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We went for a stepped skirting board as I hate anything curved. Builders like to use curved skirting as it is harder to chip the edges so they can bash it about. I had always thought we would have wood but I decided I like the contrast between wooden doors/floors and white frames/skirting. It is way neater to put the flooring down first. I did a bit of research and it seems that a lot of the yellowing is due to using oil based gloss which goes on slightly easier for the painter. We used water based gloss which should not yellow as well as making cleaning up a lot easier when you paint. An issue we have had is that the painters did a really bad job on filling and painting the joints. The builders will have to redo quite a few of them at the 12 month point.

Having no experience of cement type backer boards I used 12.5mm Knauf Aqua Panel. What I found is that you MUST use the proper screws. Other screws just chew it up. Also your battens or studs need to be dead level as it's quite brittle and will (hairline) crack. That being said it's got a reinforcing mesh running throughout so it's not going to fall apart even if cracked and tbh subsequent tanking will fill any cracks. Allegedly you can score and snap these boards. I didnt. Cutting was done with: - Starrett type hole saws of various sizes - a cheapo, old circular saw pressed into service as suggested by @PeterW - super cheap, carbide edged jigsaw blades (code 67688 from T'station) as recommended by @Nickfromwales

Sometimes questions are raised as to whether it's worth increasing insulation levels and often there seems to be confusion as to what the "ideal" level of insulation is, or even what a "good" or "reasonable" level of insulation might be. I'm not sure whether or not the non-linear impact of improving insulation, in terms of the effect on the heating requirement, and hence running cost during cold weather, is widely understood. I've heard comments like "it's not worth improving the insulation from 0.16 W/m2.K to 0.12 W/m2.K because it would be 30% more expensive and only reduce the heat loss by 25%". Most of the time this is incorrect, because homes have heat sources all year around, from the occupants, incidental heating from appliances, solar gain and even pets (a medium sized dog is probably a four-legged 40 - 50W heater). So, I thought a really simple example might help some gain a better understanding of this non-linearity, and illustrate better why some are so evangelical about trying to improve insulation levels (and reduce ventilation heat loss, too, but I'll get to that another time). Let's build a pretend house, that for simplicity has no doors or windows and is a rectangular single storey box with a flat roof. For simplicity we'll assume it's on raised piles, with an air space underneath, just so we can use the same insulation level on all six sides and to make the sums simple. All I'm doing here is making a comparison, so this is a valid way of illustrating this effect. In our rectangular box house we have an average of 100W of incidental heating, coming from things like internet kit, a PC, a cordless phone base station, a TV, a phone charger, a few lights and a handful of intermittently used kitchen appliances. This is a pretty low figure - I struggle to keep our house background load below about 200W, without any lights on. The box houses two adults, giving out around 80 - 100W each and a dog, so lets say there is 220 W of heating coming from the occupants. The box also has a heating system that can deliver whatever power is needed to maintain a temperature of 20 deg C inside, and its night time, so there's no solar heating of the walls. Outside it's 5 deg C, a chilly winters night. This rectangular box is 10m long x 10m wide x 2.5m high inside, so has a total wall, floor and roof area of 300m2 and an internal floor area of 100m2, so fairly average in size (a bit bigger than our current 3 bed bungalow). So, we have a temperature difference between the inside and outside of 15 deg C (20 deg C - 5 deg C), an internal surface area of 300m2 and a constant incidental heating level of 320 W (220 W from two adults and dog, 100 W from electrical appliances and lights). First, lets see how much heat we need to put into this box from the heating system, if we have U values for the walls, floor and roof of 0.2 W/m2.K (K is degrees Kelvin, the same units as degrees Centigrade when only temperature difference is being compared): The total heat loss power, in Watts, can be calculated from the U value, the area and the temperature difference, so for this first example we get 300m2 area x 15 deg C temperature difference x 0.2 W/m2.K U value = 900 W. There is 320 W of heat coming from the occupants etc, so the heating system would need to deliver 900 - 320 = 580 W in order to keep the house at 20 deg C under these conditions. If this were by direct electric heating, then the heating cost would be about £2.09 per 24 hours. Next, let's see how much heat we need to put into this box from the heating system, if we have U values for the walls, floor and roof of 0.1 W/m2.K , in other words, we've made the insulation twice as "good", so might think we've halved the heating cost: The total heat loss power is now 300m2 x 15 deg C temperature difference x 0.1 W/m2.K U value = 450 W. This is what we'd expect, double the insulation effectiveness and halve the heat loss. However, when we now take away the incidental heat gain from the occupants, etc, of 320 W, the heating system needs to deliver 450 - 320 = 130 W in order to keep the house at 20 deg C under these conditions. If this were by direct electric heating, then the cost would be about £0.47 per 24 hours. So, by doubling the insulation level we've decreased the heating cost by about 78%, not the 50% that might have been expected. This is a very simplistic example, but it does illustrate why doubling up in insulation can give a far greater benefit than might be expected. It also shows why, when you improve the level of insulation you can reduce the heating requirement down to such a low level that for a lot of the time you don't need any heating. In that last example, turning on a few extra lights could heat this imaginary box home to a comfortable temperature on a cold night, whereas with only half the insulation it needs something that delivers 446% more heat.

