Category: House

Research in Different Kinds of Water Nozzles for a Fire Suppression System – Part 1

We have been researching into what we would need to incorporate a fire suppression system, using spray nozzles to produce a fine mist of water droplets. We have found that if we use micro-bore 10mm water pipes, we can lay in a network of a water pipe running around inside the roof rafters, and now and again, have a “T” junction to a spray nozzle outlet. We have been testing various different sizes of nozzles, connected to a high pressure water pump and seeing what amount of spray is produced.
Our first attempt of a nozzle was to drill a tiny little hole into a brass end-cap, measuring just 0.3mm diameter, we also made two more end-caps with slightly larger holes, 0.4mm and 0.6mm. We tested all three and all three produced a very fine single jet of water going straight out of the nozzle without breaking up into a spray of droplets at all! We realised that there is more to the method of producing a spray so we bought a set of spray nozzles off the web, a bag of 30 nozzles with two sizes, 0.3mm and 0.4mm holes. The only slight problem is that these new nozzles had a American inch threads, labelled “10/24” (which is 0.196″@24 thread per inch). We took our brass end-caps and drilled a 3.7mm hole and then tapped a thread using a 3/16inch (0.187″@24 TPI) tap. It was compatible enough to allow us to screw in our new nozzles. So we tried the 0.3mm hole, producing a very fine misty like cloud which wouldn’t go very far and had a low thermal mass, which may not suppress a fire very well.
We then drilled out their little hole with various sizes, from 0.6mm, 0.9mm, 1.1mm to a 1.5mm holes and each progressively produced heavier droplets in the cloud of spray. We felt that the largest hole was a bit too heavy and the “cloud” was much smaller. It looks as if the 0.6mm hole size was vigorous enough to generate a large cloud and quite a lot of thermal mass, to cool down a fire and reduce the smoke levels.
The test results were all for a single nozzle and the pump was generating pressures of approximately 8bars of pressure (800kilo-pascals)so we knew that we had to make sure that multiple nozzles would work as well, so towards this aim, we made up four more nozzles, each with a 0.6mm hole size and then joined all 5 together and re-run the test and we still generated a huge cloud of spray and the output pressure from the pump only fell down to 6bar.

Mist nozzles test

This means that the method and choice of pipework is ok and gives us a solution and we can order a whole bunch more of these 10mm T junction pieces, along with more inserts for the plastic coil of 10mm pipe we already got.
They will come in a few days time.
This will allow us to install about fifteen nozzles in total for the whole of the Great Room, running around in the lower part of the sloping ceiling and up around the Skylight as well.

16 September 2023
All Remaining ‘Seconds’ Insulation is Now Hiding into the Roof Rafters Above Great Room

The final load of our third hand rubbish pieces of hard PU foam boards have been processed and most of it is now stuffed and glued into the roof rafters above the Great Room.
In the end, we had plenty to do the job, with most of the rafters now having well over 250mm thick of PU insulating material inserted.

Great Room Foam insulation placed (1)

Great Room Foam insulation placed (2)

Great Room Foam insulation placed (3)

Great Room Foam insulation placed (4)

We had only a pile of thin pieces and trimmings to act as evidence that we had any of this type of building material.

The next job will be to insert the final layer of glass wool to act as a fire break against the unlikely occurrence of a fire, to prevent it reaching our plastic PU foam boards.
This will be covered up with the usual DPM plastic membrane to provide a vapour barrier, and this in turn will be protected by 11mm OSB wooden sheets.

But, first, we will go right around the whole room and make sure that all our electrical conduits are installed etc. and we will report on that in another blog report!

5 September 2023
Creating a ‘Dormer’ for the Great Room

We decided to add a ‘feature’ to the Great Room by exposing the rafters where they run in front of the Conservatory Extension Gable wall. We are going to continue the room walls up to the roof of the Conservatory extension and keep the roof exposed on the inside. This will form a ‘Dormer’ niche, this allows viewing of the rafter size and illustrates the depth of the main roof.

To this end we insulated the external wall to about 200mm depth

Conservatory gable with Foam insulation installed

Then framed the extension of the wall up to the roof. We then need to extend the roof surface of the extension the inside of the main roof. We was a little tricky because there was not much depth to align thing with so we fixed a strip of Osb down the roof to get an alignment then fitted noggins between the rafters.

Framing Dormer intersection (1)

The noggins needed to have a complicated compound cuts to get them to align correctly which took quite a lot of ‘trial & error’! We finally got them cut and glued in place.

Framing Dormer intersection (2)

Framing Dormer intersection (3)

Dormer Framed

We initially made the 3 sections each side of the centre then looking at it decided we had to make the last sections as well.

1 September 2023
Extended the Ventilation Ducting for the Conservatory

We spent this week building and constructing the rest of the ventilation ducting that connect the Conservatory to our Air Con system. We had built the lower half that went across the Great Room, underneath the flooring and then up inside the wall structure between the window and the door facing the Conservatory. See Conservatory Air Duct Built Inside Wall for more details on the work we did two years ago.

