ragg987

Yes you need to watch the trades - they know what they know. I gave my plumber our installation diagram and details as well as talked it through with him. I was clear that the manifolds were to have no pumps or actuators. A couple of weeks later he asked the sparkie to provide power at the manifolds, luckily the sparkie checked with me (he knows how particular I am) and we put a stop to this. Aaargh.

Exactly - also why the local pump, you could run both manifolds off one centralised pump. If yours is a low energy house you will easily have sufficient flow with 1 pump at the lowest speed. In our case one slow pump serves 2 manifolds (basement and ground) over 150m2 at 150 pipe centres.

Cores depend on the standard you want to use - 2 cores are required for the simple on/off and 3 cores if you want to make it tamper proof and 4 cores if you want EOL capability. You may also want to piggy-back 2 or more devices to one cable e.g. 8 cores can support up to 2 or 3 separate devices on one run. The cost difference is negligible.

I use a Texecom Premier hard-wired system. Extremely flexible but steep learning curve. I have integrated fire and heat detectors and front door bell into the panel, if you wanted to you can also control any electrical loads with a few add-ons e.g. lights on when dark or on movement. Wireless means having to replace batteries on all devices on a regular basis (Texecom claim every 4 years for their Lithium battery) - not worth it in my view.

Closing a door seems completely arbitrary as a way to measure air tightness. Will depend on speed of closure, gap below door, pressure being applied, volume of air in the room, door size, plus of course what is happening on the other side (outside the room). All this can tell you is relative to before you sealed it. Having never done an air test on an older property, I can only guess, and I would say getting that low on a 1960s bungalow is not going to be easy. Remember, the test is at 50Pa pressure (to simulate a windy day, I believe), which while low as an absolute number is surprisingly high in the context of a building.

MVHR in a "leaky" house seems pointless, so as you have pointed out this needs to be taken care of. It might be worth getting a pressure test to judge how you are doing and before you invest a few thousand pounds and many hours of your time on this - older buildings will likely have air leaks all over the place incuding under skirts and cills. Passiv standard is 0.6 ACH or below at 50Pa, older houses are going to be in double or even triple figures. So your heat recovery with MVHR is going to be small unless this is sorted. MVHR will not distribute heat in the house (easy trap to fall into). The extracted air (say 21C) will warm incoming air in the heat exchanger - e.g. incoming air will raise to 16C if close to freezing outside. Air at 16C is still too cold to heat your house. And even if 16C was warmer than the room it is going into, the delta temperature is too low to actually heat the room unless your airflow is massive. Have you considered local extractors with heat exchangers e.g. in the bathrooms and kitchen? random google search https://www.vent-axia.com/range/lo-carbon-tempra-selv For a supplier, I used BPC based on other recommendations here and on eBuild. Might be worth taking their input.

My builder had these in his toolkit. It was a steel plate scraper about 8 or 10" wide on a long handle. Bit like a broom. And used just like a broom, push out to scrape the laitance off. Our screed company told me to scrape off within a week or two both to aid drying as well as to make it easier. They said it would be harder to scrape off of left on.

I used Sikabond 54 over a liquid screed floor. We removed the laitance by scraping it off with a blade. I spoke to Sika technical and they advised that I need not apply anything on the dry floor provided we had removed the laitance and were on clean and dry screed. www.flooringvillage.co.uk gave me a great price based on the quantity I needed (250m2 worth). Transition oak to tile: we used a simple steel at the transition. Works beautifully, very clean and elegant. I cannot find the name, but is an inverted T with floor tile on one side and wooden on the other, all you see is a thin steel line at the transition.

This is likely to be limited to wi-fi that the phone provider has access to. With BT every wi-fi BT router has the potential to be connected to by a BT broadband provider - it requires an App on your phone which will intercept the wi-fi network and recognise your BT credentials. Vodafone have the same arrangement, I don't know about the others. This is only useful if you are in a built-up area - out in the sticks there is no wi-fi. Dongles also use a SIM card, so if you have a 'phone and use that as a mobile hotspot it is essentially the same. If your mobile package has a generous data allowance use that. One thing to watch out for, what are you connecting to the mobile hotspot? if it is a Windows PC, then you can be sure that will gobble up your data allowance rapidly even when you are not browsing. You can reduce this by setting Windows to treat the hotspot as a "Metered Connection" - this will reduce background services from connecting to the internet.

I went with self-build zone, £2,300 for 330m2 ICF basement and timberframe above ground. 600k build cost. They were the cheapest I could find. So yes, your figures do seem mental.

