Hello Everyone, I have been a member for a number of years, I introduced myself some time ago and got some great advice about land drains. Its been so long since I have posted I thought best to reintroduce myself. I got an auto-prompt from admin asking to post about any interesting jobs
I have worked in various aspects construction for many years.
I am doing some major works (major for me) on a property That is going to be our family home.
Hoping if I get stuck on any aspects or need advice I can call on the expertise here.
I thought as I have already received some good advice and will be looking for some more. It might interest people to hear about the works so far - There is masses but I will keep it to plumbing. Prior to this project I had fitted a Tap before! but have done a fair bit here with lots still to do. for the most of you this will all be your bread and butter so may not be exciting, but it might be of interest. I have learned a lot by being a newbie, and inexperienced, I would say its been enjoyable but actually at times its been a nightmare. I have got details of all the works, if anyone is interested
replaced the ageing 15mm Copper water main with 25mm MDPE, and relocated the entry point.
replaced the soil vent including the rest bend (old Clay to PVC)
re-routed rainwater drain to join front rainwater sewer
built up 2 inspection chambers to meet new landscape level and fitted new Air tight inspection chamber frame and lid
Fitted wet UFH to ground floor of house (Upstairs still to do)
I thought I would detail the UFH job, Its something that I think is well within the scope of a lot of Novices, BUT it is pretty involved. This might inspire some to take the job on..... or scare them off
If you are interested Grab a cup of tea and have a read through
When I took the internal walls down it became apparent that the floor levels throughout the house all differed, and the sand cement screed was laid after the block work walls went up, so I broke up and lifted all the screed to gain 60 mm of depth, the slab had been poured in sections and too was all different heights too, the 2 front rooms had humps in the centre of their slabs.
So i had to decide, bring everything else up to the height of the humps, or knock the humps down to the lower levels, swell it ended up a combination of the 2, Grinding down the 60 yr old concrete as far as I could, and then raising the rest of the floor to give a level smooth sub base
I calculated it needing 80 bags (not all shown on the pallet of screed to bring the level up to a level datum, it got poured in sections, 80 bags in one go with 2 people was too ambitious! I asked advice a from the big screed manufacturers, if there was a way to slow the pot-life of the screed, they all just came back with no. But Larsen actually gave me a call and 40 minutes of their time from a really knowledgeable and helpful technical manager, without this help i would have ended up in a right mess.
here is where I learned that the slab needed to be primed too!
once I had a single level throughout the ground floor I added DPM to tank the floor, once you get the corner folds sorted its pretty easy, and The DPM tape is really sticky and dresses the corners nicely
and laid insulation - its worth noting that PIR from different manufacturers have different compressive strengths (probably all suitable for floors but I found Unilin was the strongest in compression - I only had enough ceiling height (despite raising the ceilings) to fit 60mm PIR - though having calculated the U value this still met Building regs (its not one size fits all and depends on lots of things the project size, percentage of floor affected, P/A ratio and other things
I saw some shocking installs when researching so aimed to do things right. so the boards were fitted with a Board and Club hammer - they are a tight fit, No Gaps whatsoever, and the board joints then overtaped with foil tape.
I designed the loops using loopcad. Intially I opted for serpentine pattern, but didn't get on with the 150mm spacing u turns at the end of each run, using pex al pex, I struggled to get that tight of a 180 degree turn on the ends, so quickly redesigned using a concentric pattern (Im actually happier with this having a feed running parallel to a return, to harmonise the floor temperature)
Fitting the castellated panels was a pig, i tried overlapping them by 2 turrets but they needed smashing together with a hammer and split, I spent ages trying to get them to tesselate, (by this stage I had been working til 4am for a few weeks so wasn't thinking at my best and in the end could only do so by overlapping the half turret on the edge, but this left the edges pretty unsealed. I had read that the screed would react with the foil face of the PIR and float the panels up if it got underneath, so tried taping all the joints but this was unsuccessful, eventually sealing all the joints with a hybrid sealer / adhesive. This is a job i do not recommmend tracing the profile of the panels along up the turret into the dip of the turret, down the other side and on to the next turret, Thousand of times. It genuinely took 20hrs +. it has since occurred to me (and i checked it on a spare panel) that if i has staggered the panels a few castellations they would have pushed together tightly and could have sealed enough! I dont have too many pictures of the panels going down.... i call it the dark times! 🙄
Eventually it all came together and the manifold connected up, and with a cheap pressure pump the system went under test at 6 bar, and all was good, be aware that when you put the system on test at 1am, by midday the next day the pressure will be off the clock it raised something like 1 bar with every 5 degrees of ambient temperature
I opted to get a screeder in for the final pour it wasn't practical to try and pour this myself. i opted for A gypsum Anhydrous screed budget and drying times great product and service, though the laitence needed sanding but the screeders sorted that, though i wasn't aware that this then needed a primer to be able to use a cementitious adhesive to lay ditra mat before Laying tiles, so some extra work and cost there!
It looked great once screeded and it was good to have a floor back!
I will be running Heatmiser Neostats with a Heatmiser Neohub, and a Heatmiser wiring centre and actuators, tubes for floor porbes are in and wireless air probes for monitoring and control. The stats will be hidden away, I didn't want local control in each zone, so will rely on the app for general setup and control.