Just the duct from below

The internal gable wall that separates the Conservatory from the Great Room goes up 14feet up (about 4¼ metres) above the ground floor and now that we got our temporary platform built, we could gain access at last. The first job was to put a layer of 100mm thick PU foam boards all across the back of the cement boards and followed by a layer of smooth aluminium coated 25mm thick PU sheets. This forms the back surface of the air ducting we are going to make. We then drilled a small 5mm hole on either side of the central vertical post, keeping well clear of it so we can then cut a large 180mm (about 7inches) hole on both sides. This hole then had a short length of some left-over twin-walled plastic pipe inserted into it. Everything was glued into place and left overnight to set.

Insulate wall and insert two inlet ducts

Then, the next job was to build up the two left and right vertical sides of the air ducting, using more of our 25mm smooth aluminium coated foam board, connecting from the existing ducting coming up from below, and widening it out so both holes can be encapsulated within the ducting. We shaped the final part at the top of the two sides so that we can bend the lid around a quarter circle to help guide the air flow more smoothly when it is sucking the air out of the Conservatory.

Ducts trimmed & Side walls built

Then, the final fourth side was created, the lid in front. As previously mentioned, the lid had the foam sliced at regular lines across the sheet and this allowed the board to ‘bend’ around the curve. The whole thing was then glued into place and aluminium metal tape stuck over all the joints, to make sure that we are air tight and where possible, the joints are nice and smooth so that the air won’t catch any sharp edges.

Duct covered

Eventually, we will cut out the large holes through the cement boards when we have built the Conservatory and put on a couple of neat unintrusive air grills that will allow the passage of lots of air with minimal noise.

We want to be able to keep the Conservatory cool and comfortable, even during very hot sunny days, hence we have done this very large capacity ducting, equivalent to four 100mm diameter pipes.

9 August 2023
Built a Temporary Working Platform

We spent the last three days in building a temporary working platform, right across the Great Room so we can access the rafters and get them filled up with insulation, cover them up but also gain access to the entire Skylight so we can measure and order the triple glazing units while we have this platform up. We will also put up the finishing surface, the Fermacell “plasterboard” sheets and paint it all brilliant white, including in and around the Skylight that is over the Great Room too. We want to design and build a lighting panel that will have the capability of being lowered for maintenance, adds or remove lights etc as well.
All this is difficult to do without this temporary platform so we proceeded by putting up our green laser line generator and then screw up a ring of CLS timber support rails around the edges of the room, so that we can then put a series of nine joists, separated by exactly 4feet, or 1220mm. We also put on an extra cross beam positioned at the end of the Gallery so that we can support these joist that lies beyond the Gallery. Then, we created a couple dozens of legs, along with a footpad to spread the load from the leg, and got them located every 4feet along each joist too. We wanted to make sure that our platform is good and strong and as sturdy as possible because we will be working with heavy pieces of equipment like a board lifter.

A forrest of legs 1

A forrest of legs 2

A forrest of legs 3

Next, we now brought up a whole load of 18mm thick OSB boards from our store room (Bedroom Two!) and shoved them one at a time, up onto the framework. We started next to the end of the Gallery and put in five whole sheets, in the eight foot direction, starting from the “A” wall and almost reaching the “O” wall, with only a few inches short. This shows that our Great Room is five sheets of eight feet each, a total of forty feet!
We carefully screwed plenty of screws to fix all the edges and for the second row, we sliced up an old sheet in half so we could offset the whole sheets to overlap half way. and finally, we put in a third row of another five sheets and again, there is only a small gap to the long “P” wall.
The gaps left and right of the Gallery were then filled in. the Kitchen side had a 1900mm board cut and fixed in, while the larger other side had two more whole sheets put in. This left a 240mm gap which we found lots of left-over pieces where we could slice them down and fit them into this gap.

Great Room ‘First Floor’ 1

Great Room ‘First Floor’ 2

Great Room ‘First Floor’ 3

We now have an accessible working level, connected to the First Floor, with a small six inch step down (it makes it easier to get at the bottoms of the rafters) and we can get on in doing the last section of the roof to get populated with insulation etc. And, by the way, the width of the room is four whole boards plus a bit, so that is four times 4feet which is 16feet!! This is what is called a large space, in fact, it’s a Great Room !!

An because everything is screwed in place all the wood and OSB can be used for building the First floor walls later on so nothing will be wasted!

