Bitpipe

I recall our electrician just soldering some white two core cable to the end of the strip and wiring the other end into the transformer. Stranded i suspect as its more flexible (was put in at first fix) and easier to solder. In my experience, solid has a habit of snapping off at the end. @ProDave is the qualified person here!

I have the same issue but look on this as part of my fitness regime There may be significant safety issues with a dumb waiter in a domestic setting - what if a child climbed inside etc? Doubt it would be cheap either.

We put a large letter sized mailbox in wall. For anything bigger, Amazon & co slide it under gate or drop it over wall ?

Oh no - you’ve unleashed the ‘reader’s kiosk’ genie again. Took forever to get it back in the bottle last time....

Builder looked to be of the stetson and lasso variety, court awarded them £300k damages but he liquidated the company and then started again. Although I fail to see how a demolition costs £350k...

Yes, formwork build & placement is quite labour intensive. With some thought, the same form can be reused on a build (depends on complexity of design) - for us, the shape of our basement allowed the contractor to build one pair of forms (inside and outside) that built a corner with a window and they were able to use it a few time before re-configuring it.

Very similar approach to our build - sub-structure with MBC frame on top. We also went with shuttered concrete - out team did all the steel work first then built the shuttering, they explained that the concrete needs to go off for a good few days before new concrete can be cast against it so we had a similar 'staggered' wall pour with 1m gaps between them which were poured last. You should have vertical water bar in these sections also. Is the water bar channel full of water? Our guys were made to dry it out with a blow torch before using a mastic to hold the waterbar in place (Sika products) the rep, who issued the warranty, even came out to check this and they sent him photos every day from site. They also used nifty expanding rubber plugs to seal the bracing holes, effectively a rubber bung on a thread that is screwed in to compress and expand the bung. Then cement to seal the hole.

Depends, you could still extend normal foundations / slab where there was no basement - would need to think through the insulation detail. No idea - ask a groundworker / SE. Yes, total spend was about 600k so about £1500 /m2 - however this was pre Brexit when £ was 1.45 to euro and we bought a lot of the house from European suppliers - MBC frame (priced in Euros then), Gaulhofer windows, Megabad bathrooms, Hacker kitchen, FSN doors, Sika concrete & resin etc... Only way for sure is a GI with bore holes and measuring water levels over time. If you're prepared to commit a few £k then you will get a good idea whether it's cost effective or not. Yep - Glatthar would have been £90k+50k, I got it for about £100k. Ground workers are always local due to the plant mobilisation and muck away (we had 73 20t lorries). They may sub out the RC concrete formwork but that's mostly joinery & steel work and a concrete pour every 3-4 days. Alternatively the ICF route is possible for basements but you wont see the pour quality (as it's covered in insulation c/f striking traditional formwork) so have to really trust that mix & placement is faultless.

Beautiful - we did much the same. Excavated a lot of the temp & original hard standing and put down about 120 tonnes of scalpings, heavily compacted. Then the 50mm of porus tarmac and finally 25mm of the bonded resin gravel, mixed on site and laid in one day to avoid joins. Still looks great 2+ years on, quick jet wash and good as new. Not cheap - £70/m2 for the tarmac & resin (we used a very reputable contractor) and the prep cost a bit also.

Yes - normal house needs a foundation - strip or slab. Basement is a big concrete box in the ground so where it meets the house, no further foundations required. In our case, we'd budgeted £50k for foundations (maybe would have been less) but given we had 2-3m of clay on gravel on chalk, traditional strip would have needed to go down quite a bit. With the full footprint basement we have a passive basement slab, externally insulated basement walls meeting the passive house on top. We decided not to go for a concrete lid but opted for a suspended timber floor instead, that's where the house UFH is located (no heating needed in basement, always consistent temp). We live in SE so floor space is at a premium, site is big (1/2 acre) but planning would not let us expand the footprint of the proposed house (110m2 ish). Planning did not blink at the basement which means we've extended our habitable floor space by 50%. They're currently used as two teenager dens / rooms (xbox, tvs guitars etc) and one is almost a gym (well, has a running & rowing machine, in it plus a punch bag, and lots of boxes). Last room is full of books and will be a craft / reading room. Plus plant room in there too with all the power distribution, gas boiler, UVC tank, MVHR etc... Means rest of house is relatively un-cluttered. We still have loads of garden - too much tbh. But we also have a 3.5 storey house with just under 400m2 of habitable space. Maybe if you're digging out under an existing building but, ground conditions and site access depending, it's not expensive to dig a big hole and put a waterproof concrete box in it. Biggest single expense was muck away. Once built, the additional fit out was not expensive - obv extra electrics, plasterboard, flooring, carpentry (framing, doors, stairs & skirting) plus decoration - but as it was a big house, they were probably an extra 20-30% on what we were spending on those items anyway. It has no heating or wet services and we were able to use just waterproof concrete as low ground water. Basements do get cheaper per m2 as they get bigger as there is a plant mobilisation cost. No idea - very dependent on your site conditions (which you only know after committing to a ground investigation), access (do you need sheet pile to secure the excavation) waterproofing (are you under the water table) etc. Remember our £120k included demolition & disposal of existing plus all groundworks related to services, drainage etc so was probably closer to £100k for the basic basement itself and then we would have spent somewhere between a third to half of that on a raft or traditional foundations - plus it adds significant value to the house and the surrounding area supports that value. Go ask a local groundworker for a quote. That's what I did - if you approach anyone with 'basement' in their company name then expect to pay double - we got a quote from Glatthar (German company, make pre-fabbed watertight insulated basements) and they wanted £60k for a 35m2 basement (2013 price), £70k for 62m2 and £90k for 123m2. However. this did not include any excavation or muck away etc - they needed a fully prepped hole to start work. Local friends used them, very satisfied but they were in much more challenging ground conditions (very close to Thames, very high water table.)

