Hi Scott, as a Technology teacher in NZ I have battled for 25 years with dust issues in the workshop. With class sizes of up to 30 students, extraction systems are inadequate at the best of times. Any dust is hazardous but treated timber and MDF or customwood as it's often known, is a problem that we should all be very concerned about.
extraction systems are a problem everywhere i see. my class does a lot of soldering and the extraction system is inadequate for 3 students, let alone 12. it's a shame that they always cheap out and get the bare minimum when it comes to health and safety.
Worried about the dust from these timbers is relevant , yes ...... but completely negated by the fact that most of you all took the covid vaxx ...... so I wouldn't worry about the dust if I was you !! 🤔💁🏻♂️🤷♂️
@@TheWanderingNekoAll soldering really should be chem respirators unfortunately. I run a workshop with laser/plasma/CNC/welding 3D printers, however the tendency people have to lean over during PCB repair and inhale solder fumes is very difficult to train out. Therefore in addition to the extraction systems, everyone is wearing either BA or chem respirators when soldering. Arguably more PPE than most of the other activities I mentioned above.
@@user-wh2oo4wh8v people arguably take solder fumes less seriously than any other. the amount of times i've had to close off a room and let it air out bevause some people thought they didn't need the fumehood and then sat there for hours inhaling fumes stuck in the room. it's such a shame
Now pressure treated lumber reacts with the nails or screws when it gets wet and eats up the metal. Decks don't last long, 10 years max, but can see damage early on
@@bud5084 My father's house has a 40 year old completely sound deck. Decks don't last for a few reasons. 1. Deck boards placed far too close together so leaves and other debris get stuck. 1/4 gap always, relying on shrinkage is stupid because the wood swells when wet. 2. Insufficient airflow under the deck to dry out the soil and joists. 3. Insufficient sunlight exposure
for ground contact wood buy treated timbers set them out to dry a while. get a pail/drum whatever and soak the part of the posts that will be on and in the ground in motor oil . Got a farmer guy i know did that 20 years ago his fence is fine, in florida in a not well drained area
In the Canadian Prairies, where we go from plus 35 C to minus 35 C in one year, there is lots of soil movement. So for a large deck that requires a proper foundation, there will be either cement piles down past the frost line (around 1.5 meters) or ground screws to a similar depth. The advantage of ground screws when properly installed is that they don't move up and down in the soil. Unless the cement pile is belled at the bottom, there is some chance of frost heave if the ground is too wet.
Ground screws are also great where pouring concrete would be problematic. I am putting some in to anchor bottom on the 8 step stair from my deck to my floating dock.
That's a crazy temperature difference. Here, in Auckland on the North Island, we go from about 5 C to 25 C, maybe a little bit more or less. A fine day in winter will allow you to wear just a t-shirt for most of the day.
A carpenter from Kiruna (a very northern part of Sweden) thought me to build free floating decks. You need to remove the top soils down to solid ground. You then place garden cement slabs on it and build the deck with legs that stand on the slabs. He claimed that no matter how deep you burry piles in Kiruna, the frost will push them up. The floating decks will move with the soil, but that movement is minimal in comparison. The free floating decks I have built are still level after a decade of use.
@@dvogonen We do something similar here, though we generally use precast concrete blocks that have a recess to allow the post to be help in place. The block has a drain hole down the middle and slots along the sides to allow airflow around the post. We dig down about 25cm and fill the hole with packed gravel to act as a drain and the blocks sit on that. Keeps the wood above any direct contact with moisture. The deck behind my home is a floating deck and is about 11m x 6m. Like yours, it moves a tiny bit, but it remains level and is very strong. Deck foundations here have to go below the frost line if you are attaching the deck to the house (or other building).
Yeah it was a big PITA for awhile while we worked thru the change. You can still get timbers with CCA but typically they are used for pole barns and other ag buildings. In Oregon anyway the brown #2 PT posts have now been upgraded to allow them to be ground contact and by extension buried. The bigger unmentioned issue with the change was the fastener requirement. It states that any fastener 1/2" and below in contact with ACQ timber needed to be hot dipped or coated with an ACQ approved coating and that electro-galvanized would no longer suffiece. This also led to the rise of the Zmax hangers which have to be used when in contact with any level of treated wood.. But like any change, once you get used to ordering two types of hangers and changing to only using galvanized fasteners it's business as usual. At least in our area it was simple with it's proximity to the coast, the larger yards stopped carrying any bolts or hardware that wasn't hot dipped and that made it harder to mess up.
The only thing I love more than watching you work and explain your way through various tasks is turning on the subtitles whenever you start talking about decks. Big ups, I'm about to build some floating shelves because of your video from awhile ago. Just finally got some material in. 👌
Scott when you said about friends comjng to visit that where there a year ago but no deck, i realized we’ve been watching your channel for few years now from when up in north island. The tours of your small rented shed, the trips to the store when Covid started. It’s been a privilege to follow your journey as you and Jess go about every day stuff and share that with us. And the quality in your work is bloody awesome. Loving the big deck. You’re guys are good souls and we love the genuineness of how you are.
Back in the 1980s I was taught that pressure treated lumber had to weather for 2-3 months before being stained. To be certain the paint or stain would be absorbed you would sprinkle some water on a board and if the water beaded up it wasn’t yet ready to paint. Around that time my Uncle’s company rebuilt a picket fence for a local inn/restaurant using pt for the rails. Both the owner and the maintenance staff were told the pt couldn’t be painted right away. The owner had his guys paint everything the week after the fence was done and the paint started peeling within a month
Needs to be dried. The pressurised treatment liquid leaves the wood wet after coming out of the pressure cylinder. Treatment needs to be appled to fry wood also, if not properly dried that could affect absorption of paint etc over time as water works out of it.
we always soak fence poles in diesel. then make a hole ontop to "refill " it with diesel now and then. then a nice little cap ontop to protect top of pole againts weather. same when painting aging wood . first brush them with diesel and let them soak it up before applying paint. last for a loong time and make the paint stretch 3x longer.
@@Tugela60 you are not the brightest are you ??? its basically treated wood. they sit in a bucket or tub drinking diesel so the part that go into the ground wont rot. not like you walk around pouring it all over the ground letting it soak into the poles. you are the type that dont have a logical way of thinking and need a bible sized user manual for even a fork or you will try to insert it into your ear.
@@Tugela60 it dont contaminate the land. its in the wood . its safer than many regular treated woods and will last waay longer. we have fence poles and wood siding that passed 50 years now by doing that. way better than the stuff you can buy that is chemically treated.
Depending on the position, I like to use diesel, a little sump oil and some tar based paint. Especially on the end grain. This is used in places where it can not be easily touched. It soaks into the timber. Use it sensibly and sparingly. Does not wash off or contaminate anything.
I love that you say the chorus pipe needs to be fairly deep. Ideally, you want it deep enough that no one will strike it, although there is no actual rule for depth of comms cables. Chorus contractors will literally concrete saw a line across your driveway and just tuck the cable into the cut. The amount of terrible fibre installs by chorus I've seen as an electrician in auckland is out the gate.
@Sam Davy I've spoken to a chorus contractor and they get $600 budget per job. This is to cover labour and materials. Any additional materials has to be cleared with chorus before the job can commence. So I get it, but it's terrible
It’s banned by the European Union to my parents owned a sawmill for years in Oxfordshire, England and we had a pressure treatment plant, and so I saw the whole process it used to worked wonderfully and the new acq which we had to use for everything would rot after 5-10 years
Hi Scott, Love the channel. If you are going to oil the deck I would recommend either a sikkens or intergrain system. I would never trust the weather to fully remove tannins from the timber before coating. Better to use a complete system which will include a tanning oil remover, cleaner, then oil. I am a licensed painting contractor in Australia and have done hundreds of decks. I quite often see decks done without proper preparation before coating. They dont look good for very long as the sun will pull the tannins to the surface of the timber and start breaking down the oil giving a very patchy look. Anyways all the best with it
Seriously though those pieces of steel you put into concrete at those ridiculous prices could have been replaced with ordinary galvanized 1 1/2 x 1 1/2 x 1/4 angle. Will do a better job at support and not highway robbery.
We built our deck in the summer of 2022 with ground screws. 100% would recommend. The cost was about 1.5x that of concrete and timber posts but the work was done in one day and the saddles were all laser levelled. The next day I dropped beams onto the saddles and we were off and away building the deck. Ground screws have the added benefit of avoiding (Canadian) frost heave too.
Absolutely gorgeous deck Scott, you really are a craftsman. Your home and garden is starting to look like Mr Miyagis yard from the Karate Kid, stunning.
Out here in Southern california pressure bug treated timber is required in decks and under houses to prevent termites fro eating the whole structure in a few years... since it almost never gets below freezing here along the coast, the termites. can munch all year round... Any wood you put in the ground will be just plain gone in no time at all...
Ground screws are fine in relatively soft, clear ground but in rooty, rocky clay soil they're a bit of a nightmare, and can deflect or need to be repositioned to avoid subsoil rocks and large roots. Consequently, you have to design the structure to be tolerant of these "off" positions and orientations. An alternative is pile foundations.
Also, if galv is deemed good enough for screws, then why not for the brackets that Scott used? For a deck that won't last beyond 30 years, I would have used galv with Malthoid behind it to seperate it from the timber. Or rather, like you wrote, some short posts.
@@kiwigrunt330 Galvanized screws and nails don’t do well in CCA lumber. I built a CCA deck in 1988, and the galvanized screws used in the deck had nearly disintegrated by 2019 when I had to replace a couple of decking boards. The Simpson Strong-Tie brackets made out of stainless steel in the support structure were still going strong. But, 30 years and still going strong was pretty good for a deck. I stained it every 2 years with an oil-based stain.
I'm just a DIY homeowner and have _almost_ dealt with the issue of arsenic treated timber when reworking our deck. I say "almost" because I was lucky to not have to replace any of it. (The supports are all on concrete columns, with the treated lumber above ground level. I think the concern is not so much about putting arsenic in the soil (the soil has a lot of it already here in Arizona) but the complications - and attendant violations - of disposing of the toxic wood when it is all replaced by whatever comes next.
