Self Builder

The unequal tax laws fuelling the black economy

2011-12-13T09:34:00.012Z

I have just heard an item on BBC Radio 4 about the huge increase in the cost of raw materials for the building industry. Bricks and concrete products are reportedly up 20%. While average inflation, according to the retail price index, shows a 2 or 3% rise the cost of 'trade' inflation could be much higher. The trouble is that there is no barometer for this because the cost of raw materials is only picked up when those materials go through to the retail sector. The retail price index measures a selected basket of items sold in the shops and by 'shops' they don't mean builder's merchants.

The building industry is even further out of the loop because house prices are not even included in the inflation index. I suppose there is good reason for that because houses can be sold on to people who have also benefited from price hikes but if you are trying to save up for your first house then the rate at which prices are moving away from you is the most relevant bit of inflation there is. Happily, for first time buyers, house prices are falling or at least static. But for builders faced with rising materials costs the fact that they can't pass this increase onto the customer is not quite so good. The only way that increased material costs can be absorbed is in reducing labour costs or cutting profits. You can guess which is more likely. With high unemployment and a huge army of migrant workers looking for any job they can find it is wages that end up bearing the brunt of this short fall.

For anyone looking to have work done on an existing property the fall in labour costs may also offset the rise in materials but there is another factor which distorts the market and that is vat which is not charged on new build but is charged on home improvements. It is even more unequal because small builders are sometimes zero rated for vat because their turnover is below the threshold. With vat now being 20% this can make a huge difference to a quotation. So although we have a 20% increase in materials there is a possible saving of 20% on labour costs if you find a builder who is either not vat registered or is willing to do the job for cash.

The idea of having a vat threshold is to encourage start up businesses but I know plenty of builders who have been trading for 20 years or so who still manage to keep below the vat threshold. They do this by working for cash or at least getting the customer to buy the materials. Meanwhile the honest builder (yes there are some) who is forced to charge vat loses jobs to the fly by nights.

The obvious answer here is for the government to give the same vat relief to home improvements as they do to new build or abolish that vat threshold. I, and many other in the industry would prefer them to treat new build and refurbishments equally. It would be a brave move but one which would give some real stimulus to our industry and at a time when there are skilled tradesmen stacking shelves in supermarkets while people are in desparate need of housing it is needed.

Fault finding, A plumber's tale

2011-12-01T17:47:00.009Z

Fault finding.
The golden rule that I have followed through years of fault finding is ‘never assume and never jump to conclusions’. OK that is two golden rules but the basic message is never say you know something until you prove it. This has stood me in good stead where other tradesmen have come and gone from a job missing one small fact that changed everything. This is not superior wisdom just hard won experience from getting it wrong. And sometimes I still get it wrong as this job proves.

I had been called out to look at a leak around the bath. It is almost always due to a defective silicone seal but I didn’t just assume that. I checked it by spraying water all around the edge of the bath. Sure enough the water poured down. Positive proof!

The leak had been going for some while and made a real mess. We got the job to take the bath out and renew the rotten chipboard floor and cover the walls with Knauf Aquapanel before retiling. This was the fourth flat in the block to suffer from these problems and it had caused bad feelings among the owners so this customer didn’t want any further trouble from his bathroom.
He didn’t mind paying for a good job but he wanted a guarantee. Now I know there are some plumbers who would not put their name on a piece of paper that says ‘this won’t leak’ but I was 100% confident.

Firstly we were going to renew the floor, then we were going to get rid of the plasterboard at the shower end and put up some tile backer board. We were also going to beef up the stud work to prevent any movement. Then we were going to tile the floor under the bath so the tiles came right up to the wall. The Ardex shower waterproofing system would then be used to make a damp proof membrane that ran down the walls behind the bath and onto the floor so any leak would not be able to seep down under the floor.

There would be a silicone seal between the bath and the wall and then another silicone seal after the wall had been tiled.
It was near enough a week’s work to do this but I told the customer that I was sure after all that it wouldn’t leak, but if it ever did (which I doubted) he would know about it because the water would seep out from under the bath panel and appear as a puddle on the tiled floor. This might seem like belt and braces but it is actually standard practice on the Continent, we are almost alone in ending the tiles just under the bath panel.

We obviously tested the bath waste and even replaced the flexi tap connectors just for good measure. I have heard too many horror stories about flexis springing a leak and would never use them in a flat. We finished on Friday lunchtime and everything looked good. That weekend I received a text saying that a puddle had appeared on the bathroom floor.

It was Sunday morning but I went straight over. The leak appeared to be coming from the bath waste so I took it apart. There were traces of Plumber’s Mait on the underside of the waste which indicated that this had been a previous problem which someone had tried to fix. We had obviously disturbed a bad repair. Plumber's Mait is not suitable for bedding in wastes of any sort but thousands of people use it for this job every year. If you ask Evo Stick, the manufacturers, they will verify that it is unsuitable for wastes. If you need a sealant for wastes then silicone is much better.

I removed all the Plumber's Mait and, because the rubber seals looked fine left them to do the job they were designed to do. I ran the bath and it looked OK.
Monday morning I got another text ‘Bath still leaking, please fix today’. This time I decided to renew the whole pop up waste assembly. It looked fine.
Monday night text number three ‘still leaking, pissed off’. Looking on the positive side at least the idea of tiling up to the wall and sealing the wall to floor joint had paid off with an early warning of what was really a small leak. If we hadn’t done this then the people in the flat below would have been the first to know.
I went back to the bathroom and after half an hour of having the bath full of water and nothing coming out I wondered if the problem was more to do with the person using the bath than the bath itself. He was a big guy and I wondered what difference it would make if you had another 110kg in the bath. It all seemed solid but would things start flexing? My problem was how to simulate this. I certainly didn’t want him sitting in the bath while I crawled about with a torch even if he was willing. It would take a month of Sundays to get that image out of my head. I lay there, head on the floor, deep in thought. It was at this point that the torch light caught a single silver drop of water. It wasn’t coming from the waste, it was coming from the glass fibre of the bath. I pushed it with my finger and a few more drops came down. I discovered that the bath was spongy. I could actually push a blister of water around. Clearly it had leaked through the acrylic top and been trapped by the reinforcing coat of glass fibre. I shone the torch down through the water and there it was, a hairline crack. The one thing I hadn’t proved at the outset was that the bath was watertight. Because 95% of leaks on baths turn out to be from around the silicone seal I had jumped to the conclusion that it was the cause and I hadn’t looked at a secondary cause.

The task now was to remove the damaged bath (easy with a recip saw) and then fit a new bath without damaging all those lovely new tiles or the new bath. That was slightly more tricky because it was a snug fit.
The customer, obviously not expecting to lose weight any time soon, decided to go for a steel bath. Good choice in his case. When we cut that old bath in half you could see the weak spot. It was all along the edge of the chipboard reinforcing panel where the inner acrylic joined the outer glass fibre. There was a triangular void all the way along both edges. It was inevitable that it would fail fat bloke or not but the fact that the percantage of obese people in Britain has now reached epidemic proportions means that plumbers will be busier with this king of work.

Carbon Monoxide Poisoning

2011-11-12T16:57:00.009Z

I have just read that the number of carbon monoxide poisoning incidents has increased over last year. The reason isn't entirely clear but I will offer two suggestions.

First the exceptionally cold winter. Nearly all carbon monoxide poisoning is from open flued appliances such as gas fires. These require a through flow of fresh air from outside. Natural ventilation, which may be tolerated, during a mild winter suddenly becomes an icy blast. I saw several incidents last year where people had taped up air bricks and tried to seal every available gap around the doors and windows.

