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You mark on the floor/ceiling where your studs/joists are and only screw on the centreline. Another way is if you've any redundant windows, you can make permanent inspection ports...

Just remember nobody likes a smart arse! ? Seriously though a massive thanks for pointing me at the Fugi kit!

Thanks - very helpful post. One thing to add is that if you are lining up base units with the bi-folds you will need to put end panels to the left and right of the appropriate base unit to ensure the base units stay in alignment with the bi-folds. You can use one end panel, cut it in two and put the halves either side of the appropriate base unit as the base unit will be covered by the worktop.

We have vaulted ceilings and took the ducting up through the stud walls upstairs. We also have 250mm metal web joists and used 125mm ducting rather than a manifold system. The rectangular ducting we used was 204mm x 60mm.

"Des never regretted that £2K on the second hand digger!" ?

There's a lot of confusion in the world about kilowatts and kilowatt hours. Here's an attempt at an explanation. The SI unit of energy is the joule (symbol J). It's quite small. Power is the rate at which energy is generated, moved around or used up. The unit is the watt (symbol W). One watt is one joule per second (1 W = 1 J/s). Because the joule is quite small the watt is also not large. It's typically used for relatively low-power devices like lights. The watt is a rate in much the same way that the knot is a rate (1 knot = 1 nautical mile/hour). Talking about watts/hour is about as likely to be wrong as talking about knots/hour (i.e., they're not normally used but could be meaningful in a few odd cases: watts/hour for the output of a PV factory, knots/hour for the acceleration of a supertanker, perhaps). For things like heating the kilowatt (kW) is typically used. 1 kW = 1000 W = 1000 J/s. IMHO, there'd be less confusion if we measured quantities of energy in joules and its multiples. E.g., it'd be better if electricity bills were in MJ (megajoules). But we don't. Instead it's common to use the watt-hour (Wh) and its multiples. One watt-hour is the amount of energy transformed by a power of one watt for one hour. 1 W is 1 J/s and one hour is 3600 seconds so 1 Wh = 1 J/s × 3600 s = 3600 J as the seconds cancel. One kilowatt hour (1 kWh) is one kilowatt for one hour, or 1 watt for 1000 hours or whatever combination multiples to the same amount. 1 kWh = 1000 J/s × 3600 s = 3'600'000 J = 3.6 MJ.

I like the idea of a hidden door but like you it’s not to my taste...... but admittedly I did build my own hidden door very like this........ it’s in my shed and I use it to store long stuff under the eves.

On a Wren ( aka wretched ) kitchen, I chopped the base décor ends, as you say to get the extra free mileage, and added around a half dozen additional décor end details to the customers delight. When I asked Wren to accept returns for the 11 various wall and base décor ends that were surplus AFTER the extra details were executed, they got their "lead designer" ( guy was a total penis ) to ring me to tell me I hadn't followed the plan properly and they should all have been utilised. I had a 'quiet word' with him and they were picked up around a month later, as they don't let you return direct to store. It was during the 'quiet word' that I mentioned that the "lead designer" ( 11 years experience mind you...……….) had purposefully omitted the customer's washing machine from the kitchen plan. When I asked where it was going he said "in the utility room, out of the way"......to which I replied "you've been here 3 times for a survey. WHAT UTILITY ROOM ?!?" as the customer didn't have one . Dickhead. Great trick with expensive kitchens, and can be an easy way to half the cost of décor ends ( which are usually massively overpriced for what they are ). Another trick is to work out if you have any shadow gaps to make up at the ends of the runs and to slice that out of the middle of a décor end panel during the 'halving'. Then spend the saved money on beer. Cheers!

Strictly speaking it is connected to how the load of the house is distributed if it's onto timber than it would be closed panel timber frame if not then probably SIPs. But I don't believe there is much in the way of difference.

Most definatly nope!

I’ll leave that for some of the technically minded guys but I certainly wouldn’t have paid their prices, mine were all Brett Martin which seems to be a good make

Nope.

