TerryE

OK, in the past, I have done all my plumbing in copper mostly with soldered end-feed joints and the occasional compression joint. Leak detection involved filling and pressurising the system and going around with a piece of paper towel to wipe joints and look for weeps (and I have had a couple ). We are now plumbing in HEP2O and the risk seems to be not of a weeping joint, but of the catastrophic failure of one. So I am now looking at proper pressure testing of runs before leaving them connected to the mains. This one is new to me. I can see various options: Hire a pressure tester. The trouble is that I will be commissioning the system incrementally over a couple of weeks and the weekly hire for a standard testers is ~ £50. Buy one of the same (and subsequently resell). They seem to sell on eBay for £50-80 depending on condition and frills. Do something home brew, @Onoff, you did this didn't you? I've just done a quick bit of research and Wavin "do not recommend compressed air, only a water pressure test. Water will identify any small leak, and is far safer. Use of leak detecting fluids with an air test may damage the fitting and would invalidate the guarantee." So water only. There general advice is: "First carry out a low pressure water test at 0.5 - 1 bar when the system is just demountable fittings, then a pressure test at 1.5 x the normal working pressure with a recommended minimum of 10 bar for a minimum of 45 mins." So my current plan is buy a tester on eBay and follow their general recommendation. Any general comments or advice. @Nickfromwales, I am sure that you will have some pearls of wisdom. Thanks in anticipation, guys and gals.

In practice, I would only expect dust build-up on extracts from particularly dusty rooms -- which is one reason by BPC and others strongly recommend that you don't commission the MVHR until all of the building and decorating is done. IMO, one advantage of the manifold-type systems is that all runs are the same diameter; they run direct from the plenum vent to the plenum manifold; and bends are usually limited by the tightest radius that the semi-rigid pipe can take. So the you should only expect material build up on specific runs where there is a dusty environment. And in this case you will often be able to flush the pipe using a sponge-ball & draw-cord using a vacuum hose in plenum chamber. As I said this is only my opinion so I would welcome other views.

Dave, I absolutely agree with this point general advice, but in Ian's particular case he his house is almost a 1½ storey configuration with all of his MVHR ducting running in the floor void between the ground an upper floors.

Yes, the heat exchanger cools the out-going air and this can drop it below dew point causing humidity to condense out. The drain takes this away. On another point by reddal above, I would question why you would need the pipework to be lagged (other than the main external inlet and outlet runs from the unit itself. All of your internal pipework is within the warm environment, and as you are effectively operating the whole house as a single zone, it largely doesn't matter where you add or remove heat within the internal space, IMO.

@jamiehamy, Jamie you won't get Passive-class performance with this spec, but you should comfortably exceed 2013 Breg performance. Peter mentioned decrement delay and it's worth reading up on this. This is a time constant which reflects the speed with which external heat changes propagate through the wall fabric to be experienced internally. I also did a blog post discussing this. It relates to the ratio of the U-value of the wall divided by its thermal capacity. My profile which is 300mm cellulosic filler with an external 125mm stone skin has a delay measured in days. On the other hand whilst XPS and PIR has excellent R-values, it's thermal capacity is very low, so the decrement delay is quite poor. You can see this by the way the lag between the external temperature and the measured internal is only 3 hours or so. Also your house has lost ~0.7 °C in response to a ramping delta 1-8°C external to internal. Also large areas of glass are really bad news from a thermal perspective. A U-value of 1 might seem good but that is 8× what I lose through my walls and 6× what you lose -- and the decrement delay of radiant loss is zero, of course. The main impact of this level of heat loss is that the number of heating days that you have will be quite high and the heat input will require a full solution such as UFH, plus you will probably need extra heating on the first floor to maintain a comfortable temperature in the colder months.

Yup, I lost about 3mm -- shreds lost amongst the wood shaving, so nothing to stick back. This also planed off the ends of the touch nerves. No fancy stitching or skin graft, just a smooth red weal the size of a fingerprint and the skin slowly grew back from the rim in, so now I am left with a lump of scar tissue in the centre and a crap sense of touch on that pad, not that this is at all obvious to others. Still, it was extremely painful. Nothing like a bit of pain like this to teach you to treat your power tools with a lot of respect.

Not sure about that one, though I do admit to having the top of an index finger having a slightly flattened profile and somewhat deadened touch senses as a result of a mindfart using a power plane a few years back. They plane off finger tips very effectively if you are silly enough to let them get near the cutter. Anyway, welcome!

Some of my racking had sprung so I used screws because they had better grab to pull the OSB in tight. But if you are fixing virgin OSB to your studwork then you shouldnt have this issue. But why every 50mm? The main ranking stiffness is a combination intrinsic stiffness of the OSB and the grab between the OSB and the studwork due the static resistance between them. Going from 150mm centres to 50mm centres would make bugger all difference in a properly cross racked frame.

