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15,875 posts ? Supreme leader, is that you??

Thank you. I look forward to sharing and learning new stuffs! Possibly build a bridge or two.

Ours is the Genvex Premium 1L, slightly over-sized for our house, we could have used a Premium 1, but the additional cost for the 1L was small, and the additional capacity is useful. Here's a link to the Danish supplier we bought ours from: http://www.sundthus.dk/genvex-ge-premium-1l-hoejre/

Didn't work: 1. Complicated heating controls, after many months of playing with weather compensation, controlling the house temperature using the floor slab temperature and assuming that the logical link between floor temperature and house temperature would work well at controlling the latter using the former, I realised that, as the heating system only provides a small part of the total house heating, it would never work, so I gave up and installed a very simple room thermostat, which works very well. Should have done this in the first place. 2. Water filled thermal store. No matter how much extra insulation I added around it, the heat losses from it were still very high, over 2 kWh per day (as supplied, with a double layer of insulation, the losses were over 3 kWh/day). This cause the services room to get up to around 40 deg C in summer, damaged the oak door between it and the bedroom and caused the adjacent bedroom to badly over heat. Swapping the thermal store for a Sunamp PV, with it's massively lower heat losses, completely fixed the problem, and freed up lots of room in the services area, too. 3. Complicated ozone injection and flow rate control system on the borehole feed. It worked, but was far too complex and has now been replaced with a much easier to service, very simple eductor, that is far more effective at adding and mixing ozone to the incoming supply and also easier to service and repair. The brass eductor took two goes to get right, but has no parts to wear out, no flexible seals and should last forever. Did work: 1. Choosing an insulation system with a high decrement delay factor. Not only does it significantly improve the comfort level in the house, by helping to keep the internal temperature steady, but it has the added bonus of being an extremely good acoustic insulating material too, so improves the soundproofing and deadens the internal acoustics a fair bit (handy in a house with a lot of hard surfaces). 2. Opting to have UFH inside the insulated concrete slab. This forms a nice big "storage heater", yet responds pretty quickly when needed. Having a heated (or cooled) power floated slab that was flat and smooth enough to lay flooring to directly saved a lot of hassle and money. 3. Choosing the more expensive Genvex MVHR with the internal air-to-air heat pump. It's not massively effective, but does do a pretty good job at keeping the bedrooms a degree or two cooler than downstairs in very hot weather. It also does a great job of drying out towels or washing left on the drying rack in the utility room. 4. Avoiding the use of highly paid consultants etc whenever possible. I found that, with a bit of effort, I didn't need to use many at all. It seems that when you are self-building a house every Tom, Dick and Harry comes at you with their hand held out for more of your hard-earned cash - you can avoid paying out a lot of this with a bit of determination and time.

Shame the engineering bricks are already on site or Id be saying get concrete blocks in,if it absolutely has to be masonry. And as for them speccing Flemish bond.... The strongest bond is header bond ( all bricks paid with header face showing.) Followed by English Bond (alternate courses of headers & stretchers.) Flemish is my favourite aesthetically but it is NOT a bond selected for its strength. If you're now down to a 1 & a half brick wall (as a 3 skin deep wall is referred to-a 9" wall is a one brick wall,4" is half brick etc) then I'm extremely tempted to recommend building two outer skins as a cavity wall with wall ties & back filling the cavity with concrete. The Labour saving on this method would be substantial. Good luck.

Hmmm, very good. I was going to install a bidet but these look better. Being Yorkshire I think I will have to rename it though, how's Shitoff sound ??