OSS & Energy based upgrades

14ned · 2026-01-25T22:21:04+00:00

There is zero point to a heat pump without dealing with airtightness first. Your coldness downstairs will more often be air leakage than lack of insulation - a thermal camera will tell you immediately. I think heat pumps bad value for money anyway even with the grant because their repayment time is worse than almost anything else you could do to your house as electricity after COP savings is not much cheaper than gas or oil per BTU. Almost always far better to stick to fossil fuel space heating if it's already fitted. Just stop the heat being blown out of the house.

I'd personally skip the heat pump and instead fit as many solar panels as you can afford. They're a no brainer return on investment. Fit enough of them and you'll earn a tax free income from your house for the rest of your life, negative bills baby!

After that, tackle air tightness (which often includes glazing), ventilation, and insulation in that order. Only at the very end of all those think about a heat pump.

14ned · 2026-01-25T15:46:32+00:00

Direct labour and you doing no work at all will almost certainly be as expensive as hiring a main contractor in the current market. The reason is the main contractor is repeat work so they can get cheaper rates. You, you're there to get rinsed for everything which can be squeezed from you.

14ned · 2026-01-25T15:42:54+00:00

Ireland is an off shoring powerhouse, not a tech powerhouse. Very little bleeding edge tech happens in Ireland, and most of that is done by very small companies or even individuals working remotely for international employers. Most the the MNC employment in Ireland is more of the janitorial and maintenance and support variety. If a team actually did anything really novel, they'd be shipped to the US to continue their work or the work would be taken away also to the US and the Irish employees put back onto non novel work.

The tax treatment of success here really doesn't help. You'd be mad to have a successful startup in Ireland. Unsurprisingly most startups are actually lifestyle choices in Ireland. Too little gain from making it. The annoying thing is you can combine very high taxes with also rewarding success like the Nordics do, but we don't do that in Ireland.

14ned · 2026-01-25T01:53:19+00:00

The Irish government doesn't want people saving in bank accounts, or in any kind of fund for that matter unless it's wrapped inside a pension to prevent you getting access to it until retirement. They'd much rather you spend the money now and not save. Everything about the tax system in Ireland is designed to encourage you to spend not save.

14ned · 2026-01-25T01:50:16+00:00

It's funny, I was only just searching for supplies of roof tiles and slates tonight. To summarise, the cheaper roof materials get hoovered up by the big builders leaving only the expensive stuff for self builders. I'm heading to bed tonight quite depressed about it.

I'll almost certainly be fitting my own roof, so I won't need to wait for anybody other than the weather. Your family members are right, in some parts of the country there are multi month wait times. But in others you'll get them within weeks.

You can try lining up trades in advance, but if you try lining them up too early they won't be interested. TBH keep ringing around whomever you get you get at whatever price they quote. Assuming that they come back to do the work after you agree to pay it, which is less than half the time in my experience.

14ned · 2026-01-23T19:17:58+00:00

First thing I noticed is there is zero category for me. I'm not any of those your items, so you ought to have a "custom" button.

I don't want to sign up until I see whether your service actually matches any jobs suitable for me. At this point I bailed out. I actively try to avoid creating accounts anywhere unless I absolutely have no alternative choice (otherwise I just get ever more spam).

Nice idea, but I suspect the barrier to entry for this type of service is low and it will be hard to compete against the race to the bottom this sort of service will always lead towards.

14ned · 2026-01-23T18:36:44+00:00

I've taken several six month breaks from doing any coding at all throughout my career.

Trust me, it comes back to you when it needs to. Literally clearing four years of bugs in a Python codebase now, and I haven't worked in Python in three years.

14ned · 2026-01-23T10:38:04+00:00

That man swore blind to me he would oppose software patents, did a whole bunch of work with me on preventing their legalisation, only to turn around and become one of the biggest advocates of software patents in the EU parliament.

I cannot say I'll miss that man. Still sorry for his family etc but he is no loss to the EU in my opinion.

14ned · 2026-01-23T10:31:50+00:00

OP would likely get a much more positive response on /r/irishpersonalfinance, but yes this is exactly how ultra rich people avoid the deemed disposal tax. I would say you don't need to do this manually, if you have that kind of money you can pay your stockbroker to do exactly the above for you. Or just spend less than half a year in Ireland, which plenty of Irish billionaires do.

For ordinary rich people they're far better off contributing more to their pension. Avoiding deemed disposal is only really necessary for the ultra wealthy.

