy the warm feeling of satisfaction that comes from a job well done.

Free for all

I had a call today from a young lady who told me she was from Crime Research UK.
Apparently she was carrying out 'research' into crime in my area and as a reward for answering questions such as 'Are you worried about home security and crime?" they would offer me a security systems with 'free' fitting.

I put it to her that she was not really researching but selling. "You aren't a researcher at all" I said.
"I am" she replied and such was her indignation that it occurred to me that she might actually believe it herself. They say that to be a good salesman you have to believe. I wonder if the same applies to a researcher.

To tell you the truth I would have given her slightly more air time if she hadn't got that word 'free' in quite so quickly. I hate it when people tell me something is free. Buy one get one free puts me right off. Just give me the free one.

Why would anyone give something away let alone employ people to do it? They only have to stack the goodies up outside any commuter railway station in the country and they will be gone in no time. Iv'e seen them do it with packets of cereal at Victoria Station. People fall over eachother to grab one, people even walk around the stand twice to get another one.

It should be even easier to give money away but apparently it isn't. Some weeks ago I got a letter telling me that I had been randomly selected by computer and I have won 56 million pounds sterling. Won 56 million pounds in a competition I didn't even enter. The only explanation is that the prize is worthless. There was a time when the pound was worth something and they could have stood there in the street handing cash out but then the pound went pop and now it seems there is all this worthless paper piling up somewhere taking up valuable space. So someone came up with the idea of giving it away in huge quantities. "Lets not mess around, lets give it to people in decent quantities. All well and good but letting a computer decide who gets it is not a good idea. I'm not a deserving cause, I don't even like shopping.

All I had to do was send them a mere £20.00 registration fee and they would then be able to place the money in my bank account after I had, of course, given them my bank details.
In the same delivery, we had another letter in an identical envelope addressed to the bloke over the road. I am ashamed to say that it crossed my mind to claim his 56 million as well (see how easily money makes you greedy) but I did the honourable thing and posted the envelope through his door.
That was several weeks ago and he is still living there in that nice, but modest, house driving a four year old hatch back and he hasn't so much as had a party.

Perhaps his randomly selected win was for a lesser sum, nowhere near the 56 million that I won when I can be bothered to cash it in. I don't dare ask him in case he thinks I'm gloating. See what money does to you.I'm now greedy and paranoid.

Underfloor heating

I overheard someone moaning about the running costs of underfloor heating and I couldn’t resist chipping in. “Underfloor heating is generally cheaper to run than radiators because it uses lower temperatures so, if you set it up correctly, the boiler will stay in the condensing mode and deliver efficiencies in excess of 90%.” I said or words to that effect.
“Well I have switched mine off after I got an electricity bill for over one thousand pounds. My central heating never cost me anything like that.” replied the man.

That word ‘electric’ changed everything. In the UK electric underfloor heating is usually a tile warm up system that is used in kitchens and bathrooms. It is not the same as warm water underfloor heating but is sometimes miss sold as a total heating system. It works in kitchens and bathrooms because it responds quickly to warm the tiles so you set the timer for an hour or two in the morning and the same in the evening. It turned out that his builder had installed electric underfloor heating under the entire ground floor. This was not a new build or an extension so I wondered what sort of insulation they had used. After a little bit of questioning it turned out that the builders had simply stuck the underfloor heating mesh down on the existing screed. No wonder they didn’t go for warm water. To make matters worse this house was thirty years old so was very unlikely to have any insulation on the ground floor. The heating was simply warming up that great mass of concrete and disspaeraing into the ground. A very small part of it was coming up through the tiles and wooden flooring.

I asked him whether he or they had ever mentioned insulation and he told me that he had but they told him “Heat rises”. They were obviously paying attention during their school physics class but may have dozed off during the bit where the teacher said heat will always move from hot to cold and never the other way. In other words until the slab of concrete reaches the same temperature as the tiles the tendency will be for the heat to travel at a faster rate down into that concrete than up into the tiles.

“So that means I need to hack up the entire ground floor to out down insulation?” said the man.

I gathered it was more of a statement than a question.

"The other alternative is to not have under floor heating" I said which is effectively what he has now decided.

“That can’t be right” He said.
“What can’t be right?”
“Me not being able to have underfloor heating, it is wrong, there should be a way.”
“There is” I replied
“What is it?” he asked
“Insulation”

Rising damp?

I got a call from a friend of a friend who had been suffering from persistent rising damp. He has spent a fortune on various remedies but it still it came back. The flat was only twelve years old so it sounded to me as if the damp proof course had been breached in some way. The usual reason would be having a path or patio laid to close to the dpc height.
When I arrived at the flat I was somewhat surprised to find that it was on the third floor. I have seen a lot of cases of rising damp in my time but never has it risen above 1 metre. I was ready to rule it out but when I got into the flat I could see all the familiar signs of rising damp. Large patches of bubbling plaster up to a height of around 900mm. Some patches were on internal dividing walls and some patches were on the outside walls or party walls to neighbouring flats. None of the other flats in the block had shown any signs of rising damp.

