porters-zch

Weeks Twenty-nine and Thirty

Posted on November 21, 2012 by davidl

Week 30: it wasn’t supposed to take this long! As mentioned in the previous post, with only one (albeit excellent) plasterer, this phase of the work has taken much longer than originally expected – with the odd day off, extra public holidays and the like, 12 instead of 4 weeks. But the plastering is now finished bar a day’s work in the passage way containing the stairs, to be done when the stairs have been installed – and the stairs have(has) arrived, all in bubble wrap (not really a picture – but, lying on its side, it made a useful shelf for the kitchen fitters to lay their tools out on). Yes, we now have a kitchen as well, fitted last week, complete with cooker.

Kitchen, with wrapped stairs waiting to be fitted

Given that there is no gas connected – it’s difficult in my view to have a zero carbon house that uses gas – the cooker has either to be a wood burner or to be electric. From friends’ experiences with wood burning cookers, this seems to be a “high labour” option. So, as this is also our retirement home, designed for older people, electric it is. For what we understand to be high efficiency, we’ve chosen one with an induction hob. We’ve never had one before so this is another step into the unknown. Induction hobs are said to be extremely controllable, like gas or even better. The heat is generated in the pan bottom, so the top of the hob only gets hot where a hot pan touches it. For safety, the induction zones can only switch on if there is sufficient ferrous material above it. A non-trivial down side is that our still-good-as-new, Silcro, copper-bottomed wedding-present saucepans won’t work on this stove. We have bought some (pretty cheap) new saucepans, etc.

Further, at long last, the front door has been delivered. To contain shipping costs it came into the country with a consignment of windows for another job and so has arrived without its door handles. We can manage without these for a while – it locks.

Between dining room and downstairs bathroom/ensuite there’s a solid wall, part of the thermal mass included in the design (see separate note under Definitions &c). Here the heavy block wall is being rendered (with sand and cement) before being plastered.

Block wall being rendered

Immediately to the right is the wood burning stove in its second-hand brick alcove.

: Woodfire F12 stove/boiler in brick alcove

These two sections of wall contribute significantly to the thermal mass in the house. The exposed brick makes a change from what would otherwise be painted wall.

While the plastering has been going on downstairs, we’ve been painting upstairs. There’s a lot of it, it doesn’t make for interesting reportage, and it takes a lot of time. It’s also quite hot. The MVHR arrived and has been put away safely. Its installation is held until the control room has been painted (which it now has) because it’s much easier to paint without it there! Until the MVHR system is installed there’s no air circulation in the house, so upstairs is hotter than downstairs. Despite our poor summer, the thermal store is full of hot water and there’s heat leakage from the pipes (bit more lagging to do yet) and the inverter gives off heat while it’s working – the sun comes out (yes, it does) and the inverter’s note changes and its temperature goes up. The house is very well insulated – so you have to open a window. Until the internal scaffolding came down it was easiest to open the roof lights but now you have to find the long pole to do this.

Posted in Electrics, Thermal mass, Uncategorized, Zero Carbon House | 3 Comments

Weeks Twenty-four to Twenty-eight

Posted on July 22, 2012 by davidl

Got seriously behind with this – sorry. So four weeks in one. The plastering – and odd bits of plasterboarding/tacking – press steadily on. This is taking very much longer than originally expected, largely because there’s only one person doing the work – a subcontract disagreement issue which is nothing directly to do with us. But it does mean that we are at least a month behind schedule.

Nevertheless, the kitchen and dining room have been painted (by us) and I have put up all the electrical sockets switches and lights (some of these lights are really awkward to wire, particularly if you have 2 in parallel) in the kitchen, dining room and utility room so far. The stove is installed and has been joined to its flue (together with some discussion about what was, or was not, vertical. The second-hand red brick alcove in which the stove sits has joints which are not perfectly in line). As reported earlier all the windows are in place and we have a date for delivery of the front door. This has meant that (even without the front door) the air test can been performed. I haven’t seen many Grand Designs, but I do remember one where the architect/designer was skipping for joy because she’d achieved a really good, better than Passivhaus standard figure.

