Mikey_1980

We have a duct running under our slab for our Hwam stove, we had the hearth made to measure with a hole in it for the air feed, we made all the decisions on the stove/hearth etc before the slab went down so its worth planning it as early as you can. I will post a picture later.

I used Hedges Direct once for Native Hedging in an old house becuase we wanted to screen an area quickly without a wooden fence. I think 5 x 1metre troughs of plants around 120cm tall cost us around £350 delivered and were well over 6ft tall by the end of the year after lots of water and fertiliser.

They were on our site by 6:30 everyday, except the 18th March when they said they would be there by 10 but it was eerily quiet all day ?

On our MBC passive slab We have 11 Zones downstairs all individually controlled via Heatmiser wall mounted thermostats. It works well for us as we can have a 2 degree difference in the various rooms quite easily, ours is supplied by a 70lt buffer on a modulating ASHP. When MBC put the pipes in make sure to label them, we forgot and used a IR camera to detect the circuits when it when live.

As a little tip, we brought an old vax for £20 and used it to clean the entire slab before our carpets went down, it worked really well and removed all the dust and plaster splashes, everyone thought I was mad at time but was well worth the day I spent doing it.

We have the 3G automated Velux Integras on our build with the thermal collars, Installation was very simple and they work reall well and we have had no issues now they have been in 12 months. We have 8 in total installed in our build. Also you can special order them to have painted wood internally any colour and the outside any RAL colour if you want to them to match other windows. Ares are all RAL 7016 externally and painted white wood internally to match our internorm windows.

You Can just see one on the top left of this picture

sometimes cash is king, it was with our skips

Well the walls done

we put a change over switch in our design so if there is an extended power cut we can easily connect up a generator to get us back up and running.

Thanks all, the ballast is for the footings. The Labour is £900 and materials £1000, blues are difficult to come by still so BM's are charging a premium espeically the hollows. When we built our house the order went in for them in September 2015 and they ended up being delivered in December 2015 (5000 bricks) we didn't need them until February but luckily our builder was good at planning ahead. I had builders driving past asking to buy some as they couldn't get hold of them. It was lucky he over ordered as we ended up having enough for a wall we wanted as part of our landsacping which we were planning on doing later on this year but bit the bullit and had it done at the same time. And now I have been talked into getting a puppy we need to get the rest of the garden finished. Lukily I laid the grass seed in september so we have a lawn .

Thanks all, he's coming tomorrow. He finished off our MBC shell and has laid approximately 5000 staffy blues for us so I know the quality of his work. He said he is doing us reduced cost because he has got loads of business from doing our house for us.

Thats inclusive of materials, 600 blue bricks (we have 400 already) plus 2 tonne of ballast, 2 tonne of sand, 25 bags of cement.

Does £1900 seem ok for a curved brick wall, 19 metres long, 5 courses high with bricks layed horizontal to cap. The wall will be made of blue engineering bricks. The builder who did most of the work on our house popped out to price it up for us at the weekend but has been delayed starting on another job so just text to say he could start tomorrow if we wanted. I was going to get another couple of quotes from others we used so don't have anything to compare it too, but getting it done quickly is appealing. He has done all the other brick work on our house so I know the quality is ok.

rigid duct with insulation sleeve on top.

It was the windows that caused us the issues with air tightness, not the duct work and this all rectified now. The duct was all insulated as well, prior to the isnsulation being pumped on and the heating and cooling functions work fine with our MVHR this way. We used 93mm duct all the way throughoout our house

Can you not run the ducts in the roof void before the insulation by MBC gets pumped in? Thats what we have done.

They are very good, I have a long handled one on a pole to clean up the Patio Slabs, and the smaller hand held ones for the walls and corners etcs. In my view its alot safer then a brush as it doesn flick everywhere, and they last well, and replacement pads aren't a huge amount.

I used these LTP Scourers for cleaning our external engineer brickwork, maybe less chance for acid flying anywhere with no bristles. http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/LTP-Emusifying-Scourer-Black-Pad-Coarse-Texture-/200805084725

Good luck with Ecology and completing on the plot, we used them and they were absolutely brilliant throughout the whole process.

If you have a good view make the most of it, you can use blinds for when you use the bathroom and it does make it alot lighter not having obscure glazing, this is our bathrrom

All my heating/ufh/DHW/MVHR was done by one company, and my plumber just all the runs from where the HW tank would be to the rooms.

Our last two house have been new builds and we had no issues with them in the 5 years we lived in each. The first one was David Wilson house on a new estate, and the 2nd was an infil plot where a small local developer demolished a bungalow in the hope of getting permission for a small cul-de-sace with 6 houses but permission was never approved so they eneded up building 2 semis, one 4 bed which we brought and one 2 bed. It was quite funny as the house was on the market for 18 months and we looked at it 3 times, we didn't like the downstairs layout but it was the only 4 bed that was on the market in the town that we wanted to live, so we put in an offer and 2 days after moving in the builders moved in to rip apart the downstairs. My wife was 9 months pregnant at the time and our first child was born in the middle of the 4 weeks the building work went on for, but we ended up with a house that worked. People thought we were mad redeveloping a brand new house but it gave us the house we and other people would want and it sold the same day we put it on the market.

So answers to questions are Our UFH is running at 28 degrees. I haven't been monitoring the electricity usage closely and we have been doing alot of work still so the next 3 months will give the best indicator for usage, we are also only just moving from business rates to residential as it is something I never got round to doing. The install cost was less than £20k, this was for the Ecocent, MVHR and ASHP, all pipework/controls/installation everything taking the bare UFH pipes to a full functioning Heating/MVHR/DHW system and our plumber ran all the Hot and Cold pipes back for the Ecocent to be connected to

Hi, I hope everyone is well, I just thought I would provide an update on how things are going with our Ecocent after 6 months use, and now that I have some data for the past few months where we have had below 0 temperatures. For those that can remember there was a debate over potential big temperature drops when the ecocent came on over on ebuild, here is the link http://www.ebuild.co.uk/topic/18060-i-have-bought-an-ecocent-and-everything-else-esp-do/ Well I am pleased to say that we haven't experienced anything like that, I am monitoring the temperature via the 12 Heatmiser Themostats we have installed around the house and there is nothing more than a degree of temperature varitaition during a 24 hour period, from any of the thermostats with house set around 22 degrees, we also are using the Earthsave Varimax ASHP to heat our 280m2 ground floor slab. I am waiting on our Electricity usage to come through so can't give the numerical figures yet but so far we are very happy, and only once have we run out of DHW from the 300 litre tank but we did have around 9 adults all trying to shower in the space of an hour.