MikeSharp01

'Help out or die slowly' is the title of a picture we brought at the young Scottish contempories Exhibition in London last year. The artist is 25 and 'gets it' as you have described big time. Although he is based in Kirkentolch. Your piece is very cogent and speaks volumes on the challenges you and, because of our wider interdependence - everything is connected to everything else, the rest of us face. The problem is, as you have described, rampant self interest and the accompanying decay in the ideas of community and society.

Just a thought - I would be worried if the plenums only just fit as you need to ensure they are mechanically isolated from the wall facings to ensure you don't get any vibration transfer and set up sympathetic vibes in your wall facings. There is always the chance that some bright spark will drive a picture nail through them.

Think that depends on which way around you go - if I leave from here heading south pass through the zero point at the bottom and keep on going I will eventually be heading south towards you.

As an aside a builder of my acquaintance told me that he uses 15mm boards when the studs are on 600mm centres and 12mm on 400mm as it makes getting the wall much more reliably flat, especially on dry lining.

Just sitting here with a pile of sheets of paper trying to fold one onto the shape of the foundation slab insulation lining and wondering just how many tape joins you can make in your passive slab dpc? Any thoughts?

Thanks all. We are at the detailed drawings stage and my concern is to get it right now so building it has very limited room for error / interpretation. I am happy to pay the architect for the detailed drawings but less happy asking for changes down the line, after the fixed price bit us finished, cos I didn't /could not have been expected to spot an issue. The point about just reusing existing robust details is taken but these need to be contextualised for the specific build. One thing I have had is a drawing that shows profiled tiles around roof lights even though we have flat tiles. Will just keep on keeping on.

Today our architects sent me back a number of details, second drafts, on the first, still to look at the rest, I identified 8 (Eight) issues including two cold bridges around the main front window, essentially both sides! Don't get me wrong I really like working with our architects, they treat me as an 'intelligent' client (well that is how it feels but I suppose its possible that they are just humouring me) and it also feels like we are a team. I think my concern is that they may have begun to get the idea that I am up to quality control for their work - they ask me if its buildable, if I could do their job I would not need an Architect, rather than them having some internal process that removes issues such as cold bridges from a Passive House design. My conundrums (not conundra) are: How many times should I expect to go around this loop of commenting on the drawings? Who carries the PI claim if incorporating my, perhaps naive, ideas results in problems later?

Sounds like a new TV format. The great British brick off!

Wish we could but cannot find any suitable passive house certified windows made in the UK, or any passive house windows not built from imported sections at all for that matter!

Alternatively- just find you local school art department with a kiln and ask if they would put your brick in with their next firing in exchange for a donation to school funds, for a slightly bigger donation they will probably do it on its own.

You might be lucky - assuming Mr Clause goes over, flying west in the early hours, the slipstream should take the pattern back out into the Atlantic - of course if you don't believe in that sort of stuff - strap yourselves in. Looks like we in the SE will be OK this time but will still batten down those hatches anyway it will be our turn next.

Yes thanks Ferdinand - good to know you can still get them but my question was aimed at finding other objects that use the heat from a bulb, not available from an LED, to make something amusing such as @AliG mentions.

Today I was getting millstone manor ready for the XMAS throngs (18 for lunch on boxing day!) anyway as part of this exercise I cleaned the lava lamp that is in our 'drawing room' - dank place we only use on hi days and holidays. I turned it on and by the time I had cleaned the room, polished the grate and hovered round it was bubbling away merrily. Then a thought struck me - the lava lamp needs an incandescent bulb to make it work, generate the heat to create the motion for which these lamps are famous. I had a look at it and wondered if the bulb went whether I could get a new one or would have to replace it with an LED and a small heating element (thus defeating the drive for eco lighting)! Extending this a little further I wondered what other devices of fond memory might have to be re-engineered because the incandescent lamp is in its final phase of life - or is it? Any ideas? (PS this is not an excuse to discuss the finer points / merits or otherwise of government policy or, heaven forfend, the machinations of much maligned / meddling (delete as appropriate) bureaucrats in Brussels.)

Yes me too, but for a modest home, with a gamer (or 2) a CAT6 network with switches won't be a problem. As @Alphonsox says its the broadband that will be the bottleneck for most of us.

If you haven't already don't pay them until the job is done as per the spec agreed in the contract, no joiner no payment.

Is it to passive house spec? if so there will be an approved connection and / or your PHPP model will show a cold bridge calculation for it. Making it air tight will be easy with tape but that will not deal with the structural or thermal join.