Secondly the cost of having a Gas Safe engineer out to service the appliance has risen because many people, such as me for example, who are not specialising in gas work find the Gas Safe registration and training courses too onerous for the amount of gas work I do. At most I may install five boilers a year and service another ten. This does not justify registration so I now end up getting them done by a sub contractor.

I am all for safety but the need to keep going for refresher courses and paying out extortionate fees for registering has pushed out perfectly competent fitters and given those left in the game the opportunity to charge more. I don't blame them for this because they have to cover the cost of all those courses.
As with so many things it is the poor who suffer particularly those in fuel poverty because they either forgo the annual service or use an unregistered service engineer who may or may not know what he/she is doing.

My proposal is that the HSE lets people who prove their competence through an exam register for a small fee. We would then pay a notification fee to Gas Safe for each appliance we work on. This would mean that those who did a small amount of work would not have to pay a disproportionate fee.

All gas work would be subjected to random inspections by local safety inspectors who would be paid out of that fund. Any installation that didn't pass a safety test would be shut down and the installer sent for training or banned according to the severity. At present there is a voluntary scheme where a household can nominate their gas work for random inspection. This leaves the householder feeling as if they are snitching on the installer (because the installer is informed by Gas Safe) and the installer may therefore by reluctant to return for annual servicing.

If there were a duty on the householder to send off the registration card this would protect the consumer from such accusations and make sure that all gas work is subjected to random inspection.

I am sure there are reasons why this would not work and there are those out there who may think it is no better than the system we have right now but if the number of deaths from carbon monoxide poisoning are increasing then it is clear that something isn't working.

Another idea I will put up for discussion is for Gas companies to offer free service and safety checks to the elderly.

Precious Metal

2011-10-28T11:24:00.006+01:00

Have you noticed any increase in the number of scrap men doing the rounds? I certainly have, not least because the scrap I had set aside recently on one of my jobs walked off after just ten minutes. Two hours later I had another visit from someone who was similarly interested but this time he didn’t particularly care whether the copper tube was old or new. So keen was this young man on the concept of recycling that he thought he might just cut out the middle man (me) and go from merchant to scrap dealer without the copper ever being used for plumbing.

I stopped him in the nick of time. He was not particularly bothered by being caught like this. He had, in the process of stealing things from building sites, become desensitised to physical and verbal abuse.

“It’s the Chinese” he said “They’re taking all the scrap and there’s a shortage.”

I was impressed by this immediate blame transference. He gets caught stealing and it is immediately the fault of some mythical figure from half way around the world. It seems that the Chinese are now to blame for everything from global warming to material shortages. This champion of free enterprise who was scurrying down the drive with my copper was just doing his patriotic best to help alleviate the shortage. By keeping the supply up he was also helping keep the price down which, is good for me when I have to replace it.

It suddenly dawned on me that perhaps the problem is not that we don’t have enough raw materials it is simply that these materials are not moving around the system fast enough. The 25 years (miniumum) that copper spends lying around in people’s house is way too long. We need a much faster throughput.

If you are wondering what I did with the thief having recovered my property, the answer is nothing. I could have called the police but in my experience they never turn up when you need them. I may also have ‘taught him a lesson’ but it wouldn’t have been not to steal, it would have been to run faster next time.

The serious point here is that scrap theft is now such a serious problem that millions of pounds worth of cable is being stolen from our railway lines, manhole covers are being removed from roads and war memorials stolen.Scrap dealers know they are buying stolen goods but often turn a blind eye. The Home Office is now looking to change the law to make it harder to sell scrap. They are looking at increased regulation of scrap dealers which is a typical government response. Produce another licence. This is wishful thinking because the problem starts way down the chain from the legitimate dealers who would buy the licence.

The scrap metal business at this level is run like the drug trade, small dealers to bigger dealers and always for cash. In fact there are many drug addicts who rely on scrap metal theft for their daily fix. The only way that this business will be brought into line is if the cash is eliminated from the transaction. If those people who earn their living roaming the streets looking for scrap could only receive payment through BACS you would see an immediate drop in thefts. As it is at present they turn up at the scrap dealer with a false name and give a false vehicle registration and are gone. It is so easy and lucrative it is a wonder that everyone isn't doing it.

Cracking up

2011-10-17T17:15:00.010+01:00

If you have been drawn to this blog by the title alone I will save you wasting further time by saying from the outset that I am talking about buildings here and not a mental breakdown, though that can never be ruled out in the building game.
Certainly the owner of the house in this story needs an extraordinary degree of optimism and patience in order to preserve his sanity as his new house continues to crack before his eyes.

There are of course many reasons why buildings may crack but this blog is talking about buildings made of aircrete blocks which a few months after completion started showing a number of large cracks. As with so many of these problems everyone involved is pointing a finger at someone else. Is it the blocks, the brickies, the plasterers or the architect who is to blame?

Aircrete blocks are lightweight and have a very high degree of insulation. When introduced they seemed like the wonder product of the age and to some extent the do a job that no other materials can do. I think it is accurate to say that when they were first developed the intention was to use them on internal skins of cavity walls instead of breeze blocks which are heavier and not such good insulators. This is still where they are mostly used. There are however a growing number of buildings being built with external skins of aircrete and there are even buildings being built with solid aircrete. That is to say no cavity. The appeal of blocks over bricks is speed and cheapness. They are a good product in their way but the builder needs to understand their limitations.

There is a golden rule in the building industry that states 'mortar should never be stronger than the material it is joining'. It is a golden rule that it often broken. Having worked as a brickies labourer in my teens I can tell you from my own experience two very good reasons that this rule is broken: one is laziness and the other is ignorance. Often the two go hand in hand.

The general advice is that a cavity wall is brought up more or less equally on both sides rather than building the inner skin and then the outer. Again this isn't always done but if it is done then it is highly likely that the mortar being used is sometimes the same strength inside and out. Labourers just can't be bothered to chop and change mixes or throw stuff away. At best they may put it back in the mixer and add a bit more cement but even that is a hassle so they tend to mix a fairly strong mortar for the bricks and serve it up for the blocks as well.

Another bit of advice is that aircrete blocks should ideally be laid with a sand/cement/lime mix of around 12.1.1. If you look at how much lime a builders merchant sells compared to the number of aircrete blocks he shifts you will see that very few people follow this recipe. It is far more likely that they will weaken the mortar with a plasticisers or (in some cases) washing up liquid. This gives them a lightweight mix with plenty of room for movement but the problem here is that the amount of cement is not sufficient to cover all that sand. I would argue that for this reason alone lime is always better than plasticiser because it mixes with the cement and spreads it further to form a more consistent mix.

That is the ideal scenario but, as I have said, the reality is that the labourer will often knock up a 4 or 5 to 1 mix of sand and cement with a squirt of plasticiser which is then used throughout the build.

If the aircrete blocks are used on the internal skin only and that is later dry-lined with plasterboard then the subsequent shrinkage cracks will never be seen and in any event will probably do no harm.If the blocks are used on the external skins then the cracks cannot be covered because they will almost invariably show through the render.

Even if the build mortar is the right strength to allow for movement in the blocks, tbis good work can be undone by applying render that is too strong. Getting the render mix right is absolutely critical but once again there are plenty of plasterers out there who struggle to keep a good coat of render on an aircrete wall and to make matters worse their answer is to use even more cement. The real answer is to apply a slurry coat to the blocks and then when this is dry apply the scratch coat.

The block manufacturers are painfully aware of all these problems and issue guidelines to avoid cracking. This involves the use of movement joints which must come all the way through the render. You only need to look around at rendered houses to see how rarely this is done. People just don't like the look of them.

