Jeremy Harris

Might be OK with cables, might not, I'm really not sure whether it would react or not. My guess is that it may be OK, but I'd play safe and stick with self-amalgamating tape, as I know that's compatible with pretty much every type of cable sheath around.

Should be fine once it's sealed up. Wrapping the individual wires is important, as it allows the tape to bond together in between the wires, sealing up those tiny gaps between the wires. A few wraps around each wire at a point where you can over-wrap the whole bundle with self-amalgamating tape, running the over-wrapped tape back to the tape over the end of the conduit, will ensure a good seal.

The cheap stuff from Screwfix is fine. Just remember that you have to stretch it as you wrap it around anything, as stretching it causes it to self-amalgamate. It's not sticky, but will mould together into a solid watertight lump after a few hours,

I think it's a con, for the simple reason that all worms are "oxygen breathers" (aerobic), like us (except worms "breathe" through their skin). A septic tank is, exactly as its name implies, anaerobic, so there will be virtually no free oxygen available in the tank sludge at all. It is this lack of oxygen in the tank sludge and effluent that causes so much environmental damage when septic tanks leak or land drains stop working (as they always do), as the effluent that ends up in watercourses etc has a very high biological oxygen demand (BOD). This high BOD results in the organisms in the effluent depleting the oxygen in any watercourse it's been spilled into, causes the death of fish, crustaceans, and pretty much all other forms of waterborne life. Treatment plants are very different, in that they are aerobic, as all use some form of aeration in order to treat the effluent. The result is that the discharge from a treatment plant has a low BOD, so can be safely discharged into a watercourse, with no requirement for land drains. Additionally, if land drains are used with a treatment plant, they will have a very long life, as they won't cause oxygen depletion in the surrounding soil, which is the thing that always causes septic tank land drains to fail to work properly after a few years.

Planning consent is still required in England and Wales for an ASHP, I believe, but not for a GSHP. I think the concern is over noise (not an issue with newer units) and the proximity to neighbouring properties. There's no requirement for heat energy monitoring to claim the RHI for a domestic installation AFAIK. All the well-known brand names are pretty good when it comes to ASHPs, so Carrier (often re-branded with names better known in the UK), Mitsubishi, Panasonic etc are all good. The key to getting an ASHP to work well is to ensure that it's specified, installed, and most critically, set up properly. The majority of issues that have arisen from poorly performing ASHPs have been a consequence of installers not understanding the very specific nature of ASHPs and both sizing and setting them up for the specific requirement.

I've found that our fresh air intake filter gets very dirty after 6 months. I can get away with cleaning it with a vacuum cleaner maybe once or twice, then I have the fit a new one.

I found that wrapping individual cables with a thin layer of self-amalgamating tape close to where they come out of a conduit, then wrapping self-amalgamating tape around the end of the conduit and stretching it to form a membrane over the end and then continuing to wrap it around all the cables worked pretty well. I did test for air leaks with a Testo probe airflow meter and didn't find any, so concluded that this method was pretty airtight.

@Cambs, we have UFH in the slab downstairs, no heating at all upstairs (except for heated towel rails in the bathrooms) and our house is room-in-roof, with 400mm of warmcel blown in between the deep rafters. Upstairs doesn't overheat or get too cold, as long as we remember to close the bedroom doors on hot days (to stop heat from rising up from the hall to the bedrooms). I reverse the ASHP to cool the slab down in hot weather and that works well, plus we can provide a bit of additional cooling via the air-to-air heat pump in the MVHR. Seems to work very well, and is very comfortable all year around. I did find that I needed to reduce the solar gain a lot, to stop overheating, though.

Welcome, We have a Genvex MVHR with a built in air to air heat pump, which is effectively the same as a split air con unit, but with multiple ducted outputs. It can heat the house with no problem at all, and has a high COP when doing so. It can also cool the house a bit in summer. We never use the heating function, as we hate the feel of it. It does dry the air a bit, but I think the main reason we don't like it is just a personal preference for the feel of the UFH. As a consequence, I've effectively disabled the heating function in the Genvex and just left the cooling function active.

Looks easy enough to seal up. I'd have a look at seeing if the panels can be laid dead flat and then pour a thin layer of the very runny two pack polyurethane or silicone potting compound. I had a go at encapsulating some home made panels using the water-clear (expensive!) potting compound that Dow Corning make, and it runs freely over a surface and ends up as a nice thin layer, like a conformal coating. A brush-on silicone conformal coating, like the stuff used to protect circuit boards may be just as good, but that normally needs to be heat cured. You may be able to set up a rig with a radiant heat lamp to cure the stuff, though. Whenever I've coated circuit boards with the stuff I've cured it in the oven, doesn't take much in terms of temperature, but does take a while. If the price, plus the messing about to seal up the rear surfaces, is right, then I reckon they would be a good buy. I could do with some now, as I'm typing this during (another) power cut, with the house server, modem, router etc running on my back up battery system.

