Mulberry View

Haha! If only you knew about my problems! A £60k court case is causing very much procrastination and too much time to think about stuff like this. The steps as you see them will have 150mm of PIR insulation on the horizontal treads and an effective 100mm of PIR on the vertical risers. With 50-60mm of screed over, followed by a 4mm microcement finish. It's more wanting to avoid any irreversible regret. I have this vision of walking through the house in a state of blissful house completion euphoria and the sensation of a stone-cold step bringing me back down to earth with a chilling bump! Call me an over-thinker, it's the truth, but I hold dear the attention to detail that quality has allowed me! Thanks for your help all, as usual.

My main worry is that the steps would feel colder than the adjacent floors. You don't think they will?

These are the steps I'm building. This is the arrangement from the Entrance Hall to the Kitchen/Dining Room. It will be fully insulated and hopefully shuttered and screeded all in one with the main floor areas. I would like to pass the pipe through each step. This is the finished look... From the Kitchen/Dining Room to the Living Room I have this arrangement... That's going to be a 150mm high plinth step. There will be a second uninsulated (hardwood) step, then the living room floor. The Nudura face can be battened and boarded over to give a void for the UFH pipes, some pipe slack can be accommodated there. This is the approximate look desired there... Any feedback on running the pipes through these transitions is greatly appreciated. The steps are pretty hefty and solid.

I can also run the bend in an offset position, as in not perpendicular to the direction it's heading, that way most of the bend radius can be lost in the upstand. Hard to explain, I know what I mean LOL! I'm just downloading that vid down my copper telecoms line, be right back!

What I bought were Spacetherm A1 pads (I'd call them sheets, but they are pads on the invoice). I had a lot of trouble getting consistent advice on what is what. Proctor are fairly helpful, but they still take for granted that products they work with everyday will make sense to DIY'ers like us! It came in an "8x4" sheet, rolled up. It's reasonably flexible, but they encourage the use of separate pieces on my steel column rather than wrapping it round the corner and I think that was good advice. It would follow a curve for sure, but you wouldn't want to wrap it around 2 sides of an object. FYI, I paid £515 plus VAT for 2 full sheets. The carriage was £40+VAT (included in that £515). I'd post you a small offcut if you want to see it before you fork out?

I'll sketch it or take some photos. But the upstands can be battened and boarded to allow some pipe slack within.

Thanks for that @Russell griffiths In terms of the UFH, the screed company has quoted for a competitively priced system, using Pert-Al-Pert pipe. What sort of bend radius can the pipes tolerate? I need to run the pipes through level changes, so the pipes will essentially need to run vertically up a surface, then turn 90° into the floorspace again. I thought about bevelling the edge of the PIR to keep the pipes deep enough in the screed in this transition.

@Russell griffiths Did you seal the DPM to the Nudura at the upstand? Did you run a 25mm strip of PIR around the edges? How about the normal foam perimeter insulation that usually goes with UFH kits?

I have a Beam & Block floor and am hoping to screed soon. I have 230mm of insulation going in, it's all here on site. The Beam & Block is grouted and fully dry. The grout has "cracked" in places, but just superficially. There are gaps in places at the perimeter to the subfloor. Should these be sealed? I have 4 soil pipes and a blue 110mm water pipe duct coming up through the floor blocks. Do these need to be specially sealed in any way at Beam & Block level? The soil pipes are plain ended and currently plenty long enough, should I solvent weld socket couplers in the insulation level to remove the joint that faces the wrong way or just live with the plain pipe ends and worry about connections later above the floor level? Do I need to consider air-tightness in the way to DPM is installed and terminated onto the Nudura walls? PIR upstand yes or no? The screed is likely to be Cemfloor at a thickness of 50-55mm, containing UFH (yet to be installed of course). Any tips or words of advice to limit my inevitable procrastination would be massively appreciated.

It's dreadful stuff to work with. Do you have it yet? It emits a really weird powdery dust that feels horrible on your hands and that powderyness will stop anything reliably sticking to it. I used it to insulate the outer 2 faces of a pair of steel corner posts. The posts were onwardly flashed with an aluminium trim which would hold the insulation in place. I simply taped a breather membrane over the top of the Spacetherm, all the way round the post with foil tape to hold the insulation until the trim went on. You'll struggle to adhere it in any meaningful way unless you buy their cold-bridging strips, which are enclosed in some sort of polythene and can then be glued/adhered to stuff. As an aside, Proctor will deal directly with you and they were, for me at least, the cheapest source.

To be absolutely honest, a part of this is to have a contingency for cooking during a power outage. But that's a neat little portable alternative. Thanks.

I'm now planning for Insulation, UFH and screed. We have no mains gas on site, but I'd like to run an LPG Wok Burner on our Kitchen island. Ideally, I'll have an bottle/tank positioned in an outdoor location that I can pipe to a built-in BBQ and to the LPG Wok Burner. But how to run the pipe? I know I'll need a Gas Safe guy to commission this work, but what would be a usual way to run a gas pipe across my Kitchen to an island? Should it be sleeved copper, with no connections, in the screed? It's a Beam & Block subfloor by the way. It's about 5.5m from the planned entry point to the Island. Has anyone done something similar?

This is an important response for us because, if true, then it changes everything. So, it might be the case that we won't fit UFH upstairs at all. We are planning fan coils for the 2 first floor bedrooms, perhaps we just use fan coils for the bathrooms too? We have plenty of opportunity to conceal them and just have grille outlets. We'd probably add an in-wall electric heat pad of some sort to act as a towel warmer. I think you might have really helped here @JohnMo. The reduction in agro and the improvement in the reliability of the floor point to this.

This is the way in my opinion. I've been using the stuff a bit recently and did just that. Once it's partly gone off, it'll drop out of the bucket nicely. You're right though, it goes off VERY fast in this weather.

I'm guided by a low datum too. My bathroom window is floor-to-ceiling and with a 50mm frame height, so my total is 40-45mm in reality to include a structural layer. Damn I wish I hadn't got rid of the frame packer under it, but in all fairness, 45mm does work well with adjoining rooms anyway as I'm going from Microcement in the bathroom to thick carpet in the bedroom.