Jeremy Harris

How much airtightness tape do you need? I have part of a roll left over, the expensive Siga stuff, that you could have for free if it might help.

@mvincentd, you are far from alone, I think there are many of us here that have found ourselves in the same position. My view is the same as yours, that I felt that my personal interest in things being done as they should be, and as we wanted them to be, made me more diligent than a professional may have been. My problem was solely a lack of understanding of the way that the various building trades normally work, and particularly how they interact. If I ever did this again I'd definitely be a lot better at it, but for many, perhaps most, self-builders it's a once in a lifetime project.

Yes, there were mines in many of the caves in the gorge, I've been in most of them at some time or another. It's like a Swiss cheese, that part of South Wales, with some of the biggest cave systems in Europe. Add in lead mining, which was initially mainly where Galena naturally outcropped in the caves, and it wouldn't surprise me if that may have contributed to it. I'll try and dig out my old copy of Caves of South Wales and the geological maps, as I know there are some pretty big fault lines in that area, they show up clearly in some of the caves.

@Nickfromwales is out shopping, I believe, so maybe he dropped his shopping bags, what with his dodgy arm and all.............

I found it by using a tip that someone gave me on another forum, that doesn't always seem to find things with the "search" facility. Most search engines will have a site-specific search facility, so if you go into whichever search engine you use, type in the search term (I used "Sikabond" in this case) then a space, then the following with no spaces: site:https://forum.buildhub.org.uk you should find that all the search results come from Buildhub.

Just found a thread discussing adhesives: that has some useful links to products in it.

I used Sikabond 95. Not cheap at all, but it does seem to have done a very good job. I have a feeling that someone( @Nickfromwales perhaps?) may have found a cheaper adhesive that was very like Sikabond, as I'm sure there's a thread here discussing this stuff, I just can't find it.

TBH, that was my thought, too, but it's a bit of a double edged sword. AFAIK, the point of contact with the council planning department will probably be the enforcement officer, and that might elevate things to a level that increases any friction. Ideally you want the council to just "become aware" of what's going on without getting personally involved, if only because neighbour issues can seem to get unpleasant fairly quickly, and have to be declared if you ever sell the house. Perhaps the best course of action is for someone other than yourself to report the work to the planners, in a way that doesn't give away your knowledge of your neighbours plans. It seems a bit devious, but a very non-specific report of building activity that doesn't seem to be authorised, that doesn't mention anything about the size of shape of what is planned to be built, might get your neighbour on the right track. From what you've said, it seems as if the neighbour may be acting out of ignorance of the need for planning and building regs approval. As above, I'm pretty sure they would get planning permission, and by doing it properly they would save themselves a lot of pain and grief later, especially if it went unreported and they decided to sell the house.

I wish I'd known about that tool when I was laying our floors! Seems such a simple idea, too, that it makes you wonder why no one thought of it years ago.

Thanks, that's useful to know. Our travertine is bonded down with normal standard set flexible tile adhesive, straight to a concrete slab with UFH in it. The bamboo is similar, I bonded that down to the primed slab with some very expensive Sika adhesive. Both seem to be fine, with no signs of any problems at all after a couple of years. Our floor rarely gets warmer than 22 deg C from the UFH, though, except for the bits that catch the sun that can get uncomfortably hot in summer.

If you do want start a new thread on stairs it's easy enough to get the posts from here moved to it, if you wish.

With a few coats of Osmo satin finish ours aren't at all slippery, but there is a bit of noise when you walk up or down them wearing hard soled shoes. We're adopting a "shoes off in the house" policy anyway, not because of the stairs, but really just to try and keep muck out of the house. We're finding that there's not much dust in a house with MVHR, and that highlights the fact that most of the muck seems to come in on our feet!

Let your knees and back tell you how hard it can be - they did for me! I was practically unable to do anything useful for a week or so after laying the flooring...........

Out of interest, what exactly is the issue with UFH? I hear this a lot about flooring, and I'm not at all sure why. UFH will rarely, if every, make the floor warmer than around 25 to 26 deg C, as even 26 deg C is about 64 W/m², which is a fair bit of heat into a room. I've found that the tiles in our hall, where the sun shines through the glazing, reach far higher temperatures, as high as 40 deg C on one occasion when I measured it. Similarly, we have a section of bamboo flooring adjacent to our West facing French windows, that reaches similar high temperatures when the sun shines on it - so hot as to be uncomfortable to walk on with bare feet (there's now a rug there to ease this!). I know virtually nothing about flooring (other than having laid it, at some cost to my knees and back!), but have always been a bit puzzled by concerns about UFH, when it seems that any section of floor that is exposed to bright sun could get a great deal hotter than it would from the UFH. I have wondered if there was something else causing these concerns, really just because I can't see the logic behind them, but I could easily have missed something.

I agree. We had to build a very large retaining wall right on the garden boundary with our neighbour, which included going under their land with the foundations. No party wall agreement was required, as we were a long way from their house or any other structure. We did have to ensure that we restored the strip of their land that we'd dug out to it's original condition, but other than that there was no form of legal agreement required.

