Jeremy Harris

First off you need to contact the utilities to see if they have any records of stuff crossing the land. They are far from being reliable, but if they show something as being there you can be reasonably sure it probably is. Next, take a look at as many old records as you can to try and find out how the area has changed. Often there can be clues as to where other houses and services are that indicate whether something may cross the land. Be aware that the utility companies often have stuff crossing land that they know nothing about. Worth looking closely at the well to see if there are any signs of a pump, pipework, etc. Might give a clue as to whether there are any pipes etc, running from it and which direction they head in. You may find other old pipes or drains when excavating, it's just one of the normal risks. The key thing is being able to recognise what's found. For example, we found a drain running down the side of our plot. It was clear from looking at it that it was just an old land drain, made from loosely jointed sections of clay pipe. Easy enough to just stick a bit of 100mm land drain in to replace it (it was badly broken up anyway). Finally, you can check for underground cables using a CAT if you think there is a risk that there may be cables there. You can usually get a feel for this by looking around. For example, we had an unmarked, unknown, 3 phase power cable crossing our plot. The give away was an overhead run of ABC going to a pole that had a run of 95mm² wavecon running down the side and disappearing into the ground. That had to go somewhere, and ten minutes with a hired CAT showed exactly where it was.

For a good finish the moulds need to be pretty smooth. A friend used to make concrete staircases (high end stuff, with a polished finish) and the moulds they used were made from plate glass. I've seen a concrete coffee table made using a mould made from laminate covered boards. The finish on that was pretty good. I think that one challenge maybe how to ensure there are no air bubbles on the surface. Not sure how to go about getting rid of them, but I suspect one key thing may be the "wettability" of the mould. Not sure if wiping a very thin coat of a surfactant, like washing up liquid, over the surface might help reduce the incidence of surface bubbles or not. Lots of people use ready-made moulds for casting things like garden ornaments, so there's probably a wealth of information around on how best to do this.

Me too. I'm afraid I fitted a standard MK cooker switch on the wall to isolate ours. Given there are several other double gang outlets on the same wall, having a cooker switch on there doesn't look out of place.

It's a good point, as the concrete may well last long enough to see off it's high embodied CO2. There isn't really a viable alternative to concrete for some key purposes, anyway, so we're pretty much stuck with it. You're entitled to your opinion, just as I'm entitled to mine, but I can assure you that I was not either sniping or being "holier than thou" in any way. The word "eco" is, as you know, shorthand for "ecologically friendly". My view is that if something is being promoted as being ecologically friendly then it needs to have credentials that support that description. Those credentials need to include minimising the use of materials that have a high embodied energy and minimising the use of plastics and other petroleum-derived materials. Being more thermally efficient than required by building regs is also beneficial, but the ecological and environmental impact of low household energy use is reducing all the time, both by things like improvements to grid generation and from planned legislation to reduce or remove the use of some fuels. Building a house that's more thermally efficient than required by building regulations doesn't have such a big impact now as it would have done even ten years ago, although it's clearly a step in the right direction. As I've said several times before, I do not consider our build to be "eco", at all. We had to shift several hundred tonnes of soil, build a massive concrete retaining wall and import in building materials from hundreds of miles away, for example. I'm not convinced that there are many domestic houses that can justify the "eco" tag at all, the exceptions being a few, low environmental impact homes that have been built in places like Lammas. On the other hand, there are a lot of self-builders who are building low energy homes, and whilst they don't justify being described as ecologically friendly at all, they are at least having a bit less of an impact on the environment than some other homes. Whether that is seen as positive or not depends on your personal viewpoint. The forum you've highlighted is an interesting one, as it's sponsored by manufacturers of the devices that make the second highest contribution to air pollution in the UK, only a few percent less impact than all UK road transport. Whether that's considered to be either "green" or "eco" is also a matter of personal opinion.

Welcome. Quick question (no offence intended) is using a plastic foam insulation panel commensurate with building an ecologically sound home? Have you thought about less ecologically harmful insulation materials, like cellulose, wood fibre etc? We've built a low energy home (I'd never call it "eco", although others do, much to my annoyance), that's CO2 negative, and emits no emissions to the air, and we went up an interesting learning curve when designing and building it. Our build is probably modestly sustainable, being built primarily of wood and cellulose derived from wood, but sadly we had to use a small amount of concrete, and some foam insulation under our passive slab.