They banned it because Yale University did a study in Connecticut that found the arsenic was leaching into the soil adjacent to playgrounds & decks. Therefore it could end up on peoples hands, etc. That study motivated the government to take a serious look at the health implications. It's more like a lead paint issue than a material waste problem as you described.
@@aspees depending on where you live arsenic levels can be quite different naturally. They used to use arsenic as a pesticide in the good old days, it was one of the first materials used.
Kiwi in Queensland here, my local builder used galv brackets (only need the expensive stainless steel if you're within 500 metres of sea spray zone). He used H3 MGP10 joists and primed everyone including end grain. Then installed a rubber tape / strip over the top of joists so the Kwila and rain wouldn't leech into the joist long term.
CCA is also not in use in the UK. We also have Accoya which is “pickled” softwood, the process essentially chemically alters the lignin/cellulose so microbes can’t eat in so well
Sounds it's processed similarly to the way wood, cotton, and linen are converted into rayon fiber: Plasticize the cellulose and it takes on some semi-synthetic properties.
Acetylated wood exhibits considerably increased biological resistance to brown- and white-rot fungi (Larsson-Brelid et al. 2000 This was my point, I studied white rot fungi at university (although that was because they can eat DDT)
In Sweden we use a lot of treated soft timber. Because climate. It used to contain chrome and arsenic, but that was banned back in 2007. The new stuff seems to hold up pretty well.
@@alexanderunden8607 dont worry 1-3years after installed the green have faded in sunlight... and how else could you tell if someone have bought the cheap green or the pricey brown ^_^
Great video! The deck looks amazing! The "6 months wait to stain" I think is because the pressure treated wood will not properly accept the stain. You have to wait until the pressure treated stuff dries completely. You can test by putting a water drop on the surface you want to stain and see if the water is absorbed in 10 minutes. If not then the wood will not properly absorb the stain. :)
I know you're fairly committed to undergrounding the fibre now, but if you wanted to do a zero-cost solution it's worth knowing that the installers generally coil up a few extra meters of the black fibre cable under the house or in the wall, allowing you to pull the slack back out without breaking the cable and reposition the hang point at the top of the roof apex near the mains cable so that it's above head height.
Indeed, my own company has been doing this a lot on a currently ongoing project to install municipal fibre internet for a small town. Many of the residents requested us to install the cables alongside existing utility connections that run to the low point of the roof point of their property. We simply choose to cut the cable long and leave enough slack in the eves or between the ceiling and floorboards of their loft conversion to allow the cable to be pulled back and pinned to the apex and run under the overhang of the roofline if needed. This being precisely because many of the properties are single story dwellings like this so I am certain that at least some of those homes will need to raise the vertical clearance of the cable some day. Sure it will still be a time consuming job even the lightly armoured cable in question needs to be manhandled with some care if you want to drag it through a wall but at least they have the option. Also the cable in question has a propagation speed of ~2/3rd's the speed of light, you don't even get to blink while missing the fraction of a microsecond delay that at most like 10 metres of fibre adds. Fibre cabling has a propagation velocity around 200,000 km/s slower than the speed of light in a vacuum sure but so fast that you would blink and miss the entire planet let alone a small coil of wire in the roof.
@@seraphina985 Still, the lower propagation delay has an impact in certain situations. A company wanted to shave several milliseconds off on a fiber link between the Chicago Board of Trade and the New York Stock exchange. They installed the straightest cable the could, including boring through hills to avoid going over them. Unfortunately for them, another company saw what they were doing and deployed a relatively straight set of microwave radio towers, which avoided the fiber latency, and shaved even more microseconds over the fiber, making it economically unviable. But, for home internet, a few meters in the attic is nothing compared to the fiber path to the ISP, which is still not going to be noticeable.
It is now 40 years ago working with H6 (burial grade) CCA timber, myself and a five man crew stopped for a mid morning break of donuts and coffee. Of course the nearest thing we had to hand washing was to rub our hands vigorously against our jeans,,,,, Just contaminated fingers, touching 2 donuts the entire crew was downed by lunch time. I was a few weeks later,, the rookie burning jobsite waste and scrap,, burned the cut offs and I am the one on a tour of the site that got a full whiff of the smoke,,, when I said,, "Gosh, no. Don't burn that stuff." That was the end of my work week as well. We did not use any H6 after those two events. Ya gotta be careful with that stuff. Wash thoroughly after touching,, even undress in the backyard when you get home. DON'T track that stuff into the house where the kids are. And never burn the stuff,, the smoke is toxic.
Hey Scott, you can build your leadin yourself up to your property boundary, that would save you thousands. inside the property boundary you only need 300mm cover. Avoid multiple hard bends. You can vac under your drive way with a high pressure Gerny. You can use a high pressure hose, feed it through the pipe and then clip a nozzle on it and push it through the dirt, you will end up with only a hole the diameter of the pipe rather than making a big mess under the drive way.
One of the things I noticed when I first saw this video was how precise all your lines were and the detail in making the job look amazing ..job well done!!!!
The first video of yours I watched was of a deck build in Auckland and I was flabbergasted by it's beauty. This is equally beautiful. A true craftsman.
I built my deck 17 years ago and used Trex decking. I haven't had to stain ONCE! Love it. It cost more but staining is costly too, especially at 64 years old.
The suggested delay to stain is to allow the compressed grain from the shaper/planer to rebound or fluff and improve absorbancy of the material in addition to chemical bleed off, as you suggest.
There are other alternatives than ACQ available and also ACQ has a ground contact rating if it has sufficient retention. However, we have become used to not having wood in contact with the ground even when building decks. The brackets to attach to cement are not overly expensive.
Exactly. The only reason I can think to actually have posts embedded in the ground is something like a fence where there is no other lateral support so you need the deeply buried post for stability. Other than that, sinking posts into the ground is just poor and outdated design in general.
Canada - Steel screw pilings are great as long as you do not find obstacles like a big rock. However, if you do find a stone or rock down there it can skew the piling off to one side. I still believe that a concrete piling which extends below the frost line with a bulbous foot in a sono-tube with a metal socket on top for the timber transition is best. It very simply will not move & the timber can be easily replaced in the future if it rots, splits or twists. Here in Canada, we do not put timber in the ground any more... It is simply not good practice & since the abandonment of copper arsenic green treatment, the alternate treatments are not as good. BUT... there is a system where you can fill the hole with two part expanding foam in place of concrete. For this, the wood is encased in the foam which will keep it out of underground moisture. I have also seen this done with a plastic sack on the post so in theory it could be pulled out of the "socket" one day in the future to replace it, but I have never seen that idea tested.
Nice One Scotty, I am a new subscriber after this vid. I did find the Info on CCA timber treatment really interesting. When it comes to inhalation of particulates be it sawdust, plaster, sanding materials, anything an angle grinder touches, handling cement/concrete, unwatered plaster products, sawing MDF, handling fiberglass, or whatever, the surefire way to prevent ingesting these hazardous materials. Wear a ventilator - probably the most underused and most hated PPE item!!!!! If you buy a good one they work really well and also minimize the fogging of sunnies and safety glasses. I forget sometimes and kick myself every time I remember - Do it guys and we'll live healthier and longer.
If CCA wood burns, everyone within the suburb and beyond, is exposed to breathing in not just arsenic particles, but also copper and chromium. All three are equally dangerous and all three are lethal in very minute quantities.
I have ground screws on my deck from StopDigging NZ. The cool thing is that you can get them to do the screw piles, including all the layout, which IMO is the hardest part of deck building. A bit more expensive but not a bad option.
Hi Scott. Thank you for the video. You have built a beautiful deck. I have been a carpenter in the USA for over 40 years. I saw as treated pine came into being here. I have seen it turn to dust if not sealed properly. I have used very little treated lumber in my life. Mostly a douglas fir/hemlock hybrid that is used for any connection to concrete. Now I can not get rid of the scraps as the dump will not even take it. I could make more comments on your process. But the real way to do that is to have a sit down face to face conversation over a nice cold beer. I just returned from my first trip to New Zealand. Your country is everything they say it is, we loved it! The most sad part to me was to see the clear cutting and the slash piles. As we were headed home the next big cyclone was hitting. The beached were burried in slash. I hope you all can find an alternative to the manner they log. I see the same thing in the states and have fought hard to try to bring awareness to the damage that it does. Selective logging is they way to save our forests for the next enerations. Love your home and thank you again for the video.
From a forestry family and a geologist, and most of the issues on the East Coast is that the underlying geology is so prone to land sliding (even with old growth natives) that i think that it's not going to change the potential damage that can occur on that side of NZ. For exotic pine plantations, clear felling is often used due to the amount of wood extracted at a given, and it's relatively safer than selective logging, and cheaper (as you don't need experience helicopter crews). The Slash is left to ensure that some of the nutrients is returned to the next generation of pines, though there is an increasing movement to send it for burning for electricity. Also, harvesting NZ Natives Timber is very rare, with special permits needed due to the environmental movement here in NZ, but in older homes, the untreated dry timber (Matai, Kauri and Rata) can become incrediably hard, with many builders power drills & bits breaking due to trying to drill into them after 50 years.
CCA is a real environmental contaminant, I watch with horror as people build raised garden bins from CCA, the three poisons can migrate through the soil to the veges being grown "organically". NZ is way behind in legislating for screw (helical) piles that are common overseas and have been used for decades. They are quick, accurate, and extraordinary at seismic load bearing.
Great info. Thanks. Just a note - Built many a deck in my day. Using temporary posts allows you to keep working as the concrete sets. After I pour the concrete, I go ahead and deck the framing. No need to wait, as the deck is supported on temps. A little vibration from the nailing process will actually help the trapped air bubbles in the concrete rise. No need to wait.
CCA was pretty much banned in Europe from 2004. I think the UK stopped in 2006. Fence posts were rubbish for a while but they seem to have found a decent less hazardous alternative. Great deck by the way
Ground screws are so good. Used them to build a garden room in a sloped garden that would have required a lot of cut and fill. Instead had 6 large ground screws of varying sizes installed and was straight onto cutting timber and framing the floor the next day
We still use CCA in Canada for pilings, some utility poles and heavy construction. The big screws are called Helical piles, I have installed about 5000 of them- they are the Cats Meow but costly!
