Bitpipe

Agree with much of the above, I did not plan MVHR very well into my TF design (had lots of long steels to navigate past, no penetrations) so had to make some adjustments when it came to install. You do need MVHR in the basement (I have one) otherwise it will get very stuffy. Extract not really required unless you have wet services down there (air will get drawn up to the next floor with an extract. Some of my basement runs take a very meandering route (one goes down from ground floor ceiling, through a stud wall, all to avoid a steel) but the airflows are fine. Extracts tend to be double runs of duct to get the required flows, supplies single. Things can get quite congested at the manifold when you bring that many pipes together and you need to avoid very tight bend radii as you'll constrict air flow. Expect lots of trial and error as you install but it is do-able as DIY. My strategy was to position the ceiling plenums first and be roughly consistent with spacing from wall - more for aesthetics as the downstairs is open plan so you can see more than one vent at a time. I then ran duct from a position near the manifold (but not right next to it) to the plenum and secured it there - silicone spray is very handy to persuade the rubber seals into place. I left a generous tail on each piece. Essential to mark your supply & extracts with different coloured sharpies as you go! Then, when all the duct was back to the manifold location, there was a lot of jiggling and re routing to get the ducts flat and neat as possible, and the last thing I did was trim the tails to get neat connections to the manifold. The much bigger job is getting the external supply and return ducts (mine were 180mm steel) to the appropriate location and getting those insulated. Final connections from MVHR to manifold and external ducts was made with the flexi insulated hose and jubilee clips.

We have quite a few ICs in our patio and resin bound driveway - we used clarke drain covers and inset with the surrounding material being used and they look pretty decent. Agree that the default black covers look awful in that context.

Duct tape looses adhesion over time. Airtightness tape would last longer but is quite expensive. But I digress... I have quite a large MVHR (result of building a large house) Sentinel Kinetic Plus and it has a noise rating of 39dB @ 3m. The plant room is isolated from the neighbouring room by a standard stud wall insulated with rock-wool and a FD30 door and you can only hear it when you open the door. It is mounted on a concrete wall though so there is no vibration transference. Every UVC will have one or two immersion elements (mid and near top of tank) to provide top up heating via electric - ours are wired to a PV diverter which detects exported electricity and uses it to get the tank back up to temp - on cold but bright days we have noticeably more DHW. If you're getting decent levels of insulation and airtightness, then you may find an internal heat source like an ornamental gas fire chucks out an uncomfortable amount of heat. Our previous new build (2001) was just built to regs and running the gas fire there made it too warm very quickly. In our current passive standard house it would drive us outside in minutes. We made provision for a 'fake fireplace' ethanol burner and even the smallest generated too much heat. So now it has cut logs and twinkly fairy lights instead It's good to be green but be wary of those innovations that cost a lot of money both upfront and as a knock on to your build and then have a very long payback time and questionable environmental impact. In my view, always best to design & build an efficient house that has a fundamentally low energy requirement for space heating and has an efficient DHW, lighting etc approach.

That's how MBC do it - whole floor deck and then internal studs stood up on that.

Rainwater is usually stored in a custom underground tank (3000-4000l) or if you have a suitable space you can DIY one using IBCs. Needs to be dark and cold or you get algae growth and risk of legionnaires. Also needs to run off to soak-away when full and needs to filter out leaves and other junk from the supply - which must be from roofs and not ground acos to avoid contamination. It will have dilute bird crap in it though so think if you want that flushing your loos. If you're using it to flush toilets (again, not as simple as it sounds, needs separate plumbing run) then you need a separate gravity fed header tank (usually in loft) that is pumped from the main source and has a mains feed incase the main tank runs dry. Adds up to quite a bit tbh and only gets you a few brownie points on the water usage calculator. Best to get a nice efficient dual flush system for your toilets. Grey water harvesting is even more complicated and needs loads of space.

