ProDave

Our largest bedroom (daughters room) has a full height vaulted ceiling. It also has a mezanine floor above the adjacent small bedroom. The duct for both these 2 bedrooms is in a small boxed in area right at the very bottom of the mezanine ceiling slope. One goes down through the ceiling for the small bedroom under the mezanine and the other comes out of the mezanine overhang for the big bedroom.

I am looking for the confused smiley. Never mind I'll have to borrow one.

On our first build they did. The engineer that came to make the connection was pragmatic enough to leave a long coil of cable so that when the house was built we could uncoil it and route it into the house. As always, tell the suits behind their desks what they want to hear, and the man on the ground will make it work.

Steady on. MOST of you on this forum are "southerners"

4 days in total. 3 days with 3 men on site (2 spreading, 1 mixing) and the 4th day 1 mixing and 1 spreading.

Normal landline connection.

Downstairs is going to take a lot longer. The plan, once the stairs are in and it's painted, we will start sleeping in the house. Next step will be to get one of the bathrooms plumbed in but that's £££ to spend that are in short supply. Downstairs is even more big ticket items like the under floor heating, getting the heat pump plumbed in and working, flooring, kitchen etc, so progress will be limited by availability of funds. Downstairs is not even plasterboarded yet. So for some while yet we will still be performing a lot of functions in the static 'van.

This time it's plastering. Blog at the usual place http://www.willowburn.net/ Look for the entry Plastering Upstairs. Here's one picture to whet your appetite Next comes painting, lots of painting. And the stairs are due from Staitbox on Monday

The extra cost is put down a "distribution cost" It must be a bit galling on Orkney, where you generate more on the islands than you use, to still be hit with this surcharge.

Another company I worked for later on sent and received machinery all over the world. so had a lot of surplus packing crates. A lot of it came from Brazil and was really nice hard wood crates (far too nice just to use as packing wood) It used to get piled up during the week at the back of the site and a big bonfire light each Friday morning. So the accepted practice was to go and pick over the bonfire on a Thursday lunch time and put any you wanted in a separate pile then go and organise a wood chit and collect it after work. I built a couple of sheds, a whole load of fencing, and boarded my trailer with that nice Brazillian wood. Not long before I left someone decided it was no longer "correct" to burn it, so they started paying a contractor to remove the waste wood, and at that point employees were no longger allowed to have any.

I am sure @Stones is on the same Iresa tariff as I am, and you won't find cheaper at the moment.

A 35mm box works just fine with a 25mm cavity and the thickness of a piece of plasterboard.

Well I have continued my "test" Last night as the house had reached comfortable temperature, I turned the heater down to it's lowest setting, 750W As I went to bed it was -3 outside and +15 inside giving a temperature difference of 18 degrees. According to the heat loss spreadsheet, that should require a heat input of 1KW to overcome losses so I was now under heating the house. And this morning the internal temperature showed a drop of 0.5 degrees overnight. I think this shows the real world heat loss is indeed pretty well matching the predictions from Jeremy's spreadsheet, so I now feel a lot happier that we are on target to achieve a house with a low heating requirement.

Yes it is. I also managed to purchase an early laser printer. A monster of a Cannon thing. It was given a notional value of £50 which I was happy to pay, but then the cash office complained about the cost of raising an invoice so I could pay them the £50 so suggested a nill value disposal instead.

I see some dreadful plasterboarding where the fitters bash ill fitting boards into place, bursting the edges in the process and just mutter "The taper will fix that"

Slightly different arrangement. Having identified your scrap wood, you had to get a "wood chit" signed by someone to say it was scrap and counter signed by the storeman. Then present the chit at the gate on departure. No size limitation, my trailer was the method of transporting complete workbenches. This was UKAEA It really was a hangover from 50 years ago when most people had an open fire and were regularly collecting firewood.

Perhaps @Visti can confirm or not. I recall on another discussion about the Graven Hill plots that they were obsessed with the end builder not being able to reclaim the VAT for the provision of services to the plots, and they "solved" the issue by selling the "golden brick" foundation package including service connections which would be eligible for zero rating. I thought at the time it was a restriction too far. I don't know if this is how they ended up progressing or if the idea was dropped.

Just to be clear, there was nothing underhand about me finding a good home for a number of surplus workbenches. The lab at the time was undergoing a period of change and modernisation and virtually all the old wooden benches were being replaced with smaller metal framed melamine topped replacements. The old ones were scrap. It was a quirk of the bureaucracy that anything made of wood could be freely given to employees as "firewood" for free. If an employee wanted any scrap metal or scrap electronics that was a whole new level of difficulty. Scrap metal was sold weekly and it was pot luck what was there each week. Scrap electronics had to go through the radio club, and i remember it taking a whole year for a scrap oscilloscope I had rescued from a scrap bin to be eventually released for me to buy it for £3 (I repaired it and still have it)

But wasn't it a Graven Hill condition that you buy their "golden brick" foundation as part of the plot, so local rules may prevent your chosen contractor from doing their usual package.

I am re visiting this with some more meaningful measurements. I have just received a few cheap elect convector heaters, something I am happy to leave on unattended. So I plugged one in last night and it's been on about 20 hours so far, just on a low heat setting of 1250W (just one element turned on) In that time the internal temperature of the house has risen from the 10 degrees it was sitting at with no heating to 15 degrees. This is one heater downstairs and heat getting upstairs by convection up the stair well (no doors anywhere yet) Last night the temperature was below freezing and just now it was up to the dizzy heights of 3 degrees outside. The heat lost spreadsheet tells me for a 10 degree temperature difference, the whole house should need a heat input of 640W so it looks like the 1250W I am pumping into the house is not only overcoming the heat loss, it is slowly warming the fabric of the house that has been cold for some time. I feel a lot better now that the heat input requirements should indeed be low as predicted.

An argument in favour of NOT plastering them in.

You cut the hole in the PB a bit over size so you can wiggle it Or cut it level to start with.

Why do you want adjustable? is your wall thickness too great? I will admit a limitation of the appleby boxes is they only work on pb up to 15mm. The house I have been wiring lately had pb backed with OSB and no he didn't cut an over sized hole in the OSB first, so had socket box holes 22nn thick. BG plasterboard back boxes fitted but they are the PITA sort where you just touch the lug with the screw and it retreats out of sight.

If doing that in Scotland, I would recommend a dry suit.

I am fitting mine after plastering. I have seen them done before, and there is a tendancy for the plaster edge where it meets the box edge to crack and flake. I keep saying it, but if using dry lining boxes. ONLY buy APPLEBY they are the only ones that are truly reliable. Some other makes really are dire.