The other measure to avoid cracking is to use bed joint reinforcement at vulnerable points. This is typically around and below windows. The fact that there is no load directly beneath a window means that the blockwork can simply pull apart in the middle. Again you only need to ask a builders merchant for bed joint reinforcement to see that it is rarely used. Very few stock it and some merchants have never heard of it.

What this means is that block manufacturers can simply point to these omissions or errors and wash their hands of any problems. "If you don't follow the guidelines you only have yourself to blame." they will say. I would say they could help a lot more by printing the guidelines on the packs but I suspect they don't really like the word 'cracking' to appear too close to their brand name.

There is another little point that can also help prevent cracking in rendered walls (this applies to brick as well) and that is the use of serpentine curves in the scratch coat. It seems like such a small and insignificant thing but it can make all the difference. If the first coat of render is lined through with horizontal lines then the top coat will grab it along these lines. As that top coat shrinks it will pull on those horizontal lines and hold the wall in tension as the render dries out and tries to shrink. The problem is that all the tension is in a vertical direction so the natural tendency is for the wall to move in the opposite direction which is horizontally. So, as strange as it may seem, a horizontal scratch coat will produce vertical cracks.

Again I see hundreds of jobs where the scratch coat is horizontally lined often with a notched tiling trowel. In fact the whole approach of plasterers to rendering aircrete is often completely wrong. They assume that the wavy lines which are put on the blocks at the factory are a key for their plaster or render which is wrong.

If you walk around many aircrete buildings a few weeks after they have been rendered and tap the walls you will often here a hollow sound. Shortly after that come the cracks and after that the solicitor's letters.

Built to last?

2011-09-07T20:06:00.014+01:00

Guildford Cathedral needs more money for repairs. The cathedral, built in the 1930.s and 1950's, is a brick structure sitting on a small mound. Apparently this 'exposed' position is responsible for water ingress through and around the windows which are falling in. The roof is also leaking. Not so much due to the exposed position as bad design perhaps. Did nobody notice it was in an exposed position when they built it?

I am not at all religious but I think great religious buildings are always worth a visit and ought to be saved. They were and are built not just as a place to gather but to give substance to an abstract idea. To quite literally set it in stone. To do this they have to inspire and give those who enter them a sense of awe and wonder. If you sit in the pew with rain dripping on your head it tends to dilute the experience somewhat.

I am sure there are many catholics in Liverpool who know this only too well. Liverpool's Catholic Cathedral, known locally as Paddy's Wigwam developed a leaking roof shortly after it was built. We aren't talking about a bit of lead flashing but a major design fault. The water was pissing in if you will excuse the ungodly expression. It resulted in the architect, Sir Frederick Gibberd, being sued and a subsequent settlement of £1.5M being paid. Almost half this money was spent on consultant's fees just to work out how to go about fixing the roof which is another story. The eventual bill was around £5M

Why is it that builders nearly a thoushand years ago could get it right and we can't?
Chartres Cathedral, south of Paris, is not only remarkable for its magnificent windows but the fact that it has needed relatively little repair and maintenance in nearly a thousand years. Admittedly it doesn't stand on a hill but it is exposed on all sides simply because it is the tallest thing for miles around. It is certainly a lot more exposed than Guildford Cathedral.

I am not getting all 'Prince Charles' about this because I love a lot of modern architecture but, leaving aside aesthetics, cathedrals should be desinged to stand up and remain standing with minimal intervention. Surely that is page one of the book on architecture?

Masking the truth

2011-01-16T17:28:00.004Z

Masking tape
I was in my merchants the other day and an experienced decorator was at the counter buying masking tape. Mick behind the counter asked him whether he wanted 3 day, 7 day or longer. The decorator stood making a mental calculation about how many days it was likely to be on and then added a margin for safety. It was likely to be on for 5 days. If he bought 3 day tape and left it on for 5 days he was likely to have a residue to clean off but if he went for 7 day he was paying extra for the sake of 2 days. Was it worth the risk? Decisions, decisions. It prompted me to ask why all masking tape is not made to allow the maximum time of 60 days. Mick didn’t know the answer and neither did the decorator. Neither of them had asked the question but now they were wondering why we need all these different tapes. I took it upon myself to find out.

I phoned a manufacturer who told me
that it costs a lot more money to make an adhesive that will stick but not dry out. The longer it stays tacky without setting the more it costs to produce. So the tape increases steadily in price as the days get longer and of course tape also has a shelf life. Most of us have picked up a roll of masking tape only to find it is all stuck to itself. Merchants know this so even in a large decorating merchants they stock a very limited range of tapes. So even though there is the theoretical choice of tapes up to 60 days it is something you have to order and pay through the nose for.
So it is all about the price. Now I have another bit of information to bore people with and you are another unsuspecting victim.

Hitting the deadline

2011-01-11T23:18:00.004Z

Against all odds I managed to get the room completed in time for Christmas with a little help from my friends and family. We all had a great time relaxing in the luxury of our new living room. With the 3 kids bagging a sofa each to stretch out we were still a bit short on furniture at times but who needs furniture when there room to stretch out on the floor in front of the woodburning stove.

The Building Regs. required me to put insulation under the new floor and I took the opportunity to add more elsewhere so we exceeded the requirements. This has paid dividends because, even in the coldest weather when it was minus 9 outside and the snow lay all around we were toasting in our room. The wood burner had always worked well in the old room but with the extra cubic capacity of the new space it looked a little under-powered. We thought about getting a bigger one to cope but increasing the insulation turned out to be the better investment. The central heating is now on tick over as background heat.

Now I know that all this extra insulation costs money and when you start putting huge amounts of insulation into a building, as they always seem to do in Grand Designs, there are diminishing returns. The first 100mm will return the investment in 2 or 3 years but when you get to 300mm that last 100mm will not get you your money back in less than 20 years. Those figures, by the way, are actually just wild guesses because there are so many variables in heat losses that I didn't even make the calculation.

For me he insulation is more about comfort levels than saving on heating bills and that warm floor and extra insulation in the walls has made it very comfortable indeed. The icing on the cake is that I got most of the insulation for nothing.
It was pure fluke. Just when I was about to buy it from the merchants I drove past a building site and noticed this guy putting sheets of 100mm thick Celotex on the skip. He had so much of it that he has to pile it up beside the skip. Some were small off- cuts but most of it was plenty big enough to fill the space in between the floor joist.
It had been so badly cut that I doubted he even used a tape measure when putting the pieces in. It was almost as if he had just cut one strip off an 8 x 4 sheet and then chucked the rest away. There was hardly a straight line on the offcuts which meant that the bits he had put in probably didn't fit that well. If insulation doesn't fit snugly you might as well not bother because the cold air gets around to the warm side and it's game over. The unsuspecting house owner will have no way of knowing unless they hire a thermal imaging camera.

The guy loading the skip was very happy because I had suddenly created a lot of space in the skip and he had a load of wood to go in it. "Stop right there" I told him. I would make another trip or two and take the timber as well. Free insulation and now free firewood.

My wife laughs at the way my head always turns when we drive past a skip. It used to be pretty women that turned my head. Now it is the prospect of recycling building materials. A sure sign that I am getting old and mean.

My wife doesn't understand me

2010-10-29T19:01:00.011+01:00

Over the last few months I have been building an extension and carrying out some alterations to my house. This includes removing a central chimney stack with five flues and building a new stack with a single flue in a different position so I could make two rooms into one. I have also demolished a nasty little flat-roofed modern built bay window and replaced it with a larger pitched roof bay that matches the other bay at the front of the house. As with all projects that are carried out in one's spare time it has dragged on a bit. During this period we have been holed up in the kitchen. All things considered the family has coped well with this but it is now November, it is getting colder and we still don't have any heating. It doesn't help that there are still a number of holes waiting for timber sash windows.

