MBC build- a year later

[lizzie]

Thanks guys yes our render compnay said cils first window man adamant cils afterwards and he scribes them in.

 

Cils not here and render company on site so guess they will go ahead without cils now. Just have to hope for the best I suppose, it onky affects 3 windows as all the others are in the larch clad areas.

 

[Dee J]

On ‎18‎/‎07‎/‎2017 at 19:42, dogman said:

Ok, so a month later and the windows are still not sorted. Will update when they do get sorted but to be honest its been one of the most frustrating and unbelievable periods of the build.

We have no glass in the 3 sliders which should be with us Friday, if not its another three weeks due to factory shut down.

 

MBC have been absolute stars about it all, and have agreed that we can start the brickwork on the single storey utility room before the air test and insulation.

 

 

Due to the cost of the window delay (all ready at over £6000 for rental costs etc for the 8 week delay ) i have had to make some cutbacks. one is doing thhe brickwork myself.

Considering the bricks are over 200 years old i think it looks good for a complete novice.

We had to compromise on the flint blocks but they look sort of okay.

 

 

I cannot brick up tp the door yet as it has been put in wrong.

 

 

 

I'm still learning a lot about modern house build systems... so perhaps you might help me with what might be blindingly obvious...

Your house structure is built on an insulated slab within an insulated perimeter.

The house structure sits on this slab - presumably with its insulated portion sitting over the perimeter slab insulation to ensure continuous insulation.

So do you have some foundation system outside the insulated envelope to support that brick and flint? Did you have some trench foundation for that section in place before the insulated slab went in?

Thanks.

[dogman]

There is a 200mm x 300mm reinforced ring beam around the outside, 

 

[Dee J]

On ‎14‎/‎10‎/‎2017 at 20:03, dogman said:

There is a 200mm x 300mm reinforced ring beam around the outside, 

 

Thanks. All adds to the picture. It's a long way up this learning curve ;-)

[dogman]

Scaffold down at long last.

 

still need to have the oak porch and oak balcony fitted  

 

 

[Declan52]

Very nice looking indeed with the mixture of materials but for me the one really outstanding feature is the wind vane/ clock housing on the roof. Never seen that on a house before. Really catches your eye on both pictures.

[Onoff]

Stunning. Love it!

[jamiehamy]

Wow, incredible! Really stunning and very different. You must be chuffed! 

[dogman]

It was quite a day as it appeared out of the scaffold.

57 minutes ago, Declan52 said:

Very nice looking indeed with the mixture of materials but for me the one really outstanding feature is the wind vane/ clock housing on the roof. Never seen that on a house before. Really catches your eye on both pictures.

The property that was removed was an old coach house and stable block. We have tried to reflect this is the design. There is a pair of large fake oak doors being fitted the the front window to look like the old carriage entrance. 

[Oz07]

2 hours ago, Declan52 said:

Very nice looking indeed with the mixture of materials but for me the one really outstanding feature is the wind vane/ clock housing on the roof. Never seen that on a house before. Really catches your eye on both pictures.

Didn't notice till you said! Small pictures on these phones!

 

nice looking drum!

[lizzie]

Very nice. Well done, it looks lovely

[Tennentslager]

Super tidy...lots of 'face' type aspects which I like. Brick curved lintels look like eyebrows and the rooflines are nicely juxtaposed. Very nice.

[Weebles]

Looks fantastic - what a transformation in only a few months.

[dogman]

First fix started and i will say its going well.

 

My SunAmps arrived today.

 

Need day off to rest, they weigh a tonne. well 170kg actually

 

 

Shown with tops off

 

 

[TerryE]

Here's mine. The relay box is open at the mo, and the thermo cables need tidying. But the 4 SSDs cost about the same as the rest of the computers and electronics.

 

As I said, I am overdue writing up my system, but the heating and DHW is run by a battery backed RPi3 and 2 ESP8266 FEPs handling 4 relays, 14 thermostats, 2 flow meters, 1 pressure transducer and 1 PWM fan.

 

The HA is handled by another RPi3 with HDD running Node Red.

