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Yes we had a discussion about that too. We used their measuring tape which was indeed metal. The kit has a 10mm tolerance (not sure what the regs say 20mm?) The kit erection company were grateful we’d not fitted the manhole covers etc. Generally people don’t think to leave them out at this stage and they do get damaged as you say. The groundswork company need to come back and install the PTP plant later anyway so all that can be done then and when the scaffolding is down. We also had a debate about the cold spots at the internal door thresholds between the two sections of the house. In the end we built the wall continuously, they’ll fit the kit and I’ll cut the blocks out under the doors.

Fun and games with all the rain slowing us down a little so have got hardcore down all around to make site easier to work on. Meeting with timber kit company was interesting. The purpose of the meeting was to check the foundation ahead of the kit manufacture and delivery next month plus access, and delivery details. We had to talk them in to actually measuring it because it ‘looked fine’ We’ve already measured and it matches the drawings (2mm out in one dimension and 3mm out in the other, no diagonal on the drawing but it’s all square) but I wanted the kit manufacturer to satisfy themselves it was fine otherwise why bother coming out. It’s also in their contract. Eventually they did it. This week we’re finishing off preparations for the slab pour on Friday for house. We’ve delayed the garage slab pour until next week. Drainage is all in and capped off. I said not to put the inspection chambers and manhole covers in place until after the kit is up in case they ran over them in the telehandler so we’ve banged some posts in for now. I now have all the trades lined up to hit the ground running as soon as the kit is up. The plan being to go as fast as we can so that we’re more or less complete by October.

Mine are all screwed into upvc soffit👍 May have gotten lucky and hit a timber with at least one screw. I had to drill something like a 30mm hole for the cables and balm connectors which is enough to feed a wooden packer through for your screws to fasten into. Or, what about plasplug hollow fixings or caravan cavity fixings?

C2H5OH + 3O2 → 2CO2 + 3H2O 1 more water molecule than methane. 1 less than propane. If you really want to cause damage, burn butane. Twice as much CO2 and 2.5 time more water.

I'm not sure about this logic. MVHR will not equalise temperatures within a house, because flow rates are too low. It might make warmer parts of the house, a little cooler, I estimate 0.5C or so cooler, and colder parts of the house a little warmer, I estimate 0.5C warmer, but it's unlikely to move the needle much beyond that unless you ran the ventilation rates on max all day, and nobody would do that because it would be noisy. Ultimately the purpose of MVHR is to constantly ventilate a house with fresh filtered air, without losing the heat that is already in the house to the outside. So air of varying temperatures is extracted (say 22C plus from bathrooms and kitchens) and that heat is transferred onto the incoming air which gets distributed to the rest of the house, but not in sufficient volumes to really increase the temp by much more than 0.5C or so.

I guess the conventional way is spray foam or pack with insulation and then make good the surface? For an airtight seal - expanding foam tape or sealing tape plus membrane?

From what I understand the water vapour given off is minimal, it's not like it is enough to condense or anything.

This is the you tube vid about guys deliberately boxing in a heat pump and watching the air flow with a smoke candle.

The point is that you will not feel it once 1.5 m away. You could go out and find one that is running and see what it is like. At the college I was at, they had some huge units to heat and cool the library. We all used to stand by them and smoke. I can't remember every feeling a breeze from one of them, unless I put my hand by the grill.

Love 'em! We've got 4 in the house and they are great on those cold nights when you want to feel cosy in front of a fire! 3 of the ones have a slider on the fore box and this lets you control the burn down - usually we let it go ful for ten mins then bring the flame down and it'll burn a liters for many hours. Also handy for emergencies as we are 100% electric, but haven't had to use in this situation yet. Our original plans were for WBS but these are much better. I posted pics on another thread somewhere a few years ago.

I suspect you’re asking about a built in fire? We have a small portable 2kW one. It sits on the coffee table during the winter months and gets put away in a cupboard for the rest of the year. It’s been lit probably half a dozen times in 18 months and we let it burn for 20-30 mins. It satisfies the urge to see real flame and bumps the room temperature up a notch two. It does exactly what a small electric fan heater would do but it cost more money however you do get more flames!

