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I believe @Onoff flies by the seat of his pants for the most part, doesn't work to a budget and pays no attention to costs. Now to to most people that's a non starter but as he takes so long complete anything costs are spread and don't particularly impact. Sketches are done on CAD but repeatability is an issue as he forgets what he called the drawing and/or where he filed it. Somehow it generally works out alright! ?

We have cooling built-in to our MVHR, a Genvex Premium 1L. It can deliver about 1.5 kW of cooling via a built-in air to air heat pump, which is OK, but frankly isn't tremendously powerful, and it can very easily be over-powered by solar gain during the Spring and Autumn. I had hoped that this much cooling via the MVHR would make a significant difference, but the real issue is that MVHR delivers far too low an air flow rate to be able to shift a lot of heat out of the house. When our MVHR is running in cooling mode it has to boost to maximum air flow rate to do it, so there is a bit of noise, and even then we find that the small air con unit we fitted in the bedroom is massively more powerful when it comes to cooling the house (it's easily around 5 or 6 times more effective than the MVHR in cooling mode). In terms of cost, the added cost of opting for MVHR with an integral ASHP was high, probably an extra couple of thousand pounds or more, whereas the small air con unit I fitted last year cost around £800 or so, installed. If we were starting again I'd not bother cooling via the MVHR at all, but would have saved a lot of cash and just installed an air con unit high up in the centre of the house, as that would have been many times more effective and a lot cheaper.

CVC

Hello, I wish I had found this forum sooner, mind you when we planned our project I had no idea of questions to ask, and my most pressing question is only necessary because of disruption because of the COVID crisis. Our project is the remodelling of kitchen / dining room, no change to the footprint, but knocking through rooms, putting windows where doors are, and vice versa. Most things are decided on, and we have a builder ready to start once the lockdown is relaxed, providing that the steel fabricator reopens. I am so excited about how our home will be improved, even if it does take longer than usual. I will post my question in the relevant part of the forum soon.

You could use the garden walls, but I would build a timber structure on the inside to separate it from the wall as it will be a pathway for damp as previously said.

Does it need to be a brick structure - is the current building skewing your vision. You can get some decent timber cabins that you could insulate and make dry, a brick or block building will have thick walls and need heating in winter to stave off the damp feeling unless it is well insulated. A timber cabin kit would only need a base forming and be a quick project.

That says at least that you will probably want to to be a more detached from the structure job rather than use the existing walls (could be coating or lining or a close fitting buiding), as garden walls will always be conduits for damp.

It's all do-able, depends on how much you want to take on. Main thing you'll need is a decent laser level and receiver to save time getting everything level. Straight timbers and stakes work fine for forming the edges, as will hired steel forms. Benefit of timber is you can do it at your own pace and not be on the hook for weekly costs. If you use a mix on site concrete firm you can dictate the pace and you only pay for what you actually use.

Welcome. All of those are doable, but it revolves around your requirement. Really, that is what you want to do in it, when, and in what conditions. eg is it a 12 month need, or for the summer. Does it have to be bone dry, or merely rainproof? What is going to be in it? I would start with a bullet list of "what is it for?" in about 250 words. If you are right up to the boundary you may run into a requirement for planning permission.

A sketch would help... how you design the roof and where the rainwater goes might be a good first thought. Also, what’s the workshop for? This will influence things like heating, humidity, comfort, building regs and much more. Are you going to pickle stuff?

Taper imho. Otherwise you get that thing I hate about tape and fill. You put a corner bead on, and that forces the corner to be proud of the rest of the wall. That's why I prefer a proper skim to tape and fill.

Re the kitchen. I used to own and run a kitchen company. Design, supply, install etc. They were very high end. In frame, One off door designs. 30mm thick doors. Convex, concave doors. In all sorts of fab wood. The carcasses were always made from veneered ply, and basically they used to cost a fortune. Others will say different, but my tips would be.....Do not have oiled solid wood worktops. They are a pig to keep, and if not oiled regularly, will stain. If you have kids, think hard about having wood doors. The lacquer will be very thin, and sloppy, messy kids will ruin them after 7 or 8 years.

