AliG

It was to make it easier to route the cables they said. The ethernet cables come down in the centre of the rack and go into the back of what is like a patch panel, but flat like a network switch, not sure what it is called. They are then connect to the switched by the patch cables. There are about 30 of these ethernet cables plus various speaker cables, power etc so a lot of cables to route. I tried to persuade them to use a Sanus rack as it was half the price, but they said 600mm was not deep enough. Really I think it just makes working on it easier. None of the devices need anywhere near this depth, but it does allow for things to be mounted at the front or the back which creates more space. I bought generic drawers for the rack from EBAY to store stuff. They were a lot cheaper than Mid Atlantic ones.

The heat is definitely an issue. I made the MVHR in the cinema room an extract as I thought it would help and it also would create some free heating elsewhere, but it does not. Although an oven or a hob ring might use 2-3kw, they don't run continuously 24 hours a day. They switch off once the required temperature has been achieved and a large amount of heat is absorbed by the heavy metal. I reckon that when we are watching the projector screen, we have around 1.5kw w of power being consumed between the PJ, amp and the other devices in the AV cabinet. They mostly have cooling fans pushing excess heat out into the room. I suspect that the amp and PJ aren't much more than 50% efficient and the rest of the power goes into excess heat. We basically use the PJ as our main TV and so it can be on for over 10 hours a day. That probably pushes a good 5kwh of energy into a 30sq metre room, with the switches, Sky box etc on 24 hours a day it probably pushes 7-8kwh in total. At 0C outside the house need around 300w/metre of heat. So at 0C outside this room stays at 21C. In the summer when no heat input is needed I see the temperature rising to 27C+ sometimes. MVHR just cannot move 7-8kwh of energy. I can see on charts on the Heatmiser when someone turns on the PJ, the temperature starts to rise almost immediately.

Probably worth clarifying we have permission for the house. We now have two applications in. One is a variation and one is for a car port. I have looked at all the variation applications recently made and they generally take 3-4 weeks to be approved. We would be quite happy with that, but the track record of the officer involved gives me no faith that there won't be a delay somehow. The other application is to build a car port and garden store. This is a pretty simple application, actually a number of the comments on the original application asked why there was no garage. This is the one where after 13 weeks they only just sent out neighbour notices, something that I thought was automated and is prompting my compliant as this could mean it will take another 6 or 7 weeks to be approved at least. The average response time for householder applications is sitting at around the 8 week target date and I have no idea why this small and non controversial application might take 20 weeks. Due to the delays here, I want to nip things in the bud before both applications drag on for months when they should be taking weeks. We are all set and ready to start on site.

I have considered that there might be some kind of complaint to be made re the treatment of older people via planning as they do not seem to consider the time taken and stress that it causes them is likely more than younger people. @MortarThePoint sorry for your dad, I really don't think they consider how their actions affect real people.

I got an email back that the Head of Planning retired just a few weeks ago. He does indeed have an OBE for "services to planning" For some reason the Council didn't see fit to announce who replaced him when they announced his retirement and it was quite difficult to find out who the new Head of Planning was. I had to decipher his signature from some recently approved applications. When I looked for recently approved applications I discovered many of them approved well within the 8 week target date. Yet after 13 weeks my parents' latest one is only just being sent to neighbours. Every other officer we have dealt with on past applications emails to ask for an extension at 8 weeks. This one has just ignored all communication.

The first picture is the front of the cabinet, we framed out the wall to the size of the cabinet and got a cabinet with a perspex door on front. So you can access the Xbox etc from the front and the cables from the back. The cabinet does not seem to need any cooling, but puts an enormous amount of heat into the room where the UFH has never been switched on. In the summer I leave the back door of the cabinet open into the utility room which helps dissipate the heat. You can hear the fans of various items in the cabinet, but I don't find it annoying, once the projector is on it is louder still. The loudest fan was the PoE switch which I replaced which a fanless one when it broke. But you still have the Sky Q box and the CCTV NVR which is particularly noisy. Once you are watching something it all fades into the background.

