jack

If you can hear low volume conversations, that suggests a pretty direct route for sound - think airborne rather than structure-borne, to begin with at least.

Cheeky blighter making it out of easily removable materials so he can get rid of it after sign-off.

WTAF? I wonder whether it's viewing the trap as a potential nest, and dragging in some materials to close off the entrance a bit?

I've lived with it in a highly insulated and airtight house for about 6 years, and there's no way I'd ever voluntarily live in a house without it in the future. It costs a bit to buy and run, and you need to replace filters periodically, but I think it's a small price to pay for consistently fresh air all year around.

Having had to remove and replace all of the cracked marble tiles from two showers because the tiler failed to follow some pretty basic principles, I'd go for self-builder overkill every time!

Check Quooker's current advice. Certainly when I bought mine 6 years ago, they specifically said that you shouldn't supply their product with softened water due to the possibility of the lower pH of the water damaging the tank. I seem to recall that they'd softened (pardon the pun) the advice a bit last time I looked, and now suggest this is only potentially a problem if your incoming water is very hard (and hence your softened water is of particularly low pH). We live in a moderately hard water area and we've got unsoftened water going to our Quooker. It hasn't cause any problems - you might want to get hold of a descaling kit and empty out the scale once every year or two. It doesn't stick to the element, but instead just falls as flakes onto the floor of the tank.

Take a look at Dualflo. I believe they're made by Harvey and may even be rebadged Harvey softeners. They're meant for trade purchasers, so if you have a friendly plumber who'd be willing to buy on your behalf, you could save some cash.

I couldn't agree more. I replaced a load of crappy dimmers with a Theben 8 channel KNX dimmer unit. Great hardware quality, and it's been rock solid for well over a year. Even so, I found the whole ecosystem so unintuitive to set up that there's no way I'll stick with it in the future when this unit needs replacing. As you say, I'd be starting from scratch again, trying to figure out what arcane set of hoops they want me to jump through to set it up. Six years later I still enjoy opening up the Loxone config software to tweak or add things. It's wonderfully intuitive. I'm hardly scratching the surface with what I've done (dimmers, blinds, basic ASHP control, alarm) - I plan to do more stuff when (let's face it, if!) I have the time.

I gave no consideration to date order at all. Mine were very roughly grouped by supplier, but even that was pretty haphazard.

Worth a search of BuildHub for "node red" (in quotes). It's been discussed before a few times.

My electrician installed a piece of protective steel plate across some 240V wiring that supplied the external blinds on a window. It was close to where someone might drill to install supports for a curtain rod, so clearly pretty important. I walked into the room after the boarder had been through. He'd clearly realised the steel was going to slow him down a bit, so he'd just ripped it off and threw it on the floor. Lazy and stupid? Sure. But literally so lazy and/or stupid that he'd made no effort to conceal what he'd done. I raised it with the contractor who'd got him in and he started getting cranky with me for being "unreasonable". First (and from memory the only) time I lost my rag at a tradesman onsite.

When the box is entirely sealed, that's roughly right. It's quite frequency dependent - some purists build "open baffle" loudspeakers, which are literally a large, heavy board with the loudspeaker in the middle of it. Nearly all modern loudspeakers are "ported", meaning they have a tuned length port through which sound from inside the enclosure is directed. The interaction of the box, port, loudspeaker driver boosts certain low frequencies, at the expense of introducing phase issues and a less even frequency response. For once, I actually got my act into gear in time, and ran ducts for loudspeaker cables and wiring, from a recess in the back corner of the room, over to the front of the room where the TV and loudspeakers would go. There was one duct for each cable - centre, left and right. I then came home to find that they'd double-boarded everything up with the ducts hanging out through holes they'd chopped into the ceiling against the top of the wall! WHY!?

I was convinced it had to be a rat (if not a badger!) based on the noise. I sounded like someone loudly gouging out wood with a chisel.

It's that time of year I guess. We were woken a couple of nights ago by an ungodly scraping noise in our pantry. It was so loud that I thought it was the dog scratching at something, but when I got down there I realised something else was chomping on a wood panel behind the pantry cupboards. I've now found mouse crap under the units, but I can't see any evidence of the chewing. I can only assume it's on the back panel of the units that I can't get to, where it's trying to chew through to where the food is kept. Humane trap down but so far no hits. This isn't the first I've found in this general area. They seem to enter along a gap in the internal service void behind the plasterboard. How they're getting into that void from outside (through 300mm of cellulose insulation) is the bigger question, and I don't want to block off the gap until I know the answer!