To the penny £120k (2015) for a 110 m2 basement including demolition of old house and services in ground. Saves on foundation costs too. Yes - it’s an entire underground floor, fully finished, just like any other room in house with big light wells so bright in daytime. Per m2 cheapest rooms in house. Smaller is usually more expensive per m2 due to mobilisation costs.

Our living / dining area is 10.5m long and 3.5m wide at the narrowest (where hall door is) , however most of it is 4m ish. Two 4.5m sliders break up the back wall and the room flows into the kitchen at the dining side and study (via glazed doors) on the living side so not an enclosed space, more of a L or U depending on how you view it. However feels and looks fine - yours should work especially if your family room is a cul-de-sac and not a through route. Can you comfortably get a couple of couches and a tv into the family room, maybe a bookcase etc along the wall for storage? If not consider pushing the living room wall in a bit to widen the family room - depends which gets most use.

Well done, I had similar experience with conditions discharge before commencing work - although my saving was £95 as I took @Jeremy Harris advice and submitted a response to all in one shot. Totally agree that LA and planners are underfunded and over-worked, however if there is no counter effect (such as refunded fees) then there is little incentive to change or data to support such a change. That said, I doubt the handful of refunded fees would add up too much.

Agree - I have a full footprint basement including plant room. Plenty of junk (that i'm trying to get rid off) and two teenagers (they will go once the junk is sorted).

The usual way to trigger the pump is via a timer and pipe stat close to the return to the tank. ie during the timed period if the water starts to cool in the pipe the pump runs and keeps it hot. So there is some heat leakage but if all is well insulated then it won’t have a massive impact.

Agree - risk with a developer installed MVHR system is that a) it's installed poorly / not balanced and b) the home owner just does not look after it (cleaning / replacing filters, servicing the heat exchanger, correct settings etc).

I guess its a different consideration for the volume house builder who is trying to squeeze every penny out of the build cost to maximise the profit and the self builder who had a different set of motivations. Warm roof insulation, airtightness detail and MVHR are not standard volume house build elements and if they're not contributing towards creating a habitable space that can be marketed and be reflected in the house price (like a usable room in roof, which then implies windows, stairs, meets regs etc) then little reason to do it - unless there is downstream cost of cold roof construction such as a penalty or fine on the house builder.

This forum and its predecessor have saved me more than that easily - plus other aesthetic considerations (like poking a soil vent through a flat roof).

Given it's a sealed unit, I would not expect it to make any difference just by virtue of locating it in the loft. If however it was actively extracting or supplying (not sure which one would be most effective) in the loft then it would certainly change the variables but whether enough to make a difference is moot.

Some here have gone for a manifold distribution approach (where there would be a lower bore return path for DHW to the tank from the manifold - this ensures the manifold is always hot and you then only have the leg to each room to consider. We have a radial system which tees off to each outlet as it passes but after the last room, the DHW pipe reduces to 15mm and returns to the DHW tank.

In daytime I don't need to put the bathroom light on (aside from the downstairs WC which is windowless) so we used either to trigger the boost/DHW return pump. Electrician explained how he did it, something to do with chaining all the neutrals together - wasn't expensive, just needed to get it in on first fix.

It does make a difference as the wait is typically more than a few seconds. In our house, if I'm in the kitchen running the tap in the morning (before the boost/dhw return pump is running), it can be a good 2-3 mins before I get decent hot water to wash up - it's not even coming that far. If I've triggered the pump by using a bathroom, its a few seconds. I suppose it depends on your plumbing schema but I know @jack didn't do it (we used same plumber) and he does regret it. Not expensive really, price of a pump and a few extra m of piping.

It's a way of preventing water going cold in the pipework and reducing time to hot water at tap so independent of the storage system I think - basically a return loop to DHW storage with a pump that's either temp/timer driven or occupation etc..

We use the same circuit to trigger the DHW return loop pump so that when you walk into the room there is hot water near the tap when you need it.

We have that as well on our Sentinel but it proved too fussy to implement - would have needed a current detector on the CH supply to trigger the dedicated terminal on the MVHR controller. Didn't want a dedicated switch as all of our MVHR boost is automatic - motion detectors in bathrooms & also triggered by light switches in bathrooms plus the RH detector in the unit itself. We have a MVHR controller in the utility so I just nip in and hit the boost there - although don't get the benefits of the dedicated CH mode.