Buy it. It's a doddle trust me. Don't ask me how it works. Somehow it magically removes the excess too. I need to heed @scottishjohn's advice though of less is more. I had to keep stopping and wiping the excess off of my tool so it pays to have plenty of bog roll handy and an open bin bag.

There are a couple things to sort out, but I think it might be feasible, at least in part. First thing would be whether or not the duct runs would adversely affect the structural integrity. That really depends on the slab design, and ours at 100mm thick would be a non-starter, as the smallest ducting is 51mm deep I think. A 200mm deep slab might take it OK, but I think an SE would need to say for sure, as you don't want the slab to crack along the lines of the duct runs. Second issue concerns the heating impact on the MVHR ducts from the floor. Fresh air feed ducts running in a warmed floor would be fine, it would just add a bit of heat to the air coming in. Extract ducts would pose a problem, though, as you don't want them to be warmed up, as that would significantly reduce the MVHR efficiency. Not sure how to address that, really, as I doubt that insulating the ducts within the slab would be very effective. I've assumed that the ducts all run through the concrete, as you wouldn't really want them down inside the insulation layer.

All our cables and pipes are just clipped to the side of studs or the sides of the 50 x 50 counter battens on the external wall inner faces. As an added precaution I did run aluminium foil tape on the studs/battens where the cables/pipes are clipped, in the hope that it will make them easy to detect with a cable finder (not sure whether it does or not, though). I also took loads of photos of every location where there are pipes and cables running down walls, so that I have a reference as to which side of the studs/battens they are clipped to. I've also got a load of small, powerful, neodymium magnets, plus a few fixed to the end of pencils, that are very handy for finding the buried plasterboard screws. As the plasterboard screws are pretty much in the centre of the studs/battens, I can be pretty sure that it's safe to put any fastening inline with them. I still isolate the power to the relevant circuit before screwing anything in to a stud/batten that's got cables running down the side though, as I got caught out when drilling a hole for a wall light years ago. I discovered that drilling through a cable makes a hell of a bang and totally buggers up the end of a masonry drill.

Referring to SPONS and local price experience ( NW UK) 10 - nearly 11. meters of 10mm steel, 203mm wide = £300 delivered Site welder £300 - check the quality of the work. Material handler (worst case ) £100 @jamiehamy : bang on - on as usual.

I spotted this inside a local cafe this week. Liquorice Allsort chic is not quite my taste, but the door is not as obvious as could be the case. It is an a sample of how to incorporate an element into a stronger pattern than the outline as a means to de-emphasise it. Here it could have been further concealed by choosing a different handle, or concealed hinges. It could also have been made full height.

We're doing similar with 30mm strips of birch ply, full height over our flush door openings. Router out a handhold along one edge of a strip, so no visible handles and roller catches. Hopefully it will look the dogs - took a lot of head scratching between the architect, joiner and ourselves before we worked out the detail.

We have floor outlets in the bedrooms for our MVHR system. They seem to work fine

I agree however adding 325mm to a 203mm means it’s got a 162mm or 81mm each side overhang. If it is a cavity wall, then that means 80% of the load will be on the other edge of the flange which is well past the advised loading on a steel.

To weld two flanges? Tell him to 'f*** off and stop taking the utter pi55' . In those exact words. I would suggest £700 on a really bad day. Go on metals4u for an idea of the price of steel. I'm on my break and phone but can see 6m of black mild steel flat at 300x6mm is £320 to Joe Bloggs.so your raw material is going to be tops £500 to anyone in the trade, plus a welder for a couple of hours. It's not even a complex job, it's welding a plate on to steel. @MarkyPis right, get local quotes. But I'd be wary of a builder that tries to charge that amount. Watch em like a hawk and sense check back here if need be.

Im the exact same. Fire it up and let it heat the house for 2-3 days depending on how cold it is outside. A lazy Sunday with the stove flickering away is hard to beat.