Good point, but your suggestion to me a while ago to use the motor driven Salus head was brilliant, as it has completely removed the need for a blending/thermostatic mixer valve. When fitted to either the main flow or return valve on the manifold (both of ours use the same pin-operated valve body) the Salus valve, with it's two sensors, automatically maintains the flow temperature at exactly the right level. It's a magic bit of kit in my opinion, and I now have our TMV turned fully open (I may well just remove the head and capillary tube and replace it with a cap with a push down pin). Might be an option here, as long as the system isn't being zone controlled. Even if it is, fitting the sensor clips to an always on zone would work, I'm sure. I'm not sure Salus intended this head to be used like this, but, based on my experience I can say it seems to work very well.

It's interesting looking at how the big developers are really good at building right down to minimum levels, yet still manage to get acceptable SAP results. One development that I've become fairly familiar with (largely because I drive past it every day) has utilised the ability to trade off one element against another in order to get an acceptable SAP result very cleverly. One of the things they did was to add a few solar panels on some of the houses, often not at all well located (in one case on the north face of the roof). The fabric standards for these houses weren't great, but they did use reasonably good doors and windows. None have MVHR, as all have trickle vents in the windows. I worked through some SAP rough estimates, based just on what I could see, so very much educated guesswork. What seemed clear was that they were gaming the system. Adding a few solar panels made a big difference to the SAP rating, even if those panels were unlikely to deliver their rated output, for example. Similarly, using better than minimum standard windows and doors on the smaller houses compensated in part for just building the floors, walls and roof to the minimum standards. Most had small (pretty impractical) draught lobbies that were probably exactly at the minimum floor area of 2m² tacked on the outside, again I suspect this was just to slightly improve the SAP rating. My personal view is that although what's been done is compliant with the letter of the regulations (assuming the workmanship was OK, which from my observations it doesn't seem to be), in practice the houses are very unlikely to perform anywhere near as well as the SAP EPC suggests. What's happening is that an illusion is being created that energy efficient new houses are being built, when the reality is that they probably aren't.

You can DIY it. It's a bit tedious, but not technically that difficult, and there is nothing in Part F that requires that the person doing the commissioning and producing the report needs any particular qualification or accreditation. The forum has two air flow meters available to loan out, in return for a modest donation to the forum running costs. Unfortunately, in order to see that section you need ten posts here, just as a safeguard, really, as the kit has been donated and isn't that cheap. Alternatively, you can hire the air flow meters, I believe. The guidance note I linked to earlier in this thread is a reasonable starting point, but I failed to find it when I was looking for help on how to set the system up, so I made up my own report format, again there is a link to that in the second post in this thread. If you don't want to DIY the commissioning, then really your only alternative is to try and find a HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) contractor in your area that can do it. All HVAC contractors will have the required flow meter, and know how to use it, and even if they are not familiar with MVHR, showing them a copy of the guidance note on commissioning should enable them to do the job. I would guess that you would be looking at the best part of a day's work to do the commissioning, could be less, it really depends on how much running around has to be done. The process is iterative, as every time one terminal is adjusted it tends to change the pressure and so affect the flow at all the other terminals on that side of the system.

There are a lot of accidents that led to the formation of this forum. The initial way 16 people managed to find each other after Ebuild shut down (bear in mind that we didn't have each other's email addresses - there was a sort of "chain email" that resulted in us getting together, by chance), was one such highly improbable accident, the fact that we all managed to, rather chaotically at times, create this forum is very largely accidental - who could have guessed that out of 16 random people several had very good IT skills, and knew how to set up a forum like this? The fact that 16 people actually agreed on a way forward was both accidental and, in my view, slightly miraculous. Clearly some of the 16 knew of each other, so the fact that 3 of them happened to have used the same frame supplier was perhaps less of a coincidence, but it was just a part of the near-random sequence of events that led to the group forming. From the very beginning, of the many, many discussions and lengthy debates we had when trying to decide how to set this forum up, one of the longest was about commercial stuff. Should we operate the forum as a company? Should we fund it by advertisements? Should a forum company be a not-for-profit? Should we operate this forum as a members association? Was it actually possible to run a forum as a members association (most are run by companies, it seems)? What were the legal implications of these, and other, possible operating models? There was a consensus view that we should run this forum as a not-for-profit association of members, with no advertising or commercial promotion, and I will freely admit that I was, and I remain, a strong advocate for this approach. I am vehemently opposed to the idea that we should be commercial in any way, or be seen to favour any one commercial entity over any other. I've stressed many, many times that I do not have any connection, financial or otherwise, with any building company, and never have had, despite what some may believe. I've only ever been a customer, never an agent, sales rep, or whatever. Any company that has asked me if they can let prospective customers contact me has had the same answer; "Yes, provided that I can tell them both the good, and not so good, aspects of our experience" . I've adhered rigidly to that rule, both here and when chatting to people I've met outside of this forum, and I have no intention of changing my view on the wisdom of taking this position As Terry has very rightly implied, this forum is only useful if it contains content that helps people, and if those people, in turn, add content that adds more value to the self-build community. Things change and evolve over time, both with products and services that are available, and with the evolution of some of the businesses that supply those products and services. Unless we try to encourage discussion on a broad range of products and services, taking great care to be absolutely factual and accurate when doing so, then we risk the forum developing "tunnel vision".

