Leaderboard

As oak does not compress under foot at all, nor does any timber for that matter, there will be no discernible difference to concrete other than the smooth finish which will make it feel 'nicer' under foot. Purely phycological imo. I would bond this floor down without hesitation, as the numerous new builds I have been in that have not done this ( eg floating ) have been quite 'noisy' to walk on, even in socks, in terms of the wood moving and creaking / groaning when walked across. Also, I have noticed where the floating floors meet the stairs, and other fixed junctions, the two can never be married successfully when finishing off completely flush. Instead, most floating floor require a timber or metal threshold to allow a fixed item ( such as the bullnose of the last step up onto the 1st floor landing ) to marry to a floating floor. That would bug the life out of me for the rest of my days. That alone would be enough for me to bond the floor down, point 1, point 2 would fortify that decision, eg the then far better heat transfer from the UFH to the wood. That would also lend itself, point 3, to a slightly lower flow temp for the UFH to run at, as the oak would then be 'thermally coupled' to the heated deck. +1 for bonding down.

That is the difference. Outside the night period, my mean usage is 0.1 kW, or 1.7 kWh.day-1. When I was decorating and using the wall paper stripper for several hours, my usage shot up. Hated it.

We're pretty airtight (a wee bit over 1ACH) and our hood which is rated at 600m3/hr on full will a. open the sealed, weighted, gravity flap in the duct at low speed b. depressurise the house to about 30Pa when on full. ...but the supply flows increase when it's on as fans happily freewheel and bypass. I haven't yet been able to detect reverse flow at the extract vents so at worst airflow is stalling on the extract side. I would do a fair bit of stirfry and pulling the air out of the house for ten minutes is a better option to me than the possibility of greasing up thee nearby ducts...

Self Levelling compound comes in different flavours - some are better for bulking up areas and some are better at feathering out to nothing. If you are laying parquet then it needs to be broadly level but don’t worry too much as the glue will make up some of the gaps and your sanding will take some of the edges off. Do you have any heating in the slab or not ..?? When you’ve decided what you need to do, then you need to make sure the floor is primed if it’s really dusty and then get it wet through if you want it to flow. It won’t flow if the floor is dry, and you probably want 20% more water in the mix than the bags say as otherwise it barely flows.