During the last week or so I have been crawling about under the suspended floor adding power circuits, Cat 5 cabling and new pipe runs for the radiators. I have also taken the opportunity to add some underfloor insulation to parts of the ground floor I couldn't previously reach. The other job I have been doing under there is to drag out sacks of brick rubble. This rubble was not of my making. It was put there some years ago by some lazy builders who built that bay. Rather than cart the rubble away from the knockout they decided to chuck it under the timber floor in a pile. Who would ever know?

Well I would. Since I first discovered it some years ago I have often thought about clearing it away but until now the route out through the house would have been arduous and created a lot of mess. Now with the floor open it seemed the ideal opportunity to bag it up and put it in the skip. Ideal for me that is but when my wife saw me dragging it out she wondered what on earth I was doing.

Her reasoning was that it has been there for roughly forty years (dated by the discarded Woodbine packets) and has never done any harm so why, when all the other work still has to be done, am I wasting time dragging it out?

I explained to her that every time I have been under that floor to run pipes or cables I have crawled across that pile of rubble and cursed.
"Yes but you have now done all that wiring and plumbing work so why clear it when it will not benefit you?"

I explained that I would never chuck rubble under a floor, no matter what it took to cart it away, and I wouldn't expect others to do it. I don't want rubble under my floor because the underside of the floor is not a rubbish tip. It is a ventilated crawl space and the constant stream of air will inevitably blow the dust around. If I to go and work in someone's house and I have to crawl under their floor through rubble or any debris it puts me in a bad mood. I don't even like lifting floor boards and seeing stripped off bits of cable and old dog ends. Instead of enjoying my work I want to punch the lazy bastards who put it there. I get the same feeling that I do when I see people chucking litter out of their car window. How dare they?

I could see I was still not persuading her.

"Yes that is all very well but you haven't got time to indulge these fantasies now, it is fast approaching Christmas"

Ah that old one. I haven't got time. Up until that point I could not really nail the central plank of my argument but now I had it. Time, or to be precise, the time I haven't got. The time it takes to do a job properly versus the bish, bash, bosh.
Why haven't I got the time? Why is it that with all our labour-saving devices I still seem to have no time? Why is it that the people who built this house over a hundred years ago with no power tools and no motorised transport had the time to thoroughly clear the underside of the floors and remove every single trace of debris? Not only were their lives, on average, considerably shorter than ours but it is likely that many of those young men went from building these houses on to the battle fields of Flanders. OK they didn't know it at the time but building these houses may have been the last creative work they ever did in their all too short lives. Even if they lived to a ripe old age they are gone now and the only reason I know of their existence at all is because of what they left behind. It is that quality of their workmanship that draws me and many other to live in houses that are over a hundred years old. When I look at the hand built staircases, the plaster cornices run in situ and the brick arches above the windows I am deeply impressed by what they achieved. I cannot see a single gap in the joints of that staircase and there isn't a creak to be heard on any tread.
Why did they have the time to complete a job to a standard that we can not now hope to emulate? Why are we in such a blinding rush to create homes that fall apart in less than a lifetime? The results neither please the people working on them nor the people who live in them. Is this what we want to say to future generations about our values?

I know lots of builders who readily admit that the work they are doing on large housing sites is shameful. They would rather not put their names to it. They are driven to ever tighter deadlines for less money. At least those builders know the difference between a good job and a bad one, there are others who never will know. The so-called builders who put the bay window in my house, for example, didn't have a clue. Every detail of it was shoddy. Large cracks appeared on either side of the windows where they had failed to tie them in properly to the brickwork and they used a really strong mortar to build into a sand and lime construction. They didn't bother digging a decent foundation so the floor dropped by 30mm over 2 metres. Even after cutting all those corners they still didn't have the time or inclination to dispose of the rubble. It's all gone now and I still think we will be in that new room for Christmas. Maybe not this one.....

2010-04-19T18:57:00.004+01:00

A couple of years ago a near neighbour of mine spent £30,000 on a loft conversion. He also had his garden landscaped with an extensive bit of decking and shortly after that he put the house on the market just as prices plummeted. To my surprise, and his I think, he got the full asking price. He also managed to buy a much larger house for not a lot more money. All this while others looked nervously waiting for the market to bottom out.
The new people moved in and had a new kitchen fitted and a few weeks after that the deck was on the skip and they were having Indian Sandstone laid. They are still having work done and a good many local tradesmen are grateful for it.
There is of course no guarantee that the current owners will see a return on their outlay but hopefully they will enjoy living in the house. In the end that it what home improvements should be about. If you enjoy living in a house then there is a good chance that somebody else will also enjoy living in it and to my mind if you focus upon that the investment is secondary. It might seem like an obvious statement but 'houses are for living in' and when we lost sight of that simple truth and started treating them as banks we became the architects of our own downfall.

The Great Escape

2009-12-17T22:49:00.010Z

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

2009-11-21T15:25:00.008Z

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

2009-11-09T17:59:00.007Z

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

2009-11-08T18:05:00.002Z

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?

2009-11-05T20:36:00.001Z

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

2009-09-04T18:17:00.018+01:00

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

2009-08-06T11:53:00.009+01:00

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

2009-06-21T21:37:00.009+01:00

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

2009-05-18T12:53:00.009+01:00

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.

#

What are friends for (rhetorical)

2009-05-11T12:46:00.006+01:00

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

2009-04-30T20:28:00.010+01:00

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

2009-04-19T21:00:00.006+01:00

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.

2009-04-03T19:59:00.008+01:00

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

2009-03-18T19:46:00.004Z

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

2009-03-01T19:44:00.010Z

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

2009-02-03T23:31:00.007Z

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

2009-01-18T19:01:00.008Z

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

2009-01-01T16:13:00.009Z

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
Information for Building Projects, Renovation and DIY at SelfBuilder.net

Pumping Hot Air

2008-12-19T20:26:00.012Z

I went to see an air source heat pump installed in a loft today. I was invited to view the installation by the manufacturer because I expressed doubts about the viability of a heat pump in a loft.

I like to think I approach things with an open mind, but don't we all. Seeing the unit in action confirmed my worst suspicions but what I really wanted to witness was the noise level. It was actually quieter than I thought it would be but there was still a low hum vibration transmitted through the roof timbers across the top floor of the house and the huge fan moving air through the enclosed space of the loft was also clearly audible. The unit was less than a year old and it's in the nature of all appliances with a fan to get noisier. How many hotel air conditioning units have kept you awake at night? Or is it just me who stays in cheap hotels? The rep's reaction was to suggest that "You can turn it off at night". That is fine provided you don't need hot water first thing in the morning.

There is nothing wrong with the heat pump as such but putting it in a loft is self defeating. Apart from the noise the heat pump is cooling the loft. Again the rep, paid to defend it at all costs, told me that it was only lowering the loft temperature by 1 1/2°c. How they know this is anybodies guess because that figure must fluctuate wildly according to a number of factors such as outside temperatures and wind speed, but even if it were true it's not something to boast about. The whole point of a heat pump is to extract heat from the air so the more it grabs the better. The problem is that the colder you make the loft the greater the flow of heat from the house below. Basic physics dictates that hot will always flow to cold and the greater the temperature difference the faster the flow. "Ah yes but you can insulate it" said the rep. He is right of course and the idea would be that if the loft were cold and the house was well insulted the heat from outside the roof space would flow in to replace the heat pumped out but this loft was very badly insulated so the chances are that the temperature of the loft would be raised by heat escaping from the house. In some areas of the loft there was a 100mm of glass fibre which is inadequate and in other areas nothing at all, just the ceiling. On the plus side the heat pump captures some of the heat escaping from the house and returns it, but it takes energy to do that and it would be better to stop it escaping in the first place. Spending a fraction of that money spent on a heat pump to improve the loft insulation would have been far more cost effective and far greener.

