@sawboman
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I saw it erratically living overseas but it was still a let down when it went the way of all flesh. It had something for everyone, but lots that were not for any one person and yes, costs were a bit higher then. ‘Massive’ 250 MB disk drives were quite physically quite large even when they became PC usable – if you stomach the prices. I found an old 4 MB static protection package a little while back, that bit cost more than an entire PC today. Ouch
I used to have to do that on the fly with data coming in from various sources in the mid 1980’s, but that was using a database program, which parsed the data stream, found dates and time, created files then spewed the formatted data into the database file(s) for the next component to manipulate into various studies, returns and reports with the correct formatting. Would something like this be of interest to get you started:https://exceljet.net/formula/convert-date-string-to-date-time
. Not acceptable on escape routes and stairways.“ The latter remark underlines John’s wisdom in removing the tiles from his main escape route. Apparently the fire resistance treatment is effective enough on modern tiles not to exhibit the terrifying results of the past. I have not tried so cannot comment other than pass on a third-party remark. [edit] Although I recognise that the LACORS guide had to do a cya deferring to the Courts. but I shudder to think about ignorant judges prognosticating on technical issues. Sure they can weigh up evidence but how do they know that they have seen all relevant evidence — they just do not have the training or experience to do so.
I am far more sanguine about judges’ involvement at least as far as the Grenville investigation. I should point out that there are some very pertinent issues to be considered. One of which came to light recently, fire rated doors that were supposed to meet a certain key rating and had been sold and installed as such failed within far less time, by failed I mean totally failed. I understand that there are many other issues that touch on how useful the rating are, how reliable the tests are, can they ever represent real world conditions, etc. in fact many other such questions on just about everything. It will be for the judgement to be made on the balance of legal probabilities as to where problems lay and it is on that basis any legal person should be constrained to act. (I am with those who complain that some sentences appear nuts, but if the nutty law says a murder must be given nothing worse than tea and biscuits, that is all they can be given, judge or no judge’s true thoughts.)
I want the whole system building substances approvals system to be given a once in a lifetime taking apart, so that it can be sorted out and put back on a sound basis. I want to know that if I buy something that it will be of a suitable standard for the job I want done, not a problem waiting to kill someone.
In terms of polystyrene tiles in the kitchen, perfectly permissible under the current regulations , depending on the room size. Class 3 materials are permitted for 4m^2 rooms, however. For bigger rooms, these have to be Class 1. You’ll have to dig in to the manufacturers details to find if the tiles are Class 1. Building regs are sound – they’re only about four pages of A4. Simply states that you have to build a safe building, so it’s the guidance on how to meet that is being changed (and the new version is being updated at the minute). If you’re after a chip pan fire, the following video is pretty amusing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWFH1Y0WocI EDIT: Changed the broken embedded video for a link. Tippon.
I think you explained the total gulf between the earnest desires of the building regulations and the absence of meaningful effect on the ground. I assume that the 4m^2 is 4 square metres, in which case it applies to some rather small (and if tiled with those things, dangerous) spaces. Quite where the reference can be found is not totally transparent to the ordinary householder – nor to many of the ‘tradespeople’ currently plying their ‘trade’.
Classes are classifications of the surface spread of flame test (BS 476 part 7). They refer to the degree of flame spread on an ignited panel 900mm x 230mm cut from a laminate. The panel is exposed at right angles to a radiant panel to reproduce the effect of a fire on an adjoining wall or ceiling. It is ignited at the hotter end and allowed to burn for 10 minutes. Flame spread is measured along a line 75mm from the base.
A Class 1 rating is given if the spread of flame is no greater than 165mm, does that really apply to these firebomb tiles?
A Class II rating is given if the spread of flame is no greater than 215mm in the first 1½ minutes and on overall spread of no more than 455mm. Again I find it hard to believe that anything so fire prone can be able to pass that test either.
However that is only the first weak plank in the structure, the other is that the class certifications that appear to be created in sometimes less than open ways. The above definitions are apparently quite explicit but practice suggests that they fail to live up to needs. As for Quite why anyone would want incendiary materials used on what is supposed to be a fire barrier is another question. Is class 1 really that totally useless that it can allow such materials as those tiles to pass?
