The week before last (commencing 27/07) John Daniel and team from JD Electric moved in to install 1500m of cable in the "First Fix" Electrics. This basically means running all the cables for the lights, sockets, switches, cooker etc all around the house, ahead of the stud walls being covered in plasterboard and plaster. Probably due to the very tidy nature of John and team's work this all looks surprisingly modest. Maybe we should have had a few more lights after all? We actually have just shy of 100 LED down lights so that will probably not be necessary : -)
Starting the same day Chris's team from Smokless Energy started with the first fix plumbing. The provision for hot water has been the source of much agonising but on balance we went for the KISS approach and opted for a straight forward unvented (mains pressured), highly insulated, hot water cylinder which we will power up on economy 7 via 3 3Kw immersions over night until one day we can afford some PVs to heat it during the day. The length of hot water pipe work in the house was then a key factor for the PHPP calculations as it contributes further to unwanted/uncontrollable heat input into the house and also increased primary energy as it takes into account the energy that is lost when hot water sits in pipes and looses its heat energy and therefore effectively increases the amount of hot water you need.
In the end with the use of 15mm pipe where often 22mm is used and 10 where often 15mm is used we managed to keep the volume of hotwater pipe work down to about the equivalent of 45m of 15mm or approx litres. So put it another way, if you went round every hot tap in the morning and ran it till hot came through, you would get about 8 litres of water. And then if you didn't touch those taps for the rest of the day, you would loose the energy it took to heat the water now sitting in the pipes from ambient temp in mains to approx 50degrees c. Asleep yet?
It the photo below you can see where the hot water tank will go with the effective manifold above supplying approx 6 hot water feeds to various locations and roughly the same number of cold feeds.
Chris's team has also installed the soil and waste pipes and installed are the WC frames to hand the wall mounted pans from.
The crazy green ducting is for the MVHR supply and extracts which are currently being threaded in by Jonathan's team.
The guys have now got all the windows in and door except for the front door. Below showing the various layers of airtighness layers and tapes used to ensure airtightness around the windows.
Below showing the windows in the front of the 1st floor.
And the outside of the balcony on the south side.
The big lift and slide windows are now in downstairs and looking great!
And the outside of the house looks something like this...at least it does on a drab on August evening.
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