Leaving aside the noise issue and the lack of insulation, the sole purpose of the heat pump in this particular house was to heat domestic water. Is this an economic prospect? Because the house has a gas boiler the answer has to be no. Solar panels would have been a much better bet because they use a minimal amount of electricity for the circulating pump.

The COP of the air source heat pump is around 2 at 50°c and the hot water needs to be 60°c to prevent legionellea so it still has to be topped up by the gas boiler or electricity. The heat pump is only running during the day (too noisy to run at night) so there is no off peak electricity to take advantage of, and a COP of 2 with peak rate electricity is no better than a gas boiler.

OK you could bring the cylinder up to 50°c during the day and top it up with off peak at night but with most tariffs you need to use a fair amount of off peak to compensate for higher day time rates. The whole thing is a minefield.

What concerns me most is that this sort of ill thought out installation (which don't forget the company put up as a show piece) will harm the cause of heat pumps. This is over-selling the technology. There are plenty of other places the heat pump could have been placed around the property which would have been better and there are plenty of jobs it can usefully do but it needs to be fed into a large reservoir of water in order to stop it switching on and off all the time. Nothing shortens the life of a heat pump more than switching it on and off all the time. Competing with a gas boiler to provide just the domestic hot water is the least viable application.

I didn't share my views with the householder because she is a very nice girl who is looking to do the right thing for the environment. It's just a pity that she wasn't given better guidance by the salesman.

Roger Bisby
Information for Building Projects, Renovation and DIY at SelfBuilder.net

Living in Fear

2008-12-17T19:03:00.009Z

I got a call last night from the police. My mother had been burgled. The guy came into her living room while she was sitting watching television and stole her bag with all her money.

I went round to her house and made sure it was secure. Understandably she didn't want to stay there and is now terrified. I know I'm not alone in feeling very angry about the way that crime has taken over this country. If my kids go out for the evening there is always the concern that they might be attacked by some knife wielding drug crazed moron or even just a stone cold sober moron.

It is a very tired cliché to say that my mother's generation came through the war and are now living out their old age in fear from the enemy within, but it's true and nobody could ever imagine that this country would turn out to be so dangerous for the old and the young.

So now she will live under siege in her home and I will learn more than I ever wanted to about locks, chains and alarms. It reminded me that some years ago I took part in a security makeover show for the BBC in Manchester. We visited the most burgled street in Britain and spent a couple of days putting in all sorts of security products for the resident.

There was one elderly lady at the top of the road who was living behind locks and bars on every window and she was lamenting the fact that what was once a good street had turned into such a terrible place. We fitted a wireless burglar alarm for her and I went through the procedure of arming the ground floor zone so she could sleep safely upstairs with the ground floor protected against intruders.

She was around 85 at the time and though she was very well turned out and as sharp as a pin I took the explanation of the controls very slowly. She stopped me half way through the demonstration and said "You think I'm stupid don't you?". I denied it but she had clearly detected my patronising tone.

"Let me just tell you that during the war I worked on top secret scientific instruments. Just give me the instruction booklet and make us a brew. If I've a question I'll ask you."

I could have kissed her for her fighting spirit.

Roger Bisby
Information for Building Projects, Renovation and DIY at SelfBuilder.net

Bucking the Market

2008-12-14T20:29:00.013Z

My daughter, Georgina, has just bought a house so it looks like I will be busy doing 'voluntary' work on it for a few months. The fact that she has bought a house at this time is either seen as canny or foolish. Some people think it is a bad time to buy because they see predictions of house prices falling still and some think it is a good time because they believe things are bottoming out.

Nobody knows which will turn out to be the case so it's a punt, or at best an educated guess. A year ago the price she paid for this property would have been seen as ridiculously low, now it's the market price. If prices fall by an average of 30% as some predict then conventional wisdom says she will have paid more than she need have. But the key word here is 'average'. Because the average market price falls, that doesn't mean all house prices will fall in line with the average. The likelihood is that the overpriced flats and new builds will take a hit but a house which has effectively bottomed out already will probably stay there. The price she paid takes account of market pessimism so if the prediction is for a 30% fall this is the reason it isn't selling at the moment but it doesn't necessarily mean it will go lower. There are people out there who believe that if they hang around long enough some desperate person will sell them a house for next to nothing.

There is a great deal of pent up demand in the housing market and we have stopped building at the very time that there is a shortage. Personally I have no desire to see house prices go back up, so a trickle of activity that doesn't open the flood gates is the best thing. The problem is that markets rarely work in that way. We have Bulls and Bears. At the moment it is the Bears who are dictating things but when the Bulls sniff a little blood it will be like Pamplona. People will get trampled in the rush and there will be those following behind who see it all disappear in a cloud of dust but have no chance of catching it.

This of course is just another prediction to go with all the rest out there and it means nothing because nobody really knows but, though following the herd is safe, it will never win any prizes.

Roger Bisby
Information for Building Projects, Renovation and DIY at SelfBuilder.net

Waste of Space

2008-12-11T16:57:00.013Z

I attended a press event the other day for a manufacturer of water heaters and boilers. It doesn't matter which one because what I have to say broadly applies to them all.

The Chief Executive was proudly telling us how the company is driven by innovation and they showed us some of their latest ‘innovative products’. Though I didn't want to rain on their parade I was a little underwhelmed. Most of what they showed us were 'me too products'. A new unvented cylinder with an extra bit of insulation . An under-sink hot water heater that did nothing more than deliver hot water. Don't they all do that. They showed us pictures of the heater installed under the sink. Who wants a water heater under their sink anyway? Once you have one of those in your cupboard there is very little space left for all the things that should go under there.
"Where else are you going to put it?" they asked me.
The company employs no less than 18 full time R&D staff and between them they hadn't managed to find an alternative place.

Space, or lack of it is the big issue these days. As land prices go up houses are getting smaller. Yet everybody wants more bathrooms and bigger kitchens but customers hate seeing anything to do with plumbing. Instead of designing new look casings and salivating over the sleek lines manufacturers need to think up ways of making their products disappear.

How about putting that water heater in the kick space under the unit? A small removable cover in the bottom of the kitchen cupboard to change the immersion heater is all you need to see. The kick space under the unit is dead space in all kitchens. Why not put a central heating boiler in there while you are at it? Why do boilers all have to be the same size and shape?. It makes no sense to have a boiler taking up kitchen cupboard space yet making them fit into cupboards has been the holy grail of boiler design for years. Yet when you take the casing off a boiler the components are anything but the shape that covers them. A cylindrical boiler with a coil heat exchanger shouldn't be hard to design. It could even lie along the top of some wall units, tucked in at the back.

A new solar cylinder was also unveiled at the do, but it looked like every other cylinder except that the extra coil makes it almost as tall as a man. What modern home has space for a 210ltr solar cylinder?
Why not make it so it can lie on its side in an eaves cupboard or why not make a matrix of hot water tubes that can be placed inside the 100mm space of a stud wall. The space between floor joists is also wasted. Why not make a boiler to go in there? There is around 350mm of gap between joists and it is often 200mm deep. Again a simple trap door would do for servicing.

Haven't they noticed that there is also a lot of space under the bath? What a perfect place for a water heater or a boiler. At present in design terms there is very little to choose between one manufacturer's products and another. What we need now is not lip service to innovation but some real ideas which address the needs of installers and end users. Manufacturers need to think outside the box to give the market some real choice and the market will then respond with some enthusiasm.