I'm not convinced that it's not profitable to build better quality homes at all. I've been watching the mass developers who have been building hundreds of new homes around the Salisbury area over the past few years, and they are all pretty poor, and regularly seem to attract complaints from buyers. The amount of waste during the building process seemed to me to be ludicrous, as if no one cared about ordering the right quantities of material in the first place. Same with the amount of re-work that seemed to be inherent in the process. I've seen one estate access road dug up and resurfaced three times now, not because the quality was poor, but because yet another service trench needed to go in after it had been surfaced. Same goes with the cost of snagging; it seems that a typical snagging list will have 30 to 40 items that have to be corrected post-build, at a cost that has to be greater than the cost of just spending a bit more time in getting it right first time. One thing that seems to be a significant cause for many problems is piss poor planning. The developers seems to have a haphazard approach to managing tasks, from what I've seen as an interested observer. Perhaps it's related to scale, with larger developments being a fair bit harder to keep well-organised. It's absolutely true that buyers have sod all choice. Most buyers are constrained by the amount of money they can access and their location and family needs, so they end up getting what they are given, in effect. The big developers know this, so have no incentive to do anything different. Add in planning policies that often dictate a high density of housing and it's pretty inevitable that design and quality is going to be compromised. The biggest problem seems to be the availability of land and it's cost, though. I think we're reaching a point in rural areas where we need to find mechanisms to limit the cost of land, so that decent affordable homes can be built for people who live and work in the area.

Personally I prefer @joe90 's solution, with the "T" shaped infill, as structurally that it very much better, as is restrains the outwards load in the lower joist structural member. When loaded, the upper member is in tension, so wants to pull away from the wall plate, and the lower member is in compression and wants to push in towards the wall plate. Having end restraints positively stops the lower member from trying to cripple the lower edges of the hanger.

More than once I've found that all the tape measures had migrated mysteriously to the opposite end of the house to where I was working...

Thanks, Dave, I was just at the stage of making a custom unit, but have now just ordered one of these, as at that price it's much easier to just butcher the remote as you suggest. Stick it in a small plastic enclosure with a bit of circuitry to pulse a couple of relays on the on and off buttons, plus a lead to the plug and the jobs done.

Reading through everything I'd say that there is no doubt at all the the supplier has screwed up and should replace all the joists ASAP.

Pump after tank as a configuration means the tank must be a break tank, that allows air ingress, and that's why you needed secondary disinfection. The accumulator would have been on the output side of the pump (has to be one there - the pump won't work properly without one, as water is (to all intents and purposes) incompressible). The scenario for using a pump to reinforce mains water pressure is to have a break tank filled by the mains supply via a float valve, the pump draws from the break tank and fills the accumulator (with a pressure switch to turn the pump on and off based on the accumulator pressure) and then a UV disinfection unit at the feed point to the house. If you have variable pressure, and just need an accumulator to even it out and give a robust supply, the the set up is different. The incoming mains supply feeds the accumulator directly, via the normal double non-return valve that has to be fitted to the incoming supply, and the feed to the house comes from the accumulator directly. No secondary disinfection is needed as the system remains closed. The first step in finding out what might be best is to monitor the peak pressure on the incoming supply, ideally at several different times during the day, so that you can find out how stable the pressure is and whether there is a long enough period at an adequate pressure to charge the accumulator. The size of the accumulator is set by the demand during low mains pressure time periods, bearing in mind that the useful water volume in an accumulator is less than half the stated volume, because of the air volume on the outside of the bladder.

Pipestock are my local supplier, and I've never had a problem with pipe, fittings or whatever I've bought from them. They are pipe and fitting specialists and keep a massive stock, so will almost always undercut builders merchants for this sort of stuff. Often they give you a free tape measure with an order, too. I have around half a dozen Pipestock tapes and most of the day to day measurements during the build were done with them. Useful as a freebie, as you can leave them lying around all over the place and almost be sure of having one near to where you want to use it (unless you stick it in your pocket and wander off with it....).

Timing flow into a bucket can't measure pressure, only flow rate. To measure pressure then fit a pressure gauge, ideally with a non-return valve in series, as that will then capture the peak pressure available (there will often be a significant difference between the minimum and maximum pressure available at the main supply). It's not uncommon to get a pressure as high as 5 or 6 bar on a water supply, so I'd suggest getting a 10 bar gauge.

