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Technically it can go onto anything! Most new builds mount it on a piece of OSB. There is no direct reg in BS7671 18th - which states the mounting material must be non-combustible. There are a couple of regs, 421.1.? which states that materials used to form enclosures for electrical equipment must be non-combustible or the enclosure must be non-combustible, and it even gives the example of a ferrous metal, in other words, make it in steel and you are exempt from making things out of non-combustible materials. Now just because the regs say something, doesn't mean they are infallible! So as the consumer unit itself is metal and is supposed to be fully sealed to stop the spread of fire, if the CU's integrity has been maintained, then fire should not be able to escape, so worry more about ensuring the unit is using appropriate glands and intumescent seals etc. I personally think that it should be on a non-combustible material, I made a board for my unit out of 11mm OSB covered with 12.5mm plasterboard.

I wish this was a food related post! Nope, actually the less we can cook the better. The minute the gas goes in it turns from a 36 degree caravan to an actual steam room complete with scents of tea tree and lavender from what we have applied to our arms and legs from the critters are attacking us in here through open windows and vents. Meanwhile our dry storage in one of the outbuildings, formerly a shop the previous owner had selling canal associated tat has mice! Discovered when looking for some shorts as it's where we are storing some belongings, I'm now having a panic we have a family of furry friends living in our mattress and clothes. We have 4 traps down and so far have caught 6! Either the peanut butter is attracting them in or we have a huge family. The maize hasn't even been cut down yet so I'm predicting by time we get to emptying things out in Autumn they will likely have chewed through anything of any value! Bungalow wise, the historic evidence of birds, bees and wasps nesting in the old roof has been discovered which was completely knackered and the existing floors are being excavation ready for lots of lovely insulation. That's been a big job for the builders. The joining of the existing appearance of the two bungalows created a few discussions as we were just replacing the flat roof that joins them but not any more! Someone's had a bright idea and I can't pretend to understand what's happening but apparently it will look much better. As long as they stick to the budget they can do what they want - what they didn't mention was it's more steel/calcs which is extra cost but there may be savings elsewhere.

keep an eye out for Videx stuff on eBay. It’s eye watering new but is really well made. I picked up a returned unit with a damaged internal phone for £75, and then got two new phones from eBay for £20. Total cost of all the bits would have been £7-800 at normal prices.

We're almost always fitting them in plant rooms, and we pretty much always line the plant rooms in 18 / 25mm plywood as there is just so much stuff to affix. CU's with us are straight onto that plywood, and then proper and full attention given to the fire integrity ( spread of fire from inside the CU to it's surroundings ) to maintain the standard. Yes, it won't hurt to make a nice fire resistant pattress for it, but totally pointless IMO as if that has been exposed to fire and has 'gone up in flames', you have much bigger problems to worry about at that point I assure you One thing we always do is fit a multi-sensor smoke detector in every single plant space, as early warning is what will pay dividends here, not what the 300mm around the CU is made from !! By the time fire / flames have got to that, the fire would be quite involved and the smoke detection system should have alerted the occupants WAY before the worry of how long the plywood will burn for is a question. Fire goes upwards as well as backwards, but upwards a HELL of a lot quicker...

Why would you want an outside bathtub where you never change the water? They are surprisingly popular up here. Next door neighbour has one. We declined the offer to join them in it.

You are welcome hope some new ideas help. idea being plenty of space for family plus separate quiet living room. If you are able to move the side door from kitchen I would put a large pantry there. This is cost effective as you’d need far less tall kitchen units. Also if you don’t need a shower downstairs. At the moment, you could put a non load bearing Wall between wc & pantry, with space & plumbing for a future shower. Thus can easily reduce pantry size and increase we to fit in a shower. for the study area a couple of options. One is leave it entirely open plan, or have an internal glazed partition (Per image). Again so if you need this area as a future room you can easily put up an internal wall. you can put more storage in hallway eg under stairs etc. haven’t looked at upstairs in detail but consider jack and Jill or shared family bathrooms. Also throughout better to have more built in cupboards/wardrobes etc & less floor space, than more floor space that’s full of shoe racks, wardrobes etc etc cluttering up the space. Good luck !

