epsilonGreedy

It is snowing in Bude as well but @joe90has not noticed because his wife is chasing him around the houses demanding to know why he opened the bi-fold doors to let in an arctic blast of 27 Fahrenheit air.

Going right back to the start of this thread I remember thinking did the assessor choose the right unit of measure for the internal size of the house. I recall the OP's house is a bit of a mansion and if feet were recorded as meters the large house would be a plausible small house and so the air leakage factor would be inflated.

They have teeth plus endless patience to forage and explore! I want to use hep20 but I also want to sleep at night.

The only thing holding me back from selecting hep20 is:

No. Noisy expanding copper pipes are a general problem, they have to be supported somewhere/somehow for all floor types. I had to take down a ceiling at my 2000 vintage developer house after years of creaking pipes. This revealed that a plumber had jammed a long run of central heating pipe up against a solid joist at a 90 degree turn, the pipe and joist were fighting each other under heat expansion.

It goes everywhere, it dribbles down the posi joists onto the floor below, it part dribbles and forms stalactites that hang from the joints and off the posi joist metal work, it splats down the facing brick internal feature wall that was meant to be a big feature of my finished house. All this is a result of applying D4 onto the top of the joists and continuously between the tongue & groove joints before the sheets are pushed and tapped together. Get a heavy person to systematically stomp, jump, lung and crashdown on the heels of heavy boots. You are looking for: Dry creaking joints missing glue. Floating joist ends where the supporting blockwork is a few mm low. What happens is that the stiffness of the sheet lifts the low joist up to the height of its neighbours. Pipework or cables that rattle. And hardest to provoke, thermal expansion in copper pipes that causes highly annoying creaks during central heating cycles.

I accepted my preferred BM's default stock decking material, I forget the band name. There are three broad categories of weather proofing: Thick gloopy matt grey painted surface. Thin hard plastic laminate. Peel off pvc covering with taped joints. If I were to self build again I would make it easy for the brickies to load up the internal blocks on the deck with pallets because there is a correlation between signs of minor water ingress into the chipboard with where the blocks were manhandled. The non account public TP product prices are a nonsense, I think Travis Perkins is attempting commercial suicide. The manager of my local TP branch (now closed) ridiculed the high prices while attempting to persuade me to open a self builders account. @PeterWtold me in another thread that the weather proof chipboard is bathroom rated so it should be much better than regular chipboard on sale at B&Q. Even so you might be correct, perhaps current chipboard floor sheets are the next cladding embarrassment for the industry and 100s of Britons will die falling through their floors in the 2030's.

I think you are confusing instances bad workmanship and the broader debate where fussy self builders discuss floor flex. The definition of an acceptable designed floor flex will run and run on this forum because it is a touchy-feely point of house holder satisfaction. This is really a general debate but is often framed in the context of posi joists because that is what most of us choose, however it is wrong to infer posi joists are the problem. Bad workman ship that leads to people suing major house builders is just that. As a self builder you can oversee the installation of the joists and floor deck, at the end of the day it is a simple and robust procedure. Providing copious mounts of D4 floor is applied and there are no floating joist ends and the strong backs are properly fixed you should be happy with the result. Before the downstairs plaster board ceiling it fixed up you can stress test the first floor in a few hours which gives you a chance to sort out any creek niggles.

Yes you are, the building trade does not want things to fall down and be sued. Standards evolve to meet that requirement and not your intangible satisfaction score for your new house. Unless you state otherwise the floor will be designed to minimum standards and when you move in you will be reminded daily the floor is designed to a minimum spec, as another poster observes it will be the little things like furniture creaking as you walk across a room. I am a low budget self builder but did not skimp on the floor spec. I told the joist manufacturer to upgrade to 400 centres, then I upped the wood size twice for my long 5.4m posi joist spans and once for the 4m spans. My guess is that upgrading your floor joist spec will add £1000 to your material cost. 500mm centres won't work with floorboard sheets sized for multiples of 400 or 600. Is this an improvement? Industry standard flooring sheets can cope with a lot of weather before the roof goes on. Even once the roof is on there might be weeks or months before the windows are in hence more opportunity for rain to settle on your ply.

A good question. For two years I have been wondering what the rated output of an asph actually means. Is it: Maximum heat output at cop 4. Maximum heat output at an ideal output water temp. Maximum heat output in ideal environmental conditions. Maximum electrical input power draw. Maximum electrical input power draw at worst case cop 1.

