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There are official guides as to how to do this. They vary a bit, but in essence follow much the same procedure as above: NHBC MVHR Commissioning.pdf Passivhaus MVHR Commissioning Requirements V121.pdf domestic_ventilation_compliance_guide_2010_edition.pdf Buildhub has two ventilation system air flow meters in the tool loan pool, which members can borrow to undertake testing if they wish.

Sharpie and a bit of A4 paper is all you need! ?

Thats top end ..!! Anything over £300 for kitchen brassware is a joke as there is about £40 of material in a tap. At £250 you’re paying for a name, you can pick up nice Grohe kitchen taps from £90 upward if you shop around.

And so almost another month has gone by but progress is still being made on the build and, just as importantly, hubby and I got away for a week's holiday in northern France just as the warm weather hit. After our abject failure at R&R over Christmas, it was wonderful to have a really relaxing break without illness or stress and come back refreshed for the final push on the build, which is just as well as there's a busy time to be had over the coming weeks. In the last blog entry, I detailed some of the painting and kitchen fitting that had been going on and there's been more of this recently. I've been getting the colour coats onto the walls upstairs but haven't managed to complete a room yet apart from the kitchen, but I'm generally pleased with the neutral colour choice. I say generally, though, because in the lounge, the different light in there makes the wall colour bring out the warm tones of the internal window frame finish which makes them look a slightly odd peach colour. It's not awful and I'm not going to change it now, but if we ever redecorate (hah!) it will be something I check before committing. For the more vertiginously challenged amongst you, you may wish to look away now, as here's a view from the top of my internal scaffold tower when I was putting the colour coat on up to the vaulted ceiling above the gable window in the guest bedroom. And here are the colour choices. The purple will be on one wall only. It looks a bit garish at the moment but once the room has its furniture and soft furnishings in, it should tone well and add a bit of life to the room. Cutting in and painting up to the high vault was a bit of a challenge, but I got there. I really didn't want to get any colour spatter onto the white ceiling so opted to use paint pads rather than a roller and I was pleased with the outcome. They give a good finish over the sprayed mist coat and are far less physically demanding than a roller. I was painting upstairs as the flooring guys were in downstairs putting in the karndean (same choice as upstairs) and it kept me productive but out of the way. Given all the work that went into making the dropped section of the ceiling in the lounge area, I wanted the floor to echo this but not in too obvious a fashion and so the team took a laser reference from the inner square of the lounge feature and reversed the direction of the planks, using a feature strip to create a subtle border. First, though, they had to screed the floor with a latex self levelling compound. In preparation for this, I needed to turn off the UFH a few days before they arrived to make sure the screed didn't go off too quickly due to the heat of the slab. I turned it off on a Friday afternoon and they started work on the following Tuesday and it was just about perfect. Once the screed was down, the floor was scraped to make sure it was completely level and then primed. After the priming, the planks were put down. Here is the snug - I went in the weekend before the flooring guys arrived to get the mist coats and ceiling painted as it's far easier to do when you only have to mask the windows and not worry about any other area. Here's the long view of the kitchen/lounge area: And here's a close up of the feature border underneath the ceiling feature: Moving on from the flooring and painting, my joiner, Harry has been busy at work on the kitchen. In particular, he was working on the large walnut work surface for the island. I decided months ago that I wanted solid walnut for the island but then, as I'm sure happens to many, I had a last minute dither and started looking at other materials instead. In the end, I decided that granite or other stones really didn't give the colour tones that I wanted and laminates weren't wide enough. I sourced the walnut from Worktop Express as they were very competitively priced for what I wanted, and delivery was quick. I looked at using their online template service, but it was just too tricky to get the different profiles right and, in the end, decided to get Harry to make up the island top on site. It was absolutely the right choice as he's done a lovely job on it. Here's a photo of the finished top