Friends, Romans - country men (by which refer to all countries where like minded individuals reside) don't forget that we are up now to CAT 8 (almost - but likely to be different connector and not backward compatible) and CAT7, bright green colour favoured, is common. Don't be fooled though because the transmission standard for CAT6 (10GBase-T) means CAT7 will be no faster. It has the advantage, while being a bit more costly, in that the shielding is better - you can run it more intertwined with other cables and get away with it, fewer lost packets, and it has a larger copper cross section this allowing the PoE to work a bit harder. If installing now the lowest standard should probably be CAT6 (or 6a) which has 1Gbs data performance (CAT 5 is 10Mbs (5a 100Mbs)) so 10 times a quick as CAT 5. Also in your discussion above remember that switches (true switches) allow you to set them up with different QoS (Quality of Service) offerings to the various stations on the network. In this way you can give the PS4 gamers a better connection, less latency / contention / speed to WAN at least around the house, than the iPad browser. As things stand cabled connections will be faster than WiFi and QoS over wifi is a bit more of a dark art. If you have a larger home then consider pulling through some fibre connections, packet loss immune but limited to 10GBase-T speeds if using converters - if your router / switch has fibre ports these will be faster, between switches and fan out in CAT6/7 from there. Finally in what might be helpful to others of our vintage, me not you, its worth recounting, as you pull though your CAT7 cable to your sons bedroom for his PS4 / XBOX and stretch every sinew to give him a great connection, that our son moved out of home to get a faster broadband connection - result (but don't tell his mum I said so)!

Looks like money for old rope for the installers again.. I will look at an ASHP now and solar thermal because it may now squeak in on payback. Although we will be going round the tank heat loss problem loop again.

Not sure Terry, have you factored in the expansion / contraction of the slab, I think I worked out that across our slab (15m) the expansion per degree was around 0.2mm per Deg C (K) @ 14.5 x (10-6 m/(m K)) {always assuming I have my powers of 10 right} so to stop / reduce movement I was sort of expecting to do my utmost to keep the slab at a constant temperature rather than cycle it. Given your wall construction (elsewhere here described) excessive slab expansion / contraction might appear in your outer leaf!

They must have a sprinkler system and perhaps a ladder out the back, or a secret door through into next door - good point!

I have a smaller one, plus a few 'skill' saws (Dewalt, Bosch and Festool plunger) but it (they) won't do the 300 x 90 I-joists which are the main components of the build. I watched a video of it and appreciate its big but my plan is to ensconce it in the site 'shop' and leave it there when I am on site. I want repeatability and accuracy which no matter how I try with the one I have I cannot get to the level I want it.

Today we got an email from the council saying that they, and the valuation officer, had accepted that we not longer need to pay council tax on the property we are building in Seasalter as there is no longer a habitable dwelling on the site. The roof has been long gone and I am just salvaging the main timbers, those that are not rotted, for general purposes around the site. The small win is that although they only checked on the site in October, after we requested the council tax to stop, they have back dated the non payment to the date of the demolition order (August), some here might remember that asking for a demolition order triggered an automatic commencement of the build. So we are due for a small windfall in council tax repayment which I am looking forward to putting towards on one of these if anybody has experience of the beast please let me know good / bad!

That's amazingly compact! Answers from my research - have not actually installed one yet. 1. The most you can manage but the general feeling looks like being at least a meter. One, exhaust, could be above the other but some horizontal distance will help, you want to avoid exhaust air returning via the inlet. 2. In theory but you would need plenty of gaps at the bottom / top of the door to ensure circulation but this may interfere with Q3. 3. Higher the better but somewhat depends on whether you are putting heat in via the MVHR with an air battery in the feed duct because hot air rises and you may want to induce gentle, very gentle, mixing of the air in the space using this flow in sympathy with that generated by the airflow. Extracts IMO want to be as high as possible because they go in 'warm' / 'wet' spaces. In your Living room / Kitchen you will need both inlet and extract and this in itself will cause useful circulation in the room to help handle the cooking vapours. The extract(s) will be above the kitchen and inlet(s) at the other side of the room. If this has a vaulted ceiling you will want to think hard about where the cooking smells will be going, assuming you are using a recirculating cooker hood. 4. Oversize has the advantage of having loads in reserve so should do your job very quietly in normal mode because it will be at a low setting. It can then boost loads of air in the summer if you need it. (see below) 5. Depends on what other cooling you have in the house - windows, induced circulation etc and can then turn off the MVHR. In air tight buildings I would be concerned about turning it off if I could not leave secure openings elsewhere in the house. In the case of loo you will need another extractor if you do intend turning off the MVHR. If it is running without summer bypass it will return exhaust heat. So, again IMO, you probably do need summer by pass. Hope that helps.

Sorry Nick - Typo. Yes this is a concern but I will do the sums on the heat loss, its not a huge mass but its hot - kept hot and not that brilliantly insulated. I think I was working on the basis that we would switch them off in the summer when showers can be a bit less sizzling and we don't want the heat loss warming the building. My only worry with the system as it stands is getting it to tick over at a low enough level to run the UFH and / or Air battery in the MVHR. We have VG mains pressure and flow, I will do a full test with a direct connection to the meter, when we dig it up, later in the build but a single hose delivers 24L/min from an outside tap and throws it 12 meters so I suspect full bore will be fine for our needs.

Hopefully around £1200 + VAT (New build so will get that back) the unit is THIS one suggested by @Nickfromwales. It does have some standing losses because it has a very small heat buffer in it but I think, if I read the blurb correctly, you can configure it not to use the buffer tank if you are not going to experience high demand.