We moved into our new build mid-December 2017 in time to host an extended family Christmas. We are now over 4 years into living in our new home. We have lots of accumulated experience and made a few small tweaks. However, we are delighted about how the house has turned out, and we love living here. There were no material cock-ups, or regrets on design decisions, so we have probably fared a lot better than most new purchasers or self-builders. Maybe a general experiences post should be on the to do list, but what I want to focus on here, and a couple of follow-ups, is a general topic that others on the forum have asked about over the years: that is how our central heating system works in practice, and how I control it. The system as currently implemented is still largely the same as when I first commissioned it, that is a now 5 year-old RPi-based custom control system directly controlling the CH and DHW subsystems. This is a pretty minimal headless system running Node-RED, MySQL and MQTT client for control. The three material changes that I've made since moving in are: I have followed my son and son-in-law in using Home Assistant (HA) for general Home Automation. My server (an RPi4 in an Argon One case) uses an attached Zigbee gateway, and I have a lot of Zigbee devices around the house: switches, relays, light sensors, etc. and I do the typical home automation stuff with these. There are loads of YouTube videos and web articles covering how to implement HA, so please refer to these if you want to learn more. My HA installation includes an MQTT service for use as a connection hub for these IoT devices. I also have another RPi4 acting as an Internet-connected portal / Wireguard gateway/ file-server for caching video snippets from my PoE security cameras. Note that none of my IoT devices directly access the internet, and the only in-bound access into my LAN is via Wireguard tunnelled VPN, and my HTTPS-only blog. All other ports are blocked at the router. Before moving in, we assumed a target internal temperature of 20°C. In practice, we have found this too cold for our (fairly inactive OAP) preference and so we have settled on a minimum control threshold of 22.3°C. As you will see below, because we largely heat during the E7 off-peak window the actual room temperatures have a ~1°C cycle over the day, so the average temperature is about 22.8°C. This hike of 2.8°C increases the number of net heating days since my design heating calcs and the increased delta against external temperatures in turn increases our forecast heating requirement by roughly 18% over our initial 2017 heating estimate. Because our UFH is only in the ground-floor slab, we found that our upper floors were typically 1-2°C cooler than the ground floor in the winter months. We also need more than the 7 off-peak hours of heating in the coldest months, so I have added an electric oil-filled radiator on our 1st-floor landing; HA controls this through a Zigbee smart plug that also reports back on actual energy drawn during the on-time. HA uses MQTT to pass the actual daily energy draw back to the CH control system. This radiator provides enough upper-floor top-up heat, and does so using cheap rate electricity. Note that all servers are directly connected to my Ethernet switch, and the CH/DHW system has all of its critical sensors and output controls directly attached. It can continue to control the CH and DHW subsystems even if the HA system or Internet is offline. There is also no direct user interface to the system, with all logging data is exported to MQTT, and key CH/CHW set-points and configuration are imported likewise. This integration with MQTT, enables user interfacing to be done through the HA Lovelace interface. If there is sufficient interest I can do follow-up posts on some more of the "Boffins Corner" type details on these implementations, or if this turns out to be more of a discussion then it might be better to move this stuff to its own BC topic. However, for the rest of this post I want to focus on the algorithmic and control aspects of the heating system. In terms of inputs and outputs to the control system, these are: There are ~20 DS18B20 1-Wire attached digital thermometers used to instrument pretty much all aspects of the CH / DHW systems. Few are actively used in the control algorithms but were rather added for initial commission, design verification and health checking. Some are also used to monitor and to trip alarms; for example, there is a temperature sensor on the out and return feed for each UFH pipe loop. These were used to do the initial zone balancing. However, the average of the return feeds is used as a good estimate of the aggregate slab temperature. One of the temperature sensors is also embedded in the central hall stud wall to act as a measure of average internal house temperature. There are two flow sensors on the cold feed to my 2 SunAmp DHW storage units to monitor DHW use and to help automate during-day DHW boost. There are 4 240V/20A SSRs used to switch the power to my (2-off) SunAmps, my (1-off) Willis heater, and my (1-off) circulation pump. These and the rest of my 240V household system were wired up and Part P certified by my electrician. These SSRs are switched by a 5V 50mA digital input, and so can be driven from an RPi or similar. (I used a I²C attached MCP23008A multi-port driver to do this, as this can drive 5V 50mA digital inputs, but its input I²C side is compatible with RPi GPIO specs.) There are many ways to "skin this cat", but whichever you choose for your control implementation your system will need to control some 240V/12A devices and take some input temperature sensors. My preference was to directly attach all such critical sensors and outputs. My heating algorithm calculates a daily heating budget in kWh (each midnight) as a simple linear function of the delta between average local forecast temperature for the next 24 hrs and the average hall temperature for the previous 24 hrs. This budget is then adjusted by the following to give an overall daily target which is converted in minutes of Willis on time. heat input from the heater mentioned above. a simple linear function of the delta average hall temperature and the target set-point (currently 22.3°C). This is a feedback term to compensate for systematic over or under heating. I initially calculated the 4 coefficients of the two functions using my design heating calcs and an estimate of the thermal capacity of the interior house fabric within the warm space. After collecting the first year's actual day, I then did a regression fit based on logged actual data to replace the design estimates by empirical values. This was about a 10% adjustment, but to be quite honest the initial values gave quite stable control because of the feedback compensation. The control system runs in one of three modes: No heating is required. Up to 420 mins of heating is required. The start time is set so that heating ends at 7 AM, and the slab is continuously heated during this window. More than 420 mins of heating is required. 420 mins of heating is carried out in the off-peak window. On each hour from 8 AM to 10 PM, if the hall temperature is below the set-point (22.3°C), then an N-minute heating boost is applied, where N is calculated by dividing the surplus heating into the 1-hour heating slots remaining. Here are two history outputs from HA showing some of the logged results. The LH graph is the slab temperature over the last 7 days. The general saw-tooth is identical from my 3-D heat flow modelling discussed in my earlier topic, Modelling the "Chunk" Heating of a Passive Slab. The 7 hr off-peak heating raises overall slab temperature by ~4-5 °C; well within UFH design tolerances, and no need for any HW buffer tank: the slab is the buffer. The RH graph is the hall temperature. Note the days where on-hour boosts were needed. (Also note that the CH system only updates the MQTT temperature data half-hourly, hence the stepped curves.) So the approach is fairly simple, and the system works robustly. ? And here is a screenshot of my HA summary interface, which gives Jan the ability to control everything she needs from her mobile phone or tablet.