@MikeSharp01, I didn't bother buying any nailers -- though I do have a budget Screwfix tacker. Couldn't see the point. Though since banging in ~1,500 nails when putting up ~50m of shiplap fencing, I've had nothing but grief with my lateral triceps which triggers RSI-style pain in my upper arms most evenings / nights -- so lots of broken sleep. So my conclusion is that it doesn't just take a decent hammer and a modicum of fitness to do a lot of nailing: you either need to build up your muscles slowly or to use automation to avoid the issue. In retrospect, I just wish that I'd hired or bought a decent nailer!! Any nailer would have been better than the penalties for not using one

Ian, isn't your Wintergarden unheated and entirely outside your temperature controlled living environment? Looking at the drawings it looks like you've got steel verticals carrying the horizontal steel members, and these are effectively external structural members. So why do they need insulated? Even if these are close coupled to the blockwork, then this is on a corner and the extra Psi factor here will be small. Even you are worried about this, then a small airgap (say 5-10mm with spacers between the fasteners to the steel and the blockwork) would drop this 10× to negligible.

I think that its basically the same argument as with the electrics. I did all of ours (as well as the plumbing, gas included) in our current house and have slept comfortably for 30 years or thereabouts. We've got more than enough to do will all of the other second fix, without getting into pissing competitions with the BInsp, so if my main building contractor's recommended gas installer gives me a reasonable price, then I will go with this.

Just remember that if a thief uses a hidden key to get in, then you can forget your insurance. There are only so many places to hide a key; thieves know most of them and none are approved by insurers! Decent key safes are approved by most insurers, but a jam jar or your £30 eBay version probably isn't.

+1 to that. Just use a decent safe and decent anchors. We fitted one for my parents when they became dependent on the daily carers visiting, and like it so much that we bought one for our own front door. If you think about it, most are positioned so that they are only visible to house callers. In our case it has a discrete cover and when I've mentioned it to friends who visit regularly, they usually say what key safe? It only has to be more secure than the alternative ways of breaking in (like using a typical barrel lock on your doors).

Quoting is one thing. Understanding is another @Sensus, Martin, I wasn't talking about other's generalisations, just yours w.r.t. to me and Jeremy. But will you ever speak to me again if I admit that (to my knowledge) I've never read a book or learned paper written by an architect -- other than an interesting short paper by Caliwag on eBuild? I accept the value of an architect where you need one, but I don't think that a professional architect is always appropriate or cost effective in some self-build designs, much in the same way that a hammer is an essential tool for the toolbox, but it makes a bloody useless screwdriver.

@Sensus, I want to disagree with you on this one. In my view, an understanding of thermal bridging is more to do with engineering, material sciences and physics. I wonder how many architects have heard of Fourier's Law or the heat equation or know how to go about solving it or to use packages such as HEAT3D or other more general maths libraries? (The sort of thing that I discussed in this blog post). Your statement is a generalisation, but you have no knowledge of individuals' expertise, so it is dangerous to claim it as an induction. For example I think that Jeremy, I and at least a couple others on this forum have the professional and academic backgrounds to hold our own in front of a whiteboard with any architect that you could suggest on this particular topic.

Woooo-you I would suspect that quite a few of the self-builders here could give 90% of architects a run for their money when it comes to understanding cold bridging issues

I am not sure how much further up that scale to put most architects!

Or more realistically if looks fine until the first winter and them it slowly falls apart over the next 5-10, resulting in sporadic but heavy attacks of ear ache from Faye.

Just to pick up a precautionary from your title: "How hard can it be?" The risk is that your homebew brick might look OK, only for you to discover later that the brick doesn't weather well. A typical firing for small scale production might be a day plus and then a natural cooling period of days. This doesn't scale well down to a batch size of one or a few bricks.

Alternatively as for the DWG file and use an Atutocad viewer or something like VariCAD (free) Viewer and print off the PDFs from that. This also has the advantage that you can take measurements direct off the drawing.

@Alphonsox, you should see Ian's previous YouTube link on this. I spent about 15mins looking at all of the techniques to pile with stone, injected concrete, the works. I know that I am sad but I found it fascinating.

We went around the review loop 3 times with our TA and then had to do a MMA which required another. I then got to Design Review F with my frame and slab manufacturer and we still missed a couple of things. With a passive house and achieving target performance, the devil is in the detail.

@AliG, but when was it built? BRegs do change over time, but are applied retrospectively.

@Nickfromwales C'mon he's just another anal member of this forum, just like you and me!! We all just have our own anal peculiarities -- or at least that's what Jan keep telling me.

One that @Sensus might be able to clarify, but I am confused here. Whether we like it or not, most Local Authorities now have to run their planning services under cost recovery targets. If you want to engage constructively with the LPA then PPA is their cost recovery mechanism for doing so. There are normally defined fee schedules and service levels, and as Sensus says, you can use this as a mechanism for putting obligations back on the LPA to provide data within response targets. If you've spent £5K on consultants, then surely you've been through one or two rounds of PPA at a £100 or so each? Or does the consultant have a coherent and credible rationale for not engaging with the LPA? OK, this might draw up battle lines, but isn't it better to know what the opposition's position is and to spend your money and resources on battles that you need to fight and not on ones that the LPA don't even want to have?