The patches seemed to coincide with radiators and my immediate thought was that the central heating system was leaking. “I’ve had it checked” he said.
I subsequently found out that this problem had been going on for two years and a surveyor had originally diagnosed a central heating leak some time ago. The only problem with that diagnosis was that the system showed no pressure loss. This could of course have been because it was being slowly topped up by the filling loop so I disconnected the loop just to make sure and I told the householder to keep an eye on the pressure gauge. A week later there had been no sign of a pressure drop.
“I think we can rule out the heating” I said .
“Yes that it what the plumber told me” he replied.
The householder then told me that he had a damp specialist company in around a year ago who had re-plastered the walls with a waterproof render. This is treating the symptom not the cause and judging by the bubbles and flaking plaster it hadn’t even done that. All that work and disruption hadn’t made the slightest difference.

It occurred to me that if the pipes feeding the radiators started in the hall cupboard where the boiler was and spread out like tentacles through plastic duct work set in the floor screed it was just possible that the duct work was also shared by another pipe which was leaking into the duct. The obvious place to start was in the cupboard. Unfortunately there was no sign of any duct work in the airing cupboard but I found that the pipes went through the wall and down under the bath. The bath panel was tiled in with no visible means of removal and that could have been the reason why nobody had pursued this line of enquiry.

When I eventually managed to remove the panel I could see immediately that the flexible overflow pipe had fallen off at the top end and it was dangling in the plastic floor duct. This meant that a good percentage of the water from the bath or shower was leaking into the ducts on a daily basis and was then being channelled around the house by a system of what were effectively small canals. The canals came to an abrupt end at the walls which not surprisingly were very damp.

I put the hose back on the spigot and secured it there with a Jubilee clip. The total cost of the repair 26 pence.

Sustainable Homes

The Government imposed Code For Sustainable Homes is aimed at reducing the environmental impact of new housing on an already fragile environment. As much as I support attempts to make builders and their buildings more eco friendly the very title 'Sustainable Homes' leads people into thinking that we are half way to Utopia.

The very word 'sustainable' when used in the context of most modern building is misleading. The quality of mass built houses is at an all time low and they are crammed into spaces that are inadequate. In the South East they are building homes on every bit of marginal land they can get hold of. In my area they have built houses right next to a high speed railway line in an old goods yard. On one side they have trains and the other side are gasometers. The tiny balconies of the occupied flats are crammed full of bikes, buggies and folding chairs. In modern homes there is next to no storage spaces, hence the emergence of storage warehouses such as Big Yellow.

The open communal areas of newly laid turf are already rutted with wheel marks where people park their cars. As pretty and eco friendly as planners try to make these homes anyone who lives in one for even a short while knows that they are not fit for purpose. They are homes that people move through on a ladder rather than live in. Building so many homes in such a small space also means that the infra structure is now all but crippled by the influx of people. Traffic doesn't move,commuter trains are packed, water is scarce and there are no school places. Yet there persisists this notion that a washing line, a bike space and a solar panel somehow makes our homes sustainable and eco friendly.

There is no doubt that we need more homes but calling them sustainable fails to acknowledge the reality. We can't sustain them nor them us. Britain needs more homes because we are living much longer and the longer we live the more we consume and the more we pollute. Nobody can deny that.

The Optimum Population Trust is onto something when they say that somewhere down the line we have to come up with an agreed figure for the 'sustainable' population of the UK and try to cap it. To just keep building homes for an ever increasing population is anything but sustainable.

With the U.K population growing by 1,250 people every day we cannot possibly keep pace with housing needs, let alone schools and hospitals. The fact that we aren't even meeting our current, let alone our future needs, means that we either have to build like never before or accept the inevitable fact that extended families will have to live together. The most eco friendly and economical arrangement is grand parents, parents and children all living in a single dwelling. That is sustainable but try selling that idea to people.


The following statement is from The Optimum Population Trust
'The amount of land available to each inhabitant of the UK - to provide for our ecological needs and to absorb the waste products of our consumption - has shrunk to nearly a tenth of that available in 1750. The UK is slightly smaller than Oregon, a single state of the USA. We have a surface area of 24 million hectares of land and inland water to absorb the environmental impacts of all our consumption - that’s less than half a hectare (one acre) each - and this environmental space is shrinking every year.'

Add to this the fact that, if the polar ice caps continue to thaw at their present rate, a great deal of our available land will be under water. Without substantial investment in flood defences even parts of London will be uninhabitable and East Anglia won't even exist. Yet in all these areas we are still building thousands of so called 'sustainable' homes. At the very least they should be on pontoons.

If predictions turn out to be only half true then much of the rest of the world will be in even worse trouble with millions starving and populations along rivers being displaced by floods. We can send them aid and put on a few pop concerts but if their land can't sustain them they will either perish or have to move in search of a new sustainable home.

Water Wars

Water shortage is not just a problem in hot countries. Incredibly even in rain soaked Britain we are now getting short of water and it will get worse. Either we process and store more or we use less. Using less is the cheaper option, but how do you achieve it? Water meters are an inevitability and, if you charge enough, people will be more frugal but generally the evidence has been that when people get used to the bills they tend to slip back into bad habits.