The way my ASHP (and I suspect most) work, is they don't use a conventional tank thermostat. Instead they have a temperature probe that sits in a pocket. So you can dial in any temperature and it will heat the water until the probe says it is that hot. The tank thermostat is still used but only as an essential safety feature for the UVC. I have it set to 65 degrees, and it the tank exceeds that it will close the 2 port valve to shut off heat input to the tank.

If your banking on some survey results to make them fix anything then your in deep deep shat.

Blood hell Russ You need to say what you mean ?

I think you need to grow a pair, go And ask if they are happy with it, if they say that it’s ok then walk away, if they have not noticed it then what is the standard else where.

Helen Folasade Adu What a Diamond (life)

Compare: http://skirtingonline.co.uk/epages/www_skirtingonline_co_uk.sf/en_GB/?ObjectPath=/Shops/www_skirtingonline_co_uk/Products/bul-18-4200-06/SubProducts/bul-18-4200-06-0001 and https://roncurrie.co.uk/94x16mm-4-bullnose-mdf-skirting-board-primed-various-lengths Seems to be a big difference, if RC have the ones you want. Like 30 or 40% difference on eg bullnose, but I have not dug deeply - busy. Ferdinand

Skirtings. I would recommend pre-primed. Very little extra cost fro what it saves. Mine came from Ron Currie's, family firm who have a huge internet presence. https://roncurrie.co.uk/skirting-and-architrave Hint. Paint first.

First question: "Does the hob actually need 10mm²?" 20mm conduit is damned tight, even for 6mm² (our island fitted hob is fed with 6mm², but the under slab conduit is 25mm). 6mm² T&E in a buried duct is OK for up to 41 A, which equates to a hob rated at about 9.43 kW. If the conduit is running deep in the EPS then I'd be inclined to treat it as being within insulation and derate 6mm² to 34 A, still OK for up to about 7.82 kW. If you wish to run 10mm² single conductors down the conduit then that's fine, but you will need to use conduit at either end to provide the second insulation layer required. Could be a bit of a faff to run conduit into back boxes etc, but probably doable with some flex conduit sections. My choice would be to look to see if you can get away with running 6mm² and then using a bit of cable lube (after attaching the pull-through) to ease it through the conduit. This stuff is safe to use with PVC insulated cable: https://www.cef.co.uk/catalogue/products/1748927-aqua-gel-ii-cable-pulling-lubricant

If it’s bothering you now Nows the time to say Something Badly set out Not a quick fix They would have to put the scaf back at the front and strip back from the top To get at the lower Batons

I went for a 12mm thick mdf skirting with pencil profile painting in eggshell white like this: https://skirtingboardsdirect.com/products/mdf-pencil-round-skirting-boards-12mm-thick/ Speak to your joiner but you could maybe go for 60-90 mm in height which wouldn't be very noticeable. I find the white eggshell helps the skirtings blend into the white walls. I will add a photo later on today.

The gypsum backer board is about the best on the market for tiling onto and performs better the hardy backer cement boards and is much easier to handle and cut While Gysum state they are fine for dot and dab From experience they need mechanically fixing also Ditra matting is far better than ply

We talked to a few joiners about shadow gaps as they do look nice but the extra cost is just not worth it, not for us anyway. It takes a lot of time, any small mistakes really stand out. Another alternative is this type of thing https://www.profilpas.com/en/tag/flush-recessed-skirting-boards

If you don’t have trickle vents then it’s purely about item 2, with item 1 as an added benefit

Just an update on this, tiling going well and what a sense of fulfilment when you lay one!

I'm blaming the rain for the lack of progress... Ideally drill your bricks for any conduits BEFORE you lay them! ?

