Alex C

Yep paint the bottom edge before you install the skirting especially in kitchens and use a tiled skirting in bathrooms.

I imagine they would be best placed to answer that. 01535 650 770.

Rules for this sort of thing will change and may be dependant on other factors such as LTV. I definately did not have a minimum draw down with Ecology. They were very flexible but my LTV was very in my favour.

I would often email them in the morning and have the money in my account by the afternoon. No charges and no minimum transfer amount. Couldn't have been easier.

I think it was me. I drew down 10k straight off then used my savings before drawing down more months later. saved over 6 months interest on the full amount at the end of the 2 year period.

Any SAP assessor will surely be able to do a design SAP from Plans. Like @Bitpipe I needed one for ecology and did it myself but it would have been under £200 to get someone else to do it. When I got my mortgage Ecology wanted over 100, wich was perfectly manageable with a BMC build and 5.5kw solar pv.

In my slab there are 2 layers of mesh as it is actually a reinforced raft, I think there is normally only 1 in a slab. The pipe was laid on top of the lower layer as it would have been too near the surface if it was on top of the top layer. The pipes are about 100mm below the surface which is lower than in most slabs, but this has not been an issue and I suspect it actually means a greater thickness of slab is heated which then emits its heat gradually over a longer period of time. Seeing as heat rises would it be a good idea to heat upper floors and not lower ones? Personally given the low price of pipe I would be installing it and then maybe take a view later on connecting it up. Finding out later that the ground floor is cool would be annoying at best.

In a passive house you will never want to heat the bathroom floor hot enough to dry it out as it will be like being in a sauna. We put in electric under floor in all the bathrooms in our passive house as we thought there may be a chill on the tiles but in 2 years I have never wanted to turn it on. You will only want to run your wet ufh 23-25 degree surface temp range.

I bought a blending valve that is accurate down to about 20 degrees although I have found that running it at around 26/27 works best. The boiler is a worcester bosch greenstar 12i that modulates from about 3.5 up to 12kw. I have never had issues with short cycling and with just a wall mounted temp sensor it controls the temp well. I also use it to run 4 x 600w towel rads which is all the heating we have upstairs. I have these on for an hour in the morning in the winter and overlap them with water heating as their output is even slightly less than the lowest boiler modulation. The UFH comes on a max of twice a week mid winter and often only once for about 4 hours. It was a bit of punt as I sort of designed it myself but it is dead simple and has worked really well. My plumber didnt believe that the boiler would be powerful enough to heat the house. Getting a plumber that understands low energy housing seems to be quite tricky.

I paid less than £400 for someone to lay all the pipework over 145m2 and attach to the manifold. This was then connected to a small gas boiler by my plumber. No great expense or expertise involved and after 2 years of living with it am very happy. Has the benefit that on cool, sunny days like today I can run the pump with no boiler input and it spreads the solar gain from near the windows over the ground floor.

My experience with a slab with ufh and 300mm underneath is that the house temp is kept very constant. The slab both heats up and cools down pretty slowly and only needs to be heated to a few degrees above room temp giving a very comfortable even temperature environment. We have porcelain tiles on the ground floor and if the slab is allowed to get down to around 21 it starts to feel pretty cool to walk on without shoes, where as at 23 it is fine. This may only be a small differnence but definately noticeable. I agree if you had carpet or cork you would not notice this. UFH may be claimed to be an inefficient way to heat a house, but seeing as my heating bills are about £100-£200 a year it isnt really a major worry. I will take the couple £ extra bill for the benefits of comfort.

The OP was talking about an Isoquick insulated raft and that is what I was responding to.

That depends on what your idea of warm is. It would be crazy to build a new house with a concrete slab and then not put heating under it. Running some pipe in the slab to a manifold is cheap and easy.

This is the link to the video Finished floor was tiles over concrete. You are never going to get a very good standard of concrete floor from polishing a structural slab. Concrete thickness is dependant on the design of the slab and ground conditions. Mine is technically different to the majority as it is structural with more steel in and also thicker. I wanted decent insulation with no thermal bridge so didn't look in to cost for a 'normal' raft.

Take a look at my time lapse video that is on the mbc timber frame website. Shows pretty clearly one method of installing an insulated raft

You only tend to use piles when you have no alternative due to ground conditions as they are expensive. A lot of self builders on here have used highly insulated rafts and they work very well and are pretty straight forward.

That looks like it is going to be an expensive profile and only gives a small skirting. I used this https://www.qic-trims.com/product/type-r/ that worked well. r12. Then just cut down some mdf for skirting underneath, job done. Just noticed you arent skimming. That looks like quite a high profile to cover up with surface filler.

Can anyone recommend a co2 monitor please. I have been living in a passive build house with mvhr for over 2 years and although I have no idea how much heat it recovers I really enjoy the improvement in air quality over the old house that was on the same plot. We are next to fields and it did a great job of keeping the oil seed rape pollen out of the house. The filter collects a lot of pollen which both my wife and kids are allergic to. We only ever have the mvhr on quite low but the house volume is large for the number of occupants. The humidity is always between about 38% and 50% even on very damp days, great for quick drying of washing. I would be interested to know what the Co2 levels are like.

You also need to look at floor to wall/skirting details in the room above as a lot of sound is transferred from floor down the wall. Try and track down some robust details as there are lots of examples of how to deal with this.

My neighbour is building a german kit house and the wall panels are craned in to place with a single sheet of fermacell factory fitted on each one. That is where the product is really being used to its best advantage.

You are always going to get a flatter finish by using the largest board size possible. Fermacell is crazy heavy and uses expensive screws that will be a nightmare to fix. 15mm large sheets of standard plasterboard or 2 sheets of 12.5 is how to get good sound insulation and use standard dry wall screws that will be a fraction of the price. Fixing boards to a ceiling without a board lifter will be the hardest workout you ever do. a 1200 x 1200 fermacell board weighs 21 kg. You cant lift that overhead and fix it on your own.

Why are you putting fermacell on the ceiling. Are you planning on put some shelves up there? You would be nuts to board a ceiling in half size sheets of fermacell. They will still be really heavy and all the joints will look crap. If you are doing it on your own hire or borrow a board lifter and use standard plasterboard 15mm thick or 2 sheets of 12mm. The guys I have seen who board out without using lifters tend to have no neck and look like power lifters. There is a reason for this.

Yep, both down lights and 5a lighting circuits and whatever else you fancy is how to design a lighting scheme as it is then easy to make a room bright for cooking/reading or maybe darker for movie watching. In my experience electricians and also light fittings suppliers tend to go for the grid up the ceiling with far too many downlights approach. Back to the OP. I would be interested if your free design suggested any 5a circuits, as there wouldn't be any kind of fitting for them to sell you then.

If their house feels like scratching around in a cave then it is a perfect example of not designing the lighting properly. A good lighting scheme will allow you to see properly but does not feel like you are living in an office or a branch of Debenhams.

A supplier is obviously after selling as many fittings as possible and is more than likely just going to grid up loads of downlights. As was mentioned above light the walls not the spaces and think about what atmosphere you want to create in different rooms. 5a wall circuits work really well for floor standing or reading lights so great in living spaces. Think about where you might want to hang pictures and put a row of adjustable downlights along that wall about 600mm off wall. Just rememeber if design work is free it is not going to be by a decent designer. You pay for decent work.