Nick1c

Hi, We built a house near lands end, overlooking the sea. It’s a great place to be, but has its challenges - salt, wind & humidity being chief amongst them. Anything that can corrode will, & at a frightening rate, so it is worth ensuring everything (including window & door hinges/ furniture) is warranted for a marine environment. Airtightness is key, it will minimise heat loss from wind wash & make it easier to control the internal environment via managing the ventilation. This extends to the window/ door seals, in our first week in the house we had 70+mph winds straight off the sea onto the house, this forced some water through the seals, but thankfully it drained out through weep holes. Heating is underfloor via an ASHP, we have only one zone per floor and it works well. Good luck!

We had them fitted. Where the sheets butt up is great, it’s the cut edges I am referring to. We have no architrave or skirting which obviously massively exacerbates the problem. As far as I could see if you use beads to clean up the edges you would then have to use a conventional skim rather than the FST.

We went for fermacell walls & PB ceilings due to both the weight of fermacell & the lack of requirement for impact resistance. The insulated timber frame was supplied by PYC & used smartply on the inner face. It feels really solid, is great to hang things off & adds to the racking….but the edges aren’t as clean as I had hoped. I am not sure how to make them super sharp, maybe FST on all the edges would work. The house is remarkably quiet, the combination of warmcell, a CLT first floor & (possibly)the fermacell) really works.

It’s worth bearing in mind that it is common for push fit insulation to be fitted less than perfectly, this can result in a dramatic reduction in performance. Blown insulation is less likely to suffer from this. We went for cellulose partly for this reason, partly for the noise attenuation (which is fantastic) & partly for decrement decay.

Doesn’t covering the blockwork with a cement slurry do the job?

We went for Fakro as their 3G unvented units were cheaper than the equivalent Velux, 2 are motorised to allow for cross-ventilation. The motor in them is slooow relative to the Velux ones we had in a previous house, but the rain sensors work well. One of the motors stopped working a year after we moved in, but slightly over the 2 year warranty period since they were bought. It had been used less than 20 times in that period. Fakro’s technicians were great over the phone trying to find the fault, but once it was determined to be FUBAR they came back with a quote for replacing the motor of £600 - £300 each for parts & labour!! I pushed quite hard to get this reduced, the only ‘concession’ I managed to get was that someone would talk me through fitting the motor myself as it is apparently a simple operation. On the basis of my experience with their product support I would not recommend them.

I doubt that your project would be of sufficient scale for you to be treated as a wholesaler by manufacturers. In the event that you persuade them as a small unknown buyer you will be offered their worst terms (price & payment), even if you are buying by the artic-load. Transport costs have skyrocketed (along with demand for building products), managing logistics & customs would be challenging. As a self- manager of the project organising labour will be like herding cats. A job requiring a week’s labour from each of three trades could easily take over two months….. once you have found people to do it, which itself could involve several months wait. I have almost finished a self-managed build, it has taken well over twice as long as it could have if it moved seamlessly forward & has cost considerably over £2k/m2 (all costs, inc. fees & demolition, exc. plot). Access wasn’t ideal, the ground was good. The design could have been more cost-efficient (but we like it), the spec is pretty good, but not extravagant. There is a fine margin between confidence/optimism & delusion, misjudging it could be very costly.

My understanding is that houses with a high volume of air per occupant are likely to become relatively dry with ‘standard’ MVHR , particularly in winter when the RH of the incoming air drops as it is warmed up & the moisture generated by the occupants can’t bring it back up enough. An enthalpy exchanger in some way recycles the moisture recovered from the stale air keeping things more comfortable (as a result no condensate drain is needed). We had one put in our Zehnder Q 350 as there are only 2 of us in the house for the vast majority of the time & if done at the time of ordering the additional cost was negligible. We live on the coast & our local weather station rarely shows the RH below 80%, the house sits around 60%. It may be a waste of time, but I get eczema which is worse when it is particularly dry so didn’t want to risk it.

When we lived in Sussex I tried to get some reclaimed flooring kiln dried to speed things up. No one would do it as they were making full use of their kilns for themselves. I suspect they would need a large quantity to even consider it & then jack the price up, particularly given the demand for materials atm.

Pre-Brexit I bought all the sanitary & brassware for a complete house renovation (2 bathrooms & a cloakroom) & an en-suite extension, both from Reuter Bad in Germany. It has an enormous range, the prices were competitive, the communication great, the delivery faultless….. Post-Brexit they now don’t deliver the the UK. Our new home was due to be started around the time we left the EU so I planned to do the same before our glorious leaders closed the stable door & put it in storage. As I was about to push buy the January sales started so I checked with CP Hart the costs of the sanitary ware as I thought transport costs from Germany might outweigh any savings for these items. Much to my surprise they price-matched the Germans! If I was buying now I would check products & prices on Reuter & Megabad & use them as benchmarks for the UK. Our local showroom also price-matched some on-line shops so don’t ignore them.

We had something similar after a storm, it turned out that it was due to damp getting into an outside socket on the same circuit. No idea how it was checked / sorted out.

You could try the bt forum, I got contacted by someone who moved things along when I posted there. IIRC you also get given an individual contact (& their email/phone no.) so get some consistency.

