ProDave

Why make anything complicated? Simple window reveals boarded with plasterboard, plastered then painted. After cleaning the excess plaster off the windows they have been painted and 4 years on not a crack to be seen between the plaster and the window.

Yes as above, BC are not interested in the heat pump but do want the G3 UVC paperwork.

A few basics. Most of the actuators used in UFH manifolds are hot wax rather than a mechanical motor. The picture above showed a UFH manifold without a temperature blending valve. Make SURE you include a temperature blending valve to regulate the flow temperature in the UFH and a manifold pump to circulate the water around the UFH loops. It is normal to have a control box with each manifold. this reads all the room thermostats and it's job is to turn the manifold pump on when any room calls for heat, open the actuator(s) for that room, and provide the "call for heat" to the boiler when any room is asking for heat. In a new system use 2 port valves to direct heat to manifold(s) radiators and DHW as required. Do not use 3 port and especially 3 port mid position valves, they are the work of the devil imho, I have individual room thermostats in my house. What is very interesting from that is the utility room takes very much longer to heat up and keeps asking for heat long after the other rooms are satisfied. This is a general finding I have found that rooms like our utility room that use aluminium spreader plates put less heat into the room than the rest of our ground floor that has the pipes set in dry sand/ cement pug mix.

draught proof strip around the frame? The reality is if the rest of the house is air tight and sealed you won't get much draught. In a well sealed house you can open one door or one window and you won't get a draught.

It would be interesting to see the inside of one of these meter boxes. I wonder what sort of cable clamp they use? The UK standard supply head has no cable clamp, the cable ends just terminate into the supply head and are fine because nothing moves, but if you are moving a live meter box there is a risk of a connection coming loose which would probably end badly.

You really want to use an 80A fuse in your switch fuse to discriminate from the suppliers 100A fuse, and that would allow you on up to about 24 metres to use 16mm if you really wanted to.

YOU don't. The point of this arrangement is for those that want to get the supply put in once and once only. So you get the supply connected into a meter box that is fixed in some way to something permanent. Then when the house is built, you keep the meter in the same place an run a cable to the house. If you want your supply head and meter in a recessed meter box on the wall of your new house, then you have to pay the supplier for a temporary site supply, and then pay them again to move the supply into the house meter box when you are ready. That is made more complicated now by requiring the DNO and your supplier to both visit on the same day, the DNO comes first to move the supply, then later in the day your supplier comes to move the meter.

Yes any "building" with a metal outer skin, where the earth would normally be bonded to that skin, is prohibited from being connected to a PME earth. So your static caravan, metal shed, and your general purpose site power socket, you do not connect to the suppliers earth, but instead provide your own local TT earth (earth rod) for those. For a 20 metre run from meter box to house and an 80A fuse in your switch fuse, you can get by with 16mm SWA, though 25mm would be better.

That doesn't look too bad, I somehow expected the top of the tank to be above ground level and them forming a "hill" around it. The important thing now is to get them to really really try hard to get all the drain runs to flow by gravity from the house, even if that means re laying existing drain runs less deep than they are now. P.S is that tank concreted in?

By the time this is over, the Celotex and Kingspan trade names will be trashed. I wonder what the new names of both companies will be when the inevitable re branding happens?

Have you got a picture of the tank as it is set in the ground now? Can you measure the invert level? that is the distance from ground level to the bottom of the inlet pipe?

And usually the bottom side there is a small gap at the joint even when fully home, only the top sides does the joint close tight. What is the problem with laying them the right way up?

There are some damning facts coming out. The outcome will be interesting, I personally feel prison sentences for some will be appropriate. There is also the matter of the many tower blocks needing their cladding replaced. Surely the companies that falsely claimed what they used was safe, should now pay the cost of replacing the defective cladding on those buildings?

Also if having one of these, I would also buy a general purpose submirsible dirty water pump and a length of solid discharge hose so when something goes wrong you can manually pump out the holding tank, which you will need to do if one of the pumps fails and needs replacing.

Hi and welcome I am loosing count now but I think you are now the 4th Buildhub member at graven Hill so you are in good company.

SWMBO does all the painting / oiling. Perhaps she is a little generous?

We have done 11 doors and the door frames and arcs, 2 coats each and just started on the 4th litre of Osmo. I expect that 4th litre to finish all the skirtings. Just using a standard paint brush, did not know there was something special.

What you need is a raw sewage pumping station, which is a holding tank with a "dirty water" pump. Often set up with 2 pumps for redundancy in case of failure.

No they were not pre finished. They didn't offer the 2040 doors in pre finished, so those are 2 coats of Osmo door oil, I had to contact XL joinery because the first words in the instructions was "Do not oil" but they said they are happy with Osmo oil. At least that means everything is bare Oak and 2 coats of Osmo. Yes imperial doors would have been slightly cheaper, but there would have been much greater choice, and the arc's would have done 2 imperial lengths. All the corner blocks were cut planed and sanded from a strip of larger planed Oak.

That's what happens when you let SWMBO see a door catalogue. She didn't want the cheap TP oak doors with straight "planks" She wanted glazed and took a liking to these (upstairs are the same style but solid) they are XL Joinery doors a little over £200 each, but they were much cheaper on line than any of the local merchants could offer them for.

bottom of the newel post for the stair landing.

Well after what seems forever, the doors are finally finshed. My home made Oak door frames as described above worked well, but it took ages sourcing enough Oak from the builders merchant to complete them all. They were only receiving small batches with several weeks wait before they could get any more. Then having completed the frames, I tried to contact my trusted joiner to get him to hang the doors, but he was not answering his phone or answering texts, so I hope he is okay. In desperation I hung them all myself, which is not a job I enjoy or am particularly good at, but needs must. The Architraves and skirting are Howdens Oak veneered MDF, cunningly sold in lengths just too short to get 2 full uprights from, hence the use of corner blocks to make the lengths needed slightly shorter.

It is certainly an upgrade I might consider. But if I do, it would only be to enable the water pump between the HP and buffer to run flat out to satisfy the HP's flow rate appetite, while then allowing the circulation pump from the buffer to the heating to run slower to make the whole system quieter inside the house.

The downstairs layout and the view. Downstairs there are 2 rooms, the kitchen / diner and the living room joined by the central stairwell with each room having double doors to the stairwell, so they can be used as one big open space, or close the doors and you have 2 separate rooms. We positioned the house on the plot as close to the road as we thought we could get away with, so it is further forward than the neighbours. This gives us the view down the road in front of the other houses to the mountains. The other houses in the road only have front and rear views over farmland. The view is best appreciated from the kitchen island.

All our upstairs rooms have tall vaulted ceilings, too tall for a plasterboard lifter. They were all fitted by hand by me and SWMBO from internal scaffolding. It took some ingenuity at times to fit the boards but we managed. I most certainly would not choose heavier boards than needed. Don't forget it is not just the job of fitting them to the ceilings, but the effort of getting them all upstairs in the first place. Downstairs has all normal height flat ceilings and I borrowed a plasterboard lifter, so we could have used thicker plasterboard, but I still just see that as extra effort for no benefit. The only place I used 15mm was the garage and that is because you have to, and 2 layers of it. And I still used dwangs.