We have vaulted ceilings and I didn't bother to try and get the MVHR ducting up them at all. We have low walls either side of the upstairs rooms and I just ran the ducting up from the floor to wall mounted terminals in those low walls. This works fine, with the terminals around 4ft off the floor. In the bathrooms I fitted a small false ceiling in the highest corner and ran the MVHR extract ducting along that.

That's what I thought and why I wanted to check things out.

https://www.wundatrade.co.uk/product-category/home/joist/spreader-plates/ Might work out a little cheaper

To not allow the OP to fear these things, its best to admit that you turned the stored temp down too low, and that is why you ran out If you ran your setup at a higher set temp I doubt if you'd have ever had a problem as your cylinder is enough for a couple plus 2.4 children with ease, ( when fortified with an immersion to boost the stored temp as is supposed to be for 'normal use' ). This cascade setup is exactly what I would do if I had 'tinkering time' TBH, and should work really well with ST. As said you need a separate tank to raise to the lower stored temp to combat the main cylinder from not firing useful heat into it when the temp probes say the main cylinder is sitting out of the beneficial range, typically that which the ST is often producing in our less than sun-blessed country. I proposed a 2-stage setup like this for a client who wanted to go off-grid, triple cascade with a pair of TS's as sub low grade + low grade storage so nothing went to waste. These would have been boxed in and flooded with Vermiculite / other suitable full-fill insulation to retain whatever was produced. Problem is, that lot would need an outhouse / boiler room all of its own, around half the size of a domestic single car garage, so is just totally impractical in most instances. Low grade heat is of value, but you need to store shitloads of it to have any useful energy capacity, hence the mention of the 15,000 litres stored in a gable. Anything smaller would have been quite inconsequential. That said, I would likely come to my senses and fit as much PV as I could, dumping any excess into thermal storage, ( probably Sunamp as its simply the most efficient at retaining whatever you produce ), and accept that in the summer I'll need to buy near to zero electricity ( I'd 100% fit AC batteries ) and what I saved in the summer would offset ( not eradicate ) my winter energy costs. Electricity is just a WAY more universal an energy to harvest and utilise, but this equation is hugely affected by, and the decision dependant on, a lot of factors; fabric choices, quality of glazing, airtightness with heat recovery, temperature ( and type ) of the space heating emitters, total annual energy requirements and on what do the divisible %'s go towards, and so on....and on....and on. Regularly residing over 45oC will stave off most concerns, being boosted daily by PV almost wipes that out, other than winter times of course. Thermal stores are a little mis-understood and are quite universal in their chosen applications; A TS can be just like a buffer tank, and not do DHW at all, all the way through to multiple inputs / outputs and a DHW coil ( internal coil, or external pumped plate heat exchanger ) and can be heated by electricity via immersions, by gas / oil / HP via a dedicated, hydraulic input coil. The water inside a TS is primary grade water, the same as the water in your radiators, whereas the water inside an UVC is clean fresh potable ( drinking quality ) water, the water that actually comes out fo the hot outlets. DHW, therefore, in a TS is produced instantaneously, so look at a TS like a giant wet combi boiler, with heated water doing the job of the gas burner in providing the heat energy required for DHW production ). TS's can be a static body of water, simply heated by a coil or immersion, or can be constantly circulating through the boiler and the central heating emitters as one huge unified body of water. In other mixed water solutions the heating circuit(s) could all be taken separately from internal coil(s) eg to keep glycol in an ASHP / GSHP install to a minimum volume by hydraulically separating the inputs and outputs, plus the heat inputs can also be introduced via a dedicated coil / coils say to separate ST from a gravity boiler system and so on. When you start mixing heat sources and outputs things get quite flavourful with regards to controls, isolation and general associated complexity, so choose well ( particularly if you are going to ask a 'plumber' to come up with a way to get this to all harmonise.

As I've also got to insulate the floor void, so I was wondering if I could simply use this grooved, between the joists, 50mm thick EPS insulation, from Pro-warm. At around £9.50 per board, it would save me spending £4.50 each on spreader plates?