Either have a ASHP or a gas boiler but not both. For a rarely used gas boiler, you'll need a heating design that will work with both and enable a means of cutting over, have to pay cost of boiler, install (more complex due to a dual system), commissioning, standing daily charge for gas, annual service etc. Hot return is simply running a wider bore (22mm) hot feed in a circuit around the house with individual feeds teeing off as required in either 22mm (shower, bath) or 15mm (sinks). At the end of the run, there is a 15mm return back to the UVC with a pump and either a timer / pipe-stat or in our case connections from PIRs or light switches in each bathroom (also triggers MVHR boost). All hot pipes need to be well insulated and there is a small heat loss of circulating hot water in a loop, but it's likely minimal in practice. When the pump is running (timer / pipe stat or someone has walked into the bathroom) the hot water is close to the tap and does not require a long flow to pull off the cold 'dead leg'. The end user experience is near instant hot water to any tap - most useful for hand washing, showers and baths less so as you're more tolerant to the 'heating up' delay. There are other ways to achieve similar experience - @Jeremy Harris has impulse heaters near each hot tap or you could use a lower bore run from the hot manifold to the tap (smaller volume of water to 'dead leg'.

Mine has a humm from the MVHR and usual boiler noises. Occasional gurgle from the condensate pump (as it's in basement needs pumped up to ground floor).

Depends who you've locked in it and if you used the ball gag or not.

What worked well for me was to print a longer than required tag (using spaces), loop round cable and stick it back on itself.

A few considerations. Your electricity meter can be quite far from the house (as noted, many of us have this in an external kiosk / box) but if you're on gas then that needs to be much closer to the house - ours is in a ground box right next to the utility room. Definitely plan to have MVHR inside and preferably in a central location to even out the runs (makes balancing easier), ditto UVCs which can take up quite a bit of space and generate a lot of heat even if well insulated. That said, our plant room ended up in basement under the utility so we broke both those rules we do have a hot return circuit so that minimises the impact of having some long runs to bathrooms. Gas boiler is in there also as is all the power distribution (i.c/ PV and diverter), incoming cold feed etc Can you fit MVHR and UVC in your loft? I recall an installation that @Nickfromwales did that had the UVC side mounted. They are the two bulkiest items.

I had a similar Dymo label printer from an old job - could print black on white tape and vice versa. Very addictive - was told to stop using it by SWMBO as was labelling every jar, container etc. This was pre build, I left the post build labelling to our OCD electrician...

I used Newton Stopaq for a few service penetrations to the basement - another never setting compound. Basement contractors cast in 120mm ducts for fouls and 65mm ducts for water & electric with twin Sika watertight seals on outside of the duct. I then plugged the inner of the ducts with the newton compound - was an awful job - it sticks like $#!+ to everything, nearly impossible to clean off tools etc. You then finish with a cement compound flush to wall. Still, no leaks though!

Probably not - depends on the choice of wall thickness you have. Basement walls are usually 200mm-300mm thick depending on the SE's design, what kind of structure it is, what's on top etc. I'd guess that your ICF will have enough flexability in that respect. We went for an 'open box' design so we could have flexibility of layout and a suspended timber floor to simplify the heating design. However that meant that the walls & slab needed to be thicker than usual (300mm) plus extra steel. We probably could have built a 200mm thick closed box for the same cost of concrete & steel and saved the cost of the suspended floor but the build cost would have been higher to construct the lid so it probably all netted out. GIS fundamentally tells the SE the bearing strength and composition of the ground which usually dictates the design of the slab. To preserve the passive design of the house above, we put the slab on a layer of 300mm thick EPS 200 which extended beyond the walls by about 300mm to meet the 200mm thick EPS 70 vertical insulation. GIS also tells you the ground water levels which will dictate your waterproofing strategy and the overall site conditions will influence the build strategy (i.e. are you on solid rock, clay, chalk, gravel). Site conditions (and access, party wall considerations) will also influence overall cost as when you know what material you're excavating, you know how much it bulks up and what the cart away costs will be. From memory, Chalk is 3:1. clay 2:1 and gravel and rock about 1:1. While muck away trucks are rated to 20t, they can only be filled to a certain volume so this is important as you're usually charged per M3 for excavation, cart away and backfill. The excavation design is also important - you usually can't just dig a straight sided hole as it may be unstable, so the sides are 'battered back' (dug at an angle) which generates more spoil - however this can be used to refill the battered portion if you backfill the usual 1m working gap between finished wall and ground with something free draining like clean stone. If you use site spoil to refill, it needs to be compacted every 200mm. Party wall also applies from the mouth of the excavation so if that's less than 6m from a neighbouring wall then you need to check the 45o intersection rule to see if you're clear - if not you may need to resort to sheet piling. I was away from site the final week of basement works and I suspect that the contractor skimped on stone for the rear of the house as, while it all looked great when he left, about 6 months later there was significant settlement in that area and I needed to backfill it with a lot of type one when doing the landscaping - patio has still settled a touch which caused a few issues. I had retained a few £K for residuals so rather than get them back I never paid it and they never chased for it.