I've had the view that Legionnaires was a virtually mythical risk for UK hot water systems for years. There's never, ever, been a case reported of someone being infected with Legionnaires from a domestic hot water system, and yet someone has decided that everyone should waste energy by heating up their DHW periodically in order to kill off bugs that almost certainly aren't there in the first place. Legionnaires is primarily a problem with things like air conditioning, where the bugs can live and multiply in evaporative cooling systems and then get spread around and breathed in from fine water droplets that escape from the coolers. Hot tubs and spas are another likely source. Although there are guidelines for disinfection regimes for these, it seems they may not be easy things to keep clean and well-disinfected, perhaps due to the warm temperature they work at. Looking at the statistics, it seems that the incidence of Legionnaires is around 240 to 250 people per year in the UK, with 50% of those being smokers, and most of the remainder having some form of long-term health problem (from the latest statistics about 75% of those who contracted Legionnaires had an underlying chronic health condition). The peak months for the disease are between June and September, where the rate of infection is around four to five times greater than in winter. This points strongly towards air conditioning and things like hot tubs being the most probable cause.

In an unvented system I can't see how the bugs could enter the pipework. We store our DHW at 45C and have for the last eighteen months. Hopefully my confidence won't be shattered.

To the best of my knowledge, there has never been a case in the domestic environment.

On the bright side it all sounds fixable with the help of you guys. Another problem bites the dust!

The obvious question to ask is one of safety. From your photos, @TerryE , it would seem that there was a fire risk from this part overheating. The following link is to a long list of domestic appliances recalled because of a fire risk: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/household-appliances-recalled-due-to-fire-risk More recently, Whirlpool recalled 500,000 tumble dryers that posed a potential fire risk: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/whirlpool-tumble-dryer-recall-hotpoint-indesit-fire-risk-a9015036.html So why have Sunamp made a customer pay to replace a badly designed part that posed a potential fire risk?

I'm currently painting. So Iv been watching a fair few pretty repetitive how to roll x.. Videos. But I thought this one was short and informative enough to share.

I've no problem with any disagreement, this was just a very simplistic model. Everything you say is right, and it's unlikely that anyone would use a full price direct electric tariff for heating, but the saving proportion is the same whatever fuel is used - I just picked a number (15p per kWh including standing charges) that illustrated a price difference. One odd thing is that when I've looked at the cheaper tariffs for the sort of electricity consumption our 130m² home would have (without the solar panels) they have (so far) all turned out to cost more than this per unit when the standing charge is taken into account. All I was trying to do here was illustrate one point, very simplistically, as an illustration, not a practical home. There are dozens of compromises that will impact on a real house, but it was this single principle of the non-linearity of heating cost as you reduce the heating requirement that I was trying to illustrate, as that seems to be something that some don't always take account of, as I mentioned in the first two paragraphs. Not everyone here is building a new house, either, some here are renovating, converting or restoring, and I'm not sure that many here are building houses of 150m² or more, even if that is the average for new self-builds. I may be wrong, but I get the impression that there are a lot of us are building in the 100 to 150m² range and some smaller than that, with only a few that are bigger. I'd also guess that the more cost-constrained are going to be building at the lower end of the size range and may well reap greater benefits (in proportion to their income) from having significant lower energy bills, or no energy bills at all, which really isn't either costly or difficult to achieve, we've found. Our total build costs, including the solar panels and MVHR, oak joinery throughout, fairly high to mid range kitchen and bathrooms and passive house levels of insulation and airtightness have come to about £1380/m². If we'd cut out the oak, travertine flooring, gone for budget kitchen and bathroom components, then that could easily have come down to £1200/m². Using an architect/project manager and budget to mid range kitchens and bathrooms would probably have ended up at around £1350/m². The average self-build cost for our part of the UK for this size of house is probably around £1400/m², for someone, like me, who uses a main contractor for all the ground works and another main contractor for the wind and weather tight shell, with sub-contractors for windows, roofing, electrics, plastering etc. Bigger houses may well be a bit cheaper, but then bigger houses don't need as high an insulation level, either, because of the better volume to surface area ratio. I'd be the first to say that any self build is a stack of compromises, driven by planning, the site, personal wishes, cost, etc, so there will be very wide variations. However, one consistent factor is that it is damned hard and costly to improve insulation levels once a house is built. After the house is built and been in use for a few years, and you, or the next owner, is in a financially better place, you can always change the windows and doors for better ones, fit a better heat recovery system, upgrade the kitchen and bathrooms, install solar panels, lay better flooring. So, if you're looking at making compromises it seems far better to not compromise on wall, floor and roof insulation, just because these can prove to be hard to improve later, and because, in the overall cost of even a budget build, insulation is only a small part of the cost.

Gail Porter?