Picture of the front and rear of the cupboard. Note the tidy cabling!

Thanks for all your ideas people. Only just getting going this morning as I was vaccinated yesterday and felt a bit groggy. Edinburgh is also the place where vaccinations are running slowest in Scotland, although all the people at the vaccination centre were wonderful. I think I will email the head of planning copying in the officer and his boss and then try and call him tomorrow if I do not hear back. Thanks Edit - Email sent, I said I just need to know that the delays will not compound and could someone call me about it.

The architect I deal with charges based on the expected build cost based on a standard cost and if you want a gold plated kitchen it doesn’t create any extra work for him so there is no extra charge. I think that’s fair.

@puntloos I have a very similar set up to you there. I have a Mid Atlantic 39u rack that is 600mm wide by 800mm deep. The media people wanted the extra depth. We built the front of the cupboard to the size of the rack. The rack has a perspex door n the front. We didn't put the back door on the cabinet and just put a normal house door on the back of the cupboard. The rack was just pushed through until it was in place and hasn't been moved since. The rear access makes moving the wires around a dream. The switches face the back and the AV gear faces the front.

Unfortunately I don't think this is the case. A good architect will design you a house that looks nice and gets planning permission. That is their main skillset. Some know about designing for low running costs but not many. Very few seem to consider buildability/build costs in their designs. Massive spans, lots of glass, bespoke features you cannot buy off the shelf etc. They also will not liven the house and could have a very different idea how to layout a house relative to how you will use. Don't be afraid to tell them what you are after and if they won't do that then look elsewhere.

I really like the design, accepting people's concern re upkeep on the roof. A few minor changes, mainly agreement with what has gone before. Unless you really want a larder for Instagram, fair enough if that's what you want, I would just incorporate it into the utility with extra cupboards. Ideally make sure you can see the TV from the table, hob and sofa in the kitchen. I find we sit at the table at least as much as on the sofa in ours. The kitchen as shown will have very little wall space. Assuming an eye level oven, where will it go. Next to the fridge/freezer could create an awkward corner, but that is the only place left. It can work though. We had the kitchen designed before we finalised the plans in case it didn't work. I agree flipping over the bathroom/linen cupboard would make pipework easier. Also consider the layout of the master en suite to try and get the waste pipe to go down through the utility. The master has a lot of unused floor area, would you consider a sitting area in there? Does the bed have to be in the middle? We have high level windows like that and the light really annoys me. I haven't yet got them covered since someone tried quoting 6k for electric blinds. Bed 3 does look a little narrow and stealing some space from the master would be a good idea. Will you have MVHR, large hot water tank etc and where will they go?

I spent quite a while researching this at work as a lot of people have been investing in hydrogen which always seemed stupid and wasteful to me. However, as we now believe we have solutions for road transport in the form of battery vehicles in the main and fuel cell vehicles later for scenarios where batteries don't work then we will need to move on to residential heating as the next largest producer of greenhouse gases. Fuel cells are more expensive now but they are expected to get considerably cheaper over time as well hydrogen. Batteries will be the dominant technology however in road transport. The expectation is that once almost all electricity production is renewable then we can start doing things that today don't make sense - i.e. using electricity to turn water into hydrogen or using direct electric heating or e-fuels. Hydrogen is a very inefficient way to fuel things but if electricity is zero carbon and cheap then the assumption appears to be that you can waste it to get carbon emissions down. One thing that surprised me is that the price of electricity is forecast to fall considerably in the future as renewable electricity is now roughly cost comparable with fossil fuels and continues to get cheaper. I am still bit skeptical re this, but it changes a lot of the calculations. ASHP will be the preferred heating method, but hydrogen boilers may be needed for the worst insulated houses where an ASHP would struggle to produce enough output. Electric boilers could be used where an ASHP does not fit. If electricity produces no emissions then electric boilers will be fine from an emissions perspective, although not the cheapest to run. This is all based on targets for net zero carbon and it is impossible to hit this target without drastic changes. The good news is technology continues to improve and fix these issues and I don't see it being too much of an inconvenience or cost to people. We can get emissions down about 60-70% relatively easily. We then need more expensive and awkward solutions to get all the way to zero. We may also beed more carbon taxes to force people to use these solutions if they are more expensive. I am not opining on net zero, but that is almost certain to be the target everywhere.