22 July 2023
Walls Are Constructed

We started working on constructing the Walls inside the Entertainment Room, now that we have done the floor. The concrete block walls are a bit (well actually up to 15mm) wavy so we had to mount our horizontal rails with various thicknesses of wooden shims, to pad out the gap between the CLS rail and the concrete wall, when the rail is made aligned using our green laser line generator. We started on the shorter wall opposite the window so we could learn how things went together before we tackled the long stretch of the wall. We screwed the laser down into the left corner to the floorboards and got the green laser 55mm from the surface in both corners, left and right both. We worked from top down, putting the first rail up near the ceiling, but with enough space to allow a 11mm OSB sheet to fit into the small gap so the ceiling is supported around the edges of the walls.
But before all that, we had to make dozens of different sized wooden shims, using various left-over sheet material we had lying around. We made 18mm OSB ones, 13mm Plywood ones, 6mm MDF ones, 3.6mm hardboard pieces and we found some odd 6.5mm thick MDF ones so they got included too. Plus also, we sliced up some very thin plywood that are 1.5mm thick to help with the final slight adjustments. We bought the other day a new kit of plastic spacers (also known as shims or packers), they come in 1mm, 2mm, 3mm, 4mm, 5mm and 6mm so they will be there if we run out of our wooden spacers.
So, we cut a piece of CLS timber to 3.76metres long and drilled 7mm clearance holes every 600mm along the rail, with them all offset by 300mm from one end. To make sure that we maintained a constant gap at the top there, we screwed some 12mm plywood pieces up on the ceiling so it would automatically produce the correct spacing when we pushed the rail up there and drilled the holes into the concrete. We drilled 7mm holes using our trusty SDS battery drill which made short work in drilling 70mm deep holes!
Then, we tightened the wooden rail into place using 100mm 6mm thick screws, putting a variety of different combinations of the wooden shims behind the rail until the green laser line just shimmed across the surface. We repeated this process for the mid rail and then we constructed the Utility Channel completely on the floor before mounting it up on the wall. We made 300mm long pieces of MDF strips which bridged across the two CLS rails that makes up the Utility Channel, gluing and stapling each strip over where the screws will go. Then, we glued and stapled the fermacell board strips in between, and glued to the bridging pieces.
Constructing the Utility Channel like this meant that we didn’t have to mount each rail separately and the whole length could go up on the wall in one go. The final rail to put up is the Air Channel, which was constructed completely separately like we had just done, but this time, using our 150mm MDF strips to form the channel for the air to flow sideways and into our room. The Air Channel just sits on the floor surface so that was relatively easy to mount it to the wall. The final step was to spray lots of PU foam behind the Air Channel and also behind the plastic pipes that comes around from below the floorboards via a deep slot in the concrete wall.

Assorted-spacers-aligning-rails-on-the-wall

We repeated this process for each of the other walls, including tackling the window wall and putting up enough wooden rail to form a very narrow strip above the window. With the lowered ceiling level, the height of our standard windows, being seven foot high, meant that the resultant ceiling is almost level with the top of the window, the narrow strips will be something in the order of 60 to 70mm wide. Just enough to allow for traditional curtains to be mounted across the window if we wanted too. We had to put up a 50mm square piece of timber, instead of our regular 63mm CLS timber but it worked out very well, especially that we had put up two extra layers of 89mm CLS planks behind this rail, to help reinforce and support it. We glued it using our top quality PU construction glue, and clamping the pieces all together including pushing upwards to stick to the concrete beam that is going over the window like a lintel.

We finished putting up the rails on either side of the doorway, just like the other walls, with a small extra bit sticking into the entrance way. This allows us to set the laser green line to be vertical and aligned to the hall side of the doorway and find out whether the concrete blocks are straight or not. And, of course, they are not quite vertical! They are leaning askew by 5mm or so at the opposite end, depending on whether it is the left or right hand side of the door. In fact, we had already made the hall side of the entrance square and vertical so that gives us something to measure against and make any adjustments. We took one of our very old wooden planks that we had stored on our wood rack, a “2 by 6” rough sawn conifer timber plank, a 4.8metres long. We think we had originally bought these pieces of timber back in the mid 2000’s and we knew that we would reuse them again .. one day!
We are using these 150mm wide planks to help reinforce the door frames, so that we can mount a heavy weight door to help block the sounds from escaping the Entertainment Room. So, after slicing off the excess bits off each of the horizontal rails, we then discovered that the gap between the ramp and the concrete blocks wasn’t quite big enough to fit the 50mm thick plank so we had to trim slivers of wood off the timber until we could insert the plank down pass the ramp and with a notch to avoid the floorboards, to rest on the concrete blocks that is running underneath the doorway. After making careful adjustments, using the laser level and our digital spirit level as well, we then drill five holes in each vertical planks and then drilled nice deep 80mm holes into the concrete blocks too, just like what we have been doing to fix up all our wall rails too. We put in various shims behind each screw and ensured that they were nice and vertical, on both sides of the doorway. Once we were happy, we unscrewed everything and applied loads of PU construction glue all over behind the plank and all over the concrete blocks and redid the screws and got the planks fixed down nice and tight, all smooth and level to the front of the wall rails.

We had also done something quite similar to our window, putting in a CLS piece of timber so it was square to the glass, anchoring it with screws from the front through our wall rails and then trimming off the additional extra bits of the rails that were sticking into the window space. Next, we took a length of 20mm plastic conduit pipe and bent it at four measured locations which enabled us to feed some wires from the Utility Channels and down into the space underneath the window sill, to power and control the window blinds.