Yes Bob, I would drink to that, in the past, but not for the moment. My wife’s oncologist said the chemo puts a heavy load on most parts of the body not least the liver so it is best avoided totally until after the treatment and the operation, probably in late October, or November. Hopefully all will be well for Christmas, but nothing is certain. Her birthday will be a quiet affair, tomorrow and over the weekend, the grandchildren have been in contact with Chicken Pox so must be avoided according to the Chemo book of words.
The wine rack is full as is the wine chiller, so here’s hoping.
All I know is that since my wife started her chemo back in May, 78 days ago but who is counting, I have joined her in being very abstemious with no alcohol. My weight has dropped by 12.7Kg an average I work out at 160gms per day. The economy of various far flung South American nations has probably also suffered…
As ever studies need very careful vetting to see how representative a sample was used, etc. Sometimes it is also worth checking that the conclusion is in agreement with the published results. This is not always the case.
The house at the end of the adjacent road has a large fig tree, the figs are now ripe and mushy so fall from the tree with their mushy flesh held in with a tough skin. The husky values these are prizes to bring home… except that most of the windfalls now contain several foraging wasps. So I have a right battle to kick the figs away before we have a right incident between dog and fig chasing husky, to take care. The wasps are about and some no doubt are planning war, less risk to my dangerously allergic wife who is confined to the house for the moment as it is too painful to walk due to neuropathy from her treatment. Two weeks ago I offered to get a folding wheel chair to use till the effects hopefully improve, but the offer was very firmly declined.
There are still masses of butterflies in the field, happily they are less risky.
Thank you for the clarification, I’m OK with mine.
I was on a Pan Am 747 flight when a woman found out why you should not use those lighters in the small room. She and the plane survived (happily for my wife and me) though the woman and the plane were both shaken, the woman the more so, I think she lost some hair. The plane continued OK but the stewardesses came round to explain the bump and apologise. I suspect they would have liked the passenger in question to have also enjoyed a parachute free exit and descent from 40,000 feet, as a main course to follow her aperitif.
Even a sun heated aerosol can can remove a wall and window, it happened to a relative. The wall was repaired but the husband died from a heart attack very soon after.
Bob, my wife went through 5 years of tests and checks until someone realised that a £5 blood test* would find the yes or no answer within days.
*The cost might be a bit more than £5, but a whole hell of a lot less than heart traces, echo cardiograms, etc.
UK construction quality varies from dismal to wot’s quality work? Cheap appears to understate how poor some results can be and in both cases the walls and maintaining them appear insufficient for the job. To me it is significant that the damp is worse at the ground level and less bad further up, I wonder if three is a DPC, problem (I trust there is a DPC), a splashing up issue from the dripping gutters or a similar problem or problems intertwined. A rendered wall with poor render or bad pointing can be other issues. While I hate polystyrene with a vengeance, on the external surface and rendered it could be helpful. However, it must be done with professional care, Mr Erp and his helpers are NOT required.
I think mine is as well, but I cannot see how to find or check it at the moment.
Yes, @Edp, I think that was one of the films I saw. Chip pans can be very dangerous and water nor sand should ever be used.There was another similar thing where the small fire started in a corner and could have been killed by a fire blanket, but within maybe 30 seconds the heat ignited the ceiling tiles, the rest was very much more rapid, about 5 seconds saw the whole ceiling ignite, the TV and appliances cooked off, their toxic smoke ignited, aerosols burst and the room was really destroyed, the explosions took out the walls.
I had a practical demonstration, for real not a film of how a fire blanket could imitate a pulse jet engine. Pan caught fire and the blanket went on smothering the fire, but the heat of the pan caused the blanket to move, that admitted some air and the fire restarted. The blanket moved and the fire went down, then the cycle repeated. not a pretty site on the dining room table, the pan was a fondue pan. Careful hand work stopped the blanket moving and the fire was controlled and then left for an hour or so to cool, remember the pan stayed above the oil flashpoint for a long time with the heat held in.
Far worse and very like the water on a chip pan was one of my staff who lived in a third floor flat that backed onto waste land. His pan went up so he tried to carry it out side onto his balcony. Then the near fatal step, he tipped the very hot oil over the edge thinking that the encounter with the air would cool it rapidly and kill the fire. It simply broke the oil into tiny droplets and allowed much of the stuff to turn to vapour while still above the flashpoint. The result was a huge plume of flame that went many feet above his head and reached down nearly to the floor. His arm was somewhere near the epicentre. As I recall he did the best thing and plunged the arm into cold running water for a long time then wrapped the wet hand and arm in clean something, it might have been cling film and went to the hospital. His hand survived.
