victorian/edwardian houses or new houses?

True. Very little is left of some of them. Look at that Property Ladder prog. All was replaced: walls, floors and roof and intermediate floors. It was a new house.

Reply to
IMM
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No, drove past it though, and it was packed to the rafters. At £500+ quid a month rent, I'm surprised these youngsters can afford it. I think they should all stay in every night and build up their pensions. Huh! Fat chance in my offspring's case.

I think it's only being on top of one another that holds them together. I raked out and re-pointed the whole front of our house at 4:1 with lashings of pva. Nothing's cracked in 12 years, and the dampness hasn't returned. Looks a bit tasty too. Pity it's not in SW12 :-)

Reply to
stuart noble

The message from "RichardS" contains these words:

No. Moss is a bryophyte, a true plant. Lichen is a symbiotic union of an alga and a fungus - an unlikely combination as algae are plants and fungi are in a completely separate order.

I must say that I haven't noticed any evidence of lichens being any less common than they were, and I've been interested in them since the early 'fifties.

Mosses require some sort of soil to start with, and moisture with it. Some mosses can dry out for long periods and be revitalised by a shower of rain, and it is these which you'll find on roofs.

very often their shrinking in dry periods dislodges them, and they can then colonise damper areas, either in the gutter or on the ground.

Reply to
Jaques d'Alltrades

Lots of P&L is still about today & is OK. Lots of plasterboard, an old invention, is too. Lots of plasterboard collapses in only 30-40 years. What's your point?

What? In what way?

How is modern Spanish slate superior, or even equal, to the Welsh slate used in the past for roofing?

If you can sensibly answer the above, I will be very surprised.

J.B.

Reply to
Jerry Built

Sctually its more about taking the most out of whatever tree you had, and it still happends today.

I have doors made of randomn oakl boarding. Less waste of timber - no need to cut a 4.5" board down to 4" just to satisfy brussles etc.

Anoher example of stupid legislation wasting resources.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

Of course it is.

Underpin, prop, RSJ, dig, extend, blend in new..replaster, rewire, replumb, and hey.

You have a modern house in a victoirian shell.

Local conservationists are happy, BCO is happy, and with luck its still worth living in.

Frankly I hate victorian houses - most of the small ones anyway.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

Oh he can answer all right, it may not be true, it may not be grammatical, it may not even be comprehensible, but answer he will :-)

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

They certainly outlast a lot of clay tiles: most of 1930's New Malden was built by Wates who used these new-fangled Marley concrete tiles. 65 years on they may have lost some of their colour but they are still sound. Down the road in Berrylands most houses have had to be reroofed because the tiles have delaminated.

Reply to
Tony Bryer

But of course you'd prefer nice tidy sheets of chipboard.

Every time you put 'pen to paper' you prove you have zero practical knowledge of anything.

Reply to
Dave Plowman

So now we know where your 'experience' comes from.

Reply to
Dave Plowman

It gets better and better....

Reply to
Dave Plowman

Kingdom, actually.

How unlikely would you consider mitochondria and chloroplasts?

I think that it depends where you are. I have heard that they have gone down badly in what were rural areas but now are not, like the Peak District.

Regards, Nick Maclaren.

Reply to
Nick Maclaren

What gets me, in these kinds of arguments between "old" and "new" build, is that there is no place on the web (or anywhere else) that one can go to get a *definitive* list of approved builders/companies. My pile of new house development literature is steadily growing, but I still don't have much of an idea which companies to avoid like the plague and which ones are the best. It seems a very hit and miss affair. For example, the other day I read an article in some magazine somewhere about the enormous number of snags in new builds (average was around 106 snags). While these may well be minor, why are they present at all? I would say, a dozen max could be put down to human failing, but over a hundred? That smacks of someone not doing their job properly, of the company skimping, and it's not like new properties are cheap. It's not like buying a new stereo or even a new cars. Properties cost a heck of a lot of money and it shouldn't be the buyer's job to have to keep niggling the builder for two or three years after occupation to get outstanding errors fixed. The errors shouldn't be there in the first place if the company takes pride in the quality of its product.

I still aim to buy new though, because I will be moving to a different part of the country and searching for secondhand properties with all the problems of chains, gazumping and so on over a couple of hundred miles between me and the proposed area doesn't seem like my idea of fun. Therefore, I shall move into the area into a new build, then get my bearings and spend a year or two getting to know the area and spot the real house of my dreams. Even a new build that's pretty crappy is not likely to lose in value (unless Gordon Brown hasn't done his sums right), so if one looks at a new build purely as a temporary measure, I hope there won't be a problem.

MM

Reply to
Mike Mitchell

A new house will come with a ten year structural warranty - your Victorian one with nothing and if you discover a major problem having bought it you are on your own. Building insurance covers no structural problems other than subsidence and surveyors have long since learned to make themselves sue proof. The risk in buying an old used house is significantly higher than in buying a new one.

Reply to
Peter Parry

concentrated

Sorry!? I think you have that the wrong way round. The laws on vehicle pollution continue to get tougher and tougher and the manufacturers have had to comply to continue to sell vehicles. There has been massive strides in reducing pollution from cars, per mile travelled. Catalytic Converters, Electronic Engine Control, lean burn engines, two stage ignition, direct petrol injection, particle traps etc with more to come. We are significantly reducing overall pollution figures despite a massive increase in vehicles, now all we need to do is get rid of all those old polluting buses.

