My friend desperately needs to extend his home but has only a very small budjet. Yesterday he was offered a really large quantity of grey concrete pavior by a chap had recently changed his very large driveway back to Tarmac. There are absolutely loads of them! The owner wants nothing for them; just to get them shifted from the grounds of his very large home. Is it realistic to consider using them below the DPC of the new extension? Or even to use them for the whole build? They are about the size of a common brick. The place will be Pebble dashed to match the existing. Would the blocks bond satisfactorily? Would the render stick? Would the required U value be achieved in standard cavity construction? Are there any other problems that you experts can forsee?
Note that 'house' bricks, 'facing' bricks or 'commons' ARE NOT SUITABLE for paving. They were never designed for that purpose, and often fail when wrongly used as a pavior, by flaking or cracking or just disintegrating in damp conditions. Conversely, paving bricks are not designed to build walls or pillars. Horses for courses, as they say. http://www.pavingexpert.com/blocks.htm
He won't be able to use them unless he can produce calcs showing their suitability - or a BBA cert. There won't be a BBA cert and calcs and testing will cost many times what new bricks/blocks would cost!
OK men, Thanks for your thoughts, I guess the next decision is now if it's worth all the bother of palletising such a huge amount and moving them down to my yard on the lorry to keep for use on the driveway after we have built the extension! Come to think of it; maybe we could pave every driveway in the street to pay for the extension!
You strike me as the kind of person that would have a folly, mock castle tower etc. as a garden feature CL! Could be fun. Or perhaps a tortoise temple like that chap who posted a while back.
No not me Mr Grimnasty, The only tower in my garden is of the Youngman variety. My follies are the two rowing boats that I moved from my little bachelor house on the river, that have never seen the water since in 14 years! The only garden feature is my 19 year old Westie's grave who sadly made the last visit to the vet's last week! Kind regards CL P.S My friend with Asbestosis died two weeks ago and a builder customer also, I know you have your views on this subject. It's a big shock to loose two guys of less than 50 with teenage children and surely worth taking extra any Asbestos products?
I'm genuine sorry to hear that, but if it's not one thing it's another takes us all eventually. I posted a BBC report on the Russian attitude on the other thread. They are completely the other way, which is just as wrong. I have absolutely no doubt that being a boiler pipe lagger in shipbuilding was a poor choice of occupation! It's the panic over a bit of corrugated asbestos roofing that gets me riled.
Ignore some of the rubbish above CL.The paviors would be fine and much stronger than block.There is no building regulation that would stop there use.They are smaller than bricks though and would take a lot of walling.
Its not difficult.When the bco turns up you say"I,ve got a load of free paviors to build the outer leaf of the wall from".The response will probably be "no problem".As I said before though there would be a lot of labour and sand and cement.
I agree. What is the difference between a concrete paviour and a dense concrete block (apart from the paviour being probably stronger)? Have you ever been asked for the specs about the bricks you are using by BCO? Never. The only thing they are usually concerned with is visual matching and bloomin expansion joints. Of course, you may have coursing problems etc, but technically the paviours will be tougher than virtually any brick. If they are clean I dont imagine that there will be any bonding problems, you could always pressure wash the wall before rendering etc. As for U value, little of that comes from the bricks anyway. And of course there is the environmental savings of them not going to landfill......