I would always prefer a good screw Tony. ?

I would also talk to a smallish local gate fabricator / fitter as a control. I found a custom one to be quite competitive including fitting. Around here there are a number .. a couple in each town. F

We got ours from Envirobuild We love it. The chippy hated the thought of it because it wasn't real wood but he ended up becoming a fan. As for reasonable price, I guess it's at the high end of reasonable, depending on what reasonable is.

Just finished my drains, I have put in 60 l/m of 110mm pipe, 2 x 460 i/c and used 5 c/m of pipe bedding. I was expecting to have quite a bit of spoil to get rid of and it has all gone back in including quite a lot of large stones etc from the house build. Made my day and as a self builder you need days like this, eh Ian? @AnonymousBosch

I shopped around for the various parts needed from several online suppliers, including CVC. The design was pretty easy, just stick the extract terminals as far away from a room fresh air inlet as practical, and the reverse for fresh air inlet terminals. In practice we've ended up with a near-ideal arrangement in most rooms, with the air having to travel via the longest path across the room, which aids diffusion and reduces the risk of there being ventilation dead spots. There were two places where I had to compromise with terminal positioning. One was the bedrooms, where, because of the high vaulted ceilings, I couldn't easily fit terminals high up, so had to fit terminals in the low walls, but I fitted them with directional terminal vents, so the air is directed upwards, more or less along the angle of the ceiling. The other compromise was in the utility room, where I fitted the extract terminal dead centre above where the clothes drying rack is. Not ideal, as having terminals towards the centre of a room is always a compromise in terms of best air mixing, but OK, as the utility has through air movement, as there's a door from the end of it that leads to the downstairs WC, with another extract. I found that the various companies supplying semi-rigid round duct were all selling pretty much the same product, perhaps in different colours. It seems that there may well be licence deals regarding this, so the same stuff is marketed under different names (for example Domus and HB+ seem to be an identical product). There were also wide variations in plenum chamber and terminal prices, and I ended up shopping around for those, and think I used different suppliers for each. Our terminals all came from CVC, as did the terminal to semi-rigid duct fittings, the plenum manifolds came from another online supplier, as they were a lot cheaper than CVC, and the coils of semi-rigid duct came from yet another supplier (I used stuff that was branded HB+, but it was 100% compatible with Domus fittings, seals etc).

