The oaks being planted today are for environmental effect, they are not being planted for timber, nor managed for it, and will likely yield little good timber compared with the stock we were harvesting in the 70s.
Have you any knowledge of "bent" trees being trained for curves? I only know of this for rootstocks for sticks. The bends, jowels and knees coming from a consequence of the oak crowns developing as islands in seas of underwood. This effectively grew short clean stubby butts with large branches, quite different from the French and German methods of growing long stems on long rotations.
If the need is to arrange for air changes to expel human generated moisture can the wall acts as a contra flow heat exchanger, with the living space under slight depression and sealed doors and windows? The cold air from outside migrating through the wall and picking up heat, thus also lowering rh, as it permeates through the strawbale and daub. The humid air then being rejected via a fan.
Worse than that, there is enough oxygen in the straws to provide sufficient heat to continue to pyrolise the straw even if air is otherwise excluded from it.
This reminds me of a tale one of the people at Butser recounted. Apparently when roundhouses were excavated by archaeologists a ringlike ditch was found around them, they put this down to the drip line off the roof carrying away fines. Once they had a round house built and in use the walls were inhabited by rodents (iron age din't have rats did they?). On destroying the round hoses by fire the tunnels were plainly visible as rings in the earth.
I would have though a angled DPC to ensure good drainage would solve that problem. But if no DPC then definitely no hermetically sealed outside wall - lime only.
seems to last longer than more modern building materials though.
this is a bit of a popular misconception. Victorian houses do not suffer from damp when properly maintained. The common occurrence of damp is precisely because so many have been subject to inappropriate works and failure to do basic maintenance. Damp is not a problem inherent in their design in any way.
I think it does. It also allows the reuse of bricks and blocks, and bricks are very energy intensive to manufacture, so it saves even more energy.
we do. Then again oaks will be with us in another 1000 years, oil probably will not. We choose how much oak we want to have, and for some reason we have chosen to have not a lot.
I hope straw houses become more accepted. It used to be used as insulation sheets, I dont know how it compares to polystyrene, or whether a hybrid might work well. A hybrid sounds like it might run: the straw would reduce the volume of plastic used, and add some strength.
yes, ventilation being the near universal method.
such walls do not get damp
no, that does not cause damp. Wall DPCs are a case of debateable science, there is simply no need for them.
Old houses routinely suffer settlement, not subsidence. It is misnamed fairly often, but it is not normally subsidence.
And most do have foundations. 9" is shallow by modern standards, but deep enough for the great majority of cases.
old houses work fine without such chimneys.
Yes, though todays foundation requirements have become a bit removed from logic. Sure, they wont move, but they are routinely 4x as deep as there is any need to be, sometimes more. Inappropriate blanket policies spend everyones time and money.
yes much better
a very unhealthy move. Regrettably regs insist these dg horrors be retrofitted in some cases as well, a move thats unlikely to save energy or money.
Daft to fit draught excluders then add more ventilation!
Theres nothing controlled about it. Airflow will be apx proportional to outdoor airspeed, which varies greatly, and depend on direction. A
1000mm2 of grill gives no more control than 1000mm2 of other gaps - which are easily measured afterwards or designed in beforehand.
Yes. I think this translates primarily into sameness. Sameness is caused by overregulation, and some amount of senseless regulation. For example we are not allowed to build straw houses, despite them working well. It is also caused to some extent by cheap transport. With low transport costs, regional variation dwindles.
The dictation of a very small number of building methods will inevitably result in a whole lot of sameness. Let alone the incapable style police! Gawd. I say incapacble because despite all their efforts to make nice houses, theyre still mandating what look very much like drab council houses to me. Thers still no sign of them understanding what the solution is.
The dictation against any creative buildings kills the variety, interest, development and numerous unique innovative and unusual decorations that characterise old buildings. A direct result of numerous unnecessary build regs & petty PP practice.
I think that is precisely the problem. The whole point to regaining healthy building practice is that there is no single best way, there are a whole variety of ways, and we need to see any effective method permitted again. Earth, straw, bottle, glass and steel, bare wood, brick, jetties, follies, underground, lots of variety, and room for interesting buildings again.
Why do we need upstairs sockets to be wheelchair accessible? Why do we need 10" joists when 6" are perfectly good? Why do we need overly wide corridors everywhere? There are millions of houses, mostly Victorian, that meet modern build regs in no area whatever, yet are just fine. (In all respects but insulation)
Build regs started out as a good idea, and brought good results, but their mission has crept a very long way since WW1. While some are concenred with serious and constructive matters, so many now are not.