Air test door – the calibrated fan sucks air out of the house

Well, so have we : 0.5 ach – which stands for airchanges an hour. This is good news, quite apart from the satisfaction of knowing that Touchwood Homes have achieved what is said on their signboard at the drive entrance! Combined with the known performance of the highly insulated walls, a really low energy requirement is confirmed.

There’s a discussion which led to some telephone calls between me and the air test people and the assessor who was being asked to produce the Energy Performance Certificate. The usual way of meauring air tightness in this country seems to be in volume (of air leaked) per unit area of building external surface (square metres) per unit time (hours) at a given pressure (50 Pascals) – and the result we got was 0.68m³/h.m²@50Pa. Set against this was the desire to meet the Passivhaus standard of 0.6 ac/h. But ac/h depends on the volume of the house, not the surface area, so to find out whether we’d met the standard it was also necessary to calculate the volume.

Air test graph

For a house of this sort, setting off to meet Passivhaus standards is going to be good start, simply because of the low space heating demand it implies.

The external cladding (there are references to the cladding, in rebated Thermowood weatherboard, elsewhere) is finished as far as it can be, while we wait for the delivery of the front door. This has proved difficult to source. We – well, I – wanted a pretty substantial one which, from the very earliest version of the specification I’d written, was to be a “Tilling” front door. This is a foolish literary allusion, so I’d had to include a footnote (in a Terry Pratchet manner (see the Discworld novels)) which explained that Tilling is the town in which some of E.F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia novels are set. But Tilling is actually Rye, Sussex, of which Benson was some time mayor. Visit old Rye and you will see many of the magnificent Georgian front doors. As explained elsewhere, this house is a modest, not a grand, design – so it needs a few features to give it presence, and an impressive front door should help. But to get a door this big that also meets Passivhaus standards at a bearable price has not been easy and Peter Smithdale of Constructive Individuals has spent some time canvassing, even badgering, manufacturers to see if this could be achieved. It should arrive 2nd week in July.

Receiving the EPC allows the Feed-In Tariff application to be completed. From 1st April an EPC is required to show that the building is sufficiently energy efficient to be worthy of consideration. “D” is required – this house is at the top of “A”. So at last I should begin to get paid for the electricity the solar PV has been generating since the end of March. Even in the poor weather of this summer it has already generated over 1300kWh. Later update – I didn’t; they were in error all over apologies, but . . . . No backdating, so I am unpaid for the period until they received the EPC. Miffed!

I’d better publish this before it becomes irrelevant – and get on with the next instalment.

Oh yes. Comments are welcome – but links to advertising websites will simply be deleted!

Posted in Cladding, Electrics, Solar PV, Ventilation, Windows | Comments Off

Weeks Twenty-two and Twenty-three

Posted on July 3, 2012 by davidl

Plasterboard disc clipped back in place

The insulation lorry arrived. The contains two generators to drive the machine, built into the truck, which fluffs up the Warmcel 500 and then blows it along large bore flexible pipes into the house. A disc of plasterboard is cut out, starting with the rafters, and Warmcel 500 (re-cycled, fire-proofed newspaper) is blown in filling the cavities formed by the I-beams between the external air-tight cladding and the internal plasterboard. Warmcel will fill all the wall cavities – both external and internal walls. It’s a fairly dusty job – and quite noisy outside with the generators running. It’s taken 7 days.

The circles are put back in afterwards with plasterboard clips and then, like the other plasterboard joints, covered with plasterer’s scrim. The plasterboard has been fastened with rather more screws than usual because of the pressure exerted by the Warmcel.

The tacking and plastering is taking longer than expected – mainly because of the amount of effort brought to the job – started with 2 men, now only one. We’d asked that the kitchen and utility room have their ceilings plastered first so that they can be painted ahead of the rest of the plastering so that we can be confident that the date agreed with the kitchen fitters can be met. If we have to ask them to postpone then this date will go back by several weeks. As we’re doing the decorating, we’re able to do some of this over the weekend as it’s too dusty to paint while the insulators are at work. But for the rest of the house, there’s pressure on to finish off the tacking to keep ahead of the insulating gang.