with the induction hob surface mounted into it. A word on the hob. You can recess the work surface so that the hob is flush, but I preferred it to be surface mounted, sitting proud of the walnut, purely from a cleaning point of view and so I don't have to spend ages digging out crumbs and bits of food debris from around a flush recess. These are the two worktops as they arrived from the supplier, waiting to be joined together. Harry routed along their length, used a biscuit join and then glued and clamped. The worktops being clamped. They look and, indeed, are lighter in shade than the first photo as they come treated with one coat of Danish oil. Harry put a further two coats on once he had sanded the finished surface. The area where there appears to be a base unit missing and where the surface projects beyond is intended as a breakfast bar area. There will be a supporting leg on the near right hand corner. Because the kitchen and island are large, I didn't want anything to be too matchy-matchy and wanted to break up any monotonous areas. Also, I didn't fancy walnut as the worksurface leading off the sink as I think that's asking for trouble in the long run. So, I went hunting through laminate choices. Way back when I was first considering the kitchen, I had been thinking about using large format tiles with a metallic type finish as the splashback, but it was proving to be a gruelling and not very fruitful search. When I eventually revisited this part of the kitchen a couple of months ago, I came across some laminates with exactly that type of finish, nice long runs (I need a 4m run for the back work surface) and with matching splashbacks. I also wanted to line the recessed area under the island with the same material to make it more durable and give a contrast in materials and textures. I sourced the laminates from a firm called Rearo and dealt with their Newport branch. They were lovely to deal with and very helpful. Here's the splashback applied to the breakfast bar recess. Harry beefed it up and packed it out with some ply and then put the laminate edging onto the ends to give a substantial look. Whilst we were away on holiday, my splendid general builder and neighbour, Drew, got on with putting the rainwater goods up. I'd ordered in soffits and fascias from Fascia.com as they had the width I needed in anthracite grey to match the slates and windows, as well as vented soffits, which save a lot of bother and look much neater. The guttering is all deepflow and was mounted onto black fascia board. I looked at other colours of guttering, but none of them were quite right and black guttering is so ubiquitous that the eye kind of slides past it. Having it mounted on the fascia board also reduces the visual impact of the brackets that can look a bit clunky. Whilst he was up there, Drew also mounted our swift boxes and bat boxes. We were required as part of our bat licence conditions to put a bat box somewhere on site, but this is something that we had planned to do all along. Also, there has been a dramatic loss of habitat for swifts that migrate to the UK to breed in the summer and we wanted to make provision for these too, in the hope that we're lucky enough to attract them to our site. These fabulous birds migrate 6,000 miles to reach their summer breeding grounds and are the fastest birds in level flight. Once they have fledged, the only time they ever land again is to sleep and recover from their migration flight and to feed their young. They are the most fabulous birds and I would urge anyone to make provision for them wherever possible. If anyone wants details of where to buy some brilliant swift boxes, PM me and I'll send you the details. Here are the boxes, all sited on the western corner of the north facing wall. Finally, today marked a milestone in the house progress - the scaffolding is coming down. Our foul and surface water drainage works start on Wednesday and the site needs to be clear to allow access for that. Any remaining work at height can be done from ladders apart from the cladding, but I will hire a separate mobile tower of some sort for that work once I've had a chance to identify what will be most suitable. The stone cladding arrived a couple of weeks ago, ready to go up once the drainage work is done, more details of which will follow in the next post. Here's the south face gradually being revealed. The crates to the right of the picture are the stone cladding. Here's the east face slowly coming into view. And another view of the same. Work planned for this week is more plastering, more painting (if I get the chance as I'm the plasterer's labourer this week), groundworks and starting to move some young trees to the site that we've been nursing in pots at home for 12 months. Next week, the en-suite bathroom will be started, the kitchen finished and the utility room kitted out. Plenty to do yet. TTFN.

