G and J

And will you be somehow putting slack in between sockets?

Won’t that mean there’s nothing to stop your skirting warping?

Crumbs what an interesting idea. Presumably the battens are far enough apart to fit a back box in without cutting into them. Do you put small loops every so often to give you slack for new sockets or pull new cable in?

carbon emissions, - I care but can’t quantify with any certainty so this can’t guide me EPDs, - don’t know what they are. recyclability - I intend what I put in to last decades so don’t care about recyclability. sustainability - unless I know that a particular product I’m looking at is really bad news then this isn’t a factor. I’m not going to have a tiger skin rug but telling between different types of ceramic floor tiles? aesthetics, - bingo. The big one. functionality, cost, durability - all hygiene factors not motivators.

Spoilsport.

We are replacing a dwelling with a combined system. We are on sand, so could easily use soakaways instead of dumping our rainwater into the sewers. That would require capital investment. Anglia Water incentivise such behaviour by reducing my annual water bill by £15 if I did. Everyone I talk to just tells me to forget it and stay combined, save myself money and hassle. One has to ask if Anglia Water care about sewers being flooded by rainwater. Maybe it keeps em clean and flowing without having to pay for it to be done manually.

Ah! So that’s why I haven’t got a PhD! Now it all makes sense.

In the meantime I REQUIRE it to stop flippin raining. Sigh.

Good point, and very possibly a factor. I also think it’s easy to forget on the net that it’s actually people at the other end of our messages, and like a smile in a shop, a little courtesy makes everyone feel better.

We’re aiming at nicely airtight but wall thickness precludes that level of insulation. However with some psychedelic pipe laying maybe redundancy can be effectively achieved….

As I think through many different aspects of our forthcoming build few worry me as much as the potential damage to underfloor heating pipes awaiting a protective screed. Presumably almost all such installations survive being trodden on by the guys laying the screed so I simply needn’t worry so much? Or are there steps one can take to reduce the risk of damage?

You require. I take it you missed the first year lecture series Manners: An Introduction. And I take it you repeated your demand because you didn’t get the response you hoped for instantly. May I suggest that if you asked in a more appropriate and courteous manner more of the many helpful peeps on this site might be happy to respond.

That’s centralised long term thinking. AKA heresy. Think of the effect on the share dividends. Bit like preventative healthcare. Can’t afford it in this year’s budget. 😕

Yet. If everyone harvested rainwater then the % charged of the input water would no longer pay for our sewage system. Anyone fancy inventing a poo-o-meter that measures household output? Might make your millions if you patent it.

I started reading about rain harvesting and two things hit me: even allowing for the sewage % thingy our water bills are so reasonable that payback looks unlikely; secondly the sheer tonnage of plastic involved made me feel that such laudable sounding aims might not turn out to be any kinder to our planet, maybe actually worse.

OK, potentially a dumb question. What does a solar survey determine?

It seems that most folk expect a build done by a builder for a client will come in circa £3.5k. It’s tempting to infer from the above that materials cost is around 25% to 30% of the build cost, vs 70% to 75% of the build cost being labour. Staggering!

Thank you @Nick Laslett (oooh look at me getting all technical!) - added to the reading list. I presume from the existence of airtight OSB that standard OSB isn’t airtight then?

One thing I’ve never liked about backboxes for plasterboard is that they become loose when the face plate is unscrewed. Even if fitted before skimming this can happen and it makes a mess. It did occur to me that the OSB layer may enable me to fix metal backboxes by screwing through side walls into the OSB to avoid that issue.

Noted. Would love to understand the reasoning. Presumably you mean my service void studs rather than the main frame studs. Mind you, I’d love to do the frame on 1200mm centres, it does wonders for the u value.

Earlier this week I visited Nick Laslett’s build and he was very generous with his time and patient with my myriad questions. And as a bonus I now feel I’m not the only Makita obsessed diy-er. I also realised it has never occurred to me that there may be alternatives to plasterboard other than plaster on blockwork. How dumb do I get? (No replies on that subject needed, thank you!) Because I’m mildly neurotic, occasionally obsessive and always annoying, and because we have a narrow plot that we want to make the most of we are trying to build with relatively thin walls. I also like the idea that we could hang pictures and mirrors and stuff anywhere, so I’d focussed on an internal skin of OSB or ply inside my plasterboard. We have a possibly irrational preference for skimmed walls as well. The benefits of the wood layer beneath the plasterboard are feeling of solidity, maybe a bit better sound attenuation (from outside, internal sound transmission is less of a concern), and of course the ability to hang stuff on the walls. Nick is using fermacell and he mentioned that habito might also be worth a look. So after visiting Nick I read all I could find on here about each of those. Are there other types of board I should consider? It looks to me like the materials cost is not all that different, and if so, the driver will be optimising the ‘feel’ of our little house. What do you think folks?

Aren’t Vincent Timber not so very far from you? A lot deliver almost nationally I think.

Presumably you still had to get the install signed off by a G3 person…..?

Hmmm, true, but would it be better to accept that the tide is coming in and rather than one of each type system just pressurise the lot and go with current bog standard….?

I get the electric towel rail. But the doubling up on the UFH seems daft to me, even if the COP is poor when heating just the bathrooms it won’t be less than 1, and it can’t be hard to have a second zone for just the three bathrooms and as you say, at certain times of year, courtesy of the MVHR that’ll do the whole house. And that’s the woodburner…