We did this back in 2012. Our house had timber frame with brick outer skin. The recess left by the frame designer did not work out correctly and we had to improvise on site. Our joiner was a very resourceful chap and got it sorted. Our cavity closers were the mineral wool firestop type. The VFE projected slightly into the brick but being mounted to the frame and roof had to have movement allowance. We used Compriband expanding foam tape for various junctions but the final seal was usually low modulus silicone. The Compriband was certainly under the VFE. The VFE windows (we only used two) did have a flashing kit and if I recall there were lots of bits left over. We would have followed the Velux hieroglyphs very carefully. They often take a lot of thinking about. My memory is unlikely to fully accurate and I don’t have access to any of my photos at the moment or indeed the next three months or more. I do recall going over the house about a year after finishing and re-sealing where some silicone has torn due to the differential movement. Thereafter it seemed fine. However, we sold the house in 2015 and moved hundreds of miles away. What I do know is that we never had any issues with water ingress at all anywhere in the house. So, whatever we did with the VFE and top hung roof windows attached to them worked as it ought to. Compriband is great stuff but tricky to use. I don’t think there is really a suitable alternative though. Regular squirty foam definitely not. Flexifoam possibly but I do not know if it really has the range of movement the application demands.

That is going to be very cheap cladding with those figures. Nice job

Yeah, I made them. 8 ft wide each, then joined them with metalwork at the top and bottom. Too heavy to lift as 1 gate. So it is now 1gate 16ft wide. Made it sliding, and stuck a grands worth of c20 concrete in the ground to take the sliding track, and to act as a super strong crossover for big lorries etc. Bought the motor from Italy, and welded up the stop catches etc from scrap.

My waterproof system requires using delta seal between all the board joints . Then a water proof paste over joints , tanking strip membrane over that .Then paste again with pre made corner pieces and more tanking strip . Hard to see any leaks getting through that - if installed properly of course ???

You need to leave a 4 gap clear Of grout in the shower area Then silicon afterwards Some of the builders want these grouted in But I always tell the tilers to leave them clear

I like to use CT1 for the joins in the substrate boards - Hardie Backer or whatever. Not as good as proper tanking but for a shower it seems fine. Then just tile, grout and then go over the internals with silicone.

So I made some gates. That should stop all the people walking passed having to watch me in my pants, scratching my bits, having a fag outdoors. I'm pleased with them 16ft wide.

I spent ages looking around, and found BPC are massively cheaper than anywhere else, just taken delivery of all of my components. The airy valves are incredibly expensive, i've just gone for the normal metal ones, but depends what you are after. BPC stuff is all branded, I did find their PVC 125mm pipe quite thin though, bends a fair bit.

No, silicone. CT1 does not finish well and discolours.

What say @Nickfromwales?

We apply CT1 to the joins in the cement boards. Tile and grout as per (2). Silicone to internal corners.

If doing mine again, looking at 2) I'd butt the tile going up the page against the tile going across with a credit card thick gap then clear CT1. Did this where my wall tiles meet the floor. You as I understand never want to look at such a corner joint head on.

S'alright, I got the sly dig! ? On a serious note, as I'd plastered my bathroom myself I used Leyland Super Leytex high opacity paint as a base. Also used Easifill 20 where required. Topcoated with Dulux Matt Diamond.

The way mine works is I have two motorised valves, one for heating and one for DHW. Only one is open at a time depending on what it is doing. To add cooling, either via a duct cooler or fan coil units, I would add another motorised valve. Mine ASHP has a separate "cooling" thermostat input. When that is activated the ASHP starts up in cooling mode. It would be simple to arrange a cooling thermostat to open the cooling motorised valve, and the feedback contacts on that motorised valve to activate the ASHP cooling input. I haven't done this yet, I was still trying to find some cheap fan coil units, but the other idea is to pipe the cooling to a duct cooler and cool via the MVHR, you would want to switch it to a boost speed for that to be effective.

ok, so in the winter the UFH will be off when DHW is being heated? in that case I guess doing the same in the summer isn't an issue. and I guess then that, as we're planning on Solar PV, I can heat the DHW using Solar PV via an immersion so the need to stop the cooling with be mitigated. so, that was thinking that if we couldn't have cooling while heating DHW then if we wanted both at the same time having the cooling built in to the MVHR meant that would be possible. but if I can heat the DHW from Solar PV then it's not necessary.

We used to erect quite a few commercial buildings so either: 3 or 4 inch annular ring nails using an air gun, or if we were using threaded rods chemical anchored in for the sole plate we would leave the rods over length, drill corresponding holes and fix with washer and nut .. bit more faffy but incredibly strong and easy to check / sign off after.

Bubbles! Tune!

I think that works better having another route into the kitchen. Moving the stair there would be an improvement, but I would check it can be built as it now rises up through the outside wall above the porch which may not work.

@ProDave it must be all the meters that are boosting your electricity consumption!

Standard board in the back of a meter box is very thin chipboard, so it seems no need to be anything particular.