Hi Scott, I'm from Germany and we use mostly cheap fir or spruce wood. Our way is to put cement piles in the ground with a figure H steel cemented into the top. The uprights can rest on it and are bolted - no contact to the ground, no hazardous treatment required. The steels are about 10€ each in galvanized and about 20€ in stainless, your steel prizes are ridiculous. I think, burning the ends, treating it with linseed oil and cement it into the ground would work pretty well too.
ground-screws and their larger cousin structural screw piles are rapidly increasing in use in Canada (Western Canada, at least, we’re on glacial lakebed and sea-bottom, not exposed solid bedrock like those folks in The East) Last deck/house extension I did used a combination of both… 4 foot deep ground screw on an 8 foot extension to get them below the frost line, to hold up the wheelchair ramp + landing, and 12’ deep 6” former drill pipe with 12” screw flights to hold up the (acq treated) main beams to under the deck.
As a 35 + year builder in The US I had always been taught not to bury wood, ever, no matter if it's treated or not, unless it is untreated, and meant to be sacrificial like a raised vegetable bed. All framing is either @ or above grade and attached to the concrete via a galvi or stainless metal interface. Avoiding any ground contact is the general rule. We use concrete piers that have to go below the Frost Line, in my area of New England that is 4 feet, (1.22m) we get real winters here still. I just had to dig 2 piers today to hold up a handicap ramp at one of my client's homes. ACQ is all we got, but then there is also the old school bitumen dip if you have to put in fence posts, or eastern red cedar which is impervious to almost all rot and bugs, otherwise know as aromatic red cedar that they make cedar chests and closets from. Also my lumber rep told me that you wait 6 months for the ACQ wood to dry out from the chemical treatment to put stain on or it will not take well and peal or crack, which I have seen happen. We refer to treated wood as PT for pressure-treated, as the process was described to me it involves taking the Southern Yellow pine, kiln drying it and then vacuuming down to -6 atmospheres, then pumping in the ACQ and pressurizing the vessel to +6 atmospheres. So it puts a lot of liquid into the wood pores, and then gets stored outside in often freezing temps. I put lots of CCA up before it was banned, it didn't hold up any better, mostly because they told us that galvi fasteners would be compatible, they are not and cause "iron sickness" just like in salt water boat timbers. Fe will always react with the Tannins in any wood, and cause black rot and bleed. Stainless is the only way to retard that process. Anyway, we Don't generally bury any structural wood, with the exception of RR tie type retainer walls, and stairs and such for landscaping. Even when CCA was available we still rarely buried it. The general rule is Stone/concrete/Steel below grade, and wood above.
I have built a few decks over the years, and love this one. I too have the same problem of have a beer and looking at alignment of screws and consistency of gaps etc. so need to make sure I have no regrets. The last deck I did, I used up all the offcuts of the decking timber and created a vertical skirt with them around the edge, and trimmed the bottom to the slightly raising driveway that it bordered. Looked great and I got to appreciate it every time I drove home
Hey Scott, we had an overhead telephone cable and wanted our fibre cable buried. We dug our own trench to Chorus specs, they supplied the conduit. Chorus had to have the conduit up and down the power pole 'designed' buy their design team which we paid a few hundred dollars for, but that was the only cost for us. We did our power cables at the same time, in the same trench, separated to Vector and Chorus specs. It is certainly a lot better having the cables buried, but digging the trench ourselves saved thousands.
Shortly after I found your channel, I binged your renovation jobs. I hate having to wait a week for a short 12 - 15 minute video. They are great but go by so quickly.....and now to wait another week. Deck looks great by the way!
It's kind of funny, I realize yesterday that UA-cam had not recommended one of your videos to me in quite some time (nearly a year), and then suddenly today this video popped up in my feed.
Hey Scott, I built my deck (15x6m) last year here in Sweden. Decided to go for the screw in foundation. I will never use anything else. Brilliant and easy to install. We get -30 around where I live and I measured it for fun with the laser and receiver last weekend. +/- 2mm difference on the whole deck. Your Dutch pronunciation is pretty good btw haha. Another word for you regarding your work is : vakmanschap 👌🏻
Treated wood is wetter than regular timber, so waiting a few months before staining or applying oil is to make sure the moisture level drops to a suitable level (max 16% I think). :)
We use the ground screws a lot here in Canada, and a product called a "bigfoot", it's basically a pvc pile tube with a large flared base under the frost line, looks like a funnel upside down filled with concrete.
I've got subtitles on by accident. 'Deck' is not shown as 'deck'! Robin Clevett in UK has demonstrated ground screws. Wish I'd known about them when I had a brick outbuilding built with deep footings but not deep enough so stop some heave due to hybrid pine trees. Surprised my builder by putting in some conduit in a trench from fibre internet in pavement into my basement and, from there, to where I wanted the router. Internet supplier very impressed as rest of street has messy above ground cable. Splashing water at chickens is an effective way of training them away from danger
Have been watching your channel for years and I'm proud to say I used a technique today that I learned on the channel! Did a scriber on a deck fascia to lapped siding. Turned out perfect first try thanks to you. Amazing videos Scott, I appreciate every minute
Hey Scott, ❤️ your work and the way you show it! A suggestion for you guys, run a hidden Led strip along the spaces you created, between the stairs and around the bottom of the deck.
Speak nicely to the Chorus installer and they'll often give you some of the fibre cable. If you run it yourself under the deck into the house to your router point they'll do the fibre connector (they have to do it anyway) and then they ignore the "custom install" fee. Have had this twice now. Not sure on the trenching side of it but that should be easy.
Here in Arkansas we put 4x4 and 6x6 pressure treated lumber in the ground all the time I'm not sure the exact treatment but it works well and lasts a very long time
I live in the US in a Suburb of Chicago. When I had my home built I used CCA wood for my backyard fence. This was in 1993. I've had to replace 2 fence posts due to water infiltration between the cement and the post. 160 feet of fencing. Shows you how well it holds up. Unfortunately I can't purchase it again so I'm hoping it holds up for say 10 more years.
Everything costs more here - essentially because we are an isolated island (actually many islands) at the bottom of the world. Way too many things have to be imported. We used to have a lot of industry here manufacturing all this stuff but once we started importing china rubbish at low cost, the local manufacturers could no longer compete and most closed up meaning if you want something decent you import it.
The bracket materials are not of the same quality they are not comparable at all. Ours are stamp out of thin metal that is then galvanized. This is an apples to oranges comparison.
Hey Scott, here in Canada we use those foundation screws a lot, they’re called here helical piers or piles. One of their greatest advantages is that they stop the movement of the post due to freezing conditions.
I had a cousin stopped on his way home from middle school to play at a playground which at that time heavily used CCA timbers in the playground. He made it home but soon became sick and went to bed where he went to sleep and then died in his sleep from arsenic poisoning. He along with many others deaths was the cause for EPA banning the use of CCA timber, especially in the use of anywhere near where children played.
Awesome job on the deck!! I live in the USA and I also use treated lumber but I don't care how "Treated" the lumber is, I'm never putting lumber in the ground. It all eventually rots, regardless of how treated it is. I've actually had to convince the wife on multiple occasions that the EXPENSE of concrete and brackets to set the wood off the ground is worth it in the long run. I'll never regret paying more for having my post frame last longer, or the 4x4 posts on the front porch last longer. It's all about water and moisture management. The better it is, the longer the structure lasts.
Yeah, but you simply can't get properly treated wood in the US, even if local codes allowed it. H5 and H6 treated wood in NZ is guaranteed for 50 and 100 years respectively - and in NZ those guarantees are legally binding and easily enforced. It all comes down to what standard you want to build to: a good standard or the US standards.
Construction pile foam holds in 20 mins and hardens in two hrs. And drying deck for 6 months is a good idea. My second deck built in ‘89 (22’x18’) has 9 4x6 post 40” by 14”rd down with 4 bags of concrete. 2x12 beams on 8’ with hips supporting 2x10 joist on 16”, with double ledger. Part of those post were used to add a porch swing. Deck gets paint trimmed every two years and stained/oiled every other year, power washed on 6yrs. Only thing replaced is the swing three times. Decks here require railings if the deck is great than 18” above ground, mine is 36” above with vertical cedar skirt. About 3000 #12 ring plated nails, #16 bout 200, many 5/8” galvanized bolts and lag screws. Last one I built was for my daughter two years ago only need 4x4 post but used construction foam-holes still 36” down in damp clay 👎🏼
Over twenty years ago I was working in Boston M.A. I was working on a deck for my boss and we were using C.C.A treated timber for the frame. Another carpenter on the job got a splinter in his hand, as you do. He went home and forgot about it. He woke up at two in the morning in agony. His entire arm had swollen up like a balloon. His girlfriend had to drive him to the hospital. The doctor told him that if he had delayed coming to the hospital he would have died of blood poisoning. I always wear gloves when handling structural timber, treated or not, 👍💪🔨🇮🇪
Unless it was one gigantic splinter and he chose to ignore that, it was more likely a bacterial infection that caused his problem, not the treated lumber.
@@paddlefar9175 yeah seems like a coincidence. Earlier this year I built a 35m long retaining wall, all h3.2 cca timber rough sawn. Many scratches and splinters, no reaction.
So you bury treated timbers that contain copper, chrome, and arsenic salts, which are most likely water soluable and banned for being poisonous even in the usa (!). and then you plant vegetables right next to it, which you want to eat. i mean...yeah. sounds like a great idea xD you must have a very poweful lobby of the timber treating industry in new zealand. in europe people freak out if you want to treat timbers with boron salts, that maybe have an effect on human reproduction. nice deck though :)
I'm not an expert, but from what I've heard and observed , arsenic and Chromium is the deadly chemicals are the problem. The Copper is the rot resistant part (not sure about the Chromium). The arsenic (for insect resistance) how ever is deadly. The main problem is that it does not stay in the wood. So if you walk bare food on it (deck), it can be absorbed in the skin. They found that wood in the ground leach out much faster than was originally though. The more acidic rain, the faster and further the contamination ring. Dad (farmer/carpenter) said never burn treated(CCA) wood. He didn't say why. Story I head : some one burned a pile of scrap treated (CCA) lumber. Cow got to the ask pile (apparently cows will ingest ashes) the died of Arsenic poisoning (Arsenic does not degrade in fire just concentrated in the ash). What I observed: An acquaintance asked to use my lathe to make a center leg for his couch. OK. Later, I was told the day he was turning the leg, he left sick. Later I saw what he was doing. He had been turning a treated (CCA) piece of 4x4. The dust (arsenic) made him sick. Arsenic poisoning. What is the blue colored wood they use in Canada?