Entertainment-Room-Window conduit

We finally, finishing off this period of work, we encapsulated the doorway in with OSB 18mm pieces of boards, on all three sides, the left and right and also above. We put in the above one in first and glued that piece in up against the concrete lintel and the wooden frame out in the hall, and then measured the two vertical sides. We had to mirror the shape of the floor and ramp so we took a piece of 6mm MDF board and drew a line on it by using a block of wood and a pen to duplicate the slope and flat regions. We did one for each side but it turned out to be identical which was nice to know! We sliced up some OSB sheets into a piece that measures 320mm wide by 2140mm tall and then trimmed the bottom using our template. With some minor slicing a bit off the height, we got them fitted. Next, we put in six pieces of CLS timber pieces into the gap between the wall boards out in the hall and the door frame. This is to make sure that the wall is solid enough to hang our doors on the walls without causing any distortions or warping. The three CLS fillers were glued and screwed into place at the same time when we glued and screwed each of the vertical OSB side pieces.

Entertainment-Room-Rails-finished-1

Entertainment-Room-Rails-finished-2

Entertainment-Room-Rails-finished-3

That concludes this period of work on our Entertainment Room, we are not finish of course, but we are moving on to another project next week, something completely different, we are installing our Solar Panels on our roof! All the metal framework and brackets has arrived so we can get that done.

20 August 2022
Starting on the Entertainment Room
While we still wait for our cheap insulation foam rejects to arrive, we got on with doing the Entertainment Room, which is our last ground floor room that we haven’t done yet. The Entertainment Room already has an internal walls and a ceiling, made using concrete blocks and suspended beams respectively. So, after emptying all our use full stuff ( i.e. “junk”) out (and putting it all in our Great Room and Kitchen), we proceeded to survey the state of the concrete walls, to see how flat and straight they are. They do wiggle in and out a little bit, according to our green laser line generator. We set the laser on the floor, right at one end of the wall and positioned it 50mm away from the surface. Then, adjusted the angle of the laser until we also have the beam just 50mm away from the surface at the other end of that wall. We did spot checks all over the surface to find how well, or badly, the individual blocks were set. We did this same procedure for all four walls and the results are as follows:
- Large wall opposite the doorway: minimum=36mm and maximum=52mm
- Left wall opposite the window: minimum=37mm and maximum 51mm
- Doorway wall: minimum=32mm and maximum=50mm
- Window wall: minimum=34mm and maximum=50mm
Some of the worse offending blocks were in the upper corner where we were finishing off a row and near the top as well, and we couldn’t keep it straight. But it is not that bad, so we can handle that by putting spacers behind all the horizontal rails as we screw them into the concrete blocks.

The room is 4.75metres long and 3.78metres wide (approximately 15½ feet by 12½ feet) and we took careful note of where the joints between concrete slabs were, and decided that we would run eight long rails to minimise wastage and offset the first rail 400mm from the doorway side of the room, and then the usual 600mm spacing after that, terminating with a 300mm gap to finish off. The Energy Module is located about 3100 to 3200mm from the window wall and we want to make sure that we can build a small liftable hatch so we can service the equipment and inspect the underground tank via its inspection port. We have gone for a regular 600mm spacing along the long direction which will avoid all the joints in the floor slab.

We cut two CLS planks to fit across the narrow sides of the room, marked off the rail positions (starting from that 400mm point and multiple 560mm after that one), drilled a set of 6mm holes in between those marks and making sure that we avoided the air disperser location which will be in the middle of the plank and we don’t want a screw going through our plastic module. We set up the laser in the middle of the room and set the height of our flooring framework to be at one block level, which is about 225mm, instead of the usual 378mm. We have decided to lower the floor level inside our Entertainment Room because it has already an lowered ceiling (the sound dampening concrete block and beam construction) so to make the room feel not so claustrophobic and maintaining the same 8feet clearance, we lowered the floor as well by six inches. There will be a slope built at the doorway so there won’t be any sudden steps etc. just a slope which will stretched out some two feet, starting from the Hall side of the doorway and stick into the room by about 400mm, to make is more friendly for anyone but especially for wheelchair users too.

The next job is to cut four cavities into the concrete blocks themselves, to allow for our air dispersers to be routed from underneath the flooring and bypassing the floor joist and let the air into the Air Channel. We used a diamond cutting disc to slice 50mm into the block and then chiselled out the chunks. We made it 120mm wide to make room for the twin plastic pipes to fit. We will also spray some PU foam to help stick it into the wall and insulate it a bit from the cold concrete blocks. The slot is about 250mm high and it was very very dusty, generating a huge cloud of grey concrete dust. We were wearing very good dust masks thank goodness!

Channel-hacked-the-the-Entertainment-wall

We also made the four dispersers as well, doing the usual method of trimming down the elbow corners and gluing it all together. So we could test the new slots to make sure that they had room to fit properly.

We went around drilling all the necessary holes in the concrete walls for all four sections of the floor joist support batten, putting in a 7mm plastic wall plug and screwing it down tight using 100mm long 6mm screws whilst putting the air distributers in. We also put on a large washer to help spread and grip the wooden pieces tight to the walls, especially that we had a larger clearance holes through the wood so we could tap the joist a bit up or down, to get it as accurate as possible against our green laser line level.