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Week Twenty and Twenty-one

Posted on June 20, 2012 by davidl

The log burning stove was delivered (last week – but I didn’t mention it because it came damaged). The replacement one has now arrived and been installed. There is an interesting bit of kit associated with it, called a Laddomat. This is in part controlled by a flue thermostat. When the log burning stove is lit and the flue gets hot, the stat turns on the pump in the Laddomat. To begin with water is cycled through the stove only, until it gets to 60C. Then a limited amount of cold water from the thermal store is allowed to join, such that the outflow to the thermal store remains hot. This has two benefits. First, that the stove walls come up to temperature quickly, and stay warm, which reduces condensation on them and thus corrosion, so prolonging the life of the stove. Secondly, the water entering the thermal store is at a high temperature, so that water at a useful temperature begins to be stored. If this is not done, the stove would attempt to heat all the water in the thermal store at once. It could therefore be several hours before there was any water at a useful temperature. (The thermal store has a page to itself – see under Definitions &c at the tope of the page.)

The shape and size of the house has been, partly, revealed again as most of the scaffolding round the outside has been taken down. On the south side, in particular, there’s more light in the house and the house, from the outside, looks smaller. Some of it has been put up again inside, so that it’s easier to put up the plasterboard into the top of the internal ridge.

: Ceiling “squared off” at ridge beam

Details. It’s very difficult to plaster into an acute angle, such at the top of the building where the sloping ceiling meets the ridge beam. So when the insulation has been put in, battens to support plasterboard need to be fitted so that the ceiling is squared off for few inches and can meet the beam at a right angle.

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Weeks Nineteen and Twenty

Posted on May 29, 2012 by davidl

The site is surveyed to see where the phone line should go. This was more of a learning experience than I’d expected. It’s not much use asking BT because you won’t find a number to call to say “I need a new phone line”. Lots of numbers for dealing with existing lines. And a phone menu that does not offer “if you want a new phone line, press 5”. This is because new lines are installed by Openreach which, while owned by BT, operates at arms length from BT, so that it can work for other service providers. Anyway, I eventually discovered all this and sent an email to this region’s bit of Openreach, after which things started to happen. It will be overhead and, because the walls will be filled with insulation, internally plastered and externally clad long before we need a phone line, I’ve brought a Cat 6 cable out to a gable end and Openreach can connect to it there. The confusing thing to my mind is that I will have to pay the service provider to install the line – even though the line will, and can only, be installed by Openreach

Dogged tacking. Michael and Liam push on with the seemingly enormous area of wall needing to be covered with plasterboard. (Reuben points out that the painting needed is considerable – and it’s planned that we do this ourselves.) Insulating plasterboard is used on the external walls – indentifiable by the reflective foil on one side. Internal walls, which will also be filled with Warmcel but for its acoustic properties as much as anything, need only use standard plasterboard.

The remaining doors have been fitted. To allow the ventilation system to work, the top of the door linings are routed out to provide an air passage.

Touchwood Homes standard detail - door header

As the MVHR draws air out of the kitchen and bathrooms air has to be able to move into these rooms from adjoining rooms whether the doors are open or not – and, similarly, air blown into the living and bedrooms needs to have somewhere to go. The gaps are invisible. So the whole house is continuously ventilated very much better, it seems, than most houses. The windows do not have trickle vents!

The big windows have been fitted – or rather, the glass doors in the windows have been fitted. Even these take 3 people to lift them – and are, amazingly, hung on just two small hinges. The house has suddenly become quiet.

Now that we have plasterboard in the utility room and control room – to which pipes can be clipped – Simon King, the plumber, returns to replace the temporary water main with the final, full sized one and to build the hot and cold distribution manifold. All the isolation valves – the easy to operate lever type – are therefore in one place.