I'm doing the lighting design for one of my current clients builds, which also has a tall curved ceiling. I've suggested recessed wall uplighters to wash the ceiling area with enough upward light to allow sufficient ambient light to make its way down lower in the room, with the idea being to have light but not to see the source ( or as near as damnit ). No pics of that one yet, sorry, but here are some of the same I installed on another project.

Anthracite UPVC..?? 0.7 triple glazed in anthracite / white internal at £650 or so https://www.modernupvcwindows.co.uk/upvc-door-designer.php?t=1-0-0&w=900&h=2100&h0=900&v0=1250&v1=820&cill=150&c=131&x=000032T&pr=3&p0=00T2&p1=T003

Norfolk Brick have loads

Cool Cool, A couple of things I've figured out along my house journey ( and a couple of things I wish I'd known before) BTW a good architect will have these sorted but sometimes they get curtailed by the existing building and the clients requirements. (i) The main entrance should be into a dedicated welcome space, ideally with some natural light shining into it from in front or above or beside. It is pleasant to have a sense of "opening up) once in the door, A vaulted ceiling or a view up a stairs to a large window can do this. (ii) This should include discrete storage or be very near to a coat/boot room. (iii) A WC should be close at hand. (iv) Think of the flow through the house like a road network. For instance, the kitchen and stairway will be big paths for traffic. These should be accessed directly and via large "trunk" roads. If there is a circuitous route and narrow doorways and hall's it'll be a pain to live in. (v) Natural light is super important, if well designed for it can give the impression of a much larger space without any of the actual cost or hassle of building it. (vi) Light from the South is ten times better than E/W and 100 times better than Northern light. (vii) Tricks to get it into a house (a) South facing windows and glazed doors (obviously!) (b) glazed internal elements to suck some light into the inners. ( fan lights, glazed internal doors etc) (c) Atrium style skylights to get it into the centre of a fat building. (d) Clever use of mirrors and colour to reflect it inside (viii) You cannot have too much storage (ix) Natural light entering a room from two directions can make it feel much bigger. (x) The ratio of ceiling height to room size is important. My parents with 2.65m ceiling in their 4m*4.5m kitchen feels much taller than ours at 12m*4.5m and 2.7m high. I'm sure there's more.

I separated the pipes and marked the sole plate to avoid ‘unwanted water relief holes’. The studs all reside on a course of blue bricks, so there I just packed out with timber and punched 2x 200mm concrete screws down, through liquid screed and into the concrete slab beneath Trust me, with liquid screed the challenge is to stop it going anywhere it’s not supposed to It will have 100% encompassed those pipes with ease. The builder used mastic / sealants and I also used foam to create a dam in the openings where the flow of the liquid screed needed to be arrested.

Thanks, John. I guess the loops in the corridor and plant room can always be switched off though - better to have the option, no? Harder to add the pipes later when the screed is down!

Make sure the join lines up with something, e.g. the exact centre of a window bar. If we had had to have a join in the upstand it would have been exactly in the centre of and behind the tap, which is NOT at the mid position of the upstand.

Whatever flow rate gives you the optimal temperature difference between flow and return. Does the ASHP state that temperature difference?

Is this a sill or an upstand We had a granite upstand 2.6M by 15cm tall and 20mm thick. It took the stone company 2 goes to cut it, the first one snapped. They warned us if the second one snapped they would have to do it in 2 pieces. So I think you would be lucky to get 4M in one length. I was glad we had ours supply and fit, if it broke getting installed it would be their problem.

Quartz is less prone to cracking. 3m is probably as long as you can get.

Sikaflex would be my choice. Speak to their tech dept if possible. Used a lot of their commercial marine rated stuff and it’s ridiculously good.

As long as the electrician is doing "loop at switch" wiring, which is pretty normal these days, then all you need to decide right now is how many light circuits in each room, and then in your vaulted ceiling room just leave a long length of the switched light feed cable(s) ready to be positioned before the ceiling covering goes on, once you have decided what you want. Decision time is just before plasterboard or other ceiling covering goes on.

Can you take off an electrical switch, TV point or similar and have a look behind the plasterboard this way? Similarly recessed spot lights are a great way to see what's behind plasterboard. Take a small long knife and cut out a tiny bit of insulation to see how thick it is and if you can see what's behind it. You can also purchase cheap inspection cameras. I'm not sure how accurate drawings from circa 20 years ago would be. They aren't something we'd rely on in our office when renovating buildings.