Roger Bisby
www.selfbuilder.net

Changing the Script

2008-12-05T16:35:00.014Z

When I was trying to get cavity wall insulation in my house I started by phoning a cavity wall insulation firm. Well it seemed like a good place to start. The man told me that they could do my house for £450.00 but if I went through my energy supplier I would get it a lot cheaper because of a government grant.
I phoned my electricity company and the guy asked me for the age of the property.
"1905" I told him.
"Ah sorry that's too old."
"What do you mean too old?"
"It won't have cavity walls. They didn't start putting cavity walls in until around 1936"
"How do you know that?" I asked.
"Because it is written on my sheet"
"Well I can assure you that my house has got cavity walls"
"That will be very unusual"
"No it won't there are thousands of them in my area all built before the 1st World War and all with cavities.
"No they won't be proper cavity walls"
"What sort will they be?"
"I don't know but we need 50mm cavities ".
"Mine are two inches which is 50mm"

After a little more persuading he took my details and told me a surveyor would be in touch. Nobody called and after a couple of months I called back. There was no record of my call so I started again. It was all going so well until we reached the question about the age of the property.
"Oh no sorry that is too old"
"You are going to tell me that cavity walls were invented in 1936 by a man named McCavity."
"I don't know who invented them but 1936 is the oldest property we do."
"Look I don't want to appear pushy but I have cavity walls and I want them insulated so can't you just forget the date and fill in the form."
"It's no good the computer will reject it."
"So tell the computer 1936."
"I can't. These calls are recorded."
"Yes I know, for training purposes."
"Yes."
"So why don't they tell the people they are training with these calls that cavity walls go back to just after the turn of the century? "
"I don't know the answer, I can't help you any further. I'm sorry. If there is nothing else......"
I left it for a few months and called them back
"Age of property?"
"1936"
"OK, how many bedrooms does it have."
"Is there a right and wrong answer here because now I've got to level two in this game I don't want to blow it?"
"We just price the job on the number of bedrooms the surveyor will check".
That turned out not to be the case. In fact the surveyor didn't even turn up and I was beginning not to care.
I was worn down by the whole process. I left it a few months and in a fit of enthusiasm and annoyance I called up. The man explained that they were busy and I would just have to be patient. I thought I had been but he means more patient but I was grateful that my name was still on the list. Eventually a surveyor turned up.
"This house looks old when was it built?"
"1905"
"That's too old. It says here 1936"
"A mistake probably but don't worry it has cavity walls and they are the right size, it is a perfect house. It is crying out for insulation. My neighbour has cavity insulation in his 50mm cavity and they were built in the same year".
"OK I'll put it through but don't blame me if they can't do it."
The guys that eventually came and did the job were unphased by the age of the property. In fact they told me that they preferred older houses because the mortar is sand and lime so it is easier to drill.
"We wish they were all like this"
"Well I can tell you why you don't get more of them". I said.
In truth after all the fuss and delays it was worth the wait. The house is a lot warmer, especially on windy nights when the wind used to whistle around the cavities and found its way in through the small gaps around the joist ends and up through the floor boards in the bedrooms. Stopping that air movement is really a large part of the saving. Cavity walls were after all initially designed to trap air in between two skins of brickwork so, in theory, they should form an insulating layer but they could never make them airtight without mastics and neoprene seals. The air could still run in and out through shrinkage gaps around windows and tiny gaps in the mortar around pipes etc. Filling them with insulation simply stops the air moving around so much and creates micro pockets of trapped air.

All insulation works in this way and it only works when it is dry. The thing that concerns many people about filling cavities is that damp can travel across the insulation and this needs to be considered especially on walls exposed to driving rain. It hasn't happened on my house and it hasn't happened on my neighbours. The guys that pump in the insulation tell me it is very rare to get problems. They shared my view that the house was well built and the age isn't an issue but I had to lie to get it done.

I wonder how many pensioners, in dire need of cavity insulation to help them reduce their winter fuel bills, have been rejected by their energy suppliers because their property is 'too old'. Unless they happen to have some knowledge of building construction they would probably take the word of the kid in the call centre and resign themselves to the fact that it is another one of life's little treats that they don't quite qualify for. And the kid in the call centre is just working from a script but I get the feeling that somebody needs to change that script.

Roger Bisby
www.selfbuilder.net

Men of Ideas

2008-11-29T18:32:00.010Z

I have often found that doing a repetitive job is very relaxing. Physical work that doesn't require too much concentration or working out gives you plenty of time for contemplation. For example bricklayers appear to be a fairly lighthearted bunch. They have plenty of time to day dream when they are laying bricks to the line but waht do they dream about? You might suppose it is Page 3 models and you may well be right but I can tell you that many are also busy inventing things.

The reason I know this is because, over the years, I have met a regular stream of bricklayers who have brought me inventions to look at. They aren't always inventions for laying bricks (that seems to have remained the same for more than 3,000 years) but brick layers tend to spend time looking at other people's jobs and thinking of ways in which they could be done better.

That isn't always a recipe for success because until you have done the job you don't always know why it is done in a certain way. But it is in the nature of inventions that people keep them secret until they have secured patents, so they aren't always that well researched. Several thousand pounds later they reveal their idea and go looking for a manufacturer. Sometimes it makes a fortune but often they find that their invention isn't quite as ground-breaking as they imagined.

For every successful invention there are probably ten thousand that consume a vast fortune in patents, marketing and manufacturing before they disappear without trace. Some even come back every few years like the beast that wouldn't die.
I have also seen inventors clinging to their idea like the wreckage of a sinking ship while everyone around them is in the lifeboat begging them to swim to safety.
I have met inventors who have lost their house and their wife because they just wouldn't leave their idea alone and go back to their day job.

The ones that have been successful have either given the idea to someone else to develop and just taken a royalty or had the drive and good judgement to tackle all aspects of the route to market without being mugged on the way.

I must confess that I have had a few ideas myself, that may or may not see the light of day. Every time I think I might do something with them I remember that lonely bricklayer in his suit, trudging the halls of Interbuild with his prototype and a briefcase looking for anyone who will give him five minutes.

Roger Bisby
www.selfbuilder.net

Prizes for all

2008-11-28T14:40:00.012Z

I spent last night (and the early hours of this morning) celebrating at a marketing awards ceremony in London. To anyone who isn't familiar with these industry awards I can say that these awards are like any other competition, highly regarded by the winner and derided by those who don't win. Our winning entry was for Switch On MK which is a podcast that goes out to electricians. It was dreamt up and produced by London based Facta PR and MK Electrics marketing supremo Joanne Reynolds as a way of reaching electricians with important technical information. The Podcast has now picked up three awards and is attracting interest from other companies in the industry. In many ways the podcast is an ideal medium. Like radio it has better pictures. In fact I don't even like the idea of publishing photographs of those taking part because I think when you hear someone on the radio you have a picture in your head and it is always a disappointment when you see the person behind the voice. When I worked for LBC on the Fixit Phone In I well remember the look of disappointment on people's face when I met them at a road show or similar event.
That isn't false modesty on my part it is simply that our imagination is so much more powerful than we give it credit for. It is the reason why a film hardly ever does justice to a book. How could it? The reason that those who read books love them so much is because they are collaborating in a creative process rather than passively sitting on the receiving end.

Much of the audience we reach with the podcast will never listen to speech based and those that do probably listen to Talk Sport. Statistically there is little chance that they would have had the pleasure of listening to a radio play on BBC Radio 4. This is probably a good thing because when you get into a good radio play the work rate gets slower and slower and you find yourself transfixed. On several occasions I have parked around the corner from my destination because there is still ten minutes left on the afternoon play. If Radio 4 plays ever grab a mass audience the productivity of the nation will fall during those 45 minutes or whatever.

