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Vim Fuego posted:
 I need to step up and post about my build. As I've been a coward and relied mostly on contractors it will just be four years worth of "am I the baddies?"
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Dec 2, 2022 00:25
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Bobby Deluxe posted:The conversation got onto new builds and someone mentioned that some new builds are hard to get mortages on. I think I interpreted this as them being so poo poo they're hard to get mortgages on, but a brief google reveals that it's because they lose value really, really quickly, and also something about 10 year warranties? A casual attitude to wall ties that means your gable becomes a rockery if the wind blows precisely the right direction, maybe not so much. Also, you can fit a lot more brick slips in the kiln, yard and lorry than whole bricks, and you can build them faster because the mortar isn't load bearing. So if you're working in a country where "bricks and mortar" is synonymous with dependability, they sort of make sense to reduce embodied CO2, RSI in your workforce, inventory and so on. People feel cheated by them because they feel like sleight of hand. Had people the opportunity to choose been slips, or proper bricks+10week materials lead time at 3x the cost + no progress when it's frosty, it might be a bit different. Jaded Burnout posted:I don’t mean literally, but it’s a soft material. The problem as said with these blocks is they don’t hold things well and are crumbly.
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Dec 16, 2022 21:36
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We found our PIR board was durable enough to live outside for a few months. We bought it all in one go and the builders heaped it up to make their brew shack. Like you I used the hack-and-swear technique to achieve an interference fit. Where I was too enthusiastic I used offcuts to wedge a panel in place and then rammed the nozzle of a spray foam can into the gap and gunged it. Cutting it with one of the broader snap-blade knives was a lot easier than the recommended technique of a wood saw because it creates way less evil dust and you can scallop it out nicely where there's a bolt in the way or whatever. Are you going to do vapour membrane then battens to create a service void?
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Jan 17, 2023 00:29
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NotJustANumber99 posted:Where I've left the insulation and then moved it theres like a dry shadow on the floor? Is it dust? If so, the shadow is in your lungs too. Serious answer- moisture from the air condensing on your floor slab? Concrete shows it really well compared with other materials. It's worth running a dehumidifier inside once you start getting the place airtight, especially once you have plasterers round.
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Feb 6, 2023 21:42
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It's because people are really good at missing - signs on drawings, so working to a datum that avoids them entirely makes it a bit less error prone. London Underground use OS datum - 100m. People also like to leave the levels at what the surveyor got from the magic C3PO laser thing and that's why you get things like 131.4354m AOD. You could set up a local datum and alter all the numbers to something sane, but that invites a gently caress up. Setting your only permanent ground marker right where all the site traffic will batter it is clever, but even better is to put it on the first thing that's going to be demolished. The real seasoned pro surveyors paint a PGM on the end of their boot so it's always handy. So the story goes anyway.
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Feb 19, 2023 23:17
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NotJustANumber99 posted:Insulation is solely for the ceilings. Walls are going to be directly plastered to avoid horrible dot and dab. I don't understand it? You lose room area, air tightness is poo poo. Its rubbish. I'm not sure its even cheap? So my blockwork walls will be directly plastered to like 8ish(probably more) mm of a pre plaster stuff then a skim of plaster. We had a 6mm ish "parge coat" on the blockwork which the plasterers did with a spray hose. Took them 2 days for the whole house. That was just for airtightness though and we've got dot&dab on top. The parge coat probably wouldn't give you the flatness you'd want if you were going to plaster directly on it though.
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Feb 26, 2023 22:12
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As long as you're showing that the water is being re-used in the pond, what you've done is actually higher up the sustainable drainage hierarchy than soakaways or sewers. To ensure the EA look the same way at it, I think you need to buy a jetski. Harking back several pages earlier, you've put a check valve on your incoming supply? I once had a plumber fit one in my flat downstream of the stop valve because he was a loving arsehole and rather than cutting a bit of pipe and brazing it on he bodged in whatever right sized spare bit he had in the toolkit- a check valve. Then made up some poo poo about it being good practice. It was after he left and I turned the shower on that I realised they can resonate at high flow rates and make a screaming noise.
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Apr 17, 2023 22:21
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NotJustANumber99 posted:Eventually I will buy cheap chinese activators to go on each of these little platforms which will electronically mechanically twist those cranks to set the valve to whatever level of open. But for now I can just manually balance everything as necessary for a static level of balance. Not that I really know how to that either. NotJustANumber99 posted:Also the ventilation system I think will allow me to not have a hob extractor fan which would be tricky to do given the hob is going on the island in a vaulted space. I think anyway. It would be remiss to not also direct you to clause 1.8 though. Access for maintenance.
