South East Cornwall Low Energy build

Excellent progress, congrats on getting the ground floor done! Very impressive stuff. Loving Mrs BotusBuild’s hardhat!

Looks great.

 

We used waterproof concrete with our polystyrene ICF walls - not Nudura. This is on top of the waterproof concrete raft coupled with a water bar placed into the raft. 

 

We backfilled part of our ground floor (built into a slope) but clad the ICF walls using heavy concrete blocks which were then coated in a tanking slurry. Seemed like overkill to me but that's structural engineers for you.

17 hours ago, Happy Valley said:

Seemed like overkill to me

I think it all depends on which "professional" you speak to as to what they want. ?

 

@BotusBuild How did you put up your bracing without hitting the UFH pipes in the concrete?

Edited October 24, 2022 by freshy

9 hours ago, freshy said:

@BotusBuild How did you put up your bracing without hitting the UFH pipes in the concrete?

*copied from an earlier post. 

We have now passed this phase of our build, the ground floor walls pour has been completed. In the end the UFH pipes were cable tied to the top of the reinforcement mesh in the middle of the raft. The raft was 150mm thick, the top of the UFH pipe in most places was at 80mm, with 70mm of clearance from the top surface. In some areas where there was 50mm ducting for water pipe runs, the reinforcement mesh was lifted and the UFH pipes were at 110mm with only 40mm of clearance. 
 

The wall props were 114cm long, and placed 120cm apart with fixings at 18cm and 1m. For the front fixing the builder used M10x70mm tapcon style bolts, we had no UFH pipe where there were front bolts fixings. For the rear bolt fixings we used M8x50mm tapcons, there was UFH pipe present for all these fixings.

 

We ran an air pressure test during the prop fixing process and none of the UFH pipe work were compromised. The walls were poured with only one very minor incident and the props have now been taken down. Hopefully this helps anyone that is concerned with how ICF wall props work when you have an insulated raft with UFH.

On 24/10/2022 at 23:31, freshy said:

How did you put up your bracing without hitting the UFH pipes in the concrete?

Scaffold planks on the slab, held down with lots of high density concrete blocks although some very high winds moved even those prior to the pour day.

We did use dome shorter (40mm) concrete screws with an extra washer or two in places as well.