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3:00 am, bolt upright in bed: I didn't check the positions of the piles yesterday. Ahhhh: concreting tomorrow. Bugger. Why the panic? Read on. We have ground improvement stone columns (often misnamed piles) put in by these guys. (Town and Country Vibro ) They gave us a piling design, put in the piles, and a piling log, together with the test results. Spent £6500 putting in over 60 'piles'. I think that's bloody good value - £60 quid each for a stone column about 4m deep and 500 mm wide. All put in by a very very nice man called Jay. And tested to way over what is needed. Come to digging out time to lay the strip foundation and I see something suspicious: have a look at this The inset is from the piling design. All we could see (at the time) was that we had cut into the side of a pile, not the top of it (we thought it should be pile 40) which was way off the centre line (light green line) Cue panic. Cue phone calls to Architect and Tanners. Cue cup of tea. Outside, crowbar and shovel in hand dig around. And there minding its own business was pile 40: we had cut into the side of pile 39, as indeed we should have done. The colour of the stone in the stone columns is EXACTLY the same as the surrounding clay. Add a splash of water and you just can't see the pile. I won't forget pile 40 - ever. We'll be pouring concrete at 3:00 this afternoon - unless we lose another pile. (I've prodded each and every one: they're all there: thanks Jay). Ian

Anyway I really think I also like the idea of underfloor heating for our bathroom Terry, it'll be great for drying the bath mat, along with the heated towel rail everything will dry out really well, shame we can't have the fluffy towels, maybe we will need a tumble dryer too, we could fit it in the utility maybe

Yes but a much more serious question. Has anyone found a way to make freshly washed towels fluffy, without the use of a tumble dryer? Getting them DRY is no issue but "sandpaper" is a description I get told of any towel that has not wasted spent time in the tumble dryer. EDIT: Jeremy beat my by 2 minutes.

Exactly. Anchoring with inflated initial price, large reductions in several "one-off" tranches, time-limited offers. I can't stand this kind of crap, and refuse to buy from any company that uses it.

That quote has all the discounting hallmarks of the older double glazing companies. About 20 years ago we rang around for quotes for half a dozen new windows. I was stupid enough to include a well-known big name (beginning with "E" and ending in "t"). Their shiny-suit salesman turned up one evening and right at the start I said I didn't need a sales pitch, but could he just measure up and let us have a written quote. The bloke insisted he had to go through his pitch, as it was company policy. He duly wasted an hour trying to convince us of how wonderful his windows were, then measured up, produced a quote, saying that it was a "one time special offer, half the normal price" if we signed up right now. I said sorry, but I wanted to choose after having received other quotes. He then repeated that the "special offer price" only applied if we were to sign up right away. I refused again, and he asked if he could use our phone to call his manager (this was at around 8pm). He came off the phone saying that his manager had authorised him to reduce the price by another 20% if we signed up straight away. Again I told him that we wouldn't and he, very reluctantly, left. We had already decided that no matter what we weren't going to buy from that company, just because of their sales practices. A week later we got a phone call from him again, saying that they were running a "very special offer" and could knock another 50% off the price, as long as we agreed to our house being photographed (pointless, as the new windows would be all at the back). The next house where we wanted new windows I sent out written invitations to tender to half a dozen local companies, with the explicit instruction that any attempt at high-pressure sales would disqualify them. Worked a treat, as we got a small, local, company to do the job, at a good price and to a high standard.

This is one where I am asking the views of those members that already have MVHR-fitted houses. Jan has decided that she wants out electrician to provision a wall-plate in our bathroom so that we can have the option of fitting a heated towel rail in our master en suite. Her rationale is that she wants a backstop for drying damp towels. We differ on how wet we get our towels. Jan get out of the shower and immediately wraps herself in a towel whilst still dripping wet. I don't like drying myself with a damp towel, so over the years I've got into the habit of first rubbing myself down with a flannel or simply using my hand span between my thumb and forefinger as a blade to wipe off all the excess water on my body and then I towel myself dry. I did a quick experiment by weighing a towel in a bin liner using out kitchen scales, I then had a shower and dried myself Jan-style before weighing the towel again. It had increased its weight by 40gm. (I guess that with my technique the increase would be nearer 10gm.) I then hung the towel on a peg on the back of a door in our current farmhouse en-suite and weight it again 2 hrs later. 30 out of the 40gms of water had evaporated by this point. To evaporate 40gm of water (plugging in the latent heat of evaporation for water) takes 2,260,000×0.04/3,600,000 = 0.025 kWh of heat out of the shower room. Note that this the cooling on the house is mitigated since in winter most of this vapour will condense out again in the MVHR returning 90% of this latent heat to warm the incoming air. Given the extract rates / airflow through the shower room and ambient temperature, I wouldn't have thought that you wouldn't really need a heated towel rail. However I would be interested in the experiences of those already living in an MVHR house. (And also any other data points for towel weight gain, so volunteers welcome ).

