Iceverge

Sorry to hear about this predicament. Filling is a nice easy idea. Make a hole and back in concrete trucks and pour until you see it coming out the top. £10k of concrete and call it a day........ However 160 odd tonnes of extra mass over the basement floor might have unforseen consequences. Also pouring that much concrete might be ok in small bites in one go and I'd be worried about the walls of the basement buckling out. Then comes drainage pipes etc. Gut feeling is to do as little large scale disturbance as possible and retain access to the basement for future maintenance and inspection. I don't love the idea of not addressing the existing steels as they sound beyond salvaging, but we can't tell from this distance. Also it would be good to know if the existing floor is carrying loads that it shouldn't. I have a suspicion that if the external area around the apartment was backfilled the floor may be resisting the pressure of the ground pressing in from outside. Could you perhaps make a semi accurate cross sectional drawing and maybe some pics. A good SE, a diligent local builder and a few £1000 in men and materials might be enough to solve this yet.

It's a great product if installed correctly. Are you stick framing on site or ordering a kit?

Yeah, that's fine.

300mm external wall is really really tight to meet insulation regs. Brick Cavity Osb 140mm studs Plasterboard Skim Comes to about 290-325mm by my calculations. Can you stretch the wall thickness to 400mm?

Pics .... I am suspicious of the double wrap too. It might not always be as good an idea as first it appeared to be.

Whatever you do it's better to do it outside the glazing. I've heard story of sealed glazing units cracking when they are blocked on the inside.

Run 10mm Hep2O pipe for everything except the cold kitchen/utility taps, outdoor taps and hot+cold bath and showers feeds. Heat the hot manifold by convection by having it just above the outlet of the UVC. Don't bother with pipe insulation outside the plant room. It makes no difference. I assume home run is having all pipes directly individually leading from your manifold to the destination. One pipe to one outlet?

A sketch or pic would help.

The impact we can have on our own lives, especially as self builders is pretty big. Some of the first things that come to mind are 1. Designing in good passive means to heat protection. Lots of insulation with good decrement delay. Limiting glazing, espically in bedroom's. Appropriate shading. 2. Active colding, even a fused spur and a short 70mm duct will allow an A2A unit to be installed at a later date. 3. If opting for batteries get a change over switch to cope with power outages. 4. A store of water, even a rainwater butt will allow toilet flushing if the mains is cut off. 5. Raising the floor level well above current food level. 6. Shuttering for windows is something t.o would like to have e done. Maybe PVC rollers but even a stack of appropriately sized OSB sheets stacked in the garage would offer a a lot more protection than glass windows from extreme weather.

To probe further, at what point are those of us without a scientific qualification allowed to access, interpret and comment on published science?

Does it require years in university to understand the scientific method? Being human they are not immune from bias. Even if personally incorruptible, scientists are subject to the whims of political and commercial funding. What results isn't necessarily bad science, but it does skew the volumes of papers and reports published on a particular topic leading to incorrect a public perception of its relative importance.

What you suggest can be done. It'll take 4 times a long as a main contractor unless you want a gash result.

Yet another building job limited my by my fundamental lack of arms. A water leak and the bean sprout might make itself known! In seriousness, one thing I would consider is buying a 110mm hole saw and making osb or Ply "gaskets" to slide on the waste pipes before plasterboard. Then secure them to the back to the plasterboard with a few screws through from the room side. You'll get a much more perfect air seal than anything you'll attempt with cutting a hole in a sheet of plasterboard and sliding it over the pipe.

Air paths. every one. Seal them up with acoustic sealant . Be picky around pipes etc. Noggins between roof and floor joists above and below too and more acoustic sealant . Then add mass. Simple rule. More is better. Plasterboard is cheap as is OSB per kg. Anything would work mind you. You could fill the wall with gravel or magic beans. Mass is mass . Mineral wool will help with the reverb. The extra dense stuff is an expensive way to add mass. More plasterboard is cheaper. Break any noise travelling through the structure itself by breaking the solid path through. Double studs. Resilient bars. Rubber strips on the joists.

Love the idea of earthen floors. A far more human material than concrete. An old shed is my total experience with it though. We have a single A2A into for our passive class house. Measuerd 17kWh/annum/m2 space heating demand. It lives in the hall downstairs. The house is comfortable. It needs to run maybe 9-12hrs per day at a low level to achieve this mid winter. Dryness hasn't been an issue. House plants can actually help dryness though transpiration. You cannot bank heat like a slab does with UFH so often use it outside TOU tariffs. It would be annoying in a bedroom re noise as the house is so quiet otherwise. It is simple to use. App on my phone and simple to install apart from here F Gas requirement. Ours cost €1200 from ebay and €300 for install. I drilled holes and did the mounting Daikin Ftxm-25r. If we needed it for cooling I would put another unit on the upstairs landing I think as cool air descends and warm rises. I have never needed it to cool yet but will update when I do. The bathrooms need a fast boost for a shower. Having tried a few types of heater pull chord fan heaters are the fastest and cheapest and work best for a short blast of heat. TLDR. 1. Do a single or possibly double central unit for the absolute cheapest lifetime heating and cooling costs including install cost. 2. If you go down the route of ducting every room or individual wall units for every bedroom you're probable better off going UFH + cheap mono block A2W with slab cooling and electric under tile heating for the bathrooms. It'll be quieter, cheaper to run (banking TOU heat in the slab) and more comfortable (no moving air or noise) .

Top class. That's a pucker job. Keep the pics coming.

https://youtu.be/lsOVb0BipAw?is=E_-NANuc_YEXu2A3

Maybe so called under tile heating with electric elements just for the 10 mins you're in the shower might be an option.

I think it's a good idea. More comfortable, dries the tray (slightly) faster. The UFH pipes will only be at 20 something degrees so I doubt they'll have enough punch to dry out the trap.

Commercial flying is mass transport and ballpark similar to an ICE car with one person on board in terms of CO2/Km . It's just that someone rarely drives the equivalent distances. You could probably half CO2 of airliners by having a large and much slower turboprop aircraft but the idea of taking 24hrs in an economy seat to get to New York won't make you many friend's among the travelling public.

Get up there with a penknife and poke at the timbers. The chances are that if it's survived so far it'll be fine long term. If you buy I'd upgrade the bathroom fans to dMev to ensure moisture gets extracted at source. If you upgrade attic insulation it'd be worth sealing all penetrations in the ceilings to, to limit the amount of humid internal air making it's way into the attic as the he more insulation in there the colder the rafters and sheathing will be.

It's the seals. Brush and sliding seals just don't work anywhere as well as compression seals.

A laser level head and sole plate and stand them studs between them. Shims behind and concrete screw through the studs to the brick wall intermittently to brace it. A parge coat will dry very quickly. You could do it straight away.

10mm should be fine for everything other than baths and showers. 15mm to the kitchen sink if you want to recreate a waterpark. 10mm is fine otherwise in my experience

https://www.proair.ie/products/proair-pa600li-2/ That's the one. I just took it apart and cleaned it and pulled out the fans and found some you tube vids to take them apart. The bearings are a common item. No rocket science. Ebmpapst make most of the fan units so something like this will show you.