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Still going. @Nickfromwales and @PeterW woz ‘ere.

You two deserve a medal.

I wholeheartedly agree, that workmanship is just crap. I was very, very fussy about our skimming. Our old house was taped and filled and it really, really annoyed me. With the evening or early morning sun shining every joint ripple in the ceilings was irritatingly visible, even through the Artex that had been applied to try and hide it. As a consequence, an early decision was to spend the extra and have the plasterers work another week to skim all the walls and ceilings. When our decorator came to look around and quote he commented that there was virtually no painting prep needed, as the plasterers had done a really good job. The interesting thing is that the really good brickie we used recommended the plasterers to render the big retaining wall, they did such a good job of that, that I didn't even bother tendering for plastering the house, I just gave them the job. In turn they recommended the decorator, who also turned out to be an ace floor tiler. There's absolutely no substitute, IMHO, for getting one very good trades person to recommend another. Good people will be very reluctant to recommend someone with lower standards than their own. The sad fact is that you don't often find this out until too late to change things. We were lucky, we only had one really bad (as in bloody dangerous) trades person on site (for one day only) and one mediocre chap that I'd frankly not ever use again. All those I'd recommend are listed on our blog - I've not linked to anyone that I wasn't 100% happy with, which I'm sure has pissed off a couple of people, but that's just tough.

Peter not drinking then?

Hi,I Read a good book - "Wind Energy for the rest of us: A Comprehensive Guide to Wind Power and how to use it" - by Paul GipeBasically the summary is that it's all been tried before, an amazing new urban solutions are unfortunately usually smoke and mirrors. Most are now tied off and non operating. There's a reason the wind industry currently builds wind turbines on 100+ meter towers with 3 very large blades and he explains how this developed very clearly. I would suggest checking out the book and see where the industry has come from before making a purchase decision. If you have enough land a standard domestic wind turbine would be a better bet once you have taken an extended set of measurements of the wind power (6-9 months at the proposed height of the turbine) to ensure you can generate the kWh you purchase! Wind is great and a free resource but taking advantage of it to generate power (vs pumping water/milling) has taken a century of trial and error to get right . There's always a new never heard of idea that's promoted, particularly over the last decade fooling entire Governments, Departments and companies into chasing them down (New Zealand Pension fund lost $50 million investing in the Ogin ducted turbine) and guess what the Ridgeblade system appears to me to be....a ducted turbine! And how does it handle overspeed in a storm? It can't be furled....there goes your roof!I may be wrong but you would want to see actual site installations and independent testing results before considering.....As with all things - it's Buyer Beware.... Now if you could mount your house on a turntable so it always favors the best wind direction....

I am all confused now. Was just catching up and saw the comment about the boys in the shower, so when back a page to remind myself what they were up to and this is what I saw first. And I went to Public School in the 70s, so thought I had seen it all

Joking aside it's great this is getting done.

Pass the mind bleach!

Most turbine manufacturers suggest a mean wind speed of 5m/s as the cutoff point for viability. It's not overly expensive to rig up a data logger- something we looked into quite seriously. A 5kw turbine would have cost about £30k to install, but that was most of our build budget so we decided to do the new house instead.

I thought I would post my own take on a manifold hot water distribution system. Requirements: To provide a central distribution and isolation point for hot (and cold) water distribution. To minimise pipe length to hot taps. To minimise pipe usage and be as cheap as possible. The location proved interesting. There is no central cupboard to locate such a thing without making the hot pipe runs longer. So I put it under the floor. It is above the utility room, so when the ceiling is boarded a small "loft hatch" will be made that can be lifted out to gain access to the manifold. This would not have been acceptable had it been any other room. This is what I came up with: All just standard soldered fittings and ball valves. This feeds the bath and shower in the main bathroom. The basin and shower in the en-suite will be added later when that room is done. The basin in the main bathroom is on the wall backing onto the HW tank so gets a more direct feed straight from there with it's isolation points inside the vanity unit. The compression tee is the "I forgot that" hot water feed to the utility room (which will have it's isolator in the unit under it) and I decided it was a little busy there to solder more joints in situ. The kitchen will also have it's own feed from the HW tank as that will run in the opposite direction to all other HW points. Not as pretty as a bought "proper" manifold, but a damned site cheaper.

I can be there Monday, £110. ?

Another grommet would have cost 2p, ffs.

Your SatNav says 'Find Alternative' Do they find plumbing parts now as well as speed cameras

Don't even speak about CPC..!!! Sent a part by UPS on a paid for Saturday delivery and forgot to say it wouldn’t be delivered... til Tuesday ..!! Which according to the UPS Polish call centre is “Next Working Day”....!! But on the up side, the main display now shows this ...