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Apr 24, 2023 22:00
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You'd normally tie back internal walls into the ceiling structure. Peak deflection of cantilever loaded by a uniformly distributed goon is about ten times what a simply supported beam gives under the same loading (1/8 vs 5/384 wL^4/EI), so it's not surprising your walls are a bit lively before you put the straps on. Ancon do loads of builder's metalwork bits like frame cramps that you could use if you wanted to get fussy about degrees of freedom and structural movement and all that.
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May 9, 2023 23:13
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NotJustANumber99 posted:The downlighters will have an airtight seal into the ceiling I can't lie to you about your chances, but...you have my sympathies. Is it really too late to push the airtightness envelope out a bit further?
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Jul 2, 2023 21:16
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NotJustANumber99 posted:Also finished off the boxing in for the final WC down the other end. This one needs a box all the way up to run a soil pipe up to a vent in the roof. I wasn't sure if i needed to do this as building regs are weird and its like I dunno 1 in 5 houses need this. It could be you?!?!? It's not so much about explosion risk as when you flush the khazi it sort of moves like a plug down the sewer pipe. This creates transient high and low pressures that can pull and push the water out of other traps connected to the same system. Sometimes if you're in a poo poo hotel you'll find the shower plughole has regurgitated. Usually that's cause the vent pipe has blocked. With your system there's also a scenario that as the pump runs on it'll slurp all the water out of the sink and toilet traps, leaving the sewer gas to waft its way up from the plugholes. The soil vent pipe will stop that but you can use an air admittance valve instead.
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Jul 19, 2023 21:34
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NotJustANumber99 posted:Anyway heres my new heating plan. Its already wrong and incomplete but roughly accurate. You could simplify this by accepting that your hot water tank is already a heat store, and you don't really get much operational cost saving from having a second one? Set the heat pump to heat your tank in the middle of the night when the cost is negative. As you're totally unconcerned with efficiency you can have the tank temperature really high, like 70 degrees. If you set your tesla to charge at the same time, you'll pull around 11kW and earn 33p/hour. If you've got the log burner running for your evening cocktail parties, that can boost the tank temperature a bit after it's dropped/been used during the day but you're not going to win a great deal from it. There is a nuclear submarine's worth of additional plumbing to go around an unventilated tank as well, so you're definitely going to need a plumber.
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Jul 26, 2023 23:42
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El Pollo Blanco posted:I am aware of that, but an uncontrollable heat source, such as a fire, heating water in an unvented tank can lead to a big boom. The ones I'm familiar with are vented so once the water in the tank starts boiling steam can escape. I am probably reading the diagram wrong though There's an array of pressure relief valves on our unvented system that all pop off at 3 bar and drain to a common outlet pipe via a tundish. I'm meant to give the valves a twist once a year to make sure they don't seize. Obviously NJAN is going to need that, then a whole parallel circuit with some remotely operated relief valves and an argon filled dump tank to catch the liquid sodium.
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Jul 27, 2023 23:02
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Our 100m^2 house took a team of 3 or 4 about 3 days to plaster, but that was all onto plasterboard or dot and dab the builders had already put in. We built a scaffold platform in the big room so they could reach the ceiling easier where it's like 4.5m off the ground. It's cracked a little bit since it went on in Jan 2022, mainly where you'd expect structural flexing and the biggest ones are at the movement joints. Gonna leave it for another winter and then try to gunge them up. I've spent the evening swearing at and loving up wiring an EV consumer unit for a piddly single phase 7kW charger. A bit in awe that you're going 3-phase. Still, explains why the DNO hasn't poo poo a brick.
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Jul 31, 2023 22:41
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Parge coat basically is concrete sealer, just done with plaster rather than other chemistry. You can see the marks where they've used some sort of spray gun wall rake thing. Doing this and about a million loving miles of expensive tape got us to an air change rate of 3.2m3/m2/hr, before we put dot&dab on top. It's worth testing before you put your final aesthetic layer on because it's a lot easier to troubleshoot. I suppose that is another advantage of doing two layers rather than one.