It was very fortunate that the balcony was solid so the fire could not get through to set his body on fire. At least David lived to tell the tale and show the results as a warning to others.
I was surprised to hear your comment about an absence of regs for polystyrene as I had the same thought as Steve about its being banned in kitchens. (Apparently they are not approved by local councils for apartments or in HMOs) As the stuff is even more flammable than the Grenfell Tower cladding no doubt building regs will change! [edit] Many moons ago I was trained as a backup fire-crew member and I can still remember one training film of a ceiling tile flashover fire – something like 10 secs then you are cooked to death! I stripped all the tiles off our kitchen the next day over-riding SWMBOs protests (this was in the early 70s). Unfortunately I cannot find a similar video but it was scary as hell. (Most of my training was for large chemical/oil fires so this must have been thrown in as a filler by the safety officer)
I have seen those sorts of things, I guess that was film was without the ‘ceiling bomb’ of tiles. I saw one on the TV years ago, with the tiles, I cannot remember in which country. It was really scary stuff, everything exploded in the room due to the heat from the chemical fires. You would not want to be near that lot when they are having a party!
That is fair enough and I cannot argue with the logic, but when updates are offered as becoming available before you buy the darned thing it is over promising and under delivering when the updates come along very, very late to the party. I do accept that at £115 my Moto 4G Play phone was a cheap buy, with a possibly limited life of value, though a Nokia for about the same price point lasted closer to ten years. That probably ‘sort of’ set an expectation point in my life, though its need for OS updates was very limited, it just did everything I then needed. Perhaps my expectations moved too far for my own good?
If I paid north of £300 for a phone, I think I would expect a straight jacket and a big yellow van thing with blue lights…?
Sometimes it is easier (and get a more professional result) to bow to the god of inevitability and live an easier life.
It is not in the same league but many years ago I ran a small data centre on a floor of our large building. I had a small bunch computers running all sorts of stuff doing process control, running off international reports largely autonomously and as work demands grew I kept adding a few more machines. From time to time I would write to the power engineer asking for confirmation that all was well and all I ever got was silence. Then I collared the power engineer one day and marched him into the area asking if it really was OK to run this little lot off his UPS.
His answer was a surprise, ‘we wondered who had been consuming more power than the main frames up on the 5th floor‘. Perhaps someone should have read their e-mails…
I could find no reference to it being banned anywhere and frankly I was stunned. After several really bad fires recently I found it disturbing that cladding that was clearly a fire risk could still be used internally in both residential owner occupied properties but also in rented properties. There were comments about recommending when work was done heave ’em out, but if treated with ordinary emulsion with no work planned you are still good to go.
The recent investigations have hinted that building regulations and fire regulations have become a dog’s dinner over the years, but that was enough to give the dog the runs as far as I was concerned.
If anyone has better information please don’t just speak SHOUT!
Steve, I thought so too but before posting a hard comment I needed to do some research. I was stunned to find that they are not actually illegal though snide comments were made about so called flame retardant modern versions. The implications being that anyone who used them was the retarded one not the tiles.
If you are very lucky they were applied with dabs of adhesive, but because a fire could loosen them when done that way some were really bonded on with wodges of sticky stuff so good luck in a case like that.
@Edp put that too mildly. Damp should always be cured at source and the paint is only ever an initial, temporary sticking plaster. Cure the source of the problem via ventilation or other corrective actions, gutters, window frames, DPC, lowering external ground works, and so on. Plaster, mortar and even bricks will suffer if kept damp for too long, some blocks will crumble away and timber will turn to little more than dust. You really do not want mould reactions in humans, my wife has a long standing problem with aspergillosis which is not by any means the worst mould. Mould will seriously affect the property value and if not disclosed during any sale process, can result in court actions .
Steve, that is the cancerous aspect of the term. The fact that it came from the so called POTUS, (or was that the fake president of the US) means that the whole news business is tarred with the epithet. While I understand @Edp’s concern, there are few who did not understand that at best politicians were wishful thinking and yes some resorting to wholesale distortions, ‘The pound in your pocket’ and other lies. The abuse of the term fake news means that anything and everything can be discredited in the minds of the gullible, ‘oh such and such politician said it was OK that is fake news it was really a lie. We all know they lie, so sugared water makes you slim not fat, vaccinations kill don’t protect.’
So the dissembling train rumbles onwards.
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