jack

Indeed. Isn't there are an issue with joins between fresh and cured concrete in ICF (as in you need to make provision for joins between pours done more than a day or so apart apart)?

Literally word for word what I'd say about our experience with balconies. They add positively to the look of the house at the back, but were very expensive, introduced the only cold bridges in our entire design, and will never be used.

Only you can put a value on it, for sure. Personally, I'd find the money by sacrificing other things, because it makes that much of a difference to my life. As one example, I've had chronic sinusitis problems in winter for decades. In the freezing cold hovel I rented for a year while we built, I had three or four nasty attacks without any triggering illness like a cold. Since moving into the new house 3.5 years ago, I've had two minor attacks (one triggered by the flu and therefore pretty much unavoidable). Anyway, I'm not going to argue any further. I just wanted to provide the perspective of someone who's lived in a lot of places without MVHR who would never choose to do so again.

During hot periods, I think the approach of keeping the house closed up when it's hotter outside than in is useful irrespective of whether you have MVHR or not. It's just that when you have MVHR, it's more effective. I'm not that worried about closing things up until the weather reaches about 22-23 deg C, as that's the maximum temp downstairs when we have a series of warm days (we have underfloor cooling downstairs). If it's really hot, then the sliding door stays closed (bonus: it's south facing, so somewhat less solar gain when closed) and people use the side door to get to the garden. Not as nice as having everything open, but then I'd rather keep the inside of the house as comfortable as possible during hot weather.

I don't know where the idea of an MVHR preventing the opening doors and windows comes from, but it's repeated all the time and it's a complete fallacy. We open ours all the time when the weather is right. Interestingly, other than winter, we get a lot of use out of the MVHR in summer. Without it, the house would get a lot hotter during a string of hot days. Remember that the effect of MVHR is not to keep the inside warm - it's to maintain any temperature difference that exists between inside and outside. So in hot periods in summer, we have all the windows open at night and early in the morning to purge as much heat as possible. As soon as the temperature outside reaches the temperature inside, we shut everything and let the MVHR work to keep the heat outside where it belongs.

Hi, and welcome to the forum. To provide yet another opinion, I've lived in over 20 houses in my life, from the south of England, to Sydney, to New York. Climates ranging from very hot to freezing cold, wet and dry, in houses large and small, well-insulated and not. My current home is the first one with MVHR. Having lived with it for a while, if I were to ever build another house, it would be a non-negotiable item right near the very top of the list after decent insulation and airtightness. It's just that life-changing. Absolutely true - but if you haven't lived with it over the course of the seasons, you don't know what you're missing out on. There's something weirdly "right" about the air quality, especially in winter. First-time visitors are always surprised that the air feels warm but really fresh.

Sorry, are you saying £1300 per SQM including the plot, using a main contractor? I know land in Scotland is relatively cheap, but that seems like an extremely aggressive price You say it's £150k above what you were hoping for, but it makes a massive difference whether you were hoping to build for £500k or £150k.

That's my guess. I'll take a pic next time I'm up there.

I recently noticed a very thin patchy area of black dust on the wall adjacent our MVHR outlet. I suspect it's the result of moisture (particularly from showers) condensing onto the adjacent surfaces in cold weather, and providing a habitat for mould. I plan the clean it off with a weak bleach solution and see how long it takes to come back. Edited to add: you could try Bordeaux mixture. I can't, because my area is painted

My suspicion is that it doesn't need to have a lot of effect if it's being used in conjunction with floor cooling downstairs. We have a lot of PV. The aim would be that during hot weather, the cooling is on permanently from as soon as the sun is up when you know it's going to be a hot day. It should cost little to nothing to run, because when the sun's out on a cloudless day, we're generating a lot of surplus energy most of the time. My experience living in hot climates is that it's easier to keep the environment cool if it's prevented from getting too hot in the first place. Even being able to reduce the peak temperature by 2-3 degrees across the day would be very helpful - big difference trying to sleep at 23 deg C versus 26 deg C! Interesting idea. The main issue is where to put it!

Why not do (or at least allow for) both? We have slab-cooling and it's remarkably effective at keeping the house cool. It definitely doesn't cool upstairs sufficiently, and I'd love the option of air cooling as well. I may try and retrofit at some stage - it would've been far easier if I'd planned it from the start. Another possibility is fan-assisted radiators that cool as well as heat. They seem extremely expensive, but just for bedrooms they might be worth the cost.

We have these. Working fine for the last 4 years - haven't even looked at them to be honest (they're on the roof under the panels, which in our case are mounted on weighted frames on a flat roof). The latest update to the app gives per-panel info (per day, I think, unless you pay), so you can see whether there's a problem with any particular panel.

Ah, sorry, missed it was an "and"!

Our slab is around 150m2 and we have an 8 port manifold. All loops are just short of 100m (one is around 80m, from memory) at 200mm spacing.

Exactly that.

You'll be pushing warm moist air outwards, where it will condense at some point within whatever gaps it's moving through. Balanced pressure is better.

I'm interested too. Of all the things we've learned from building a new house, the quality of life improvement from having MVHR installed would put it at the very top of the list of things I'd include in a house if I were doing it all again.

I did consider this, but from memory it would have voided the warranty.

The problem is that 99% of appliances wouldn't be able to take advantage of such functionality if it existed. There's simply no way of signalling most appliances to start, other than manually setting a delayed start time. I couldn't even find a dishwasher that would take hot fill, so it sits there using resistive heating to heat cold water even when I have a full tank of hot water generated from an ASHP.

Yup.

Our council sends them out to be put up by the applicant. Not sure what, if any, checks are done to ensure compliance!

We engaged an architect from the start (two, actually - we didn't like what the first one designed so we replaced them fairly early on). For us, the second architect was an almost wholly positive experience. I was really impressed by the unexpected but excellent layout he came up with on his first go. It was completely different to what the first architect came up with, and to anything else we'd come up with over all the months we'd been sketching things out. I ended up being largely responsible for the outside design, but I don't think I'd have come up with anything like what he proposed for the layout. Another thing our architect was excellent at was the planning process. He's a local guy who almost exclusively designs very modern houses to be built in a conservative area where planning is pretty anti-modern. We got through planning first time with his help, and I don't doubt for a moment that his local knowledge got us there. I know there's a can-do spirit on this forum, and perhaps people genuinely have done as good a job as most architects would have managed in the circumstances. For me, I just wasn't willing to save a few thousand quid to risk a huge amount of money building something I'd come up with myself. Perhaps I should/could have been more self-confident, but ultimately each individual needs to make that choice.

You can get a special plunger for toilets. It's hollow with a bellows-type arrangement, and is far more effective than rubber plungers designed for sinks.

I was recently told by a Powerwall installer that, after Elon got kicked off the board following a couple of silly tweets, there was a change of policy. Before, the aim was market share growth, even if it meant little or no profit. The new policy is to increase profits.

You may not want or need one, but the fact that there are tens of models of this type of stripping tool available suggests that this sort of automation is considered necessary by the market. Sure, saving a few seconds per connection if you're only wiring up a few sockets doesn't make the cost of a tool like this worth paying. I don't know how many double sockets we have throughout our house and garage. 50+, for sure. Every one of those is a double socket, then you have a huge number of lighting circuits, and all the other connections at the other end. Saving a few seconds and the cumulative impact on your wrists and fingers for each of hundreds of connections is worth it for my money.