Nickfromwales

Space cooling for first floor?

Cooker and extractor etc are vat reclaims or as they’re part of the functionality of a habitable dwelling. Built in oven is, extractor is, job isn’t. Buy a down-draught hob so extraction and hob in one unit and that will be accepted afaik. Get your VAT advice in check independently (for the whole project) well in advance is my 2 cents. @saveasteading Here’s another helpful Welsh fella for you!! https://www.vat431.co.uk Tell him I said to look after you

The ones in my pic were self adhesive, so I had to get the prep spot on. All a bit dark for me but the client was ex UAE, so that was his chosen colour theme. Mosaic tiles were a right bastard to do, tiny glass ones which I had to mitre….. joy. Slowly leaving that life behind. The LVT shop should be plenty well equipped to tell you which glue to use, and how thick to apply it. Usually they sell you a 3mm notched trowel to spread it around consistently. Much better to reduce the ply and have the lip. You’ll thank me later, even though the thought of (edit) deleting the lip seems a good one right now. . I use ultra stuff, so this primer watered down 75% primer / 25% water, and just have a wet sponge full of it to work into the surface of the plywood. It needs to be completely dry before using LVT glue on top, so give it 24hrs after saturating the plywood with it. Link Keep driving the screws into the ply until they’re about 2mm below the surface of the plywood. So for 9mm ply into 22mm P5, you’d want 4.0 x 30mm screws.

You’d get get beaten up by the scaffolders, if you asked them to wait whilst you scraped off each board! 🤣

All vaulted ceilings, so this would be more of a compromise over wall mounted. There are walk-in or fitted wardrobes throughout, so I’ve considered using those spaces, but the master bed WIW is on the outside wall, at around 2.1m internal head height, so would only really work for 3 of the 4 bedrooms. I’m doing (sense checking at pre-construction) all the MVHR layouts atm, so radial 92’s are already going into the 400mm posi roof structures to combat the open aspects of these large, vaulted spaces, but I’m unsure if the mechanics of ducting the AC would work. I had already specd fan coil units over the bed 3&4 fitted wardrobes, which I could easily vent in / out of the open landing (2-storey gallery) which I’ve now abandoned, so there are still possibilities. Just need to see how many ducts it would take, and where the air would get to the upper levels for the AC to cool effectively. Heating, as you know, is required by the thimble-full when at PH level; that’s the lowest priority but the system does need to be able to service both heat and cool. I do like the integrated ducted units like in nice hotels, but service and operational noise is a worry. Can I ask exactly how audible your system is when cooling, and does it heat effectively too, if you’ve used it for heat?

It’s how us Welsh folk emphasise. I see lots of kind people feck a good job up by doing something daft. So please DON’T feck anything up

Indeed. Thanks for the link too, I’ve just shared it. The units will be located strategically within bedrooms, eg away from the beds, so they will have sufficient effect, but the absolute minimum of nuisance. These are going to be (slightly over) sized to provide the necessary effect, but with very low operational noise.

Do NOT clean the boards off near your new render!! Leave the Scaff guys take them down and they’ll just bang off the excess as they go. It’s another day in the office for them, so chill out

Not sure what shop it was….but I’ve been fitting high end bathrooms and kitchens for decades, and I’ve never used anything other than regular plywood off the shelf, or the very worst case of the client poops the bed I fit ‘marine’ ply, but as it’s all covered by tile adhesive and tiles, or glue and LVT, there’s just no way the ply can fail (if the jobs been done properly). Just regular BZP countersunk posi head screws, cheap and cheerful, which I buy to be 5mm shorter than the sum of the 22mm deck and the plywood of choice. FYI, it’s not a great idea to finish the floor level with the tray. Sounds great on paper, but is wholly impractical in real life. I’d say you’d want 10mm of upstand showing, so you can fit the flooring against a vertical surface with some real estate to seal the two together with clear CT1. If you’re good laying the plywood, eg screwing with higher frequency at the edges and seams, then that will reduce or remove the need to feather. You can just get away with spot-filling the screw heads one by one, and sanding those and the seams to get it smooth and regular. Sealing with Ultra flexible-prime watered down 25% would then give you a very good platform to start laying the glue and flooring. Bare, dry, non-sized plywood isn’t the best thing to try and lay the flooring onto btw.

For 2 current (sizeable) new builds I’ve just bleached the complexity, @JohnMo will be proud, and lost the AHU’s and FF UFH etc, but have advised both clients to install proper AC in the upstairs rooms which they’ve agreed to. The sniff of heating is simple then, but cooling (both of these customers were very concerned about comfort and NOT being too warm during the summer months (all 2 of them 🤣)) so AC just seemed to tick all the boxes. Not everyone is bothered about cooling, but when it is part of a remit conveyed to me, then I can’t just talk them out of it as it may only be used sporadically. Not expensive by comparison, much easier to have room by room set temps, and the controls are just the remotes sat in their respective wall holsters or set on a piece of furniture, looking after the spaces accordingly. The ethos is to leave these run on demand, so any change up / down in temp is countered as it happens; this should mean the units are only ever running very low and very quietly, doing to bare minimum duty. This should maximise longevity and reduce running costs, but summer cooling via the AC HP is likely to always be met if solar is present, so it’s offset so to speak. There are some very nice looking wall mounted units available, Matt white finish etc, so that’s the way forwards methinks. You just cannot beat having AC keep you cool in those stinking hot few weeks / summer months, and my sons attic room is just a joy during these times as I put AC up there for him (otherwise he’d be dead) and it’s defo high up the list when I finally do something nice for us, eventually……

Does your local pub have an engraved 1/4 pint glass for when you go out for a beer?