I no longer wish to stick a flint to anything. Thanks!

What's your 75mm concrete going on top of? If it's to be the sole structural slab, that sounds thin for concrete. I have a ~65-70mm polished concrete layer on top of a nominally 100mm slab (with many deeper ribs and a couple of spines along structural walls) with 300 EPS insulation underneath. The slab has the UFH pipework. We were told 75mm minimum, but didn't have the height available, so we were required to sign something saying we understood the risks. We do have cracks in a couple of places.

Did they give you a specific reason for recommending you not use ASHP cooling? Condensation would be the main potential issue. We only heat/cool our downstairs floor. The ASHP pipework comes into the plant room and is connected to the manifold only a couple of feet away, so there's very little exposed pipework. I run the cooling at a temp of 15 or 16 degrees, from memory. In this situation, we get a slight breath of condensation on the metal parts of the manifold, but nowhere else and there certainly isn't enough to drip. I'm certainly not worried about condensation on the floor surface itself, as I doubt it ever drops below about 19 degrees. It might be more worrying of you're running long sections of pipework inside walls and within floor cavities. But if you keep the temps reasonable, I doubt it'll be an issue.

It's a lot of fun. Even without getting into the programming language (pico C?), it's amazing what you can do with it.

You've never been in a house in the UK that you thought was too hot? I find that surprising. I've been in several. As for cooling the floor, to save me repeating myself, have you read any of the several threads on floor cooling? Having worked in air-conditioned offices for many years in Australia, I find floor cooling to be a much more comfortable way of cooling a space than air cooling. One hot day is fine. A couple is okay. It's when you get a run of several hot days that the heat gradually creeps up. Having cellulose insulation in the walls and roof is a blessing and curse - it buffers heat really well, but when it eventually warms up, it has a lot of energy to re-radiate into the house. It takes days to heat up, and days to cool down. We don't have insect screens (something I'll definitely be addressing eventually), so we can't ventilate at night. We do have an ASHP and concrete floors with UFH, so it makes sense to cool them. We also have a lot of PV, so on sunny days, cooling is effectively free - I only tend to run the cooling during the day when the sun is up. These are more interesting questions imo. This year, much of summer was mild and very overcast. We only used it for maybe a week. Maybe two or three years ago we had a couple of multi-week hot, sunny periods with high overnight temperatures. I believe we ran the underfloor cooling for at least a month or maybe even six weeks over the course of three or four months that year. At a guess, I'd say we've averaged three or four weeks of cooling across the summer over the last six summers since we moved in.

We were looking at reclaimed parquet blocks on eBay on and off for a year leading up to the build kicking off, but it always seemed like a lot of work and a fair bit of risk. They were generally stuck down with a bitumen based adhesive, which is an absolute pig to deal with. You could buy stuff that had been cleaned etc, but that was always crazy expensive for what it was. Edited to add: we did consider the best of both worlds with porcelain wood-effect parquet, but I don't remember why we chose not to go with it in the end.

Yup, porcelain all the way. Decent porcelain tiles will last forever. Worst case you can always dig out a broken one and replace it. I really like parquet flooring. We were very close to having our downstairs floors being parquet throughout. I'm still not sure whether we made the right choice going for concrete.

The thing that would swing it towards an ASHP for me is the opportunity for cooling. We have concrete floors downstairs, and the ability to run the ASHP in cooling mode makes our downstairs a very pleasant place to be in a run of hot weather. In fact, if I were building again, I'd consider tile throughout, including the bedrooms. I'd buy a load of fitted rugs to lay down in the bedrooms in winter (with no or minimal heating), and cool the bare tiles in summer.

UFH is definitely something I wouldn't be without in a well-insulated house, especially downstairs.

My setup is nearly as simple as it can be - single thermostat, single downstairs zone - but I do find weather compensation to help. I run 25 degrees when the temperature is above (from memory) 7 degrees, with a linear rise to 28 degrees as the temperature drops to 0 degrees. Could be my imagination, but I found that running at 25 degrees fixed would leave the house feeling a bit cool during a long cold spell. It adds almost no complexity. I set the curve once on the main ASHP controller, and haven't really looked at it again in several years.

Nice looking project. I'd definitely be looking into getting three-phase power onsite if you have two electric cars and are considering running your house solely on electricity.