Adsibob

I wanted to fill the whole void, to try and mitigate a sound transfer issue we have. But I’m probably just being neurotic. I’m very good at that.

No. Annoyingly, I somehow managed to mis-measure the quantity of wood required. I think I must have only added 5% instead of 10%. There must have been some off cuts, but the fitter didn’t keep them. Other option is buying sheets of MDF in 9mm and 6mm and laying one on top of the other.

I have run out of our engineered oak tongue and groove flooring boards, but have managed to get away with it by leaving a gap in the floor which will be covered by IKEA carcasses. The gap is 3.5m long, 39cm wide and 15mm deep. i need to fill that gap with something to level the floor, such that when the carcasses go on top they have a level surface to sit on. Only sheet material I can find locally in stock for immediate pickup that is 15mm thick is OSB. Will OSB take the weight of wardrobes (the big ones, 236cm tall), each weighing about 38kg without clothes or inserted pax shelves and other accessories (and there will be 5 of them). Plus the weight of clothes, shelves, rails, drawers etc, and everything could be quite heavy. Or will it eventually get compressed?

I always agree a fixed fee for conveyancing. It’sa standard transaction, and Even the costs of “surprises” can be legislated for in advance. Anyone charging an hourly rate for residential conveyancing in this day and age is a cowboy. Not illegal, but not best practice for standard residential conveyancing.

Plus 1. Your only duty as a seller is to answer questions (that the buyer puts in their pre-contractual enquiries) honestly. You don’t have to give a view on whether something is compliant with planning law. Or rectify things that aren’t.

@puntloos why do you need a shower in there? Is it for dogs, bikes or humans? If for humans, think about whether showering there will be a pleasurable experience - my own view is that it won’t be. Much rather shower in an actual bathroom. if for dogs or bikes, just fit an external tap on the outside of the building and have a hose with a shower head. Install drainage to catch the water.

You could post your doc here and the forum could go through it and identify the missing gaps. You could then amend the doc to legislate for those, send it to the builder in track changes and ask him to confirm he has included these. He will say “no” and then you can agree a price for those items as well. i had an incredibly detailed schedule of works. It had about 250 items on it. I also had a pack of construction drawings my architect has prepared which were maybe 35 pages in all. As the we went through the build we regularly came up with things that I hadn’tprovisioned for and which the builder wanted to charge me extra. He was generally right, but the constant revision of the budget upwards was stressful. As was the need to suddenly research which type of insulation or which type of sealant to be used for the missing item, and then buy it.

Yes, I thought that this is what I had agreed to and signed up to. But the builder misled me. Anyway, luckily that was a long time ago and resolved ok. Lessons learnt!

My first ever build was about 9 years ago. Thank God I had a contract. It was very well drafted and enabled me to write a detailed letter of claim when the biker walked off the site owing me money. I threatened to sue him, explained by reference to the contract why i thought I would win by reference to the contract. He caved and settled for 90% of what he owed me. That is a best scenario. There will be times that such an approach doesn’t work. But you must absolutely have a thorough contract and as detailed a schedule of works as possible. Get him to prepare a gant chart so that you know what he is planning to do when, and you can be ready for each stage. Make it crystal clear who is responsible for doing and buying each thing. RIBA do a fairly decent set of contracts, one of which will be appropriate for your needs.

Better to flush salt into the sewer than all the extra cleaning products that would be needed to clean off the limescale… At least that is what a salesman would say.

I would get a water softener. They are fantastic. Yours will just use less salt because there is less limes ale to remove. Otherwise your plumbing fittings will eventually get limescale build up, and you will get streaks on shower screens. It will just take longer for these issues to materialise than if you lived with harder water.

I don’t think it’s irrelevant at all. If you banned all open fires and converted them all to the latest eco design stoves, the pollution caused by log burning would fall drastically, such that they would emit less than road transport.

