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Mine is 1.2m wide by 3.7m long and it’s a bit tight. My batteries will be in the garage. I stole 400mm of the width to make the hallway wider. It houses MVHR up one end, data cabinet, CU, home automation panel, water distribution manifold, UFH manifold, HWC plus space to hang coats, dog leads, keys. You need to draw everything to scale and plan out exactly where it’s all going to go including pipe runs. I could easily have screwed my layout up by not doing that it’s so tight.

With my build I had a plant room cupboard in the back of the cloakroom. Frankly you need to draw it out on paper to scale against the wall to see if your “kit” will fit. With the “cupboard “ I did I didn’t need to have “standing room” and double doors to access everything (I even had a washing machine in there.)

Usually loose terminals. There will be a lot of current through that for 7 hours a night for half the year. One of the reasons a regular EICR is a good idea, that would likely have been spotted before it actually failed like that. When I did a CU replacement for a house with that sort of big central storage heater, I specified an over size board, so the 50A rcbo for the big heater, could have a vacant space either side of it to aid cooling.

I've been looking at some EPCs on older houses and reminded what a load of nonsense these are. For 11 flats in the same very pretty church conversion: (1) All electrically heated, thick brick walls, and no obvious differences - the EPCs range from F to C. (2) For the C, the assessor assumed the wall, roof and floor were insulated. Unfortunately, that's not actually true, but doesn't stop the estate agent advertising it as 'C'. (3) I see for some of these assessments 'Boiler and radiators, electric' scores 'Very Poor', for some, the same scores 'Average'. Maybe something to do with when the EPC was done? OK a pretty Georgian house this time, 1870s maybe, no insulation to speak of, single glazed etc: (1) EPC E, fine. (2) 'Could be' EPC C if you insulate floor, walls, roof, replace boiler, double glaze windows. £250K maybe? And it's in a conservation area, so extra insulation either extremely difficult or impossible. Yeah, a rant.

your picture shows brick work is this covered with cladding ? if so then 2 concrete ones will do as the edge of them will not be seen or if totally internal then concrete will do

So glad you got it sorted, and a shame the first electrician turned out to be no good. At least you can carry on with the heating you have for the short term and have longer to plan a longer term replacement. Keep the details of today's electrician, now you have found one that knows what he is doing.

I suppose it depends upon what you are building e.g. airtight, passive standards and what you are having in the plant room, we have MVHR, UVC, ASHP Controllers, HW Recirculation, Data Cabinet, Battery, Inverter, Solar Diverter, Core Distribution Boards, Shelly Controllers for automation. So hence it's part of our Thermal and Airtightness Envelope. We also dry clothes in ours , as its the warmest room in the house! If its part of your thermal / airtight envelope, you'll need a good airtight door, if it's not part of the thermal envelope then you'll need to consider the insulation of pipework and MVHR ducts (if using), and also then the sealing of penetrations between the Plant Room and House.

If you do not want the lintel to show on outside brickwork then you use a "catnic" lintel and conctrete one for inside https://catnic.com/products/lintels there are many suppliers but this will show you how they fit and work

Two concrete lintels.

Why not get what you can from the government schemes with regard loft insulation, whilst your parent(s) are living there? They may even qualify for free solar panels if there is enough allowance left.

This is good advice. I terminated everything at a patch panel, but several locations just have a coiled up network cable in a backbox, covered with a blank plate.

Looks like 60A, which is odd. Do they put stickers on the other isolator switches, showing maximum amps, when the other phases are connected up.

I’ve enabled the sensor stats for all the Loxone switches around the house so will remember to update this thread with some graphs when I have the data. It’s been very humid here in Perthshire these last few weeks. The Zehnder MVHR unit recorded the external humidity at 97% yesterday which makes for beautiful misty mornings. So much so it prompted the unit to temporarily run in boost mode (I assume as we weren’t cooking or using the showers) The nominal internal humidity is sitting around 50%. However what has surprised me is how different some of the rooms are. Some of this is driven by a slight difference in temperature (1°C between the rooms in the north elevation compared to the south elevation) One room (study) has been much higher at 58% than the other rooms so much so I thought we might have a problem as it backs onto the downstairs bathroom and most of the pipework runs across the ceiling. However there’s no correlation between showering and the humidity levels and my moisture meter wasn’t indicating anything. What it turned out to be down to was all the pictures we were storing in this room. They all have wooden frames and were being stored in a room in the rental that was unheated and was a bit damp. A combination of that, it being slightly colder in this room, and my wife wfh in it. Plus there still might be a bit of construction moisture in the building as it’s only be fully closed up for 11 months.