@vivienz Just a couple of things for you to check: the sewage treatment plant needs to be located at least 7m from the house but, in my view, the further the better if you have enough land as they can be a little noisy and the large lids are not usually pretty to look at. You need a small inspection chamber on the outflow pipe from the sewage treatment plant (unless your model of plant is one of those with the inspecttion point built in)

typical build up would be hardcore, 25mm sand blinding layer (to protect DPM from being punctured when concrete is poured), DPM/Radon barrier, concrete slab, insulation, polythene separating layer (500 gauge poly), UFH pipe worked clipped, screed. the polythene separating layer over the insulation isn't really as a DPM, it typically serves to protect the insulation from contact with the wet screed. I believe this is because the foil facing of PIR reacts with wet cement. It is also, where a liquid pumped screed is used, to create a bath to hold the screed and stop it running down the sides or between the insulation sheets before it sets. Some have used a further DPM over the slab where there is concern it hasn't dried fully.

What do you intend to do with the annex afterwards? If it’s for someone to live in permanently you will need to fit it out better than if it’s for occasional use or whatever. Something cheap and free standing, even second hand may suffice as a kitchen if you are only living there whilst you are renovating the main house. You can then replace that later when finances allow. You’ll want to save your cash for work on the main house surely unless the annex is intended to be a source of income to help fund the renovations.

I think the trouble is that you are amortising various close to fixed costs across a very small building. Bringing in the services will cost the same whether it is 50 or 100square metres. A consumer unit and boiler will cost the same. A kitchen and bathroom may be slightly smaller but will cost the same. These will really boost the cost per sq metre. One thing to consider is do you need gas in the annex, work with gas piping, boilers etc is all regulated and extremely expensive. Why not just put in electric radiators and an electric water heater. I would guess that this will save £3000ish. There are too many sockets and LED lights, each will cost around £60. 50sq metres is basically a 1 bedroom apartment and does not need so many fittings. Can you make it more open plan, this will save on stud work, woodwork fittings etc.

Yeah but it's probably as good or better than watching porn where @Onoff is concerned so it was bound to take all night

Its one of those questions - have they not taken these designs into production as the costs would outweigh the benefits...?

No, not at all. Both can have different coil arrangements depending on the application. A thermal store holds a body of inhibited water which is heated to a fairly high temperature. It then "instantly" heats cold potable water coming in to an internal or external heat exchanger at mains pressure. The body of water inside the thermal store doesn't move or flow anywhere, it just sits there and stores heat. A UVC is a mains water pressure fed cylinder where the water in the cylinder is the hot water source.

Lovely looking place that is...

Read my response carefully then comment please. To get anything like a decent capacity - such as 200 litres of usable hot water - you need to use either a UVC of 300 litres at 55c, or a thermal store of around 425 litres due to how they heat the water. That’s a big ass TS to get not a lot of DHW capacity. I expect the Ecodan you’re using is one of the PUTZ units that has its own controller. If you read the technical manual ( I have) and also look at the control algorithms (I have) and then look at the on off cycle of the compressor vs auxiliary heater (I’ve done that too..) you’ll find that it uses a secondary aux heater to get to 55c so your CoP is around 2.1 at best when it’s 17c outside. (Somewhere around page 32 of the manual). At 7c outdoors it’s 1.6, -5c it’s around 1.2. For reference, that’s a pretty crap score and makes your ASHP solution for hot water roughly 30% more expensive than mains gas ... but what do I know ..?? ASHP is not designed to heat to those temperatures unless it has either an auxiliary heater - ie an immersion element - or uses a type of compressor that can create high output temperatures which is at the direct cost of flow volumes. Lower flow volume = longer recovery time. So yes, Mitsubishi do know what they are doing, but I suggest you read the manuals and understand how they actually work before commenting please.

Keep up, it's DONE!