Bear in mind that if MBC does it and something goes wrong, they're responsible for putting it right. If someone else does the UFH in MBC's slab and something goes wrong, you potentially have a fight over who caused the problem. I'd personally consider that worth at least some sort of a premium.

Forget burning the trees you might be glad if the shading in summer with your glazing

I'd have done this grey but was overruled: Ended up at an 8mm bead. The far side was proud of the floor by about 4mm so "out" was the pedestal casting. The gap is packed with CT1 Fugi'd flush then gone over with Forever White. Cheated with the black waste by covering with some foil tape until I cut a bit of upvc or something:

My raft was DIY so was just material cost so hard to say. A quick calc you would need approx 600m of pipe approx £400 maybe less if you shop around.

Our slab was ~75m². We had ~300m of UFH pipe. The cost of the pipe would have been about £200, plus maybe £20 worth of cable ties, plus two guys working for around half a day. At a rough guess, I'd say that came to around £400 to £450 for 75m² back in 2013. Not sure how the length of pipe needed or the time taken scales up for a bigger slab and perhaps more complex floor layout (a fair bit of time was spent marking all the wall, toilet, stairs and kitchen unit positions on to the EPS). Prices may well have changed in the intervening years too. Do you know how much pipe there is in the slab? Might be able to scale up the cost by just scaling up the pipe length and the likely layout complexity increase, as both will also increase the time taken.

Yes I think possibly they are all guilty. I never heard anything from Scotframe despite pestering. Weird considering the effort they put in to getting new business. Their rep in Cumbernauld contacted us in February for our brief and that was that!. Nothing. Commonplace response for norfolk trades but disheartening to think it is more widespread. I hope hope hope we have made the right choice. ?

& MBC have quoted me £1,952 for UFH piping (125 m² , no manifold), which does not strike me as cheap. Should I challenge such a quote? Hmm.

The air flow rates can't be measured by the MVHR, they need to be measured using an air flow meter at every room terminal. Sadly, I suspect that many, many MVHR systems may be installed and "commissioned" without bothering to set them up properly, let's hope yours is an exception, despite the room terminal readings not having been recorded. The process is to start by setting the MVHR to the background ventilation rate (the rate it runs at most of the time) and then go around every terminal using an air flow meter to measure the flow rate either in to, or out of, the terminal, and write the reading down. Here's a photo of me measuring one of our terminals that shows how it may be done (there are different types of air flow meter): Once a set of baseline readings for every terminal have been done, the first thing is to add up the rates from all the supply terminals, then add up all the rates from the extract terminals. The total air flow for all the supply terminals must equal (more or less) the total airflow from all of the extract terminals, this ensures that the system is balanced and operating at best efficiency. If the system isn't balanced then the terminals need to be carefully adjusted to get the system in balance, or restrictor rings have to be fitted if the system uses that type of flow balancing. Once balanced, the air flows need to all be measured again and the total background ventilation rate must equal or exceed the rate given in Part F, calculated from the house area. If all's well so far, the the next stage is to increase the MVHR fan speed to boost and check the extract flow rates to ensure that the minimum room extract rates for the kitchen, bathrooms, WCs, utility room etc can be met. Those rates are in table 5.2 in Part F IIRC. The chances are that the whole house background ventilation rate may already exceed the required extract rates, in which case there's no need to do this second set of tests. When everything is completed you should have a balanced system with the measured air flow rates at every terminal listed on the commissioning report. Adjusting the whole house ventilation rate up or, most probably, down, after commissioning shouldn't upset the balance, so you can adjust things for the best comfort level without needing to go around re-doing all these measurements. The measurement process is a bit tedious and time consuming, it took me the best part of a whole day to get our system balanced and set up properly.

@DreadnaughtGo and talk to some really good kitchen designers, go with your plans once approved, its never too early to start....you don't have to buy.....take advantage of their expertise in their field. You may be surprised at how they look at your wish list and how to achieve it.

Notwithstanding the position with the regs if you are intending adding the 'kitchen' to a bedroom it may be much nicer to provide better homely facilities (sofa, desk etc) if there is room and leave the kitchen facilities where they are. You could still have a kettle, small fridge and possibly a microwave but full cooker and a sink is likely to change the use I imagine. The kitchen isn't a room used all the time so I doubt that most people who are 'living in' would mind sharing a kitchen. Given a choice I would choose a private bathroom over a kitchen every time.

Doesn’t answer directly but might help... ” If a bathroom or kitchen is to be provided in a room where there wasn't one before, building regulations approval is likely to be required to ensure that the room will have adequate ventilation and drainage, and meet requirements in respect of structural stability, electrical and fire safety.” from https://www.planningportal.co.uk/info/200130/common_projects/34/kitchens_and_bathrooms/3 if you avoid a sink (drainage) and a cooker (gas/electrical) you might be fine. All that said I employ home personal assistants and they have a sleepover room with desk TV bed etc but use the main kitchen. im fact cooking is one activity that can be inclusive for the carer and looked after person to participate in Also I encourage my guys to cook proper food from fresh in bulk and batch freeze. Dont know the set up with your dad but my folks have plenty spare time to plan, ship, cook etc