Here in Finland CCS- wood is also banned almost same year that in US. And treated wood today last easily 15 -20 years, so no need to buy every year. We had that CCS earlier it for sure has better longevity but ATM sold ins't bad either.
Yes, arsenic is poisonous. Direct burial of posts just doesn't make sense, either: eventually that wood is going to deteriorate. Saving a few bucks per post now, when it will be a lot of trouble to replace them in the future, is a false economy. It's unfortunate that combination of small import market and still being allowed to use arsenic-treated timber keeps the price of brackets high. Truth is arsenic works a lot better than the safer replacements. Makes sense: their effectiveness is directly result of being poison, so less poison means less effective.
The NZ ERA decision and paper is online so you can read up on their rationale. Which was mostly that there weren’t many studies done to show how much, if any CCA leaching actually occurred from properly installed timber.
What a beautifully done ua-cam.com/users/postUgkxYGamVaHfdHiPlAQaLa7zkwR02OKpGYDU ! The instructions and the photographs are brilliant. It is thorough and genuinely informative. Ryan got another winner! No one does it better!
Hi Scott, love your videos. Re the comment about not staining for 6 months. In the land of Oz we wait 6 weeks, but I washed my deck with tannin remover and then stained it a day or so later. Finished product much sooner.
Interesting conversation. I live in the US Mid-west. We do not put deck lumber/timber supports or wood building structure into the ground. Termites/Carpenter-Ants/worms and water/fungal rot are problems here. Steel re-inforced concrete piers/pilings/posts are the norm. Our frost line is about 1/2m so to defeat frost heave, the concrete piers are placed a bit over 1m deep with a 25cm concrete inverted mushroom shaped 'footing' at the bottom. It's not that we do not use ground contact timber for anything at all, but not for building structure. Thanks for the video.
Wow... thats expensive. One mounting bracket cost about 5 to 10 € here, and a 6€ for a bag of concrete to mount one or two of them..... Ajustable polymer pedestals come at 3 to 7 € each.
When we built our new house 6 years ago, we used composite decking with galvanised steel framing. After 6 years it is as good as new and will never needs staining. Our previous home also had lots of wood decks and staining the wood every year or so drove me nuts.
I’m in the US. The old standard was to dig 1m holes half fill with concrete and half buried post. That lasts about 20 years or less if the the area is very wet. Now they want all posts above grade with standoff brackets either wet set or bolted after. For steps i have been pouring long full length formed footers that finish at grade. I thunderbolt a 2x8 flat to the footer. Stair stringers rest on that keeping them above grade. Setting stairs on a level footing is easy. Concrete is cheap and so are a few bolts. I mix the concrete with a poly tarp with two people. It takes 5 minutes per bag to mix and pour. Great system and more solid than posts every 6’.
Very nice work and good quality lumber. In Canada, our lumber is ALL warped and twisted, it is wet and heavy when installed and must be cut and screwed down as soon as it is unbanned to reduce cupping, twisting and bending.
Could you not use a concrete footing and use a stirrup? I work for a very famous green warehouse, that’s in Aust and NZ. We sell a heap of framing hardware, most of it is by Pryda. They can either be bolted down to the concrete footing of cemented in place
I used a bunch of the ground piles (ground screws) for my off grid ADU. I love them. They allowed me to get through the sand down to the hard stuff without digging that deep and without bringing in lots of heavy masonry
Just to note as well that in Canada and the US, the options for brackets to support posts in concrete are quite wide and a basic support can go for under 10CDN$. Perhaps because that method is not widely used in NZ explains why the type/cost of post brackets is limited and expensive?
@@warrenspillane4552 I hear you. It's kind of the same and the opposite here. It's so big that unless you live in one of the big cities, you pay far more for the same thing.
I used 9 meter deep screws to build an extension of our house in Amsterdam. Much cheaper than the alternative concrete foundations. Each screw holds 1ton.
In the U.S. they do have a pressure treated timber from a company called Coppers. They also use Hemlock as a building material which is resistant to bugs and mould. There are some Hemlock barns that have stood for over 100 years, it's also used for outdoor decking.
CCA isn’t used in EU either: ”Since June 2004, the use of CCA-treated timber has been severely curtailed with an amendment of the European Union Commission Directive 76/769/EEC. This amendment now states that arsenic compounds may not be used ‘in the preservation of wood. Furthermore, wood so treated may not be placed on the market’. The only exceptions are wood to be used in industrial installation that ‘the structural integrity of the wood is required for human or livestock safety and skin contact by the general public during is service life is unlikely’. The following uses are specifically not allowed (Commission Directive 2003/2/EC, 6 January 2003): *in residential or domestic constructions, whatever the purpose, *in any application where there is a risk of repeated skin contact *in marine waters, *for agricultural purposes other than for livestock fence posts and structural uses… *in any application where treated wood may come into contact with intermediate or finished products intended for human and/or animal consumption.”
Couldn’t you use galvanised stirrups. We get them out of Bunnings in Australia for like $10-15 each. The ones you used looked like stainless Steel, are you near the coast?
It seems really strange NZ didn’t ban arsenic treated timber but the US did. Our EPA gets criticized constantly for being too hesitant to make seemingly obvious restrictions. We still do have a ton of in ground timber options aside from arsenic treated timber. I use them all the time and they work well. The stuff I buy at the hardware store is rated for 25 years ground contact!
In the UK, AFAIK, we have no threshold for arsenic treated timber. Only stipulation was not to handle timber until it had dried after pressure treatment.
Scott, the deck looks nice in the states (I'm in New York) we have to have railings on the deck when were are about 3 feet above the grade. Do your building codes require that as well? Regarding staining, we also have to let the deck weather as well.
Hi Dave. In Australia it is 1 metre. Which is about 3' 4". NZ would be similar as many of the codes and standards are shared. Yeah, always good to leave it to get rid of natural oils to finish deck, especially if using water based finish.
Just used some screw piles for a timber store. They are a pain to install straight, so get the ones which have an slotted plate so you can adjust the bracket. We have Heat Treated timbers for pallets and then Treated Timber for Construction. Generally will not find anyone putting timber in the ground here.
The ground screws are called helical anchors in the United States. They are starting to take off but have been around for a long time. A benefit is that removal is just unscrewing. A friend researches helical anchors professionally and they are very strong. She uses 100,000 pound vibrators to test the anchoring power. Not an option in large rocky ground.
here in Michigan USA we do not put wood in the ground on permanent structures because of frost heaving, which can lift or crush wood right out of the ground so we use concrete with a cone shaped bottom we get temps from -40F (-40 C) to 110F (43.33 C) and have to bury something deeper then 42 inches (1 meter) just so it does not get pushed out of the ground when it freezes -this is all for small structures, large structures require deeper footings -it is easier to redo concrete then disassemble a deck to replace wood
I had some pressure-treated green board, rated for ground-contact here in California, stored on the ground under a privet hedge. Then it rained a lot, and the hedge started dying. I use gloves and a mask when using that product, and never use it where people may come in contact with it... unless it's painted.
In UK we also use treated timber for all outside timberwork, but not indoors. The most important one is batons for roofing where tiles/slates are attached to the roof outside the waterproof membrane. The lumber inside the membrane is classed as inside the building. Since a tile roof in the UK can last 100 years, and slate 70 years, it is important the batons last a long time.
I used to work in the lumber industry in the US. HT (heat treating) is primarily used to prevent the spread of invasive insects.
but when its burned to some degree, not just scared with the flame, it stop water to get into the wood.and bugs too.
heat treat does nothing for bugs, termites love it.
@@daniel-it2lw It stop the spread of invasive insects. The insects that already exist in your area are another issue.
HT just kills bugs and fungi that is in the wood now, it offers no residual protection.
Hi Scott, as a Technology teacher in NZ I have battled for 25 years with dust issues in the workshop. With class sizes of up to 30 students, extraction systems are inadequate at the best of times. Any dust is hazardous but treated timber and MDF or customwood as it's often known, is a problem that we should all be very concerned about.
extraction systems are a problem everywhere i see. my class does a lot of soldering and the extraction system is inadequate for 3 students, let alone 12.
it's a shame that they always cheap out and get the bare minimum when it comes to health and safety.
Worried about the dust from these timbers is relevant , yes ...... but completely negated by the fact that most of you all took the covid vaxx ...... so I wouldn't worry about the dust if I was you !! 🤔💁🏻♂️🤷♂️
@@TheWanderingNekoAll soldering really should be chem respirators unfortunately.
I run a workshop with laser/plasma/CNC/welding 3D printers, however the tendency people have to lean over during PCB repair and inhale solder fumes is very difficult to train out.
Therefore in addition to the extraction systems, everyone is wearing either BA or chem respirators when soldering. Arguably more PPE than most of the other activities I mentioned above.
@@user-wh2oo4wh8v people arguably take solder fumes less seriously than any other. the amount of times i've had to close off a room and let it air out bevause some people thought they didn't need the fumehood and then sat there for hours inhaling fumes stuck in the room.
it's such a shame
One example is that I installed CCA timbers at my home and they lasted 15 years. When I replaced them with ACQ it lasted four years!
You must be in a wet area or soil. In my area (sandy, well drained, not much rain) even lightly treated lumber lasts quite well.
Now pressure treated lumber reacts with the nails or screws when it gets wet and eats up the metal. Decks don't last long, 10 years max, but can see damage early on
I claim BULLSHIT ! you were sold an Imposter ! ACQ lasts for Decades.
Mine certaiinly have, despite simply being bedded into Dirt as fence posts..
@@bud5084 My father's house has a 40 year old completely sound deck. Decks don't last for a few reasons.
1. Deck boards placed far too close together so leaves and other debris get stuck. 1/4 gap always, relying on shrinkage is stupid because the wood swells when wet.
