jack

I've been talking with some friends of mine who are in the middle of gutting and extending their house. We were discussing insulation, and particularly underfloor insulation given that they're replacing all their downstairs flooring and installing UFH. At present, their builder is doing standard building regs structure of concrete, insulation (is 100mm rigid standard to meet current regs?) and screed with UFH on top. I was thinking about how to compare the impact that better insulation would have on costs. Jeremy's excellent heat loss calculator potentially gives some clues, but I suspect that it works better for highly insulated houses where the air temperature (one of the required user inputs isn't much above the floor temperature. For a standard building regs house, for example, I assume the floor needs to be quite a bit warmer than the intended room temperature, so there'll be more losses through the underfloor insulation. This general question comes up quite a bit, and I think it would be nice if we could come up with a spreadsheet that lets us convincingly show the energy and financial impact of different floor buildups in different houses. I'm happy to have a go at this (@JSHarris, if okay with you I may use your heat loss spreadsheet as a starting point). However, I'm unsure about how you'd go about calculating the necessary floor temperature to achieve a required heating output. I suspect that to do a proper job, you'd need a combination of Jeremy's spreadsheet to get heat load, and then work backwards to determine floor temperature. It may, however, be possible to simplify this by making some assumptions and reasonable estimates. Any thoughts on this before I have a go?

Interestingly, I just downloaded this. Previewed fine in file explorer (Win7 box) but said it was a corrupted file when I tried to open it. I shut down Excel (I'd had another file open at the time), tried it again and it worked fine.

We thought long and hard about something like this for our house (my wife was very much in favour), but I just didn't see the benefit. I think I was right in the end: the one we were thinking about would have gone in the main bathroom, but frankly, our children manage to leave a trail of clothes throughout the entire house over the course of a day.

Can't remember (blocked it out!) but I believe it was over 100 £/m to supply, lay, powerfloat and polish the concrete top layer over our base slab.

Aldi specials this week bizarrely include an £899 thermal imaging camera. I know it's always a bit random what they stock, but how many of such a specialist item are they really likely to sell?

Whenever I look at wiring, the word "blue-tral" (blue = neutral) immediately jumps to mind. It's something I made up years ago to try and remember the colours for live and neutral. Everything else follows directly from that. Funny how effective memory techniques can be. I still have a mental image of a (steel) army truck blowing up, which I used in A-level chemistry as a way of remembering that metallic elements want to give up electrons. I also remembered F=Bqv (force on an electrically charged particle is magnetic field x charge x velocity) because we were doing Macbeth in English at the time, and "Bqv" reminded me of the character Banquo for some reason. Weird how the brain works...

You're right to get off the long term use of painkillers, but repeated cortisone injections are also a big no-no. They do nothing to help the underlying problem, and in fact can make the damage worse (from memory, repeated use weakens connective tissue). In my opinion, cortisone should only be used once or twice, and only to relieve pain so that rehabilitation exercises can be done. Shoulder rehab is particularly difficult due to the complexity of the joint and the amount of freedom of movement it has. I'd encourage finding a physio who's an expert in shoulder rehab and planning to spend at least several months exercising daily to get back strength and, as importantly, control of your shoulders. I went from being unable to lift a 10kg dumbbell overheard without pain and impingement to doing the same for reps with a 25kg dumbbell without any discomfort at all. Part of it is improved strength of both primary and stabilising muscles, but a lot of it is about control of the scapulae and upper back. As for surgery, ask your doctor for a referral to a surgeon. I can't see why a serious longstanding issue like this is being managed long term by a generalist. Personally, I'd be looking for another GP.

I've done a lot of reading on low carb, ketogenic and even carnivorous diets over the past few years. There's a lot of evidence - well, anecdotes - about people who have cured or drastically reduced the symptoms of immune-system related conditions like eczema, arthritis and colitis by making drastic changes to their diet. Not science, but for anecdotes, see https://meatheals.com. From memory there's a tag list that lets you filter by condition. A bit extreme, for sure, but the guy who runs it is 50, can deadlift a quarter of a ton, holds the world record for rowing 500m for his age group, and 90+% of his diet for the last 5 years has been beef. I'm increasingly of the opinion that diet science has been hijacked by zealots with an agenda. Dig into the recent Lancet article on meat and cancer, for example, and you'll find that it's literally laughable. They can get away with this because there are serious difficulties in doing proper research on diet. Partly it's the difficulty in doing double blind studies when it comes to food, but there's also inertia, special interest groups (farmers, animal rights activists), ethics (difficulty in testing unconventional diets), compliance (who wants to eat what they're told to eat for months or years?). It's little wonder it takes decades for food science to advance.