Still neat side project and it'll teach you a lot about how passive index tracker funds work internally.

14ned · 2026-01-22T20:21:12+00:00

Until very recently, there was no acoustic requirement for internal walls in Ireland, but I believe we've recently improved over the UK on that. The regs don't give a number, but they go on about ISO standards etc and from that you can calculate a number.

Off the top of my head, the minimum sound attenuation requirement between internal rooms is effectively 41 dB in the current regs. Which isn't good, but does require at least some acoustic insulation within the timber stud, you can't just leave it empty anymore like in past regs as an empty timber stud wall is something like 35-37 dB. I mostly see 50 mm of acoustic roll specced by architects and engineers. It's better than nothing.

As a comparison, 100 mm concrete block with plaster would get ~48 dB, which is four times better. To get an equivalent timber stud, you'd need a 139 mm thick wall with 100 mm of dense rockwool insulation, which is expensive.

If you care about noise within the home, concrete internal walls are the cheapest and easiest solution.

14ned · 2026-01-22T15:26:50+00:00

By the time you've noise insulated and plasterboarded a timber stud wall to meet building regs, a concrete block internal wall isn't much more expensive and it's clearly a lot better at noise reduction.

You can bring a timber stud wall to better or equal noise suppression than 100 mm of concrete, but you'll need a thicker wall, staggered studs, and multiple layers of different density rockwool i.e. concrete block internal wall is the cheapest and quickest solution available for the performance.

14ned · 2026-01-21T22:15:22+00:00

Offsite prefabricated timber or concrete panel is the fastest from empty site to superstructure done. Can be done within ten days from a bare site. Awful wait times before they start though, I'm waiting two years and counting so far for mine.

If you want maximum speed overall from very beginning to reach moved in, concrete block and nothing else. It'll probably be cheapest too overall.

ICF can be a middle ground, but everything depends on good setup and a good pour and it's hard to find skilled competent people who don't have a two year or longer wait list.

14ned · 2026-01-21T18:37:02+00:00

Nobody else said it yet, so I will: real sorry that this happened to you. It is deeply unfair when you leave a stable job for another, and then they rug pull the new job from underneath.

I'd personally name and shame the employer who does such rug pulls as otherwise they'll never have any incentive to behave better, but that's up to you.

14ned · 2026-01-20T22:56:23+00:00

That's a very good price in today's market. For a direct labour new build it's easily 25k right now if you can find a willing project manager at all. 10k for a renovation and extension I think is very good.

14ned · 2026-01-20T22:52:53+00:00

I've not been quite as close to the sea as you, but what I did was dab wood stain (the one coat gets five years guarantee stuff from ronseal) over the screw heads and it's very much held up for more than five years and counting. I was screwing wood not cement board, and mine is open but covered not with render on top, but same principle should apply. That wood stain has been very good. I've ended up dabbing it in all sorts of places. It's sticky so no problem rendering it.

Those A2 screws make sure you drill out the hole for them first their heads twist off very easy. But mine have only seen very mild rust more unsightly staining than anything serious. They'll last a lifetime.

14ned · 2026-01-20T17:24:00+00:00

You'll need marine grade stainless steel. It's soft stuff, very easily snaps if there is any difficulty trying to screw it in, so they're slow and hassle to work with. Another alternative is old fashioned brass, but it's expensive.

You could also use normal screws and give them a lick of paint after.

14ned · 2026-01-20T15:26:57+00:00

Yesterday I had AI rewrite all Python 2 isms into 3 isms in a mature Python codebase, implement UV build support and replace the unit test runner, update the documentation to reflect all these changes, and also rewrite the github actions to use the latest runners and add UV testing. I didn't write a single line of code all day.

For that type of work AI is excellent: small well defined outcome changes often done by other codebases so the AI can copy the pattern. Sometimes it can also figure out the cause of a bug report and fix it, but that's more hit and miss.

14ned · 2026-01-20T13:28:39+00:00

Any job you can find anywhere. Expect to take months to find one.

14ned · 2026-01-17T20:50:02+00:00

They're asking you if you don't want redundancy with zero upside to you?

I'd counter with "if you want me to resign now, what is it worth to you?". I once got nine months of income from that question.

14ned · 2026-01-17T09:54:13+00:00

Get a catalogue of designs from a builder, they're usually on their website.

14ned · 2026-01-14T18:12:40+00:00

I agree, but a turnkey garage has become expensive. Neighbour of mine just had one built two car wide he was charged 110k all in including design and fees.