Pro Clima Solido SL tape with the wall sprayed with SPrimer before taping. Not cheap, but excellent stuff.

After some consideration, we have decided to part company with the architect who did the initial sketches. My wife and I need to get this right, and we need an architect who specialises in modernist design, but who can also do some good 3d drawings of how the property will sit on the plot, and how it will look from the lane. These will hopefully enable the locals, the Parish Council and the planners to visualise that a modernist home will look good and actually enhance the lane.

I have just taken out the glycol on my system and now using VDI2035 (straight water with testing). Without any other changes the water flow rate jumped from 1m³/h to 1.3m³/h. So glycol slows the system right down.

Terminate everything at a patch panel. Then workout how many need to be POE. Eg cameras, access points, non POE may include TV, computer, printer, hue bridge etc etc. buy a switch with the correct number of ports (POE and Non POE). (I’m a Ubiquiti fan but others available). Get patch leads and connect from the Patch Panel to the switch. Connect a cable from your router to the switch, disable router wifi and you’re sorted. btw. Suggest you get a little data cabinet keeps everything clean and tidy.

Encounter this nearly everyday at work. lintel is more than likely right up against back of the block. Chop a slight chamfer at the back of the block where it meets the back/bottom of lintel. Add more compo to the front than the back so it’s not squeezing up behind the block and pushing it out. Place blocks dry across the cavity from front to back to hold the front in place until they go off. With the weight holding them in place you can knock the tops back to the line and leave until set. The thicker the DPC the more you have to chamfer the back of the block. On paper it’s a wonderful thing but using hyload DPC with a tight lintel is a pain.

Really pleased with how this detail ended up!

Au contraire. You lack the vision and creativity of an architect. Imagine how impressed your friends will be to ascend half a staircase then clamber over a banister to finish the climb. No one else will have a feature like it. 😉

Sleeve it with a slightly smaller diameter pipe.

Hi @TheMitchells No matter what you do, increase the loft insulation to 300mm where you can. Ditto. And yet they say they will do them after..... If you are going to increase airtightness I assume you are going to use or have trickle vents in the windows. I think this will assume that 1/3 of the volume of the air in the building per hour will be replaced by outside air and therefore in winter produce a calculable heat loss. Pipework from the outside ASHP would be better run inside the thermal envelope of the building unless wrapped in a layer of 300mm loft insulation. Can you mark the position of proposed outside unit on the plan? I see you need a hot water tank. Will you need a buffer tank as you have underfloor heating and radiators? Where are they proposing to put the underfloor heating manifolds? Good luck Marvin

How did the damage happen? Wet vac to suck water out, and I'd be tempted to do as you say. It's a slight niche vs replacement, but as long as done carefully and checked before dealing over.... Its just a drain.

Plastic nut caps. We just print them as we need them now: Ready made caps:

Sorry, does not pass muster. Way too much maintenance polishing that bell. I presume that’s one of these modern ‘Ring’ doorbells everyone is talking about. 😉

Sorry to lower the tone but down at our end of town we won’t have a plant room, we will have a rather forward thinking plant encapsulation system (a.k.a. a little cupboard at the end of the garage). We’ve streamlined our data centre, patch panel and comms distribution system, it’s now called a Wi-Fi router. We’ve also recalibrated our multi functional audio-visual experience system and using the latest 2018 technologies we’ve managed to cover all the current state of the art functions with a smart tv and sound bar. Oh and we’ll have one of those new fangled DAB radios too. We’ve pushed the home automation system boat out massively in that we will have a couple of hive bulbs so some lights come on when we are away in our campervan. Through dedicated use of exactly what we do already we won’t have any cat anything cables or PoE either so we will save a few bob too. We will however, most importantly, have a whizzy coffee maker. But not in the plant suite.

Pretty useless inspection, if he doesn't know the details of what he is there to inspect.

As it happens I had a Building Inspector here today to look at my recent HP installation. There are also (wireless Honeywell) TRVs on all radiators in habitable rooms. I asked if they were still required on a heat pump system, but he didn't know and said he would find out in order to satisfy his curiosity and mine.

like it, bet the planners will spill their vente oatmeel lattes when they see it though.