If it helps, I built very similar to you (demolish, cast in situ basement vs ICF and 2.5 storey MBC TF passive standard house on top) with zero prior experience. Could not have done it without this forum and its predecessor. Ask all the 'stupid' questions you like Have you done the ground investigation survey yet? This is the one that determines the spec & cost of the basement (or any foundation structure).

Just done a big basement post on another thread. ICF with wp concrete (Kryten, Sika etc) is a great system, but the concrete placement needs to be bang on as you can't see any issues due to the insulation - did you do the ICF yourself or use a contractor? Separate tanking should not be required depending on ground conditions but some warranty systems will ask for two out of the three systems (external, concrete and internal). We got an all in warranty (Ark I think) but by the time we got BC sign off to release the policy, somewhere in the insurance chain had bust but we got an equivalent policy from the broker at no extra cost. Not that it's worth anything really but necessary if you wanted to mortgage or sell.

How can they recommend a system until they know the specific site conditions? This is the type of conversation that would ring alarm bells for me. As @Carrerahill says, there are crews that do this work to high quality day in and out, usually contracting to big developers to do basement car parks, service rooms etc. Give them a proper set of drawings and they will price accordingly. Simpler to have a groundworker to contract the whole thing as a package as they will usually have a few crews that they work with to do the steel & concrete works - they usually stick to digging the holes, removing spoil, backfill and supply of the materials. Like any contractor, always inspect previous clients and ask to see them on site currently. Scrutinise their quote and when they're on site, watch them like a hawk to make sure they follow it. The only downside with subterranean works is when it's finished, all the evidence is covered so hard to see if they've followed the spec. Internally, the fit out is like any house, we tacked electrics onto the bare concrete and used dot & dab to fix the plasterboard. Laytex to floor to even out the bumps and then karndean on top as tile would have been colder underfoot.

I'd hate to think what they made of your soul But yes, for the contamination that is a good option and one I should have used. Part of the GW quote will depend on the classification of the spoil as their landfill will need to know. Our site was also within 100m of historical workings and was clay on gravel on chalk so risk of 'solution features' (fancy word for holes) so we needed two sets of GI as the first was 'inconclusive' basically the supervising engineer made a bit of a hash of it so I had to pay (a discounted rate) for a more comprehensive study. By the end of that the site was like a teabag but we had good data. All went smooth after that. You do not want a surprise when you start digging.