No design, just happy accident. We have high level Integra Velux in the roof over the central stairway / atrium and I just open the GF slider that sits over the basement lighwell / mezzanine and lock it at 6". As it sits behind a Juliet balcony, there's no real security issue. Had I designed it, I would have had the air coming in via the basement somehow per Nick's suggestion - there is only one door down there but it can't be securely opened. That said, basement is lovely and cool this week, daughter has been sleeping down there in her TV room.

Fireline PB is what we are using.... the remnants of the board not used to line the steels. Plus a bit of fire resistant foam, jobs a goodun.

We used 12mm Hardiebacker board, on 15mm OSB for the Garden room and will use the same in the main house shortly.

Not simpler really as you'd have 2 x ASHP, but simpler plumbing yes. It's not just the distance but how much space you have for flow/return pipes. Moderate distance isn't a major issues if pipes are well enough insulated. Zehnder aren't the cheapest MVHR unit, but they do sell high capacity units which can easily do a large house. Airflow also have high-capacity units.

You can get a simple steel calc done online for about £40 - peace of mind doesn’t normally come that cheap !

The final plans are ready. The kitchen and bathrooms are not the final designs yet, but pretty close. floor plan.pdf

We do seem to have adopted a cat from somewhere who we spotted with a mouse at the weekend. I guess I should be pleased it isn't a rat. Haven't had any in the traps for a few days. I perhaps need to change the peanut butter for chocolate muffins.

Plastering,floor tiling ,garden work and workshop and a big cockup on the steel x3 and it's on me

Plenty of cockups here, onwards and upwards, don’t beat yourself up over it, not many on here doing all the work themselves.

Run over the stuff with a wacker until it stops compacting. For future reference Type 1 properly wacked makes better blinding than sand.

Absolutely ? I've put a question mark on the title, just for you.

Hi, We probably have the highest electricity use of anyone on Buildhub. I am coming in at around 17000kWh per year, maybe 25% of this is for our Tesla. We generate around 3500kWh from out solar panels, he 17000 is a net number. We have a pool and the pump and dehumidifier use a to of electricity, but I wanted o get an idea if there were other things in the house using an unexpected amount. I bought a WiFi plus that monitors energy usage. They may not be that accurate, but I wanted to get an idea. I will put this into a spreadsheet once I have more data. I was pleasantly surprised to find the usage from our MVHR was very low. We have 3x Dantherm HCV/HCH5. Yesterday, I tested one of these and on the lowest speed setting, which I have them set on 90% of the time, it was only using 14W. My suspicion was that watching TV on our projection screen, which is pretty much standard practice was using a lot of electricity, so I wanted to check. The sound system uses around 100W, which is less than I expected, the projector uses 280W or 350W in HDR mode. The shocking thing is that if the screen is blank and it has gone to sleep it still uses 280W so that you don't need to wait for the bulb to warm up. I reckon that especially during lockdown it is on around 10 hours a day and often people just leave it switched on when they leave the room or don't realise it is on as the screen has gone to sleep. So watching TV is using 380W, which means it is using around 4kWh per day, or 1500kWh a year. So almost £200 a year. The one that surprised me was the Sky Q box which uses 27W whether or not it is on standby, so double what the MVHR uses. It goes into eco mode for 3 hours a night which won't really make much of a dent. So just over 200kWh a year. We have 2 network switches, 9 WiFi access points, a DSL router, a smart light controller and 4x CCTV cameras with a PVR. All these use 114W, so that is 1000kWh per year. I am trying to think which of these devices could be put on a smart plug and turned off at night. The trouble is that someone is bound to want to use something at an odd hour and complain. I need to check various Alexas, Sonos speakers, Sky Q minis etc which are all on 24 hours per day. Having looked up the specs the Alexas only use a few watts, I am suspicious of the Sky boxes but they don't have a hard drive in them like the main box so hopefully will be a lot lower. One thing I have done is programmed all the main lights in the house to switch off at 8.10 am during the school run and 10pm after bed time so that if anyone leaves lights on they don't stay on too long.

Made the mistake of putting mine down a couple of weeks ago. Would have been beautiful this week in this heat.

1080P apparently is my one. Must mean something different in China! ?

Looks great @Big Jimbo Remember the nice touches as you’ll be sleeping there if you get too drunk/snore loudly/say you fancy an actress/tell her mum she’s put on weight...?

I thought Artex had gone out of fashion? ?

Well we have two cats our neighbours one who sits lounging in the sun and probably couldn't care less about any mice and the real bastard canal moggie who has turned up. Once we move back in we will be adopting a cat. I fostered three kittens earlier this year who I named after Game of Thrones characters and it broke my heart letting them go.

https://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/society/hot-tub-owners-pretending-its-not-a-nasty-sex-pond-2013042266204