PNAmble

Wow. Purple paint isn’t like by this forum. Sorry I mentioned it. House finished time to leave the forum.

If you have a membrane then yes you are correct you don’t need this. The point is that there are different approaches. We didn’t want a membrane, and had seen three passive houses during the design phase which had cut into the membrane for various reasons and then taped the break and then stuggled on their first air test.

Each to their own. Unless is certified you can’t get passive house. Happy you’ve got a cheaper solution. Great thing about self build is there is no correct answer. I’m sure your house is better than mine .

It’s a passive house certified airtightness layer. Doesn’t rip like a membrane. Easy to look up 🤷🏻‍♂️

To be honest some of it ie the external taping was overkill. But we and the builder were learning - it was his first airtight house. Our contract had airtightness as an outcome that they signed up to, so he had a last minute wobble that the OSB wouldn’t be airtight so he decided to go with purple paint. the advantage is that it doesn’t get nicked and if you do need to screw anything into it you can dip the screw into the paint and it doesn’t impact the airtightness. there are loads of papers on whether OSB is airtight or not and how long it remains airtight but I think the scientific jury is still out.

have you spoken to openreach and registered ? You’ll want a separate duct otherwise when OpenReach come to upgrade you next year to fibre you’ll have to dig another conduit. You also need to put the ‘detectable services tape’ along it as well. So that when it’s fibre not copper you’ll be able to find it.

Ooh. You’ve made me go and check the details. We only used 18mm in the garage which has no service void as everything is surface mounted and we wanted easy ‘fastenings’. Main external walls are 11mm.

Totally agree. Somethings are best hard wired. Also don’t rely on the providers router wifi. These are always rubbish. Hardwired dedicated access points are much more reliable. As it’s a new build it’s easy to do it. We went cat6a which was probably overkill and they are a bugger to terminate and bend.

We used standard 18mm OSB taped and purple paint. Got 0.42 ACPH. it was applied with a spray.

We have the openreach box outside in a kiosk with all other external services, so that we only have one two ducts (power and data) into the airtight house. The Openreach box is the grey one. The openreach cable then goes into the plant room when it connects to the other OpenReach box. From there it connects into my data cabinet. A cat6 cable then comes back out into the kiosk (through the same duct) to a mini switch which feeds all external data requirements. Eg EVC, CcTV, Access Points. we had to use openreach provided ducting from the pavement to the kiosk. Provided FoC by Openreach.

We had a similar email from our architect once we sacked the idiot. they are covering their arses and trying to con you into paying for them during build. Ours wanted to install roof safety systems and a A1 fire protection system as in his view it protected his role as principle designer.

I find it very funny all these people working out ROI on PV and Battery on export at 15p when in 12-24 months we’ll be the same as California and you’ll be at -15p. this will move really quickly so be very certain on your ROI re renewables.

I emailed photos to our assessor within a pdf document and they were quite happy. A mix of my photos and the builder’s photos. I don’t believe they cared about GPS and timestamp.

We thought about this (a visual heat) with our build. We are near passiv and radiators running at about 30-40 degrees depending on outside temp. We looked long and hard at LED fires. in the end we thought ‘we’ll live a year in the house and decide’ but made allowances if we thought it was necessary in the future. So far the heating hasn’t come on, but we felt we needed something visual as a focus point. So we bought a lava lamp. 😂

Agree. Don’t understand why it was thought it was a good / relevant thing to post.