I did a lot of research before building ours. I'm no expert but here is my experience. Unless you're excavating under an existing building, if you hire someone with 'Basement' in their company title then you're probably paying a premium for what is essentially a concrete box that any decent ground-worker firm can build - i.e. the type of firm that would build an underground carpark etc. Here are the steps that I followed: 1) get our planning permission for the basement element of your build. In our case, we re-submitted the planning app once the above ground element was approved - our planners were mostly interested in the lightwells to the front of the house (which are only visible as grills in the front paving and not so much the emergency egress to the rear the footprint itself. We represented the basement as a big empty box with 'basement' on it - not not indicate any room division or use at that stage. 2) get your SE to commission a ground investigation spec that will give them the relevant data (soil bearing, composition, water levels etc) and will also satisfy any conditions imposed by your LA (we had archaeological and soil contamination conditions). You can shop the spec around yourself but don.t be tempted to come up with your own. Then choose your GI contractor and get them to do their stuff. In our case, they were probing and coring around the existing house (that we later demolished) but they got enough data points to satisfy the SE. NOTE - steps 1 and 2 are committed costs, depending on what comes out of the report, you may decide that it's not cost feasible to build your basement, especially if it requires piling etc. 3) get your SE to design the basement, paying attention to supporting the loads imposed by the house above. In our case, we already had a MBC structural design with calcs so the SE was able to take these into consideration. BC will also need to be consulted to ensure that the basement meets regs regarding emergency egress in fire (either a separate exit to ground level or sprinkler system). You will also know your groundwater situation and this will inform your waterproofing strategy. What shape is it? Ours was a slightly off square box (11.5m x 10.5m) with an additional rectangle bit for the plant room. We used stud-work to create the internal rooms and a web of steel above to hold the suspended timber floor. Wet ground floor UFH is on spreader plates. Complicated shapes, corners etc will cost more to build as there is a lot of labour in the formwork and steel placement. How will light get into the basement? We sourced german GRP lightwells (MEA Bausysteme) and specc'd holes to fit. East then to get a window made (UpVC) to fit the hole. Cheaper than specifying made on site concrete lightwells. Will you have wet services in the basement (shower, toilet etc). Wet services will need a means to connect to the ground level fouls (pump). We decided not to but do have a plant room in there for the gas boiler, MVHR, UVC etc. Just have to get rid of boiler/mvhr condensate and we have a external drain for the UVC tundish where the external exit stairs are. Will it have a solid lid or be open and rely on a suspended floor (we did this). Will have implications on how you heat the GF if you're thinking of UFH. How will it be insulated? We put ours on a layer of 300mm of EPS200 (the bearing strength, calculated by the SE) and applied 200mm EPS70 to the walls (with LE foam) which then met the insulation detail from MBC. This was not hard to do but that grade of insulation is not cheap. We did not heat our basement, it's always 20oc year round due to being in the ground and having decent insulation. Also, there is lots of ambient heat released by the plant room and electrical appliances, people etc. 4) you will need a waterproofing strategy - really depends if water table is far below you or you're effectively building underwater. We had gw at 6m and as only digging 3.5m down type B alone was ok. A is an external membrane - can be effective but only as good as the application - a problem will not be apparent until you have a leak B is waterproof concrete - uses an admix to the concrete, water bar on vertical and horizontal pour joins and penetrations (like fouls) and special plugs to fill the formwork bracing holes.. We used a warrantied SIKA system that was inspected and signed off C is an internal membrane, sump & pump. In this situation you are expecting the walls to leak so collect water internally and have it run down to a precast sump which is continually emptied by a pump. If the pump fails, the basement floods so it's good practice to have two and some kind of warning system and plan for power failure. If you're above ground water then you need a land-drain at the perimeter of your basement to a soak-away. Covering in shingle and using clean stone as backfill for the gap between excavation and wall will act as a giant french drain to deal with rain water. 5) you need a build strategy. How will your basement be built? Concrete poured in situ using movable formwork (most common method), ICF? Precast insulated panels? Bored holes filled with RC? Blockwork? How big is your site, how much plant can you fit on it during the build? How close are you to neighbours? Does the party wall rule come into effect (the 3/6m separation bit) NOTE - you may choose to build in ICF but be aware that for a waterproofing strategy that depends on the walls being a barrier, ICF has the challenge of not being able to see the quality of the pour (marshmallow finish due to etc) as both sides covered with insulation. Does not mean it will be a problem, just means you won't know if there are any issues and will have to trust your contractor to get the mix perfect and vibrate well. Will you need to de-water during construction - we had friends who live by a river and they were in this situation, they used an (expensive) system that pumps ground water out of the excavation continuously during the build. 6) when you have all of this info (most from SE) you can get groundworking firms to tender. The SE quote should detail the concrete spec, bar schedule, waterproofing strategy, backfill spec etc. If not, you're leaving some discretion to your contractor so pay attention to what they propose. Most GW will sub out the concrete work to specialists so they essentially dig the hole, get rid of the spoil and then backfill when the concrete is done. You'll probably use them to do any pre-site work (demolition, clearance etc) and put in the services for the new build (fouls, water, ducts for gas & telecom, power). You should make it clear that you expect a turnkey package based on the SE spec and make sure that all elements have been included - contractors will look to cut costs by using spoil to backfill (vs stone) etc which will lead to more settlement after. At this stage you will know what your basement will cost You may want to get the SE to spec traditional foundations to understand the incremental cost / m2. in our case we had the passive slab quote from MBC as a comparison. A basement company may do all of the above for you but some costs may be opaque. Our friends in the river used Glatthar and were very pleased, however for our basement their waterproof system was overkill and was about 40% more expensive than the route we took. They also don't do any groundworks. Do not be bounced into using the system a contractor is used to if it's not necessary for your site - i.e. an internal draining membrane if you're miles above groundwater (we had one who was very pushy on this) Make sure the critical elements are warrantied with insurance backing as you will depend on this to get your overall house warranty (if you need one). Good luck, it's a cost effective and amazingly useful space if you get it right.