Air-distributer-in-the-channel

Next, we chopped up 62 legs that the whole floor will need, with 19 of them having one corner sliced off to allow for the mortar on the bottom of the walls. All of them were then dipped in our coloured timber preservative liquid, to make sure that the timber will last for decades, even if we had a water leak so it won’t affect the wood.

Then, we started by the doorway and put in the first rail at 360mm spacing and cut a piece 4665mm long and put in seven legs along its length and two specials for the ends. Using this rail, we then built the ramp for the doorway using three pieces of CLS timber, with angles cut on their ends to connect to the bottom rail and also joining up onto the hall framework too. We also put in trimmed filling in pieces in between these sloping rails, with the surface planed so it matches the slope in general, so that the top and bottom edges of the ramp will be fully supported. Finally, we stuck in two additional legs to help support the two outer sloping rails so the joints will not creak in the future. We topped the whole thing off by laying down a floorboard piece, measuring 880mm wide by 590mm long, with a shallow 18degree angled cuts for the top and bottom edges so that we don’t end up with gaps in our flooring.

Then, we continued with mounting the rest of the floor joists, six more rails, each having seven legs under each one and we got that all done, including the horizontal noggings every 1200mm.

Entetainment-Floor-grid-1

Entetainment-Floor-grid-2

Next, we built a box around the Energy Module collection of pipes and conduits coming out of the concrete floor slab so we put in four plywood pieces around the four sides, lined the bottom with 50mm of PU foam and put in additional rail around the top edge so our lid can sit on something solid.

Energy-module-equipment-box

The conduits for the temperature probes were threaded around the legs and framework so that all four of them were routed over to the plumbing box and poked through the plywood sides, ready for threading the actual temperature sensors down the conduits and measure the state of of the environment around and inside this Energy Module.

The filling pipes were fitted, being 15mm water pipes, and they were routed towards the hallway. This meant that we drilled a couple of 65mm diameter holes through the concrete blocks and pushed in some short length of pipe insulation to protect the energy in the water when it is transferred from inside the Energy Module and the Utility Room.

All-the-pipes-and-conduits-in-place

Then, we built another air distributor module to be connected to a 100mm feed off the main air duct back in the Hall, coming down the hall towards the front door and then turning into the Entertainment Room under the doorway itself. The distributor module is the usual affair of one 100mm input pipe, being squeezed and spread out to four 50mm connections, to be sent around the room.

Oh yes, we just remembered that we needed a data conduit to be fitted to our central plumbing box and routed the other end out in the hallway under the doorway. This will allow us to feed a couple of cables through to connect our house network and provide electrical power to the little computer that is monitoring the vital signs of our buried Energy Module.

This concludes all the bits and pieces going under the floor so we loaded in two layers of 200mm thick glass wool strips, laid flat. These strips would be 400mm high but when laid down, they only just came above the wooden rails which is 235mm off the floor, which is good to provide a much better sound absorbing layer.

Insulation-in-the-floor-1

Insulation-in-the-floor-2

Now, we went ahead and laid down the 22mm thick floorboards, starting left of the doorway and worked our way across the room towards the window. The floorboards were glued and screwed down nice and solidly. The width of the room meant that we had to throw away fairly large pieces especially when we came to the ramp where we decided to start over again with a full length board, to make sure that the floorboards in the doorway is well supported.

Enetertainment-room-floor-finished-1

Enetertainment-room-floor-finished-2

This concludes this stage of building the Entertainment Room, we will carry on with putting up the wall rails, getting them levelled and flat including putting in the Utility Channel and the OSB wall boards and may even get the ceiling done too.
6 August 2022
Second Half of Great Room’s Floor is Finished Including Ducting and Pipes Underneath

We started the second stage of building the flooring for the Great Room by fetching down from our upstairs timber storage, 10 nice straight pieces. We then marked the 600mm markings on eight of them which will be where the support legs will go. Then, we laid out these eight lengths, ready to be our joists for the framework, putting them down on the concrete itself. We did this because we needed to get the air ducting laid and positioned so it connects to the exhaust air from the Conservatory and routed diagonally across the room and up to the First Floor to join into the main Air Duct that will travel through the house towards the Utility Room. This bridging section going underneath our floor needs to fit in between all the support legs, hence why we had marked out those positions and we soon realised that we had to shift things around a bit. The set of eight joists were spaced so that the bigger gap was next to the Kitchen side of the Great Room but we discovered that one of the joists and its support legs landed right over a joint in the concrete itself. So we moved everything over by 300mm so that the bigger gap is now over next to the Conservatory side of the room and that made it much neater. Then we could see that the metal ducting, two joined together making four lines stretching diagonally across the room was going through the support legs locations too. This meant another adjustment in our arrangement but this time, we shifted the support legs positions along the joists by 300mm which also turned out to be an advantage by avoiding another joint in the concrete slabs but in the other direction this time.