And forget this one. Just forget it as you will never use it. Even the smallest efficient wood stove will generate at least two kilowatts. Do the math, let's say 3 kilowatts; putting this into a single room in a passive class house will get the room temperature up to about 40 degrees within a few hours. I remember one guy who had a passive house with a wood stove telling us that the only time that he used it was one Christmas when the family was round; after 2 hours they had to evacuate the living room and open all the doors to let the house cool down. My wife @JanetE originally wanted a woodstove in our house, but she soon saw the sense in my argument that we would never dream of lighting a stove in the middle of the summer, but a passive house internally has that summery feel every month of the year, so we would never use it. We have never regretted this. So UFH scores about 1 or 2 on the 1:10 complexity scale, trying to implement usable wood stove maybe 8 - 9, ditto large acres of glass like you propose. As @jack says, the main issue in a passivhaus isn't working out how to add the extra heat when you need it, it's how to dump the excess heat when you don't need it.

@Hecateh, that's a very kind offer! As soon as my layout is finalised (I am still in the middle of planning approval) I will do as you suggest.

@Dreadnaught post the dimensions of your kitchen and I will do a design for you. I suspect others will too. A few questions to help with making sure that it meets your needs. How many people will be using the kitchen? cooking? preparing food - even if just making tea/coffee or toast. Will you eat in the kitchen regularly - just breakfast or casual dining too Do you have/use a lot of appliances - large mixer; dry fryer; halogen hob; coffee maker; bread maker; soup maker etc etc How often is food prepared from scratch? What sort of fridge/freezer do you want. How much fridge freezer space do you need. More fridge (if you cook mostly from scratch) bigger freezer if you either buy ready meals or batch cook and store your own 'ready' meals/soup/ice cream? I or 2 or more ovens - built in at accessible level or floor level. separate grill or built in to over Microwave? Washing machine/Dryer in the kitchen or elsewhere? Dishwasher? built in or free standing? Refuse Do you want built in? For recycling? How many discrete recycling? Hot water tap? Would you like a walk in pantry Lots of tins? Lots of spices used regularly? These are all questions that I can think of off the top of my head. It's a good idea to have the answers even if you go to a designer A bit of 'office' space - for bill paying, list making etc etc. A 'charging' area? There is also the type of kitchen you want (modern; traditional; shaker; solid wood; handles or handleless'; colour or finish; matte or gloss? I'm sure others will know of other things to consider as well.

@A_L, think of the heat equation: the inner skin is above the dew point, the outer skin is often below the due point, so the due point will be somewhere in the wall profile. So what? Our frame has its airtightness membrane on the inside and a breathable membrane on the outside. There is no flow of (moist) air so no moisture condensing out. Any moisture within the profile will slowly evaporate off during the summer. What you don't want to occur is having the dew point or below at any surface where there is air flow, as this will create a condensing surface.

I agree with @TerryE here. Fitting our UFH pipes into the passive slab took less than half a day and cost a few hundred pounds. Even if I'd chosen to not connect them up I wouldn't have begrudged that cost. It was so quick, easy and affordable that it seemed daft not to just include the pipes in the slab. The big bonus for us was that when I found that our house overheats (solar gain though ~ 9.3m² of shaded, south-facing glazing, plus ~3.84m² of unshaded east-facing glazing) it turned out to be pretty easy to just cool the floor slab down by reversing the ASHP. I was very surprised at just how effective floor cooling like this is; it surpassed my expectations and is now an intrinsic part of the house temperature control system.

Of all of the complexities in building our house, this but was one of the most trouble-free, so I can't follow this logic, to be honest. There's about half a dozen blog examples of this done here. Why not pick a few and visit them; talk to the self-builders about what went well and works well and what doesn't. A raft with UFH is a huge storage heater and is simple to heat. Our house is smaller, about 180m², but we currently heat the house with a 3kW immersion coil in a Willis Heater through the UHF loops and this comes on at the moment for about 4 or 5 hours on overnight E7, so there is something way off with your 7kW estimate. If you build the house to spec, then your daily average should peak at maybe a quarter of this.