Flexible gap filler should be fine. But before doing it I would take a scraper down the wall and take off the lip of filler that was previously there. Otherwise the new filler will dry with a step to that filler and it will look untidy. There is always a trade off of time spent versus how neat it looks. TBH you could just fill the space there but it will look very rough. Chipping out the existing filler first will look much better. Then painting over the top of the filler and the the skirting will look better again. It also looks like the stairs have dropped slightly so you may also have to paint the wall as well after you knock the filler off and perhaps fix it up too. I think this is why people are suggesting the quadrant as it will cover both sides.

I should add, I have written a formal letter of complaint also, but I hoped that I could sort things with an informal discussion and not sent it yet. Working in planning sounds quite stressful and I don't want to get the officer into trouble, but what am I supposed to do after this litany of issues.

Just a rant really unless anyone has any ideas as to how to sort this out. Still plodding on with my parents' place. On Friday, they noticed that their application to build a carport next to the already approved house was open for comments. I said this must be a clerical error as the application was made 12 weeks ago and the coment period had long since passed. Emailed planning (they will not accept phone calls due to COVID and as of two weeks ago Edinburgh planning said they are too busy to answer individual queries about applications) They emailed back that the neighbours had not been contacted originally and they had just sent this out. I was gob smacked. The architect tried to email and call the planning officer for two weeks before the moratorium on speaking to officers was put in place with no response. Prior to this we made an application in early 2019. After the 8 week determination deadline the architect tried to contact the officer and finally got him after 12 weeks when he said he was going to refuse the application without ever speaking to anyone about it and giving us a chance to revise it. We then had to start all over again which took months. On the approved application last year, he emailed the planning consultant to say it was recommended for approval after 12 weeks. Then he said that they had forgotten to send out consultations and this further delayed things so it took a further four months for approval to be granted. One of the consultations that was not made was with Scottish Water. Admittedly the architect/consultant did tell the planning officer that they had sited the house considering the position of the water main on site, but they are a statutory consultant. They then emailed us four weeks before starting on site which has resulted in a three month delay, redesign and extra costs that could approach £20,000. The variation application is now sitting with the same planing officer. Finding out on Friday that our application had been sitting for 12 weeks without the neighbours being consulted was the last straw. I emailed back asking what had happened and could someone call me. No response, despite the first email being answered n 40 minutes. I emailed the planning officer's boss with a summary of what has happened yesterday asking him to call me. No response. I tried calling him today, straight to voicemail. If I don't get him in the morning I will be trying to speak to the head of planning. Consistently the architect has said that we have to keep them onside, but frankly their actions are disgraceful. My parents are 73 and 74 and distraught. They think they will be dead before the house is built.

For above the garage, if you have the height it will probably be better to put PIR under the joists, it will be almost impossible to properly insulate the floor otherwise. We once had a kitchen above the garage and it was always colder than the rest of the house so it is important. I would watch particularly for cables and pipes causing draughts in between and make sure it is well sealed. For the master bedroom, resilient bars will probably be enough. You could put some acoustic rockwool in there, but according to the tables it only adds 2dB to noise reduction anyway. The bars and sounbloc plasterboard would make a bigger difference. Again though a lot of the sound transmissiom will be flanking sound behind walls and it is at least as importnat to seal any paths the sound can travel along.