I bought the electric fire, designed what I wanted, purchased all the decorative elements , handed all to builder, carefully and clearly illustrated what I wanted using photos and tasked our builder and plasterer with creating it. Will Pm an image. Fireplace companies are only happy to advise what you need ..decorative surrounds did not seem to be within their remit.

It was at the time Kingspan had a little forray into the market and had re badged the Misubishi Lossnay units. They had abandoned that idea and the Kingspan units were coming up on ebay. I think i paid £400 for the unit and £100 to get it delivered.

Double plasterboard all the way. Cheap as chips and will sound better. Kitchens use hanging rails for units and mount to studs. Also with glue. 9 mm OSB is only useful as a "washer" for better spreading load from plasterboard fixings. Useful but not with the hassle.

Having looked at the floor plans and for that size of a building and making a stab at the extent of the works required I still think the fees were far too high. While I appreciate that restoration works tend to be more labour intensive for everyone including your architect I would have expected 10% to include a complete design team (if one was needed) including a QS for the complete duration of the project. Having looked at the cost breakdown there are quite a few Provisional Sums which make me wonder how detailed the drawings are and how much information the materials specifications actually have. I would love to see the drawings if you are minded to post them - I’d love to see what a set of drawings that cost £50k actually look like. As an architect I pride myself in making sure everything is specified to within an inch of its life before a QS gets anywhere near it. I really think that having so many Provisional Sums in a cost estimate is really a cop out and looks like someone throwing costs at a project and covering their back side. For what it’s worth I would take a deep breath, circle the wagons and look at getting some advice from another architect and/or QS. A second opinion as it were.

Either way use stainless steel screws.

If it's a decent 10mm soffit you can use self tapping screws so a very small hole, shallow, is needed just to start the screw and select the length so it does not come through. You need not worry as if there is water up there you have much bigger problems.

Yeah ours was just shy of £1500 all-in. Took a fair bit of shopping around, bit of good fortune/timing for picking up the unit cheap and again all DIYed but I had the time (and inclination - tight Northener here!) to take such an approach. I can see costs being much higher for paid services, single sourcing and of course much bigger houses.

I find that a staggering cost. My mvhr unit was about £500 and all the ducting about £1000 all DIY fitted. Even allowing for doubling due to inflation I don't see where £10K comes from.

I'd say pragmatic rather than downbeat. Midnight with a glass of wine brings out the inner feelings. The wallet thing is key. Most people will buy what they want, if it is cheap enough, and it will be from China. If wool insulation was the same cost as glass insulation then we woild use it as standard. Farmers lose money each fleece so they are very very cheap. A reborn wool marketing board could turn this around. If nothing burnable was buried or exported, but used for power then clay bricks could replace concrete and eps. And 100% recycling plastic into whatever. Subsidised house improvements will quickly repay the investment. And so on. Put Gus in charge and i will help, and it could all be sorted....BUT would the government allow big oil and other cosy relationships to suffer? Most of all perhaps, who in govermnent would understand anything slightly technical...a different mindset.

The guys have taken full advantage of the good weather. Foundations dug, poured, and initial blockwork up. Will be finished tomorrow. Garage foundation will be dug out tomorrow and all the trenches for the ductwork. The cold weather might put the brakes on the slab pour until next week. We have a retaining wall to dig out. We don’t really need to do it as we can grade the ground but it’s not huge and we think it will look better. Plan is to build it in block then clad it to match the house.

I’ve had a few fitting like this where the supplier even suggests doing this . I tried it once and with enough force could pull the fitting apart . So when the destructions state olive compression fitting onto Hep2o pipe - I just purchase a threaded hep20 fitting otherwise I won’t sleep at night .

