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So a quick recap - back in December 2023, what may be my last ever employer decided to ask me to leave. I had mixed feelings about this. I took several weeks to think about next steps and actually get around to writing a father of the bride speech which I'd been putting off. After the wedding in March (a great day and a great speech!) I started to look more seriously for a new job, but being the wrong side of 60 now, the IT industry is not a good place to be looking especially when so many other people have been let go as well. Coming up to the end of May, we sat down and took some tough decisions; we bought a static van on a site about 3 miles from the plot, I stopped looking for a new job, SWMBO did an internal job transfer, we rented out our current house (instead of our original plan to sell up) to three newly qualified doctors (our niece and two others on their first F1 rotations in our local hospital so that worked out well), and we spent 6 weeks decluttering, and moved down SE Cornwall (Kernow) at the end of July. In the last blog entry I ended with a list: Finish ventilation system Finish insulating the GWW Finish backfilling Electrics Floors Walls ASHP and HWC Kitchen Bathrooms The remaining plumbing Outer wall coverings This is how it looks today Finish ventilation system Finish insulating the GWW (Great West Wall) Finish backfilling (on the back burner) Electrics (first fix) Floors (now on the back burner) Walls (En suite partition walls to be done) ASHP and HWC (being done in January) Kitchen (planned for January or February) Bathrooms (temporary loo and basin installed, cold water only, temp bathroom planned for January) The remaining plumbing Outer wall coverings (rendering done, stone cladding starting next week) What I missed off the list, and has taken most of our time: Sound insulation (R35 rockwool and resilient bars) Plasterboarding So a few photos are required I think: MVHR unit in place (since removed as plant room walls have been put in and waiting to be plastered inside) Ventilation distribution boxes and pipes fitted: Plaster board arrived (in May): My cold water manifold has pipes attached for the first time (one now being used for the temporary toilet and basin), no picture of it but just to the right is the hot water equivalent: We powered up the sewage treatment plant for the first time (nearly 4 years after it was first installed!): We started plasterboarding, first a large room into which we moved all our stuff that was in storage so saving a hefty wedge per month on storage fees, and then the much larger and more complex open living area: We took some time off in early October and went sailing for a week, and when we got back some kind fellows had installed some scaffold (first time on this build), and in the following few weeks we had the renderers in thanks to the Kernow weather gods: Meanwhile back inside, we finished plasterboarding the large living area, and during this last week the plastering started (kitchen area first!). We set off a couple of insect smoke bombs as we had a cluster fly infestation and wanted rid before plastering started 🙂 : Dare I add a what's next list 🙂 ? Well, here goes .... Plastering finished in the open plan area this coming week (by others) Remainder of stone cladding arrives and work begins to get the most inaccessible (high) parts put up before the scaffold gets taken away - this means cladding two 7m x 2m wide walls Plumbing pipework ready for ASHP installation Gabion basket and pad for ASHP to be installed on Mist coat and first coat on plaster (SWMBO is at the ready) Begin fitting upstairs UFH Front door being fitted (January) by others Take 3-4 days off for Xmas ASHP installation (January) by others, that will allow for hot water and the downstairs UFH to be available ... Fit a temporary bathroom ... Fit out utility room as temp kitchen ... ... and this is why - Move out of static van for the month of February (rules is rules!) and decamp to the house Well, I'll let you know how it all goes 🙂

Hi all Early 30s and just bought a 1970s mid terrace build which I’m looking to gut and renovate. Look forward to sharing my story and learning from you all.

When i remove existing window boards as a carpenter. I do 2 cuts in the centre to create a V shape narrow point at the window. I then carefully slide a handsaw under the window board an try to cut the adhesive, then with a sharp knife cut any sealant around the top of the board. Then use an old saw and lay it flat on the board and cut the plaster to give a few mm tolerance. You can then carefully and slowly wiggle the 2 halves free. In your case depending on when the window board was fitted ie before or after the reveals were boarded? will depend on how big a V you cut in the centre. To help minimise any damage. Cut 2 pieces of timber for the reveals and use a batten between the 2 on either side to stop the reveals from being pulled off with the window board.

If you have the time, once you've cut the pb out for the dry lining box then paint the cut edge with PVA and let it dry. It really does hold it all together and "harden" the exposed edge for the future. I use my multi tool now rather than a pad saw as an aside.