My house is 289m2, 0.11 raft floor, 0.12 cellulose walls and 0.10 cellulose roof. Airtightness just below 0.6 ACH. We're in the South East. We have a 5kW ASHP and it spends most of its time in winter ticking over very slowly. It has no difficulty at all keeping the house warm and heating our hot water as required. That said, you seem to have an extraordinary amount of glazing for the size of the house. I did a rough calculation and I think we're around 50-55 M2. That's with floor to ceiling windows in several rooms (including a 5 x 2m slider and three 1 x 2m floor to ceiling windows in the kitchen alone) and large windows even on northern elevations for bathrooms. Given this amount of glazing, I'd be more concerned about overheating than how much heat you'll need to stay warm. Also, the larger the house, the greater the importance of airtightness to energy consumption. ICF generally does a good job of this, but it's worth having a clear plan to ensure you maximize airtightness during the build. Oh, and I personally can't stand air heating. It provides a very dry and unpleasant form of heat that I'd personally avoid at any cost.

Have you modelled the passive house with PHPP to get the heating requirement? If so, then I'm surprised that you've ended up with a figure of 7 kW, as that sounds to be more like the sort of figure for a reasonably average house, rather than one built to passive house performance standards. If you haven't yet modelled it with PHPP, but want to do a "quick and dirty" estimate of heat loss, then I wrote a spreadsheet a few years ago that simplifies things a lot. It's nowhere near as refined as PHPP, but is a lot simpler, and people here who have used it have suggested that it gets within around +/- 10% of the real heat loss, which is usually good enough for sizing a heating system: Heat loss calculator - Master.xls

Its fine - plenty will nest there as it’s away from predators such as cats.

If you have a small garden and don't like ivy, honeysuckle is a good alternative. We are also going to grow pyracantha along part of the fence, it is evergreen but spikey and the birds like it for nesting and the berries are a good food source.

Can you plant native hedging around the plot? Once it gets established, it can support lots more wildlife than a few nest boxes. Mature ivy is fabulous, too. A rich late season nectar source, provides berries through the winter and nesting/shelter provision all year round as it's evergreen. It's also beautiful grown up posts and pillars to give an architectural impact to a garden.

For exactly that reason we decided to use a Genvex Combi 185LS in conjunction with electric towel rails in the three bathrooms. When the Genvex is in air heating mode it turns the supply fan speed up to maximum for around twenty seconds and then turns the fan down to around 70%. We can hear the fan on maximum but when it slows down it isn't audible. We have a small house, around 306m3, and the system works well for us. If the house were any larger the warm air supply wouldn't be sufficient in cold weather.

I'd missed that 7kW figure, too. Looks very high to me. Our house has roof and floor U values of fractionally under 0.1 W/m².K, walls at about 0.12 W/m².K and triple glazed windows that are around 0.7 W/m².K. Airtightness is about 0.43 ACH @ 50Pa. The floor area is 130m² and the worst case heating requirement, with no incidental heat gains at all, is only about 1.6 kW. In practice the house never seems to need more than a few hundreds watts of heating, and often needs no heating at all, even in winter.

I am surprised that with U values of 0.1 your heating demannd is as high as 7KW Our U values are only 0.14 any while our house is smaller than yours at 150 square metres, the peak heating demand when it is -10 outside and +20 inside is only a little over 2Kw Even if you doubles the size of our house that would only be 4Kw so with your lower U values I certainly would not expect it to reach 7Kw

It seems to me that flat panels are the “natural” form factor for LEDs as they can emit both their light and heat in all directions easily. Also, they avoid big holes in the ceiling. They seem to still be a bit of a niche product, I'm not sure why.

We have an air-to-air heating/cooling system built in to our MVHR (a Genvex Premium 1L). It has the capacity to heat and cool the house without any problems. Some like the feel of warm air heating, but we don't, so have never used it, instead we use UFH fitted into the ground floor passive slab. It's purely a personal preference thing, though, as at least one other member here heats their passive house using an active MVHR unit (a Genvex, different model to ours, but same working principle) and likes it.

I would also have a look at the Nilan Compact P series https://www.nilan.dk/en-gb/frontpage/solutions/domestic-solutions/compact-solutions/compact-p which was around £6000, depends a bit on the exchange rate.

Apologies @PeterStarck here she is - all yours for 3 minutes and 8 seconds.

