Home Renovation
 

This is a holding post, as i'm going to backfill with details.

Starting Jul 2009 I extended, gutted and renovated my house, in that order.

Finished, mostly, Dec 2011.

Added: extra bedroom, huge open plan living space, Laundry room, cloakroom, comms room, Solar PV, Rainwater collection, underfloor heating throughout downstairs, ensuite bathroom, Whole house Mechanical Ventilation with Heat Recovery and Rahau Ground heat exchange, Central Vac, Suntube, fully insulated and boarded loft, fully insulated exterior walls all round, Full pre-wiring for Home automation of all sockets, lighting and heating elements, new rear windows/doors with integral electric blinds, hot water loop for instant hot water everywhere.

*thats* why I'm broke and have to drive a diesel.... ;)

^^^ Wow. Sounds like an episode of Megastructures.

Are you a builder, by any chance? You seem to know your stuff.

*thats* why I'm broke and have to drive a diesel.... ;)[/quote]

- Yeah, and even us lot would admit that we probably spend more time at home than in our cars. So objectively, you - and the family - get more benefit from all the hard work you've put in. And dare I say that it won't depreciate like a car would/will/does...:(

Tell me more about this - Rahau Ground heat exchange.

Music wise I use SONOS. Fantastic :D

No, I'm an IT geek... +++

Feel like a builder now though :rolleyes:

Quite a lot of research, some stupidity, and a big dose of 'seemed like a good idea at the time' :D

Once in a lifetime renovation of a house I've lived in for 10+ years.... So wanted to make it perfect. Couldnt find a builder I could trust, or rather, couldnt find one that even understood the whole project, so chose to manage it myself... Sheeesh.... ;)

The ventilation system work on the commerical principle of sucking fresh air into the property, and blowing the stale out. Simples.

With more modern insulation, building regs tightening up etc, the days of trickle vents etc are fading fast - But you still have to have air exchange to remove the moisture from the air, and prevent damp build up.

The next problem though, is that if you suck in outside air, you get it at whatever the outside temp is, eg -8 a few nights ago, and quite warm in summer.

The Rahau is (in very simple terms) an air intake pipe that runs under ground, so the air is sucked down through the soil at soil temp, thus normalising the temperature to something more useful.

Ie, in winter, it warms the air up before coming into the house, and in summer, it should chill it. +++ This makes the whole proposition more energy efficient as the heating is slogging away to warm up the house which is being chilled.

And in summer, you get chilled air in, which is good, coz the heat wont leak out anywhere else.

All for free once installed....

Music is a pending item - All rooms (except kids bedrooms) are hardwired for speakers back to a central point. In fact the central point has everything coming back to it - Light switches, temp sensors, pirs, speakers, HDMI, Coax, Cat 6 etc. So, no central sound yet, but its coming.

I even plumbed in wiring for speakers in the back garden.... +++

Sounds exciting, and some good ideas I can latch on to. I'm currently having my house done 3 bed to a six bed. Have moved out to a dodgy part of town really worried about the 8 parked out side these days. Got any pics Ian?

Very interesting Ian. How did you insulate exterior walls?

Well, heres the first 12 months +++

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?s...3&l=b9ccbdd089


*if* you take the time to sift through all of this lot, you might just get the slighest appreciation for why I went through an incredibly quiet patch on the forum.

It was one of the most exciting, yet stressful and expensive things I've ever chosen to do. There is no exit, no way back, no rewind. Once you've gutted your house and effectively wrecked it, the only way to move back in is to keep ploughing funds into it.

If you have the time, the money and friends/family around you to support you, go for it. If not, then it will swallow you whole !!

Well, good old building regs insist that on the new extension, that the cavity walls are insulated. I wasnt convinced about the full cavity fill foam type insulation as it didnt leave a damp gap, so asked my builder to do kingspan type insualtion slabs instead.

Reluctantly, he did, and in my naivety I was very pleased he was doing what I needed.

After hd' done his little bit of throwing together the extension brickwork and legging it, it dawned on me that in hindsight, he'd done a crap job. The insulation slabs were shoved in, not taped, not sealed and were essentually useless. Yes, they'd stop direct heat going outwards, but heat doesnt go out much, it goes up. So if you have loads of gaps, you just have a chimney effect that takes all the heat up to the roof, and out.

Plus, even if he'd done a mint job on the extension, it still left the rest of the house with regular 1979 uninsualted cavity walls.

I'm not convined by cavity insulation, that silly foam/worm type stuff they squirt in. Seems a bit hit and miss to me. No, I wanted something robust. (i do drive an A8 you know... lol)

So, 50mm of insulation was placed on the inside walls. All of them. I put up 25mm battons all the way round every outside wall, upstairs and downstairs, filled the void between the battons with 25mm kingspan, and then ran an interweved 25mm of kingspan across the top. All foil taped at the joints, running from the insulation of my concrete slabs right up the the kingspace layers I ultimately put on my upstairs ceililngs.

Its extreme, the whole house is tin foil box.

Allegedly, its been quite cold outside the past few days. Thank god I have temperature sensors to verify that, as honestly, I wouldnt know otherwise +++