As installed our system has humidity sensors and automatically boosts. From watching it it seemed to me that the outside humidity level has a lot higher impact on whether the boost comes on than if someone has had a shower. In the end I just turned off the function as I felt it just caused the system to run at a higher speed more than was necessary. First I raised the humidity boost point, but in the end just turned it off. I then set it n a programme for speed 1 most of the time and speed 2 a couple of hours a day when people were most likely to shower. Then I decided it was all unnecessary and just set it to the lowest speed all the time, except when summer bypass kicks in. I think unless you notice loads of steam and humidity after a shower it will be fine. In fairness I wonder if it depends on the volume of your house. The regs allow for the same amount of ventilation no matter how big and how occupied your house is, presumably allowing for a worst case scenario. A shower in a 700sq foot 2 bed flat is going to have a lot more impact on humidity than in a 3000sq foot 5 bed house.

You can save a lot on some of this stuff buying from here in Europe. https://www.skybad.de/en/k/frame-and-cistern.html As they all seem the same I would just use Geberit which is quite a bit cheaper.

Having looked at a video just now the Grohe ones seem to use exactly the same kind of push fitting. All three seem to use exactly the same connecting pipes. I was a bit nervous, but we have 9 of them and they have all been fine for three years now. Just keep an eye on them when first installed.

We have Noken/Porcelanosa concealed cisterns which as far as I can see are exactly the same as the Geberit ones. The push fit for the water connection to the pan is the weak point. One of our WCs was installed with this leaking. We kept saying we could smell something, the builder said it was fine until flies appeared! It shouldn't move after it has been installed but it definitely can be installed incorrectly and leak. We also had one installed incorrectly in our last house. The builder mounted it behind the studwork instead of inline with the studs and the same pipe leaked through the ceiling. All these cisterns look nigh on identical to me and I have wondered if the flush plates are interchangeable. I think Grohe and Geberit are a different size, but maybe between Geberit and Noken. I ended up paying for some of the Noken glass ones as I don't like the plastic chrome ones, but in the end they aren't as bad as I thought and better at £25 versus well over £100.

I thought about this. The alternative is putting another entrance to the dressing room next to the bedroom door, but that would mean losing dome of the cupboards in the dressing room. TBH you have to walk around out bed to get to the dressing room. I did wonder it was a bit far, but in practice have never actually noticed it being an issue.

A lot depends on how you use the en suite and particularly if there will often be two people there at once. I originally designed our en suite with a walk through shower, but decided it used too much space and also I didn't like the feeling I was on display if someone came into the room. One thing I really try to avoid is the design of the first layout where the WC is directly facing the door, sometimes it cannot be helped but in this design you could look straight through from the bedroom to the WC. I based the final layout on hotel bathrooms. They often separate the shower or WC so that it is easier for two people to be in the room at once. So you might want to consider that. I really like that our WC is separated from the rest of the room. I doubt you would ever use the exit from the shower next to the WC, it is too much in the corner. I would likely move the shower into the corner to free up space. If you freed up more floor space you could have a chair in the en suite. We love having somewhere to sit and get dressed, or to chat to the person in the bath,. Alternatively you could move the WC to the alcove area and put the shower where the WC is, fully hiding the WC in the corner. As to the dressing room, it looks like the distance between the two side on the second plan is only 800mm, I would probably want a minimum of 1m. Also I got 650mm deep cabinets which are a lot easier to hang things in. We do not have a door on our en suite or dressing room. It works fine, but the light can be annoying in the bedroom and it is also noisy when someone runs a bath. In the dressing room I just put the light on a very short timer, but you cannot do that in the bathroom as the light would go off while in the bath. I would probably if I did it again have a door to the en suite, but not the dressing room. If you want to face the window, why not just put the bed back against the dressing room wall, you could even move the wall forward to have more room again in the dressing room and en suite.

Our house is actually on their website, it wasn't there the last time I looked. https://www.angusandmack.com/projects/job1910 Suffice to say it was not cheap, although not unreasonable for the quality of the work. For the bookcases, the price increased a lot adding the drawers.

Sorry, posted in the wrong thread