The lack of hot water circulation pump is in my "top 5 things I'd change if I were doing it again". We have a 45 second wait for warm water at our main bathroom sink, despite it being almost above the plant room, and the shower less than a metre away taking a mere 5 seconds to get warm. We have over 20 seconds' wait for hot water in the kitchen, and the downstairs toilet is about the same. It depends where the manifold is as to how well this will work. I guess if you have one for, say, the bathroom that's relatively close to the bathroom, that'll help a lot. For long individual runs that can't be run from a local manifold (like my kitchen and downstairs toilet), you probably need circulation on a per pipe basis,

You also need to factor in the cost of changing out the fluid in the brine loops of the GSHP - I seem to recall that that's a couple/few hundred quid every few years.

Agreed. I haven't experienced any issues with our 5kW heat pump getting our 250L tank to 55 deg C, regardless of external temperature, even early in the morning on the depths of winter. it manages this while keeping the house as warm as I can bear it (my wife would have it warmer). What I haven't checked, though, is how long it spends defrosting to achieve this in cold damp weather. We did have the circulating pump go in ours after only 2.5 years. The guy who repaired it suggested only heating to 50, as it takes a lot of time to get the last few degrees, which might have put undue pressure on the pump.

I read The Housebuilders' Bible twice, cover to cover, pretty early on in the process. I found it a great general introduction, and I learned a lot about sequencing and timescales, in particular. That said, I found it light on actual detail, so ended up using it as a high level guide and filled in the detail from other sources. Edited to add: I did find some of the pricing optimistic for my area. There was (and still is) a shortage of trades and builders, so all the good ones are expensive and/or unavailable for months.

Interesting, thanks Jeremy. It's actually easier for me to do as you've done, as I think I have exactly the same manifold as as you, but I was just wondering about whether I was overlooking some major factor about the choice of location. I ordered one earlier today, as I can see us turning the heating on occasionally in the next couple of weeks (I'm fine but my wife is starting to get cold as of this evening!)

Just bumping this one @JSHarris thanks

It's spelled "Grindr" isn't it?

Out of curiosity, what was your thinking in putting the Salus valve on the return side rather than using it in place of the thermostatic valve on the flow side? In my system I can't see that it makes much difference which side the Salus valve is installed, as long as you leave the thermostatic valve open enough to allow the Salus valve to work properly.

That's right, I had to go into service mode to access this setting. The installation manual didn't describe what you had to do to get into service mode, but I found out how online. From memory, the unit also came with a slip of paper in the box telling you how to access cooling mode, but I couldn't find that when I went to do it!

This is very useful info Jeremy, thanks. I'd been scratching my head about how it worked so well with such a large temperature differential when supplying relatively low temperature water from the ASHP (or buffer). In my system, at 25 deg C supply temperature (the lowest my ASHP will output) this valve wouldn't open until the return temp is 18 deg C, which would be way too low. 4 deg C is a lot more sensible. A version of this valve with an adjustable temperature differential would be excellent.

@Ashandiamo, this is true, but do check what "complete" means in this context. You don't, for example, need a completion certificate. You just need your as-built EPC. I don't know whether it's feasible to get your builder focused on getting everything needed for the EPC - for example, I don't know whether you need a kitchen and bathroom for the EPC. Worth checking...

What happened to "render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's"?

Welcome to Buildhub - looks amazing!

Sounds like a good outcome, and more importantly, you haven't been jerked around for weeks (months, years...) to get to it.

Welcome to BuildHub! It's a long old road, so take your time, read everything you can, and then start asking questions. A good starting question might be what you're likely to get planning for on that site.

All boards are exciting! Typo maybe?

Core bracing and a neutral spine is what's important. With a bit of training, it's possible to safely deadlift surprising weights with nearly locked out knees.