Not sure if that reply was to me or not, but here goes anyway. Not sure whether you mean power or energy, but I'll answer for both. In very cold weather (-10°C outside), with no incidental heat gain, the house needs a heat input power of about 1.6 kW to maintain 21°C room temperature. That equates to about 38.4 kWh of heat energy over 24 hours. However, our heating does not use PV generation, as in winter it's both low and unreliable (same goes for solar thermal), so we use off-peak E7 to run an ASHP at a COP of around 3.5, so the energy usage for heating in very cold weather is about 11 kWh per day. We've never had temperatures that low here though, the lowest we've seen is about -5°C, and then only for around half a day at most, so in reality that 11 kWh/day figure is more than double our normal cold weather usage. We don't ever need to heat the floor as high as 24°C, as that would give us a heat output of about 2.4 kW, far more than we ever need in the coldest weather. The highest temperature we ever need to heat the floor to is about 23°C.

Yes, I'm more creaky now than I was nine years ago .

I've experience of reduced partial pressure of oxygen; had to endure a hyperbaric chamber session every two years for around 20 years. Up to about 10,000 to 12,000ft (reduction in available oxygen from about 21% to around 12% to 13%) there are no perceptible physiological symptoms for the vast majority of people. Above about 12,000ft symptoms of hypoxia start to become apparent, but hypoxia is insidious, in that you are often completely unaware that you are becoming hypoxic. The idea of making aircrew do a chamber run every two years was precisely because the symptoms of hypoxia are so difficult to spot. By sticking you in a chamber with a doctor, then taking you up to 25,000ft, you get a chance (a slim one, in my experience) of being able to detect your own set of symptoms that might, possibly, allow you to recognise that you are hypoxic. I should add that at 25,000ft with no oxygen most people only remain conscious for five minutes or so, so it was a slightly extreme way of teaching a vital safety lesson. To highlight just how insidious hypoxia can be, this is a tale of the only time in a few decades of flying that I've ever been hypoxic. Two of us were flying from West Freugh up to Inverness. I was in the right hand seat, pilot flying was in the left seat. I did all the flip card checks, and our taxy checks were interrupted several times by a minor airfield emergency (nothing to do with us, but there was a lot of radio chatter). We lined up, took off, completed the post-take off checks and set the autopilot to climb on a set heading. We'd been cleared to FL22 (~22,000ft). About 3 or 4 minutes into the climb I noticed my ears pop more abruptly than usual and made a remark to my colleague, who confirmed his had as well. We just assumed that the cockpit pressurisation was being a bit clunky (not that unusual). We sat back for another few minutes, when I spotted the altimeter coming up to our assigned cruise height and mentioned it to my colleague. He didn't reply, so I gave him a nudge, and found he was asleep. He didn't wake up, so I wound the height bug down to level us out, but found that I was really struggling to do something this simple. Not being able to wake my colleague up didn't bother me at all. I eventually noticed that my vision was fading to black and white, remembered having experienced this in the chamber and thought to look down between the seats at the cabin altitude gauge. It was showing 22,000ft, when it should have been around 8,000ft. There was no way I could fly the aeroplane, but I did manage to wind the height bug right down to a few thousand feet, which caused the autopilot to put the aircraft into a steady descent. I'm not sure if I remained conscious or not, but remember making a pan call much later, telling Scottish Mil that we were doing an emergency descent, so they could clear any conflicting traffic out of the way. My colleague came to just as I was making the radio call, and was as confused as hell. We sorted things out, cancelled the sortie to Inverness and headed back to West Freugh. We both regained full consciousness pretty quickly and spotted the cause of our problem before we landed. During the interrupted taxy checks we'd both somehow missed the pressurisation dump valve check and cross-check, and left it wide open. There was no way the cockpit pressurisation could have worked, as with the valve open at the rear of the aircraft pressurisation air would have been blowing out as fast as the engines could pump it in. In the inevitable stack of paperwork we had to complete after we'd landed on, we both noted that neither of us had thought to don our emergency oxygen masks, despite them being stowed at the side of our seats. Looking back, we were both seriously compromised by hypoxia, and it was pure luck that we came out of it OK. My colleague was about 10 years older than me, with over 30 years flying experience in fast jets, yet this didn't help him spot that he was losing consciousness. It was pure luck that I spotted the loss of colour vision. If I hadn't been concentrating really hard on the flight director display I might well have never noticed that I was on the verge of passing out. We could very easily have been yet another "pilotless aircraft flying on until the fuel runs out" accidents. I think I worked out afterwards that we'd have been over half way to Greenland before we'd have crashed into the sea. Whether we'd still have been alive when that happened is anyone's guess; I think we probably could have been.

