ProDave

That does not just apply to a "plant room". The noise of a central heating circulating pump reverberates around anywhere there are pipes. And i made the mistake of routing the flow and return from the ASHP under our bedroom floor. If i were doing it again I would have taken a slightly longer route and put it under the bathroom floor instead. I would not say it is "loud" but when I want to be quiet, I want things like that silent.

Since somebody mentioned Valspar, and this is a thread about recommending paint brands, then I feel it my duty to say DO NOT buy Valspar Decking Paint. You might expect being called decking paint, you would have a reasonable expectation to paint some onto some clean new dry timber decking in your garden and expect it to stay attached to the wood. Well I can say that it does not and the first winter of being rained on, it will start to flake off. Utter rubbish and certainly not fit to be described as decking paint.

That's the main shelves finished, the bottom stone one now the right size and the two wooden ones at the bottm. And now all the shelves are in, the bifold oak door is fitted with the oak door facings both sides. And with the door shut Outside plasterboard and all the trims around the door opening to fit. That won't happen yet until we know what shelves we are putting on the left wall, as no doubt dwangs will be needed to the frame for those before the outside gets boarded.

The Scottish system is better, you would not get your building warrant until all such details are properly detailed and agreed and confirmed by BCO to meet building regulations. Then as long as you build to the drawings you should not have issues.

I did similar, a blower door on the door through to the garage, sucking air out of the house. It was very crude, big bits of cardboard, some duct tape, and old office desk fan and some strips of wood to support the fan. With the fan extracting air from the house, you can go round feeling or listening for any signs of air coming in. Also once the fan has been running for a while, a good test is to go and open a window or a door, if you are reasonably air tight, you will get a big whooosh of air enter as you open the door ow window showing the house had depresurised. Getting an actual measure of air tightness would be nigh on impossible as nothing is calibrated, but it gives you an idea of any air leaks you might have.

Or if we still had a UK nuclear industry and we would be building our own designs.

Like many I started down the "plant room" idea. I soon realised in my case at least it would not work. The only things in my "plant room" now is the MVHR unit, a pump and an expansion vessel for the heating circuit and some of the electrical controls for the ASHP. The ASHP is a monoblock so most of that is just in a box outside. CU is on the wall in the utility room where it is handy. HW cylinder is in an airing cupboard in the corner of a bedroom, positioned for short HW pipe runs i.e. at the centre of the points of use. Kitchen water goes direct from the cylinder, bathrooms (in the opposite direction) have a distribution manifold in the inter floor space again to get the HW runs as short as possible, anywhere else would have made the HW runs longer. There is a trap door in the ceiling of the utility room to access this. I am reminded of my plumber friend that put everything in the plant room and ended up with his hot water tank literally as far from the kitchen as it could possibly be.

What did your plans approved by building control before you started specify?

I used that to obtain planning in principle before I bought our present plot. With the agreement of the owner but I still had to serve the correct notice to him. Once PIP was granted we completed the purchase of the plot.

Careful with that idea. Fire doors have to be mounted in fire door liners with intumescent strip in the right places in the door or the frame. I very much doubt a custom made bifold door set would comply.

Was that a full SAP assesment taking ALL the actual details of the as built house, e,g actual UW values of each window?

I anticipated the potential difficult access to the kitchen taps, so I butchered the back of the kitchen sink unit to open up a section of the back right back to the plasterboard to make future access easier.

Yes. I know my doors are not as heavy as yours, but I did not put the outer edge screw into the floor straight away, until I was sure the bracket was in the right place and working correctly, and even without that screw into the floor, the bracket seemed stable. So the floor fixing is not doing very much at all and could be perhaps a short screw resin fixed into a tile depth hole?

Another off the cuff thing that I have often pondered. All the talk is of CO2 and greenhouse gasses making the sun warm the earth quicker. What about direct heat? ALL the heat we put into our homes, regardless of how it is produced, leaks out and directly warms the air. Ditto any industrial process directly warms the air. I wonder if this direct heating has been included in the models? Perhaps it has and is insignificant, but it would be reassuring to know it has. Of course the more insulation we fit to our homes, the less heating they need so the less direct heating there will be.

