Iceverge

The wonderful thing about living in the free world is that it's your money, you earned it, spend it as you please! A fact sadly not celebrated as much in the old world as by our new world cousins. Some plans might help the collective masses gather our brains around the plan. I wish I'd put mine up, lots of good advice I might have received might have saved me lots of hassle!

Welcome to the forum. We moved from a 60m2 cottage to our 180m2 new build and really missed the proximity of everything. Have you done a survey on your daily movements in the house. EG how many times you go walk from the fridge to the TV to the toilet to the bedroom. I think you're going to need bicycle lanes to make it work .

Correct but you did build your house to a high level of airtighess and install MVHR. The absolute humidity of the air in the house would have been very well controlled by the MVHR so even if air did ever get to a cold spot it would have been unlikely to have been carrying enough vapour to condense. The airtighess you did to your attic ,(OSB and foamed joints I think from memory) would have played a very important role. Think of it like blocking a pipe at just one end. It still stops all flow. Your attic would have had very little air from the house coming up there because it had nowhere to go. This isn't the case in @mjwards house as a non airtight loft conversion. Best to work with the problem in my opinion and extract the damp air from where it's causing the issue. Think of it like putting a bilge pump in the area where all the water is gathering in a boat with lots of small leaks.

All the adding mass in the world makes little difference if the ceiling is full of holes. Think of a 1m wide solid stone dividing wall between two rooms with a door opening. You would hear more through it than the most crappy partition wall. You could always put in a couple of layers of plasterboard above a service cavity but you're loosing ceiling height then. These are the trade offs of building.

The cost might be prohibitively Vs resilient bars.

The warm moist air from the house is coming up and condensing in the colder roof area. Put a continuous extracting fan up there pulling air out of the loft space. £50 would buy a reasonably one if you can tolerate eBay. I put a continuous extract fan in the attic of my uninsulated parents house drawing air from the landing space 24/7. Although it isn't directly connected to any of the wet rooms it has notable dried out all of the house by ensuring a steady flow of fresh air gets pulled in all the time.

Just put in large radiators. In an efficient setup then UFH runs below skin temp anyway so still feels cool to touch. If you have ever experienced "hot" UFH then the system is lightly to be very very expensive to run as the losses to need the high flow temps will be correspondingly large. If you do need a bit of extra comfort in the bathrooms electric UFH just under he tiles is an option. As the area is small and the run times intermittent then it won't be too dear to run.

Indulge me, what you got!? you could put resilient bars on the roof for a small service cavity for wires

What is your plan for insulation and airtightness, you could be missing a golden opportunity? Any pics of the walls/ceilings as is?

1. Block air paths. Acoustic sealant around the edges. Block all gaps. Get rid of the downlights and speakers. 2. Add mass. Just adding more standard plasterboard is the cheapest way. Soundbloc or OSB is similar £/kg. Mass loaded vinyl is much dearer as is insulation. 3. Stop resonance. Add something fluffy in the void to stop sound bouncing around. Id be happy with up to 150mm of Rockwool there with 150mm of PIR on top. 4. Stop sound transferring through the structure by breaking the physical link. eg resilient bars.

Can you post your raw data units used at the meter please and the period of time between readings.

I have about as much interest in learning this as pre decimals currency. Yup, me too.

Would it be sensible to size boilers/heat pumps for the modal demand rather than the maximum given supplementary heating can be supplied by cheap fan heaters for the few days a year they're needed. At the moment people are installing Ferraris when Fiestas will do almost all the time with the knock on effect on running costs.

A little bit lost at this one as I'm unfamiliar with the conversion factor you're using. What was the beginning and end usage difference for gas usage over what period. EG was it 50 units of gas over 72hrs??? At the moment at 140m2 with 3.3kW of peak heating load that gives a specific heating load 23.6W/m2. For comparison a passivhaus is 10W/m2. To get just only over double that on an uninsulated house seems unlightly. Is there a wonderful possibility that your gas meter is under reading?

Ours used these. Seem to work ok. The Trap is on the bottom of the sink/shower/whatever to stop smells. I suppose it might leak around the rubber eventually. On the plus side the lack of "U"bend will make it easier to rod if that's ever an issue.

47*220mm C16 @400cc will be fine. Use 3x layers of 75mm mineral wool as insulation then. And 18mm OSB glued and screwed as decking.

Do you have ridge height restrictions? What is your current ridge height? Vaulted ceilings can be achieved many ways so I wouldn't worry about that. Raised tie trusses. Exposed tie trusses, scissors trusses ,A central ridge beam are all options. As to the roof you can now get tiles to go to 12.5⁰ pitch. https://www.marley.co.uk/roof-tiles/concrete-roof-tiles/mendip-double-pantile However........for durability more is better than less, overhangs also help with a buildings durability. Avoid complex shapes, valleys and flats roofs if you can. They're expensive to build and maintain properly.

Yes but they release a lot of moisture in combustion which can make a house feel damp and cold when not in use. Anyway I think @M-Rod has gone on hiatus.

High density/high rise and combustible externals are fundamentally incompatible. If your buildings are covered in something flammable it's only a matter of time. We seem to forget that with alarming regularity. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_town_and_city_fires

Welcome @Tony t Real world setups are always welcome evidence. What kind of pipes and radiators were there before and afterwards?

Yup press fit are very good. This type of compression fitting with the built in inserts are very robust too. I wouldn't use these ones which rely on olives. Would it be worth digging up the other pipes anyway and seating them lower in the screed anyway. I'd be worried with so little coverage they would fray and wear over time.

Nobody listens to instructions, nobody reads drawings. They're forbidden from thinking. Not because they're not capable but because there's a cultural rift between those allowed to do the thinking and those allowed to do the doing. It's totally archaic. If I was to do the house again I'd lock the site with one key and keep it that way unless I was there.

I would cut the three sections back to virgin pipe. It might need to be done with hand tools and slowly. Tooth brushes for the last few bits. I wouldn't let the floor grinding knuckle draggers near it. You'll probably need to do it yourself and charge them for it. Put in 6 joiners and 3 new sections of pipe. Those multilayer fittings with the built in inserts are pretty bombproof. Then pressure test the pipes. Then wrap all the exposed pipe in cling film to protect the joints from the screed and make it easier to repair if needed in future Repour the concrete and forget about it. Charge the grinding company for your time and put it down to experience.

These statements seem contradictory. If the door is sitting on concrete and the cavity is full of concrete you have a very large thermal bridge. Any chance of a sketch of a cross section please?

I'm not sure this will solve it. Applying fixes without knowing the cause can be tempting but it's a quick way to burn cash without any guaranteed results. The render above the wall looks pretty good from what I can see. Better pics of course would help. Sellotaping your phone to a long stick and taking a video would work. I've avoided a lot of dismantling by taking phone videos on areas my head wouldn't fit. Can you get into the attic and have a look at the chimney from the inside? Can you look in the bedroom and see if the corner begin that wall is damp? Can you establish is it is a cavity wall or not?