There are many ways to install UFH. My preferred method is 25mm battens UFH pipes between and fill with pug mix. Your finished floor goes over the the top which you would have any way. But it is irrelevant in a new build, you plan for it and design the building according to what method you propose. Not wanting to add to the floor thickness in a new build is a weak excuse for not fitting UFH.

Usually all these cheap Chinese brands don’t tend to last very long or perform especially well . I had a reolink camera fail in warranty . Expecting the usual poor customer service I was very surprised. No issues - received replacement. The video doorbell out of warranty has issues I’ve been trying to sort with them . Eventually they offered up a replacement! Considering it’s well out of the warranty period I was really surprised. So for once - reporting good customer service and warranty!

Sometimes life throws the reset switch and gives you the space to re-evaluate and go again; well done for embracing it! Great progress on the house; love the manifold!

If only. EDF who I am with, estimate the amount based on average usage. Trouble is that it is not my average usage, but national average for a house that uses E7, so about 3 times what I use. I refuse to set up a direct debit with them as they once tried to bill me £2500, when that was refused by my bank because I did not have enough money in my account, they tried to bill me £1999, that was refused as well, then they tried £999 (refused). The amount owed was about £60, but I got left with £90 bank charges, which Santander refused to refund, and EDF said it was not their problem. I cancelled my direct debit and went to quarterly postal billing by cash/cheque , which is not available any more. This got changed to monetary billing, without any notification or warning. These energy companies just do what they like, and getting a proper resolution is time consuming and exhausting. Swapping provider, when you are a very low user, is not worth the effort.

As a way of illustration, this is our house with MVHR and our insulated summer house. The summer house has a single dMEV fan and it's heated, but temp is allowed to move about much more than the house. As you will see both building follow each other quite closely. The graph is year to date. Only time you have elevated humidity is in the summer, but it's hot not an issue.

I am not sure companies can charge anything they want against the variable direct debit, just the electric you have used. Surely this is better than paying too high a dd and building up a credit that you then struggle to get back? There is some noise about poor service but I think a lot of this is due to growing too quickly. They have been around a while and also rebranded a number of times over the years but I understand this is the first time they have entered the domestic market. They are certainly disrupting things, isn't this a good thing. My feeling is that Octopus has got a little comfortable of late. My other gripe with Octopus is that you need to have an EV to leverage the cheap overnight rates. I have 30 kWh battery storage so in a week probably use as much if not more than the average EV driver but yet I can't get a cheap tariff with them. With Tomato Energy ( and EON Next ) you can. I am just about to pull the trigger, will keep you all posted.

My door bell works perfectly, it has never failed to work, it has never needed a software update, it has never frozen, if does not need any setup or configuring. The bell connects to the button with 2 very fine wires build in at first fix wiring stage. WHY do people choose to make things complicated?

do what all the young ones do at my place. Get to the door then send a text.

Get in contact with a Local Councillor, ask for it to be called in and determined at Committee. The meetings are usually held monthly, but it may now end up in the January meeting.

I’ve found the Loxone system to be very reliable. It’s mostly wired for a start so that helps. Most of the issues I had early on were down to me and how I’d configured it which are all sorted now. I did have a very frustrating problem with the Audioserver and network connectivity that was a combination of a configuration problem with the Audioserver and some odd behaviour on my network. Both fixed now.

I had that problem plus it not detecting you’d left the room. For me these things need to work or not with very little to no buggering about. It’s fine if it’s a hobby and the people that live with you accept it. I have neither of those 😂

Looking dead good ! Redundancy feels like a kick in the teeth at first . But as you have found out - it can be taken as a positive sign . Onwards and upwards ! 👍

They’ve got failed supplier written all over them so another SoLR waiting in the wings and more costs added to consumers in the long run. No thanks.

The Aqara FP2 Zone sensors are very flexible and really move presence on. However I found it to be too unreliable and needing too much intervention to keep working reliably. But this was just after it was released and I was just playing with it and Home Assistant while I was deciding whether to do HA at all and which to use. I like Home Assistant because it’s so open and works with just about everything plus I was familiar with it but I felt it would end up being a bit lashed together with a mish mash of devices making it even harder for anyone other than me to deal with it.