results from tonights shower. Faye's towel weight before : 634g after: 663g Ed's towel weight: before: 504 after: 557 things to be considered, Faye didn't wash her hair ( i will get results for this tomorrow) whereas I did. I wiped myself down in the shower whereas Faye didn't. my towel was a lot warmer, fluffier and smaller than Faye's (doubt any of these make much difference but they were observations i made) I have got a LOT more hair not on my head than Faye has

Ed if you think Faye is going to buy the ".... but if I leave it on the floor love it dries better..." argument then you need to think again!!

Sorry meant British Water: http://www.britishwater.co.uk/Accreditation-Certification/certified-equipments.aspx Big hole pics next week I hope!

Well clearly it can't be done now, and what's more it's Jan's fault! Good luck with that argument! No. One of the larger errors we made when building.

Just get a towel rail then and don't connect it Tell her it's somehow connected, use your imagination battery, mobile charging, and hope she doesn't read this thread.

We have MVHR extract in our utility, we have a heat pump condensing tumble dryer and an electric drying rack from Lakeland. Quite a bit goes on the rack, which is usually off unless there's something particularly heavy (i.e. jeans) or urgent. Things seem to dry pretty quickly.

Nothing to do with evidence, or experience. Much more subtle stuff going on here. Just Do It Ian

I was about to raise the dreaded "fluffy towels" issue, too....................................

Have to admit to being another member of the hand blade method you mention. We've now lived in several houses with MVHR and have relied on simple air drying of towels in bathrooms. A lot depends on the time frame between uses of towels. Our experience is that towels will dry out overnight or between morning and and late evening use. Handtowels, which get used continually throughout the day remain damp (depending on use) through the day, but do dry overnight. We dry all our laundry inside on airers in our utility, and have done for a number of years, simply because MVHR is so effective at drawing moisture out over several hours. This method of drying replaced our tumble drier many years ago (cue discussion on fluffy towels!)

@readiescards, fancy doing the towel weighing test?

The TMV then just becomes a failsafe device in case the Willis heater / its controller goes nuclear and tries to delivery heat to its infinity. So basically, you can't do away with the TMV even if you don't 'need' it .

That's the beauty of it, it doesn't need to 'pull' ( draw ). The TMV is just a gate which opens partially / fully to allow heated water to be introduce into the already recirculating, free flowing body of water ( between pump, manifold the Ufh loops ). That circuit allows the manifold pump to freely circulate regardless of the state of the TMV, e.g. open or closed the pump sees no real difference as the loops typically will have no motorised actuators per loop arresting flow. If the TMV opens partially then water will be forced down the return and subsequently back into the flow, and that will be gentle rather than a surge so basically linear with the required amount of heat input. It's a beautifully simplistic, self managing arrangement .

Bespoke can mean 2 things- A company makes doors in many sizes and they arrange a combination to get as near to the size as possible and then infill the rest. This is not really bespoke. A company measures your alcove and gets doors measured to whatever sizes you require. The latter is usually going to be more expensive. In any case, Sharps are the rump of the now defunct Moben/Dolphin/Sharps operation with all the ethics and integrity of Tony Blair and Donald Trump rolled into one. See if you can find a Trend/Mereway or Crown retailer locally and get them to quote. Its probably the best no-nonsense product you will find for sensible money.

Glad to hear there's a simple solution to getting the tape to adhere, and that there's no need to undo the work that's already been done.

Same thing, I got a kitchen for nearly the same price as quoted and I thought to myself, how can wardrobes be nearly as expensive as a kitchen with all the appliances included, only difference in my case is the angled doors!

I believe so, yes. It would have been about 15-18(ish) months ago. I don't remember exact pricing, but I was very surprised given what appeared to be the amount of work and materials involved relative to, eg, a kitchen. In fact, I did wonder at one point whether it was feasible to get wardrobes from a kitchen company!

The seamless look is down to the skill of your carpenter, not an IKEA limitation. If interested I can take some photos at the weekend. Personally, if anyone were to pitch this to me at a starting price of £15k then I would steer well clear...

It's about double the price it should be. I've used some very nice units from a specialist and it came in at around £3300 for similar to yours. Sharps do a 50% sale in the summer normally - just tell him he is £2k too expensive and he will come down in price...