The RF transmitted from a smart meter is exactly the same frequency and ERP as that from a 'phone, as they use the same network, so have to meet the same client side specification. The actual ERP will depend on the distance from the nearest cell tower, as the spec requires devices to step their ERP up and down such that the power is set to the lowest level needed in order to maintain a reliable connection. The rationale for this is primarily driven by the requirements for mobile devices, to improve battery life, but it holds true for all client side equipment, as there is a need to try to restrict interference, and having all devices use the lowest power needed for a reliable connection helps to maintain network capacity. An establishment I managed a bit over 20 years ago did a lot of research into the biological effects of RF, driven by health concerns that arose from an enquiry into why the safe exposure limit set by Russia (more accurately the former Soviet Union) was about an order of magnitude lower than the limits used widely across the Western world. This was around 1998, when people first raised concerns about mobile 'phone safety. The safe limit we use in the UK and most of Europe was based on the measured heating effect in biological organisms, whereas the limit used in Russia was based on some very small observed cellular effects on single celled organisms. The Russian researchers hadn't found any evidence to support the view that these small effects were adverse, but they nevertheless chose to adopt the precautionary principle and set a lower safe limit at the point where there were no observed cellular effects. Because of the inverse cube law relationship that governs the power per unit area relative to distance from a source, the one case we found where a mobile 'phone could just exceed the conservative field strength limit set by Russia was when it was held close to the ear. There was a region of around 30mm around that part of the skull close to the ear where the field strength could be sufficient, when a 'phone was transmitting on maximum power (very roughly equivalent to a weak received signal of about 1 bar on many displays) to exceed the Russian safe limit. Moving the 'phone just a 100mm or so away from the ear reduced the field strength to below that limit. At no time was the UK/European safe limit exceeded. If someone is worried about the RF from their 'phone, then just using it in speaker phone mode, or via earphones, completely removes the risk, as with the phone held maybe 200 to 300mm away from any sensitive area, even when in a very weak signal area, the field strength will be well below the most conservative limit. Most 'phones have their antenna near the top of the case, so holding the 'phone low down reduces the field strength at the hand by a great deal. A smart meter will usually be a very long way away (in field strength terms) from people, anything over a metre away reduces the field strength to a very low level, well below any threshold for any observed cellular changes. The maximum transmit power of a smart meter, 'phone, or other connected device is restricted to 2 W, and that maximum will rarely be reached if the device is in an urban area. Our work estimated that full power might be used about 3% of the time in urban areas, whilst in rural areas the chance of the device using full power is greater, we estimated that in sparsely populated areas of the UK a device might use full power about 50% of the time. Smart meters only connect to the network periodically, for a few seconds every 15 to 30 minutes, usually. A mobile 'phone behaves similarly when on standby, as it keeps the cell connection alive. If there is a risk from 2G/3G/4G/5G RF systems, then it will be massively greater from mobile 'phones than from smart meters, just because of that inverse cube law relationship and distance; a mobile 'phone is pretty much always going to be a great deal closer to a person than a smart meter ever will be. The field strength from other wireless devices in the house, like wifi (operates at 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz, so very similar to mobile 'phones etc) and perhaps wireless data links used to switch lights, thermostats etc (usually either 433 MHz or 868 MHz, the latter being close to the 900 MHz mobile 'phone band) probably also needs to be considered if anyone is concerned about this stuff. I'm personally not particularly bothered, although I do pretty much always use a mobile 'phone hands free, having seen just how close to the safe limit a 'phone held right against the ear can be. Having said that, we've had mobile 'phones around for 30 years now, and there has been no reported increase in the incidence of disease around people's ears, so if there was a health risk I'm pretty sure it would have shown up by now.

When camping in Scotland, pick an exposed windy camping spot. I like the Western isles, lots of windy places to choose and not so many midges. Having said that the worst I can remember was a still August day on Jura. You could see the clouds of them. That's one reason we live where we do, less rain and less midges and we can hop over to the west coast in just over an hour.

Possibly ADM. We had an initial design from them and they were very helpful.

BPC ventilation would be up there as a trusted and very competitively priced supplier. There is another but for the life if me I cant remeber right now...something like CVS or something like that...

Hi @Agnius, I was in the same situation as you are now a couple of months ago. I didn't know anything about MVHRs. This forum has a lot of useful information, a lot of resources and helpful people. I have just installed my MVHR, all DIY. I have done the design with the help of other people on the forum. All I need to now is to balance it. There's a lot to take in but you will get there. Good luck!

Good job you and I aren't neighbours then! In all seriousness though, if you were my neighbour and it was your tree I'd respect your right to adopt that position.... if you always loved that tree, and cared a lot about it's vital role in your lovingly tendered garden. Even then, I'd also expect you to respect my right to develop my own land, and at least explore the issue with me. If it turned out you were an absent landlord using a tree that you actually didn't care about just to hold me over a barrel to line your pockets, I'd perhaps think a little less of you. If you were an absent landlord who wouldn't even respond to my polite enquiries, I'd probably start a thread on BuildHub asking how to force the issue!

CAD = (crayon assisted drawing) ?????

Your pipe has probably collapsed and all the excess soil is inside the pipe. ????

Yes as it would exceed 30sq.m.

you not been following my thread then still plenty here - but within sensible distance of civilisation multiple attacks on clearing roads and site