No, the pump is there to get the accumulator up to pressure, and is turned on and off with a pressure switch on the output side that will typically have around 1 bar of hysteresis. Typical settings would be to have the pump turn on when the accumulator drops to about 2.5 bar and off when the accumulator reaches about 3.5 bar. These are the settings we use and in practice you can't notice the 1 bar drop before the pump kicks in. The idea is to make sure the pump only operates when needed, and to let the accumulator do the task of maintaining a fairly steady supply pressure to the outlets. This also means that the pump doesn't have to be sized for the short duration, peak demand, as the accumulator will have enough reserve to meet that, and can deliver a flow rate that is probably an order of magnitude greater than that of the pump for short periods.

There's no need for additional disinfection as long as the water supply isn't opened up to air or contamination. Pumps are sealed units, so contamination can't get in, as are accumulators. There's nothing in the water regs that recommends or requires secondary disinfection for a mains water supply that remains sealed from the water main to the point of use in the house, as the residual disinfection that the water companies use will remain effective. The issue only arises usually when a break tank is fitted, or if some form of water treatment that involves aeration is used, and for both of those cases secondary disinfection is a good idea. Much of the time low pressure from the supply can be resolved just by fitting an accumulator, after the mandatory double non return valve from the main, as low pressure is often just a transient, demand related, event, that an accumulator can get around. Pumps sets directly connected to a mains water supply to charge an accumulator create a host of issues, the primary one being that if directly connected (so avoiding the need for secondary disinfection) they must have a way of preventing the incoming mains pressure dropping below a set level, and must definitely have a device that turns the pump system off if there is suction on the mains input side. The water companies quite rightly get upset at the pressure being dropped to the point where contamination can get sucked into their network.

Good 3G might have a Ug of around 0.5 W/m².K, whereas a building regs minimum specification wall would be 0.18 W/m².K, so very good 3G has a heat loss that's not far off three times that of a minimum building regs specification wall. If the oak posts were around 150mm square, then they would have U value of around 1 W/m².K.

They vary a fair bit in price, and you need to shop around. We have two 300 litre accumulators in parallel (for space reasons) and IIIRC they were around £300 each. One would probably be enough, I only fitted two as we have a high flow filter backwash requirement, which is unique to our setup. There's no requirement for UV disinfection with just an accumulator and NRV fitted in the line, as the system remains closed and sealed. There's only a need for additional disinfection if there is a break tank and pump, due to the possibility of contamination entering the open break tank.

3G would make sense, and I suspect that even then the heat loss through the glazing in a room like this will massively exceed the thermal bridging through the oak posts, so overall I'd not worry about trying to add insulation where the softwood spacer sits. That glass fixing detail seems to work well with oak framed buildings (that are always subject to a bit of movement), from what I've heard, and looks pretty easy to build, too. An extension that's largely all glazing like this is unlikely to meet building regs in terms of heat loss, anyway, so presumably it's small enough not to need to. Being able to close it off from the rest of the house with well-insulated doors, when not in use, would seem a wise move, both in winter when it's likely to lose a lot of heat and in summer when it may well tend to get a bit warm (depending on orientation).

There's no way I'd be faffing around with doubled up wall plates (which will inevitably then be working at a much higher than designed shear stress) for a problem that's someone else's error. I don't even think that the doubled up wall plate solution would be acceptable with the present depth of the timber used - at the very least it would need an SEs input to confirm that it's OK, as ideally wall plates should be as thin as commensurate with getting adequate joist hanger fixings in, as that minimises the peak shear stress they see from the total floor load.

It's the same in the rest of the UK, too. Be aware that you cannot (at least under water regs that apply here) fit a pump directly to a main that could lower the pressure to an excessive degree (specifically cause suction in that main that could suck in contamination through any leakage in their system), either. If you fit a pump there is often a requirement for a break tank that's filled by the low pressure main, then a booster set and accumulator can draw from that to feed the house. If a break tank is fitted then it is very sensible to also include water disinfection, as the sealed supply will have been opened to air, residual disinfection provided by the water supplier will be lost, and airborne contamination is a real risk (same risk as having a cold tank in a house and not using it for drinking water). There are booster pump and accumulator sets available that include supply-side pressure monitoring, I believe. I've not used them, but they may be a solution that satisfies the water regs and also avoids the need for consumer-side disinfection. Before you do anything, though, I would get a peak reading pressure meter and fit it to the supply where it comes in, via a non-return valve, as that's a cheap and easy way to tell you what you really have at the incoming supply. If you get a peak reading that's well over 1 bar (and I strongly suspect you may, as pressure increases a lot at some times of the day or night) then an accumulator will fix your problem with no requirement for a pump or further disinfection. I'm really impressed with the pressure and flow stability we get from our accumulator, it really does make a big difference, not least of which is in reducing interaction between outlets (so no problems with shower fluctuation when a toilet is flushed or the washing machine turns on).