Hmm, more pit bull than Labrador sweetie

I support everything that the Js say. Our MVHR stays at 30% except for the occasional boost, and doing the airflow calcs this does a complete air change of the house roughly every 4 hrs, so the house smells airy and fresh all of the time. When we do our 3-monthly clean of the MVHR filters, we still get a covering of fine white dust on the outbound filter which I suspect is a result mostly of the rubbing down as we finish off our P&D. What horrifies me is the black particulate matter on the inbound filters. Our house fronts onto the street through our village, but this is quiet except for the ½hr rat-run period morning and evening; and the inlet and outlet are 5m up and ~12m from the road, but we still clearly get diesel particulates (and perhaps wood smoke) being taken out by the MVHR filters. As the slab, our ground floor is slated, but Jan prefers to walk around bare foot in the house because it is a nice steady ~23°C. We haven't put in the upper control on our UFH, so we still do fixed heat chunking over night. The conversation that I've just had with Jan went along the lines: "the average temp has risen by 0.8°C over the last 7 days because the average temp outside is starting to climb at last -- OK, I'll trim the overnight heating from 5½hrs to 4½." Life is tough in a passive house. We used to live in a traditional farmhouse: wavy floors and walls, draughty windows, wood-stoves, classic CH, walk from one room to the next and the temp drops by 5-10°C; within 1hr of the CH going off overnight, ditto. Do I miss it at all: not one jot.

Good point, Nick, but I'd do it the other way around - spec a buffer with a solar/heat pump coil and leave the PHE as is. The big advantage is that you don't need to fill the buffer tank with very expensive antifreeze/inhibitor, only the relatively low volume heat pump and coil circuit. The buffer can then be filled with cheap standard inhibitor.

Get the DHW preheat as an integral coil!!!!! PHE and pump / flow switch = PITA.....losses......complexity......grief.

Looks OK, but there's no need for the magnetic filter, I think. The MIs for our ASHP only specified a much cheaper Y filter, like this: https://www.bes.co.uk/y-in-line-strainer-dzr-22mm-compression-7533

20. Or thereabouts if Im pricing work :))

As in ongoing maintenance, bleeding etc, good point.

Lol, didn't realise there was another two pages to this thread...

Look v similar.

Woops, I meant to say unlikely to leak !!

Oh and I’ll buy beer on the way home since it was wiped out last night

If you've got time to drink and measure each others fart temperatures... Seriously though well done for taking this on. Proper DIY SOS stuff!

We tried that earlier and got an error .....

I'd be worried about his insurance policy - does it cover what he's about to do?

Surely it is classed according to the work he is doing rather than whatever he does in the rest of his time? Otherwise, builders and the like would argue that they can't zero rate because they normally do work rated at 20%.

Looks like one of these projects designed to either get investment money from the gullible, or sell ineffective systems to the gullible. You can't compare wind generator efficiency with PV efficiency in any meaningful way. PV efficiency is a measure of how much energy you can collect from the incident light (real world theoretical maximum about 50%, generally 15-20%), wind generator efficiency is a measure of the amount of energy extracted from the wind passing through the swept area of the collector. Betz's law says the theoretical maximum is about 60%. Real world efficiency of the best turbines about 45%. Of course PV output is perfectly linear, wind output is proportional to the cube of the wind speed; low wind speed no energy, high wind speed turbine destroys itself. As well as not generating much energy, those Windsave house mounted turbines had a big problem with noise transmitted directly to the house structure. I'd expect this design to have similar issues. Paul Gipe has a website with lots of information about wind turbines. http://www.wind-works.org/cms/

The way I've done them in the past (without using explosives - splits them and is fun, but not that effective) is to drill big holes with an auger bit, as deep as you can and pack them with potassium nitrate (salt petre). Cover the stump with plastic sheeting tied down and repeat this process of filling the holes a couple of times over a few weeks, as the potassium nitrate gets absorbed. Then start a small charcoal fire on top, with minimal flames. What you want is barbecue like heat. Over a fairly long period the stump will smoulder away, with most of it's roots, to ash. The process works because the potassium nitrate provides a source of oxygen to sustain the gentle fire inside the stump, with no big blaze, plus the potassium nitrate massively increases the timber decay rate - it will decay timber in weeks, rather than years. If you use potassium nitrate from a farm supplier (it's sold as fertiliser) then grind it down first, as they now sell it in coated granule form to stop people using it as an oxidising agent like this (and for other nefarious purposes). The method is even now mentioned on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_stump

This photo shows the controls that we retained ( that cock plumber fitted ). Polyfiller time...........

Are they the cheapo thermometers @newhome said about getting? Edit: Crossed posts!

This is also the first house I've ever lived in where I don't wake up every morning with a stuffy nose.

Lol .

.....is the right answer. .

I am going in the opposite direction, cheap ebay Pex pipe £45 per 100m, after all it’s buried in concrete and is protected, so is very likely to leak.

I think readers might be confused, naturally the beer is being used to fill the intermediate transfer circuits with alcohol, it will never freeze and if desperate you can get a drink from the drain tap!

Ours is much the same, the bedrooms are typically a degree or two cooler than the living rooms downstairs, plus the fresh air fed into them all the time tends to make the bedroom air quality a great deal better than homes without MVHR. I did some measurements on our old house tht has no MVHR and found that the CO2 level in the early hours of each morning (with just a fanlight ventilation window open in the bedroom) were regularly reaching around 1600ppm, whereas with MVHR it's rare to see the level get above that outside, around 450ppm is typical.

Pipe is pipe - ask him what manifolds he is planning to use as thats the killer question. Most of the newer pipe lays flat anyway -JG is a bit pricey but the off cuts can be used for plumbing afterwards unlike the 16mm standard PEX stuff that needs converters.

@Nickfromwales and @PeterW showered together this morning and it was all lovely

It's in a residential area.....