What are bad habits? Using a full flush on the loo when you have only had a pee, having a bath rather than a short shower. Leaving a garden sprinkler going. You can't rely on people to do the right thing. The WC has been redesigned to use less water even in the full flush mode and the shower is now about to follow. After years of customers demanding more and more powerful showers they are going to have to get used to something with a lot less oomph. They aren't going to like it.

New Building Regulations Document G will attempt to design in water saving to limit water consumption to 125 litres per person per day. This will mean fitting showers and other water fittings that limit the flow rate. Using grey water, or pre loved water as I prefer to call it, to flush your loos will be one way of saving your allocation for more important things such as drinking and washing

I suspect that what will happen is the same thing that happens with loos. You put a certain type in to meet the regulations and then, when the building has been signed off, you change it, either with a new shower, or by carrying out some small modification such as removing a flow restrictor.

The only way that this will be detected is if some official carries out a spot check. The idea that the 'Water Police' will raid your house is of course farcical. They would need grounds for suspicion. "Yes your honour he just looked too clean".

The new legislation also introduces the possibility of a trade off. You can keep your water guzzling shower if you can show savings elsewhere. We have seen this slightly farcical concept in carbon trading where we continue our excessive consumption by buying someone elses share. So find somebody who uses less water and you can take their share. Sort of sponsor a soap dodger. Buying credits from dirty people is all very well but you will have to sniff them out.

The work ethic

After several months of doing building work at the weekends I finally got a Sunday off and lay on the sun lounger reading a book. Life can't all be about work. The sun was hot and the neighbours were mercifully out at someone else's barbecue for a change so we had a break from the relentless thumping base that comes from their all weather garden speakers whenever the sun shines. Instead we heard the sweet harmonics of undigitlised birdsong from the woods at the back.

I happened to look down from reading, and through the increased magnification of my reading glasses, noticed an ant making it's way across the patio. Nothing remarkable about that except that it was carrying the carcass of a much larger insect. I know that ants are said to be incredibly strong but it is only when you see one carrying several times its body weight that you fully realise just how strong they are.

Due to this great dead carcass it couldn't see (or sense?) a lot in front of it but it clearly had purpose and direction. When it abruptly hit an obstacle, such as a twig it backed up and moved around it. The insect it carried was stretched across its front like an abnormally wide load but without the flashing lights and traffic jam building up behind. It held the dead insect high (by ant's standards) and moved at an amazing rate. Then it hit a rough patch of what looked like congealed wood pigeon's crap (yes I should clean it up) and it ground to a halt. It pushed, it lifted, it moved sideways and after each one of these attempts it immediately modified its actions until eventually it turned itself around and walked backwards across the rough terrain dragging its load. It was so clever and effective that I almost burst into spontaneous applause.

When it got to the nest the other ants no doubt gratefully took the load, they could even have had a party while he regaled them with stories of his heroic effort across the mountain of bird crap. I wondered what reward he got for this work. I can't imagine that it spent the rest of the afternoon on the sun lounger with its feet up and a cool drink. I suspect that it went straight back out for more food, programmed as it is to work for the common good. And it will also never know that it had an admiring audience and even induced a twinge of guilt in me. A twinge of guilt that is, for me, the quintessential ingredient of idle pleasure.

A hard rain's going to fall

It has been raining hard for the last few days and that always brings a trickle of phone calls. Blocked gutters, drains backing up leaking roofs. I got a call at 8.30 on Sunday morning from an old fella who has an ongoing problem with a leaking lead roof.

He is the neighbour of a friend and originally he tried to say it was my friend's broken tiles that were causing his problem. It is in fact a box gutter that sits entirely over his property but takes rain from my friend's roof. It was ridiculous to suggest it was broken tiles because my friend didn't have any broken tiles and even if he had, there was no way that they were causing this lead roof to leak.

What I discovered, from a close examination two years ago, was a hairline crack in the lead. The roof should have been laid in sections or bays to accommodate expansion but the builder hadn't bothered and had put it in using a single sheet. It must have taken a crane to get it up there. I told the old fella that it should really all be stripped out and relaid properly with expansion breaks and drips. He clearly knew this from previous problems but he also knew that it would cost thousands. I proposed giving it three coats of acrylic sealer or better still using a single membrane straight over the lead. There are now a lot very durable products such as Plygene from H D Sharman in Yorkshire (www.hdsharman.co.uk) that are being used to solve just this sort of problem.
"That sounds like a cowboy solution" The old fella said.
I told him it was anything but. The newly refurbished, magnificent barrel vaulted roof over St Pancras has gutters lined with Plygene and they don't expect to be touching them for at least the next fifty years. They may even last a hundred.
Given that this bloke is 75 years old I call that a medium to long term solution. In the end I sent him a written quotation for £150.00 for the 3 coats of acrylic option because it is the cheapest and easiest. I told him that I thought it would give him ten years.
He hit the roof, not literally but I got a letter back calling me a criminal and accusing me of damaging his roof when I went up to look at the problem. I had never intended to make any money out of it let alone rip him off. The materials would come to £35.00 and it would take a day. It was also a round trip of a 180 miles so it would have to work in with a visit to my friend. I didn't reply.

