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And I understand you're point of view, I really do. And you're right, if you are doing it daily, you should have every tool under the sun to maximise efficiency. As it's now common knowledge that I work for a professional outfit, I'll also say that we work with designers and manufacturers to create ever better tools and systems to increase our efficiency. So yes, we think about it a lot. 9pm Friday night and I'm talking tools 🤣🤷🏼‍♂️ Somewhere in the middle is where we meet. So, for £300(max), buy a 240v hot knife kit or hire one from the distributor and make full use of one of the best practicability benefits of a lot of EPS based ICFs. Save on batten, screws and time. Whichever way you do it, one way will take longer than the other. It simply has to. 30 % more screw time for a start. The issue, and I think to some extent what your opinion is based on, is that this level of information is not always given or available to the self builder other than through forums like this. Therefore, if anyone would like a video of one of our team setting up and using a hot knife to prep for electrics to show a)how it's done b)how little waste there is c) how long it takes to clean up and d) the order of tasks, drop me a message. I.e. let's share some best practices from people doing it regularly and those who have solved problems rather than the sales bumpf. And that's what I'm on this forum for. And if that comes across as patronising or anything other than just trying to help, I apologise.

On our last build We both worked 40 hours per week Spent two hours Monday to Thursday 12 hours Friday to Sunday All holidays including Boxing Day and still took two years to finish It will be a Lonnnnnng road unless you up your site time 😂

Evening all! I’m kind of half way through and plan to do most of the remaining work myself… maybe! By day I make polished concrete, by night I watch box sets and drink gin. On the weekends I get about half an hour to do construction!

As always Nick Spot on The preparation work on something like this is key The whole surface must have several coats of R10 K sealer Around £40 a tub So not cheap As already pointed out A fibre mesh should also be applied Then 10-15 mil of top coat Unfortunately It will all have to be knocked Sorry

Yeah great looking job @Nickfromwales I don’t need any thing quite so belt and braces as there’s just me and the missus so pretty unlikely we’d have both showers running at the same time. I assume 25mm main will be ok. I really like the idea of single runs to each tap, toilet etc with no joins to leak, and the 10mm pipes to low flow items makes sense.

Oh dear! That walls does not seem very sympathetic to directly covering with a thin coat render system. @nod ? ( he’s the in-house plaster god, so let’s see what he has to say ).

All the videos @FM2015talks about are readily available on YouTube, if people do the hunting. Anybody picking an icf product should have a good hunt on YouTube, if you cannot find it on there chances are not many people are using that product.

Yup. Seems Russian roulette out there tbh. There is more demand than satisfaction, now that the UK had opened its eyes to the better way to build eg fabric first. It used to be “kitchen first”, insulation if there’s money left over from buying the granite worktops 😐. I’ll admit when I first started plumbing the answer to a cold draughty house was bigger rads bigger boiler. . I’m a changed man lol.

@Gone West, @joe90 and myself could turn up at the film set and we could have a go. Think @BotusBuild has used ICF, depends if he is about.

When higher power LEDs started to become a 'thing', I, like many people that had had their cataracts replaced with shiny new acrylic lenses, found them quite painful. Now they put better coatings/filters/diffusers on them, they are not quite so bad. Been told the earlier ones were 'more blue lights' and considering most misted up lenses are caused by UV light, this group of people could be more susceptible to that part of the spectrum. The headaches brought on by excess brightness is because the iris is forced to contract more than is natural, and then we screw our eyelids up, in the best Wilfred Pickles impression we can. So muscle pain, not magic piskeys caused by EMR at special frequencies in the air. Over at the other place, there is an architect who claims, his wife claims, that she knows when he has the WiFi on in their office as she gets a headache. Having spent a couple of hours listening to him, and 3 con men, trying to convince themselves that both thier bio digestor and hydrogen fuel cell broke the known laws of physics, and PV could never pay back the embodied energy involved in its manufacture, I had a headache. Humans have always been bathed in EMFs, even when we sat around the campfire.

Welcome Seems about the right balance. If you spend half an hour a day, and it is productive, then you are way ahead of others. You could swap out the gin for Blue Sparkle.

Not on the Beko - it is a combined heater and pump unit. @AdamD they are £130 plus an engineer to fit so you would be cheaper buying a new dishwasher and run a fortnightly cleaner / descaler through it https://www.espares.co.uk/product/es1784148/dishwasher-heater-pump-motor

welcome to the forum, could i politely suggest you spend less time drinking gin and do perhaps an hour a weekend?

Will do when the time comes

On this one, a few of us have gone down a dissenting route and have been successful at it. I did the overall design for my house myself and spent a lot of time on the 3D visualisation to make sure that the internals worked as a whole. I then used a decent local architect technician to draw up the set of plans for planning submission, and put the money that I would have spent of architects fees into our TF and passive foundation by subcontracting a decent custom build TF passive house specialist firm (in our case MBC, though there are a few to choose from). I did all of the design validation myself. To be fair, I had recently retired when we started the build, so I could invest the time in doing the research and getting on top of all the issues. I do disagree with Mike on "PH experience doesn't matter". If you are going to invest in an architect's services then he or she should be competent to do what you require: although passive house design is any more difficult than classic UK build, IMO, it is just very different. For example, it is really hard achieving passive class performance with conventional foundations + beam and block floor + block and brick leaf walls. We used a warm slab (that is a floating reinforce slab with UFH in-slab on a structural EPS bed + twinwall TF with blown cellulosic filler: this technique achieves passive-class almost by design. Anyway have a browse of some of the blogs, and do your research. 😊

Thats exactly what we did to dial down the flow to our showers to a flow rate that would make the Water Calculations work... Promptly dialled back up again as the Building Control inspector waved goodbye after sign off (he never did check any flow rates though).

Nail pops - has the board been hit..?

Sorry this didn't post for some reason. Wet plaster and skim over the airtight paint.

@bassanclan I wasn't a plastic fan, but after reading @JSHarris's conclusions on EB I had no choice other than to realise that it's undeniably more practical in certain installations. Having a manifold gives you the non-localised isolation benefits, part commissioning, and much better flow to the outlets vs standard / series plumbing. If you wish to reduce the number of runs / manifold ports simply tee the WC's off the bath cold or basin cold and run 15mm instead of 10mm. Remember that wall hung / concealed WC's will already have built in localised isolation so it's just down to having hidden T's etc where you can't get to them afterwards. Fwiw, if I were plumbing my own house from scratch I would 100% deffo be doing 'point to point' continuous runs of Hepworth plastic for a ( hidden ) joint free installation. It's a no brainer tbh, and even though I'm currently plumbing two 2 bed flats completely in copper as we speak, ( standard series plumbing so push fit joints are a no go due to size / practicality / cost ), I'd still convert when the job dictated it. With posi-joists it's just like pulling electrical cable in, and you could DIY first fix a large property, with a labourer to help handle the coils, in a few days. It also removes the risk of hot works which is a huge worry in a TF house. Have a sit down and reconsider your position with the copper, and that's coming from a die-hard copper fan. .

Which year was it that the challenge to become a SI unit pedant? We certainly noticed that one 😆

Jealous, I would do the same if I didn’t have a SWMBO to motivate me 😬