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PV would have been a good idea. I did look into this, but couldn’t get a quote that was reasonable. Stupid prices really. My concern about spending money on fancy blinds/shutters is that the Velux is not that big, and I reckon the rising heat from the house is more of a factor. Anyone know how I can test to work out which factor is causing more of an issue. I have an optical thermometer which I guess I could use but not sure exactly what I’m looking for: The temperature of the glass on the Velux vs the temperature of the ceiling in the rooms below?

That’s a nice money saving idea, but Velux market the external blinds as blocking out 95% of the heat, whereas no such claims are made about the internal blinds. I think this makes sense as one needs to stop the heat passing through the glass. Has anyone got an external Velux blind? Did it really block out 95% of the heat gain? If so, as my Velux is East facing I would close it in the morning and open it in the afternoon.

Try 1111 or 1234

Inflation can certainly not amend an agreed price, unless there is a clause in the contract which specifically says that. Don’t pay the final balance until ALL issues are rectified.

My two veluxes are GGL UK04 and GGL UK10. I think Velux make external shutters for the UK04 size but not for the UK10 size. Is that right? Luckily the one in my office is the UK04 size. Bloody expensive though.

We took advice from two different architects, both of whom were against air con. The first advised that as long as we devised our sleeping quarters with the ability to have a cross breeze, we could cool bedrooms in that way. We have more or less done that, but for sufficient ventilation one needs to lift the blind with isn’t great in the morning. The second architect wrongly thought MVHR would make air con unnecessary. I wrongly thought that investing £££££ in wood fibre insulation to improve decrement delay of the roof, would keep the loft cool. If all that wood fibre is doing anything, I haven’t noticed. I think the heat from the rest of the house is rising and getting trapped at the top, despite me running a significant breeze up there by keeping rooflights and windows open. The house is not passive, but is very well insulated and airtight. All west facing windows (including two big ones in the loft) have SN70/30 double glazing which is meant to reduce solar gain by 30%. The skylights in the loft are: two openable veluxes on the east side, and a fixed skylight on the west. I need to check the spec of the veluxes, but I think they are fairly high spec ones so will block some solar gain. The fixed sky light which is west facing definitely has SN70/30 glass. The bedrooms are not the worst area in the house. The worst is my office which is in the loft, and I fear it will make working there in summer pretty unbearable. So I’m thinking of adding some sort of air con unit in that room. What options do I have? Do I have to install a box on the outside of the house that then needs to be plumbed to the air con unit and to the drains? Or could I get one of those units with a big water tank that I empty when I use it?

I’m the prime minister, of course I’m posh.

Well I tried JL originally. They had three models I would have been very happy to buy. Annoyingly, their website said two of those models were in stock and the third wasn’t, except that it was a lie. All three were out of stock with not even a lead time. Poor communication really from them. I’m sure JL will say pandemic / supply chain issues beyond their control. But updating a website to give the correct info is really a 2min job. Not grumpy, honest.

The one I am looking at is apparently very quiet at 39db, though that is 1dB louder than some of the 38dB ones available from JLewis. Which model did you send back? our kitchen is open plan to almost the entire ground floor and stairwell, so quietness is important.

I'm looking at an Avintage undercounter wine fridge. Avintage are a French company who have been producing wine cabinets since the late 1990s, apparently. They only make wine fridges. I've never heard from them, but am considering them because their fridge meets all my required specs, is just within budget and on a shorter lead time than stuff coming out of china. Has anyone got any experience with this company? If not, anywhere you know I could get unbiased reviews?

Yes, I’m interested please. Tado has very good graphs for each thermostat, showing temperature and humidity vs time of day, and allowing you to also add the times when heating or hot water was on to see the correlation. It is very useful in demonstrating, for example, that the decrement delay of my roof design is insufficient (doh) but it’s main drawback is that you cannot aggregate data sets from various thermostats to analyse whole floors of a house together, for example, or to output that data to something smart that could act upon it. I have about 12 Tado thermostats, so that’s a lot of data. I have invested in some Philips hue bulbs and a hue external motion sensor. Haven’t bought the hub yet, which I need to make the sensor work. If you were in my position would you return the sensor, sell the lights online and wait for October to buy into a new system? I guess you’ve already answered that. Curious to know what tangible benefits Matter will bring.

I am an iphone user and have an imac, but I don't have Apple HomeKit. Is that additional hardware that i need to buy? Surprised to see loads of Tado devices on apple's homekit site. Do they have additional functionality when used with homekit? E.g. can apple take all the temperature data from the various tado devices and plot it on interesting graphs or activate switches based on temperature?

Any tips for doing this? I have two Veluxes that are both East facing and then regular windows in each room on the opposite side of the house (West facing). I open all of these at around 8pm and it definitely cools the top floor. Should I also open windows in the middle floor (my house has three floors, including GF), or will MVHR be enough? And at what time do you close the windows? I wish i’d installed veluxes on both sides of the roof, not just one! Would investing in velux’s automation Velux Active help at all, or will it not help because the draft i need will only work if I open the windows on the west side of the top floor, and that can’t be automated? i also have a small window on the South side of the house at top floor level, if that is relevant at all.

Welcome! It’s good to have you on board. What stage are you at with your self build journey?