I have never minded people not accepting my quotes, they don't have to avoid me in the street if they decide to go with someone cheaper. If they can get a cheaper job and they are happy with it then good luck to them. It is business, you can shop where you like. My suits come from Marks and Spencers not Saville Row but I don't begrudge Saville Row tailors their place in the market. I certainly don't send them insulting letters calling them rip-off merchants. Having said that I also understand that £150 is a lot of money to many pensioners, it is a lot of money to me if I am paying it out, but strangely just chicken feed when it comes in.

All that was 2 years ago and he has been up there regularly with some bitumen and a brush which seems to last about 6 months. In between his bodged repairs he has had a bucket catching the drips. It is only in the really heavy rain that he has to get up in the middle of the night to empty the bucket and without knowing his personal habits I would bet he is getting up once or twice anyway. Still I don't like to think of him lying there listening to the drips.

Last summer I was feeling a bit sorry for him and told him I would fix the roof for nothing. I wanted him to see that I am not the baddie he thinks I am, but he then spoiled it all by telling me that even though I was doing it for free for him I shouldn't lose out but should charge my friend double. "Make him pay" He said with a vindictive sneer straight out of a Dickens novel. He wasn't quite getting this concept of friends.

Again I let it go hoping he would get tired of waiting and find someone else but there he was last Sunday morning on the phone. It had poured down all night and I can only imagine the conversation that he had with his wife before calling. I bet the words 'cowboy' and 'unreliable' were in it somewhere. No doubt he has had a chance to test the market and has found that my original £150.00 was not that dear. But that was before I gave him a 100% discount. Then I unwittingly put him in an impossible position. Once you have sniffed the scent of 'free' anything with a price attached has a nasty smell about it. All those MPs who are currently being brought to book for charging their household repairs to the taxpayer as 'expenses' are going to find just that when they start paying for them out of their own money.








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What are friends for (rhetorical)

A friend phoned on Sunday morning telling me that all his electrics had gone off. He had been making a bit of toast and the power went off. This is classic. The moisture in the bread shorts out the toaster. There was a time when they went bang but with RCDs being so sensitive they simply trip out. He told me that all his lights were working and he had checked the consumer board. All the little MCBs were in a row none of them down. He was baffled and starting to think about unloading his freezer and shipping it up to our house.

"What about the RCD" I asked him?

"Yes I have tried that."

"What do you mean you have tried it?"

"Well I pushed the test button."

"And what happened?"

"Nothing"

What do you mean nothing?

"Nothing."

"You mean it didn't drop the switch down?"

"The switch is already down."

"OK so push the switch up. Then go and try your sockets."

A few seconds later I heard him shout.

Blimey! It's working.

It was that simple and he felt a complete fool. I told him there was no need. We are all fools in some way. We all have blind spots. Mine is algebra.

I have often thought about what makes a person clever. We see a person making a stupid move on the road and without hesitation we call them an idiot. The only thing we really know is that they are a bad driver, or to be more accurate, at that moment they are a bad driver. It may well be that they were just thinking about algebra. It can be a killer.


My fuse box friend had a public school education and is clever in very many ways and he earns a lot more than me but when it comes to practical things he is not so good. The paint is peeling off his windows and they are rotting. His lack of investment now will cost him dear. I tell him every so often but he is oblivious. His mind is on the millions.

I have often wondered if I would swap my skill and knowledge for another person's. Would I swap with my friend and take his pay cheque and pension? The answer has to be no. Having come this far I would now hate not being able to fix things and work my way through a practical problem, it would be a bit like being partially sighted. My practical ability is part of who I am and it affects the way I see the world. If I press the clutch pedal in on the car I have a clear idea of what is happening at the other end. Then again plenty of people manage to drive perfectly well without any knowledge of what goes on beneath the bonnet.

No doubt my friend feels the same about his knowledge and his view of the world. So long as he has me, or someone like me, to call when his power goes off he is fine and I know that if I ever need to know about opera or quantum mechanics I can call him.
Actually I lied about the quantum mechanics, so it's just the opera then.

The Miracle Cure

I drove to Watford today (someone has to do it) and the roads were eerily quiet. I have rarely seen so few cars on the M25 during the working day. Surely Swine flu hasn't caused that much panic?

The purpose of my visit was to look at the Socket and See range of electrical test equipment from Kew Technik. The number of test meters and detectors now required to comply with the IEE 17th Edition Wiring Regulations has grown dramatically and there are even test meters to test the test meters. The good news is that, in real terms, this equipment gets cheaper and cheaper.

Electronic measuring has hit the building industry in a big way. Last week I was fitting a kitchen and the first thing I did was to set a datum line all the way around the room with a laser. It was a very nifty self-levelling rotating laser from DeWalt. I had another laser to set the right angles and yet another Irwin Straight Line laser to line up the fronts of the units. O.k I could have done most of these jobs with a tape measure and some string. You are either a techie or you ain't. As you might expect with all these electronics the worktops were all perfectly level and square which is more than can be said for the room. Fitting worktops and a four metre worktop is a sure way to find any discrepancies and to some extent it is best to ignore the room and set the whole thing out and then adjust the room to it. These days this is easy to do with dot and dab plasterboard set over the units.