2. Insufficient airflow under the deck to dry out the soil and joists.
3. Insufficient sunlight exposure
for ground contact wood buy treated timbers set them out to dry a while. get a pail/drum whatever and soak the part of the posts that will be on and in the ground in motor oil . Got a farmer guy i know did that 20 years ago his fence is fine, in florida in a not well drained area
In the Canadian Prairies, where we go from plus 35 C to minus 35 C in one year, there is lots of soil movement. So for a large deck that requires a proper foundation, there will be either cement piles down past the frost line (around 1.5 meters) or ground screws to a similar depth. The advantage of ground screws when properly installed is that they don't move up and down in the soil. Unless the cement pile is belled at the bottom, there is some chance of frost heave if the ground is too wet.
Ground screws are also great where pouring concrete would be problematic. I am putting some in to anchor bottom on the 8 step stair from my deck to my floating dock.
That's a crazy temperature difference. Here, in Auckland on the North Island, we go from about 5 C to 25 C, maybe a little bit more or less. A fine day in winter will allow you to wear just a t-shirt for most of the day.
A carpenter from Kiruna (a very northern part of Sweden) thought me to build free floating decks. You need to remove the top soils down to solid ground. You then place garden cement slabs on it and build the deck with legs that stand on the slabs. He claimed that no matter how deep you burry piles in Kiruna, the frost will push them up. The floating decks will move with the soil, but that movement is minimal in comparison. The free floating decks I have built are still level after a decade of use.
@@dvogonen We do something similar here, though we generally use precast concrete blocks that have a recess to allow the post to be help in place. The block has a drain hole down the middle and slots along the sides to allow airflow around the post. We dig down about 25cm and fill the hole with packed gravel to act as a drain and the blocks sit on that. Keeps the wood above any direct contact with moisture. The deck behind my home is a floating deck and is about 11m x 6m. Like yours, it moves a tiny bit, but it remains level and is very strong. Deck foundations here have to go below the frost line if you are attaching the deck to the house (or other building).
@@Major-Dan This guy floats.
Yeah it was a big PITA for awhile while we worked thru the change.
You can still get timbers with CCA but typically they are used for pole barns and other ag buildings. In Oregon anyway the brown #2 PT posts have now been upgraded to allow them to be ground contact and by extension buried.
The bigger unmentioned issue with the change was the fastener requirement. It states that any fastener 1/2" and below in contact with ACQ timber needed to be hot dipped or coated with an ACQ approved coating and that electro-galvanized would no longer suffiece. This also led to the rise of the Zmax hangers which have to be used when in contact with any level of treated wood..
But like any change, once you get used to ordering two types of hangers and changing to only using galvanized fasteners it's business as usual.
At least in our area it was simple with it's proximity to the coast, the larger yards stopped carrying any bolts or hardware that wasn't hot dipped and that made it harder to mess up.
The only thing I love more than watching you work and explain your way through various tasks is turning on the subtitles whenever you start talking about decks.
Big ups, I'm about to build some floating shelves because of your video from awhile ago. Just finally got some material in. 👌
Scott when you said about friends comjng to visit that where there a year ago but no deck, i realized we’ve been watching your channel for few years now from when up in north island. The tours of your small rented shed, the trips to the store when Covid started.
It’s been a privilege to follow your journey as you and Jess go about every day stuff and share that with us. And the quality in your work is bloody awesome. Loving the big deck.
You’re guys are good souls and we love the genuineness of how you are.
Back in the 1980s I was taught that pressure treated lumber had to weather for 2-3 months before being stained. To be certain the paint or stain would be absorbed you would sprinkle some water on a board and if the water beaded up it wasn’t yet ready to paint. Around that time my Uncle’s company rebuilt a picket fence for a local inn/restaurant using pt for the rails. Both the owner and the maintenance staff were told the pt couldn’t be painted right away. The owner had his guys paint everything the week after the fence was done and the paint started peeling within a month
Needs to be dried. The pressurised treatment liquid leaves the wood wet after coming out of the pressure cylinder. Treatment needs to be appled to fry wood also, if not properly dried that could affect absorption of paint etc over time as water works out of it.
we always soak fence poles in diesel. then make a hole ontop to "refill " it with diesel now and then.
then a nice little cap ontop to protect top of pole againts weather.
same when painting aging wood .
first brush them with diesel and let them soak it up before applying paint.
last for a loong time and make the paint stretch 3x longer.
Creating contaminated land. Nice.
@@Tugela60 you are not the brightest are you ??? its basically treated wood. they sit in a bucket or tub drinking diesel so the part that go into the ground wont rot. not like you walk around pouring it all over the ground letting it soak into the poles. you are the type that dont have a logical way of thinking and need a bible sized user manual for even a fork or you will try to insert it into your ear.
@@Tugela60 it dont contaminate the land. its in the wood . its safer than many regular treated woods and will last waay longer. we have fence poles and wood siding that passed 50 years now by doing that. way better than the stuff you can buy that is chemically treated.
Depending on the position, I like to use diesel, a little sump oil and some tar based paint. Especially on the end grain. This is used in places where it can not be easily touched. It soaks into the timber. Use it sensibly and sparingly. Does not wash off or contaminate anything.
@@harryvanhoo7235 Until your land has to be decontaminated by the sucker who ends up owning it in the future.
I love that you say the chorus pipe needs to be fairly deep. Ideally, you want it deep enough that no one will strike it, although there is no actual rule for depth of comms cables. Chorus contractors will literally concrete saw a line across your driveway and just tuck the cable into the cut. The amount of terrible fibre installs by chorus I've seen as an electrician in auckland is out the gate.
All for speed
@@daeyvidd and "cheap".
@@sw6188 one in the same, in 98% of cases
@Sam Davy I've spoken to a chorus contractor and they get $600 budget per job. This is to cover labour and materials. Any additional materials has to be cleared with chorus before the job can commence. So I get it, but it's terrible
My chorus cable bows out of my lawn like a rainbow about 800mm and then goes through a sheet of fibre cement and under my house. 😂
It’s banned by the European Union to my parents owned a sawmill for years in Oxfordshire, England and we had a pressure treatment plant, and so I saw the whole process it used to worked wonderfully and the new acq which we had to use for everything would rot after 5-10 years
Thanks fuck not in the bloody e u
@@chipperkeithmgb well I wouldn’t go that far things aren’t exactly going great at the moment are they ?
Sounds like a great way to force everyone to replace their decks even 10 years...
Banned in 2006 in UK, presumably to fall in line with EU directives.
Hi Scott, Love the channel. If you are going to oil the deck I would recommend either a sikkens or intergrain system. I would never trust the weather to fully remove tannins from the timber before coating. Better to use a complete system which will include a tanning oil remover, cleaner, then oil. I am a licensed painting contractor in Australia and have done hundreds of decks. I quite often see decks done without proper preparation before coating. They dont look good for very long as the sun will pull the tannins to the surface of the timber and start breaking down the oil giving a very patchy look. Anyways all the best with it
I swear by Shaffer's decking products
ua-cam.com/video/tbazGVrbN-g/v-deo.html
Deck, not Dick 😂
Seriously though those pieces of steel you put into concrete at those ridiculous prices could have been replaced with ordinary galvanized
1 1/2 x 1 1/2 x 1/4 angle. Will do a better job at support and not highway robbery.
We built our deck in the summer of 2022 with ground screws. 100% would recommend. The cost was about 1.5x that of concrete and timber posts but the work was done in one day and the saddles were all laser levelled. The next day I dropped beams onto the saddles and we were off and away building the deck. Ground screws have the added benefit of avoiding (Canadian) frost heave too.
Absolutely gorgeous deck Scott, you really are a craftsman. Your home and garden is starting to look like Mr Miyagis yard from the Karate Kid, stunning.
Out here in Southern california pressure bug treated timber is required in decks and under houses to prevent termites fro eating the whole structure in a few years... since it almost never gets below freezing here along the coast, the termites. can munch all year round... Any wood you put in the ground will be just plain gone in no time at all...
Except out in the high desert they don’t have to do pressure treated because the wood is generally too dry to support termites.
Ground screws are fine in relatively soft, clear ground but in rooty, rocky clay soil they're a bit of a nightmare, and can deflect or need to be repositioned to avoid subsoil rocks and large roots. Consequently, you have to design the structure to be tolerant of these "off" positions and orientations. An alternative is pile foundations.
Also, if galv is deemed good enough for screws, then why not for the brackets that Scott used? For a deck that won't last beyond 30 years, I would have used galv with Malthoid behind it to seperate it from the timber. Or rather, like you wrote, some short posts.
@@kiwigrunt330 Galvanized screws and nails don’t do well in CCA lumber. I built a CCA deck in 1988, and the galvanized screws used in the deck had nearly disintegrated by 2019 when I had to replace a couple of decking boards. The Simpson Strong-Tie brackets made out of stainless steel in the support structure were still going strong. But, 30 years and still going strong was pretty good for a deck. I stained it every 2 years with an oil-based stain.
I'm just a DIY homeowner and have _almost_ dealt with the issue of arsenic treated timber when reworking our deck. I say "almost" because I was lucky to not have to replace any of it. (The supports are all on concrete columns, with the treated lumber above ground level.
I think the concern is not so much about putting arsenic in the soil (the soil has a lot of it already here in Arizona) but the complications - and attendant violations - of disposing of the toxic wood when it is all replaced by whatever comes next.
They banned it because Yale University did a study in Connecticut that found the arsenic was leaching into the soil adjacent to playgrounds & decks. Therefore it could end up on peoples hands, etc. That study motivated the government to take a serious look at the health implications. It's more like a lead paint issue than a material waste problem as you described.
@@aspeesyou mean it wasn't the lumber industry wanting wood to rot faster so they could sell more wood?
Buy the recycled plastic lumber. All the advantages of treated lumber, none ofnthe arsenic.
@@aspees depending on where you live arsenic levels can be quite different naturally. They used to use arsenic as a pesticide in the good old days, it was one of the first materials used.
Kiwi in Queensland here, my local builder used galv brackets (only need the expensive stainless steel if you're within 500 metres of sea spray zone). He used H3 MGP10 joists and primed everyone including end grain. Then installed a rubber tape / strip over the top of joists so the Kwila and rain wouldn't leech into the joist long term.
CCA is also not in use in the UK. We also have Accoya which is “pickled” softwood, the process essentially chemically alters the lignin/cellulose so microbes can’t eat in so well
Sounds it's processed similarly to the way wood, cotton, and linen are converted into rayon fiber: Plasticize the cellulose and it takes on some semi-synthetic properties.