I am going to build a sparrow terrace this month and site it under the eaves on the NNE side of the house. A lot of boxes are positioned in the sun which can be a problem for young birds that only receive moisture through the food brought to them.

We need more example of good lighting, as being a bloke I struggle with lighting design!

+1 for DIY kitchens. My joiners started fitting my units last week and are really impressed with the quality. As they were so well priced we could afford to upgrade everything - soft close, custom paint etc. we are also getting our joiner to do custom finishing touches such as end panels, trim etc which should it make it look much more expensive. DIY kitchens sold us some extra paint, custom depth units and have replaced a few slightly scratched doors without a murmur. All in all an excellent experience and we spent just under £7000 including a load of units for built in living room stuff and a big kitchen. Were going back to get some 100mm deep cabinets for the bathrooms and 1m wide multi drawers for the dressing rooms. Also, the fittings box contained a box of yorkshire teabags and a packet of biscuits.

That's in. Just waiting for the CT1 to go off: Then I'll nut the tails and waste up:

Something like mine? Took some working out: Timber frame covered with moisture resistant pkasterboard generally and Aqua Panel in the wet room corner and behind the wc: NB: Aqua Panel is a whole different ball game to mrpb. Pretty much inflexible by comparison and cracks quite easily so get your studs dead flush. Dusty (old circular saw and carbide edged jigsaw blades) to cut and needs special screws. The bottom "shelf" of the Aqua Panel (where the beer is above ) projects over the wall panel that comes up to it. When all the boarding was done I tanked the pocket with the blue stuff, Aqua Seal in this case. This is the 10mm white pvc trim I used for 8mm tiles. I went for the tile flush with the trim so you don't feel the trim edge: Trim on. I stuck mine on with clear CT1. @Nickfromwalesfavours mitre bond but I couldn't get on with it: (I wanted chrome or stainless trim btw but was overruled ) Back tiles on first - sits behind the bottom tile btw: Bottom tile in second, mine slope toward the front by a few degrees. A bit of plastic helps to check the fit and get the tile out again: Then the top: Then the sides last. See the sloping bottom tile? Note the 1mm shims all round. I take no credit for the majority of this. Mainly done with advice from @Nickfromwales. Standing on the shoulders of giants me!

Is this the type of thing you had in mind https://www.iso-chemie.eu/en-GB/sealing-solutions/sealing-products/window-and-facade-sealing-films/iso-connect-hb-band/

I ended up ringing around a couple of places that hire fencing for events. One near me was selling used panel sets (panel, two clamps, one foot) for £15 each. These hire places seem to replace their hire stock fairly regularly, so might be worth asking around.

Part numbers: Rail/handset: http://www.britishbathroomcompany.co.uk/slimline-slide-rail-kit-a3041 This mixer: http://www.britishbathroomcompany.co.uk/reign-triple-shower-valve Rainfall head: It wasn't this HR one but v.similar and at the time a real steal. Nearest I can find (cheap): https://www.bellabathrooms.co.uk/hudson-reed-round-fixed-shower-head-300mm-diameter.html? Then the ceiling drop arm. HR again. Will try and find the part numbers for the arm and rainfall shower head. Edit: Hudson Reed AR15 is my ceiling drop arm.

Option 6 after fixing it, which I will have to add to the Construction Cocktails page. The Forget-me-Shot. From the Simpsons. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Yi7e8mWV0Ec

Option 1.... But they need to be careful as to how they dig out the pipes and ensure that they don’t cause further damage. You then need a repair coupling and it needs to go into a straight section. Then get it pressure tested, wrapped in insulation tape and then carefully back filled ...

I have an Italian kitchen. It is wonderful quality and designed and fitted perfectly. In my last house I had a perfectly acceptable mid range kitchen but because we ran short of money on the build at the time it was a compromise kitchen. I sold the house with the compromise kitchen still in place and almost as good as new. I waited a long time for ‘my’ kitchen and I love every inch of it.

I think you are right @JSHarris - we installed our MVHR last time but paid the supplier to come out and balance it before we used it. They were there an hour or two. They definitely didn’t have meters to check the air flow!

@PeterStarck no housepants due to bug risk ?

I did this in our first house. the shower tray got bigger than the original plans and when I was jig sawing the hole in the floor, it took a few seconds to realise just what the pretty fountain of water was coming from.