Yes, it is!! Some folk need to take a day off lol. However........ 20 degrees C in a passive house (ish) setting is absolutely NOTHING like 20 in my stone survival pod. At 18 degrees and with MVHR / UFH these dwellings just perform so much comfortably then a 'naturally aspirated, box of upset', such as mine. I just pay the gas bill and don't read it for too long. @-rick-, are you in a super-duper, energy efficient and low temp dwelling with MVHR currently?

Yup. Why introduce any unavoidable risk, especially if you're cladding over it which would make rectifying any feck-ups a costly process. It's more of disappointment / frustration vs life or death, so patching it in should be fine if it's not the fundamental rain screen.

Hi. For LVT you usually have an 18mm or 22mm P5 deck board, and then glue and screw down some ply over this to act as a binder, but also as particle board doesn't like feathering compound as much as plywood does. The screwheads all need filler-ing and sanding back, so the plywood surface is relatively flawless. Then goes down the LVT. I've never seen any particular plywood needed for this, it's just a floor. If you want to seal it, then tank the plywood layer and drop a few mm of feathering compound over that.

Lift your hands up in the air, and say "I didn't do it, I was in a different fecking country!!". I think you should pull the band-aid off, and tell the contractor that this is between them and UKPN, and you wish to hear no more about it. A service alteration at the very worst should be sub £2k, so they'll have to give their purse strings some slack and stump up. Doubt they'll be so quick to do it again then!

In Leicester the builder dug up the 3ph cable that serviced the very busy steakhouse / pub next door. Plans didn’t show the cable. Neither builder nor client paid a penny, nor were they asked to. It shut the pub at peak lunchtime on a very busy day, so lost revenues would have run into multiples of thousands. The repair was made immediately and THEN the cable was added to their records. Bottom line here is, the supply head and meter would have been in this locality, so the likelihood is that Gumbo, the low earning digger driver, just didn’t put 2+2 together or do any diligence whatsoever. Depth of the service should have been identified by the digger operator having a banksman (or woman 👀) looking for the cable manually, with a trench shovel, and then this would never have happened. Has a bill been presented to anyone? It’s on the contractor if he was principal, but very likely it’ll land in your lap if you were principal. Too many people operate sites with their heads down and fingers crossed. If that’s saved north of (say) the £5k bill then you’re still ahead.

BCO is just out of their depth / comfort zone, so has gone into the default “ass-saving” mode. @Oz07 is bang on the money, set the two professionals up to communicate directly so you’re 1) not losing things in translation, and 2) are not introducing any emotion into the mix. Easier said than done, and sometimes we don’t know when emotion compromises any situation. I’ve dealt with one SE lately, and after he stared and pondered and scratched his head, I just said get your lead SE to say yes as this is all perfectly fine, please. He left, did as I asked, lead SE confirmed all my adaptations were spot on and the lot was signed off without further hesitation. Been doing ‘construction’ for north of 30 years, and not had a proposal fail to date. They just need to tweak their antennae’s to align, and the problem will disappear quickly.

Yup. The steel beams that MBC are supplying are currently getting penetrations in them and plating back up so we have a hole for 110mm soil pipe and 4x MVHR ducts, plus some small letterboxes for plumbing and electrical to go through. No extra cost to the client as we planned these well in advance amd the 1st fixes for M&E will just fly in now; I’ve mapped al the pathways and that meant a glulam had to be binned, but just a coupe of clicks in a mouse and it was sorted. Nothing really to drill through as built now, so happy days.

Depends if it’s practical to do so, and if you’re in dire need to push on. If neither, then wait it out I guess, but I’d go scatty sitting on my thumbs. Find something to do recreationally, to break the day up maybe. Have you started planning M&E etc? That’s usually a good thing to do well in advance of the actual construction phase. Been working with a client since summer getting all the T’s crossed and I’s dotted, and MBC are now due to start founds end of Feb. Start looking at materials and suppliers, price up MVHR and plumbing, start your electrical layouts and browse light fitting types and where switches will go etc. Design the kitchen / utility and bathrooms etc, go look at showrooms for inspiration and take pics / make notes. I try to do as much of this with clients as possible, well ahead of the busy and brain consuming founds and frame erection.

Ah yes, just reread that post and you mention them, just my poor brain recalled that you had gone for one. They do seem to be cheap as chips though!

Yup. Proper old school stuff.

I think that came to you in a dream. 🛌

Sorry. My DNA is made primarily out of copper and brass. Yes, Hepworth (NOT JG Speedfit!!!!) would be equally as handsome as I was when in my 20’s. Im still quite buff at 51 btw. 🤩

For completeness, the old school fix down with bare BFO brass screws was successful and reliable, only, because the pans were always set down onto a bed of mortar to absorb undulations or imperfections in the cast of the porcelain. Doing that with the junk that’s puked out of factories nowadays is a suicide mission. Furthermore, I haven’t screwed a pan down for prob over 2 decades. I just bed them down, like the old boys did, but with clear CT1. If there are fsome zing holes, I buy the kit I linked to above, grind the heads off the bolts, and silicone the remainder of the kit in as decorative plugs.

How long is the wait for Fogstar? You can’t become huge rush, and @jack has one of their units iirc.