I think it is too high a price. In my opinion the high-street custom fit are at least 50% too high - so when they have their "half-price sale" they can still make a profit. I bought an IKEA flat-pack for about £1,000 (including all internal fittings, drawers, shoe-racks, jewellery trays etc) and paid my carpenter to hack them to fit under the sloping ceilings. I think it cost approx £2,000 in total. The only limitation with IKEA is that they have standard widths of carcass, so if your room dimensions do not conform you could end up with wasted space. Similar number of wardrobes to your schematic.

Too late for you, @TerryE, but for others who might be comparing the two, this is my experience as well. We went for the Wilo-based UFH set from Wunda following probably too much research trying to compare it to the Grundfos equivalent, and I'm amazed at how quiet it is. Our house doesn't have a lot of background noise, but even in our small plant room it's hard to tell whether it's operating when I have it running at about 40%. If only our Immersun unit were as quiet at full load!

None that I am aware of ..! They use a simple pipe stat to regulate the water temperature - I've come up with a change over relay scenario that when the 3 way valve changes over then it also connects a relay to move from a low temp 35c stat to a high temp 47c stat. That allows me to have dual flow temps.

Don't forget that I spent over a year trying to fine tune the slab control system. I know, beyond doubt, what is possible and what is not possible, not in theory, but in practice. The key issue is that this is not anywhere near as simple a challenge to find a solution for as I originally thought it should be. There is no way on this planet I'm going back to using a complex control system, been there, done that, and run around in circles in the process. We now have a reliable, simple, off-the-shelf, control system that works - it maintains the house at a steady temperature with very little variation, and certainly not a big enough temperature variation to be noticeable. I will admit to being a bit annoyed at just how well the simple control system works, having invested a great deal of time in trying to get the rather complex, multi-sensor control system to keep the house at a steady temperature. My switch to the simple room stat control came about by accident, in part, as I loaded a very simple on/off room temperature control code into the microcontroller system one Friday, simply because I wanted to stop the house getting too cold whilst we were away for a break and the system was still failing to reliably control the house temperature. When we came back from holiday and I downloaded the logged data I was more than a little surprised to find that the simple room stat code had done a far better job of controlling the temperature than any of the complex multi-sensor strategies I'd been playing with over the previous year. That finding, together with a decision we made whilst away, which was to take out as much customised, home-built stuff as possible, and replace it with off-the-shelf alternatives that anyone could fix, led to the system we have now. I've no intention of changing it, mainly because it just works very well. I'm afraid that I have no appetite left for installing critical components in the house that are not fairly easily serviced or replaced when I'm not around to fix them. Had I managed to get the original microcontroller system to work as theory suggested it should, then I would have been the critical failure point for the whole house heating system, if something happened to me their was every possibility that the house system could fail and there would be no way of fixing it. It is very easy to fall into the trap of over-thinking things, just because you can, I found. Sometimes the best bet is to just take the simplest solution that's available off-the-shelf and use it, even if you do think you can do better.

I can confirm that the Wilo is a lot quieter than the same size Grundfos. We have a Grundfos (the newer low energy model) on the UFH, and that pump is in the utility room, downstairs. On the DHW preheat system I fitted the same size pump, but a Wilo, and it's much quieter; so quiet that it's very hard to hear when it's running. When the time comes to replace the UFH pump then I'd fit a Wilo, just to reduce the noise (not that the Grundfos is really noisy, it just makes a slight noise that I'd like to get rid of).

Ah good, glad it's not just me! I was fitting the VCL to one gable yesterday; the wind was howling outside and clearly air was getting in somewhere because the whole thing blew up like a balloon. At least the VCL seems pretty airtight, I could not press it back against the wall at all. This morning the wind had changed direction and it was flat as a pancake. Expanding foam just isn't airtight, not 100% anyway- that's my conclusion. What's your plan, by the way?

It was tongue in cheek. We've discussed this a lot on other threads and I agree that they provide a good service. They've clearly made a concerted effort to increase product quality. Some of the "Silverline" tools though are utter pants.

My build is practically sponsored by Toolstation. Don't knock it! With a £10 minimum delivery they have probably *lost* money with all the stuff I've bought. And there is never any quibble over delivery- in contrast to 'proper' trade suppliers who tend to phone me up sheepishly ten minutes after placing my order online, to ask if I can pay the delivery surcharge that was conventiently not mentioned anywhere on the website.

Our daughter helping build the garage - she picked it up faster than I did.