Best practice depends on the situation. You've only got to look at converting an old house to see this. It would be illegal under todays regs to do all sorts of genuine improvements to old buildings: how does that make sense?
We do not have the best, never had, and never will. It is precisely this denial of insisting that every new house should be the best that is leading to our unhealthy building stock today. Rather than making them the best, or a healthy variety, it is making them a uniform standard with no room for the various clever ideas that people come up with, and were once free to incorporate into their houses. 'The best' is obviously far from the best, think Barratts, and simply kills progress and character/ individuality.
I'm totally in favour of there being build regs, but I do think the ones we have today have forgotten the plot somewhere along the line. And the style police... theyre the problem, not the solution. Remove them and there would be some yucky buildings, that is the inevitable consequence of allowing more freedom, but style would become free to develop again, and lots of lovely places would show up. The development of style has been killed since WW2 by our overregulation, so much so that there isnt even any style our present period will be known for.
I didn't think his new rules allowed for many of those. A village near us has nine new 4/5 bedroom houses squeezed onto what I would have regarded as a nice plot for a big bungalow.
It is. In that way our building regs are much better than the USA's. Ours say that you can build anything, any way you like, so long as you have planning permission and you meet certain _attained_ standards.
America insists on _how_ you build something, according to some pre-defined rules. Inventing a new technique there is very difficult.
Sadly though our planning permission (which should take no real interest in such things) is often withheld on sheer prejudice, even when the building regs regard an unusual technique as entirely legitimate, if novel.
Drivel is always going on about aircon with heat exchangers etc..its the best way..you suck warm sticky air out, pass it through a heat exchanger to heat cold air on the way in.
Its actually fairly not good to use bent grown timber for structures. The assymetry of the growth makes it move in quite drastic ways under humid/dry cycles.
I suspect a lot of what Anna thinks is grown bent is, in fact, branches, and the mediaeval chippies who used them went to some fairly extreme lengths to accomodate the warping that they engender.
Read 'Understanding wood' by Hoadley for a more detailed analysis.
(i) it isn't 2400 yet so who knows what of todays building materials will survive
(ii) only about 1% of buildings of that age survive if that. The rest all burnt down or rotted away.
(iii) If you look at any castles, the bits left standing are stone. None of the timber survived lack of regular maintenance.
Actaully, having lived in them they do.
Its a very poor grower. Its main use was in framing because its very strong for its size. Its totally superseded for almost all purposes by steel, which we DO have a lot of.
I haven't seene many oak bridges or oak oil tankers, have you?
I would guess that a 2 foot of straw beats 6" of polystyrene any way.
Go tell it on the mountain. They do. If they are unsealed outside, and relatively unheated inside, or heated by open fires, they dont show too much condensation or efflorescence, but they are damp through and through and you can generally smell the moulds.
You are a tosser, you really are.
I had a whole chimney (completely unrendered) sitting in wet clay, and it sucked water up and rotted anything it touched.
Rising damp is a fact, and your religion will not make it go away.
Semantics.
Most don't actually. My old house was built on roes of bricks laid straight on the clay. With no damp proof. The sole paltes rotted away completely in several places, and ther were signs of considerable movment along the whole length of them. Only the fact that the timber acts as a aort of stiffener, spreading the load over the brick plinth, stopped more serious problems. You can get away with a lot on a timber fare, until it rots..however judging by what we found when we lifted teh floors, the whole house had sunk into the clay by up to 8 inches in places...
Are you IMM in a new guise?
Deep foundatins are beneeded for rigid strucrtures: I agree that a timber framed house doesn't beed them THAT much, but even so, internal; cracking between sections would be far more common if we had more relaxed regs. Concrete is cheap and so are diggers.
If you whack the insulation into the walls to get torwads a U value of <
0.3 then the windows do need to be either small or DG I am afraid.
There is no law saying you must use them. You can do an overall energy calc in the house like I did and show that your overall losses are wihin spec.
well I see the point...in my case though wioth two huge chimneys and underfloor vents to them and enough fans punched through the walls, I have to argue the case with the BCO that that is enough thank you.
Hit an miss vents can of course be closed...permamnently once the BCO leaves ;-)
No, its not the regulations, its the generation of rock bottom prived identical boxes done to a price by large building firms.
the cheapest house shape to build for a given size is a simple oblong with gable ended roof.
The cheapest construction methiod is block - not even brick - and face it with eiher render or a tacky plain common brick laid in the straightest lines on piece work. Or maybe they will add some wetraher board or a line of tiles.
The cheapest roof is machine made cement tiles.
The cheapest doors and windows are mass produced DG units.
