ProDave

Boy that is busy in that back box. If the wall depth had allowed I would have used a 47mm back box there.

Yes this was a lesson in how to waste money on a completely unecessary design feature (the cantilever) when a couple of pillars would achieve the same thing so much easier and cheaper. But I felt sorry for the bloke, start a project expecting another house sale to fund it, then find that house does not sell and the only way to shift it is drop the price drastically. A bit close to home that one. And i also saw a broken, bitter and twisted lonely man putting on a brave face with the situation he found himself.

Rationel at least, leave a gap between the timber window and the aluminium cladding. So the wooden window can breath and the aluminium keeps the rain and the UV off it. That I feel confident will last. I did wire a house a few years ago that had "aluminium clad timber windows" and that had a thin strip of painted aluminium tight up touching the timber window frame. That did not strike me as a very good arrangement as indeed water would at least wick by capillary action and the small gap between wood and aluminium might end up permanently wet. I the subject of weight, there is no disputing my 3G Rationel slider is a big lump of window but once you get it moving it slides smoothly, but agreed someone weak and frail might struggle to get it moving.

Personally I would go 2.45 downstairs and 2.4 upstairs. Our house is a little unusual that we have 2.4 downstairs and the two main upstairs bedrooms have vaulted ceilings going up to the ridge, and I like it. The small, spare bedroom has a 2.3M ceiling to give more height on the mezanine but it is only a small room. I think it would be oppressive in a larger room.

Don't worry about the boiler flow temperature, the UFH manifold should have a blending valve to mix the temperature down to a low temperature just for the UFH. Upstairs rads and HW tank will operate at boiler temperature though of course the tank will have a thermostat to turn it off once it reaches it's set temperature.

I used royal mail special delivery. My concern was if the package went missing, there was a potential loss of many thousands of pounds. It was impossible to insure the package for that much. So I mitigated that risk by scanning and storing a copy of all the receipts, so if it did get lost I could re print them and re submit.

What I would have done is lay a sheet of air tight membrane over the wall plate before the joists went on and applied the Tony Tray principle.

What I did is used an anemometer to measure the speed of airflow flowing past the fan to achieve equilibrium at 50Pa. then knowing the area of the fan you calculate the volume of air flowing past the fan in a given time and that Vs the volume of the house gives you ACH. Just a case of scaling to get airflow units and volume of house units the same. So if you want ACH calculate the volume of air flowing past the fan in an hour, and compare that to the total building volume.

Recirculating cooker hood about a metre away from mvhr extract duct.

There is a different set of requirements for constantly running mvhr, I am sure it is less than 60L/min. but that is why mvhr has a boost mode where it runs faster while showering and cooking. In our case we have a choice of 4 speeds to run the MVHR so I have set it for the very fastest when boosted by the upstairs boost switch and one down from fastest when boosted by the kitchen boost switch. In any event you don't want or need a separate extract fan for a kitchen or a bathroom when you have mvhr. The Scottish regs call for 0.5 ACH continuous ventilation with mvhr and a 25 to 50% boost. Check what the English regs say.

Check there are not larger distances required from a watercourse and a road (there are in Scotland) If you don't have enough room on your plot you need to look to other land, the soakaway does not need to be on your land. Under a field behind your plot is common up here. This really is one of the things you should check before buying a plot, as no drainage solution = no house.

We fitted a 3M wide 3G slider with 4 men and 4 sets of suckers. Obviously took the sliding sash out to halve the weight to lift in one go.

Yes a satisfied Rationel customer here. I put our windows out to tender to a lot of companies and Rationel were half the price on Internorm, and almost as good. So worth a try.

So mvhr covers your kitchen and bathroom extract requirements.

I assume as you are building in ICF you are trying to build a nice warm comfortable house that does not need much heat? Well it WILL need ventilation. the best way to achieve that in a well built air tight house is whole house MVHR. Just 2 holes through the building instead of lots of uncontrolled trickle ventilation holes and various extrac ventilation holes. Don't forget bathroom and utility room extractors needed so yet more holes through your building. Just 2 looks very attractive.

My take is that "surrounding" wall has been filled presumably with some hardcore or other infill, and that is creating outward pressure on that wall which is now spreading and pushing apart. that "surrounding" wall should have been built as a retaining wall for that application.

I looked at ground source. It would have taken up (and meant digging up) almost all our garden. It was not the hard work that put me off (I had my own digger at the time) but the additional cost. the pipe and brine to fill it would cost as much as the GSHP and then add the cost of replacing that every 5 years or so, and that would kill any savings from efficiency. The noise thing. It am always puzzled my why people detest the noise of an ASHP outside the envelope of their house but are happy to put something that makes a similar noise inside their house.

I used to in rental properties as that is apparently a requirement.

In Jeremy's case he had improved the insulation in the building but they ignored that and just used a standard guess at what the typical insulation levels would be for that type of property. That is not "undermining the standard" That it taking into account what the building actually is. If this attitude does not change, how do you improve the EPC rating of a building by insulating the walls if the assessor is going to ignore it? Or is it just a "jobs for the boys" scheme that you only take the improvements into account if done by some company who is a member of some over charging scheme again? If anything, an under occupied building should cost more to heat as less incidental heat input.

Get him a proper variable speed drive. Or a single phase motor for the lathe.

It looks to be made of boulders, not cut stone. When I worked on a similar looking building, they propped the roof, then dismantled stone by stone the opening they needed, just a bit larger, and built back the edges using cut stone to form the corners. There was never any attempt to just cut a square hole in it. It will obviously need a new lintel above and rebuild the stone above that to the roof line.

For my calculation and real world costs, I work on 20 degrees inside. I don;t believe it would triple my energy usage if I wanted 23 degrees not 20

That could be why my SAP estimated the energy usage to be about 3 times what a simple heat loss spreadsheet, and real world bills suggests. I guess I am in an unusual position of not getting the final as built SAP done until I have at least 2 full years of real world energy usage data available.

Some find just cooling the UFH slab works well. Other alternatives are a duct heater / cooler to introduce cooled air to the MVHR system, or fan coil units in the main rooms that want cooling. The important thing is if you have an ASHP that will do cooling, you need nothing else outside.

Just a few weeks ago.