PNAmble

We have an upside down house and it runs along the part of the back of the house (leading from a utility room) where we have no windows as we have a three meter high retaining wall. A good size plant room for ease of maintenance was something we planned at the beginning.

seperate stack pipe through the slab, and a dry drain to avoid smells. it was this or very similar. https://www.google.com/aclk?sa=L&ai=DChcSEwjMutqT3N-HAxWtnFAGHQthLqUYABAxGgJkZw&co=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjw8MG1BhCoARIsAHxSiQmdv4yA0pdq41GGWYQo0K-zzKZwfH4OHH1cJVCu_c6iAjAdt1xzaZcaAjicEALw_wcB&sph=&sig=AOD64_07J-Xz9knQqzSX1DoDgr3Rr--apQ&ctype=46&q=&ved=2ahUKEwjmlNaT3N-HAxW-UEEAHUukIrUQzzkoAHoECAcQJw&adurl=

Ours is 1.5 wide x 8m. It contains MVHR, 300l UVC, battery, inverter, Distribution Board, all heating manifolds and pumps including recirculating, data cabinet, other control units, it also has a Floor Gulley if anything floods.

This is what our garden room was built on. Worked perfectly. Especially as we were only 3m above sea level.

I suppose it depends upon what you are building e.g. airtight, passive standards and what you are having in the plant room, we have MVHR, UVC, ASHP Controllers, HW Recirculation, Data Cabinet, Battery, Inverter, Solar Diverter, Core Distribution Boards, Shelly Controllers for automation. So hence it's part of our Thermal and Airtightness Envelope. We also dry clothes in ours , as its the warmest room in the house! If its part of your thermal / airtight envelope, you'll need a good airtight door, if it's not part of the thermal envelope then you'll need to consider the insulation of pipework and MVHR ducts (if using), and also then the sealing of penetrations between the Plant Room and House.

Terminate everything at a patch panel. Then workout how many need to be POE. Eg cameras, access points, non POE may include TV, computer, printer, hue bridge etc etc. buy a switch with the correct number of ports (POE and Non POE). (I’m a Ubiquiti fan but others available). Get patch leads and connect from the Patch Panel to the switch. Connect a cable from your router to the switch, disable router wifi and you’re sorted. btw. Suggest you get a little data cabinet keeps everything clean and tidy.

I’d also say you want to access your plant room from inside, do you want to go outside to clean your MVHR filters, reset your internet, reboot the iboost etc etc.

once you’ve bought it, unless the neighbours have a covenant on the land about house design their opinion is just a ‘neighbour’ and is unlikely to have an effect on planning. Our land had a covenant where next door could effectively refuse any design, funnily though they didn’t have know that they had that right. We chatted our design through with them and asked them to make a positive planning comment which made their ‘approval’ a matter of public record.

Your building inspector may take a view that it doesn’t need guarding. It’s from road to house not house to road. we’ve got a sign off conversation with our BCO re a wall which isn’t part of the ‘garden’ or ‘driveway’ and his view (although he’s taking advice) is that it’s not within the scope of ‘guarding area’

Our build is very different from all other houses around and the initially approved plans, it’s cubist, flat roof, fibre cement cladding as opposed to chalet style bungalows. No objections from neighbours. Now it’s built it splits opinion, some love it as it’s modern some hate it. We get a lot of neighbours talking to us as we landscape. As long as you aren’t changing ridge heights, I’d be tempted to submit plans as you want them, no reason to keep building the same looking houses.

We installed a Grohe Sense Guard - all water goes through it. So if there is a leak it shuts off. I works on a volume or a pressure test. Suppose I’ll never really know if it was worth it until I have a burst pipe.