No, it uses acetic acid. Preserves the would and even makes softwoods somewhat harder. Great tech -sucks that it can’t seem to take off in the States.
@@grimmWednesday So it's soaked in vinegar?
Acetylated wood exhibits considerably increased biological resistance to brown- and white-rot fungi (Larsson-Brelid et al. 2000
This was my point, I studied white rot fungi at university (although that was because they can eat DDT)
@@grimmWednesday Accoya is readily available in California.
In Sweden we use a lot of treated soft timber. Because climate. It used to contain chrome and arsenic, but that was banned back in 2007. The new stuff seems to hold up pretty well.
Yes. But ugly green color..
@@alexanderunden8607 You get also brown color and both can be stained what ever color you want.
@@alexanderunden8607 dont worry 1-3years after installed the green have faded in sunlight... and how else could you tell if someone have bought the cheap green or the pricey brown ^_^
Great video! The deck looks amazing! The "6 months wait to stain" I think is because the pressure treated wood will not properly accept the stain. You have to wait until the pressure treated stuff dries completely. You can test by putting a water drop on the surface you want to stain and see if the water is absorbed in 10 minutes. If not then the wood will not properly absorb the stain. :)
Hello from San Francisco, CA Scott. Beautiful work bro. From one young carpenter to another you are a massive inspiration man.
I know you're fairly committed to undergrounding the fibre now, but if you wanted to do a zero-cost solution it's worth knowing that the installers generally coil up a few extra meters of the black fibre cable under the house or in the wall, allowing you to pull the slack back out without breaking the cable and reposition the hang point at the top of the roof apex near the mains cable so that it's above head height.
Yeah, that was my thought, there's already some other service arriving up there so why not shift it up.
I think it’s also to remove the ugly conduit running down the outside of the weatherboards
@@0NoQuarter14 or call the utilities company to come bury the power so the ugly above ground cables are gone.
Indeed, my own company has been doing this a lot on a currently ongoing project to install municipal fibre internet for a small town. Many of the residents requested us to install the cables alongside existing utility connections that run to the low point of the roof point of their property. We simply choose to cut the cable long and leave enough slack in the eves or between the ceiling and floorboards of their loft conversion to allow the cable to be pulled back and pinned to the apex and run under the overhang of the roofline if needed. This being precisely because many of the properties are single story dwellings like this so I am certain that at least some of those homes will need to raise the vertical clearance of the cable some day. Sure it will still be a time consuming job even the lightly armoured cable in question needs to be manhandled with some care if you want to drag it through a wall but at least they have the option. Also the cable in question has a propagation speed of ~2/3rd's the speed of light, you don't even get to blink while missing the fraction of a microsecond delay that at most like 10 metres of fibre adds. Fibre cabling has a propagation velocity around 200,000 km/s slower than the speed of light in a vacuum sure but so fast that you would blink and miss the entire planet let alone a small coil of wire in the roof.
@@seraphina985 Still, the lower propagation delay has an impact in certain situations. A company wanted to shave several milliseconds off on a fiber link between the Chicago Board of Trade and the New York Stock exchange. They installed the straightest cable the could, including boring through hills to avoid going over them. Unfortunately for them, another company saw what they were doing and deployed a relatively straight set of microwave radio towers, which avoided the fiber latency, and shaved even more microseconds over the fiber, making it economically unviable.
But, for home internet, a few meters in the attic is nothing compared to the fiber path to the ISP, which is still not going to be noticeable.
It is now 40 years ago working with H6 (burial grade) CCA timber, myself and a five man crew stopped for a mid morning break of donuts and coffee. Of course the nearest thing we had to hand washing was to rub our hands vigorously against our jeans,,,,,
Just contaminated fingers, touching 2 donuts the entire crew was downed by lunch time. I was a few weeks later,, the rookie burning jobsite waste and scrap,, burned the cut offs and I am the one on a tour of the site that got a full whiff of the smoke,,, when I said,, "Gosh, no. Don't burn that stuff." That was the end of my work week as well. We did not use any H6 after those two events. Ya gotta be careful with that stuff. Wash thoroughly after touching,, even undress in the backyard when you get home. DON'T track that stuff into the house where the kids are. And never burn the stuff,, the smoke is toxic.
Hey Scott, you can build your leadin yourself up to your property boundary, that would save you thousands. inside the property boundary you only need 300mm cover. Avoid multiple hard bends. You can vac under your drive way with a high pressure Gerny. You can use a high pressure hose, feed it through the pipe and then clip a nozzle on it and push it through the dirt, you will end up with only a hole the diameter of the pipe rather than making a big mess under the drive way.
One of the things I noticed when I first saw this video was how precise all your lines were and the detail in making the job look amazing ..job well done!!!!
The first video of yours I watched was of a deck build in Auckland and I was flabbergasted by it's beauty. This is equally beautiful. A true craftsman.
I built my deck 17 years ago and used Trex decking. I haven't had to stain ONCE! Love it. It cost more but staining is costly too, especially at 64 years old.
We had a Trex-type deck and one thing I particularly liked was that you could walk on it with bare feet without worrying about splinters.
Those are insane prices for small pieces of steel. Crazy.
A$10.25 M10 Galvanised Full Anchor Post at Bunnings.
You sure do it hard in NZ!
The suggested delay to stain is to allow the compressed grain from the shaper/planer to rebound or fluff and improve absorbancy of the material in addition to chemical bleed off, as you suggest.
There are other alternatives than ACQ available and also ACQ has a ground contact rating if it has sufficient retention. However, we have become used to not having wood in contact with the ground even when building decks. The brackets to attach to cement are not overly expensive.
Exactly. The only reason I can think to actually have posts embedded in the ground is something like a fence where there is no other lateral support so you need the deeply buried post for stability. Other than that, sinking posts into the ground is just poor and outdated design in general.
Canada - Steel screw pilings are great as long as you do not find obstacles like a big rock. However, if you do find a stone or rock down there it can skew the piling off to one side. I still believe that a concrete piling which extends below the frost line with a bulbous foot in a sono-tube with a metal socket on top for the timber transition is best. It very simply will not move & the timber can be easily replaced in the future if it rots, splits or twists. Here in Canada, we do not put timber in the ground any more... It is simply not good practice & since the abandonment of copper arsenic green treatment, the alternate treatments are not as good.
BUT... there is a system where you can fill the hole with two part expanding foam in place of concrete. For this, the wood is encased in the foam which will keep it out of underground moisture. I have also seen this done with a plastic sack on the post so in theory it could be pulled out of the "socket" one day in the future to replace it, but I have never seen that idea tested.
Nice One Scotty, I am a new subscriber after this vid. I did find the Info on CCA timber treatment really interesting. When it comes to inhalation of particulates be it sawdust, plaster, sanding materials, anything an angle grinder touches, handling cement/concrete, unwatered plaster products, sawing MDF, handling fiberglass, or whatever, the surefire way to prevent ingesting these hazardous materials. Wear a ventilator - probably the most underused and most hated PPE item!!!!! If you buy a good one they work really well and also minimize the fogging of sunnies and safety glasses. I forget sometimes and kick myself every time I remember - Do it guys and we'll live healthier and longer.
If CCA wood burns, everyone within the suburb and beyond, is exposed to breathing in not just arsenic particles, but also copper and chromium. All three are equally dangerous and all three are lethal in very minute quantities.
What a stunning deck SBC. Well done! Interesting information about the timber too. Good to see you & friends’ relaxing on the deck.😎☕️☀️
I have ground screws on my deck from StopDigging NZ. The cool thing is that you can get them to do the screw piles, including all the layout, which IMO is the hardest part of deck building. A bit more expensive but not a bad option.
How much did it cost
Hi Scott. Thank you for the video. You have built a beautiful deck. I have been a carpenter in the USA for over 40 years. I saw as treated pine came into being here. I have seen it turn to dust if not sealed properly. I have used very little treated lumber in my life. Mostly a douglas fir/hemlock hybrid that is used for any connection to concrete. Now I can not get rid of the scraps as the dump will not even take it. I could make more comments on your process. But the real way to do that is to have a sit down face to face conversation over a nice cold beer. I just returned from my first trip to New Zealand. Your country is everything they say it is, we loved it! The most sad part to me was to see the clear cutting and the slash piles. As we were headed home the next big cyclone was hitting. The beached were burried in slash. I hope you all can find an alternative to the manner they log. I see the same thing in the states and have fought hard to try to bring awareness to the damage that it does. Selective logging is they way to save our forests for the next enerations. Love your home and thank you again for the video.
From a forestry family and a geologist, and most of the issues on the East Coast is that the underlying geology is so prone to land sliding (even with old growth natives) that i think that it's not going to change the potential damage that can occur on that side of NZ. For exotic pine plantations, clear felling is often used due to the amount of wood extracted at a given, and it's relatively safer than selective logging, and cheaper (as you don't need experience helicopter crews). The Slash is left to ensure that some of the nutrients is returned to the next generation of pines, though there is an increasing movement to send it for burning for electricity.
Also, harvesting NZ Natives Timber is very rare, with special permits needed due to the environmental movement here in NZ, but in older homes, the untreated dry timber (Matai, Kauri and Rata) can become incrediably hard, with many builders power drills & bits breaking due to trying to drill into them after 50 years.
CCA is a real environmental contaminant, I watch with horror as people build raised garden bins from CCA, the three poisons can migrate through the soil to the veges being grown "organically".
NZ is way behind in legislating for screw (helical) piles that are common overseas and have been used for decades. They are quick, accurate, and extraordinary at seismic load bearing.
Yes! No chemicals, just load support.
Great info. Thanks. Just a note - Built many a deck in my day. Using temporary posts allows you to keep working as the concrete sets. After I pour the concrete, I go ahead and deck the framing. No need to wait, as the deck is supported on temps. A little vibration from the nailing process will actually help the trapped air bubbles in the concrete rise. No need to wait.
CCA was pretty much banned in Europe from 2004. I think the UK stopped in 2006. Fence posts were rubbish for a while but they seem to have found a decent less hazardous alternative. Great deck by the way
Use locust trees for post they last for 50 years.
