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Before this thread goes the way of the previous one,I’m going to make one prediction & leave it at that. Spurs will be out of Europe before the UK is ;))

@zoothorn it may seem pendantic, but there is a very important difference between "common" and "standard". Yes, 100/50/140-150 is common. It is often the most cost effective way to balance the various constraints in the most common conditions. But that does not make it standard. Standard implies it will always be valid, and there are many, many situations in which it is not. This is where it gets particularly dangerous. If you do a neat careful drawing of a common construction detail, it is very easy for the builder to assume someone has checked it is valid for your situation. And because it is common, they won't question it. Which then leaves you high and dry if in fact you needed something less common to suit the constraints on your build. In my experience, in problems often boil down to one of two causes: * A client who was vague when they should have been specific. e.g. "make it roughly 4 feet wide". Builder uses a full sheet as that's easiest for him and the client doesn't seem to mind. Later turns out it needed to be exactly 1.1 metres, and it's too big. But the builder made what he was asked to make. * A client who was specific when they should have been vague. E.g. "make it 140mm thick". The number is plausible, and builder assumes the client has done the calculations to get the specific value. Later turns out the client meant "make it have a u-value of 0.18", and there's not enough insulation depth. But the builder made what he was asked to make. I have seen this happen again and again, not just in construction-related fields but also in software development (my current trade) and elsewhere. Or, think of it another way. Imagine for a moment you do hire an architectural technician to do your building plans. Would you prepare them a drawing showing what you wanted? No, of course not. You'd give them the planning drawings and tell them to draw up construction details and come back to you with any questions. When you pay a technician to draw construction drawings, you're not really paying them to draw - anyone can do that. You're paying them to do the calculations and make the decisions required to know what should be built. The drawing is just the way they communicate those calculations to the builder. In your situation, you are not paying someone for drawings. But you are paying the builder to do the calculations and make the decisions that a technician would have done. The builder may do some drawings (e.g. for a panel supplier) or he may do it all in his head. Regardless of how he chooses to communicate with his team, he has taken on the role of the technician. If in the midst of that there are drawings floating around that you've done based on what you think is "standard" there will be conflicting information. And conflicting information always, always means trouble. The more carefully you draw, the more it looks like you've put a lot of thought (and knowledge) into what you're drawing. And the less likely it is that someone will query it. People don't like to think unless they have to. If there is no drawing at all, the builder will have no option but to think about everything. If there is a rough sketch, it will still be obvious nobody is meant to actually work from it. You need to insist the builder does all the thinking you're paying him to do. This is the only way to ensure you and he are on exactly the same page about who is responsible for what. If his role is as you've described it to us, he should be able and happy to work from the planning drawings.

I was set on installing a GSHP, and did a fair bit of work getting prices, working out the most cost effective way of getting a ground collector in place, etc. The lowest price I could come up with, with me doing the GSHP installation work myself, was a bit over £8k. That was for a small Kensa GSHP (Kensa were very helpful at that time, BTW). Two things swayed me away from installing a GSHP in the end. We stayed at a holiday place that had a GSHP and found the noise from the unit very intrusive. The main thing that persuaded us to switch to an ASHP though was cost. The 6 kW ASHP we have cost about £2k, installed, compared with over £8k for the GSHP. Even though the GSHP was, on paper, a few percent more efficient, it would never have come close to paying back the additional £6k before it died from old age. I've really glad we opted for the ASHP, as it's extremely quiet, and in practice is performing better than the predictions we had for a GSHP. It was also very quick and easy to install, just a concrete pad for it to sit on, a flow and return pipe and the wiring. Took me less than a day to install it and get it running, and I'd never seen one before.

This appears, in comparison to our normal traffic, to be a thread of very little value. ?. If anyone wishes to take reference from any posts, maybe now would be a good time to get some screenshots .

Looks quite firmly screwed up...