I had assumed that the only way to configure and control Philips hue bulbs would be with an app made by Philips. I’m very much new to this (having only just received my bulbs and not even bought the hub yet) and have just learned that there are a whole host of competing apps for doing this. iConnectHue looks the most sophisticated and Huemote looks nice and simple, so maybe I will start with Huemote. Anybody got any experience of either? Why would you deviate from whatever Philips have designed?

I specified Sunguard Superneutral SN70/35. Should there be a marking on the glass (usually in the corner) that confirms this? There is a marking with a class and BS kitemark, but I can barely read it. I think it says "846241 Class 10512 ... UFF BS" The three dots may or may not represent missing text that wasn't captured by my photo. (The angle is too awkward to see without photographing.

this is probably overstating it slightly. We've just had the first civil conversation in years.

There is no soffit or fascia there, it's a contemporary style roof with the gutter concealed within the roof (on my side of the wall). Good idea re the weed membrane. How do I design something to stop that? The soil line is currently well below the DPC, as all the engineering brick courses are above the soil line.

Brand new extension wall, built on very deep foundations (about 1.8m to 2m deep) that our BCO insisted on. On top of the foundations we have about 3 courses of engineering brick, then facing brick. There are also two DPCs if I remember rightly, one directly above the engineering brick and the other a bit further up. After a lot of wrangling with my neighbour, we finally had a civil conversation about various things, and they have agreed to chop down various things affecting our light if I put up some trellis on this wall so that they can plant some plants to grow up the wall on the trellis. My builder thinks it should be fine as he has sealed the bricks and the wall is so well built he didn’t think there will be any issues. Is he right? The wooden trellis won’t be fixed directly to the wall, it will be fixed to some plastic spacers which will isolate the trellis from the wall. But there will obviously be some fixings drilled into the wall. Neighbour is keen spacers are only 5cm deep so that the trellis is in the same position as the fence would have been to match the rest of the fence. Is there anything else I can do to prevent future problems, say in 15 to 25 years time? Neighbour has agreed to keep plants to no higher than my wall, so that there are no issues with the plants affecting the roof. Obviously enforcing that might be tricky, but I do have fairly easy access to that roof from a bedroom window, so if he doesn’t comply with his promise I could in theory trim it myself.

Ok, well that would suggest it is off. The temperature of the finished floor level should be between about 24C or 27C. So when you touch it, it should feel warm, even through socks, particularly if your floor finish is something that would otherwise feel a bit cold like tiles or laminate. So double check your thermostats are calling for heat and that your heat source is working and if it’s still not warm to the touch Definitely raise it with your plumber.

Sorry, I’m confused by your question. If the slab is warm to the touch, then it’s already heated up. Are you asking how long it took to get warm? Or are you expecting it to get hotter? UFH does not work like a radiator. A radiator needs to be quite hot to work efficiently, whereas UFH operates at a much lower temperature.

@AliG I’m just wondering if your PIRs are triggered by animals? If so, is this bothersome? If not, how did you achieve that?

But what about cracking in the sand and cement screed. Ours was poured about 3.5 weeks ago and the main contractor wants to commence tiling in a couple of days. If the screed cracks in a month or two’s time (as our internal sand and cement screed did on month 5) then will we have cracks in the porcelain? Internally we had already run the UFH for quite while whereas externally we obviously don’t have that, although London temperatures have fluctuated between about 10C and 22C over the last 3.5 weeks or so. I should add that we don’t have space for a decoupling membrane, unless it’s possible to find one that can be laid externally and is only 1mm thick.

I thought I had my front driveway lighting scheme nailed after doing some research on Philips hue. I thought I'll just fit a Hue PIR motion sensor in my front yard and have some GU10 philips hue bulbs where I need them. Bought all the GU10 light fittings (though not yet bought the bulbs) and they are being fitted later this week. But now that I'm living in the house, I'm realising that foxes and cats are triggering the cheap PIR we have on the side passage a lot, which is rather annoying. That is going to be replaced with a rather expensive Steinel iHF3D PIR sensor which claims to be so clever that it won't identify animals (sometimes called a "pet immunity" feature). I can't however use that for the front because I don't have wiring for it. My option for the front is therefore limited to: re-doing my wiring and getting another Steinel iHF3D. This might still be possible as the wiring has only been half done and there are conduits in place, so it might be possible to feed through new wiring through some conduits, but I'm not sure. stick with the original plan and buy a Philips hue and accept it will ocassionally be triggered by animals, and set a routine so that it is on snooze mood when we don't need it to be on, thereby avoiding false triggers. Whilst I don't have any philips hue stuff so would need to invest in all the kit, it would solve a couple of problems we have inside the house if we had a philips hub. use a shelley motion sensor and turn the sensitivity to really low. I'm leaning towards the Philips hue, as the benefits may outweigh the negatives, but thought I'd post here for debate/discussion/insults.

We already had a concrete slab already, but needed to make up an additional 75mm or so in height, so we just did a sand and cement screed, with a aluminium profile in the middle to create a fall line from. The sand and cement screed went down about 4 weeks ago, and we will be laying the tiles in a week or so. It’s probably will not have fully cured by then, but I think @nod and others have said that for outdoors, it didn’t matter so much if the substrate is not fully dry. Where is this from? We’ve gone with 1500 x 750 x 9.5mm tiles made by marrazzi which are “frost proof” and anti slip, so I had understood they were fine for an outdoor patio.