Ground screws are so good. Used them to build a garden room in a sloped garden that would have required a lot of cut and fill. Instead had 6 large ground screws of varying sizes installed and was straight onto cutting timber and framing the floor the next day
We still use CCA in Canada for pilings, some utility poles and heavy construction. The big screws are called Helical piles, I have installed about 5000 of them- they are the Cats Meow but costly!
Ground screws rock! We use them all the time now, for decks and additions. If you don't want/need a crawl space or basement they save a lot of labour.
Hi Scott, I'm from Germany and we use mostly cheap fir or spruce wood. Our way is to put cement piles in the ground with a figure H steel cemented into the top. The uprights can rest on it and are bolted - no contact to the ground, no hazardous treatment required. The steels are about 10€ each in galvanized and about 20€ in stainless, your steel prizes are ridiculous. I think, burning the ends, treating it with linseed oil and cement it into the ground would work pretty well too.
ground-screws and their larger cousin structural screw piles are rapidly increasing in use in Canada (Western Canada, at least, we’re on glacial lakebed and sea-bottom, not exposed solid bedrock like those folks in The East) Last deck/house extension I did used a combination of both… 4 foot deep ground screw on an 8 foot extension to get them below the frost line, to hold up the wheelchair ramp + landing, and 12’ deep 6” former drill pipe with 12” screw flights to hold up the (acq treated) main beams to under the deck.
“You’re supposed to just suck it off” lol 😂. Scott-“don’t worry I won’t include it” Also Scott- includes it. Lol. Awesome
No sucking on the dick!
As a 35 + year builder in The US I had always been taught not to bury wood, ever, no matter if it's treated or not, unless it is untreated, and meant to be sacrificial like a raised vegetable bed. All framing is either @ or above grade and attached to the concrete via a galvi or stainless metal interface. Avoiding any ground contact is the general rule. We use concrete piers that have to go below the Frost Line, in my area of New England that is 4 feet, (1.22m) we get real winters here still. I just had to dig 2 piers today to hold up a handicap ramp at one of my client's homes. ACQ is all we got, but then there is also the old school bitumen dip if you have to put in fence posts, or eastern red cedar which is impervious to almost all rot and bugs, otherwise know as aromatic red cedar that they make cedar chests and closets from. Also my lumber rep told me that you wait 6 months for the ACQ wood to dry out from the chemical treatment to put stain on or it will not take well and peal or crack, which I have seen happen. We refer to treated wood as PT for pressure-treated, as the process was described to me it involves taking the Southern Yellow pine, kiln drying it and then vacuuming down to -6 atmospheres, then pumping in the ACQ and pressurizing the vessel to +6 atmospheres. So it puts a lot of liquid into the wood pores, and then gets stored outside in often freezing temps. I put lots of CCA up before it was banned, it didn't hold up any better, mostly because they told us that galvi fasteners would be compatible, they are not and cause "iron sickness" just like in salt water boat timbers. Fe will always react with the Tannins in any wood, and cause black rot and bleed. Stainless is the only way to retard that process. Anyway, we Don't generally bury any structural wood, with the exception of RR tie type retainer walls, and stairs and such for landscaping. Even when CCA was available we still rarely buried it. The general rule is Stone/concrete/Steel below grade, and wood above.
I have built a few decks over the years, and love this one. I too have the same problem of have a beer and looking at alignment of screws and consistency of gaps etc. so need to make sure I have no regrets.
The last deck I did, I used up all the offcuts of the decking timber and created a vertical skirt with them around the edge, and trimmed the bottom to the slightly raising driveway that it bordered. Looked great and I got to appreciate it every time I drove home
Hey Scott, we had an overhead telephone cable and wanted our fibre cable buried. We dug our own trench to Chorus specs, they supplied the conduit. Chorus had to have the conduit up and down the power pole 'designed' buy their design team which we paid a few hundred dollars for, but that was the only cost for us. We did our power cables at the same time, in the same trench, separated to Vector and Chorus specs. It is certainly a lot better having the cables buried, but digging the trench ourselves saved thousands.
Shortly after I found your channel, I binged your renovation jobs. I hate having to wait a week for a short 12 - 15 minute video. They are great but go by so quickly.....and now to wait another week. Deck looks great by the way!
I think we all did that 😂
I agree we need 40 minute feature length episodes. Half of it should just be peaceful atmospheric shots around Nelson. 😀
It's kind of funny, I realize yesterday that UA-cam had not recommended one of your videos to me in quite some time (nearly a year), and then suddenly today this video popped up in my feed.
Hey Scott,
I built my deck (15x6m) last year here in Sweden. Decided to go for the screw in foundation. I will never use anything else. Brilliant and easy to install. We get -30 around where I live and I measured it for fun with the laser and receiver last weekend. +/- 2mm difference on the whole deck.
Your Dutch pronunciation is pretty good btw haha. Another word for you regarding your work is : vakmanschap 👌🏻
Sounds like "workmanship". Am I right? If so, I agree 👍
@@JohnPatersonAu yes!
Treated wood is wetter than regular timber, so waiting a few months before staining or applying oil is to make sure the moisture level drops to a suitable level (max 16% I think). :)
We use the ground screws a lot here in Canada, and a product called a "bigfoot", it's basically a pvc pile tube with a large flared base under the frost line, looks like a funnel upside down filled with concrete.
screw piles are great
I've got subtitles on by accident. 'Deck' is not shown as 'deck'! Robin Clevett in UK has demonstrated ground screws. Wish I'd known about them when I had a brick outbuilding built with deep footings but not deep enough so stop some heave due to hybrid pine trees. Surprised my builder by putting in some conduit in a trench from fibre internet in pavement into my basement and, from there, to where I wanted the router. Internet supplier very impressed as rest of street has messy above ground cable. Splashing water at chickens is an effective way of training them away from danger
Look back and watch the previous episodes of this deck build, with sub-titles on. They're funny as.
You should fly out Paerau, to help oiltreating the deck 😀 Miss him 💪
Have been watching your channel for years and I'm proud to say I used a technique today that I learned on the channel! Did a scriber on a deck fascia to lapped siding. Turned out perfect first try thanks to you. Amazing videos Scott, I appreciate every minute
Hey Scott, ❤️ your work and the way you show it!
A suggestion for you guys, run a hidden Led strip along the spaces you created, between the stairs and around the bottom of the deck.
Speak nicely to the Chorus installer and they'll often give you some of the fibre cable. If you run it yourself under the deck into the house to your router point they'll do the fibre connector (they have to do it anyway) and then they ignore the "custom install" fee. Have had this twice now. Not sure on the trenching side of it but that should be easy.
PSA - please turn on closed captions and go to @0:40
lol!
Here in Arkansas we put 4x4 and 6x6 pressure treated lumber in the ground all the time I'm not sure the exact treatment but it works well and lasts a very long time
LOL It's gummetje. Gum = rubber + tje (pronounced chuh) which is a suffix the Dutch use a lot that means "little".
How appropriate to bring up a little rubber while SBC wants to protect his big deck.
@@EUC-lid 😆
I live in the US in a Suburb of Chicago. When I had my home built I used CCA wood for my backyard fence. This was in 1993. I've had to replace 2 fence posts due to water infiltration between the cement and the post. 160 feet of fencing. Shows you how well it holds up. Unfortunately I can't purchase it again so I'm hoping it holds up for say 10 more years.
Interesting to hear brackets that cost $15 in the US are soooo expensive there! Thank you Scott and crew!
it's because it's all stainless steel in NZ
Everything is very expensive in NZ building industry. It would be interesting to see a video on building cost comparisons between the two countries
Everything costs more here - essentially because we are an isolated island (actually many islands) at the bottom of the world. Way too many things have to be imported. We used to have a lot of industry here manufacturing all this stuff but once we started importing china rubbish at low cost, the local manufacturers could no longer compete and most closed up meaning if you want something decent you import it.
The bracket materials are not of the same quality they are not comparable at all. Ours are stamp out of thin metal that is then galvanized. This is an apples to oranges comparison.
Hey Scott, here in Canada we use those foundation screws a lot, they’re called here helical piers or piles. One of their greatest advantages is that they stop the movement of the post due to freezing conditions.
Yup, we also use screw piles, helical piles
Not a factor in his part of New Zealand so not a selling point. The biggest problem is seismic movement.
I had a cousin stopped on his way home from middle school to play at a playground which at that time heavily used CCA timbers in the playground. He made it home but soon became sick and went to bed where he went to sleep and then died in his sleep from arsenic poisoning. He along with many others deaths was the cause for EPA banning the use of CCA timber, especially in the use of anywhere near where children played.
Wrong cca treated wood last for years there was not enough in it to kill once it dries
Awesome job on the deck!! I live in the USA and I also use treated lumber but I don't care how "Treated" the lumber is, I'm never putting lumber in the ground. It all eventually rots, regardless of how treated it is. I've actually had to convince the wife on multiple occasions that the EXPENSE of concrete and brackets to set the wood off the ground is worth it in the long run. I'll never regret paying more for having my post frame last longer, or the 4x4 posts on the front porch last longer. It's all about water and moisture management. The better it is, the longer the structure lasts.
Yeah, but you simply can't get properly treated wood in the US, even if local codes allowed it. H5 and H6 treated wood in NZ is guaranteed for 50 and 100 years respectively - and in NZ those guarantees are legally binding and easily enforced. It all comes down to what standard you want to build to: a good standard or the US standards.
You guys need to invite Gaston over for a barbecue now that the deck is finished.
Construction pile foam holds in 20 mins and hardens in two hrs. And drying deck for 6 months is a good idea.
My second deck built in ‘89 (22’x18’) has 9 4x6 post 40” by 14”rd down with 4 bags of concrete. 2x12 beams on 8’ with hips supporting 2x10 joist on 16”, with double ledger. Part of those post were used to add a porch swing. Deck gets paint trimmed every two years and stained/oiled every other year, power washed on 6yrs. Only thing replaced is the swing three times. Decks here require railings if the deck is great than 18” above ground, mine is 36” above with vertical cedar skirt. About 3000 #12 ring plated nails, #16 bout 200, many 5/8” galvanized bolts and lag screws.