The upstairs I hope wont be such an ordeal, as I am using overlay panels then engineered timber finished floor.... I will let you know in time
I learned a lot of the wrong ways of doing things, probably not qualified to give advice but If anyone had any questions, I did lots of research to get to this point so may be able to help
I have worked in various aspects construction for many years.
I am doing some major works (major for me) on a property That is going to be our family home.
Hoping if I get stuck on any aspects or need advice I can call on the expertise here.
I thought as I have already received some good advice and will be looking for some more. It might interest people to hear about the works so far - There is masses but I will keep it to plumbing. Prior to this project I had fitted a Tap before! but have done a fair bit here with lots still to do. for the most of you this will all be your bread and butter so may not be exciting, but it might be of interest. I have learned a lot by being a newbie, and inexperienced, I would say its been enjoyable but actually at times its been a nightmare. I have got details of all the works, if anyone is interested
replaced the ageing 15mm Copper water main with 25mm MDPE, and relocated the entry point.
replaced the soil vent including the rest bend (old Clay to PVC)
re-routed rainwater drain to join front rainwater sewer
built up 2 inspection chambers to meet new landscape level and fitted new Air tight inspection chamber frame and lid
Fitted wet UFH to ground floor of house (Upstairs still to do)
I thought I would detail the UFH job, Its something that I think is well within the scope of a lot of Novices, BUT it is pretty involved. This might inspire some to take the job on..... or scare them off
If you are interested Grab a cup of tea and have a read through
When I took the internal walls down it became apparent that the floor levels throughout the house all differed, and the sand cement screed was laid after the block work walls went up, so I broke up and lifted all the screed to gain 60 mm of depth, the slab had been poured in sections and too was all different heights too, the 2 front rooms had humps in the centre of their slabs.
So i had to decide, bring everything else up to the height of the humps, or knock the humps down to the lower levels, swell it ended up a combination of the 2, Grinding down the 60 yr old concrete as far as I could, and then raising the rest of the floor to give a level smooth sub base
I calculated it needing 80 bags (not all shown on the pallet of screed to bring the level up to a level datum, it got poured in sections, 80 bags in one go with 2 people was too ambitious! I asked advice a from the big screed manufacturers, if there was a way to slow the pot-life of the screed, they all just came back with no. But Larsen actually gave me a call and 40 minutes of their time from a really knowledgeable and helpful technical manager, without this help i would have ended up in a right mess.
here is where I learned that the slab needed to be primed too!
once I had a single level throughout the ground floor I added DPM to tank the floor, once you get the corner folds sorted its pretty easy, and The DPM tape is really sticky and dresses the corners nicely
and laid insulation - its worth noting that PIR from different manufacturers have different compressive strengths (probably all suitable for floors but I found Unilin was the strongest in compression - I only had enough ceiling height (despite raising the ceilings) to fit 60mm PIR - though having calculated the U value this still met Building regs (its not one size fits all and depends on lots of things the project size, percentage of floor affected, P/A ratio and other things
I saw some shocking installs when researching so aimed to do things right. so the boards were fitted with a Board and Club hammer - they are a tight fit, No Gaps whatsoever, and the board joints then overtaped with foil tape.
I designed the loops using loopcad. Intially I opted for serpentine pattern, but didn't get on with the 150mm spacing u turns at the end of each run, using pex al pex, I struggled to get that tight of a 180 degree turn on the ends, so quickly redesigned using a concentric pattern (Im actually happier with this having a feed running parallel to a return, to harmonise the floor temperature)
Fitting the castellated panels was a pig, i tried overlapping them by 2 turrets but they needed smashing together with a hammer and split, I spent ages trying to get them to tesselate, (by this stage I had been working til 4am for a few weeks so wasn't thinking at my best and in the end could only do so by overlapping the half turret on the edge, but this left the edges pretty unsealed. I had read that the screed would react with the foil face of the PIR and float the panels up if it got underneath, so tried taping all the joints but this was unsuccessful, eventually sealing all the joints with a hybrid sealer / adhesive. This is a job i do not recommmend tracing the profile of the panels along up the turret into the dip of the turret, down the other side and on to the next turret, Thousand of times. It genuinely took 20hrs +. it has since occurred to me (and i checked it on a spare panel) that if i has staggered the panels a few castellations they would have pushed together tightly and could have sealed enough! I dont have too many pictures of the panels going down.... i call it the dark times! 🙄
Eventually it all came together and the manifold connected up, and with a cheap pressure pump the system went under test at 6 bar, and all was good, be aware that when you put the system on test at 1am, by midday the next day the pressure will be off the clock it raised something like 1 bar with every 5 degrees of ambient temperature
I opted to get a screeder in for the final pour it wasn't practical to try and pour this myself. i opted for A gypsum Anhydrous screed budget and drying times great product and service, though the laitence needed sanding but the screeders sorted that, though i wasn't aware that this then needed a primer to be able to use a cementitious adhesive to lay ditra mat before Laying tiles, so some extra work and cost there!
It looked great once screeded and it was good to have a floor back!
I will be running Heatmiser Neostats with a Heatmiser Neohub, and a Heatmiser wiring centre and actuators, tubes for floor porbes are in and wireless air probes for monitoring and control. The stats will be hidden away, I didn't want local control in each zone, so will rely on the app for general setup and control.
The upstairs I hope wont be such an ordeal, as I am using overlay panels then engineered timber finished floor.... I will let you know in time
I learned a lot of the wrong ways of doing things, probably not qualified to give advice but If anyone had any questions, I did lots of research to get to this point so may be able to help