Hi All, Thank you very much for having me on your forums, the design is very nice and easy to navigate. I am a qualified electrician and been in the trade for over 20 years, I have a level 4 in electrical design plus all the usual electrical qualifications, city and guilds Solar PV Qualified but never held the MCS, Btec Level 3 in fire detection (but forget almost all of it as it was around 15 years ago). Own a Small business in Audio visual and high end lighting control. Really enjoy and have a passion for designing high end lighting control systems, and I am qualified in KNX design, Lutron HomeWorks QS, Rako Lighting, etc, and Cisco networking and I don't really know how I have a MCP (Microsoft Certified Professional) qualification for my sins - but use a Mac for everything now... All my friends say I am addicted to courses. I came here for help with a MVHR system that I am planning the installation of and I will have many questions on that, and hopefully I can help other members with lighting or audio visual in the future. Love a beer with the lads when the mrs lets me out, support Arsenal (don't say it lol), just enjoy having fun and my kids drive me mad! Thank you for reading.

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply anything about bills, it's solely the laws of physics and the true amount of heat that is available from any bit of kit that is delivering a service to the house, that's all. It's a hard fact that any lighting control system isn't going to generate a lot of heat, if it does then it needs sorting, as there is no need for any such control system to waste more than a tiny proportion of the power of the controlled lighting. The same goes for audio, or video. Audio amps shouldn't be that inefficient that they generate significant amounts of heat, in the context of a domestic environment, and safe levels of SPL. There's just a massive disparity between the likely waste heat from even a really comprehensive domestic audio/visual system and the typical heating/hot water requirement. This makes it really hard to justify spending any significant amount on heat recovery from this low level waste heat, as the probability is that the capital cost of the system will be orders of magnitude more costly than the true value of any recovered useful heat.

Arsenal...North of the river then? I mean "Welcome aboard!" ?

I appreciate what you're saying, but the heat produced is directly proportional to efficiency, and the standby power of domestic equipment has to comply with current regulations, so can never be anywhere near 19 W (check the current regs on this if you don't believe me). Older kit could consume a few watts on standby, but not anything sold in the past few years, as there has been a gradual clamp down on standby power consumption of all domestic kit. The size of the amps has little to do with their heat output, as in a domestic environment they just cannot deliver a high mean power output. For example, a decent sound system in a room of around 5m x 5m, will deliver an ear-splitting SPL with about 10W of audio power, so maybe 100 W of electrical power, and 90 W of wasted heat, with a poor efficiency class A amp. With a decent class D there may well only be around 5 W of wasted heat, not enough to bother about doing anything with, when you consider that an immersion heater is typically around 3,000 W.

The key thing is that the waste heat from the rack isn't really wasted, as it ends up inside the thermal envelope, so contributes to keeping the house warm. In effect, it just offsets the heating requirement, so is a direct, 1:1, saving from the heating bill. If the rack is so inefficient that it creates lots of waste heat, then adding forced air cooling from the room would help both cool it, and distribute heat to the house. It all hinges on efficiency, and I find it hard to believe that even a big house audio visual system would be so inefficient as to generate a useful amount of heat from the control/amplification rack. A pretty loud audio system is only going to deliver maybe 5 to 10 W of acoustic power into an average sized room (even that is probably up in the region where damage to hearing is likely). Even a crappy class A amplifier is only going to draw around 100 W to deliver that acoustic power level, a more common class C/B amp would draw maybe 30 W, and a decent class D might be less than 15 W. Of course, the peak power ratings will be a great deal higher, but the peak-to-mean ratio in music is pretty high, and it's the mean power that ends up determining the heat loss through inefficiency. Lightin system switching should be virtually lossless, so there will be near-zero heat recovery from the lighting control side of the system.

Drink less, winebibber, and stop dreaming of Jilly Goolden. Found out today that there is a vineyard in Hathersage at 900ft. Not sure what is happening; they already have Little John and a gorgeous lido. F

Enjoy the torture / pain / enlightenment..... ??

Thank you very much Pocster, looking forward to reading about your MVHR Installation. Mick

Hey ! Welcome ! You’ll get much more help from the more intelligent that will be along shortly. Just installing my mvhr !

If the lighting is efficient, then there won't be any significant heat to recover from the control cabinet, so it wouldn't be worth the effort of trying to recover wasted energy from it. As an example, our 130m2 house has a total lighting power input, with all lights on, of less than 250 W. I'd expect any switching system to be at least 95% efficient, so that means that, with all the lights on, the wasted energy in the switches/control system would be around 12.5 W. Apart from this heat loss being very low, it ends up directly heating the house, so there is no real merit in trying to pass this through the MVHR.