Yes but what the people that say it is carbon neutral can't grasp is it you left the trees standing, and generated the electricity instead from wind turbines you would stop sending CO2 up the chimney at DRAX and the trees would be absorbing CO2. Best thing to do with them is leave them standing until you can fell them and make them into something useful that will last a long time keeping that carbon out of the atmosphere. Until the people that plan all this realise this, I have little faith in the plans for net zero actually working even if fully implemented.

Very hard to photograph but the short part of the L is recessed into the door jamb and screwed there, and the long part on the floor supports and locates the pin, with just a single screw at it's outer edge for stability.

Yes it is an L shaped bracket that came with mine. The upstand of the L is recessed into the door janb and fixed with 3 screws into that. That leaces it pretty stable. There is then just a single screw at the end of the bottom part of the L that screws into the floor for good measure. I will take a photo later. Perhaps your solution might be to make a similar bracket that locates your pin but is fixed to the jamb like mine?

Just to follow on from my earlier comment about my own bifold doors. I fitted them this morning using the supplied pivot pins rather than ordinary hinges. In my case the bottom bracket is an L shaped bracket that fixes to the door jamb and then has a single screw at it's outer end for stability. As i was fixing into oak flooring, I just used a short screw that I knew would not reach through the floor board so no chance of hitting the UFH (which should in any event be missing from this bit of floor)

Like being told Drax burning imported wood on an industrial scale is "CO2 neutral" and is not putting CO2 into the atmosphere.

One sentence sums it up. "The Norwegians also benefit from well insulated houses" Which brings the conversation back to what do we do with the millions or poorly insulated houses in the UK. Our traditional answer when energy was cheap was just pump loads of heat into them as fast as it leaks out.

No 1, if you are expecting to lay in the cables and then get an electrician to sign it off then find that electrician first and discuss the details with him. Electricians can sign off work partly done by others, but are not obliged to, and many will not entertain that. What cable are you proposing? 2.5mm conduit singles will fit in 20mm conduit okay. If you really want to, 2 lengths of 2.5mm twin and earth will JUST fit if you are careful and keep them flat, no twists. NO chance of a third (lighting) cable in the same conduit if you choose that. Personally I would just run one run of conduit horizontally from socket to socket no tees. And a separate conduit up to the lights. Read up and understand safe zones or agree routing with your chosen electrician.

The issue is "the long wave goodbye" The old BBC Long Wave transmitter that broadcast the radio tele switch command is in borrowed time. It is old technology, huge valves used in the transmitter are no longer available. The BBC bought up all the spares it can find and it is reputed to be running on the last working pair, being run at reduced power to try and eek out the last bit of life from them. You would think the solution is to switch all off peak tariff users to a smart meter. Surely a smart meter has bidirectional communication so that can be used to do the rate switching. At last an actual technical reason why in some cases a smart meter might be better for a consumer. But it still won't help those too remote for a smart meter to communicate. It would mean all customers with THTC first switching to ordinary economy 10 or economy 7. They would lose the only advantage of THTC, the 24/7 cheap rate for heating appliances. But THTC has so many other issues like it has become very expensive, and is considered "complex metering" so most energy suppliers won't take you on and you are stuck with one or perhaps 2? I bet there are a few technical bods, worried that if these last 2 working valves fail, it all might end sooner than anticipated and that will leave a problem to solve quickly.

I can see no reason why you could not do some form of suspended construction based on block and beam with outdoor tiles on top but it is not something I have experience with.

You don't want top soil as infill for something like that, it will take ages to settle anc compact even if you compact it as much as you can. I would seriously look at making that at a suspended construction. What do you want as the finished surface? Timber decking is the easy option here. with solid infill material, beware of building up the outside level above any damp proof course, it should remain 150mm lower than any DPC

No, 100 ohm connected to 240V is (V2/R) is 576 watts, apart from wasting a great deal of power, your 1/4W resistor would last milliseconds and end in a big flash. 100K Ohm would be about 1/4W but without trying it you would not know if it would quench enough.