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Aug 1, 2023 23:01
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NotJustANumber99 posted:hmmm so you;ve done airtight taping around windows to the parge coat? Windows went in after the parge coat went on, so we ended up taping in that order. You can get fleece backed airtight tape that's meant to allow a parge coat to bond well to it, so we could have taped the windows before parge coat. Cavity closing is a marine ply box because we couldn't find a decent off-the-shelf cavity closer that would bear the load of the window. There's a 20mm timber lath around the inside of the marine ply that the uPVC window frame sits within, so that it's not completely disappearing behind insulation, plasterboard and sill. We used some spare DPC membrane to cover the external side of the marine ply before adding the sill, the hope is that makes it last a bit longer.
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Aug 2, 2023 23:29
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It's a land rover with the engine block out, chocking one front wheel. We've got larch cladding but it's the quick growing live fast die young UK stuff rather than the impassive and ancient boreal Siberian kind and oh boy is it unstable. It lifts out the nails and ticks like a timebomb when the sun comes round. Luckily we went for waney edge and that sort of ship-lapped shed aesthetic, so it seems deliberate.
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Aug 8, 2023 22:21
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Bit of a misunderstanding of the passive house standard ITT. The idea is that it needs no supplemental space heating beyond the waste heat from other activities in the building, but that only really matters during poo poo weather when you don't want to open a window anyway. In summer, it's not like you need to conserve any heat so opening a window is fine. The real technical challenge of passive houses isn't the airtightness, thick insulation, low thermal bridging, high solar gain and heat recovery. It's making all those things beneficial in winter without the place becoming a sauna in summer. NJAN's build is more complex than usual because the airtightness layer is located somewhere that gives more compartmentalisation from one room to the next, but then means so many services have to pass through the layer to get into each room. Hence all the airtight backboxes.
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Aug 11, 2023 22:18
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These sorts of things might be useful for bringing individual cables across your airtightness membrane? https://www.greenbuildingstore.co.uk/products/pro-clima-kaflex-cable-grommet/ We ran out, so quite a few of the cable penetrations are just sort of blobbed up with extoseal magov tape or orcon F sealant. Seems to work.
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Aug 20, 2023 18:43
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Could you care less that it's normal to do a parge coat of plaster before you put door linings in? They need to be there for second coat to finish up against, for sure though.
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Aug 30, 2023 21:55
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Parge coat on the blockwork, no door linings. Those went on just before we plasterboarded out. Be reet, probably. We were parging for airtightness so the parge coat went on with a spray gun and didn't really need to "finish" against anything because it was way too early for such fancifully precise ideas. Whereas you're parging through hatred of plasterboard and they'll maybe apply that more like a normal coat? Even if they did have to feather in the skim to the linings later, you're going to put the door architrave on top of the join so nobody will see it. And you might have some spare lining depth in hand too? If the trims are sized for a wall with 12mm of plasterboard on it, whereas a parge coat can be 6mm or so.
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Aug 30, 2023 22:58
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Fixing your external cladding to thermalite blocks is going to be a fucker. Our builder warned us about it right at the off, so we switched the outside skin for medium density block instead. You could maybe fix on a 300 wide strip of ply at each building corner so you can screw that into the thermalite well away from the corner, then nail your cladding into the ply much closer to the corner. We used galvanised nails and they're looking fine after a couple of years. The larch cladding keeps shifting about with moisture changes though, so I'm going to have to go round and bash them all in again. It is weird how the plaster hardens up the acoustics of the building, and it won't really lose that liveliness until you furnish it. Also the sense of space changes as well I think. Our build was a whole succession of "this is a tiny space" "this is a massive space" "this is a tiny space".
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Sep 19, 2023 20:55
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NotJustANumber99 posted:I am unsure exactly what to do about all lighting wiring hanging out of the vaulted room's ceilings. What are you fixing that plasterboard back to, out of interest? If you're having any big dangly chandelier lights in the great room it'll be worth sticking a timber noggin in behind the plasterboard, so you have something more substantial to screw the light fitting to. As others have said though, mudslingers are happy plastering up to, around and over all sorts of features. We'd left screws in the plasterboard to mark vent positions and they were very happy about entombing those.
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Sep 24, 2023 13:45
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NotJustANumber99 posted:Not today's problem We did the high temperature silicon flue pipe gasket thing to get the airtightness. It works OK as far as I can tell but we'd already had the test done before we added the stove. I gunged up around the flue pipe with some Orcon-F as well, it's meant to be rated to 70 degrees. We fixed plasterboard to the beam using tek screws, but that was into a 5 thick RHS and the flanges of your beam might have been a bit chunky for that. Either way, hilti caps are a far more fun way of doing it..
