Kelvin

It’s not just the settlement is the drying out. A new building holds a lot of moisture and can take a long time to dry out. I’ve read on here it can be a year or more. I caulked a door frame join using plenty of caulk and made a nice neat job of it. It was a waste of time as it cracked the full length of the join.

Exactly this. I even used flexible repair tape over the areas I knew would crack and they still cracked. While the temptation to repair them again is strong my intention is to leave it until the summer and do it then. We have very few cracks in the plaster generally though.

I’d have thought these pre-plumbed cylinders are hard to get wrong. Two zone systems are typical though albeit it’s more normal for it to be a large ground floor UFH zone and a smaller upstairs rad zone. This system is the other way around with a very large heat pump. It probably would have been better to have also used rads in the smaller zone snd run the whole system as one zone backed up with electric UFH. It might be better to just fit an electric wall mounted emitter and switch off the UFH in the kitchen assuming there’s wall space.

I have the same and I don’t recall any difficulties installing them. I added offcut noggins here and there to give me something to fix them to.

Ours is 170m3/hr and boosts to 25% above that when it detects the humidity is high. The boost speed isn’t particularly intrusive in the other rooms. Only the extract in the kitchen gets slightly louder and it clears the bathrooms very quickly. The shape of our humidity graph is similar to @JohnMo

I had something very similar in a bathroom at our previous house. Not a cathedral ceiling but quite a high ceiling with a large step that ran the full width of the room. Moisture was getting trapped in this area and sitting on the wall upstand. The extractor was on the lower part of the ceiling. I moved the extractor to the stepped bit and this solved the problem.

Excellent. I’m a bit like that too. Sometimes sleeping on stuff is the best way to fix it.

The cheaper end of their range don’t have them. It also comes with a warranty that should it not stop a leak they’ll cover the damage. However they also know that dishwashers rarely leak from the cold water inlet so they’re providing a feature you don’t really need and charging you more for it.

Yes it’s called Aquastop and is used across the Bosch family brand. It has a solenoid that closes if it detects a leak. It uses a 3/4” thread.

I’ve messaged you. If you click the person’s name in a post it takes you to a profile type page. Just below their name there’s a mail icon. Click that and you can private message the person.

I’ve not had that issue but ours is as close to the doorbell as possible and still be in the main room. We don’t really need the chime as Rufus, our flat coated retriever, tells us the minute anyone walks up the drive. The issue I did have, which fixed itself, was the video stream being too dark at night as if the infrared had been switched off. It was working then it wasn’t for about a week then it started working again.

I thought you had a Reolink doorbell? It’s what I’m using. Cheap, works, and locally connected to my NVR. The downside is you can’t integrate it with Loxone beyond some limited integration with certain cameras. I contemplated the expensive Loxone one but it’s too dear and Loxone don’t seem very confident in it’s ability to withstand some weather.

Of course. Happy to. Send me a private message with your number.

How could I determine if folk would refuse to pay or didn’t have the means to pay? How could I estimate how much something might cost in the future and when that was likely to be. It was also a catch tank not a septic tank so I’d need to go fishing about in it to see what was being flushed by other people. We paid a monthly mgt fee into a fund that was accruing at £3000 pa and the account had £16,000 in it at that point. It was maintained annually and cleaned and I could evidence that. In the end they accepted what I provided them and agreed the rest of it wasn’t required.

All of which might be true but I wouldn’t just take their word for it. As a minimum speak with the other owners to get their opinion. Solicitors (lenders) are becoming ever more focused on all of these details and it doesn’t take much for it to become an issue. Our last house had a shared catch tank and pump to pump it to the main sewer line. I had all the drawings and specifications for the tank and pump. We had it serviced and cleaned every year. The drawings were really hard to read, a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy. And the details of the system vague. When we came to sell we had no end of back and forth with the lenders wanting ever more detail about the sewage arrangement, proof it had been serviced, details and remediation of any issues, estimates of cost to replace/upgrade and when I thought this might be required, how much money was in the shared sink fund and how it was proportioned to fund future (unknowable) costs and whether we had had any issues with people putting the wrong things down their loos. Our conveyor had never come across this level of detailed requirement and, frankly, nonsense before. I’d never do shared anything ever again tbh.

I’d need check back on my notes but when I was researching windows the Solarlux SL97 bi-fold was advertised as having triple seals and an air permeability of class 3 (highest being 4) and met the requirements for passive house. I’m pretty sure I got that information from here or a link from here.

Solarlux do very good bi-fold doors from what I’ve read. I’ve had two shockingly bad bi-fold doors in previous houses one of which was so bad that the builder eventually agreed to replace it with a French door and side lights.

It’s like the standard 100mm floor insulation. That’s common too and also in our construction drawings until I changed it. I know three people that self-built but were completely led by the architect so didn’t know any better. They would have put more in had they been aware. I reckon the majority of the Heb Homes only have 100mm.

Unfortunately common. Our construction drawings had standard concrete blocks which I swapped out. There was a very large house built near us that was on one of my training runs. The owner was there one day so I cheekily asked him for a nosey around as we hadn’t started building so had a curiosity. They had strip foundation walls running everywhere criss crossing the building for internal walls and standard blocks on the perimeter wall.

Could be worse

I’ve found the Loxone system to be very reliable. It’s mostly wired for a start so that helps. Most of the issues I had early on were down to me and how I’d configured it which are all sorted now. I did have a very frustrating problem with the Audioserver and network connectivity that was a combination of a configuration problem with the Audioserver and some odd behaviour on my network. Both fixed now.

I had that problem plus it not detecting you’d left the room. For me these things need to work or not with very little to no buggering about. It’s fine if it’s a hobby and the people that live with you accept it. I have neither of those 😂

Also 57. On day one of our build I hurt my back due to stupidity and rushing. I went to disengage my trailer which had stuff in it so was heavy. Rather than pulling it straight up with knees bent I yanked it when I was at an angle and pulled my lower back. Bloody agony which knackered me for two weeks. But an important lesson so I’ve taken great care since then and rarely carry anything particularly heavy (bought one of those multi-purpose carts) I also do yoga which has been great.

The Aqara FP2 Zone sensors are very flexible and really move presence on. However I found it to be too unreliable and needing too much intervention to keep working reliably. But this was just after it was released and I was just playing with it and Home Assistant while I was deciding whether to do HA at all and which to use. I like Home Assistant because it’s so open and works with just about everything plus I was familiar with it but I felt it would end up being a bit lashed together with a mish mash of devices making it even harder for anyone other than me to deal with it.

Open plan rooms with multiple lighting circuits are harder to control that way though. I’ve set it up with different automations light night mode that just switches on one row of dimmed downlights, or if we come home it’s all the downlights plus a few other automations. I don’t want to be controlling the house from an app as that’s hopeless for the other folk that live in the house that aren’t interested or when you have visitors plus I don’t carry my phone with me constantly. If I ever find myself needing to use an app to change something I try and figure out a way to automate it. Voice control isn’t nearly good enough yet and generally no one else in the house uses it (in my experience anyway) We have a lot of visitors/house sitters to stay and that switch allows them to control the main lights without needing a manual or instruction. I also don’t want any reliance on cloud services. The main issue I’ve found is making it easy for other folk in the house. It’s fine for me as I know how it all works.