Massively so. 5l of 360 is good for treating well-established weeds over about 10,000m2 I'd be inclined to dilute to a fairly strong mix, of around 30ml/litre at this time of year (20ml/litre is usually fine in peak growing season). You'll find that 5l of concentrate will last a pretty long time.

Yes, any glyphosate with "360" in the description is generally the strongest concentrate that's easily available. I've been using Gallup 360 for years, as it's generally the cheapest way to buy concentrated glyphosate. £30 sounds about right to me, I'm pretty sure that's about what I paid for the last lot I bought. It does contain a surfactant, but it can be slightly improved when used on waxy-leaved weeds by adding a squirt of detergent, to help it wet the surfaces of the leaves a bit better.

Two to three weeks after spraying, or when you see the signs of the leaves yellowing. For best effect, spray twice, about two or three days apart, as at this time of year growth is slow and uptake of glyphosate will be much reduced. The idea is to leave it long enough for the glyphosate to be translocated to the root system. One issue is rain. If it rains within 12 to 24 hours of spraying, then you'll need to spray again, as the stuff may well have been washed off the leaves.

Well, not really for the reason quoted. The reason it was originally banned was primarily to do with the fact that it was being used to make improvised explosive devices on a large scale (so called "weedkiller and sugar" bombs). The environmental damage reasons were put into legislation mainly to placate farmers, who were used to using the stuff for permanent weed killing. The daft thing is that the ban on sodium chlorate just caused the bombers to switch to using ammonium nitrate fertiliser instead. The next step in this ongoing war was to ban the sale of powdered ammonium nitrate, and insist it only be sold in coarse, granular form. The bombers got around that by just grinding the granules down to powder, at which point the government specified that a retardant should be added to the stuff. Needless to say it's not hard to remove the retardant, by making a solution and crystallising out the pure salt. Yes, sodium chlorate is a fairly environmentally toxic compound, but so is road salt, and many other compounds that are routinely used in large quantities. The very fact that road salt works pretty well as a long duration herbicide is a good indicator as it's toxicity.

Probably salt (sodium chloride, another chemical). Needs to be a high concentration, though, so bags of rock salt might be the cheapest way to buy it. Sprinkle that liberally over the area and it will suppress most weed growth until such time as it gets too diluted by rain. Covering a mound of soil with black plastic will work well. Look at getting a silage sheet from an agricultural merchant, as that's often the cheapest way to buy large sheets of black polythene.

Hard to get hold of now, but sodium chlorate is the most effective long term weedkiller I know of.

Don't they screw a dosing pipe into this to inject chlorine? IIRC, the aim is to get at least 50ppm of chlorine solution into the pipe and leave it for an hour, or 200ppm and leave it for 30 minutes (I've done the latter). I think the regs say to use sodium hypochlorite, but I've always used calcium hypochlorite, as it has double the free chlorine content.

Yes, they do add a bit of additional cost, but they are worth it, I think. Out of interest, did you shop around for prices, as I found there was a very wide variation in price. IIRC, I paid around £30, inc VAT, for ours, but some places were selling them for around £50, which was ludicrous.

Yes, I did, just so I had the option to isolate close to taps etc and not have to drain out a pipe full of water. The isolators at the manifold were mainly of use when commissioning, when it's handy to be able to finish one section, then test it, before moving on to another room.

You can flush and disinfect the pipe yourself. Flush it through with clean water first, to remove any crud, then fill it with diluted, un-thickened, unscented, domestic bleach for half an hour or so, then flush it through again with clean water until there's no residual smell of chlorine. Instead of beach you can use calcium hypochlorite granules, sold as "pool shock", for disinfecting swimming pools. Does the same thing, just mix it with water to get a bleach solution. I've had to do this a couple of times with our borehole, whenever I've pulled the pump out and replaced it

I have a very old first fix air nailer. Damned near indestructible, never jams, just needs a bit of oil now and again. It does need a compressor, but doesn't seem to be that hungry for air, so a modest compressor runs it OK. They use air nailers almost exclusively in the US, where timber frame accounts for almost all housing. No idea why we seem to fight shy of them, and seem to prefer to use gas nailers. A first fix air nailer is probably around the same price as a gas one, including the cost of a cheap compressor to run it.