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Oct 5, 2023 00:06
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Plaster cures by chemistry magic rather than by drying out, so if you get the water gone too quick it cracks. Our exposed timbers got a bit mildewy but sandpaper fixed that. I wouldn't fire up the ventilation system until you really have moved in though. It's full of delicate little fans and moving parts which don't appreciate builders dust.
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Oct 18, 2023 22:36
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Getting the mudslingers to finish within six inches of the floor is a minor miracle. Plastering is also a manual process judged by eyeball, so it prioritises smooth over flatness or straightness. Undulations are totally normal. We also had to clear out the sockets. And also patch where the plaster fell off the board screw heads. And patch where I drilled holes in the wrong place for lights, or overtorqued a plasterboard fitting and ripped it out. Or bumble-hosed in a downlighter and made the hole a bit big. Or got carried away with the flush-cutter when I was breaking through into the eaves. Point is, it's not finished yet but it's looking OK. We got our floor to wall junction airtight with the parge coat and screed but I went round afterwards and covered the junction point with some of the miles and miles of spare airtightness tape we had. It meant a lot of time on hands and knees with a wallpaper scraper hacking off snots and loose bits. And was probably pointless for me. You could probably do the same thing but the floor slab might need a bit of smoothing too? Maybe you could go round it with some levelling compound or something.Tescon vana tape comes in rolls 100mm wide so you'll be able to bridge the gap.
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Oct 25, 2023 19:32
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distortion park posted:Here's a fun photo of a local building that was almost entirely demolished before being extended with three different wall materials on display. I can only assume they kept that one wall as a workaround to planning rules. A common non-UK method of construction is concrete frame and infill, usually with those interlocking terracotta blocks that get rendered. Looks like that's what's going on here? All the sites get a dinky tower crane to lift the concrete for the upper floor concrete pours. I've no idea why it's not taken off in the UK cause it's quick, cheap and only really has drawbacks in seismic risk areas where it folds neatly flat. Possibly because you need a crane and other significant plant, whereas brick and block can be done with nothing more than scaffolding and swearing. Our ship-lapped larch cladding has gone a bit shoogly woogly over the two years it's been up and we haven't treated it. I should go round and bash all the nails back flush again where they've started to lift out. Other than that, it's good.
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Nov 2, 2023 19:59
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Lived in a maisonette of this construction for ten years. On one hand, it was a 1960s ex-council housing build to Parker Morris standards with masses of space. On the other hand, the concrete tiles I think are fixed back to a thin wooden frame with tar paper behind, then a suggestion of insulation, then the plasterboard. Those were the warm walls. The build quality was amusing. Not a single right angle in the place, and every single hinge, socket or light fitting had one of the screws missing like the builder was skimming off material to build a whole extra house. Asbestos tiles under the carpet, artex on the ceiling. The bricks are characterful too. They're either as tough as tank armour or explode into dust at the first hint of a drill. Fun times.
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Nov 5, 2023 17:22
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NotJustANumber99 posted:yeah the mold is integral to the plan. Get a dehumidifier and run it inside. We did that after plastering. Plus a couple of oil filled rads. The plaster should be old enough now that you're not going to gently caress it up by drying it too hard. NotJustANumber99 posted:The sewer pipe pressure test kit. Bung off each drainage run at the lowest manhole, fill the system full of water with a hose and see if the level drops. Our building control guy asked us to check that and tell him the result. I am definitely definitely going to do it after using those drain runs for nine months. If you test with air it'll piss out all over the place. Air pressure tests are used for component certification, but only by manufacturers in factory conditions.
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Nov 20, 2023 15:59
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Leperflesh posted:There's no electricity Ah, this is a slight problem. A lot of those boxes of dehumidifying crystals then?
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Nov 20, 2023 19:09
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Back to your heat pump with the rear diffuser. Like, your rules lawyering makes sense with envelope mathematics but fluid mechanics is a deeply weird subject and odd things can happen like helmholtz resonance coupling between the fan and the space you've created, or the fence is going to rime up all the way into the fan, or just plain exhaust recirculation killing the efficiency. If you do think it's worth chancing, how about laying some council paving slabs (the big 3'x2' fuckers that come with a free hernia) around your concrete base so you have a solid working surface and you can make position adjustments in future, should you need to? Ours is on some anti-vibration rubber feet that aren't even bolted down, and the last foot or two of pipework is flexible, so udging it around wouldn't be that hard.  Also, these boys piss out water all the time and no amount of fiddling with the drain plugs will solve that. Make sure you've got something that can deal with a couple of litres/hour of water leaking out.