My mate Steve Farrow came round in the evening after a long day's work elsewhere to cut the mason's mitre on the worktop. This is another job that requires precision measuring and cutting. I have worked with him a lot over the years and have seen how to set up the Trend jig and DeWalt router so many times that I am fairly confident that I could do the job myself but a worktop is an expensive item to mess up so I chicken out and get him do it. With the aid of a colour matched adhesive he achieves a virtually invisible joint and my impression is that he enjoys it. He certainly takes pride in his work. He started out as a machine shop engineer and won the national top apprentice of the year award. He brought this discipline with him when he moved into the building industry and whereas to a lot of builders a millimetre here or there is not a concern to him a millimetre is the difference between a good job and a bad one.

When he had done his bit I had to cut in the sink and hob. It is fairly straight forward but I know how easy it is to make silly mistakes such as drawing around the sink and then measuring in and marking the cutting line only to then start cutting on the outer line, and, if I messed up my bit he would have to do his bit all over again.

The Franke Laser sink is unusual in having a mere 10mm lip instead of a rolled over section so my cutting had to be spot on. The sink sits virtually plush with the worktop. I was nervous cutting it in but I knew I just had to concentrate. I have never been that good at using a jigsaw and for a long I couldn't understand why. My trouble was that on a deep cut the bottom of the blade was liable to go its own way so even if the cut was on the line at the top it could be 10mmm out at the bottom. I came to the conclusion that my cutting got worse when I began using bimetal blades rather than the old fashioned kind that snap. The good old brittle blade is a lot stiffer and stays in the roller wheel and remains plumb even through a 40mm worktop. The bimetal blade bends like toffee and goes its own way. The other thing is to use a new blade on every cut out.

Of course all this cutting creates a lot of dust so when I went out for the new pack of jig saw blades I also intended to pick up some dust mask. The merchants were completely out of stock. "Swine flu" said the young lad, "It won't do them any good but you know what people are like. We have also sold loads of latex gloves."

So Steve and I breathed in the dust that evening. The air was thick with the fine particles of saw dust and, unlike natural softwood, this reconstituted wood dust is loaded with chemicals which sting your eyes and give you sore lips. Though it can't have done us any good it is difficult to imagine that something as minute as a spikey little flu bug could move very far in it. If you sneezed, the dust would act like blotting paper. Am I on to something? Never mind your drugs and disinfectants. How much for a bag of finest sawdust guaranteed to cure all known ills?

Power Cut

It is Sunday evening and I have worked another weekend on my daughter's house. It is getting very close to completion and I know from past projects that it is the time when you start to rush things.

This weekend I have been running new pipework for the heating and the kitchen and sorting out some of the electrics. Stephen, my daughter's boyfriend, has been helping me and has proved to be an invaluable assistant. I was keen from the start to make sure he is fully involved so he is not just a labourer.

On Saturday afternoon we were tidying up some of the dog's breakfast of wiring under the floorboards. There were old rubber cables going to nowhere and other newer cable not now needed. The place had been rewired by a firm that specialises in doing rewires in a day. the upstairs and downstairs were both on one circuit and the whole lot went into a junction box in the hall. "Really I would like to strip it all out and start again" I told him.

I pulled on one of the redundant cables to identify it and asked him to grab the other end.

"Is it this one? he asked.

"If that is the one that is moving yes" I replied.

"OK cut that" I said.

"Are you sure?" He asked.

"Yes" .

"The one with the junction box on it?"

"Yes that's it, cut it"

There was a flash and a bang, a great chunk was blown out of the cutters and he sat there looking at me. It looked as if there was smoke coming out of his mouth. His knuckles were burnt black and he didn't say a word. He just looked at me. In my head I was filling in the gaps with my own swear words. I didn't even say sorry. I just looked at him and suddenly he got up and ran down stairs into the garden. He hadn't received an electric shock but he was in shock.

I continued to sit there, re-running the sequence of events in my head.
What had I done? Me the bloke who has been dishing out DIY and building advice for years, me who tells everyone to take care and turn off the power. As I have said elsewhere on this site the second after an accident happens you know exactly what you should have done.

If he had been seriously hurt or died I would have rerun that event in my head for the rest of my life and never been able to look my daughter in the eye again. I had been an idiot, I am still an idiot. He had trusted me and I had let him down, big time. When he asked if I was sure I said yes but I wasn't sure, I couldn't have been sure.
I gave him a hug and apologised. I was very, very glad that he wasn't badly hurt but he shouldn't have been hurt at all.

When I woke up this morning it was the first thought to enter my head. You know something is bad when that happens. I have re-run it countless times and, as with all mistakes you try to square it so it isn't your fault but I can't square it. This was my fault and there is no dodging that.

He is O.K so I can move forward and learn from it. He doesn't have to turn up every weekend for this torture. I need to take better care of him, as much care of him as I do of my own children. I discovered on Saturday morning that I had failed to do that and I also found out that he means a lot more to me than I realised.

Though shalt not covet thy neighbour's meter box.

I was supposed to call the gas company ( or whatever they call themselves this week) to ask if they could move the gas meter out of the kitchen onto the wall outside. It was on my list of things to do but it wasn't my top priority. Then I noticed some guys renewing gas mains down the road so I stopped to ask them if they were likely to be doing the house I was working in.
"Yes mate we are going all the way up this road and round the corner". As part of the renewal they were placing the meters outside. 'A result' as they say in all the best bookmakers, it would save the client (my daughter) a fair few quid.