To add a hipped roof, or use tiles instead of slates, or to use natural wood windows, or add dormers, or make a house an L or a U shape adds cost. Quite a lot of it actually.
I am equaly sure that the unending sameness of 2 up 2 down victorian terraced labourers cottages, most of which have thankfully been pulled doen or the undending shabbiness of wattle and daub damp thatched fire hazard labourers cottages of the 17trh century, were eqaully reviled in their age. When you arebuidling down t oap rice, your optins are limited and thats that.
Ther is no dictaion by te givernement agianst creative buildings., but people won;t pay the extar for something when they are on a tight budghetr and they need a new hutch for teh barts, conveniently located fior Tescos.
The only few areas where interesting design is militated against are the disabled regs, which make stpes to the only doors a thing of the past.
None of those are prohibited under the regulations: However you have to convince the BCO that they will meet the spirit of the regulations.
This is not impossible, but its not as easy as putting up a DG blockowrk box.
No they trulty are not. I waled up to a friends 3rd floor under teh attic, and realised that teh satirs were farnly dangerous. alamost a ladder.
I am with you on disabled regs, which are stupid beyond belief, but all the other stuff is about eliminatiing faults that have been found with oldder buildings. Over engineering means they have redundancy in case of strictural failure or rot, and people simply don't like flexible floors that transmit vibration and noise, hence super thick joists.
Decent sized straicases and corrodoors mena yoiu CASN get an office desk into a room.
If we did not have these, then builders would buoid totally unsuitable houses.
Many, but by no means a majority.
Er..name one?
Barratts *is* the best for a first time buyer who wants a rock bottom price on a living unit.
If you want more, build your own. And pay the price.
What style police? Planners? you just need to emply a fancy architect and you can get away with murder.
Its a very poor grower. Its main use was in framing because its very strong for its size. Its totally superseded for almost all purposes by steel, which we DO have a lot of. I haven't seene many oak bridges or oak oil tankers, have you?
Oak grows better than steel and requires far less energy to produce and fashion than steel. In houses, it is more versatile and adaptable and easier to use. It performs better in a fire. You are right to suggest that oak is not much good for oi; tankers but then we won't be needing them in a little while.
Rising damp is a fact, and your religion will not make it go away
Dunno much about religeon but the science tells us that capilliary action does not cause moisture to rise more than a couple of brick courses. I'm not sure whether what the DPC industry says should be regarded as religeon or mythology, but science it ain't.
Deep foundatins are needed for rigid strucrtures:
Domestice building just does not need to be rigid - ban spirit levels :-)
Concrete is cheap
Concrete is only cheap so long as oil is cheap and we don't take into account the cost of climate change caused by one of the most guilty industries - ban OPC as well!
It does. British homes notoriously leak air like crazy. A ridgid air-tight structure means you control the ventilations instaed of having it by excessivly by default. 40% of heat loss ia via air leaks.
These days you will not get away without a rigid foundation, so why all this lime mortar, that is good for old building that move on poor foundations, but pretty inappropriate, and expensive, for a modern building.
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The thing about bends, knees and jowels is that they were natural structures and the grain followed the curve, sawing was not needed other than to square the timber (really only to accept joints) so no fibers were cut across to cause problems with short grain. The warping did not occur (other than causing fibres to split apart as cracks) because, as was previously mentioned, wood only shrinks as it drops from about 25% mc down to whatever equilibrium mc it ranges over as the rh of the local environment changes. Then its length shrinkage is negligible and the movement only becomes a problem if the baulk has been cut such that the large difference in radial to tangential shrinkage has an effect. In general the curves were used as boxed heart, though I am told crucks would often be a halved tree. Even then the changes would only be in cross section.
It's things like flooring boards that warp because to get the width they were often through sawn. The real problems arrive with large knots, as then any plane through them has longitudinal, tangential and radial features. This is why the trees planted now will have less value as structural timber.
I know, that is what I was asking, as the whole wall is acting as a heat exchanger it would have a thermal gradient across it, as do all walls, but the air entering through the wall would be picking up heat, which would be lost through it anyway, and entering the house warmer.
Mm. I aree that you can make nice curved pieces out of curved wood, but they liked that because the amount of effort to cut wood in those days was immense. We don't have that problem today.
And curved wood - wood that has been grown that way - exhibits extremely assymetric ring growth and is very prone to movement whether whole sawn or cut into beams. In fact its better to cut it to separate the wide ring areas from the narrow.
It's never a good idea to confuse what people did because there was nothing better, with genuine engineering excellence.
You may want to adze down a piece of reaction wood to make an oak arch, but frankly I won't bother.
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