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Dec 3, 2023 14:42
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c355n4 posted:Just mill the cabinet out of a solid piece of wood. No joints. Is there some spare oak left from the beams? You could use the digger to claw chunks out of one and fabricate a sort of dugout sink.
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Dec 6, 2023 00:58
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Mousus posted:The buffer vessel arrangement looks pretty fine to me. The point of the buffer vessel is just to ensure that your heat pump doesn't end up with too many compressor starts per hour as that is what ends up wearing one out. I'm struggling with that justification for the buffer vessel though. Compressor starts isn't going to be a problem because the heat pump is either going to be heating a 200l tank or a big chunk of concrete through the UFH, neither of which are five minute tasks. Ours probably runs for an hour to do the hot water and I have it on a four hour limit for the UFH because I forgot to install thermostat probes in the slab, so I have this to stop it running on and room temps overshooting. I thought the whole point of the buffer tank was to rinse the electricity supplier during negative pricing events? That can still be accomplished with an immersion in the main tank.
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Dec 8, 2023 19:54
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Mousus posted:On the coldest days the buffer vessel isn't doing anything as there is a full heating load. The buffer vessel only has a job to do when it's 'a bit cold', not very cold, so you need some heating but not the full output. In the middle of working you don't have a cold slab of concrete anymore you have a warm (but not quite warm enough) one. Either way, there's enough thermal mass in the slabs that even lifting them a degree or two is a reasonable length duty-cycle at full output. If the job of the buffer tank is to ensure the heat pump runs at full load whenever it's running, then there needs to be more controls to swap over to the buffer tank just when the heat pump thinks it can slack off. Like, a thermal switch set to 35 degrees on the UFH return manifold or something. At the moment it's just in parallel with the UFH. If say zone_fuckdungeon3 calls for heat, the buffer tank has to get heated at the same time and that'll make things slower. What's stopping hot UFH circulation water just passing through the buffer tank and back to the heat pump, rather than passing around the UFH circuits?
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Dec 9, 2023 21:06
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NotJustANumber99 posted:Found another off the shelf buffer tank that suits my needs so ordered that, Polish. Can you not just use a second normal unvented hot water tank and just not bother plumbing up the heating coil it has in it?
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Dec 15, 2023 13:45
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It's not ideal but it's hardly loving Jotundheim round the back of your house is it? Tell him I said that. Tell him from me.
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Dec 22, 2023 01:01
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If you want to get deep into the numbers, the Microgeneration Certification Scheme produce a calculation sheet for heat pump sizing and you can get it here: https://mcscertified.com/mcs-launch-new-improved-heat-pump-calculator/ along with the standard MIS-3005. Heat pumps specified using this method reference an outside temperature that is exceeded for 99% or 99.6% of the hours in an average year, depending on whether the heat pump is designed to run intermittently or full time when heating the house during that outside temp.
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Dec 27, 2023 22:16
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Yes. This is the reason we have tunnel boring machines and road pavers and high output ballast cleaners. You want as few people involved in your project as possible. NJAN is working by themselves and in my opinion, that's still one human too many.
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Jan 26, 2024 18:21
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Leperflesh posted:I think dirt-colored floors never look clean and I would pick zero of those stone samples Dirt coloured floors never need cleaning, you mean? We have carpet in a few rooms, and the colour is deliberately close to the shade of spilt tea.
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Feb 12, 2024 22:24
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Really pleased you've got the heating to work. Well done. Coupla things: You need to use a special inhibitor in UFH systems with a biocide in it or something. Because it runs at lower temps than normal CH systems, there's a greater risk of mould growth blocking your pipes. I had bamboo floor in the flat on an underlay. Because the pirate that did it couldn't use levelling screed to get a level surface, it had a poo poo load of bouncy points. We went for glued down in the new house. There's less cushioning, but also no patches that feel like a loving diving board. We splashed out for the posh manufacturer's recommended adhesives too, rather than a screwfix special. Definitely worth the money. If your UFH screed is a calcium sulphate screed, some tile adhesives don't like it.
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Mar 8, 2024 14:48
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