Posted in Cladding, Plumbing, Ventilation, Windows | Comments Off

Weeks Seventeen and Eighteen

Posted on May 7, 2012 by davidl

Another rush of progress, but in curious fits and starts. One moment the site is full of activity, the next there’s hardly anyone here doing anything. We’ve made it clear that we’re not aiming for a particular date, so we cannot really complain if people have to go to do other jobs. Touchwood Homes, we know, are working on other buildings, though there’s a concern that the big windows have been standing outside now for quite long time. They need five strong people to move them, being very heavy, even after removing the doors from them.

Dining room window, doors detached, just goes in

Reuben worked out that they can be got into the house past the scaffolding after all, but there can be no mistakes.

During the first of these two weeks, the downstairs ceilings have been covered with plasterboard, drilled to allow the Warmcel to be blown into the void, the holes filled and then all the ceilings plastered (see last post’s picture). This allowed the tilers to start work and during this last week all the downstairs floors have been tiled except for the areas immediately in front of the big windows (as they’re not there, the exact position of the edge is not known). Suddenly we could see what the house could look like – and were immensely relieved that the colours we’d chosen looked OK. We need tiles on the ground floor for thermal mass – not (just) in themselves, but to provide good thermal conductivity to the concrete slab beneath. If we covered the floor with carpet, this would insulate the slab from the room and the thermal mass would be ineffective.

Bedroom tiles laid; the black bit is the correx installed to protect them

The tiles on the utility room, kitchen and pantry have also been grouted. The grouting of the paler tiles (and paler grouting) will be left until later as it could get stained. We have now (Friday before the BH weekend), covered the entire ground floor in Correx, a corrugated plastic temporary covering, to protect it and particularly the un-grouted porcelain tiles against chipping. On the Saturday, the 5 strong men arrived and got the windows into the house. While the tilers have been working downstairs, the plasterers have “tacked” upstairs. And carpenters have been applying more Thermowood cladding outside. The west gable end if complete and the east end coming along. The horizontal lines of the cladding have changed the look of the house from this view – it looks less tall.

The garage has got its roof.

And finally the garage (aka cart barn aka carriage house) got its slates.

And a quiet day when I could catch up with this blog!

Posted in Cladding, Ground Floor, Thermal mass, Windows | Comments Off

Weeks Fifteen and Sixteen

Posted on April 30, 2012 by davidl

The week after Easter was only a short week, but seems to have continued very busy. Tacking—putting up plasterboard—got underway. The intention is to tack the downstairs ceilings first. This will allow the Warmcel 500 to be blown into the ceiling voids—and then the ceilings can be plastered.

Utility room - tacked: Warmcel being blown in

It makes sense to plaster the ceilings before we tile the ground floor because of the risk of damage to the tiles from the scaffold tower. Also, you get a neater finish if the tiling is completed before the walls are tacked or the door frames installed. 8 pallets of Warmcel arrived. Each bale weighs 13kg, there are 40 bales to a pallet—and this is only a small proportion of the total that will be blown in. In the meantime we’ve moved the doors out of the house to paint them—at least in primer and undercoat.

The roof is finished and looks very fine, with all 6 rooflights in and both the solar thermal and PV panels fitting in as well as can be expected. We were keen to have panels which did not have light coloured edging.

Earlier - fitting the flue; the roof's coming on well

As reported earlier the Solar PV is complete and up and running. Although this happened and was registered before 1st April, I failed to get the Feed In Tariff Application in before this date. The rules changed on 1st April, so before the application can be accepted an Energy Performance Certificate must be provided. The Predicted Energy Assessment will not do. (The PEA Energy Efficiency Rating came out at 98.) It will not be possible to provide the EPC until all the doors and windows have been fitted, the insulation installed and an air test performed. This will be a few weeks yet. In the meantime, the electricity supplier is doing very nicely—well over 300kWh generated already almost all of which is going into the grid! I’m hoping this will be backdated to the application date—but you know what? I doubt it.

