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Thanks gents. I've made a start, got a dry pressure tester, just need to dig out my bicycle pump! I've soldered the manifold sub assemblies - where the cold manifold supply bridges over to the middle manifold (where the mouse is) , I'll be putting a compression Tee to make it easier to join. I've just used 22mm to all the manifolds - the left most is the hotter supply for showers and bath, the middle for basins at a lower temp and right most cold feeds. All supplies are heading through the floor space as the plant room is upstairs. The red arrow will be roughly the level of the UVC outlet with min 500mm distance.

The solvent is the same for PVC of all flavours, and the cleaning agent is MEK (methyl ethyl ketone). Cheaper to buy MEK in litre or 5 litre cans than buy the branded cleaner. EDITED TO ADD: You can thicken up standard solvent cement by adding ground up PVC to it. Takes a bit of time to dissolve but works OK.

It's fine - crack on ..! Terracotta uPVC isn't stabilised for UV as much as the black / grey stuff but if it's boxed in and covered from the sun just get on with it ...

A lot of this makes very good sense, Terry, but you (and I) have the time to do things this way, for our own convenience and peace of mind. Someone making a living from it has to do the job at an affordable price for the customer, and as the saying goes, time is money. The electrician I used for the house wiring was bloody good, but did think that I was going a bit OTT with some of the stuff I'd specified, and even some of the work I'd done before first fix, like fit loads of backing boards wherever fittings were going, all set to the right depth to either set the boxes in the right place or be dead flush with the rear face of the plasterboard where things like lights, pull cord switches surface mount control units etc were going to be fitted. I can understand why, as I had the time to do all this stuff in exactly the way I wanted it done, a luxury that someone making a living from it wouldn't normally have.

We get it, he's Welsh. Give the guy a break!

Too late. It's my impulsive nature.....

Use this for sloppy joints. Sorry for the late heads up

All I did was lay the base stone in compacted layers, to their spec, with around 300mm all around as an additional French drain. I had a soil pipe coming up and some ducts for the water pipe, phone line and power cable, all in exactly the right place according to my plans. They had those positions and they laid and levelled the 50mm grit layer and placed the outer ring of EPS, with the upstands, so that the North East corner was in the correct position relative to my datum point near that corner, and with the North wall parallel with the retaining wall we'd already built, and the correct distance away from it (again, as per my plans). The didn't lay any drainage pipes for us, as we'd already put them all in well under the sub-base and had them pressure tested for BC before MBC arrived on site. That, together with the compacted sub-base of type 3, was all done by our ground works guy. The did leave the UFH tails poking up out of the slab on a temporary timber frame and also put the 25mm conduit I'd made up to take power from the wall to the kitchen island in the place I'd marked out on the plans. This is what our site looked like not long before the MBC guys arrived; you can just make out the ducts and soil pipe poking up at the centre left in the distance (the other stuff is the ground works guys radio and tool box). The type 3 is 150mm deep, whacked down in layers:

It is wonderful that people do this. An entire site about bricks and brickworks from my area. https://eastmidlandsnamedbricks.blogspot.co.uk/ And a wonderful "walking" steam engine from a different site, made by the Butterley company. It ran at 3mph up a 1/50 gradient. Designed by someone familiar with a horse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_Horse_locomotive Commendable nerdery. Found due to following a reference to the billionaire with a global conglomerate who lives in Repton. Not, unfortunately, @PeterW Ferdinand

Someone I used to know had a gas fired hot air system in her house. She used the same guy for years to service it annually. Then she had a fire (probably dust in ducts). As the Fire Service attended they did an investigation. Found out the guy was not qualified to do even a service (think he may have been commercial only, I can't really remember). Just another good reason to avoid gas if you are self building/DIYing.

?. That looks awful familiar ?? Patent pending me thinks lol. Manifold plumbing has a good few advantages. One which I found most useful is to be able to purge and set to work each individual run without having to pressurise the whole installation at once, like you have to do with series ( regular ) plumbing. Very handy indeed for those who mostly work alone for the finer jobs, like myself. Keep at it! Looking good so far ??

If the turkey isn't in the oven my head will be!

+1 I know a lot of boys who are GSR'd and do fires and cookers without the relvant tickets. This can't be done on your vanilla GSR and you have to either do your fires and cookers at the same time, or go back later and do it as a bolt-on. NOTE : Always ask to see your GSR'd fitters card. On the reverse is all the different types of equipment / classes of what their entitled / qualified to work on or install. .

338 and 339 are for tiling on to so you can fit flush to the wall. 340 is a threshold strip to stop water running out of the shower area.

Yes... GSR is split into commercial, domestic, NatGas, LPG and any combination of the above ..! It then gets split on boilers and gas appliances along with other different classes and each has its own separate training and certificates.

NOPE. If you aren't up to speed with regs, equipment and it's installation criteria, YOU DONT TOUCH IT. Ignorance or lack of experience is nonsense. A GSR fitter will have to specifically and separately sit the LPG section of his / her qualifications so they'll have ZERO gap in their knowledge. That is renewed every 5 years so, sorry J, that's not a reason at all.

@JSHarris, Jeremy, I agree that there is a different sweet spot for professional plumbers who can have a high degree of confidence in the reliability of their joints, and this is also a case of time - money and the end customer might not be willing to pay. But @jamiehamy is a DIY installer, and I feel that decomposing the full down installation into separate sub-units and doing sub-unit testing is a sensible approach for him to consider as an option.

Wedi board can also be used for curves but would need a skim coat. http://www.wedi.de/en/area-of-application/processing/designing-constructing/individual-forms-and-curves/

I used Gyproc Soundcoat plus, paddle mix with a bit of water and coir broom, mix to the consistency of emulsion paint and "paint" the walls with it as fast as you can, it will go off in 30 mins.

hello, @oranjeboom, assuming lambda values of 0.022W/mK for celotex and 0.038W/mK for EPS then for floor areas from 100m2 to 400m2 and a P/A ratio of 0.449 the U-value for your 100mm Celotex and 160mm EPS is 0.09W/m2K

People this is FAKE noos, very bad Guardian reporters. Bovis inherited a mess. Give the builders a break. #makeBOVISgreatagain

Did this to get a BFO extractor in below pozi-joists. 9mm PB wetted both sides 5 mins before fitting. Internal radius done in 4 pieces. This was in the ensuite upstairs. Formed with 4x2" and double boarded with 4mm ply. I soaked the ply ( dripping wet ) for a couple of hours and then rolled the 2 sheets up then ratchet strapped them overnight to dry. Straps came off and they retained about 50% of the curve so happy days. The PB was special order 6mm and that was wetted both sides and left to stand up against the wall, getting further wetted by brush where I wanted the radius, throughout the day. Just wet it and push against it, leave for an hour and repeat. The weight of the board pushes down and helps. Prop the top of the PB with a dead man ( timber T piece ) so it can't fall over . Easier to do than most think. ?

7. Moisture resistance – Celotex, due to having a closed cell structure, is a hydrophobic product meaning it doesn’t absorb water. This allows the thermal performance and reliability of the product to be retained over time. https://blog.celotex.co.uk/technical/10-advantages-of-pir-insulation/