Appeal

Looks fine Nice job

Open plan rooms with multiple lighting circuits are harder to control that way though. I’ve set it up with different automations light night mode that just switches on one row of dimmed downlights, or if we come home it’s all the downlights plus a few other automations. I don’t want to be controlling the house from an app as that’s hopeless for the other folk that live in the house that aren’t interested or when you have visitors plus I don’t carry my phone with me constantly. If I ever find myself needing to use an app to change something I try and figure out a way to automate it. Voice control isn’t nearly good enough yet and generally no one else in the house uses it (in my experience anyway) We have a lot of visitors/house sitters to stay and that switch allows them to control the main lights without needing a manual or instruction. I also don’t want any reliance on cloud services. The main issue I’ve found is making it easy for other folk in the house. It’s fine for me as I know how it all works.

Oh my word my worst nightmare!

They're not a replacement for the backbox or dry-lining box - they go over the top to make plastering easier and, when then cut out, the hole left much cleaner. See https://www.beadmaster.co.uk/ and you'll quickly get the idea. £1.50ish for a single gang and £2.20ish for a double with further discounts in bulk. They also do a downlight version now.

Me too but it is dear like any of the dedicated systems and arguably not worth it if it’s just lighting you are controlling. My favourite part of the lighting is this switch that controls the whole open plan area and its many lighting circuits. You can also tap through all the various moods as there are several of those.

Out of interest, I've done this with lots of combos. I think A2A and solar PV plus divert is probably the cheapest lifetime install for a building that is well enough insulated not to need central heating.

Fine to do that with the cold. Don't do it with the hot circulation route. You need the circulation route within a couple of feet from the tap. Our main bathrooms are within 2ft and it works perfectly... Our kitchen is a out 10ft and the hot water arrives by the time you've finished washing your hands. Still a great decision though, as without it we'd be 30m + away.

If there are coliform bacteria present I would also worry about possible cryptosporidium from animal faeces, this has cost SWW a shed load of money this summer in an area near me.

Contractor should have registered them with relevant utility authority - as laids they are called. So one for electric, one for gas, one for telecoms, one for water etc.

Are there better ways of storing curtailment energy than as H2. H2 being produced from "waste"elec is not too bad for high value uses. But we still have other options for waste elec eg battery storage, cheap vehicle charging, thermal storage for domestic heating. We were speaking about hybrid Heatpumps being a misdirected bytgr FF industry to slow rollout of heat pumps. There may be some truth to that, but H2 domestic heat is the ultimate expression of that.

The absolute worst thing you could do with green hydrogen (if you had any spare) is pipecit into people's homes and burn it to keep them warm. Green H2 has it's place but that should only be for processes where it is absolutely irreplaceable chemically

Thanks for all the input so far. I am most definitely not bothering with a wet system for such a small house. I have one in my home and personally I am not a huge fan of the air source system. It is not cheap to run, makes a lot of noise, has a lot of maintenance issues. I have no problem with wet UFH per se, mine is in 60mm of screed and I do know there are some great products put there like Omnie boards which mean that I can reduce build up considerably. Where I am building I have a lack of talented plumbers and IR is definitely my preferred method. I have used it on walls and ceilings before and there are products out there claiming to work well underfloor. I have visited a small home office with it under tiling and was amazed at how warm the floor was. Here are some of the products I have been looking at... https://infraredheatinguk.co.uk/products/underfloor-infrared-heating-film?srsltid=AfmBOoqDTYy_k1oyFWbMfDjZfcJSu764oA8NYTRRI_y2Qoi0sz-kb72C https://termofol.co.uk/product/heating-film-complete-kit-140wm2/ And some "sponsored" information! https://www.theecoexperts.co.uk/infrared-heating/infrared-underfloor-heating

I don't think infrared underfloor heating makes any sense whatsoever. If you could bury an IR emitter under the screed then all the IR would surely be absorbed in that screed so there would be no difference to conventional electrical underfloor heating. Unless you are telling me that can get special screed that is transparent in the infra-red? And then special IR-transparent carpet or tiles top of on top of that. Nonsensical.