So this allowed us to then construct another Air Splitter module that joined to the chimney that is coming down inside the wall between the large window and the Conservatory French doors, bringing the old exhaust air from that room. It was a case of carefully cutting and slicing several pieces of our chipboard pieces and shaping them so that we could plug in the set of four metal pipes into this module and draw the air away. It was quite fiddly but we managed it after a couple of days of work.

Then of course, we had to remove all our CLS planks out of the way so we could lay down properly the eight metal pipes, join them to the four purple flexible pipes coming down inside the Kitchen wall and four double length joined and trimmed with small pieces of short pipes to finally connect to our new splitter module. We sealed all the joints with aluminium tape and Stixall glue.

Conservatory-Air-crossing-GR-and-ascending-to-FF-void-1

Conservatory-Air-crossing-GR-and-ascending-to-FF-void-2

We now have that particular air ducting completed and we can continue to build the floor framework over the top of it. It took us the next two days to complete that wooden structure, putting in eight joists and a collection of posts and noggings and it went in quite well. The metal tubes were successful in their location, only had to move a couple of legs a centimetre or two to avoid them.

GR-Floor-grid-complete

Next, we put in the conduits for the temperature probes that surrounds the Energy Module, another six of them, to add to the other four plus the other local ones already in place so we can put in sensors to monitor the performance of this large tank. Then, all the water type pipes were laid in, four of them using 15mm direct water connections going to the external world in various forms and then two more thin irrigation waterlines going up to the Eves, so these were 20mm conduits to help feed this pipe through. Next, was the hot water twin pipes, travelling on its last stage of its long twisty journey around the house, to go diagonally across the room, next to the metal air ducts, poke through the kitchen wall and arrive inside the plumbing box located in the Kitchen where the sink and other water related services are.

The cold water, the 32mm header tank water supply, then came across the room and join alongside the hot water to enter the same plumbing box and then finally, a single 15mm mains water pipe coming all the way from the Utility Room and also coming around to enter into the plumbing box too. This will provide fresh drinking water for the Kitchen.

Finally, one more 15mm water pipe was inserted into the Energy Module, threaded down a sticking up 25mm pipe coming through the concrete and going back to the Utility Chamber to join with its twin, to get married to a larger 22mm pipe going off to the Utility Room. We also inserted a second 22mm water pipe alongside this one, but starting slightly further down the hall where our second largest Energy Module is located under the Kitchen and Bedroom One, both going all the way to the Utility Room.

GR-EM-Fill-connections

EM-Pipes-running-to-the-Utility-Room-1

EM-Pipes-running-to-the-Utility-Room-2

The last job to do under the floorboards is to put in the air pipes to provide fresh air for this half of the Great Room, another eight air distributors located around the edge of the room, two along the Kitchen wall, three along the “A” wall and the final three along the Conservatory wall. These outlets are fed and grouped into four separate 50mm conduits that goes back to a splitter module which has a 100mm conduit connected to it and the other end coming from the Utility Chamber, ready to be connected to the main Air Duct.

GR-PA-Air-distribution-point

GR-Hot-Cold-water-Fresh-Stale-air-all-in-one-place

Finally, we carried on laying down the floorboards for the rest of the room, again, not glued down, or screwed either. We knocked each row securely against the rest of the floor, to encourage the joints to close up nice and tight. But the last row is only a half width piece and we have not cut an accurate piece to go into this space, but just laid down a couple of left-over half boards to fill the gap, to make it safe.

GR-Floor-finished

One of the last task to do while we remembered, was to insert a collection of conduits and pipes around the windows so the wires and cables can carry on along all the Utility Channels. We did also the conduit that goes down into the bottom module underneath the window where the blind mechanism is to be located.

GR-Window-conduits

This concludes the work for the Great Room for the time being!! We won’t get back here until we have fully finished filling in the Roof Rafters and putting up the ceiling panels etc. After that, we can lift the floorboards and “throw” all the PU foam rubbish under it! Next, we will make a start on the Entertainment Room while we wait for this insulation PU foam pieces to arrive.

27 July 2022
Part Two of Great Room Floor Construction with Air, Sensors and Water Installed and Floorboards Laid but not Fixed

We started the second stage of construction of our Great Room floor construction, by continuing the task of putting all the various utility pipework snaking around under the floor. We put in the conduits to all the temperature sensors that we have scattered around the Energy Module, all coming back to the central Utility Chamber, we did four that were coming in from the patio side of the room. Then a couple of cold water connections were also fitted, providing an outside tap for the Patio area plus also an underground connection for sending any water supplies further into the gardens if we want. Also there is a couple of irrigation connections going up to the Eves. Finally, a 15mm water pipe installed to the connection points of the buried Energy Module itself.

Cold-water-connections

EM-Temperature-sensor-conduits

Next was to lay down 50mm to 60mm thick layer of PU foam down the Utility Chamber so there is some protection against the warm concrete or indeed maybe cold concrete and it becomes trouble for the Air Duct and Water pipes running inside the Utility Chamber cutting across the Great Room.

We also screwed on small pieces of battens across the central two legs that will perform a dual role of supporting the Air Ducting itself, but also provide tie up points to keep all the dozens of water pipes in a neat arrangement whilst travelling to and from the Utility Room and to various Energy Modules.