Challenge for the younger generation is that no matter how much they scrimp and save, they have high rents, tuition expenses and are chasing an every increasing deposit (as a % of the property price). They also look at the generations ahead and see how they have benefited from free higher education, stable work environment. a boom in the property market and generous pension provision. Politically, ask yourself what happens in 10+ years when the political centre of gravity swings down from the boomer generation to Gen X / millennials and they want a fairer deal - I think that you could see are some pretty interesting policies of wealth redistribution becoming mainstream.

Yep, we have mastered the art of getting dishwasher and washing machine auto running once the sun is up...

But do you mix & match with abandon or stick religiously to the toe coding?

I would suggest this - contact BT and put a request in for a new connection. They will send an OR team to site who you can then collar to get their opinion on what to do about the overflying wire. Then cancel the BT line request. You should not need to pay anyone anything. This is how I got a friendly OR guy to work up a free quote for them to duct across the street to a pole (all ducting on my side was already in situ). We agreed that it would be cheaper (and probably better quality) to get my groundworker to do it and just coil the appropriate cable at the foot of the pole. I cancelled the BT order and did so. Month or two later I renew the BT line order and when the guys turn up, they're happy to see the cable at foot of pole with other end already run into the plant room. Job done. You don't mention what you plan to do for your own telecom provision?

We got a heated drying rail in the days of the caravan - used to put it in the greenhouse alongside the washing machine. Now it sits in the utility under the MVHR extract vent. As the house humidity is quite low (30%) everything dries quite quickly. Folds up and hangs on wall when not in use. Rarely turn on the heating aspect, maybe if there is something needed urgently or if it's particularly heavy material. Now, like loading the dishwasher it has become a source low level martial friction as we have different styles of hanging out the laundry. Do you have a compulsion to pair every sock at this stage or, like me, match them up when putting away. Discuss...

Average tenure is < 2 years.

The approach many of us have taken is a) confirm that the min extract rates are being met for kitchens & bathrooms (n.b. we easily exceeded these without even trying) b) balance in / out at a given air flow (the most fiddly bit) c) figure out the fan speed required to meet the whole house ventilation requirement and confirm that your system can meet it. Then turn it back down to whatever you're comfortable with. d) write up the above in a formal looking report and see if the BC ever asks for it. Of the above, b) is probably the most important as it ensures the system is running well. a) should not be a challenge and c) is all down to personal preference.