Withington Co-operative Eco-house - united utilities

This week's progress

Robert — Sat, 19 Oct 2013 10:59:08 +0000

Progress has been a bit slow this week. The builders have been doing general making good and plasterboarding work, in preparation for the plasterers coming in and putting the skim coat on the remaining rooms.

I've been down in Exeter this week doing some non-eco-house-related work, so have picked up a van-load of UdiReco insulation from Back to Earth to bring back up to Manchester with me. However due to a fault developing on the van I've ended up stranded in Exeter this weekend, so the builders won't get the UdiReco delivery until a week on Monday now.

Speaking of deliveries: United Utilities have now opened the stretch of road in front of our house, but because they've moved their road-closure compound further down the road, and everywhere is choc-a-bloc with parked cars, we still can't get any HGVs up to the house for major deliveries of eg skips, EWI, scaffolding, etc.

Spacetherm internal wall insulation (and a general update)

Robert — Fri, 20 Sep 2013 18:32:11 +0000

A while since the last entry... we've now taken delivery of £4,500-worth of Spacetherm, for internally insulating the front wall (see article for a more detailed description). As the delivery was on an 18-tonne truck, we had to decant it into my 3.5-tonne van in order to get as close as possible to the house. The contractors are using their joiner to fit the Spacetherm: a slightly curious choice, but makes sense given that there's some difficult angles around the bay windows, and cutting the stuff neatly will be half the battle.

The walls have been prepared now, and the actual fixing is due to get underway next week.

The plumbing is ongoing, with domestic hot and cold water and most of the waste pipes in now, we're moving on to the rainwater system and radiator circuits next week. Although the on-site work is progressing slowly, the bigger difficulty is that I've had to pretty much abandon the original idea of using a Baxi Ecogen MicroCHP unit in conjunction with a thermal store/buffer vessel. Although it's great in theory, the reality is that Baxi don't have a wide enough installer network for a one-off installation like ours to be achieved cost-effectively. So I am, reluctantly, looking at a condensing boiler system instead - will write more on this next week.

The plaster is pretty much dried out; the builders have fitted the new lintel over the front door, and the new kitchen door was delivered today; will be fitted next week.

United Utilities have promised us that they will be gone from outside the house by 2 October. Fingers crossed!

Getting ready for window fitting

Robert — Wed, 21 Aug 2013 17:53:56 +0000

United Utilities have confirmed that they're (another) two weeks behind schedule. The window company still want to go ahead with next week though: they'll be bringing the windows two or three per day, in a small van, and we'll be carrying them down the pavement into the house.

The builders are almost done with the plasterboarding and insulating; after they've done that I've told them to get ready for the window fitters next week.

I've chased up the Cavalok cavity closer, hopefully this should be arriving on Friday (the builders are ripping out the old windows and fitting the cavity closers, then the window company put the new one in).

Also, the building society surveyor came today to do a re-valuation. He seemed to be OK with what we'd done so far (despite the fact that we hadn't stuck to the original schedule).

About road blocks, and burning gas

Robert — Mon, 19 Aug 2013 22:12:49 +0000

It's rather ironic given today's events in Balcombe that, as far as the Withington Co-operative Eco-house is concerned, roadblocks are bad news, and burning gas is good (well, less bad, at least).

Unitied Utilities have enlarged their fenced off area and moved about half their equipment into the new part; it remains to be seen whether they'll hit their latest self-imposed deadline of clearing the part in front of the house by the end of this week. I intend to get a clearer picture of this by the end of tomorrow. Back To Earth, the EWI supplier, are concerned about being able to gain access at the pre-agreed time, so to be on the safe side I have pushed back the EWI to September. As things stand though, the window delivery and fitting is still timetabled in for next week (and given the difficulties I've had with the window company, I really don't want to change this).

I've been to-ing and fro-ing with my contact at Baxi, regarding our proposed Ecogen installation. It seems that it is do-able, so I now need to get the company that will be doing the Ecogen install to agree to the specification from myself and Baxi - but my contact there is on holiday until next week.

It might seem paradoxical that burning gas is the most appropriate choice for an eco-house. I'll be writing a full article on this once the details are finalised, but in the meantime suffice to say that we did look into the issue, and gas-fired plant is very much the lesser of evils for a house of this type and location. What's actually more important than the choice of fuel is to minimise the amount of fuel burnt - hence the superinsulation. And according to our calculations, the size of boiler we need to heat our 6-person eco-house is smaller than what is typically installed into a one bed flat.

Speaking of which, the roof insulation is almost complete now, with Andrew on-site today and returning tomorrow to work with the builders to address a few detailing issues with the air-tightness tapes and sealing.

Road closure

Robert — Tue, 02 Jul 2013 19:42:28 +0000

The road closure has been enlarged now - making it even harder for us to get deliveries etc:

And, as can be seen, the chimney has now been scaffolded.

We also can't get any skips to the house, which means building waste is now having to be stored in the front and back gardens, and in the front downstairs room.

Rainwater harvesting, and neighbours

Robert — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 17:49:57 +0000

The rainwater harvesting system we're going to use is from rainwaterharvesting.co.uk - they sell a complete system, in kit form. Because the tank is shared with the fire sprinkler system, I thought it would be a good idea to get it on-site ASAP, if possible. So I've been thinking about how to achieve this, given the road closure going on with the United Utilities works (The tank we'll be using measures 2.4m x 2.4m x 1m approx).

At the moment, UU have the side road (which gives us access to the rear garden) closed during the daytime, but then they open it to (small) vehicles before they finish work each evening. This is going to change in two weeks' time. So I came up with a slightly convoluted but workable plan: hire a 3.5t flatbed from Salford Van Hire, drive down to Peterborough, get the rainwaterharvesting.co.uk people to load the tank onto the vehicle, drive back to Manchester (by which time it would be after 5:30pm so UU would have finished work), and have a bunch of people ready to offload it into the garden (then return the van next morning). After making quite a few phone calls to confirm availability of both the tank and the vehicle, costings, ordering procedures, etc, I came to the conclusion that whilst I could get it in to the garden, this would be pointless unless we could get all the displaced earth out of the garden - and that we didn't have enough time to also achieve that, before the 24/7 road closure comes into force.

So we'll have to stick to Plan A: wait until the roadworks are finished before putting the tank in. I need to tell the sprinkler people about this; they sent through a CAD file following Wednesday's meeting, mostly OK but a couple of points to raise with them, which I'll have to do on Monday now.

I'm very eager to ensure that we have good communication, and good relationships with the neighbours. Both the adjoining houses are rented. I already know the owner of one of them, but yesterday I managed to speak to the other one on the phone for the first time. He seemed rather concerned, so there will be more work to be done to put his mind at rest. In particular, there are some Leylandii trees in the garden that we are going to get rid of, and what gets done about the boundary (ie do we build a wall, plant a hedge, etc) will need some careful negotiation. He promised to have a word with his tenants, and then we'd speak again next week.

Fortunately for this project, my time is not being charged for - but in other circumstances such time would have to be paid for, yet the above aren't things you can "see" in the finished result. I had no idea when I started that my time would be needed for these kinds of things - certainly something to bear in mind for future projects.

Going to see the window supplier on Monday morning, which I'm quite excited about.

Withington Co-operative Eco-house - united utilities

This week's progress

Tags:

Spacetherm internal wall insulation (and a general update)

Tags:

Getting ready for window fitting

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About road blocks, and burning gas

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Road closure

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Rainwater harvesting, and neighbours

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