jack

Man, I hate people who finish things they start. It's a sickness. That's an amazing level of finish for the price. No way I'll be sharing what we've paid to date...

Hi Sue No, there wasn't any credit card deposit. The £100 credit card thing was discussed near the start of the thread.

Where was this advice three years ago! Who else would you get to design pipe runs? We made sure when we designed the house that everything was as compact as possible. The bathroom and two ensuites are all in compact row directly above the utility room and plant room (which are adjacent each other). The kitchen is literally the only tap that's any distance at all from the plant room where the UVC is. I don't understand what sort of route the basin tap must take if it takes over 8 times as long for hot water to get to it as to the shower literally two metres (in plan) away. Even the kitchen tap gets water faster than the basin, and it's miles away!

The basin in the adjacent ensuite takes a while to heat up as well, but I don't think it takes as long as the basin in the main bathroom. From memory, if you've had one of them warm, the other one runs warm almost immediately, so you might be onto something. Even so, I can't see why there's ~40 seconds difference between the shower and basin in the same room. They're both almost directly on top of the plant room where the UVC is. Even if the pipe did loop next door first, it's a couple of extra metres at worst. One thing on my list is to get hold of a schematic from the plumber so I have a reference in case it's need in future.

Our static pressure is very high - just short of 6 bar, from memory. Our plumbing design assumes a 3 bar PRedV. Given that one or two elements of the design have left us a little unhappy (eg, 45 seconds - admittedly at 1.5 bar - for warm water to reach the bathroom tap, while the shower in the same room takes 5 seconds to get up to full temperature), I suspect that the ability to tweak it a little higher or lower than that might be useful.

Okay, thanks very much Jeremy. As mentioned in a recent pm, lunch is on me at some point in the near future. At this rate it'll have to be somewhere Michelin starred!

I bought a pair of Milwaukee magnetic bit holders for impact drivers, one for the drill and one for the impact driver. They've both lasted for nearly three years with no signs of giving up. A bought a pack of 20 Erbauer impact driver bits at the same time and I still have half of them left (and not all broke - some have been lost). I was genuinely surprised at how good they were for the price. I once had a go with one of the cheapo ones that came with a crappy old drill and it managed to screw in about 5 tough screws before shredding itself.

You're too kind Jeremy! Honestly, I don't mind buying one - I'm sure you'll find a use for yours at some stage.

Interesting. We still have the temporary 1.5 bar PRV on our incoming main. Our plumber installed it as a failsafe, to ensure if building control decided to test anything, there'd be no chance of it failing. Of course, since we've delayed so long, we've been stuck with this for ages. We do find that the shower pressure noticeably drops during a water softener recharge cycle, or if someone turns on a tap full bore, but that's hardly surprising at this pressure. I was going to install a 2.5 bar unit, but it looks like maybe a variable one would make more sense, so we can tweak it to the setting that gives us the best results.

That is a steaming pile and no mistake. What's going on the outside of the SIPS? If it's render board or the like, then the battens will hold the membrane in place, surely?

We very nearly had these on our house, along the lines of the pinned example, but couldn't get the roof pitches to work for us aesthetically.

I know, it's mental. 11mm internal diameter is less than a third of the internal area of 22mm pipework. I don't know what the practical impact on flow rate and pressure would have been, but best case it would likely have been noisy.

I was looking at buying a couple of years ago and all the reports say that the older they are, the better the quality. The new ones are apparently a pile of cack.

I spent far too much time reading about water softeners before we chose one, and I definitely recall saying that occasional use of hard water (eg, if your softener temporarily runs out of salt) make no difference at all. Indeed, installing a softener will allegedly slowly break down existing deposits over time. Harveys make a big deal about their twin tank system ensuring that softened water is always supplied, but I don't think it's that big a deal. Re: the pressure drop, what size flex connectors did they supply? Mine was supposed to come with 22mm "full bore" connectors. The flex connectors supplied each had a 10-11mm diameter restriction at each end. I rang the supplier and told them that they'd supplied me with the connectors for the smaller kit. They sent new ones, but of course, it turns out that's what they actually supply. My plumber was frankly a bit of a dick about it, and tried to say that he'd been put in an awkward position with his supplier, but didn't have much to say when I asked him whether 11mm seemed like "22mm full bore" to him. In the end, we binned the flex connectors and connected it with Hep2O instead.

Good spot, thanks!

I know what a Willis heater is thanks (I seem to recall discussing whether to install one as the primary immersion way back on ebuild when doing our initial design), I'm just interested in how Terry's arranged it within his system. The arrow I put in the pic above points to something vaguely the right shape, and I can't see anything else suitable in the pictures.

Is this the Willis heater? How's it plumbed in? Is it in a bypass loop?

Interesting stuff @TerryE, thanks for sharing. Do you have handy a schematic and/or photos showing how and where you've installed the Willis heater? We're about to have some work done on our heating circuit and it would be a good opportunity to plumb in at least a connection point for a Willis heater for backup. Many thanks.

This, this and this. We took hundreds of photos, and they've been incredibly useful. Even so, I wish we'd taken more - a full set as soon as the studwork went up, and another set after each trade finishes (or periodically if they're all working at the same time). You mention your electrician - oddly enough, our electrician was obsessive about this (he's the one that encouraged us to do this) and took a lot of his own photos. Occasionally, the ones he's taken have shown the relevant bit that we've missed or had a poor angle on.

Yep, exactly this. Drain runs can be hard enough even going first if they haven't been planned in advance.

See page 26 of Part F - the minimum area is 7600mm2. I guess this is roughly based on a standard 2'6" door (7620mm) and a 10mm gap. Wider doors can get away with a bit less. This is the architrave detail we used.

I think you should balance the system with the doors how you usually have them. For example, our bathroom door is closed for less than half an hour a day. Bedroom doors are almost never closed. The only doors that're regularly closed are those on the utility room and TV room.

If you need to meet building regs, you strictly need to have a particular cross-sectional area, which ends up being 10 or 15mm (can't remember) across a standard door width.

The recommended gap is either 10mm or 15mm - I can't remember. It's a lot though! There's a formula for the size of the aperture, so you may get away with less if you have a wide door. I did a concealed gap in the top of the door frames, but I'm not sure it's actually worth it, especially given how infrequently doors are actually closed in our house.

Not a bad idea. I wonder whether it would leave it feeling top-heavy?