There were only two guys working on the gang and I figured that it would take them a month to reach me. What I hadn't reckoned on was that these two guys did the work of ten men. They ran around all day digging holes, pulling pipes and tapping the main with the new branches to each property. I hardly saw them stop during the whole day. They told me that they had worked 30 days without a day off and they were due to get to me next week. It wouldn't have worried me if it had been next month because I had gutted the kitchen knocked down a couple of walls and with no cooker or boiler in the house I had limited use for gas.

One thing I did notice was that they were fitting surface mounted meter boxes which in my case would have meant a great white lump obstructing the path. I had a word with them and they said that if I wanted to buy and fit a recessed cupboard they would be happy to fit the pipe to it.

The box cost £24.00 from my local builder's merchant and with the help of a diamond saw I was able to cut it into the cavity wall in minutes. It looked a lot neater than the surface mounted boxes and I wasn't the only one who thought so.
One of the neighbours saw this neat little box and demanded to know why he hadn't got one. Before long he was crying foul and had whipped up further dissent among other neighbours. We explained the situation but the neighbour kept moaning and as much as I tried to keep out of it I was kind of dragged in. "How was I made aware that a recessed box was even an option?" he asked. "I am a builder I just know these things" I told him.
In the end I suspected that what was really bugging him was not that he didn't have one but the fact that I did and had worked some kind of flanker.

The contractors were not able to help him any further but that didn't stop him going on and on. It occurred to me that I could have made myself a few quid by going down the road and getting him a box and fitting it. In fact I could probably make a good living going ahead of the gang fitting recessed boxes. The trouble is that he wasn't about to go private on something he considered to be his birth right. Free education, free health care and now free meter boxes. Surely a winning platform for any political party.

Not able to get his own way on the box he set about stirring things up for the two lads. "What a mess they are making" he said and started to take digital photographs to send to God knows who. They were, by any standards, remarkably neat workers but if you have to dig a hole you have to dig a hole. Anyone who has any knowledge or experience of this kind of work will know that it isn't easy because you never quite know what you will come across when you start digging and driving pipes through with a mole. What they achieve is akin to key hole surgery but it isn't in the nature of most people to view those who dig up the roads as anything other than the evil enemy. Sure they make a noise and slow down traffic, which as we know should never, ever be slowed down even by a lollipop lady on a school crossing. But for that small inconvenience these guys bring gas into our homes and how brilliant is that. The people of the Ukraine who were cut off for weeks in the middle of winter think a reliable gas supply is very brilliant indeed.

How do those lads digging up the roads in all weathers, working 30 days non stop feel about the fact that they never get invited to any awards dinners?

"You get used to people moaning. You can't make 'em happy so why waste time trying". They told me.

They are right, what point is there in trying to make people happy if they feel the world is out to get them besides for all we know they could very well be be right.

Risky Business

My parents used to say that they had all the excitement they could ever wish for living through the war but for all the people who have lived through an unprecedented period of peace over the last 60 odd years the question is ‘How now do we get to live on the edge?’

I have always held the opinion that a lot of drug taking and anti social behaviour among the young is due, in some part, to the lack of risk in our society. Kids have always needed excitement but when a young person encounters danger there is often someone standing by to stop them. I am not talking about the kind of sanitised thrill seeking you get from controlled environments such as bungee jumping and roller coaster rides, but situations which require input from the kids and calm judgement in the face of danger.


I was particularly pleased, therefore, to see a new poster from the Health and Safety Executive acknowledging that a little risk and adventure is a good thing. The headline reads
“Don’t wrap kids in cotton wool”
and it goes on to say.
'Health and safety law is often used as an excuse to stop children taking part in exciting activities, but well-managed risk is good for them. It engages their imagination, helps them learn and even teaches them to manage risks for themselves in the future. They won’t understand about risk if they’re wrapped in cotton wool. Risk itself won’t damage children, but ill-managed and overprotective actions could!'

The HSE is primarily talking about leisure activities here but the same must be true of work. Young people eventually enter the workforce, or at least that is how it used to be, and I have often seen young people on building sites who are clueless about danger. Not surprising if they have been shielded from it for most of their lives. They walk behind a reversing forklift in their hard hat, high vis and steel toe caps safe in the knowledge that the hidden forces that have protected them since the cradle are still taking care of their every waking hour.

A new organisation called the Campaign for Adventure has been set up 'to influence attitudes towards hazard and risk'. It wants to foster recognition that chance, uncertainty, hazard and risk are inescapable dimensions of human experience. Among its supporter is the Duke of Edinburgh, who routinely risks putting his foot in it and mountaineer Chris Bonnington, who has lead many successful expeditions.

Hopefully if young people can use their skill and judgement to get them through potentially life threatening situations they will no longer feel the compulsion to stick knives into total strangers in pubs.

Invisible Builders

I have just returned from a month long cycling tour of Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand. This is the second trip I have undertaken with Bangkok based Spiceroads Cycle Tours. There is a part of me that resists organised tours but this company is excellent and employs local guides who take you to places which are so far off the beaten track that it feels like an adventure.

