puntloos Posted August 16 Share Posted August 16 Just a discussion I had with my wife earlier, but I'd love the BH opinion and stories - how many "major" preventable mistakes happened with your build. Back story: Not talking about tiny snags, small mistakes that can be fixed with a strategically placed nail or a lick of paint, and also not talking about things failing because sometimes stuff comes from the factory semi-broken. The 3 that I have: - Water leaks from fan coil units not connected properly (condensation drain installed without a dry trap, if I recall correctly) - Patio mostly flat, doesn't drain - One room is consistently too hot (thankfully only 1 room) The common part here is that they seem preventable, and an experienced builder would (probably?) have known that this was coming, but well, humans are human, things get rushed, things don't get double-checked, sometimes communication problems (person A expecting X, and person B doing Y..) cost-cutting or rushing might play a role but I never got the impression this played a major role with my builder thankfully... My house is built to a high standard overall but just wondering what is a normal/common amount of issues that could have been avoided if the builder/architect 'paid more attention'? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
joe90 Posted August 16 Share Posted August 16 The only problem we had was a gable wall blowing down in high winds two nights in a row, however fixed price for shell from builder 👍. I am renown for being “mr organised” and I think that level of organisation precluded any “unforeseen” problems. Builder was great to work with as I was doing a lot of the work along side them. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ProDave Posted August 16 Share Posted August 16 Not this build but previous one, first self build 20 years ago. First house with UFH upstairs and down. Had planned bathroom layout (3 bathrooms) with normal rectangular 900mm shower trays and laid UFH pipes accordingly. I even drew on the floor boards where the UFH pipes were. But we decided 900 by 1200 shower trays would fit much better. Cutting the hole in the floor panel for the shower trap, yes of course in a different place than it would for a 900mm square tray, I suddenly wondered why there was a fountain of water coming out of the floor. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SteamyTea Posted August 16 Share Posted August 16 Unstable partners. More friction than a P-Zero. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nod Posted August 16 Share Posted August 16 Fatigue is the main cause of mistakes by a self builder One that springs to mind was putting 22 mill pipe work in for the HP Luckily I hadn’t got round to insulting it I put the ducting in the wrong place in the floor for the kitchen island and realized while I was marking out for the HFH Back boxes for all the stats to shallow I did the same thing on our previous build Same friend pointed out my error Rushing Im sure there’s more Oh Just ordered some oak Wrote 200 instead of 2000 Supplier phoned me to ask if I was making beer mats 😁 1 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JohnMo Posted August 16 Share Posted August 16 Mine issues related to heating a low energy house and early issues I had with excessive gas consumption. Basically way to many thermostats trying to control everything to tightly causes major short cycling. Took awhile to sort. But plumber would have done the same and charged a fortune to install and would have never rectified. Bathrooms really need electric UFH and water UFH House stops needing heat way sooner than the bathrooms do. Would install better bigger opening windows in the spare bedrooms. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G and J Posted August 16 Share Posted August 16 36 minutes ago, JohnMo said: Would install better bigger opening windows in the spare bedrooms. I’m sure I’ve read that you’ve got MVHR, so I’m curious, why the wish for the above? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JohnMo Posted August 16 Share Posted August 16 2 minutes ago, G and J said: I’m sure I’ve read that you’ve got MVHR, so I’m curious, why the wish for the above? Yep have MVHR, I also thought MVHR means equal room temps and moving heat about, it doesn't work like that, it's just ventilation. But when the sun's shining it gets hot, MVHR is rubbish at moving heat. Also have UFH in cooling mode, but to get rid of heat quickly opening windows is best. UFH cooling, really just helps bring down the temps quicker than it would otherwise be and tempers the extremes. Our bedroom window is open most of the summer. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G and J Posted August 16 Share Posted August 16 I think a little light bulb just lit in my head…. So when the MVHR is using the heat exchanger there is the possibility of sharing between rooms in the sense that one very hot room causes warmer air through the heat exchanger and thus slightly warmer air supplied to everywhere. But only when the heat exchanger isn’t in use. And whilst this would also work for cooling if not in summer bypass your UFH would have to cool an awful lot to actually beat the benefit of summer bypass…. I think. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JohnMo Posted August 16 Share Posted August 16 You need to break down what MVHR does Extracts from wet rooms, so all the wet rooms temperatures will be averaged out by the time they get to the HE. But you are only extracting 1/3 to 1/2 the whole house volume each hour. So not much Supply air will pass through the exchanger and basically be within a deg or so if the outgoing air. Again you are only supplying the same volume as you extract each hour. So again not much. You bypass the HE if the outside world is cooler than inside the house, when inside is hotter than outside but at summer temperatures outside (not winter), but you are still changing the air in the house once every few hours. HE bypassing is stop making things worse not really fixing them. Open a couple of windows and you can do several air changes an hour with a cross flow. MVHR is just ventilation don't treat it as anything else. A floor several degrees cooler than the air can suck a lot of heat away. The other day the heat pump was pulling 7kW out the floor for about 1.5 hrs over a 2 hour period, just because the sun was out, it was about 20 outside. But this is really a topic for a different thread. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ToughButterCup Posted August 17 Share Posted August 17 Working while in pain. Juicy pain. Ceiling lights out of line. Battening for cladding out of line. Skirting badly fitted. Sloppy fitting of airtightness tape. Selling my digger. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G and J Posted August 17 Share Posted August 17 8 hours ago, JohnMo said: But this is really a topic for a different thread. Agreed (but thank you). Back on thread in ‘91 we were building in a row of much older, lower properties, and we wanted to fit in as much as possible. So we set the house as low as possible in the site to reduce our ridge height a few inches. Even so the village nicknamed us Sizewell C. So the rain flows off the road onto our gravel drive rather than the reverse. Which means the drive slowly fills up with soil and the weeds grow very nicely thank you. We needn’t have bothered. Within a decade other houses in the row had been replaced with taller ones than ours. Sigh. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gone West Posted August 17 Share Posted August 17 14 hours ago, puntloos said: how many "major" preventable mistakes happened with your build The major one was having to completely dig up and replace the the whole insulated concrete slab foundation. Surely things couldn't get any worse?....... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
joe90 Posted August 17 Share Posted August 17 11 minutes ago, Gone West said: The major one was having to completely dig up and replace the the whole insulated concrete slab foundation. Why 🤷♂️ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Marvin Posted August 17 Share Posted August 17 13 hours ago, JohnMo said: Yep have MVHR, I also thought MVHR means equal room temps and moving heat about, it doesn't work like that, it's just ventilation. But when the sun's shining it gets hot, MVHR is rubbish at moving heat. Also have UFH in cooling mode, but to get rid of heat quickly opening windows is best. UFH cooling, really just helps bring down the temps quicker than it would otherwise be and tempers the extremes. Our bedroom window is open most of the summer. This is also our problem. Thinking of installing second system and splitting MVHR system in two, one in the east end, and one in the west end: Sun in the am east end too hot: Sun in the pm west end too hot. During spring and autumn one end can be too hot whilst the other too cold..... Kitchen too hot 95% of the time. I wish I had spent more time working out these problems at design stage. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ToughButterCup Posted August 17 Share Posted August 17 41 minutes ago, Gone West said: ... having to completely dig up and replace the the whole insulated concrete slab foundation... How on earth do you recover from that? Our wall collapse pales into insignificance by comparison. And as for @Pocster's little glazing episode, well.... It's honesty like this that offers us all valuable perspective. Thanks very much. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Andehh Posted August 17 Share Posted August 17 Our plasterboarders were a right laugh, and got on with them well. Only 3 weeks after moving in did I realise they must have been cock eyed.... Some of the bows in the plasterboard panels are unforgivable... Esp down our long corridor.....! Moron electrician, amoung many other things, didn't label any of the Cat6a cables... So now I get the shitty job of trying to figure that one out! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
garrymartin Posted August 17 Share Posted August 17 43 minutes ago, Andehh said: Moron electrician, amoung many other things, didn't label any of the Cat6a cables... So now I get the shitty job of trying to figure that one out! Get yourself a tone tester. If he didn't test the cables either, something like this would be ideal and would get the job done in minutes... https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/166191878185 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gone West Posted August 17 Share Posted August 17 4 hours ago, joe90 said: Why 🤷♂️ 3 hours ago, ToughButterCup said: How on earth do you recover from that? Back in 2010 we were the first Isoquick foundation system to be laid in England. Unfortunately the concrete laying did not go well. A combination of cost cutting, by not using a pump, and the concrete setting too quickly left large voids in the 200mm slab which were detected using ultrasonic testing. The results were confirmed by drilling core samples. Fortunately I had videoed the whole process which showed the mistakes made by the concrete installers, and the company doing the work for us accepted full responsibility. A month later we had a completely new slab. We just carried on, but a few weeks later than we had expected, but as the whole build took eight years it wasn't too bad. 2 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pocster Posted August 17 Share Posted August 17 3 hours ago, Andehh said: Moron electrician, amoung many other things, didn't label any of the Cat6a cables... So now I get the shitty job of trying to figure that one out! Get a cat cable tester . You put a dongle on one end and tester on other . Piece of piss . Pocster knows best 👍 1 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pocster Posted August 17 Share Posted August 17 37 minutes ago, Gone West said: but as the whole build took eight years it wasn't too bad. I hate when people show off how quick their build was . 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pocster Posted August 17 Share Posted August 17 3 hours ago, garrymartin said: Get yourself a tone tester. If he didn't test the cables either, something like this would be ideal and would get the job done in minutes... https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/166191878185 Or a cheapo one for a tenner Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
garrymartin Posted August 17 Share Posted August 17 16 minutes ago, Pocster said: Or a cheapo one for a tenner I was guessing none of the cables were terminated with RJ45 plugs or into a patch panel to be honest, especially as they weren't labelled. Hence why I suggested something that would help with tracing (tone) as well as checking. Really cheap tone ones are a little hit and miss if the cables are bundled tightly. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pocster Posted August 17 Share Posted August 17 2 minutes ago, garrymartin said: I was guessing none of the cables were terminated with RJ45 plugs or into a patch panel to be honest, especially as they weren't labelled. Hence why I suggested something that would help with tracing (tone) as well as checking. Really cheap tone ones are a little hit and miss if the cables are bundled tightly. Ah ! assumed rj45 terminated!!!!! 😩 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ToughButterCup Posted August 17 Share Posted August 17 6 hours ago, Pocster said: I hate when people show off how quick their build was . Erm, ours is starting the ninth build year this October. And I have enjoyed every minute 😑 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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