Jeremy Harris

Would seem speedy compared to @Onoff's bathroom . . .

Never a truer word said. I have no solvent weld soil pipe anywhere in the house. I was working alone and knew full well that I didn't have a hope in hell of being able to fit things together in time. Our old house was the same. When I rebuilt the bathroom and WC there all the old pipes were push fit, and they hadn't been a problem for 30 odd years, so I fitted the same again.

The aluminium foil tape should be fine for this, it sticks pretty well to the surface coating on PIR. Good idea to rub it down to get it to adhere well, I think, as this seems to make a big difference to how well it stays stuck.

Yes, it has to be earthed as it has exposed metal parts.

They can get in through extremely thin gaps, and even seem to be able to get past the flap type outer window seals. They are also creatures of habit, and will often over-winter in the same place, year after year (no one seems to know why, as they don't live that long). I believe that there are some deterrents available, a bit like using diluted peppermint oil to keep spiders away. Once the cycle is broken it seems that there's half a chance that they won't come back again in the Autumn.

Sounds very much like cluster flies. They hibernate in tiny gaps, typically around the outside of windows and doors. I had thousands of them inside my garage last year, all banging their heads on the window, trying to get out.

I treated all our oak joinery (doors, skirtings, architraves, staircase etc) with Osmo about 5 years ago, and the only thing I've rubbed back a bit and re-coated has been the treads on the staircase, just because of a bit of scuffing from foot traffic. The doors etc all still look the same as when I did them, and probably won't need anything for years, I suspect.

@Declan52s idea of getting a large timber shed and then insulating it and fitting it out seems a good one. Being able to quickly get a watertight structure up that you can then fit out makes a lot of sense, as long as it's not too costly. There always seems to be loads of bargains for things like windows and doors, kitchen units etc that come up on places like Gumtree, too, which could save a few bob.

48° feels surprisingly hot, it's about what our hot water thermostatic mixing valve is set to. Our shower is set to 38°C. Legionnaires is not a risk within a closed system, as it's an airborne pathogen that somehow has to get into the water. An unvented cylinder fed by mains water cannot get infected, as air can't get to it. I really wish that this bit of common sense logic was sensibly applied, but it seems not. If you're paranoid about it (and I'd personally not be the slightest bit worried) then fit an immersion heater with a time switch set to boost the tank above 60°C for half an hour once every few weeks. You can always use the immersion to boost the tank if you ever need it, too.

If you're pretty confident that the plaster nibs through the laths are all sound, and haven't cracked away from the plaster, then patching should be OK. TBH it may well not be a long term solution, though, as the patches won't grip the laths as well, just because it's hard to force the stuff up through a narrow slot so it forms a nib to lock it behind the laths. If you've vacuumed up above the ceiling then I'd guess you've had a good look at all the plaster nibs on that side and will have spotted if any were loose.

Same meter we had until we switched to E7. The E7 meter didn't have the isolator, so I added one alongside the meter. With hindsight I should have done this when we first put the supply in, but at that time I knew we were going to get a meter with an isolator (we're also in SSE land here) so I didn't bother. Luckily I was chatting to the meter fitter when he fitted the E7 meter, spotted the lack of an in-built isolator and somehow he must have forgotten to fully crimp the fuse seal, and accidentally dropped a couple of seals and wires in the bottom of the box . . .

Doesn't it just! I find I have to relearn how to decode the damned thing every time I try to use it. If ever there was something that deserved a prize for being the least user friendly bit of kit, it has to be that Carrier/Kingspan/Glowworm command unit. Whoever the person was that "designed" (too strong a word) the display and interface on that needs to be made to use it every day, with a mandatory overnight loss of memory.

Good result! Great to see the DNO respond so quickly, given the remoteness of your location and the present circumstances. They usually do try to come out quickly for something like this, as they may have been a real risk of it causing a fire.

Not sure, but @Bitpipe has a basement with no heating that seems to stay at a pleasant temperature.

If we'd had the option to build an "upside down house" then I think I'd have opted for it, and then only put heating upstairs. A friend had an "upside down house" years ago, and I really liked the layout. In his case it worked well because the house was built in to a bank, that sloped away below the level of the road, so the front door opened in to what was really the first floor. This also meant that the bedrooms downstairs didn't have a view out to the road, just down the garden.

I'm very glad we didn't install upstairs UFH. We find we don't need heating in the bedrooms at all, but then we also don't like the bedroom to be too warm. We try and keep the bedroom below 20°C, something that needs a bit of cooling from time to time (like yesterday, for example).