I find that a bike is the ideal way to see a country. The speed of travel allows you to see all kinds of things that you miss in a car but it is fast enough to make the scenery ever changing and around every corner is a new surprise.


Being a builder I am interested in how people construct their homes with local materials. In the Mekong Delta they build timber houses on stilts to avoid the rising flood waters of the rainy season. This is something we could learn from in certain areas of Britain. Naturally corrugated iron sheets now play a big part in any number of buildings throughout the developing world and they have replaced the straw roofs of the past.

Getting a roof over your head in the rainy season is a priority and a lot of the building is very crude and makeshift with no real regard for the aesthetic. It would be all too easy to dismiss the Cambodians, for example, as fairly primitive in building terms but then you see the magnificent temples of Angkor Wat which are on a breathtaking scale. The roofs built of overlapping and interlocking stone blocks are unbelievably sophisticated.

You can see that even though they had the idea of the pitch in the roof they hadn't discovered the arch or dome so there are no grand rooms. They have inner courtyards and meeting areas open to the elements which for most of the year is fine. The carvings and illustrations rival any in the world and give some idea of how life was in those days. This complex of temples must surely rate among the greatest wonders of the world, but what happened to all that building expertise after the temples were completed? There is very little evidence that building of this sort continued to produce further great architecture. Perhaps they just got bored with all that stonework.

Of course you have to have the means and a very good reason to build on such a scale in the first place and apart form serving the ego of a despot, providing a place of worship has been one of the most compelling and productive causes of great architecture throughout history.

Whether all the participants were willing and justly rewarded for their efforts is doubtful but it is difficult to believe that they didn't take pride in their work and possibly believe that their efforts were buying them a place in a better world.

Their lives here on earth certainly couldn't have been much fun. Looking at those great temples I tried to imagine the kind of shanty towns which must have built up around those construction sites. Countless lives would have been spent on the various projects. Families would have been raised and children introduced to the task of breaking and hauling stone from a very early age. Unlike the Pyramids very little is known about the people who built the Cambodian temples or even how they managed to transport such huge quantities of stone from the quarries to the various sites.

A great deal is written about the various myths and religious beliefs depicted in the temples but as interesting as this is, it is just another form of mumbo jumbo. Gods with four heads and ten arms are useful for keeping an eye (or eight) on the masses and possibly for directing traffic but they didn't build the temples. Gods never do. For me the real history is of the everyday people and how they lived and worked and, as so often occurs in history, this has largely disappeared without trace.

There's no business like snow business

Ah there is nothing like a little snow to get people excited. For a short while everyone forgot the credit crunch and some enjoyed the crunch of pure white snow under their feet. Hardly a car moved and the air was all the better for it. My neighbour gleefully announced "It's like the Alps" and off he went for a long walk over the hills. Other people discovered that walking is not such a bad way to get around and they said good morning and smiled. We were drawn together by the magical transformation of our town into Narnia.

By the evening the television was showing the inevitable pictures of disgruntled commuters and in particular one man who was waving his arms at the great white emptiness and saying that Britain is like a 'Third World Country' and it is disgusting. I must have seen him on a ten minute loop for an hour. I have no way of knowing for sure but I wouldn't mind betting he has never set foot in a 'Third World Country'. If he did, go to some parts of Africa for example, he might find that people don't tend to complain as much. They are generally more stoical and resourceful and they smile a lot more.

In this county people need someone to blame for everything that happens. They complain about a 'Nanny State' and the first time they are out of their comfort zone they go looking for nanny. The news media feeds and I believe orchestrates this for entertainment so the whole process becomes self fulfilling.

All those smiling faces I saw in the morning were not on the news and gradually the mood was eroded away by tea time when they discovered that what we naively thought was a bit of fun was really a National Disaster.
There was an estimate of how many billion pounds this snow has cost the economy and of course there were moans and groans about the lack of planning and investment.
Presumably those people want us to invest in hundreds of snow ploughs to clear the streets within minutes of it falling. They are convinced that Britain is rubbish at everything and that Russia, Canada and Norway all cope better. It's true, they do cope better but they spend a lot on preparing for it because it comes every year without fail. Motorists routinely change to snow tyres in November and keep them on until March or April. Motorists have to invest in looking after themselves rather than relying on the state. Paying road tax doesn't give them a right to snow free roads. Nobody hands out free snow tyres but if you haven't got them you aren't allowed on the road. There is also a downside to snow tyres because unless you have a good covering of snow the tyres tend to churn up areas of tarmac. so ideally you need complete snow cover or non at all.

There is also a fundamental difference in the layout of a Norwegian (for example) town. They don't have nearly so many streets with cars parked nose to tail down both sides. If you plough a street or a road like this you simply build two walls of tightly packed snow against the cars and this freezes quickly. You would then need a jack hammer to clear it and long after the snow on the road has gone these walls remain locking the cars in their parking places.

I lived in Northern Norway during the winter way up in the Arctic Circle and the snow builds up in front of the doors and windows and it is impossible to get the car out without a good few hours on the end of a shovel. There is no magic machine to do it for them.