Welcome, First point is what level of airtightness have you managed to achieve? Unless you've sealed up the house to better than around 3 ACH at 50 Pa it's pretty doubtful as to whether MVHR would be worth installing. Ideally, MVHR really need the airtightness to be better than about 1 ACH to reap significant benefits. This is a tough target to achieve; few houses built to current building regs will be this airtight. If the lighting system is so inefficient as give off lots of heat, then I think the first thing to do would be to change it for something less wasteful, as that would be both cheaper and more effective than trying to recover heat from an inefficient lighting system.

We designed our own house back in 2009. At the time there was a scheme called 'Architect in the House' where a participating architect would visit you at your home to go through your plans in return for a donation for Shelter. It worked well for us, picking his brains to improve our plans.

Had to drill through the existing footings when I renewed my mains water. What a bitch! There's a metre of pipe insulation down inside the duct and Wiska gel on top to hopefully fully seal the duct.

No, I showed in 2014-2016 that the case law (which dates from 2011) had not been superseded by a more recent adjudication.

Don't know where the idea that MDPE is attacked by concrete came from, but it's completely false. The only reason for putting a water pipe in a duct, rather than directly embedded in concrete would be if the water regs requirement for the pipe to be "accessible" was being enforced by someone who was absolute stickler for the meaning of "accessible". Having said that, I ran ours inside a bit of 50mm duct, just in case it ever needed to be replaced.

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No fear of drowning now either. You can get rid of the life belts on the wall.

You only need your basic liability Forget all the add ons for tools plant hire etc Works out very expensive your mainly covering yourself for someone wandering onto the site and getting injured Or the building to be a complete loss

Did a ‘fudge’ step at the top - ‘feels ‘ better when walking down and round the top edge . Carpentry skills award ?

I used stainless steel ring shank nails on my larch cladding as there is a lot of pressure / movement on the fixings when using unseasoned timber in this style as it dries and tries to warp. I had no problems at all and 4 years on nothing has failed. I pre drilled all the holes and again have had no splitting or cracking.

If you put a post on this forum for other peoples views I think you will get a better perspective on the thing i have one leave it turned on 24/7 and it just comes on when the room stats say it needs too -simple

would keep away from that you need quotes for different stages saying you just pay by the time spent is a recipe for a continual go slow and so many extras it will break you first thing is get references for previous jobs of your size they have completed --note i say completed not started then run away

Great post Andy.

Pure cotton I find or silk...

Tried the above in Google Translate but to no avail... ?

why do you want one ? climate is never so cold in uk thats its superiority in COP over ASHP in very low subzero conditions like -20c for months will ever make up for initial costings most parts of uk have an an average winter temp ABOVE zero degrees if you are in canada that would be a different thing Your choice of course ,but having looked at it and costs for the ground works or bore holes etc It did not stand up as a good alternative to ASHP -yes you get more rhi --but if building a thermal efficent house then that will not be that big anyway look very closely before deciding is my suggestion you could have a situation where it might be better --but most cases it will end up more expensive

Final warning: the topic is the impact of Brexit on self-builders. Further off-topic opinions will be deleted without further explanation.

Looks like a picture from one of those HSE reports that ends with the amount of fine the company got for unsafe working practices.....

We went with the pure white (rather than warm or natural) as we wanted a more clinical light.

Just a quick update for those interested in following the project. We have now installed the Izodom 2000 insulated raft foundation ready for our ISOTEX walls. We have a few details in the roof structure to finalise but we hope to be onsite with the blocks in mid to late September. Anyone who is interested in looking at the insulated slab let me know. Tom

She's too busy keeping me in expensive tools and spares for my digger. Top lass!

Its easy - draw your room, add the doors and windows and drag and drop the cabinets. They do check before you order you haven’t missed anything and are good when you get a cabinet wrong. Personal opinion is that all the Wren/Wickes/Howden designers have a set pattern they use and it’s crap. You know how you will use your kitchen and what works for you - you’re the best designer for your kitchen ..!

Lay them out both ways and stand back and see what suits your eye best. Then ask the wife to have a look and then talk it over and then do it the way she wants.

This is how ours where done in oz. timber inside reveals was a finger jointed pine, with the architrave of your choice. I actually liked it compared to the standard plastered reveal. It had another benefit if fitting blinds it provided easy fixing points.