[dogman]

@TerryEYou obviously got two independent units.  Ours is one plus an expansion 

[TerryE]

18 hours ago, dogman said:

@TerryEYou obviously got two independent units.  Ours is one plus an expansion 

 

Yup, but they didn't sell the expansion module when I bought mine.  I also like the redundancy, anyway.

[Nickfromwales]

4 hours ago, TerryE said:

 

Yup, but they didn't sell the expansion module when I bought mine.  I also like the redundancy, anyway.

And twice the DHW flow rate if the cold mains will allow it. . 

[TerryE]

4 hours ago, Nickfromwales said:

And twice the DHW flow rate if the cold mains will allow it. . 

 

Yes, paralleling up the SunAmps has a lot of advantages, though at the moment (before moving in) I only have one on at a time.

 

But the biggest throttle on my flow rate is my water softener which drops the pressure almost 1 bar if we have two high flow taps (e.g. two showers) on the go together.  Our mains is pretty steady at 3.2 bar, so one of the possible "to do" items is to add a PRedV in parallel across the Harvey, set at 2.4 bar say,  which will allow water to bypass the Harvey in these rare high-demand cases so we might end up with a 50:50 hard/soft mix, very occasionally. 

 

Yes this will allow some hard water into the system, but given that under normal circumstances the PReV won't cut in and the system will be being flushed with softened water, this shouldn't be a problem. But that is better than no being able to have two decent showers going when the occasion demands.  But I am waiting to do full load commissioning tests before considering this any further.

[jack]

3 hours ago, TerryE said:

Yes this will allow some hard water into the system, but given that under normal circumstances the PReV won't cut in and the system will be being flushed with softened water, this shouldn't be a problem. But that is better than no being able to have two decent showers going when the occasion demands.  But I am waiting to do full load commissioning tests before considering this any further.

 

I spent far too much time reading about water softeners before we chose one, and I definitely recall saying that occasional use of hard water (eg, if your softener temporarily runs out of salt) make no difference at all. Indeed, installing a softener will allegedly slowly break down existing deposits over time.

 

Harveys make a big deal about their twin tank system ensuring that softened water is always supplied, but I don't think it's that big a deal.

 

Re: the pressure drop, what size flex connectors did they supply? Mine was supposed to come with 22mm "full bore" connectors. The flex connectors supplied each had a 10-11mm diameter restriction at each end. I rang the supplier and told them that they'd supplied me with the connectors for the smaller kit. They sent new ones, but of course, it turns out that's what they actually supply. My plumber was frankly a bit of a dick about it, and tried to say that he'd been put in an awkward position with his supplier, but didn't have much to say when I asked him whether 11mm seemed like "22mm full bore" to him.

 

In the end, we binned the flex connectors and connected it with Hep2O instead.

[Jeremy Harris]

I binned the pipes that came with our softener, too, for the same reason.  I found some 19mm bore flexis that fitted, and 19mm is around the bore of 22mm pipe, so they are effectively full bore.

 

Quite why Harvey sell these with such small bore pipes as standard is a bit of a mystery.

[jack]

7 minutes ago, JSHarris said:

Quite why Harvey sell these with such small bore pipes as standard is a bit of a mystery.

 

I know, it's mental. 11mm internal diameter is less than a third of the internal area of 22mm pipework. I don't know what the practical impact on flow rate and pressure would have been, but best case it would likely have been noisy.

[TerryE]

I think that this comment has been raised before, but I bought proper 22mm flexible couplers for mine.  But the main issue is the internal ion exchange unit inside comes at a pressure drop cost, particularly as the flow ramps up.   I came across this in one of the Harvey data sheets:

 

At a nominal  aggregate 35 l/min with this and the DoubleCV, SunAmps, TMV, etc., I suspect that the flow will pretty marginal for showers and the  2nn floor.  But TBH, I've still to do his test.

