Day 120 - Heat Recovery Ventilation System

The electrics are almost complete for first fix and the electricians did a superb job of cleaning up when they were done. What stars!

The Heat Recovery Ventilation (HRV) system was installed today. This is the clever bit of kit that takes warm, stale air from the bathrooms and kitchen, extracts the heat into fresh air from the roof which it then pumps into the living spaces.

This removes the need for trickle vents in the windows and will keep the house fresh, warm and very thermally efficient.

I have also taken delivery of most of the bathroom fittings including the toilets and showers. The remaining items will be coming along shortly.

The second fix carpentry items also arrived today, including all the internal doors, door linings and skirting board, plus another back and front door just for good measure! The lorry driver waited for me for 2 hours as he said he couldn't lift the doors on his own. Much humble pie was eaten when he then watched me offload and carry singlehanded all 12 in one-by-one.

That's my workout for the week!

I'll post some pictures of the joinery items later in the week.

        

Category 8 Data Cabling

One of the key decisions when planning the build was how we were going to distrubute television, telephone, audio and computer signals around the house.

You've probably heard of Category 5 (Cat-5) cable. This is the standard for computer networks and is geneally used in new houses too to perform all of the above functions. However, with the new HD video standards Cat-5 is finding it hard to keep up - you just can't get enough information down the cable.

A bit of research lead me to a cable standard that I wasn't aware of - Catergory 8 (Cat-8), which can carry over 7 times more data than Cat-5.

Plus, with some clever faceplates and a neat patch panel its much tidier as well, minising the clutter and number of sockets we have to put on the walls.

Check out the supplier website for more details: Single Point Networks

The clever bit comes in how we wire up the Sky boxes. By putting the Sky box in the roof along next to the patch panel for the Cat-8 system, we can distribute the TV signal, in full HD and digital audio glory, to many TVs around the house. Plus, we put infrared receivers on each of the tellies to pick up the signal from a Sky remote and relay it back to the box via the Cat-8 cable, so you can change the channels from any of the rooms too.

Clever eh?

Day 116 - Guttering in the sunshine

I got a chance to get back onsite today and complete the last bit of guttering by the back door. The electricians are pushing on inside but no sign of the plumbers today; typical!

  

Day 115 - A little more electrics and plumbing...

Here are a few more shots taken this weekend which include a little bit more work done on Thursday and Friday last week.

    

Day 114 - Electrics and Plumbing

The first fix plumbing and electrics are in full swing now.

The electricians are wiring in the sockets and switches, cutting in and fixing the back boxes and running all the power cables to the fuse board in the utility room. They've already throught of at least ten things that I'd forgotton! I've also replanned the location of all the data wiring. I'm now going to setup a small server rack to house all the IT kit, Sky boxes etc in the loft and run all the structured cabling to there. This will de-clutter the study and mean I can install some proper server-grade hardware without the fan noise being a nuisance.

The plumbing is going well too with the water and soil pipes all in, together with LPG feeds for the hob and the fireplace. Jamie and co are now moving onto finishing the under-floor heating systems for the first floor and have worked out a way to get the kinks out of the cable by running it all the way up the driveway - a great idea until the post woman trips over it on her way round the corner...

Oh, and the keen blog followers amongst you should take a look at the last picture below. Remember that cock-up with the ground workers six months back? Well all is well. Jamie managed to route the soild pipe as planned. Phew!

Next week, more plumbing and the geek-tastic Cat-8 data cabling goes in.

    

Day 110 - Heat Pump Arrives

The heat pump arrived today and just about fitted through the front door. The delivery man wasn't very happy with our gravel driveway as it didn't exactly agree with the 200KG heat pump and his pallet lifter.

Its actually shorter than I had anticipated so we may have to apply some clever boxing to the top to hide the plumbing away out of site.

 

Day 109 - Happy New Year!

It's 2009 and we're still not in...

...but we're getting closer! The screed has gone off well over the Christmas break as you can see and now its all hands to the pumps for the first fix. The plumbing and electrics will start this week (once my plumber gets over his vomiting virus or "Extended Christmas" disease), the heat pump arrives from Sweden in the next day or so and the ventilation system will be going in next week.

I'll keep you posted.