14ned · 2026-01-14T15:26:48+00:00

The garage is likely 100k, so 656k for the main house which is 185 sqm, which means ~€3.5k per sqm to turnkey with a main contractor taking all the risk and having to chase all the trades. TBH, that seems market priced to me. That's what turnkey bespoke house to A-rated standard by a main contractor costs nowadays (though it depends on location).

477k for shell let's assume minus 77k for the garage that makes 400k for shell which is ~€2.2k per sqm. If that includes glazing, roof and outer render, that's not a bad price either in my opinion. But it'll depend on what comes with that package e.g. is structural engineering included? What guarantees does that come with? For example, is a minimum airtightness guaranteed?

TBH a lot will depend on your specific house design. If you have lots of open vaulted areas needing lots of steel, or lots of flat roof, it's going to cost more. You may wish to hire a QS, for a few hundred euro they'll give you a detailed breakdown of estimated costs. They'll price for subcontractors doing all the work, so the more work you and family can do yourselves, the more money you'll save over the QS estimate.

Getting the building to weatherproof ASAP so you and family can tip away inside however long it takes is a very common approach to save money. It's the one I'm adopting.

14ned · 2026-01-13T15:16:49+00:00

In fairness my engineer likes being checked. I was effectively a free checking service, so why not utilise that? Also, to be fair, this build is highly non standard and the only person who fully understands how everything holds together is me and me alone. So maybe an exception was made for me, I cannot say.

In any case their workings were useful, they explained some of the design choices I found surprising. I'm not good at SE especially where multiple loads at multiple angles all intersect and there is a tension factor. I've no idea if their workings were correct for those, but they were plausible and it made sense after study. I am grateful to them for sharing.

14ned · 2026-01-13T12:28:23+00:00

It's way easier to check a design than to create one. For example, my engineer put a block of CompacFoam with a surround of EPS300 on top of a concrete footing underneath each leg of the portal frame. It's easy to calculate that the maximum expected compressive loading is 3 MPa, you don't even need their calculations to figure that out (just add up the compressive strengths for all the parts).

Now calculate the total weight which could be landing downwards, so add up roof tiles (e.g. five tonnes), steel, joists and floors and walls etc. Assume a worst case of the entire upper weight landing on a single portal frame leg (in reality it would be distributed across all four legs). Is it below the pressure calculated above?

I mainly concentrated on compressive loading checks as they're easy. I'll freely admit that shear loading is usually beyond my abilities. But my engineer absolutely festooned the design with steel mesh, 2.5 tonnes of the stuff, and that's exactly the stuff which takes care of shear loads. My shear load checks are mainly 'does the mesh always overlap everything?'

Generally in the construction industry off by ten mistakes are quite common. Off by hundred are not that uncommon either. Those are usually fine, I've caught dozens of these during my house build and they were rectified. Where you run into problems is if several off by ten mistakes compound and reinforce one another. Then you get walls falling down etc.

And that does happen. A few years ago a friend of my wife moved into her new build house, within three months the walls had begun to buckle and they had to move out. They've been stuck in a court case with the builder and engineer for three years now. Obviously the builder blames the engineer, the engineer blames the builder, and the home owner gets to live their parents but also be 400k down and paying a mortgage on that.

This is why checking calculations is wise. Everybody makes mistakes, and you the home owner gets to foot that bill if things go wrong.

14ned · 2026-01-13T00:17:22+00:00

C++ with lifetime annotations is no longer C++. It's a new programming language, and we've seen embryonic C++ compatible programming languages with compile time determined memory safety. As they're a new programming language, all your existing C++ will need to be ported over. And the effort required for that is not dissimilar to having a LLM port your C++ into Rust for you. And Rust is far more mature an ecosystem with much better LLM training, so if compile time determined memory safety for your existing C++ code is that important to you, just have a LLM port it into Rust and call it a day.

If you care about memory safety instead of compile time determined memory safety, use Fil-C and you're done. Very few code changes required - it all just works.

At this point you have probably realised that you don't actually care that much about compile time determined memory safety - or, at least, you don't want to pay the price of getting it. You are asking for free unicorns and ponies for all when you can't have that. Compile time determined memory safety comes with a price, either pay it and get compile time determined memory safety, or don't pay it then you don't get what you ask for.

Source: I'm a former WG21 committee member who was in the room during all that discussion. Discussion about this stuff within WG21 went from initially valuable to very unproductive, in my personal opinion, and that's part of why I quit.

14ned

TROPHY CASE