The original house has a plastic moisture barrier between warm space and cold lofts. When I ran the necessity of repeating this for the new bits by the architect he said things have moved on and that it is no longer required. He did agree that foil backed PB would be a good thing.
Any thoughts bearing in mind comments from earlier threads.
Also.. has anyone used a thermal store rather than a megaflow. Plumbing and inspection issues?
Not so go for WiFi though (especially on internal walls / ceilings).
I was asked to help a mate who had built a study into the garage on the front of their house and he used foil backed PB. BT put the wireless router into the new study and he asked me to explain why the kids couldn't get a reliable signal in the lounge some 2 meters away.
I suggested he got some Powerline adaptors to export the LAN outside his new Faraday cage and they seemed to do the job ok. ;-)
Huh! Building Control want chicken wire (fire reasons, lets me get away with 12.5mm ceiling plasterboard) supporting the inter joist insulation.
OK Here. No radio hams to annoy:-)
I will have similar issues: the router at one end and the lounge upstairs at the other. I am hoping someone will give a words of few syllables instruction how to migrate the wi-fi using ethernet cable:-)
The inference was that it was thought important when modern timber frame housing started but less so now. Permeable felt has come along for one thing. Tacking up polythene is not difficult for room spaces but small warm loft areas much harder.
If you still have the opportunity to flood wire R.C. with whatever the best spec Ethernet cable is (Cat5/6?) then you could put Access Points at whatever locations are appropriate.
Or Wireless Powerline adaptors if you don't want to run the cable and want something more 'portable'.
Summat like: TP-LINK TL-WPA4220TKIT AV600 (1 wired master, two wireless (+wired) slaves). With a wireless router that would give you
3 Wireless access points and if you put them all on the same SSID, it would become one big wireless network (I believe the TP-Link units allow you to set up the WiFi units using WPS (press button).
Yes to thermal store - home brew (s/steel hot cylinder, normal central heating pump, plate heat exchanger, and flow switch with homebrew electronics) about 8 years ago. No inspection issues, as the cylinder is non pressurised with a small header tank. There is inhibiter in the cylinder - still original, and looks OK so far. No complications re DHW plumbing - almost all in 15mm, as mains pressure is (via reduction valve) about 3.5bar.
I did take the precaution of having valves and capped pipe stubs on the DHW side of the heat exchanger, which lets me isolate and pump (via old central heating pump) descaler through the plates every few years to stop it liming up - might be worth a thought, as the heat exchanger is likely to be the most difficult item to source or replace.
Run a few cables while you have the opportunity with walls down, floorboards up, etc.
Run twice as many as you think you need, i.e. if you think you'll need an ethernet point at one location, run two cables to it. You need not use both now, but will be glad of it at some point in the future, and it's easier and cheaper to do it now than later.
Consider running cables to points even if you think they will not be needed now (change of room use, room re-organisation, etc.)
Use Cat5e or Cat6 cable, and make sure you get all-copper, not CCS or CCA (copper-coated steel, aluminium).
:-) Sorry. More of a reason for my interest rather than quest for further knowledge. Owners speak grandly about having a *megalflo* without mentioning any of the downsides.
OK. Probably over ventilated loft though. We had an Edwardian (1909?) gabled house with roll tiles and no underfelt. Dry blowing snow used to find a way in to the loft. We once had 2" on top of the insulation!
I was a bit surprised to find modern structural timber is not treated with preservative!
All hot water will be softened here (East of the Chiltern Hills!) but good to know a satisfied user. Roughly what is the cylinder volume and usage? Daughters seem to use an inordinate amount of hot water when showering!
That's the good things about setting all the access points with the same SSID (Wireless network name) and password (that applies if you use Ethernet wired Access Points or Powerline ones).
However, I don't think there is normally the same level of intelligence as with say Cellular Telephones where the link will 'hop' to a stronger signal if it senses one available. So, if say you made the first wireless connection to the Router and then walked to another room with another access point on the exact same network, I don't think it would use that (stronger signal) till the connection to the first one broke.
Cheers, T i m
p.s. Windows gives you the ability to prioritise the order of the network connections (so you set the one you are most likely to be nearest at the top of the list) but not sure you can do that with other OS's (FWIW etc).
Er. not necessarily. I have just had some roof trusses fitted. Designed and supplied by Pasquill of Leicester. Either they or the builder decided timber preservative treatment was not required.
Cylinder is 1050 high and 450 diameter, 140 litres, the biggest I could get into the existing cupboard This does for the two of us, so that we can have two decent showers in quick succession, or even simultaneously if we don't push the flow rate, but you would want a bigger store for multiple females with a tendency for long showers.
We run the store at 55 deg C, which gives DHW at about the max that is sensible for safety. This is the simple way, but you could get greater stored heat capacity in the same size cylinder by running the cylinder hotter and using a thermostatic mixing valve on the heat exchanger output.
The system behaves rather like a combi boiler, but with greater heat capacity, and like a combi it starts to show it's limits in winter when the incoming water is at its coldest. Thus in winter showers are still fine, but bath filling (not too often used) is slower than a conventional hot tank, but quite a lot faster than a combi.
One aspect that I'm going to deal with soon is that normal mechanical tank stats (to trigger the boiler) have a hysteresis of about 10 deg C, which can mean that if one person has a rather long shower and drops the cylinder by
9.5 degs, the cylinder doesn't start to reheat until the next shower is started, which can mean that the second one can be less hot than wanted. I'm looking at the proliferation of Chinese thermostatic PCBs, which have a hysteresis of more like 3 deg, to improve the situation.
One other point - don't do as I did and assume that the usual magnet + reed relay flow switches can control a central heating pump directly - the result is welded contacts on the reed relay, which should have been the obvious result.... Now the flow switch controls a relay with decent contacts via a transistor, and has been reliable for some years.
Yeah, some drivers have a threshold you can lower that will make them tend to roam rather than cling like grim death to a weak signal.
It's one of the reasons why businesses tend towards a controller for multiple wifi points, the controller can tell that a given device is using the "wrong" access point for the location it is in, and kick it off, so the device will then connect to a better access point.
OK I am a bit pushed on diameter but weight and height could go double.
55 deg. C seems very low. I suppose you are not concerned by disease with no direct contact but it must seriously reduce the total useable hot water. I will use bar mixers for showers and rely on users blending cold in for baths etc.
55 deg at the store gives a hot water temperature at the taps that if unmixed will make you pull your hand out fairly quickly, but doesn't immediately burn skin. 60 degrees at the store is very uncomfortable at the taps. Most thermostatic showers have an initial limit of 38 degrees.... With 1 grandchild here and another imminent I'm cautious about that, but with older children/teenagers you could go higher, and that would certainly store more heat. Most of the commercial heat banks do run the store at higher temps, and then use a thermostatic mixing valve to reduce the DHW to something safer.
As far as disease (legionnaires I presume) the store has inhibitor in it, is quite separate from the DHW, and there is no storage of DHW - so I don't think there is a problem - we are still here at any rate!
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