daiking

And this is why people bodge up some surface mounted lights and cabling and hope for the best.

The back of the wall will be infill and covered by a patio. No future access from behind. Front access from brick shaped hole only.

Its going to be a block and (eng) brick solid wall. Brick left out for the light, then I would be going round to drill the block for the cable run. I doubt there is enough room in the brick space for the light and a JB but would have to measure it at home later. Plenty of room on the back of the blockwork but I don't have an electrician let alone one planned to come before the wall is back filled to terminate the swa into jbs and put a flexible cable into the brick hole.

I don't want to start from scratch, I'm blindly optimistic that with a little bit of care the grass will grow through its new 'covering' of soil. edit: I just meant stabbing the fork into the ground many, many times, not turning the ground over with it.

Not a great loss, its like a ploughed field with grass growing on it. I need a lawn mower with tracks not wheels. I need a new fork but I’ll be spending Easter Sunday forking and raking the newly compacted soil over the top of the grass. Work up an appetite for those chocolate eggs

Is 3 core 1.5mm SWA going to be any easier to work with that 4 core? O.D. is similar 11 & 12mm and still bend rad of 8 x O.D. Looking at how the cable goes in the light the cable needs to go in and out at an angle not from behind, perpendicular to the light. Also I'm not sure that the cable will go into those brass inserts... These cables are going to need to be exact lengths as there's no scope for curling the cable up in the hole like T&E. I won't be connecting any wires to anything but I will be the one going round pulling the cable into position and drilling through the back of the wall to leave the cable in the correct location before it is all back filled.

Day 2, massive trench in the garden. Trusting builder to put 2 ducts in the correct place before pouring concrete. Clearly I am a big fan of roulette, Russian rather than French. The lawn, the poor lawn...

Perchance?

I don’t know exactly what I want, 2 way external switches, who knows?

As usual, it’s going to shit so far.

Micro digger and mini dumper arrived, waiting like an expectant father for guys to arrive. Cardboard tubes at the ready (h/t worlifts)

Its for the bedroom, plenty of places to hide the sausage awkward cumbersome electrical solutions. Standard plug adapter is fine. Prob the WiFi one so it’s app and switch enabled.

Yes, that is the intention.

Yes had ducting anyway - had to buy 50m back in the day to use 10-15m of it with UFH pipes. for the 25p/m difference I bought 15m of 4core from rs as well just in case I go with 2 way switching.

Back on topic, not sure that 4 core 1.5mm swa will fit that 20mm flex ducting. Lights from @Onoff rs elec supplies link. Not sure if safe or not but can’t burn a patio down. got a couple of cardboard tubes in lieu of ducting if it doesn’t arrive in time. Builder will be thinking, wtf?

I need new ones, are yours just generic Chinese?

But I don’t have world class insulation Obviously I’m running a traditional GCH set up, ‘on’ for 2 hours in the morning and then 6 hours in the evening with stat at a set temp. Manually put it on outside those hours. If someone is cold and feeling it. Which wouldn’t suit a slab UFH so it prob will need extra controlling.

Still in cellophane, never opened. Possibly not needed if just running off the central heating timer and setting temp with TRV.

Similar but different to first one.

Cast your minds back to ebuild and June 2015. I had a 40sq m concrete slab poured and put in 3x 75m (approx.) loops 16mm pert-al-pert ufh piping (via Wunda). Also got all the parts to go with it. I did my best to connect up the manifold to pressure test the piping after noticeably denting one pipe during the install. It didn’t keep a seal during the pressure test on any of the 3 loops, not just the suspect one. At least they had water in them for the concrete pour. I later found out that for the pipe connections to seal they must be straight. Mine weren’t so the connections were stressed during the test so I’m hoping that’s why they failed. As for the concrete, no idea if the concrete had fibres but it did have a mesh that that the pipes were attached to. And I wasn’t around for the pour itself so no idea if it all floated or they wrecked the pipes during the pour. No bother as the concrete later got dry screed on top. Leaving a nominal 100mm concrete slab + 50mm concrete screed. Could be more could be less, who knows? Do I really want to heat that sort of thickness in a poor thermal spec house? House is brick/block, 100mm boggo cavity batts. I later added an extra (shorter) loop for a section of suspended floor. I insulated as best I could but it was the tilers who screwed the final boards over the top so the integrity of this loop is unknown. This pipe was in spreader trays to give it any chance and I understood the issue of having this loop in the same single zone as my slab loop (lower temp). that’s ok, this was only a small section. So now I have a place in the utility room where I have 8 loose pipe ends – 6 through the floor and 2 through the wall. Nearby is sort of random fused spur outlet – possibly put in for the UFH pump. The gas boiler is a 2015 Baxi duo-tec 33 that runs a conventional radiator system and is wall mounted on the other side of the room, approx. 3m away. The heating piping runs along the base of the wall adjacent to the presumed manifold location. The slab pipes still have the water in them from the abortive pressure test. The floor finish over the UFH is tiles. The tiler insisted we use a decoupling membrane because of the UFH. We didn’t have a liquid screed which is also a bonus. I can’t actually remember what went on top of the suspended bit. It was 18mm ply at least followed by something else, possibly wedi or hardie? So there we are, warts and all - At the very least all the pipe work will need a pressure test and a good flush. - I’m concerned that there are a couple of hollow sounding floor tiles and whether the UFH would affect these or others. Nightmare if more tiles lifted. - When I told the builder that I was putting the pipes in the slab I didn’t expect there to be another 50 mm (min) screed going on top. Is the UFH even worth bother with now? I bet its thicker in places. - Insulation wise I have 100mm EPS and 100mm PIR under the slab but there’s bound to be a few voids and the perimeter insulation was not great, 25mm PIR where present on the exterior walls. At the 3m wide bi fold door, he took the slab up to the outer face bricks. Not so much a cold bridge as a cold multi-lane super highway. And I don’t think I there was any on the edge that went up against the existing house wall either. - Wisely, due to the problems with getting the UFH all fitted we had 2 feature radiators put into the space – 40 sq m fairly low ceiling. Most of the winter they are cranked open to max and we get by but it was pretty cold the either week during the cold snap. this space is our day space, cooking/eating etc. We go to the TV lounge at night or when its cold and crank up the gas fire. Considering how mediocre-ly everything is built, I’m surprised how modest the house running costs are for the 4 of us. Given that I’m already using the boiler to heat 10 radiators I hoping that the UFH will be able to top up the existing rads in this space to make things pleasant without adding a massive demand for heat from the boiler. I try to keep the boiler to below 60 degrees for the heating anyway as any higher and the towel rads in the bathrooms become dangerously hot. - As above with the plumbing and electrics, there needs some thoughts on how to connect it up. First play in this match is to get the manifold out, clean it up and sort an installation position to be able to connect it all up for a proper pressure test and take it from there.

I’ll speak to the brickie in the morning.

Balloons You did say you wanted out of the box thinking, work back from there.

Yes (wisely)

Pics not going to happen soon ? There’s appliances in front and storage units. I don't know how best to run it. Rads will go off after this last cold spell till October time. Unless I tweak the programme to run the rads for towels for a short time every day and turn the stats on each rad off. we have 2 rads in the ufh space which are a little underpowered and noticeable in the very cold snap we had but fine 95% of the time. Don’t think I need much out of the UFH to top it up.