As for central heating, I thought the figures were they produced 80% of the greenhouse gasses produced in this country.

Not much can be done about cars? What about the exhaust emmissions laws which have worked amazingly and conuinue to get tougher, the MOT emissions tests, that's a damn sight more than is happening with central heating. Some people use boilers that are decades old and with no maintanance.

Fact is... All the major manufacturers and significant others are working flat out on Fuel Cell engines which produce no pollution except steam. Meanwhile they continue to develop even cleaner reciprocating engines. The Hydrogen to run Fuel Cells can be produced using sunlight eventually, to split water, so then we will be using the energy current account and not even extra heat will be produced above that the sun provides.

True but that's as much a social problem. Anyway, see my comments above.

Reply to
Bob Hobden

Wrong. The hydrogen has to be made. An innefficent process that burns as much, if not more, fossil fuel than any other form of transport.

Better to use batteries, and then whilst the electricity generation is still

an issue, as with hydrogen, at least there is no need to build a huge

new infrasturcture of hydrogen supply and handling equipment.

A car that will do 300 miles between an overnigh charge of 9-10 hours at

20 Amps is technically feaisble and hads been demonstrated. Got about 600bhp as well, and under 1.5 tons weight.

I doubt that it can in any real quantity. The energy per unit area falling on teh earh is probably best used to make e.g. biomass, which is about teh most efficient process we have available.

However the real simple answer that dare not speak its name, is 'why the f*ck do we need to go anywhere at all' and the answer is, mostly we don't.

Lets face it most of what we do could be done in front of a console from home, if we had to.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

Welsh is best.

Reply to
IMM

The message from snipped-for-privacy@cus.cam.ac.uk (Nick Maclaren) contains these words:

Order, according to my reading, but I'd go for kingdom if given the choice, as it seems more appropriate.

In lichens? Logically, I'd consider chloroplasts and mitochondria universal, since they are both present in the green and blue-green algae which make up part of a lichen. The algae in lichens can be cultivated separately, but AFAIK the fungal element will germinate but not continue developing to maturity. I presume that mitochondrial DNA is present in fungi, but chloroplasts are not, hence the value to the fungus of the symbiotic arrangement.

While I have stopped many times in the Peak District, I've never done so with lichens in mind. Radio waves, yes.

I hadn't noticed the areas I've stopped in to be even remotely urbanised.

Reply to
Jaques d'Alltrades

No.

Not tough enough, the Internal combustion engine is only around 30% efficient, and the emissions are highly polluting because of the small explosions it creates (not continuous burn).

They are still highly inefficient and pollute heavily.

They are twiddling around the edges of a flawed highly inefficient design.

Pollution is still high and efficiency woefully low.

Not in a million years. CH output is very low. Natural gas is the main CH fuel, and this is the cleanest fuel by a mile.

Emission equipment still is just twiddling around the edges. See above.

A natural gas boiler can go for many, many years and still be quite clean burning. Modern boilers are super efficient, and emissions super clean too. The efficient of gas boilers rose by about 30% in a few years. Lets see if GM can do that with a sill piston engine.

MIT realsed a paper that fuel cells research has not come up with the goods and diesel and gasoline engines will have top fill the bill in the short to medium term. The US government gave billions to auto makers to squander. They don't want change. They should not be given research money at all. The technology should researched by other organisations and legislation to make them adopt the technology.

Still twiddling around the edges. No major breakthroughs yet, despite some nice, more efficient, and running, concept engines around.

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Russians have come up a Rotary engine that is the reverse of the wankel, Instead of a an elliptical chamber and triangular rotor, it is the reverse. the seals are in the engine block, and can be readily changed. Good for Heat and power applications. The Russians make two normal Wankel engines for aircraft and helicopters.

The Australians have come up with a good improvement on the piston engine, not using a crank shaft and or swivelling con-rods. No real figures as yet, but production imminent. An auto engine is currently being tested in a Proton car donated by Proton.

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> Cars are even dirtier until the engine and

No. the engine is highly polluting until fully hot which takes many miles.

Reply to
IMM

And just how do you think electricity to charge the batteries is produced? With a loss approaching 30% at every stage: thermal value of fuel for power station to power delivered at charger (taking in power loss in transmission lines), charging the accumulator, discharging the accumulator all taken into account, the net result is a great deal more pollution to propel your so-called clean electric vehicle.

Unless, of course, *YOU* can differentiate between the reciprocating electrons which are being excited by wind or hydro power........

And?

Much more efficient to burn the hydrogen in a reciprocating (or rotary) engine than to convert it through a fuel cell to run an electric motor, though electrically propelled vehicles do have the potential to convert the slowing down process back into usable power.

And I suppose the goods we need will be delivered through the telephone wires too? When I go shopping I visit a number of outlets. I can see what I want to buy, and reject what had interested me from its description. I generally share a car with a friend's family anyway, doubling the efficiency of a trip. Well, since he has a family, more than doubling it.

Sorry, your dream will never catch on.

Reply to
Jaques d'Alltrades

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