Our main room is open plan & the original intention was to have engineered boards in the living area & tiles in the kitchen. We were told by the retailer (waxed floors) that he had customers with his flooring in kitchens for over 10 years. 2 1/2 months in & ours is still looking good, I’ll give you a definitive opinion in 9 1/2 years! Ours was factory sealed, laid & then I put another 2 coats of osmo on it.

I put a solar powered fan in the roof of my van. Obviously no good at night, but helps keep moisture levels down. Are you sure you have no leaks?

Thank you.

Having had a puncture in a pipe repaired does the system need to be off while the screed over the repair cures? Unfortunately no matching tiles are available so the plan is to put in screed to the original level, let it harden & then either fill it up to floor level with another layer of sand & cement with fibre or patch with different tiles. The whole thing is complicated by the fact that the repair is under a stairlift which is in daily use & needs to be removed for this to happen. The ideal would be the stairlift being removed 1st thing, the area made good during the day & the lift going back on before night. Is this feasible & does the screed need to be cool to avoid cracking? If it does it may be best to delay the job until spring when the heating can be off for a few days.

a) - you will be slower than someone who does it for a living & saving on the cheaper labour. It depends on how much time you have available & how much you value it as to whether it is worth doing. I laid the UFH pipes, did the final sand & sealed the power floated GF & oiled the FF engineered boards. Other that & odd bits of labour I left the rest to professionals. b) - I hope this saves money as it was the approach we took! I found it to be stressful, frustrating & occasionally satisfying. As someone with limited knowledge it soaks up an unbelievable amount of time. Do you know reliable, good local tradesmen? c) - what do you want the space for? There are 2 of us in about 185m2 & it feels very generous (at least it will when all the rooms are finished...). We have a large living area with a pantry, a decent sized tv room, master bedroom with a small dressing room & an en-suite, plant room, 2 further bathrooms & 2 smallish double bedrooms. Were money no object it wouldn’t be much bigger, there is no point in having space if you don’t use it. If you have room where you are try mocking up spaces for rooms, in a previous home we had a barn in the garden & did this, it was very helpful.

We had a steam oven & regular oven in a container for 2 years. When they were finally put in our new house the steam oven tripped it’s rcbo & the main element in the other one wasn’t working. By a quirk of fate I found the number of the (ex as it turned out) Gaggenau engineer who had come to our last house. He was helpful & said that steam ovens often trip & elements go after storage due to moisture - due to electronics in the steam oven & the material in elements being hygroscopic, eventually causing a short if damp enough, this isn’t a problem in normal use as the heat from using the ovens drys them out. Having turned the steam oven back on at the board a couple of times it was fine. The other oven needed a repair to anoint in a relay & a new element - total cost £90. This was done by a local electrical repair man - I am sure a gaggenau engineer wouldn’t get out of bed for that......

@PeterW I know, but my in-laws moved in yesterday & I would rather they don’t freeze to death! Wrangling over who pays & how much will happen later.....

Thanks @ProDave my current plan is to take the screws out of the handrail fixing, if the leak is there chop out the pipe, put a dab of this on it : https://www.screwfix.com/p/flomasta-external-leak-sealer-50g/8487j#product_additional_details_container then put a jubilee clip over it so that it doesn’t blow off & see if it holds. It looks like if I use the self-amalgamating tape it might make a ‘proper’ repair harder.

Thank you. I have left the screw in & turned the entire system off, but if possible would like to get some heat into the house to improve their comfort levels. At the moment there are a number of electric heaters in there which I suppose is better than nothing. The pipe is 14mm (an old Nu-heat system). I’ll check out the tape. Things are complicated by the fact that this happened during the installation of a stairlift. A total of 5 screws were put in the floor in 2 locations. 2 are for a handrail, 3 for the bottom of the stairlift. The stairlift company are getting another way of making the bottom of the track secure, hopefully in the next few days, until this is here I can’t do anything with it. The handrail is doable as soon as I can seal any potential leak, it also projects further into the corridor so may be more likely to be the culprit ?

With immaculate timing a screw has been put through a pipe in the screed of the house my 90 year old in-laws are in. I have ordered parts to repair it which should be here on Tuesday. In the meanwhile, if I can identify which loop has been punctured, would closing the flow regulator right down & setting the stat which controls that loop as low as possible to close the other end give a good enough seal to the loop to allow the remainder of the system to be used without filling the screed with glycol?

That’s a relief - I wondered if there was something wrong with the motor!

@tanneja, we have yet to move in, so have no experience of living with them. 2 of our 3 are electrically operated - the movement is slooow, much more so than our veluxes in to old house, but I suppose there is no rush normally. Is it possible to foam the vents in the Velux? That may be a way of getting a cost-effective compromise.

We had what I was told was the only 8.5kW ecodan available in the country supplied & fitted this week. It was a replacement for a 7 year old unit that failed at the start of August, ordered on 10/8. I believe there are production problems with their new model. Our fallback was to swap to a Daikin unit, in out case it was significantly more expensive as it would have needed both external & internal boxes changing whereas the ecodan was a straight swap of the fan unit.