It may have been spec’d, it may be as drawn but I would dig into what you have and find out (and be sure) rather than relying on presented documentation from 18 years ago

You may find any warranty is void if not bonded with the correct adhesive on a concrete floor with UFH. Read the manufacturer installation instructions, for whatever make you are choosing, there will be a defined method. Our clearly stated that.

I am all for organisations and individuals reducing their impact on the environment, reduce waste, recycle more, use different processes and materials etc. But it really grinds my gears when all these inefficient, heavily polluting and wasteful organisations pat themselves on the back for being so green by buying credits! Surely that’s like showing you are not in debt by borrowing more money

From the second sentence: Suggests he/she hasn't done any research in to their opinion piece, so is not worth investing the time to read. Edited to add: From UK Government published White paper 2019.

Looking great, good to see a garage that’s fits with the house design

So this bit ^ I definitely like. How the shaft is ventilated is the tricky bit. It needs a different strategy for mid winter vs mid summer. If I was doing this, my own inclination would be: 1/ vent the shaft into the loft 2/ use a high power variable speed fan to purge the shaft into the loft as/when needed 3/ ensure there's a clear "return path" from loft back to the network cupboard via the hallways and living spaces, so this excess heat gets best chance to percolate around the building a bit in winter. This maybe just a dedicated open grill from upstairs hallway into the loft, or use the service void all around the perimeter of the house, or something else. 4/ have the 20L/s MVHR extract in the loft rather than in the shaft, to keep the systems somewhat isolated (avoid risk of shaft purging reversing the MVHR flow) but still allow MVHR to contribute to moving this excess heat around. 5/ have an automatic opening roof window in the loft to stack purge the whole lot overnight in summer. Ideally this is coupled to another automatically opening window/door somewhere downstairs to maximise the stack vent effect. (An electric opener on a small fanlight window somewhere might do it. Ideally something hard for cats / burglars to get to) 6/ Think a bit about how FCUs can help if there's a genuine heat wave (>25ºC overnight for several days) and the loft is never getting cooled. By no means is that lot ^ a proclamation of how you should do it! Just working through my own thinking process on it.

Yes, I was mindful of the possibility that the VCL might well completely hide the consequences of any problem I might have with my flat roof - or at least make it more difficult to work out the source of any leak. With the former I could well imagine you might get years of ignorant bliss with such a situation!

You need 75mm for polished concrete. If you have this then let me know and I'll provide a lot more information to help you. For example you have to use a special type of glass aggregate. Regular glass will shatter during the grinding process.

Use 32mm plumbers pipe in between boxes and this will let you pass hdmi cables through.

Lol, pushed the dimensions out a bit ? unless you have gone way over or had a complaint I would be suprised if they check... Are the internal walls plasterboarded yet

where does the £1000 come from..? You can do it yourself, you just need to use the letter template from gov.uk and they reply with the response and job done. If they don’t agree it’s only then when you need surveyors etc

It's easy to do with a service void (remember to leave a length of twine between the two endpoints and don't let your tackers block the void with insulation if it's on an internal stud wall. Dot and dab plasterboard also onto a solid wall. Probably a bit tricker in a chased wall, you'd probably want actual ducting between the endpoints. Also remember to protect the ends of whatever cable (e.g. HDMI) that you choose to pull through.

I glued our engineered oak over the UFH, I hate floating floors, always sound hollow (IMO). it’s got to transfer heat better too.

Thank you Further updates: Today I bumped the day timperature to 23º. It was also a bit warmer outside so the flow temperature really didn't change much. The equipment did not cycle often (only 3 times in 8h), but the power consumption was always very low. Setpoint was at 23º, room temperature at 20,5º maximum. It seems clear that the compensation of room temperature is as I read it from the manual. I might get in touch with Vaillant to clarify this. In other news I temporarily set up home assistant in a virtual machine (I want to later move it to a rpi) and sucessfully integrated multimatic. It's really easy and I have have never worked with HA before. It's as slow as the app and fails as often to fetch values ? Unfortunately since I connected the buffer tank sensor I lost the flow temperature in the app, and it seems that in the integration as well. I need to check if there are further values which the API can fetch. And I would need to be able to change my energy meters from emoncms to HA. That will be a problem... While looking for information on how to do this I came across this video Managing heating in Home Assistant - part1 - YouTube In the first 5 minutes the author describes a heating behavior which is precisely like mine - but on a gas boiler. Outside temperature translated to flow temperature. So I guess I'm not alone in this...