In the last post I said next week for the three big south windows. But a strong workforce needs to be assembled for this work as they are very heavy and there were some doubts whether they could be got into position while the scaffolding is still there.

: Solar thermal (left) and PV panels all now working

The thermal store has been filled—1000 litres (= 1 metric tonne!) and the solar thermal system brought into operation. When the sun comes out, the system compares the temperature of the panels with the temperature in the thermal store. If the panels are hotter than the store, the (low energy) pump starts. As there’s no one using heat or hot water in the house there’s a risk that temperatures could get too high. If the thermal store gets above 70C the under floor heating will turn on and heat will be dumped into it. This will help to dry the house out. It feels pretty dry already, but with space where some windows will be and the massive slab of concrete on which the whole house rests, there must be a good deal of water to be removed yet.

Energain® installation. All of the downstairs bedroom ceiling has been lined with this – under the plasterboard – a further 11 m²in the sitting room and little bit left over has been put at the front of the bathroom. Now it is not my job to advertise Energain, but we needed more thermal mass in the house and this product, which Touchwood Homes told me about, seems a good way forward.

The shiny stuff's Energain. The rest of the ceiling is levelled with 3 ply before tacking plasterboard overall

In essence, it uses the latent heat of fusion of a wax to provide thermal mass operating in the range 18 to 24C (if you want to know more, it’s easily found by internet search.) It’s not cheap – but probably less expensive than building a 50mm block wall on the inside of the rooms or putting a concrete slab in the ceiling.

Posted in Foundations, Ground Floor, Solar PV, Solar thermal, Thermal mass, Underfloor heating, Windows | Comments Off

Weeks Thirteen and Fourteen

Posted on April 26, 2012 by davidl

Got rather behind with this – not keeping it up to date – sorry. Here goes:

OK, things have got pretty hectic. First was Alex and Andy the electricians arriving—as expected. What I’d failed to do was ask what I should have got in ready. So I was off to the local supplier for more cable, back boxes etc., than I would have thought possible. This was pretty stupid of me as I’d already bought all the sockets and 2nd fix items, so why did I not think about the cables? Well, partly it was because this had not been fully discussed. Almost all of the mains cabling would run in walls, rafter space and floors—buried in insulation. To meet the standards it must be run in conduit or de-rated. So a 32A ring would need to be run in 4mm² cable. Expensive. Alternatively, you can have a 20A ring instead using the normal 2.5mm² cable. Very few appliances in this house will draw significant power. This is discussed in a separate section under Definitions.

The other excitement is that the solar PV has become operational.. Without any fuss, it’s just well, been connected. And the meter flashes away (1000 flashes/ kWh). I must get on with having it registered.

: Solar panels – now working!

Now, I probably haven’t got this completely right, but at least I’ve tried. Given that all the walls and floors and rafters are to be filled with Warmcel 500, the opportunity to make changes later is reduced. Indeed, for all but the simplest of changes it’s either unacceptably messy and expensive or at best very difficult. So if a cable isn’t there, we’re going to have to live without it. There’s another section under Definitions about trying to future-proof the house.

The scaffolding has had to be altered to let the roofers access the roof safely to put in the heavy rooflights. What started as a generous 6 board scaffold has become a very narrow, barely 2 board one as soon as the deep overhangs had been completed—so the scaffolding has had to be extended to allow ladders to be planted against the toe boards and held clear of the lower slates. This has allowed 4 of the six rooflights to be fitted. At the same time most of the smaller windows have been fitted, which has suddenly changed the feel of the house. The 3 huge windows/doors need more people to move them—they’re 2.5 by 2.8m. Next week!

The Easter weekend has allowed some more time to walk the house and see what needs doing. Just as well. We’d changed the way one door hung—and failed to tell Alex. So I’ve had to re-run all the cables to it myself—pity there were 5!