So if you have a site where the guys like to play the radio the best bet is to keep it tuned to something upbeat and inane. On one site recently the ceramic tilers had a ghetto blaster playing CDs of trance music. It sounded like Ibiza. Oddly enough I could see exactly why and how it helped them to lay tiles and it echoed brilliantly against the hard walls and floors. It got me thinking that different trades could be suited to different music because it fits the activity.

Bricklayers. Pink Floyd Another brick in the wall. (too obvious) but you could lay bricks to it.
Plasterers. Dire Straits (money for nothing)
Plumbers. Tricky this but probably Handel's Water Music.
Roofers. The Beatles. Fixing a hole where the rain comes in.
Carpenters. If I were a Carpenter. A bit of an insult to carpenters really because it is saying if I were just a lowly carpenter. It is a great tune though but the Tim Hardin original gets a lot less air plays than the Four Tops which is a shame.
Electricians. Anything by AC/DC.

Roger Bisby
www.selfbuilder.net

Room to Breathe

2008-11-23T21:30:00.021Z

It has been raining all weekend which tends to make me feel a little trapped. You can tell by my wrinkles that I am the outdoor type so I went out for a bike ride yesterday and a walk today. It is, after all, only rain and to tell the truth I enjoy braving the elements and tramping around like a nutter in my Gortex jacket and over trousers. I take a childish delight in the fact that I am warm and dry. A bit like a kid stamping through puddles in wellies. It is almost as if I am defying the jacket to leak but I don't suppose it ever will.

I have heard of Gortex leaking. I was in a branch of Cotswolds Outdoor shop in London and a bloke came in with a Gortex jacket which he said was porous along the arms. The man behind the counter said it was probably a fault and all he could do is send it back. I hesitated to say anything for a while but in the end I couldn't resist it. "Have you tried giving it a wash and a light tumble dry?"

"Oh no we couldn't condone putting it in a tumble dryer". said the shop assistant huffily.

"Well you might not but that is what it suggests in the care instructions". I replied.

The man who brought the jacket in was equally surprised so he looked on the label of a new garment which he picked off the rack. He read it out loud.

"Tumble-dry warm. The heat from the dryer will help to reactivate the durable water repellent (DWR) treatment on your garment's outer fabric. I'll give it a try. Thanks for your help".

Clearly it was the first time he had read this information. Despite having paid two hundred quid for the jacket he hadn't so much as given the instructions a glance. It is a common problem. "As a last resort read the instructions" is a national motto of many and even the bloke in the shop was more willing to pack and post the garment than read the instructions. Mind you he didn't look very pleased with me either. Nobody likes a smart arse and the definition of a smart arse is someone who knows something that you don't.

So here goes.
Gortex is made up of millions of tiny holes that keep water droplets out but let vapour through. These micro-porous holes get clogged with dirt and they need cleaning out. The repellent then needs to work its magic over the holes on the outer layer to stop the fabric becoming saturated. Also moisture that wicks through from within will condense on the outside and roll down the surface like water off a duck's back. Preventing water absorption also keeps the fabric feeling light. When it was first invented, by accident I believe, it was revolutionary but now we take breathable fabrics for granted. Gortex is even used in heart surgery though how you tumble dry it I am not sure.

The technology has since migrated. Now we have breathable fabrics in buildings as well as clothing. Breathable membranes are used under roof tiles to allow moisture to escape whilst keeping out any leaks in the roof. The membrane will keep out rain and wind but let moisture escape from the house. A miracle for sure because you don't have to ventilate the roof space and that cuts down on draughts which keeps the house warmer. But once again you need to read the instructions. Roofers have come to rely upon breathable membranes to take care of all moisture problems in the roof space and you now see fewer and fewer tile and soffit vents, so they must believe it works. Well yes and no, sometimes they ask the membrane to do too much.

A breather membrane, like a water proof jacket, is capable of dealing with a given amount of moisture per hour depending upon temperature and pressure. In the case of the house you need to stop it sweating too much. If the passage of water vapour from within is not restricted by a vapour barrier and a sealed loft hatch etc. then too much vapour will enter the cold roof space and saturate the air.
To reduce the amount of vapour in the roof space it needs to be cleared from the house by extractor fans. These are now a requirement of the Building Regulations in kitchens and bathrooms so the problem will be taken care of automatically within a new building but if a breathable membrane is being used on an older house as part of a re-roof then these points need to be looked at specifically and with no building inspector involved, who is going to carry out the survey?

As much as I love roofers they aren't given to reading instructions. So they certainly won't go around the house and check details such as sealed loft hatches and extractor fans? Like the man taking the Gortex jacket back roofers will naturally blame the product for any short fall and if the man in the merchants has also neglected to read the bit of paper he will be shrugging his shoulders and laying the problem at the door of the manufacturer. Technical reps must spend half their life looking at the same set of problems over and over. Many web sites have a category FAQ's 'Frequently asked questions' but it is FUQs 'Frequently Unasked Questions' that cause all the problems.

Roger Bisby
www.selfbuilder.net

Silence Is Dangerous

2008-11-19T22:43:00.016Z

I have been out today to the old Brooklands race track in Surrey, which is now home to Mercedes Benz World. I am no petrol head but I wanted to go and look at the latest innovations by Mercedes and Mitsubishi. You often hear the theory that motor manufacturers are secretly sitting on the successor to the internal combustion engine but won't release it for fear of destabilising the global economy. In other words they are waiting until the oil runs out and at one minute to midnight they will pull the dust sheets off an invention that they have been sitting on for twenty years. This is yet another ridiculous conspiracy theory that doesn't stand scrutiny.

From what I saw today these motor companies are pouring money into research and development of new fuel technologies like there was no tomorrow, which may well be the case. In fact they are putting in one million Euros per day, which doesn't sound much like the are waiting until the oil runs out. What they have achieved so far is just the start but it is impressive. I got to drive some of their latest offerings which include The Smart electric car, a hybrid lorry and a natural gas powered van plus a couple of vehicles that have stop start technology, which prevents fuel wasted when idling. That idling fuel amounts for one sixth of everything we use. I particularly liked the hybrid lorry because it decides whether to run on battery or diesel according to the load on the engine. You can hear it change over as you drive along

The one reservation that I have about this technology is that it is far too quiet. During the transition period when we are running electric and internal combustion vehicles I predict a sharp rise in the number of pedestrians run over simply because they didn't hear these new vehicles coming. Despite the fact that we all know that you must look right and left before crossing the road many of us step off the kerb depending solely upon our hearing to tell us whether traffic is coming. Every cyclist knows this to be true.

Old habits die hard but the young iPod generation may already be better equipped for the new electric vehicle age, because they have already given up using their ears to cross the road or do anything much other than receive the relentless beat of
music. For them looking is the natural option, as is lip reading, so they stand a far better chance of surviving.

It isn't often that you see natural selection or Darwinism in action before your very eyes, or ears come to that.

Roger Bisby
www.selfbuilder.net

Crisis? What Crisis?

2008-11-19T15:32:00.012Z

A friend of mine runs a fairly large plumbing firm and he tells me that he's inundated with boiler replacements at the moment. It seems that the soaring cost of fuel has finally driven people to look for new efficiencies. The Government has also announced that massive funds will be made available for insulation and draught-proofing. Inevitably there are those who pour scorn upon this initiative and would prefer the money to come directly to those who need it most. The fact that the money is being clawed back from excessive profits made by energy suppliers doesn't mean that it should simply be given straight back to them. Sooner or later we have to face the facts that fossil fuels are finite and that we should be doing everything in our power to avoid squandering them.