[Jeremy Harris]

I did some testing at our old house, which has a fairly high water pressure, over 5 bar and the only restriction is that the rising main is 15mm copper.  The pressure is so high that all the taps were very sensitive, pretty much all or nothing, with a lot of splashing, so I fitted a PRedV on the incoming main some time ago to drop the pressure to 2.5 bar, which made the taps a fair bit more usable.  That house has a combi boiler with a 28 kW (I think) DHW capacity and no power shower.   The incoming mains water temperature seemed to be around 7 to 8 deg C all year around.   The idea was  to try and find out what sort of real world flow rates we get from outlets.

 

What I found was than an unrestricted kitchen mixer tap gave around 9 litres/minute with a 2.5 bar feed, but was easier to use with a 6 litre/minute flow restrictor, as that reduced splashing still further with no significant impact on the things like the occasional bit of hand  washing up.

 

Wash basins would flow at around the same rate as the kitchen tap (one flowed a bit higher) and again benefited from 6 litre/minute restrictors, as these made the taps more controllable.  With a basin mixer set for normal hand washing the flow rate was around 3 litres/minute.

 

The shower and bath both ran at the same flow rate when on full, a bit over 11 litres/minute.  The shower was pretty good, well over double the flow rate of a 9 kW electric shower.  We had an electric shower before we fitted the combi, a 9 kW model, and that would only deliver around 4.2 litres/minute.  This isn't surprising, as 9 kW can only raise the temperature of water by around 30.6 deg C at 4.2 litres per min, and when I measured our shower temperature right at the head is was around 38 deg C for a reasonably comfortable shower.

 

I also did some experiments at the new house with flow restrictors, having been told by a building inspector to fit them.  The pressure there is a pretty constant and controlled 3.5 bar.  Again, I found that fitting 6 litre/minute flow restrictors on all the taps, except the bath,was beneficial, in that it made them easier to use and caused far less splashing.  The shower head has finer holes than the one at our old house, with three adjustable spray patterns.  Even on the widest spray pattern I found that the pressure was a bit uncomfortable, and when I measured the flow rate I found it was just a fraction over 10 litres/minute.  I played around with restrictors, and found that fitting an 8 litre/minute restrictor gave a pretty good shower, with less stinging from the finer outlet holes.  With the shower head switched to the narrowest, most forceful, setting, it was still uncomfortably powerful - a bit like a jet wash.

 

My conclusion is that 10 litres/minute is probably as much as most need for a pretty good shower.  That's nearly two and half times more flow than a 9 kW electric shower, and there are many who are happy to use them (although I reckon they are a bit too feeble).  For a bath, the higher the flow rate the better.  Our bath will only get used very occasionally, and holds around 70 litres when reasonably full, but with only a 12 litre/minute fill rate it will still take nearly 6 minutes to fill.  The limit seems to be within the taps themselves, but I cannot find any removable restrictors.  The pipework to the bath taps shows there is plenty of pressure even when they are full on.

 

As an aside, our old 28 kW Valiant combi could deliver around 13 litres/minute at a reasonable shower temperature of around 38 deg C, so could only manage a single shower, plus, perhaps, a basin or kitchen tap just cracked open for hand washing, at the same time.

 

If you want to run two showers at 10 litres/minute each, with an instant heating source, like a thermal store, combi boiler or Sunamp, then you need a power delivery rate (assuming no pre-heat, an incoming mains temperature of 8 deg C and a shower temperature of 38 deg C), of 42 kW.  I found that the hottest shower that I can comfortably withstand is round 40 deg C, and I prefer it to be about 36 deg C.  Ours stays set at 38 deg C because I can't be bothered to adjust it after my wife has used it.................

 

 

Edited November 10, 2017 by JSHarris

[jack]

7 hours ago, TerryE said:

I came across this in one of the Harvey data sheets:

 

 

Interesting. We still have the temporary 1.5 bar PRV on our incoming main. Our plumber installed it as a failsafe, to ensure if building control decided to test anything, there'd be no chance of it failing. Of course, since we've delayed so long, we've been stuck with this for ages.

 

We do find that the shower pressure noticeably drops during a water softener recharge cycle, or if someone turns on a tap full bore, but that's hardly surprising at this pressure. I was going to install a 2.5 bar unit, but it looks like maybe a variable one would make more sense, so we can tweak it to the setting that gives us the best results.