Big Neil

I will give it a try when i get home. At work at the moment and no way of saving it. We just have a crap low grade edition of adobe pdf reader so i can't save. Why that whacking great idustrial grade printer/scanner doesn't just do it straight to PDF's is beyond me...

Firstly I had no idea the already terrible sketch would scan so badly (my apologies), however for anyone who can make out the scribbles, have i got this more or less correct? the one thing I forgot to add whilst building this up was a DPM. Should this be immediately on the cross hatched area? Second and third pages are the same but relate to how I understand an ICF structure should go atop such a foundation. Is this also correct? Foundation.tif

@Onoff. What made you choose to go under instead of over the mesh?

can't seem to find anything telling me the difference and relative benefits. Plenty of suppliers like wundatrade but no side by side comparisons that i can find. THat wundatrade has a 500m coil of pert al pert for 265 sheets. Is that good, bad. Is it too cheap?? All the sample costs i've ever seen are from designer suppliers lie continetnal, nu-heat etc

Lovely stuff - IS it held under pressure whilst the concrete is being poured to avid compressing the pipe? Were you at all worried about warranty being an issue with not getting the whole system from a single supplier? It has always seemed to me that warranty concerns aside, it really wouldn't be that hard to design a layout, once you know where the edges of the building are and where the internal walls will be.

I may have seen that on your Blog @JSHarris, slowly reading around it at the moment. Is the actual pipe material any different? Could it just as easily have been stapled to the insulation and then have the rebar above it? If bought a system having had a company design the layout on the basis of if needing stapling to insulation and being under screed, but the after taking delivery decided I was going to put it in the slab. Would i effectively just have to bin the staples and buy myself some cable ties, both otherwise everything would be the same. Likewise would this go for BUteline, HeP20 etc etc

I realise the answer is probably in the forum somewhere but I couldn't find it asked in quite the way i have the question in my head. IS the process of laying out (if not actually fixing) the pipe when putting directly into the slab, in principal any different to if you were pinning it to insulation/clip track, on the top of a slab? Are the materials Exactly the same, i.e. would one have to tell an UFH supplier whether the system was to be in concrete or screed?

As it goes I started thinking of the (i think) Lloyd's tower in London. Went in the lift there when I was a kid and I seem to recall all the services were run up the outside in an unusual fashion so as to save room on the interior. Obviously there has to be a nod towards acoustics, views etc, but maybe this is something which people should be more inclined to consider. Might actually by the nature of doing it, provide some interesting designs. In cases where houses are of a more normal appearance and design, so brick and block 4 bedder etc, then concessions seem to often be made which restrict quality of design anyway, so might as well have a focus on mechanical practicality.

I'm sure members with much more technical know-how will be along shortly, but from what i've seen of those sort of units it's probably a case of aesthetic preference. I found a panel on https://midsummerwholesale.co.uk following discussion about solar panels, and a 300w panel is about £100 for one of the manufacturers there, so not that much cost wise...

Is there any merit to having some sort of hybrid in any situation, so lets imagine in the floor of the loft for a minute. Lets say a layer of EPS then a load of cellulose, sandwiched by maybe a sheet of PIR. Or any combination frankly, they were just the first three which came to mind?

It has sort of occurred whilst playing around with floor plans, that it makes s significant amount of common sense to try and plan a layout so that all the water based services were in a single corner/line of the house, to minimise material cost and of course the likelihood for knock-on issues in the case of a leak.

Righteeeo, so actually if your external walls and ceilings are well insulated, shouldn't make much of a difference thermally one method to the next, but acoustics is where there may be a decent difference. I know if sort of oversimplifies if a bit, but given that it seems to be recycled paper for the most part, can the process of recycling and blowing in, be done on site by the same machine? And I assume there are no issue with it sitting around electrical cables/pipes etc?

I may have misunderstood the intention here, but i found a product called insumate, link below. will this address your issue at all? https://insumate.co.uk/product/400mm-joist-insulation-tray-1-bundle-of-10/

IN both Thermal and accoustic terms, how effective is wet cellulose as in the video above, compared to say rockwool slabs. I had always thought on using rockwool slabs for the filling in the stud walls upstairs to reduce sound transmission, amongst other systems on top. Would cellulose be as effective in that instance?

Obviously there are a variety available - wood-chip type (Durisol & Velox), EPS (Virtually all of them it seems), XPS etc etc. so far i've only seen one (POlarwall) which uses XPS. Why do we think this is? Am I correct in thinking that measure for measure it is a better insulator than EPS? Also doesn't it generally speaking have better strength characteristics?

ahhh coool. Good to know, thanks

Is this similar to/the same as the stuff that Charlie Luxton used on this build (if anyone watched the YouTube mini series on his build)?

belt and braces???

...so why the dressing up like a super-gimp as described by Mr Harris. have I missed something?

my god there are bees in it - what are rockwool doing - that's disgusting treatment of animals. I bloody hope they don't claim to be vegan free!!!

obviously i'm the thick cousin on this forum, but i didn't think rockwool was itchy. I thought it was only fibreglass insulation that made people itch????

That's the crack Mr @ProDave - exactly what i was after - So basically, get an un-vented cylinder unless you've a penchant for buzz bombs, gout and like drinking condensed milk straight from a can. I know i'm sort of digressing from the original topic somewhat but it sort of still relates to my understanding of heating as a whole. IF you feel so obliged, So far as you are able, would you mind grabbing some product links from the interweb of a pre-plumbed un-vented cylinder, expansion vessel and aside from pipes any other specific bits of kits one might need, if putting together a setup which was to also include an element to take excess PV generation. Just so I've a basis for comparison. Otherwise I 'll likely end up looking at any old crap and miss stuff out as well. Or should I start another thread do you think? I'm proper crap at all this forum stuff, always waffling around me....

gotcha . So why would one be under pressure and the other not be? are they for different applications? Also, where do the vented ones, vent to?

So if i wanted to build a kids playhouse, so effectively a posh shed (but out of lets say brick and block for the sake of argument), and equip it just a simple one zone wet underfloor heating system and I was also going to give it solar panels. What setup would be best? A tiny sunamp, an ASHP with (i imagine) a buffer tank? Can one get very small ASHP units? Likewise For the battery power would you just use one of them thar Sofar systems, given it would only be a few lights, and maybe a tv and stereo. They seem to be small as I've seen mentioned in other threads.