We had a joint supply, firstly to us then to the neighbours. joint supply is no longer a done thing and Western Power are keen to remove them. Admittedly the supply originated from the public highway but I paid around £800.00 for the supply to be separated. Looking at yours it would be a simple removal and reconnection down the pole to underground service. HTH

Really, there is nothing special about a person when to comes to thermodynamics. That is better. It is an inverse square law, so double the distance from the heat source, you half the power transfer, why people crowd around a fire. Then there is the angle each direct beam of IR hits the object, at 30° half the energy goes somewhere else, and then gets worse as the angle increases. There is also the physiology of humans. We breath in air. If we breath in cold air, we have to raise the core body temperature by some other method, i.e. moving about. We also have a relatively small surface area (couple m2), which we then cover in clothing, to stop heat transfer. Don't believe the claims about Far Infrared, they don't really 'penetrate' the skin much, thankfully. Microwaves, which are the next longest named range of the electromagnetic spectrum, don't really cook from the 'inside', ask any chef. @NMarshall If I every see, or hear about some novel technology that is based on simple principles, I always ask myself 'why is it not used by everyone'.

Where will you be running your ducting? Mine is in cold loft, but heavily insulated so it loses a bit more temp on its way to the terminals. When it was like -3C the other week, internal temp was showing as 21.2C (extract) and the supply temp was at 19.4C, with a Vortice HR200BP unit, not sure what its rated at efficiency wise but it'll be less than the Zehnder. By time it gets to terminals its down to around 15C on a very cold day like above, i'm hoping to improve on that and have got a thermal camera to check everything, just not had time to do it yet

We have a long thin house and from UVC to shower is about 15m. It's run to an intermediate manifold about 7.5m each way (UVC - manifold - shower) running the shower tonight with HWC pump off (for 12 hrs) it took just over the time to take my clothes off to be hot. 15mm pipe everywhere. Sorry you have had way too much time thinking. Simplify, one hot manifold, one cold, you only need one feed to each room then branch from there. Keep 22mm well away from hot water supplies other you will get bored waiting for hot water. We have HWC it goes to the furthest room and through the manifold back to the cylinder. Run it on timer and thermostat.

All your cables for power have to be run in what is called a safe zone, your electrician will sort this out, it’s probably ideal to keep data cables in the same safe zone as it tries to prevent any numpty drilling or screwing through them. you can run your cables from the consumer unit across the first floor ceiling / floor then they can drop down to the room below or go up to the rooms above. all you need to worry about at foundation level is making sure you have provided a route into and out of the property for all services in and out.

It can work well to create a service void in the walls with vertical battens, so you can route cables and smaller pipes. You can also run these in the ceilings or create a service void there too. Network cables are very simple to run. More difficult services are soil pipes and ventilation ducting.

I wasn’t either but a few hours reading on here and googling and I’m sold on the idea. We are building them in so they will be almost invisible (apart from a couple of grills). They connect to the flow and return of your wet UFH and they have a controller and, optionally a drain which I will be doing. The drain is for condensate if you run em cooler than the dew point, but we’re hoping we can run one zone UFH plus fancoils at a cool enough temperature to help cool the place but not enough to cause loads of condensation. So I think they’ll sit there with their guts at the same temp as the UFH and when more heat or cold is needed in that bedroom then the fan kicks in. That must mean a stat and controller just for them.

would the two capped-off valves that just need a flexi fitted between them not be a good start?

BEFORE you depressurise it to fix the leak, you DO have the fill loop needed to re pressurise it afterwards?

It will leak air like a Wimpey Home, especially around the doors. When your husband got it, did the old mannequin get left behind.

Back in the seventies I was told a similar thing by a chemist at work. Don't wash your hands with Swarfega, use washing up liquid and cold water so the skin pores don't open. He said Swarfega was carcinogenic in those days.

The problem I find is when an element starts working reliably ( like my lighting ) you then want to find something new to play with which of course requires buggering around .

I’ve given up with their doorbell ! Reliably getting it to pair with the chime is impossible! . Tried to circumvent this issue by not using the chime and have the button push call a notification in home assistant . Much better ! But still the doorbell can ‘freeze’ on a button push and therefore no event triggered ! Reolink have been awesome . Told them it was crap and they said to return for a full refund ! So ! Need another video doorbell , poe , no subscription crap , no cloud based crap , works would be nice !

I am sooooo 20th century. Sigh. I guess the best representation of my ideal level of automation is the kind of clockwork plug mounted timer that turns the fairy lights on just outside our rear kitchen doors….