Sorry to hear the news, Ian. In case this helps, our build mortgage process was the most stressful part of our build. We had it all agreed, but once the formal application went in all sorts of obstacles started to be presented even though all the aspects had been discussed and agreed on the initial query. I owed a builder over £100k and was unable to pay it all until the mortgage came through. After over 10 weeks of this and with no end in sight (process was supposed to take 6 weeks) I rang the BS and asked to speak to the CEO. It went to his voicemail and he (unexpectedly) called me back later in the day. Funds were released within three working days, so all credit to him for seeing it through. We turned the corner after this and all later issues to build completion were minor in comparision. I subsequently complained to the Financial Ombudsman who disagreed with a lot I said but directed the BS to pay me a few hundred pounds for messing me around. Another piece to the funding - we tried to stick it out in our current house during the build as we thought it would be upsetting to move us and the kids into rented temporarily and then into the completed house. In the end we had to sell and rent for 6 months - this was a very good move as it immediately released a pot of money that would see us to the end of the build without restriction. The inconvenience of the temporary rental was trivial. Funny how you can get fixated on an idea but in the end it is not important. As someone said earlier - cash is king.

I suspect your energy is going towards drying out the house, it has been exposed to the elements for a while prior. Think of all the surfaces and materials that could have soaked up moisture. Not to mention plaster, paint and other finishes. When we first moved in we used up a lot of energy, it seemed to take a couple of months or more to stabilise.

Very nice. If you have not already, suggest you use the 8 weeks to talk to neighbours and other interested parties like the parish council. Communication is key in heading off objections. Of course, planners are supposed to use objective criteria to assess the plan, but they are only human...

Welcome, seems in interesting project. Lots of knowledgable AND helpful people here - you are in good hands. Gave me the support and confidence to complete my new build.

Regarding BC sign off, they were OK that some internal and external build was incomplete, I discussed prior to final inspection. Also, VAT on materials after this date was refunded no problem, though bear in mind you have 3 months to submit the claim.

I did this in January, we went with Melton who had also provided the build mortgage and avoided all redemption and new mortgage fees, which represents quite a big saving. The new mortgage was not the cheapest in the market, but the rate difference would have required 3 years to pay back the fees. I decided to take the variable rate and took on the risk that the base rate remains low for the near term. Fixed rate was higher. BC sign off was a prerequisite, same for moving off build insurance to standard insurance.

We looked at Marmoleum as this seems to be the real deal (i.e. linseed based) rather than some of the cheaper and flimsy products claiming to be lino. It looks very durable and should be fine with wet cleaning. In the end the lack of a colour we liked meant we used Amtico in our bathrooms and plant room. I agree with the warmer underfoot comment. Tiles tend to be unpleasant in that respect.

@JSHarris, you're a star, this is just the kind of practical info that I need. I guess I could do this on the external wall near my plantroom and run the cable behind the render carrier from roof level to give a nicer appearance, though I imagine getting the dangling cable from roof level to the hole at ground(ish) level might prove tricky. This has given me the confidence to proceed - awaiting quotes from the service provider before I decide. Those custom tools of your might come in handy - I will reach out if needed, really appreciate the offer.

Having lived in our new house for 10 months, I am on the verge of chucking out my BT line for internet and switching to a village supplier who mounts a small dish at roof level that points to a central receiver. This is not a scenario I had catered for and have no ready-made solution to bring this cable into my house. The closest I have is a small duct into which I supply the aerial lead, though the inside of this duct is in our upstairs bathroom and sealed and boarded up. I would ideally install the wi-fi router centrally inside the building to give max coverage - this is on ground floor (as we have a basement) so quite a way away from aerial point. In a traditional build we could simply run the cable externally and drill a hole into the brick at ingress point. So, question is how can I proceed with providing this cable into my house without destroying the integrity of the MBC cellulose insulation fill plus the air-tightness we worked hard to achieve? Any sensible ideas welcome... Wall construction is (outside to inside) render, render mesh, render carrier, cavity, MBC external board (OSB?), cellulose, internal board, cavity, fermacell, plaster, paint.

No it is not. IE11 is current and supported and is packaged in supported versions of Windows. It is still used by a significant portion of desktop users. I think this was the point that @recoveringacademic was trying to make in his "Maintenance" post?

Nice and simple, I like it. Worked on firefox, chrome, edge. Failed on IE (kWh remains blank). Windows 10.

Just a thought, maybe create a spreadsheet (excel format is pretty universal) and people can download and fiddle to their hearts content?

Nice writeup. I have a timer on ours and humidity sensor in bathrooms. At night it slows to approx 0.2 ACH. At daytime we have it at 0.25 to 0.3 ACH. The humidity sensor will boost to up to 0.6 ACH, which is close to regs for our house. So far so good, not sure if those rates will be OK in the cold when condensation becomes a bigger factor, so awaiting winter to assess this.

Our final BC inspection was laughable. Chap spent 15 - 20 minutes on site to "inspect" 3 floors and a garage. Half of that time was checking water flow through the underground drain. Some aspect of the build was not quite there - painting, a bit of second fix plumbing and electrics. The inspection prior was before we had boarded up the walls and ceiling and first fix was still in progress, so there were a lot of works in between. He did not find any issues.

I used thick MDF on one wall to hang the MVHR (I think was 28mm, cannot recall, the heaviest we could get). Logic was to minimise sounds transmission of the fans. We just emulsioned the MDF, which works OK other cracklines at the joints. I should have done the same with the opposite wall where the ASHP and pumps are hung, we ended up with using fermacell, pump noise is more prominent.