Then it was the turn of the hot water system, coming around from Bedroom One and curving to the middle of the Great Room, the two 28mm water pipes were wrapped in layers of PU foam boards to protect the heated water as much as possible from losing any energy. We had to lower the levels of the twin plastic pipes so it could fit under the main air ducting that is coming across the Great Room so there is not as much insulation as we normally have, but it is only for a short length and besides that, if our Energy Module get hot then there wouldn’t be so much temperature difference and hence not as much energy will be lost after all.

Hot-water-Insulated

The next job was to construct the Air Distributors, eight of them, to be located evenly around the edges of the room. We had to make two more jigs to help, as it was taking too long for the solvent to evaporate when we were gluing the various bits together. This Air Distributor is made using 40mm waste pipe plumbing parts, with a 68mm guttering pipe to allow us to connect the 50mm flexible air ducting into these distributors.

Making-Air-diffusers

We need a total of sixteen outlets for our Great Room, making sure that we had fresh air coming in easily and be able to cope with all the solar gain we would get from all the sunshine pouring in our five windows. The other eight modules will be done later on.

As part of this job, we built four Air Splitter chambers that takes a 100mm wide pipe and squashes the air down and splits it up into four separate 50mm pipes.
We installed two of them into the half of the Great Room we got completed, and connected the flexible plastic pipes, a purple 100mm pipe coming from the Utility Chamber and four orange 50mm pipes bending around and going off to four spread-out locations for each quarter of the room.

Air-distribution-to-Bedroom-side

Air-distribution-to-Patio-side

We tested each quadrant with our portable air fan and turned it up to maximum speed to make sure that we didn’t get any resonating noises whistling down our tubes. We were able to get approximately 16metres per second of air flow from each distributor, which works out at about 20 litres per second, or a grand total of 320 litres per second for the whole room, without making too much whistling noises. This will achieve about five changes of the volume of the entire room per hour. This is very important on those very hot and sunny days during the summer!!

Then, we laid down eleven rows of floorboards, only screwed in a couple of places for each board. We did not want to permanently fix them down just yet because we will want to “throw” away our foam rubbish material when we get to populate the roof rafters and we will have loads of left-over pieces. We shred it all up into small fluffy chunks and place them under our floorboards to act as more insulation to keep our house warm but also to protect us from our Energy Modules which are likely to get very hot during the Summer months.

Half-the-floor-boards-loosly-laid

Now, we can make a start on laying out the other half of our Great Room, the left hand side from the hallway, but we need to make sure that we have got the air ducting that is coming from the Conservatory lying just in the correct place. That will be part of the next blog report!!

11 July 2022
Built Half the Flooring Framework and Most of Wall Rails While Waiting Building Supplies

Since we had finished building the basic shell of all our downstairs hallways, we needed to get on with something else while we are waiting for a particular type of building material to arrive. So we decided to work on building the framework for the floor in our Great Room and also put up most of the horizontal rails up on the walls too. But, we had to empty the room out as it is full of timber, well over 400 x 4.8m long planks, plus a large bench saw table double module and a long chop saw module as well, as well as a standalone planer and other pieces of equipment, all needed to be moved out. But, first of all, we looked ahead to see what we needed in terms of cut down strips of fermacell plasterboard pieces (to go in the back of the Utility Channels) and MDF strips for the Air Channels too, both uses the saw bench table module. So, we sliced up two more fermacell boards into 12 more strips which should be enough to complete the Great Room and also slice two more MDF sheets to make 16 more strips, again enough to do the job. Then, we calculated that we needed 221 legs to support the entire flooring framework at every 600mm point in both directions and 85 horizontal pieces that hold and space out the long floor joists. We used our big chop saw with an end-stop to rapidly chop up 27 lengths of our 63mm CLS timber to produce the required numbers.
Then, the 221 legs were then dipped, one end only, in timber preservative solution.

Lots-of-legs

Only after this, we proceeded to dismantle these pieces of equipment and move them out of the Great Room. The last big job was to move the huge stack of the CLS timber upstairs as most of it is earmarked for building the upstairs walls etc. We needed to leave behind about 50 planks which meant that we had to move everything else. in the end, we moved 414 planks to the middle of the space upstairs, running down the middle under the Skylight.
We moved the 50 planks into the middle of the room so we can work around the edges doing the walls but also we could do one half of the floor at a time etc.

2-Tons-of-wood-upstairs

We had to tidy up several years of dust and sand that has crept under the timber pile, plus a large heap of left-over timber pieces which will turn into something useful we thought but after this long, perhaps not! Actually, some of it will be used later on but quite a lot only ended up outside in our rubbish bag, ready for the next bonfire, or hand it over to our neighbours for their own wood burner.
We had to put back outside 15 homemade concrete blocks that were used to support our timber pile, back when we even didn’t have a roof on our house! We now have one empty Great Room for the first time in years!