Just to give you my novice's take on the point @Dan F raised in his last post: if you scroll back to the beginning of this thread, you'll see a cross section of my house. It's a 5 bed house at about 2400 square feet, with decent sized ceilings in most rooms (between 2.6m and 3.3m). We just have the UDR in the corner of the house on the ground floor, then one in-wall AP inside a UFH manifold cupboard in the middle of the first floor and another in-wall AP plugged into the wall almost behind a cupboard more or less in the middle of the second floor. Very good coverage all over the house and apart from the UDR (which I think looks quite elegant) not a single AP in sight as they are all concealed. So I would think very hard before forking out all the extra cash for a UDM. The UDR is much cheaper, and enables me to power both APs directly from it using PoE. Only issue on wifi coverage for me is that because I put a metal foil into our EWI as part of our build up, and also have steel studs behind the plasterboard, I've made my external wall somewhat of a faraday cage and so I don't get such a great wifi signal in the front of the house (i.e. outside our front door and our driveway) but even there it's still good enough for the outdoor hue bulbs to connect and for the Ring doorbell to just about work.

I can’t help with this I’m afraid, way above my geek rating. You might have better luck asking @Thorfun, @Dan F, @Wil, @joth or @Dreadnaught.

Plus 1

You will likely still need to use your Hub2 from plusnet as a DHCP server (ie the thing that automatically provides and assigns IP addresses, default gateways and other network parameters to client devices). If you log into your Hub2 from a laptop directly wired into it, this should be quite easy to do. In that same screen, switch off wifi, as you don’t want your Hub2 signal causing interference for your ubiquiti stuff. Then you plug your UDR to the Hub2 using a CAT 6 cable.

A lot of people on this forum are keen on buffers for UFH. Just to say that there is an alternative which might be simpler: we have a low loss header and a boiler which can modulate to 1/17th of its maximum (Viessmann). We don’t have a buffer tank, and don’t have a problem with short cycling. Even though our house is nowhere near passive, I’ve been impressed by how little it costs to heat, so big vote of confidence for the low loss header.

@vala did you resolve this issue?

Just to clarify the above further, here is the guidance from my IR thermometer manual for emissivity settings: So the choice appears to be: plastic 0.85 to 0.95 copper oxide 0.78 iron oxide 0.78 to 0.82 Maybe I should go with 0.85 which is more or less in the middle of these?

I have an IR thermometer, but not sure what emissivity setting I would set it to. The pipes are Pex -Al -Pex pipes, I think. They are described on the website as "Combines the benefits of both metal and plastic pipes". So do I set the emissivity setting on the IR thermometer to plastic or metal? I don't have auto balancing actuators. I have a very basic manifold system made by a company called Warma. My actuators look a bit like this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0819Z6LPV?tag=picclick02-21&linkCode=osi&th=1&psc=1

How do you measure (or “see”) the delta? My temp is set to 38C; I rather not go much higher as one of the loops from this manifold run under a wooden floor.

This is utter nonsense. The hardness of the floor can only be a health hazard if you fall onto it. I wouldn’t bother asking an orthopaedic doctor about this (who wouldn’t have the expertise anyway), it’s just nonsense. The answer to your question about insulation relates to the feeling of the floor surface when you walk on it barefoot or in socks. It the floor is very well insulated (e.g. at least 150mm of PIR), then in winter, heating the screed above the PIR just a little bit will be enough to take off the chill of the floor. If you aren’t having UFH, or if you don’t have space to insulate properly, then the downside of tile / stone / micro cement (and even laminate and linoleum to some extent) is that it will feel cold to the touch. That is nice in summer, but not in winter. In that case, wood is a better option. But otherwise porcelain is great. Very tough.

Use @Jeremy Harris’s spreadsheet. It looks complicated, but isn’t.

It's not possible to move the thermometer, as the thermostats are wired in already. Unless by "thermometer" you mean SWMBO, in which case she is even more difficult to move.

How much overshoot is acceptable? We have a room which overshoots by 0.4C and another that overshoots by 1.9C. I need to do something about the 1.9C room. I guess just reduce the flow rate OR the temperature?