Plant room location

[Russell griffiths]

Evening, having a re,design due to our planning officer ?

Ive just re jiggled the location of our plant room, and think I've may have made things hard for myself. 

 

Should i I try to have the room situated on an outside wall?

will the pipes for the ashp be easier to route from out side to inside straight through the wall rather than ducts in the floor. 

What about the ducting for heat recovery system, better on an outside wall. 

Still plenty of time to jig things about. 

Cheers. 

[ProDave]

I battled with the notion of what is a "plant room" and what should go in it. Some people put everything in there, which I think can be a mistake.

 

My plant room houses the mnhr unit and the buffer tank for the UFH but it does NOT house the domestic hot water tank, that would put it too far away from the taps.

 

In my case the mvhr is in the plant room above our garage. The inlet and outlet ductwork is short. These are the only ones that carry outside temperature air and so need to be insulated to prevent condensation, so it makes sense to keep these short. I can't see it matters if the duct runs along a wall or not, it is all inside the insulated building so makes no difference.

 

The plenums and radial ducts then go from the plant room to all other rooms, some in the first floor void, some in the  (warm) loft void.

[Bitpipe]

Our plant room is in the basement, under the utility room.

 

Has incoming water main, gas, electricity, and BT.

 

Houses MVHR unit (insulated ducts to external wall above), gas boiler, UVC and one set of breakers for electric plus the PV controls.

 

Also acts as a tool store. 

 

Plumber did not have any concerns on length of pipe runs, we have a hot water return so cold legs are not really a problem.

[NSS]

Ours sits between the garage and house, with access from the garage only. With most of the penetration though the air tight envelope being from the plant room, the idea was it would effectively give us an extra 'skin' to help control the airtightness through. To that end, the door to the garage has airtight seals and the wall and ceiling junctions to the rest of the house have had particular attention to sealing penetrations and seams. Within the plant room we have the MVHR unit, UFH manifold (plus pump and wiring centre), expansion/buffer tanks for both the DHW and UFH, consumer unit, PV inverter, water softener and main SageGlass control panel. The ASHP and MVHR control panels and the SageGlass controls are inside the house for ease of use/monitoring, and the DHW tank is in an airing cupboard which is directly adjacent to the plant room. Water and electricity services enter via the plant room floor (we have no gas).

[Gone West]

We designed our home so all the bathrooms, kitchen, water tanks, pipes etc were in one quarter of the house. This meant there were no long pipe runs and the utility/plant room could be next to the kitchen and have all the ventilation, electrical and plumbing equipment in it.

[TerryE]

Somewhat like Peter,  we laid out our house to keep things simple. It is double fronted and roughly organised as a 3×2 file with the middle front third the hallway stairs and landings, the middle back third is where our utilities bathroom, ensuites are clustered.  The only exception is our kitchen sink.

 

My "plant room" is a 1.4×0.65m cupboard off the downstairs toilet. There are some pics in my recent Boffin's Corner topic.  We saw no point in wasting a room on what could be fitted into a cupboard with a little thought.

[le-cerveau]

It is all down to what is going in!

MVHR, DHW, Boiler, CU,.......

I have a large plant room, but a large house, with 2 x MVHR units almost filling one wall.

There is no wight/wrong answer just less than optimal decisions/compromises.

[Russell griffiths]

Thanks all.