Great-room-empty-and-clean-1

Great-room-empty-and-clean-2

The next job was to encapsulate the last exposed bit of the concrete block walls under each of the five windows, and also glue in a sheet of 12mm plywood in the bottom of the window sill.
Then insert four rolls of glass wool insulation into ten wall segments, one roll of 150mm thick stuffed in the lower 900mm section, followed by a 2400mm piece of the 200mm thick stuffed in the upper section, going all the way to the roof rafters.

Then, the vapour membrane barrier was placed all over the walls, to seal the wooden structure from moisture generated by us humans inside the building. The black DPM plastic was stretched along the wall, joining to existing vapour membrane. We put up three 4metres pieces to complete the job. The windows were trimmed and wrapped back to the glass. We then continued with this task of wrapping the sections below and above each window in the same plastic material, encapsulating the pocket spaces so they are sealed too, these chambers to put our electronic and mechanical bits and pieces to drive the automatic blinds to help give shade from the sun or privacy at night time. We did four larger, and one smaller window. Plus also the section above the Conservatory Door too.

GR-Vapour-barrier-all-fitted-1

GR-Vapour-barrier-all-fitted-2

Talking about the Conservatory, we modified the temporary door by slicing off 60mm off the bottom of it and mounting a new door sill onto the concrete blocks. This is in readiness for when we laid down the floorboards across the room. We didn’t have to slice an additional small piece off the top of the door after all.

Another thing that got done was the insertion of a vertical CLS timber piece on either sides of the windows and also a similar pair mounted at the front of the window opening, which was adjusted so that the side walls of the windows are a proper 90degrees right angles to the glass. We put in plastic spacers to make sure the front leg lines up with the window leg perfectly.

Now, we have started putting up the horizontal rails on the walls, starting at the bottom doing the floor support first, running right around the whole room.

But, then we thought we had better put in the four 100mm flexible air ducts up inside the Kitchen wall that will connect to the pipework running across the room, from the Conservatory so we can take the waste air out. It was so much easier to install these conduits before we put up any more wooden rails!

Conservatory-waste-air-going-up-the-wall

And, we put in 18 strips of 200mm thick glass wool, split into 400mm wide pieces and stuffed into all the columns in the Kitchen and Bedroom One walls, to provide as much sound deadening as possible.

Next, we built our Utility Channel that runs right around the whole room at the 800mm to 900mm height level, skipping pass the five windows and two doors. The Channel is lined with a strip of fermacell plasterboard material which provides both a surface to screw hooks or electrical modules somewhere around the room, but also it is fire rated to provide 30 minutes protection and hence keep that slim chance of an electrical fire contains while the alert is raised. We put in the usual holes for both a 32mm and 20mm conduits to be connected later on, to route around these aforementioned windows and doors, but we also put in extra 20mm holes for plumbing in additional lighting at the top of the walls where it meets the roof rafters.

Gr-Utility-Channel-installed-1

Gr-Utility-Channel-installed-2

Gr-Utility-Channel-installed-3

Gr-Utility-Channel-installed-4

Gr-Utility-Channel-installed-5

We also discussed putting in hanging lamps of some sort, down the middle of the room to provide a “feature” for the room but also plenty of illumination too. We need to install an empty 20mm conduit from that high point and terminates inside the triangle voids up on the First Floor.

We completed as much as we could do for this moment in our building of the wall utility rails, doing the two middle rails going up the wall, including the one that lines up with the top of all windows and outside door, and then completed the loop underneath the Gallery with a rail over the door and tight underneath the joists.

GR-wall-rails-1

GR-wall-rails-2

Now we make a start on building the floor structure by extending the framework that supports the main Air Ducting that is coming down the hall, and duplicated the structure across the Great Room and arrived at the Conservatory doorway. As it entered the Great Room from the hallway, it bent at about a 15degrees angle to the right and travelled for about 3400mm before straighten up and going 1900mm towards the Conservatory. This section will have the usual liftable panels, three in the first angled segment and a further two in the straight segment. This will allow us to service the plumbing bits and pieces including a fair number that are going to the outside world and Conservatory, plus also the air duct connection points, four of them to distribute fresh air for the whole of the Great Room and also further air connections going off to the Conservatory as well.

Air-Duct-Framing-across-GR

Now we got the room divided into two areas, we started building the structure for the rest of the flooring. We did the back of the Great Room first, the area to the right side as you walk in from the Hall. We marked off all the 600mm spacing and make sure that we could still insert all the air output vents and its pipework into the wall without hitting a support leg etc. It took a couple of days to do this first section.

One-half-of-GR-floor-framing-done

That concludes this stage of the work so we can publish our progress. We got another couple of weeks of work to go to get the second half of the flooring done, as well as installing the hot water pipes in their insulation, lots of cold water pipes, dozens of electrical conduits and sixteen air pipes distributed around the room. We will laid down the proper chipboard floorboards but it won’t be glued down, just lightly screwed in a couple of places. We need to lift it again so we can “throw” away all the left-over PU foam pieces that will be generated when we fill in all the roof rafters when our long-awaited supply of PU rejected foam boards arrive!

2 July 2022