Posted in Electrics, Solar PV, Solar thermal | Comments Off

Weeks Eleven and Twelve

Posted on April 8, 2012 by davidl

Two very hectic weeks. 16 sheets of 3 ply appeared. These are for the soffits of the deep overhangs—please paint them—one side only. This seemed to be just the job for spray painting. Lean them up against the black barn wall and any over-spray only adds to what’s there already. (Almost) needless to say, by the time we’ve got everything ready it’s become far too windy, so back to the brush. But, blessed with dry weather, we put the first coat on (thinned) in an afternoon leaving them out to dry on the grass, and the following day we put the top coat on. By the end of the day they’re dry enough to stack.

Last week was also plumbing 1st fix. Simon went through the house with amazing speed. Plumbing is almost entirely in PEX, a pipe with plastic inner and outer separated by a layer of aluminium—a layman’s description anyway. This makes it flexible, and therefore much easier to install than copper would be—holes can be drilled in the I-beam webs and the pipe pushed through. This contrasts with the ducting where pre-cut holes, included in the structure design have eased the installation of the rigid ducting. It’s easy to see that using rigid copper piping would have been extremely difficult. Everything has been brought to cxommon point in the control room where a manifold will be installed, so there are no joints anywhere in the floors or walls. The thought of soggy Warmcel is terrifying.

Then it starts getting pretty exciting. For dealing with the thermal store damage there were two options. Either have a new one—with a consequential delay of 5 to 6 weeks—or have the damage repaired. We’ve accepted the latter—it is, after all, cosmetic. Most of the work was done in a day and then internal work stopped for a day so that spraying could be done in a dust free atmosphere.

Feel sorry for the Clancy–Docwra people connecting the mains water. Day 1: the traffic lights arrive and initial holes dug. It seems that it’s a 6 inch main not a 4 inch one, so the fittings are wrong. Day 2: all goes well until the end of the afternoon when the main breaks—water everywhere. Suddenly there are a lot more people around—and I fear we may not be popular with the neighbours—no water for a few hours. Day 3: fill in and go away. Day four: there are still traffic lights there, causing annoyance at school times—but after a telephone call or two, by the end of the day they’ve gone.

Touchwood Homes have been at the Ecobuild exhibition, so there has had to be a short pause and I would hope that next week the skylights can be fitted with their flashings. (We spent a day there too, but with most decisions made our enquiries lacked the urgency of last year.) It should then be possible to complete the roofing.

Windows are unloaded

The Optiwin windows also arrived. The ones for the front look incredibly large and are very heavy.

The solar thermal panels have been installed—and covered against the sun. (We may need rain—but we’re also glad that it’s not raining when it comes to work on the roof). The slates have arrived—second-hand Welsh slates—and the roof loaded and—by the end of week twelve, partly slated. Matt and his team have been inter-working with Jonathan and his team installing the solar panels. Everyone seems to be working in with each other very well, and long may it continue.

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Weeks Nine and Ten

Posted on February 20, 2012 by davidl

Not than nothing happened during week nine, but most of it’s happening indoors and photos aren’t very satisfactory. It’s a bit dark, because the whole roof is now covered with the cladding, even the places where the roof lights will go, so that the house is dry (and it makes a difference—in the wet, the nice new clean concrete slab got covered with a layer of mud from boots walking on to it from outside which, as mentioned earlier, had become a quagmire. That has dried off and we have now been discussing how best to clean it—which it has to be before it can be tiled.) The studs have all gone in downstairs and upstairs. We’ve suddenly been put to work—the wood for the bargeboards and fascias arrived and needed painting. These have been done with barn paint—one coat on the side that won’t be seen, two coats on the outer face. And some have been put up.

The thermal store arrived.

Thermal Store

It’s a variant of an Akvaterm Solar Plus but with removable coils. Unfortunately, the packaging for this large, heavy tank is inadequate, so it has arrived with several dents and scrapes, 3 of which are quite noticeable. We’re discussing what to do about this. If you bought a fridge freezer, let alone a car, would you accept it with dings? I think not. Should I accept this, costing nearly 10 times as much—nearly as much as a cheap car. Not that it’ll be seen much in the control room. Hmm. I certainly think Akvaterm ought to crate them as routine. A bit of cardboard and plastic is laughable.

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