Last one I built was for my daughter two years ago only need 4x4 post but used construction foam-holes still 36” down in damp clay 👎🏼
Over twenty years ago I was working in Boston M.A. I was working on a deck for my boss and we were using C.C.A treated timber for the frame. Another carpenter on the job got a splinter in his hand, as you do. He went home and forgot about it. He woke up at two in the morning in agony. His entire arm had swollen up like a balloon. His girlfriend had to drive him to the hospital. The doctor told him that if he had delayed coming to the hospital he would have died of blood poisoning. I always wear gloves when handling structural timber, treated or not, 👍💪🔨🇮🇪
Unless it was one gigantic splinter and he chose to ignore that, it was more likely a bacterial infection that caused his problem, not the treated lumber.
@@paddlefar9175 yeah seems like a coincidence. Earlier this year I built a 35m long retaining wall, all h3.2 cca timber rough sawn. Many scratches and splinters, no reaction.
I found this video so relaxing watching you put a deck together.
So you bury treated timbers that contain copper, chrome, and arsenic salts, which are most likely water soluable and banned for being poisonous even in the usa (!). and then you plant vegetables right next to it, which you want to eat. i mean...yeah. sounds like a great idea xD you must have a very poweful lobby of the timber treating industry in new zealand. in europe people freak out if you want to treat timbers with boron salts, that maybe have an effect on human reproduction. nice deck though :)
I'm not an expert, but from what I've heard and observed , arsenic and Chromium is the deadly chemicals are the problem. The Copper is the rot resistant part (not sure about the Chromium). The arsenic (for insect resistance) how ever is deadly. The main problem is that it does not stay in the wood. So if you walk bare food on it (deck), it can be absorbed in the skin. They found that wood in the ground leach out much faster than was originally though. The more acidic rain, the faster and further the contamination ring. Dad (farmer/carpenter) said never burn treated(CCA) wood. He didn't say why. Story I head : some one burned a pile of scrap treated (CCA) lumber.
Cow got to the ask pile (apparently cows will ingest ashes) the died of Arsenic poisoning (Arsenic does not degrade in fire just concentrated in the ash). What I observed: An acquaintance asked to use my lathe
to make a center leg for his couch.
OK. Later, I was told the day he was turning the leg, he left sick. Later I saw what he was doing. He had been turning a treated (CCA) piece of 4x4. The dust (arsenic) made him sick. Arsenic poisoning.
What is the blue colored wood they use in Canada?
Is it really a hazard? Or is big lumber wanting you to spend more yearly buying shorter lasting treatments to generate more money
Here in Finland CCS- wood is also banned almost same year that in US. And treated wood today last easily 15 -20 years, so no need to buy every year. We had that CCS earlier it for sure has better longevity but ATM sold ins't bad either.
Yes, arsenic is poisonous. Direct burial of posts just doesn't make sense, either: eventually that wood is going to deteriorate. Saving a few bucks per post now, when it will be a lot of trouble to replace them in the future, is a false economy.
It's unfortunate that combination of small import market and still being allowed to use arsenic-treated timber keeps the price of brackets high. Truth is arsenic works a lot better than the safer replacements. Makes sense: their effectiveness is directly result of being poison, so less poison means less effective.
The NZ ERA decision and paper is online so you can read up on their rationale. Which was mostly that there weren’t many studies done to show how much, if any CCA leaching actually occurred from properly installed timber.
We still have pressure treat for ground contact just cant use it on playgrounds etc.
What a beautifully done ua-cam.com/users/postUgkxYGamVaHfdHiPlAQaLa7zkwR02OKpGYDU ! The instructions and the photographs are brilliant. It is thorough and genuinely informative. Ryan got another winner! No one does it better!
Hi Scott, love your videos. Re the comment about not staining for 6 months. In the land of Oz we wait 6 weeks, but I washed my deck with tannin remover and then stained it a day or so later. Finished product much sooner.
Lekker gewerkt pik! Ask Ray to translate that haha
Interesting conversation. I live in the US Mid-west. We do not put deck lumber/timber supports or wood building structure into the ground. Termites/Carpenter-Ants/worms and water/fungal rot are problems here. Steel re-inforced concrete piers/pilings/posts are the norm. Our frost line is about 1/2m so to defeat frost heave, the concrete piers are placed a bit over 1m deep with a 25cm concrete inverted mushroom shaped 'footing' at the bottom.
It's not that we do not use ground contact timber for anything at all, but not for building structure. Thanks for the video.
Wow... thats expensive. One mounting bracket cost about 5 to 10 € here, and a 6€ for a bag of concrete to mount one or two of them..... Ajustable polymer pedestals come at 3 to 7 € each.
When we built our new house 6 years ago, we used composite decking with galvanised steel framing. After 6 years it is as good as new and will never needs staining. Our previous home also had lots of wood decks and staining the wood every year or so drove me nuts.
Why not use galvanised stirrups for posts in the ground? Many options here in Australia, effective & affordable.
I’m in the US. The old standard was to dig 1m holes half fill with concrete and half buried post. That lasts about 20 years or less if the the area is very wet. Now they want all posts above grade with standoff brackets either wet set or bolted after.
For steps i have been pouring long full length formed footers that finish at grade. I thunderbolt a 2x8 flat to the footer. Stair stringers rest on that keeping them above grade. Setting stairs on a level footing is easy. Concrete is cheap and so are a few bolts. I mix the concrete with a poly tarp with two people. It takes 5 minutes per bag to mix and pour. Great system and more solid than posts every 6’.
Robin Clevett has a video about using ground screws to construct a garden room.
Love the musical choices in your edit. I'm also glad I leaned Danish and not Dutch in my teens, that sounds like some hard throat work.
Very nice work and good quality lumber. In Canada, our lumber is ALL warped and twisted, it is wet and heavy when installed and must be cut and screwed down as soon as it is unbanned to reduce cupping, twisting and bending.
Could you not use a concrete footing and use a stirrup? I work for a very famous green warehouse, that’s in Aust and NZ. We sell a heap of framing hardware, most of it is by Pryda. They can either be bolted down to the concrete footing of cemented in place
I used a bunch of the ground piles (ground screws) for my off grid ADU. I love them. They allowed me to get through the sand down to the hard stuff without digging that deep and without bringing in lots of heavy masonry
Just to note as well that in Canada and the US, the options for brackets to support posts in concrete are quite wide and a basic support can go for under 10CDN$. Perhaps because that method is not widely used in NZ explains why the type/cost of post brackets is limited and expensive?
Everything is expensive in New Zealand, we are a small country far away from everything.
@@warrenspillane4552 I hear you. It's kind of the same and the opposite here. It's so big that unless you live in one of the big cities, you pay far more for the same thing.
@@warrenspillane4552 A small country, but a great one.
I used 9 meter deep screws to build an extension of our house in Amsterdam. Much cheaper than the alternative concrete foundations. Each screw holds 1ton.
In the U.S. they do have a pressure treated timber from a company called Coppers. They also use Hemlock as a building material which is resistant to bugs and mould. There are some Hemlock barns that have stood for over 100 years, it's also used for outdoor decking.
CCA isn’t used in EU either:
”Since June 2004, the use of CCA-treated timber has been severely curtailed with an amendment of the European Union Commission Directive 76/769/EEC. This amendment now states that arsenic compounds may not be used ‘in the preservation of wood. Furthermore, wood so treated may not be placed on the market’. The only exceptions are wood to be used in industrial installation that ‘the structural integrity of the wood is required for human or livestock safety and skin contact by the general public during is service life is unlikely’. The following uses are specifically not allowed (Commission Directive 2003/2/EC, 6 January 2003):
*in residential or domestic constructions, whatever the purpose,
*in any application where there is a risk of repeated skin contact
*in marine waters,
*for agricultural purposes other than for livestock fence posts and structural uses…
*in any application where treated wood may come into contact with intermediate or finished products intended for human and/or animal consumption.”
Couldn’t you use galvanised stirrups. We get them out of Bunnings in Australia for like $10-15 each. The ones you used looked like stainless Steel, are you near the coast?
It seems really strange NZ didn’t ban arsenic treated timber but the US did. Our EPA gets criticized constantly for being too hesitant to make seemingly obvious restrictions.
We still do have a ton of in ground timber options aside from arsenic treated timber. I use them all the time and they work well. The stuff I buy at the hardware store is rated for 25 years ground contact!
In the UK, AFAIK, we have no threshold for arsenic treated timber. Only stipulation was not to handle timber until it had dried after pressure treatment.
Scott, the deck looks nice in the states (I'm in New York) we have to have railings on the deck when were are about 3 feet above the grade. Do your building codes require that as well? Regarding staining, we also have to let the deck weather as well.
Hi Dave. In Australia it is 1 metre. Which is about 3' 4". NZ would be similar as many of the codes and standards are shared.
Yeah, always good to leave it to get rid of natural oils to finish deck, especially if using water based finish.
Just used some screw piles for a timber store. They are a pain to install straight, so get the ones which have an slotted plate so you can adjust the bracket. We have Heat Treated timbers for pallets and then Treated Timber for Construction. Generally will not find anyone putting timber in the ground here.
The ground screws are called helical anchors in the United States. They are starting to take off but have been around for a long time. A benefit is that removal is just unscrewing. A friend researches helical anchors professionally and they are very strong. She uses 100,000 pound vibrators to test the anchoring power. Not an option in large rocky ground.
here in Michigan USA we do not put wood in the ground on permanent structures because of frost heaving, which can lift or crush wood right out of the ground so we use concrete with a cone shaped bottom
we get temps from -40F (-40 C) to 110F (43.33 C) and have to bury something deeper then 42 inches (1 meter) just so it does not get pushed out of the ground when it freezes
-this is all for small structures, large structures require deeper footings
-it is easier to redo concrete then disassemble a deck to replace wood
I had some pressure-treated green board, rated for ground-contact here in California, stored on the ground under a privet hedge. Then it rained a lot, and the hedge started dying. I use gloves and a mask when using that product, and never use it where people may come in contact with it... unless it's painted.
In UK we also use treated timber for all outside timberwork, but not indoors. The most important one is batons for roofing where tiles/slates are attached to the roof outside the waterproof membrane. The lumber inside the membrane is classed as inside the building. Since a tile roof in the UK can last 100 years, and slate 70 years, it is important the batons last a long time.