JohnnyB

You could visit our site. The slate roof won't quite be finished next week but it will the week after and we should be fitting the windows the week commencing the 25th. There's very little plasterboard up yet but most of the sevices are in so there is quite a bit to see. The closest pub is Battisford Punch Bowl, in the next village. It is a community pub, run by local people, and I've been told it is good but I've not yet visited.

That is what I would suggest. It will be the cheapest option, you only need them for a short while, and they will be used to the machine. Whether you can get one to commit to a time in advance at this time of year is another matter.

My HP has integral pump but it will be several metres away from the house with about 15 metres of F&R pipework and I have been told I will need a second pump indoors to pump the water around the UFH. The pump on the HP isn't large enough to do everything. The HP has a minimum water content of 30 ltrs so a 50 ltr buffer/volumiser is large enough to satisfy that requirement. Whether it will be enough to stop short cycling I don't know, I haven't asked that question. I don't intend to run it all the time when it is just the bathrooms where we want a warm floor, I intend to run it on a program so the floor is warm morning and evening when we are showering. Running for a few hours each day I'm not expecting it to be an issue.

My installer is suppling a heat pump that is large enough to heat the whole house but is putting the upstairs radiators down as phase 2 (It's a new build and I don't think I need rads upstairs but have installed the pipework just in case) I think if you have an installer who can think outside the box a little there are options. In my current house I have a Samsung Gen6 and if I understand the manual correctly it can supply 2 zones at different temperatures without mixing valves, but not at the same time, i.e. it would heat one zone at one temperature and then the other at a different temperature, but I haven't tried that as I have a single zone. I'm also building a new build which will have a the R290 Samsung HP and I'm hoping to do a similar thing to you, but without the towel rails. This is still theory so I'm not sure how well it will work in practice, but my plan is to have 2 zones controlled by 2 room stats connected to the UFH controls. Downstairs UFH and FF rads (if fitted) will be on zone 1 then upstairs bathrooms UFH will be on the second zone. I'm expecting it all to run at the same flow temperature. During the cold months I will run it with both room stats set to max and let the Samsung weather compensation control the flow temperature, it will be running as one zone. When it warms up and I only want the bathrooms UFH on I will turn the downstairs UFH off by turning that room stat down but leave the bathroom UFH running. All the time the HP can be controlled using the weather compensation so should be running efficiently. I'm having a 50 ltr two port buffer so there is always enough water flowing in the system. Currently I don't find a cold floor that useful for cooling the house, all I get is cold feet, but most days opening the doors and windows is enough to cool the house in the evening for our comfort levels, but I am putting power points beside the bedroom rad postions so I can add fan coils in the future if we want them.

Thanks @zzPaulzz, it was really interesting to see your timber frame and chat about various things, it really is at an intersting stage to visit. It was good to meet a few more of the Suffolk BH members as well, a shame I couldn't stay for a drink and get time to chat to you all for a bit longer. Our house is a little further on and is very different to Paul's. If anyone wants to visit I would be up for that, we are near Stowmarket. We will be starting to plasterboard the internal walls fairly soon but not slates on the roof yet, I still haven't ordered the solar panels, waiting for one more price back. I used Envirograph CV Cavity Strip Barrier, ordered from Antifire, here. They offered a discount when I asked for it. They took a bit of prodding to answer questions at times but did get the strips sent out when they said they would and the price was the best I could find at the time. Building control asked for it after checking the BR drawings so if you haven't been asked for it you may be OK without it. I was told it is something they have started to ask for in the last year or two after one of the team went on a course and it was brought up. Apparently it has been in the regs for years but they weren't aware of it until relitively recently, I assume since the Grenfell disaster.

This Thursday works for me too

Following on from this I'm wondering how I can insulate between the back of the door cill where it meets the concrete. We are having timber doors and windows and with a level threshold some of the timber cill is level with the screed. In another area I have 25mm of celotex between the screed and the door frame but I'm wondering if there is something better I could be doing on my door frames I've ended up ordering foamglas blocks for below the door frame. The difference in price between those and compacfoam, brigi foam or marmox blocks is minimal and the foamglas blocks can be on the outside skin of the wall without covering so they work best for me. The brigi foam company said their foam can be under the ground and exposed to the type 1 under paving slabs but the price is about the same so I decided not to use it here.

I might get time to stop a little earlier than usual, there should be a little less to keep on top of this week.

Hempcrete isn't like that, it is mixed on site by a small local company who don't have in house staff to do things like that.

A bit more info on this as I have found a helpful SAP assesor and asked him about modelling the junctions myself as I will probably need a minimum of 5 at £150 each. He came back with the following for the requirements needed for experience/qualifications. Has anyone Here’s what I can tell you about needing to be ‘qualified’ to use your own psi value calculations : “If a junction has been modelled by an individual with suitable experience**, or is a product that has been certified to achieve a certain psi value (e.g. lintels), the psi value can be entered by selecting this option” *’suitable expertise and experience’ is defined in BRE IP 1/06, Assessing the effects of thermal bridging at junctions and around openings, and BR 497, Conventions for calculating linear thermal transmittance and temperature factor. Not very helpful I know – bur perhaps one can read between the lines I can’t easily access the relevant BR papers without paying. Has anyone downloaded a copy of BRE IP1/06 and BR497? The first is only £9 but the secind is £50 and I assume is rather more involved. I'm wondering if I would be exploring this further or just accept it is going to be expensive and pay someone else to get it done!!

The VAT is strange. Nearly everything else is zero rated if it is supply and fit, it seems strange that a broadband connection isn't zero rated when it is now a requirement to fit fibre to the premises. It seems that is an outdated policy. But, it is a matter of where we book it and how much it costs. Book with BT, zero upfront, book with Openreach and they want £2400. There is already fibre the other side of the road so it will be fibre to the premises if we book it through BT or Openreach. We can get 900Mbps if we wanted, not that we need it that fast. The letter from building control say the connection needs to be capable of high speed communication, which is classed as at least 30Mbps on other documentation. I can get that on the mobile sim we are currently using on a good day.

I went on the BT website last night to see if I could now request a new connection, and I can. I didn't get as far as signing up and today I got a phone call from the sales team asking if I wanted to go ahead. I explained I was building a new house (so not ready for the connection yet) and was told that a new house wasn't a problem, I didn't need to go through Openreach and they will call back in 2 months time check if I'm ready for a connection. Thanks for the info @nod, it seems we don't need to spend £2k on a new connection

It sounds like I need to call BT again and see if I can get any further with them. I don't remember, but I thought they meant the property doesn't have a phone/broadband connection so need to go through Openreach to get that sorted before they could get involved. The house is listed on the post office database and comes up in most postcode searches now, I'm not sure if it did when we last tried to get the connection through BT. Is that what you mean by the address database?

Interesting, I'm sure we called BT last year and were told we need to contact Openreach as the house isn't on the system. Is your house signed off yet and when did you start the build? Building control notes make it sound like we need to be high speed internet ready before they will sign it off.

I see from an older post that an internet connection wasn't zero rated but has that changed now it is a requirement for high speed internet to be connected to a new build? It used to be easy to get a new phone line, and free from what I have been told by the builder opposite our site. I have found that I need to go through Openreach as a 'developer' and they now charge £2000 plus VAT. My understanding is I am required to have a high speed internet connection for building control to sign off a new house, so it seems wrong that it isn't zero rated. Is this something that is left over from a time when a phone line was a choice and it was quite cheap to get a new connection? Or am I missing something and there is an easy and cheap way to get a new internet connection?