You should have a load of AVI files and you can edit them, join them together, add titles and music in Movie Maker or any AVI editing software. I found it really simple as I got my son to do it for me.

The 19mm bore hose that fits the Secoh JDK 60 we have will easily run for 20m with virtually no flow reduction at all, as it's way oversized for the pump flow rate. I strongly suspect that this is to do with Secoh having standardised their smaller pump housings, as the pump with double the output of ours still uses a 19mm outlet. If anyone is concerned about flow reduction/head loss over a long run of pipe I can quickly and easily do the calculations, but 90% of the time all they will show is a very, very tiny loss that's not worth worrying about. I did use reinforced spiral wound 19mm bore hose, inside a duct, down to the treatment plant, just to make sure that it didn't get squeezed anywhere. This then gets reduced down in diameter inside the unit anyway, using the pipe fittings that were originally supplied to adapt the 19mm outlet from the pump when it was living inside the top of the unit. That stone housing has, as mentioned earlier, a gauze filtered air inlet, arranged to minimise noise transmission and keep bugs out. The lid is also sealed with a neoprene tape gasket. Another thing I added was a timer to cycle the pump on and off (and disable the under-pressure alarm when off) to reduce the running cost. Our unit (like a lot of units, I suspect) massively over-aerates the effluent. A quick calculation showed that even with a maximum BOD effluent input, at maximum daily flow rate, it was still providing around three times more dissolved oxygen than needed. It's a pity that cheap, rugged and reliable dissolved oxygen sensors aren't available, as it would be nice to be able to run closed-loop control to ensure that the BOD of the discharge was always within limits, yet without having to waste a lot of energy pumping air through the unit that simply isn't needed, accepting that regular high volume air pulsing is required to ensure good circulation of semi-solids in the main treatment section of the unit.

Just sticking the compressor on a pad of firm neoprene foam makes a big difference to the noise. Making any enclosure from something like block or brick also makes a big difference. The lid of mine is made from two layers of 18mm ply, glued either side of a layer of 6mm neoprene foam, with the underside lined with acoustic foam. The lid is hinged at the rear and has a strip of 6mm neoprene foam all around the edge as a seal. The only slight source of noise I had initially from the box was from the air inlet hole, which I had made from a bit of 40mm waste pipe sealed into the enclosure with sealant and fitted with a rod end type screw cap, with the lid bored out and a mesh fly filter fitted. Noise from that was fixed by fitting an elbow inside the box and short length of 40mm pipe running inside, perpendicular to the pump.

@joe90 Like you, our build is in a very quiet spot. Our own sewage treatment plant is a Bio Pure 1 and I've located the Secoh JDK-S-60 air pump in a separate brick built housing away from the actual treatment plant and there's absolutely no noise from the pump however we still get the noise of the bubbling air/water from the plant.

already suggested that -

sounds not bad for them £1000 for a couple hours of welding .LOL. but thats maybe the going rate for on site welding there

Thanks, Christine. I'm pretty sure that, sadly, I'm being tucked up here. It's very disappointing as the groundwork team have been very good up until now but he seems to have succumbed to temptation on trying to price an all-in job at way over what's reasonable.

This could be a silly observation, so bear with me if it had a round waste would it not have a fall to a centre point, so if you change to a linear waste will the pre formed falls not line up very well.