@Jeremy Harris said much the same a few back when I asked if aspect could affect annual ASHP running costs. At this time of year a southerly brick wall could absorb a useful amount of heat and gently warm an ASPH during an evening but probably a marginal effect.

Is it possible these different ASHP frosting experiences relate to installations with a north or south aspect?

I think Parish Councillors are unpaid. County Councillors bagged themselves a minimum wage salary of £12k p/a a few years back.

Ok I will try the by-eye-hand technique first. I might borrow Swmbo's cooking scale to grade the first 30 numerically then switch to hand. Yup I have 8 hips in total plus 4 more for the garage so plenty of opportunity to assign rogue slates to awkward bits of the roof. The idea of creating a kick with errant knobbly slates is an excellent tip, something I would have thought about having finished the job. 3500 but the garage roof (1000 slates) is 8 months away. The slates are preholed about 5 mm further up the 500mm long slate than the "universal" hole position so I guess these means the batten gauge will be a touch tighter. It is a 30 degree pitch in a moderate weather exposure area.

It is counter intuitive, they would be vanity EPC points I accept. The real saving will come from running the extension 5 degrees cooler than the rest of the house and not extending the UFH into what is a small floor peninsular with a high perimeter ratio. There will be 140mm of xps insulation under the floor screed, 0.36 U in the 100mm cavity and 300mm in the cold loft space above. Given a short truss span and a 30 degree pitch it will be difficult to get much more loft insulation in without completely choking the attic space. So not exactly bad and not stella by BuildHub standards, just within regs if it was heated. The complex shape of the house to blend in with a conservation area and our budget mean the house will perform well short of a passiv house but your typical Passiv house owner does not get to see alpacas and haltered sheep being taken for walks around the village or see a vintage horse & trap passing by through a Georgian sash window.

I understand the first step with grading slates is to divide them onsite into 3 to 4 groups by thickness. Assuming that slate weight is proportional to thickness I was thinking of rigging up a simple balance scale to take the guesswork out of assessing each slate. Is this a crazy idea? What to the pro's do?

The intermediate internal door does not have to be stylistically fancy unlike the real exterior door. I have not looked at new build door SAP regs, I am guessing the U should be 1.6 or or 1.8. My build is a new build not a conversion. Anyhow thanks for the feedback, I am just exploring the regulatory boundary at the moment and also thought excluding the entrance hall extension would deliver a few bonus points on the final EPC rating.

Ok this indicates that such self declaration is possible, thanks for posting. I would ensure that provision is made for retrofitting a radiator if the unheated equilibrium temperature mentioned by @PeterWis much below 15 degrees in winter. Thinking more about this, if the extension is a 6 sided cube shedding heat on 5 sides it will get chilly. Some heat will leach through the floor slab from the UFH on the other side of the internal door then the U 0.28 cavity wall will shed a bit more heat into this space.

One reason is our expensive taste in doors. When the sash window company quoted for the windows they added quotes for wooden doors. The price was over £1000 for a semi glazed stable door with 9-pane Georgian window panel. Sub £250 would be great. Something like this: The door will be our primary entrance door. I thought SAP conformance was a reason for the high price, I had not considered the weather resistance and security cost elements you mention.

That may have been your intent but it reads like an assertion with a questionmark at the end. You said But you meant

I one lived in a rental property where emptying the bath also sucked water out of the bidet water trap. Once that trap had lost its water then in some wind directions there was a direct airflow from the septic tank into the bathroom.

YouTube views are growing at 200,000 per hour or about £150 per hour* in ad revenue for the pro comedian who uploaded the recording. Plus 3000 comments. Perhaps we could host a video version of the BuildHub Corona virus thread discussion as a reality TV experiment then upload the video to YouTube and share the ad income fairly. * Income estimated from what sailing vLoggers get per million views.

A lasting online testament demonstrating the curse of the Boomers, no wonder the country is in such a mess.To think these same people had real influence on the world 10 years ago. @daiking

This is excellent news. If the red mapped area is the original offer from the farmer that @Highland girlaccepted, then she just has to persuade other conveyancing professionals to accept they mis transcribed 61.3m to 51.3m then tell'em to sort it out.

What is your mains water pressure? It looks like you have decided drinking water can be delivered via the softener? Worth mentioning that clicking on the diagram pops open a higher resolution version with legible labels.