2002 should have been under the BRegs radar, yes, but assume at your peril! I’ve done exactly as you’re doing for a client who did not want to pay for excavations / removals / new concrete. Apart from the losses of a possibly non / not very well insulated slab, it worked quite well. That section ( about 20m2 in that instance ) just took a bit longer to heat up than the new extended area. The advice will always be not to router them in to your floor, but in absolute real world honesty, and if you can accept a bit higher running costs, you can carry on and do this if it saves you a chunk of cash. Not ideal, but sometimes life isn’t ideal, so go make the best lemonade you can out of your wonky lemon lol.

So you use a 22mm elbow and shove one of those in and you now have 15mm https://www.screwfix.com/p/hep2o-plastic-push-fit-stem-coupler-f-15mm-x-m-22mm/8401f Or you use a 3/4 to 15mm Titan and then use one of these. https://www.screwfix.com/p/hep2o-plastic-push-fit-equal-90-stem-elbow-15mm/8137f The straight bit goes where the pipe normally goes in a standard connector ..??

I spent a lot of time modelling the design of our house, and then measuring its performance, both when setting systems up, and through life with embedded sensors that are logged every 6 minutes and the data stored for later analysis. In terms of energy saving alone, our MVHR reduces our heating requirement by a significant amount, enough on its own to justify the expenditure. First, a look at the house heat loss, versus the difference between the inside and outside temperature, when not fitted with MVHR, but with the level of trickle ventilation/extraction required by building regulations: Note the blue line, which is the proportion of total heat loss attributable to the required level of ventilation to ensure that the house remains comfortable and damp free. Next, plotted to the same scale, the house as built with the MVHR system we installed. All other parameters are exactly as in the plot above, the only difference is the use of MVHR, rather than trickle vents, extraction fans, etc: Note that the ventilation heat loss is very significantly reduced, as is the total heat loss. In simple terms, at a differential temperature of 15 deg C between indoors and outdoors, the house needs about 45% less heating than if it did not have MVHR. That is, in my view, a massively significant benefit, nearly halving the heating requirement, just from fitting MVHR, and is, alone, enough to justify fitting it. Perhaps the most important benefit, though, is the one that everyone who visits our house notices almost immediately they walk in the door, and one that @NSS has made a very powerful argument for, the improvement in air quality. Having a house that is always fresh, has no residual odours from cooking etc, is free from pollen (that alone is a godsend for anyone who suffers from hay fever) and which results in bathrooms staying condensation free, with damp towels etc drying very quickly is probably as great a benefit as the saving in heating cost, and in my view probably worth fitting MVHR for on its own. However, there are many, many, examples of poor MVHR systems, either by poor design, poor installation, or a combination of both. There's also the fact that some people are persuaded to fit MVHR to houses that simply will not benefit from it, because they have an inadequate level of airtightness to allow MVHR to work effectively. Very few houses in the UK are built to an airtightness standard that will allow MVHR to work well, as even the current building regulations level of airtightness is inadequate for MVHR, and mass housebuilders struggle to even get houses to meet that requirement. There's little hope that a house built ten or twenty years ago could be made adequately airtight to allow MVHR to work efficiently, without a great deal of major improvement work to the core fabric of the house. I tried to improve the airtightness of our old 1980's built bungalow, and spent weeks air testing and going around sealing up every gap I found. Despite my best endeavours it still ended up at least 20 times more leaky than our current house. The main problem was that houses need to be designed to be airtight, it is pretty damned hard to try and bodge them to some level of airtightness when their basic structure was never intended to be free from many thousands of small air leaks.

The school my son went to had a strict "no coats or jackets inside" policy. Teachers would stand at the door from the outside making children take their coats off before they entered, even though the halls weren't that much warmer than outside. Even during Covid when it was cold and they had the windows open, a couple of miserable fvckers still refused to allow coats or even an additional jumper inside. Of course, the teachers doing this were were standing at the front of the class in a puffy coat over a thick jumper. In one class when the weather was particularly cold there was nearly a riot - some of the kids were shivering and a couple had blue lips. It took a surprising amount of parental backlash to get the school to relent even temporarily.

There's your drainage report. AVOID. Or immerse yourself in the depths of the most dysfunctional sector of the building industry. Everyone is an expert on your dollar.