All efforts to appeal to people's social conscience have achieved insignificant progress compared to the 20% hike in prices we have seen recently and yet there's still a huge amount of waste. We are dancing on the Titanic, with people driving their obese kid's distances of less than a mile to school and sitting in stationery cars with engines running, often for quarter of an hour or more outside the school gates just to keep the single occupant warm. People do this in the certain knowledge that there is still plenty left underground. Even if there is, even if we are barely half way through the world's oil and gas reserves at just 7% growth in consumption (remember China and India here) we will double our consumption in ten years and that will be the end of that.

I know there are people reading this who don't believe the figures, by all means feel free to dispute them but do the math first. Most people have heard the story about the bloke who tricked a king into giving him a fortune by saying "Give me one grain of rice on the first square of the chess board and two on the next and so on". By the time you get to the 64th square you are into something very big. How big? A warehouse full? enough to cover the country? Don't try working it out on your calculator, it isn't powerful enough. The amount of rice is more than all the rice produced in the world. Stupid king, all he had to do was get a bloody great abacus and spend a lifetime counting.

So if we have an increase in fuel consumption of just 7% per year that will double our consumption every ten years. The amount of oil and gas we'll then consume in the following ten years will be more than we have consumed since we dragged the first barrel out of the ground. Most of us are like that king; we have no way of processing these figures even in our imagination. It is just too much to contemplate and we shut down. In fact even people who are paid to know these things are often unable to grasp what is really happening.

Despite all the rhetoric from the Government and local authorities, about saving energy we still aren't really serious. Public buildings, and offices are often overheated simply to allow people to wear summer clothing all year round. I was visiting a relative in hospital recently and the place was stifling with radiators pumping out heat on every floor and windows flung wide open in an effort to cool the building down. In the summer you see the reverse. The people working in my local filling station wear body warmers to avoid the chill brought on by the excessively cold air conditioning.

Of course the most conspicuous waste of all is the traffic jam which brings a special brand of misery to hundreds of thousands of people every day. Millions of litres of motor fuel (possible one in ever six tank fulls) are wasted while we sit waiting to move, and in the UK the answer to that seems to be to bring even more people into what is now officially the most crowded country in Europe. 350 people for every square kilometre is the average, and if you live in the South East it can be twice that. Ah well if we carry on like this we will double the population and the close proximity of all those extra people means that we won't be half so cold when the Russians turn off the gas.

Roger Bisby
www.selfbuilder.net

'Not So Grand' Designs

2008-11-19T15:21:00.017Z

The bloke down the road is having an extension built. The job is being done by Steve a friend of mine. The customer is, or was, a graphic designer. When work dried up in that field he turned his hand to decorating. He is meticulous, about anything he does and he took great pleasure and pride in designing the extension. He is proud of it but to most people the glaring omission in the plan is a window looking out into the garden. Instead he has a brick wall with cupboards on it. The daylight to the kitchen is provided by four Velux windows. I am a big fan of roof lights but looking up to the sky is no substitute for looking out on a lawn and trees. Most people these days are desperate to get as much light into their homes as possible and I fear that, should he want to sell the house, this will put off many prospective buyers.

Now I know that everyone is entitled to design their house the way they like it. So why am I annoyed by the way he has vandalised this once charming Victorian semi? Do I care how he dresses, what books he reads or where he goes on holiday? Not one bit, but somehow what people do to their houses affects me.

I don't think I'm alone in this. If I walk down the road and see an example of stone cladding or day glow fluorescent masonry paint over what was once perfectly adequate brickwork I feel some sense of outrage. If I see someone replace a slate roof with large concrete interlocking tiles I feel a sense of disappointment that they took the cheap option at the expense of good taste. Although most buildings are privately owned there is some sense in which we all have collective ownership of them. Architecture, even on a small scale, gives us a sense of well being and it is defines where we live. We take pleasure in seeing a well kept village, a lovely house or even a palace and we are excited by iconic structures such as The Gherkin.

Planning laws are in some sense our attempt to regularise individual expression for the greater good. Yet the evidence suggests that we built much more attractive buildings before planning permission. Why should a handful of councillors on a committee have any more idea about what should or should not be built than anyone else? If the bloke down the road wants to build a claustrophobic cell and shut out views of suburbia why shouldn't he. In fact he did, and they let him and though I support individual expression in theory, I can't help thinking that they shouldn't have.

Roger Bisby
www.selfbuilder.net

Rising Damp

2008-11-19T15:15:00.008Z

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 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 too 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 classic 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. It took some patience to remove it without damaging the surround.

When I eventually managed to remove the panel I could see immediately that the flexible overflow pipe to the bath had fallen off at the top end and 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 soaking up the water like a sponge.

I put the hose back on the spigot and secured it there with a Jubilee clip. Had he known the problem I am sure that the householder could have done the job. The total cost was 26 pence.

Roger Bisby
www.selfbuilder.net

Time For A Change

2008-11-17T13:55:00.017Z

I have been working with a very small team of volunteers on a project to modernise a bungalow which is used by spinal injury victims. Once they leave hospital in a wheelchair they move into a halfway house where they practice coping on their own but have the backup of a carer should they need it. Getting used to fending for yourself in this situation is no easy task and it obviously helps to have equipment that works. The charity that looks after these houses is called Aspire and we started working with them around twelve months ago with the intention of building up a network of tradesmen and women across the country. Each team could then look after its regional homes. It was a good idea but we failed to get the volunteers in any appreciable number. There just isn't the glamour.

Of course there is one sure fire way of getting volunteers and that is to get some television cameras in there. Even better, turn it into some sort of game or challenge. The bungalow we are working on was originally converted by another team of volunteers under the stewardship of Aneka Rice. This was probably the first of the genre of television makeover shows and the intentions of those who gave up their time were honourable, but judging by the results the whole team was put under impossible time pressure, and had to work through the night to turn the job around in time for the prancing Aneka to arrive fresh faced in her helicopter.

Considering the corners that had to be cut to meet the impossible deadlines, the building has stood up very well. The wet room less so, but wet rooms were in their infancy then and there just wasn’t the necessary kind of equipment around. That said the leaks around the tray were due to the fact that it was bedded-in on mastic and was never going to support the weight of a person and a powered wheelchair. The leaks made the joist rotten and the whole thing was a festering mass of decay. It didn’t help that the shower walls were lined with plasterboard stuck on top of wallpaper with tile adhesive. I can imagine the conversation that must have gone on as the guys discovered that, at four in the morning, they had run out of board adhesive. They then turned to the only adhesive they had and to be fair it lasted over twenty years.

Given that Challenge Aneka wasn’t a live show you have to wonder why it was so vital that the work was completed on time. The precedent they set in this impossible 48 hour makeover, or whatever it was, gave rise to Changing Rooms, DIY SOS and several other shows of this ilk. Most people watching them have some idea that they are watching a bodge job and that may even be part of the appeal but television executives believe that audiences will not put up with the pace of a job done in a realistic time schedule. They may well be right, but what few of them realise is that there is a knock on effect. Customer’s now expect their kitchen, bathroom or even loft conversion to be finished in a week.

This rush and tear culture is everywhere now and there is no going back. Every travel show now has a time beating element in it. A young lad cycles around the world and the only value is to do it faster than anyone else. He hasn't got time to lift his head and enjoy the view of stop and chat to the people he passes which would have made much better television than the sight of him pedalling furiously. And television is seeking out new subjects and ideas. We now have face lifts and even serious medical operations served up as infotainment. It is fascinating stuff but the pace is perhaps a little slow. Six hours for a triple heart by pass is surely too much. What they need is a girl with a clipboard and stopwatch cajoling them. Aneka where are you?

Roger Bisby
www.selfbuilder.net