In parts of America the public is expected to keep the streets clear. There are laws requiring residents to clear the full width of the pavement or a minimum of 42inches wide. Those Americans need a nice wide sidewalk. In Minneapolis we are told there is even a fine of something over a hundred pounds if the snow isn't cleared within 24 from outside your house.

In this country you rarely see anyone shovelling snow any more. In Norway we shovelled snow and chopped logs and we brought our shopping home on a sledge and even in temperatures of 25 below it felt great to be out.
More snow forecast, Bring it on.

Jack the Lad

This weekend I have been taking out some old, badly cracked and corroded, concrete lintels and replacing them with extra heavy duty steel lintels from Stressline. The concrete had blown off the reinforcing irons and they were bowing so much that they touched the window frame in the middle. I approached the job with my customary optimism (assuming it would take half as long as it did) because I thought these 50 year old bits of crumbling concrete wouldn't put up much of a fight but they proved to be heavy weight champions. To add to the problems the outer course of bricks had also dropped and we had to jack them back into place so we could get the lintel clear without bringing down a large triangle of brickwork.

The problem with doing any job of this nature is that you have to strike a balance between accessibility and supporting the building. If you put too many Acrow steel jacking props in you can't get the old lintel out and the new one in. If you don't put in enough then you risk having some unwanted movement in the structure.

When it came to the point where we were going to drop this 300kg of concrete we knew that it would take the Acrows with it if it fell the wrong way. We were using Strongboys, which are cantilever plates that fit on the Acrows. These can support inner and outer skins at the same time if they are close in. But once we had nudged the lintel out to its critical balance point we then had to transfer the Strongboys to the inside of the building. Moving Acrows around is a pain. They aren't the easiest things to operate and if they have been stored in the open they tend to be a bit rusty which stops them operating smoothly. So far nobody has come up with a better design for adjustable steel props and I have a feeling that I might be retired by the time they do.


Once the old lintel was out it was very easy to lift the steel into place and jack it up (more Acrows tight under the floor joists. At this point I like to put the pressure on so the building lifts ever so slightly. That way if there is any shrinkage in the sand and cement bearers at least it will sit back where it was in the first place.
The usual trick is to build up the courses and leave them to go off overnight and then dry pack the last course before pointing it in as if it were ordinary brickwork.
Once the lintel was in place we intended to enlarge the window opening and put in a patio door. With the lintel still being supported by the jacks we decided to leave the window installation until next week. There is no sense in rushing these jobs.

Working all weekend also gets harder as you get older. At one stage of my life I could work ten days without a day off and think nothing of it but now getting up on the Monday morning after a full weekend of work comes hard. Is someone trying to tell me something?


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People Should Jump Up & Down a Bit More

I have been out at my daughter's house over the Christmas break, knocking down a few walls. Nothing like a bit of demolition to wake up the metabolism after sitting about eating and drinking too much. Her boyfriend enjoyed it as well. Taking a sledgehammer to a wall seems to appeal to boys of a certain age, usually between six and sixty.

Of course you have to take care, you shouldn't just start knocking down walls. He was interested to discover how you go about supporting the structure with Acrows when you take out a load bearing wall. Then you need to know what to put back in place of that wall. The structural engineer did his calculations based upon the information I gave him. I measured the depth of the joist and their distance apart and then the span.

By modern standards the joists were over-spanned even before we took out the wall. Even putting a steel beam back in place of the wall left the joist over-spanned because there was a breeze block wall on top which added considerably to the weight. I was about to email off the measurements when I took a floorboard up and what I then discovered made me rethink the whole thing.

Whoever put the central heating in had notched the joist to an excessive depth. The central heating was a good job but my guess is that they got the apprentice or labourer to go around lifting boards and notching joists. They gave him very little guidance.

The rule of thumb is to notch no more than one sixth of the depth and the notch should be in the first quarter of the span. This clown had taken out a 2x2inch section of every joist. It amounted to a quarter of the depth right in the middle of the span (the weakest point) very near where the block wall was. So instead of there being 8 inch joists there were effectively only 6 inch joists. Either the load had to be reduced or the span reduced by putting in more support. It was decided that the best bet would be to put in another steel beam to divide the span into 3 parts.

It was a good job I discovered it because details such as how deeply the joists have been notched will never appear on a survey but they can make quite a difference. You might think that I over-reacted to the problem, after all one sixth or one quarter is to be the difference between the floors collapsing. In all likelihood over-spanning will just make them a bit lively. You can usually tell whether joists are on their limit by things such as cracked ceilings. It is also likely to show up if you jump up and down. This is tricky to do if you are just going to view a house particularly because it might just cause a lump of plaster to become detached from the laths. This won't make you very popular but it'll tell you a lot about the house you are about to make an offer on.

You might of course be happy to have a little shake and rattle on your upstairs floors. A lot of people, even in flats can hear the light fittings rattle when people walk around upstairs but if you are putting down ceramic floor tiles for a bathroom or wet room then you cannot afford to have more than 1mm of deflection in the joists. In my daughter's case it was highly likely that with a bath full of water and somebody walking across the bathroom floor the floor tiles would have cracked due to this deflection. People are very quick to blame the tiles or even the adhesive in such cases, but the provision of a rock solid base is the first essential and it is worth spending a bit of time at this stage to avoid problems in the future.


Roger Bisby
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