While internal changes, not effecting the exterior, do not fall within the planning definition of "development" and as such do not require permission, they would be within their rights to ensure the habitable area of the building is as approved on the plans, even though there would be nothing stopping you converting after occupation, as long as there is no condition that says you must not, and it meets building regs. They may also wish to ensure that any internal changes have not effectively changed the building's Use, by making the building no longer fit for the Use it has planning permission for. More related to agricultural buildings. If they can't make those checks, I would assume they would refuse the S73 on the basis they've not been able to ascertain if you have honoured the approved drawings. But, if there's no staircase and it doesn't appear there is provision for one, then it can't be a habitable 1st floor. If there is a stair sized opening though, I would be inclined to board it up to a loft hatch sized opening, with no steps available to gain access.

Yup,cavity wall full fill usually with closed cell foam, new build or remedial. Walltite and Isothane are two brands. It's at least 4 times the price of EPS beads, can glue failed cavity walls together. Has been used to water proof walls in flood zones. If not done well can shrink and crack the walls. It has a mega GWP however so not a particularly environmentally good choice. On another note my uncle had his house done about 10years ago with open cell foam in the cavity which is not recommended AFAIK. Probably by one of these disappear into the mist type installers. However it's been quite successful. Much warmer house, less drafts and the condensation/mold is gone.

Often a nightmare between old and new floors, get it right and looks great, sadly too many try butt one up against the other and it shows through the floor finish. assuming it’s just minor level/s then a liquid compound over the whole floor will sort it. im assuming and hoping the two slabs are dowelled together to keep them aligned

Why don't the new and old floors match up? Presumably one of them isn't perfectly flat? (Hopefully the old!) If you do go down the self-levelling route then you it can go straight on the surfaces as-is as long as it's suitable for the maximum depth you required.

Good morning and welcome

Welcome . A glutton for punishment, I see. Yer in good company here then.....

@Jenki IMO, implicit to all this is that I have a passive class house in terms of U-values, air tightness, MVHR, etc. In this, inter-room or inter-zone heat transfer is an order of magnitude higher that interior to exterior transfer. I have what is called a warm slab -- that is the entire reinforced floor slab is within the insulated perimeter so my total thermal mass internal to the external insulation barrier (I did the sums once and reported these on a post somewhere) IIRC is equivalent to that of ~100 tonnes of concrete. If the heating fails, then the house as a whole cools at around 1°C per day. In my previous house we heated by room, with only a few rooms kept at a comfortable temperature. In our current house every room and touchable surface is essentially at the same temperature within a degree or so; zones make no sense in this new context. Our UFH, loops were laid into the slab by being tied to the rebar before pour. The layout avoided walls etc, but MBC advised that we keep the loops all the same length (and close to the 100m roll length). We could have just about fitted in 4 × 100 loops, but this was tight. As I only needed to pump a few kW into the entire floor, we spaced the runs out a little and dropped heating the utility room, so that we could make do with 3 loops (which when laid actually varied from 93 – 100m, IIRC). I trimmed the manifold valves by setting them to max and slightly closing them as need so that the temperature drop across all three zones when heating was the same. The Willis actually draws 2.88 kW, so an entire 7 hour heating budget works out at just over 20 kWh. 2 × Willis seemed like overkill at the time, as a single unit should have been enough to keep within cheap rate for maybe 95% of the year with our planned 20°C target, given our expected other waste heat. However as I said previously, we upped the heating set point for comfort ending up with an average some 2.8°C higher. BTW, pretty much all electricity used within the house ultimately cascades down a waste heat within the environment. In practice our new lighting, computers, and our other base electric load ended up being quite a bit more energy efficient in the new house, so this waste heat element was less than anticipated from previous use. The electric rad on the landing typically adds 8 kWh over night for a full 7 hour window. We have maybe 30 days a year where we need to top up over this 28kWh threshold, and end up using peak rate electricity. So yes, using a bigger resistive heater such as a 5kW inline or just 2 × Willis (as others have done) could have kept heating in the cheap rate window, but it just wasn't worth the hassle to make this change, as our current arrangement only adds maybe £10 - 15 to our annual electricity bill.

Well, it is the plant room...

We may need an translator ....

Omg! Excuse my poor English. … then again I am from Barnsley ?