If you are putting Ethernet through the same duct as power (bad design by who ever designed your electrics and network) then use cat 6a which is shielded otherwise you will get problems. Probably too late but a good airtight strategy has one power duct, one data duct and MVHR ducts and ASHP in/out ducts. You don’t need anything else, use an external box to run an external DB and Network Switch.

if you door bell is ethernet POE then that will be powered by the switch as long as the port it is connected to is PoE. any switch you get will be plug and play, connect it to your router and power it up. Note that not all your port requirements will need to be POE, only things like access points, doorbells, cctv will need to be. if you have lots of POE devices then you may need to consider the overall power requirements. I'm running about 35w (max 95) for 5 APs and a CCTV camera at the moment.

How many terminations do you have? A switch like this https://uk.store.ui.com/uk/en/pro/category/all-switching/products/usw-lite-8-poe will work if you have less than 8 (you need one port for your router) if more there are 16 port ones.

You need POE if running Ubiquiti Access Points , so hence need a router with POE which I suspect you don’t have. So you need to go. Router —> POE switch —> Access Point. or you can go router —> POE converter — access point. But each converter will need a plug socket. If you want / need full control eg vlan support, multiple WiFi (eg user and IOT) then you’ll need a cloud key. Otherwise you can run via the UniFi app and configure them. Re your door bell. Is that POE as well? I use a UniFi 24 port switch which has 16 POE+ ports and 8 none POE.

we had a condition about driveway and surface drainage. We tweaked our plans against the submitted whilst clearing the condition to just state ‘permeable surface’ as opposed to resin. I’m 100% certain that planning either won’t care or notice as long as it’s ’permeable’.

We’ve just done our final air test. Temporarily taped over the MVHR external ducts outside. Our result was 0.46. So I probably wouldn’t worry too much about that aspect.

Thanks all. we also did a pre plasterboard (bare shell) 0.9, then a pre second fix test 0.42 We followed the advice re sealing the external MVHR ducts, it worked well enough, final result 0.47 ACPH. Electrician had to re feed wires through a duct during second fix due to a fault so looks like we didn’t seal it as well as we’d previously.

We went turn key due to the Time dimension, spend money where you see value. If you don’t like entertaining / cooking don’t build a fancy kitchen. If you like spending hours in a bath spend money on a bath. Our ££ saving was ground works, build, finish, occupy in 9 months, including the wettest winter in history. But we had borrowing fees so that was important to us. But insulate, get airtight, and remove cold bridges as those can’t be upgraded later.

yep, it was a service which wasn’t listed, but they were really helpful when we called them. Cost was approx £400.

we used EasyEPC, sent them our drawings and they built the model, we also used them for airtightness testing and design SAP - and currently building the photo evidence for them to do the as built SAP. We are passive standard but not certified. I’m sure there are other companies on the web who do similar services.

searched but couldn’t find an answer to this Got our final air test next week and just wondering what the best strategy is re MVHR. For Earlier Test (0.42) it wasn’t installed so we just taped up the penetrations. For this test can we just seal the outside ducts with an airtight membrane and tape?

We went rigid as by all accounts it’s quieter plus Nuaire certify only with rigid . designing it in at the start means that in a new build rigid was no more difficult.

The structural warranty (mine is protec but assume all is the same) requires to see all the certificates and guarantees. It excludes flat roofs and ‘forces’ you to pay for an insurance backed guarantee - unless your roofer provides it as part of his guarantee - most smaller roof companies don’t offer this - I am still jumping through hoops to get this sorted. my understanding is that if you claim on the structural warranty the first thing they do is chase all the original guarantees and try to get them to pay out first, so many claims take quite a while whilst this chasing is happening. But without a structural warranty including the flat roof part a) it’s very difficult to mortgage b) very difficult to sell in the first 10 years.

Just to support @Gus Potter, ive kept my SE on throughout, every time we had a questions; be it foundation design, drainage, fire escape , guarding, flat roof support or anything else they have been brilliant developing solutions both off the shelf and bespoke from a fees cost perspective they have saved me £££, we’ve discussed every solution including final look. I’d say they’ve saved us about 7-10% of my build cost compared to the architect ‘solutions’. But we’ve put in the effort with them.