jack

Difficult times @Ferdinand, but your mum's lucky to have such an attentive son helping her out. Re: food, I've read repeatedly over the last few years that protein is less well-absorbed as we get older. Is appetite a problem? If not, I'd be trying to get her to eat as much protein as possible. Focus on beef and eggs, but lamb and fish (particularly oily fish) are good too. If she'll eat it, liver (even 50g a couple of times a week) is fantastic. If tolerated, full fat dairy is an excellent source of nutrients. Vitamin D supplementation is useful at all ages (especially outside of the summer months, or all year round for those who aren't out in the sun regularly). And as I'm sure you know, any form of activity is good. If nothing else, exercise may help with appetite. All the very best to your mum.

I skim read that and thought that the whole house was to be pulled down!

@Ferdinand is bang on. This is an excellent and useful document, but it includes an awful lot of stuff that is at best a distraction, and at worst potentially off-putting, for any potential architect. Much of this is the sort of info you should be thinking about when formulating a brief, rather than something that should form part of the brief itself.

At the very start of our self-build journey I got slightly obsessed with straw-bale houses. I actually don't think the old-fashioned version is a great idea in our damp climate (although it can definitely be done with careful detailing), but there are panelised versions that apparently work well. A school not far from us used one version: https://www.modcell.com/projects/weydon-secondary-school/ It all got a bit too hard in the end, so we went with a more conventional construction.

Everyone. We can't poll the wider self-build community, so this is by definition a poll for BuildHub members to see what building system they're using. What big builders, non-members and the wider self-build community may or may not do is irrelevant. Please consider that before posting.

Reply deleted - pointless escalation on my part.

I'm not that tall, but my wife is. So you're probably subliminally thinking about her

We have 1100 on our landing. Feels tall, but since it's all steel with fairly fine balusters and a thin plate handrail, it looks fine. I actually think it make the landing feel very safe. I can't recall why we went with 1100 rather than 900. Might have been because our kids were quite young when all this was being decided, and a little bit of extra safety seemed like a good idea. There was also the fact that one bit extends above a double-height area, so it's a bloody long way down onto a concrete floor if you get it wrong!

How's the blade coping?

A family acquaintance who made a packet selling his business has spent several million on a massive house for him and his wife. It's turned out to be an utter nightmare, including him ending up in court with the builders. Money doesn't necessarily obviate the need for the traits @AnonymousBosch listed imo.

Not a bad price. I'm sure I paid more than that 4+ years ago.

Agreed. In fact, there's no reason to even have a bath drain routed throught this sort of unit. You connect the drains of one or two (I believe they recommend no more) showers to it, and connect the outlet of the device to the main drain. That's it.

The rate for ASHP (at least) went up a couple of years ago, from memory.

The heat recovery on these smaller horizontal units tends to be a lot less than on the large vertical units (like this, for example).

Yes, that's what I was told. Bivalent systems require metering for billing purposes. It also used to be the case that the system had to be capable of having metering installed. However, from memory, this was to do with capturing real-world data for research rather than being anything to do with billing/payments. The requirements were something like you needed an accessible straight portion on the flow and return pipes of some length - 500mm, 600mm, something like that. I think they got rid of that requirement when they made changes to the RHI in late 2017.

Not really - the system is really only functional when you have continuous warm water being used, and simultaneous warm water going down the drain. You might get a bit of recovery if you drained the bath while hot water was being used elsewhere, but realistically, it's designed and connected to work when people are having showers. I believe the split system works better because the higher flow of cold water though the device allows more energy to be extracted from the drain water. They're not cheap - maybe £600-1000 depending on model? In our case, we have a very active family who all do sports throughout the week. I sometimes have to shower twice a day, and my wife is the same. Our kids aren't that heavily into the long shower routine at the moment, but I'm sure that's coming. Overall, we foresaw the potential for a lot of heat going down the drain from showers. Even if the payback period is 15 or 20 years, there's an awful lot of energy being saved over that time, which is no bad thing.

Yes, that was the de facto connection standard when I installed mine. I believe our plumber actually talked me into this arrangement instead of the dual connection arrangement (possibly due to pipework complexity - it's been a while, so I can't remember the reasoning).

For the highest recovery, you split the preheated water between the shower and the DHW cold feed. You can just supply it to the shower if connecting to both is difficult for some reason. You can also supply it just to the DHW system, but from memory that's the least-recommended arrangement.

The sieve is clearly for aeration.

19" is width, not depth. You can get different depths of 19" cabinets/racks to suit your needs.

On the subject of frameless glass, my main point would be to make 100% sure that you have every detail worked out, especially drainage (including how you handle any leakage into the channel supporting the glass). I overlooked these details on our (admittedly timberframe) build until too late, and it's added a lot of stress, delay and cost trying to sort something out.

I'm sure there was a discussion year or two about something like this, or maybe I read it elsewhere. Just go for shower waste water heat recovery. While it doesn't save water, a properly installed system will return over 50% of the energy that would otherwise be lost straight down the drain. No moving parts to go wrong, and no need to bathe in your own crap. Win-win.

Yup. And proud.

I adjusted the settings so that only one displays the time. Far easier!

Like you need more kids!