Yes, these are the terminal numbers inside the heat pump itself. take care, as there are low voltage (12V DC) terminals that are pretty close to some that may have mains voltage on. Just as you say, if you ensure that 13 and 15 are open, that 3 and 6 are linked and that there is also a link from 3 to 7 (that puts the heat pump into heating mode, if terminal 7 is not linked to terminal 3 the heat pump will run in cooling mode). Hope this helps.

As said elsewhere, I really do think that the role of a good project manager is underestimated, and I also think that there are some peculiarities in the way that the building industry works that makes a significant difference to the way self-build project management needs to be approached, especially if not using a main contractor. I have a bit of project management experience, but that was managing major procurement programmes, and despite having all the relevant bits of paper (Prince 2, MSP etc) I was wholly unqualified to manage a self-build project. We started out intending to use a project manager, and went so far as to engage with a local chap who assured us that he would almost certainly save his fee, both by cost savings and by resolving issues and bringing the project in on time. There were many, many times when I've regretted the decision to not use him, a decision that was largely based on over-confidence on my part. In our case, everything I'd read or heard suggested that the ground works were the most likely area to cause problems, and were the part of the job that carried the highest risk. To mitigate that I wrote a ground works contract that effectively made the ground works company the main contractor for the first 6 week phase of the build. There were a couple of relatively minor issues that arose, and one pretty serious issue that led to me seeking a reduction on the final stage payment, but when they were finished I realised there were some other errors that cost us a fair bit of money to sort out, like the site levels being way too high (no allowance, as per the drawings, for the topsoil needed to bring us back to the stipulated finished level), the access track that we paid over the odds for was unusable for anything other than a digger, so I had to rush around and hire a digger the day after they were off site to correct it, and much late I measured up for the drive and discovered that the garage foundation and treatment plant were not in the right place, both of which caused more hassle. However, and this is the dangerous bit, at the time the ground works were completed I felt confident that I could manage the remainder. What I failed to realise was that there was far more to managing building contractors than I believed, in particular the need to be pretty hands-on all the time. In general we had a pretty good bunch of people working with us on the build, with only one really iffy contractor and a few that were worth their weight in gold. Without the help and guidance I received from the best of them, I'd never have picked up some of the issues that arose, all of which were down to me not having enough knowledge about the details of building a house. As project manager, you really have to have a pretty good understanding of these details, as it's inevitable that you will be asked last-minute questions and expected to just give the right answer!

In theory they might, as the spec for F7 is > 1µ, I believe, but they seem to rely on stuff that small sticking to the filter, rather than actually being positively filtered out, I think. This seems to be a general principle with a lot of air filtration, AFAICS, in that in order to reduce the flow resistance the manufacturers rely on the filter capturing smaller particles by some sort of attraction between the particle and the filter material, maybe by shaping the filter to force a velocity change over it's surface (that's a random guess!). I've had a close look at the F7 filters on our unit, and to the naked eye they look coarser than the 5µ filter in our water system. Not very scientific at all, but intriguing as a comparison.

I may get time tonight to do a sketch of a design that I think might work OK, and that could easily be a DIY project. I've been giving this some thought overnight, as we could do with something to help keep bonfire smoke out. Twice this week I've had to turn the MVHR off, because a couple of neighbours decided to break the "bonfire ban". It's only a seasonally issue, really, but is still a nuisance if you don't happen to notice until the house is already smelling of smoke. Watch this space, as I should be able to post up my early sketches either tonight or tomorrow, depending on the weather and if I get deflected off to do some other task............ None of the available filters will take take out PM2.5s, but carbon may well adsorb them, I think.

My experience with bamboo flooring has been that it only tends to expand and contract very slightly, along one axis, perpendicular to the length of the boards. As it happens, the two door thresholds which could have caused an issue (I wanted flat thresholds, with no sort of bump) were both aligned with the long axis of the boards. I just left a small gap (maybe 5mm) and filled it with the flexible floor filler stuff that the flooring companies supply, which I think may be either an acrylic or MSP compound. In practice I've seen no signs of movement at either of these joints, so I strongly suspect that the floor barely moves at all. Not sure if engineered flooring behaves the same way or not, though.

A couple that came to our open day two or three years ago used Touchwood. They were pretty happy with everything, except their room sealed wood burning stove, that over-heated the house (not Touchwood's problem!). When we were looking around I missed Touchwood, but talking to the couple nearby who visited I got the feeling that they may have been a bit expensive. Always hard to judge, though, as comparing prices on a like-for-like basis seems to be challenging, to say the least.