Depends on whether you want to take advantage of an off-peak tariff, like Economy 7, really. I have our UFH set to charge the slab up overnight, at the cheap rate, and unless it's really cold we don't need to boost it during the day. Doesn't make a massive difference, in the overall scheme of things, as the heating energy use is so low that the cost saving is probably less than the cost of an evening out at the pub for dinner. I sometimes think I've spent far too much time and effort thinking about optimising stuff to the last few %, when in reality I'm not sure if it really matters if our annual heating bill is £100 or £200. It's pretty modest in the overall scheme of things, certainly when compared to the ~£1150/year we spent on heating and hot water at the old house. You could just not bother with programmable thermostats, run the system all the time, and have the temperature set by a few room stats. Given the pretty slow thermal response of your house (I'm guessing it'll be similar to ours) it should just stay at pretty much the same temperature all the time with such a system, barring a bit of solar gain warming things up a bit.

@AnonymousBosch, worth noting that the manifolds pictured in @ProDave's setup are for the UFH, not hot and cold water distribution. The ones in the photo of @PeterStarck's installation are for hot and cold water distribution, not UFH.

I found it best to use thermostats that can be set to have a small switching hysteresis, as it's a bit too easy to get significant over/under shoot with thermostats that have, say, a 1°C hysteresis. I fitted Computherm wireless stats, that can be set to switch with a 0.1°C hysteresis, and they seem to work well. Not sure if they do a programmable version that adjusts for BST/GMT though. Wireless stats are the easiest to fit, as the only wiring is near the manifold.

Yes, exactly like that. You can add reducers for the pipes you may wish to run in 10mm, and if you want absolutely minimum interference between circuits you can run the supply pipes to each manifold to both ends. @PeterStarck has a photo in his blog of this:

Best to run both from manifolds, IMHO, as some of the imbalance problems affecting flow come from cold water outlets, like toilet flushing. The other advantage of having all the hot and cold feeds coming from a manifold is that you can fit ball valves to the manifold outlets, so allowing individual pipes to be isolated at source. This can be really handy when first commissioning things, as you can turn supplies on one at a time, check for leaks, function, etc, then move on to the next. It also means that any feed can be isolated in the event of a leak, leaving the rest of the plumbing still working. Being able to do all this from one, fairly easy to access, location, seems useful, apart from the advantages it gives in terms of faster hot water to taps, lack of interaction between outlets, etc.

Looks like there's an AAV above the Willis heaters, on the flow side.

The UFH is configured to all be a single zone (no actuators on the lower, return, manifold) so all you need to control the UFH is a programmable room stat. Plenty of choices, depending very much on what features you want. At the most basic I'd go for a programmable stat that automatically changes the clock, as @Temp, suggests (although it does seem possible that we might do away with the BST/GMT change twice a year). You could go for something "smart", that can be controlled by an app, although there's always the risk that any app-based control system could fall over as devices get upgraded, cloud-based infrastructure falls over, etc. If you want to consider zoning the UFH, then the white caps on the return manifold need to be swapped for actuators, and the actuators need connecting to a wiring centre, that then allows individual loops, or groups of loops, to be independently controlled. This means more thermostats, to set the temperature for each zone, and may or may not also need a programmer that can control the overall timing of when things are on or off. This is potentially a fair bit more complex, and needs a bit of thought as to whether it will be a benefit. That really depends on how well heat can move around the house. For example, we have no heating upstairs, other than towel rails in the bathrooms. Despite that we sometimes find that the bedrooms get a bit warm. If we had zoned heating that would still happen. It might be an idea to have the bathrooms separately controlled, though, as being able to warm the bathroom floor slightly morning and evening is a nice feature to have. You might want to think about having maybe three zones, one for the bedrooms, one for the bathrooms and one for the rest of the living areas. It depends very much on how you like things. We like the bedrooms to be cooler than everywhere else, so are happy with only heating the ground floor living areas, but we're all different!

I believe that the other PCM that Sunamp developed was PCM 34, but yes, something around 28°C phase transition temperature would seem to be about right for charging with an ASHP. I have a feeling that some paraffin waxes might be around that sort of temperature, but their volumetric storage density isn't that great, IIRC.

Typically about 15°C or so, as the flow to the UFH rarely needs to be higher than about 25°C. Dropping the ASHP to 30°C would work fine, I'm sure, and still give about an hour of buffering in normal winter conditions.