FWIW, we have all our UFH as a single zone, as we don't like keeping doors closed all the time. Flow temperature on our system is typically about 26°C to 28°C. UFH heat output averages about 6 W/m² of heated floor area, with a maximum in extremely cold weather of about 22 W/m², but that's for a well-insulated house that only needs a small amount of heating. Changing the flow temperature increases the heat output per m², by raising the floor surface temperature. For a room temperature of 21°C the approximate heat output per m² of heated floor area for a range of floor surface temperatures would be: 30°C floor surface temperature ~100 W/m² 29°C floor surface temperature ~87.9 W/m² 28°C floor surface temperature ~75.9 W/m² 27°C floor surface temperature ~64 W/m² 26°C floor surface temperature ~52.4 W/m² 25°C floor surface temperature ~41 W/m² 24°C floor surface temperature ~29.9 W/m² 23°C floor surface temperature ~19.1 W/m² 22°C floor surface temperature ~8.9 W/m² You can work out how much heat each room can get from the above, just use the heated floor area for each room and multiply it by the floor surface temperature. It's unlikely that you would need more than about 50 W/m² even in really cold weather, and most probably you may not need as much as this for a new build.

That's the main incoming fuse and cable termination. Call the DNO now, using their emergency number, and tell them you believe that there is a fire hazard from a defective main fuse that is running hot. Turn off the supply at the switch on the consumer unit (they will probably tell you to do this anyway). I hope they can get someone out to you quickly. They usually do, but I believe you're in a remote location, so I'm not sure if they will have someone out there or not. It's definitely not something that you can DIY, I'm afraid.

Any chance you can use the quote function, please, so that we both get notifications properly and to make reading and replying a great deal easier? The simple reason is that much of the air permeability will be through fabric that you cannot easily draft proof. Masonry is inherently quite leaky, for example, as are other elements of the structure. A chat with any builder who is building new houses will quickly show that, even to meet the pretty low demands of building regs, they have to radically change their approach to making the house less permeable by design. Our house, like all new houses now, has an airtight/vapour tight barrier layer over the inside surface of the external structure of the whole house. This is taped and sealed everywhere, including taped seals that connect this internal layer to the door and window frames. It's really difficult, short of completely stripping an existing house back to a shell, to get close to this when trying to improve an existing house. I think you've made your point clearly that for your particular circumstances, with an expensive installation in an existing house, where ventilation heat loss may not be the most significant heat loss element, you do not feel that MVHR is worth installing. That's fine, but many others hold views, based on their experience, which are markedly different to yours, and those views are every bit as valid as your own. The title of this thread is bogus, too, as it is clearly intended to be highly provocative and to create a firestorm of outrage. You knew that when you chose it and that doesn't really endear people to respond calmly, IMHO. My personal view is that the air quality alone in our house is something I would gladly pay a premium for. Not having hay fever symptoms, because the pollen and spores are filtered out of the incoming fresh air alone makes it worth having. The complete absence of condensation anywhere in the house, the rapid drying rate of towels and any washing we hang indoors, and the fact that we no longer use the tumble dryer are all additional reasons for having good ventilation. I've never lived in a house with such good air quality in my entire life, and frankly I couldn't go back to living in a house without an effective form of continuous background ventilation.

Probably because, as above, Part F makes no mention of using ACH, it only uses areas.

The regs do not refer to ACH, as it's not the way either air permeability or ventilation is measured in Part F. Part F references everything to areas, not volume.

@DavidHughes, did you manage to do and air test and measure the air permeability after all the sealing work you've done? I spent hundreds of hours trying to seal up our block and brick built bungalow, but even after I'd finished it still leaked like a sieve when I fitted a test fan in a window and depressurised it. I doubt it would have met basic building regs requirements, TBH, and wouldn't have been airtight enough to make fitting MVHR worthwhile, in terms of any energy saving. Good draft sealing doesn't come even vaguely close to the sort of measures needed to get down to the sort of airtightness where MVHR starts to save worthwhile amounts of heat.

FWIW, we under ventilate our house, as, I think, do others with MVHR. There has been a lot of research into ventilation, and personally our experience pretty much lines up with this. This article aligns well with our experience, and is worth a read: https://passipedia.org/planning/building_services/ventilation/basics/types_of_ventilation

Not at all, just relating our experience over about 25 years of living in houses with trickle vents and extractors, that's all. Our house with MVHR has zero wind noise. With the thick cellulose insulation (great for acoustic attenuation) and the 3G glazing we never hear any wind noise in the house. All we ever hear in really severe weather is rain against the windows, even during the storms a few weeks ago. Two of the houses we had with trickle vents were incredibly noisy in strong winds. One even used to have some noise from the vents when they were closed (we had to close them in strong winds to stop them howling). Opening windows for ventilation is OK in warm weather, but less than desirable when it's cold outside. MVHR has massively reduced the cleaning requirements in this house. The MVHR filter seems to take out almost all the airborne dirt, and, more importantly for me, the pollen. The latter saves me a significant sum in antihistamines, as well as giving a marked improvement in comfort. There is very little dust in the house, what does settle seems to be fluff and hair mainly. At a guess I'd say this house only needs about 1/4 the amount of cleaning of our last house, yet it's about 30% larger. We bought two Dyson cordless cleaners, intending to have one for use upstairs and one downstairs. We can vacuum the whole house with half a charge from one of them, and we generally only need to do that maybe once every three weeks.

3D printed gremlins sat on the top of each might be fun: