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Constructed Hot Water Heat Exchanger Coils Plus Other Pipes and Sensors

We have been spending a day here, a day there, whenever we were waiting for glue to set, paint to dry etc. etc. and got on with the task of designing and building a heat exchanger coils for our Hot Water tank sitting in our Utility Cupboard. We wanted to have a system where we could run in various hot water, or indeed cooler water sometimes, to transfer energy into, or out of, the tank. We are going to use lots of copper pipes, narrow 10mm wide copper pipes, and bend it into a coil, to form a tall rectangular spread out maze of pipe bending this way and that way, to form a column. We want to make four of these, so that they stand in a line, inside our Hot Water tank. They will be connected to a 22mm copper pipe and a tiny little manifold which will allow four 10mm pipes to join into the 22mm pipe. The 22mm would then go up to the top of the tank and exit to the outside world.

So we were thinking of doing a series of “figure-of-eight” loops, wrapping the copper pipe around two 110mm waste pipes, set apart very slightly, making sure the overall dimensions kept within 150mm by 300mm. In fact, we made sure that the longer length didn’t exceed 270mm so that there was room to slide the finished article into our tank. We found some left-over waste pipe, made two equal length, measuring 250mm and then cut little slots at one end, all the way around, to form little bendable tabs. We heated up the plastic to bend these tabs out and then we screwed the two pipes onto a block of wood.

We then started trying to bend the copper pipe around these template, but discovered straight away that the thin walled copper pipe kept on buckling and didn’t want to bend smoothly around. Oh Dear!

So for Plan B! We decided to use our miniature pipe bender tool, designed to cleanly bend these microbore pipes but at a much tighter radius, of around 20mm, forming a bend that would be only 40mm across for a full circle. We still tried to use our existing template, to bend the copper pipe with right angle corners, and 60degree in the middle when we wanted to make the “figure-of-eight” shape but it was proofing very difficult. It was a matter of getting precise distances from one bend to the start of the next bend, to apply the bending tool in that precise location, to end up having the copper pipe going around the two upright plastic waste pipes. We had a little chaotic set of coils.

Trying out pipe bending

By the way, we were using old copper pipe we had from a previous project some 15 years ago, so we were not losing material here with our experiments!!

What we ended up, as you can see in the photo above, is a random collection of lengths and gaps, which gave us the idea that if we change our approach slightly, like for example, if we build a rectangular box and, instead of the two plastic tubes, we mounted two wooden pillars using 63mm CLS timber, to ensure that we had maintained a cleared section to allow the insertion of the immersed electrical heaters as well. This box measures 270mm long by 130mm wide.

Frame to constrain tube bending

We did another test run and it was much easier to randomly bend the copper pipe at various points, so long as it obeyed the basic requirement of going around each pillar in a figure of 8 movement, it doesn’t matter where or what path the copper pipe takes. It looks quite reasonable.

So, we committed ourselves to using our freshly bought boxes of 10mm copper pipes, and proceeded to bend one column of random lengths and angles, to bend the entire 10 metres of the copper pipe, all into that limiting rectangular requirements. It took a couple of hours to do the job, but we ended up with a column, vaguely rectangular in shape. We pulled the approximately thirteen loops out, stretching it out to about 1metre tall.

First heat exhanger formed

On another day, while waiting for the Cloakroom paint to dry, made two more “coils”, this time only taking about an hour to do all the bends. The third one had a slight crumpling up of one of the bends so we had to chop that out and replace it with a new bend and soldered the replacement back into that location.

Then we did the fourth and final one the other day. We now have four of them, ready to be assembled together later on.

On another occasion, while we were waiting for a new tin of acrylic varnish to arrive, we got on with the job of assembling our four coils, to form a single module, ready to be slid into the Hot Water Tank. So, towards this aim, we put together a rough and ready simple template of our hot tank, just the back and two sides, measuring 600mm wide and 300mm high, and 1700mm long, emulating the shape and size of our tank. Then, we put in 100mm wooden blocks at the top, to make sure that the copper coils do not occupy too far up the tank and we did a similar thing at the bottom, but this time, only a 50mm blocks so we can guarantee a buffer of water underneath the coils.
We then stretched out all four coils, to fill the majority of the space. We noted that we could, and did, slide in pieces of 18mm and 22mm thick boards in between the coils, including on the outside too and that helped keep them much neater and separated from each other.

Now these four separate coils needs to be connected together. I mean the actual copper pipes at each end, so that the water coming in, and out, of the tank, via a 22mm copper pipe, can be split up and flowing around the four group of coils, transferring the energy in one direction or another.
We got a very neat brass adapter that fits to a 22mm size copper pipe and four 10mm holes, arranged in a two by two grid, on the other side. We managed to carefully bend each separate coil “tails”, sometimes with an extension piece, and connect each tail into this adapter. Then, we cleaned all the joints, put on flux and then got our gas torch to heat up all the joints and melt solder in the joints.

Heat Exchangers Base

Heat Exchangers base manifold

The 22mm copper pipe went up the middle and pokes out the top end.

We then repeated the process to the other end of the coils, and soldered the adapter and joints in a similar manner. This time, we put on a little short piece of the 22mm pipe. Both of these pipes will have elbow right angle bends but we will do that later on when we got the whole thing inserted into our tank.

We then bend a small piece of 10mm pipe, into a “U”, to make a “foot” to take the weight of the heat exchanger and also maintain a 50mm gap at the bottom of the tank. That was also soldered into place too.

Then we slid in a length of 28mm copper pipe down through the coils and anchored that into place by twisting some thick copper wire we found in our left-over cable scrap box. We also threaded some more of the thick electrical wire (we stripped off the plastic coating) and anchored the coils together as well, to stop it wiggling around.

Heat Exchangers in place

Another additional little task we did, was to twist little pieces of wire on the outside of the coils, between it and the walls of the tank, to provide a simple way to make sure that the coily module will sit nice and centred in the tank and keep away from the wall surfaces. We had to solder these pieces into place, to stop them twisting out of alignment.

All these pipes (the two 22mm ones plus also two 28mm ones) and also a 15mm filling pipe that we haven’t mentioned yet, will all need a tank connector mounted at the top of the tank, to allow the copper pipe to gain access to the outside world. But, we want to slide the copper pipe right through these connectors, but that can’t happen until we have grinded an internal flange away. We used a 16mm HSS drill to ream out the 15mm tank connector, and used a tungsten carbide grinder to do the job in the four larger connectors.

Tank Connectors reamed out

finally, we could do a “leak” test at last! We connected up our compressed air adapter which we had previously assembled, using various plumbing bits and pieces, joined to our tyre adaptor. We push it on the 22mm pipe, blasted air down inside the long coily pipes, to remove any rubbish. Then, we put on an end stop on the other 22mm pipe and built up the air pressure inside the pipe. We had a hissing sound!! We squirted some soapy water on everything, to track down the source of the hissing noise and eventually located it to a repaired section where one of the inline joints was leaking. It took us two goes to plug the gap in the joint with melted solder. We then tested everything again and this time, we held tight! Our testing adaptor has a digital pressure gauge and we put in 3.90bars of air and it stayed steady for a couple of hours, only very slightly dropping to 3.88bars, which is probably as a result of temperature change. We had squirted more soapy water on all the joints and see if bubbles formed like a little miniature volcano .. but none developed. Yippee!

The last thing we did, was to slide a length of plastic 10mm pipe down in among the coils, to serve as an temperature probe. We sealed the bottom end with a brass end cap compression fitting, to make it water proof, but also, to provide a good metal heat sink to help warm up the thermometer sensor that we will slide down inside the 10mm plastic pipe. We even put in a blob of thermal transfer paste, to help improve the connection between the thermometer sensor and the hot water that it will be measuring near the bottom of the tank. We did another one, but a much shorter one, to measure the top of the tank.
That concludes making the Heat Exchanger module !!

The next job is to patch up the tank itself and then we can install the heat exchanger in for real, and connect all the pipes through those tank connectors to the outside world!!

6 July 2024
Exterior Larch Cladding and Oak Frames Cleaned and Oiled

In the glorious sunshine, while it was far too hot indoors, we decided to start one of our Summer job now. We needed to do some serious maintenance to our exterior cladding of our house, giving it a thorough clean, and give it a good treatment of oil, and perhaps a touch of colour dye as well.
So, the first part of this task, is to clean the larch cladding and the oak guttering and the oak surrounds at each window.
We got our pressure washer out, pulled the hose off the reel, all 50 metres of it and only just got to the far end of the house! And started washing down the walls, using the rotating nozzle that seems to do the trick of shifting the dust and dirt out of the grain of the wood. Some of the larch has fungi growing on them as well, especially in those locations that don’t have a lot of sunshine on them, and gets wet from the rain. We are planning to apply some anti-fungi treatment, mixed in with the timber oil solution as well and give the wood some protection against further fungi growth.
But, right now, we slowly worked our way around the whole house, doing each section by section. We even blasted the gutters as well, they are starting to turn silver and the pressure washer seems to give them a new leaf of life and colour again.

P1 Wall before cleaning

Clean a Stripe

As you can see from the photo, the walls were definitely grimy, and also, much of the original “burnt” colouring has disappeared as well. It is amazing that the Sun was able to bleach even the burnt colouring. O Boy!

So we now have a fresh looking house again!

Walls all Cleaned up (1)

Walls all Cleaned up (2)

Walls all Cleaned up (3)

We have decided that the Larch Cladding had come out much better than we thought so we are not going to add any colouring dyes to the timber oil and just leave it natural.

We pulled out a spray machine that we required from somewhere in the past but discovered that the old Lead Acid battery was dead. After replacing that with a 12V mains supply adapter, we got lovely pumping noises .. but no liquid coming out the nozzle! Upon opening up the little pump, we discovered that the rubber membranes had stiffen up and were no longer flexible anymore. So, we ordered a replacement 12V pump, trying to match the specifications, like size and shape and wattage, as much as possible. Our new one is only slightly more powerful but otherwise the same. We swopped the two pumps around and we now have a lovely sprayer. We poured in our timber oil we still had from our original application and poured in about 25litres into the tank. We started on the O section, at the back of the house, and worked our way clockwise around the house. We even sprayed all the Oak framework around each window, plus also the Oak covers on the corners of the building.

Cladding all re oiled (1)

Cladding all re oiled (4)

Cladding all re oiled (6)

Cladding all re oiled (8)

We then had to wash all of our twelve windows, to remove the oil that had splattered onto the glass. We used a handy little vacuum wiper that sucks off the soapy water after the glass has been scrubbed.

And, because we had washed the windows, we went around and painting more oil onto the sills. Some of them needed three coats of the oil before it stopped soaking in.

Finally, we spent an afternoon, rubbing down the Oak timber, to reduce the “fur” texture that had lifted off the surface after we had blasted the timber with our pressure washer. We used a soft sanding pads to knock off most of the white furry surface, also rubbing the sills as well. Some of the windows needed a bit more energetic scrubbing using courser sandpaper.

5 July 2024
The Leak From Gutter in A-B Corner Repaired

While we had this lovely dry weather, we tackled a problem we had with our Gutters in the A-B corner of our house, above our Kitchen window and the Front Door section. We had a steady dribble whenever it rains, underneath the guttering and dripping off the fascia. It does not do this anywhere else so we had to get up there to inspect the rubber liner and interface to the downpipe module.
This involved us having to unscrew the thin oak batten that is clamping down the metal mesh and the edge of the rubber membrane. It was rather difficult because we filled the gap in among the holes in the mesh with silicone sealant and it has stuck itself rather well. After a careful teasing away the rubber material, we could finally bend back the metal mesh to give us access to inside the Gutters.
Here we discovered that the rubber liner has become unstuck off the glass fibre resin surface and therefore, allowed water to sneak backwards underneath the liner and eventually found a joint from one piece of oak to another, and dribbled out.
So, it is a case of re-sticking the rubber membrane back down again. but, will it? It is very dirty so we did a lot of cleaning and looked at the old glue on the back of the rubber, got some solvent which seems to be able to soften the old glue and start removing it.
At this point, we decided to pin back as much of the rubber material out of the Gutters, to allow the wood to dry out more thoroughly before we continued with the repair job.

Lifted the rubber in AB Corner Gutter

After a couple of days, while fortunately the rain held off completely, the Oak wood is looking much better now. We prepared the glass fibre surfaces by rubbing it down with sandpaper, some powerful solvent and also cleaned the rubber membrane as well. We then coated both surfaces with a good quality contact glue, where we then waited for those coated surfaces to dry, before we carefully rolled the rubber membrane back flat down along the whole gutter section and getting it nice and flat on the glued area. We then went to find some extra rubber membrane material and cut ourselves a piece measuring 100mm wide and about 300mm long. This went across the front edge of the downpipe channel so that the gushing water coming off the valley of the slates up on the roof, will be deflected away from the open edge of the fibre glass and the front Oak vertical cover.

AB Ruibber glued back down

We put in a little bit of mastic sealant in the edge of the rubber membrane that flattens across to the fibre glass, to make sure no water can creep into and underneath the rubber protector.

We then treated some of the timber with anti-fungal timber treatment solution, by dribbling some of the liquid down between the rubber membrane, to discourage any further fungal growth etc. before we pinned the rubber back down along the front vertical part of the guttering. We squirted a line of black sealant glue on top of the rubber strip, before bending the metal mesh, along with the wooden strip, back down and screw it all back down tight again.

And mesh back in place

Now we need lots of rain to test our work .. phew!

29 June 2024
Sorting Out Pipes and Doing the Floorboards

We have been tackling our Utility Room, to sort out the pipes that have been “coiled” up in a untidy bunch for quite a while now, so that we can assemble the rest of the floorboards in the room. Why you may ask? It is because we actually want to get on with implementing and building the main Air Ducts that runs around the triangular void space up on the first floor, and we are going to use our left-over sheets of the 22mm thick floorboard pieces. But, we need some to finish off the flooring in this room, our Utility Room first! It would be really annoying to discover later on that we don’t have enough of these specially made sheets that has proper tongue and groove joints on all four edges and they cost an extra premium for that.

So, we have been sorting out the water pipes that are bunched up, all coming from various sources all over the house. There are a pair of pipes from each of our five Energy Modules, a pair of pipes that goes to and from the two extreme corners of the house, ready to connect to our Swimming Lane, and finally, an additional pair of pipes, this time coming from our Garage and the Thermal Solar System that we will have mounted on the roof.

But, first, we had to lay down the other half of the Swimming Lane connection that comes from the very very far corner, outside the Patio area. So, we had to lift all the hatches down our Hallways and across the Great Room, and slide in a single length of 15mm plastic waterpipe, connecting to the length of pipe that is coming underneath the Great Room flooring. And terminating in our Utility Room. Hence why we wanted to get that done now so we didn’t forget it later on.
We sorted out the bunch of pipes so that all the high filling pipes were grouped together, all seven of them and then the second bunch had the low filling point pipes. Then we cut two 95mm round holes through the cupboard wall underneath the flooring level, as high as possible and separated by about 100mm between them. We then pushed the collection of pipes through these holes, untwisted them and then anchored them up the wall, ready for further work later on.
This includes connecting two 22mm pipes to the Garage’s Solar System as well, and having that coming around and joining with the other pipes.

The other major pipe we sorted out, is the circulating hot water system, using our 28mm pipework. We needed that pair of pipes to curve around and enter into the Cupboard as well. So we drilled two 38mm diameter holes near the other holes we did earlier, over near the air ducting so they were relatively close to the Hot Water tank etc. The hot water only needs to connect to the pump, a flow rate sensor, temperature sensors and a couple of isolating valves plus also a couple of draining points.

Plant Cupboard Incoming pipes

Now that we got the pipework sorted, we now can complete the floorboards for the Utility Room, making sure that we use enough chipboard floor pieces, to cover the entire room. We won’t glue or screw them down because we still got a lot of stuff to do underneath in that space, like building the Air Ducting and putting in several more conduits for connecting data cables etc.

Utility floor completed (1)

Utility floor completed (2)

We needed two and a half more boards to get it all done.

It was quite tricky in getting the last section done, the doorway area going into the hallway. It was a funny “L” shape piece, with a little notch cut out as well, to fit around the corner of the cupboard. The last piece was relatively easy and only needed to glue on an extra 50mm wide strip of the chipboard floorboard to finish the job.

With that now complete so we can start working on building the Air Duct upstairs !!

24 June 2024
Broken Window!

While out cutting our jungle, oops, I mean, grass, we discovered that one of our windows on our mini-digger is broken. It is the lower window on the front. It could have been broken for a few weeks as we rarely go past the digger. It is safety glass so it has shattered into lots of small pieces. There is no evidence of vandalism so perhaps a bird strike. Poor bird.
We picked up most of the broken glass and have measured the gap so we can order a plexiglass replacement. It measures 795mm wide and 530mm high. We also will try and find a rubber seal that will join between this fixed section of glass, and the moving window above it.
In the meantime, we covered up the poor old mini-digger in tarpaulin, to minimise the rain from getting inside.

The new window came a few days later and we cleaned up the seals and installed the new plastic, we applied some sealant where necessary.

Digger front window got broken

And replaced with Polycarbonate

24 June 2024
Construction and Decoration of Cloakroom

Now that we have finished installing the air ducting and water pipework that are travelling underneath the Cloakroom, we are now tackling the task of building up the inner surfaces of the walls inside the Cloakroom. One of the first jobs, is to put on horizontal utility rails on the door wall, so that we can have a small “control” panel beside the Vanity Unit and the entrance of the door, to provide knobs and buttons, to control the water coming out of the spout in terms of temperature and flow rate. Also, we would have a display to show the temperature when the water is flowing, and default back to showing the time otherwise. There would be a loudspeaker built in so we could have gentle music, or play gentle tones like the hourly chimes etc. finally, there would be a button to make the doors open!! We set this Utility Channel a little bit higher than our normal height, adding another 100mm. We wanted to keep clear of the Vanity Unit so that it is easier to keep the area clean and dry, and keep any water from splashing up to the Oak “control” panel.
We also put another “control” panel over near where the toilet is situated. We created a niche in between two vertical legs, measuring 350mm wide. The niche is based on the same size and position as the Utility Channel, lifted up that extra 100mm higher. This niche will provide a place where we can put in controls for flushing the toilet, controlling the lighting levels etc. We drilled a hole in the bottom rail for a 20mm pipe, to go down inside the wall, underneath the floor and then back up inside the wall beside the doorway, to the other control box. Then we put in a short pipe connecting this control box to the Hall’s Utility Channel, so we can bring in data and power cables from the outside.
The second control box also have a 20mm pipe put in the side and that travels down the wall and this time, goes across to the toilet and terminates inside the toilet internal framework. This will provide the means of adding extra features to the toilet, like having a heated seat, or perhaps have sensors to detect when the seat has been lifted up. A third hole was also drilled in the side of that control box, a smaller hole, to take a small 6mm plastic pipe, which also goes down the wall and across to the toilet as well, which will join with the existing bellows that causes the flush action to occur.

We have measured exactly where these control boxes are, so when the wall boards have been installed, we can cut out the small segment of the wall, to to replace it with a piece of oak which will have the buttons and bits and pieces on them.

We then turned to the task of installing the toilet framework and cistern into the body of the wall. We have gone for wall mounted toilets so it makes it much easier to keep the floor nice and clean, but also, hides away the cistern itself too. There will be just a small square access removable panel, so one could service the cistern, or even replace the filling mechanism etc. Everything is hidden inside the wall itself and will only show a small push button to flush the loo. We decided to take the opportunity to raise the toilet up higher than typical toilet bowls are, because it is sensible as we are all getting older. This metal framework provides a method of sliding up and down, to control the overall height of the ceramic bowl and we went for an additional 100mm higher, to make it come up to around 500mm off the floor, instead of the usual 400mm. Having done that, we then could measured the position of the large waste soil pipe and cut a piece to go horizontally from the stack, which then turns 90degrees upwards to join onto the elbow connecting pipe that comes from the ceramic bowl itself. Now, that we got this major pipework in place, we then could secure the framework into place using four coach hex-headed screws, two at the top and a further two at the bottom. That is it!

Cloakroom WC Frame

We then connected the cold water 15mm pipe to the back of the unit, using a tank connector fitting to a copper pipe, which we soldered on a short piece of copper pipe and then bolted on a right angle bend which then had the plastic 15mm pipe inserted in and tightened down.

Back of Cloakroom WC Frame 2

We put in a couple of 20mm pipes, one of them coming from Bedroom One’s Utility Channel, to provide mains electricity if we ever needed that and the second pipe, coming across from the small control box already mentioned above.

That concludes all the conduits and pipes going from here to there, including going under the floor as well, so we could get on with the next task. This is where we put in lots of glass wool pieces in that large space under the flooring, like we have been doing in all the other rooms, to insulate against the cold (or perhaps hot!) concrete slab.

Cloakroom floor insulated

Then we glued and screwed the floorboard pieces that were already done (years ago!).

Cloakroom floor down

This meant that we can now, and did, install the first layers of wall boards. The first layer is the usual 18mm OSB sheets and we worked our way around the room, doing each wall segment. Some of the pieces had pipes sticking through, like the 32mm waste pipe socket, waiting for the pipe to come from the basin, the bigger 68mm air ducting and the 15mm hot water pipe, to connect to the spout sitting on the Vanity unit. The tricky bit was the toilet wall, because it had two round holes to put in, plus also the “access” panel to the cistern, but also, a future rectangle access panel just above the ceramic bowl itself.

At this point, we decided that we would install some additional lighting into the Cloakroom so we could see what we are doing better! We had various samples of LED lamps so we gathered three of them together and placed them on short pieces of 12mm thick plywood and hang them up inside the ceiling space so that they don’t intrude into the room itself as we will be moving around and fitting large pieces of our plasterboard sheets. We wired the lamps back out to the Hall and put on a pull-cord switch for a local control when we have turned on the Hall lighting.

The next job was to trim the excess OSB material away from the door edges and also to cut out the Utility Channel that is beside the Vanity unit as well. At this point, we had a sudden thought that we had forgotten to make some provision for a future installation of more sensors and controls in and around the Vanity Unit itself, like detecting when the water is overflowing, or controlling the water by tapping the spout. So we needed an additional 20mm conduit installed, coming from inside the proposed Vanity Unit cabinet and going up to the Utility Channel we had just cut out. But, in order to do this, we had to sliced away a small portion of our new wall, to expose the hollow wall and the lower part of the utility channel framework itself. There, we drilled a 22mm down through the CLS timber for a conduit to fit through. We then took two pieces of our 20mm wide rigid plastic tubing and heated them to bend them 90degree right angles in them. Them using a small piece of 25mm wide water pipe, we could join the two halves together to form a single continuous conduit, going through the aforementioned hole. We finally, drilled a 20mm hole through the OSB cut-away piece, and then glued this piece back into the wall again. We will sand it all down once the glue has set rock hard and it will all disappear when we cover the walls with our plasterboard material anyway!

Next, we sanded all the wall surfaces, to remove any splinters and roughen up the surface, ready for the glue. We also gently washed the walls down with a damp cloth as well, to remove the dust.
Now, we can proceed to put on the Fermacell boards (our high performance plasterboards), and started on the back wall where the toilet will be hanging. We measured the locations of the various holes, including the “letter-box” future expansion, we drew a thick black line around the edge of the rectangular hole, wrote the exact measurements on the wall itself and then took several photos for future records ..

Cloakroom WC Slot dimensions

.. and we continued to measure the other holes etc. The width of the wall in total was 1100mm so we collected up a sheet off our pile and took it to the Great Room where we had our working table set up. We marked out the newly measured locations of the four round holes (one large one, one medium one and two much smaller ones for the bolts) and the large rectangular hole for the “pretty” plate that has the flush buttons on it. These got drilled and sawn, as well as the whole sheet was sliced narrower to that 1100mm width. We test fitted the board back in the Cloakroom and we only needed to rasp some of the edges a little bit, to make them fit smoothly. Once we were happy, We dampened down the back side of the fermacell sheet, and sprayed PU foam glue all over the wall, put extra construction PU glue around the toilet holes and pressed the sheet into place. We then stapled it all over and screwed a half dozen of short screws in and around the various holes, to make sure that the fermacell is well and truly squashed flat against the OSB board, so that when the ceramic toilet bowl itself is bolted into place, it won’t crush, wobble or damage the fermacell material.

We proceeded to cover up the other five surfaces in the room, including doing the surrounds around the door entrance way itself.

Cloakroom Fermacell Up (1)

Cloakroom Fermacell Up (2)

Cloakroom Fermacell Up (3)

Cloakroom Fermacell Up (4)

Cloakroom Fermacell Up (5)

Before we could get on with doing the next step with the skirting boards, we needed to trim all the corners, plus also slice a small radius on the outside corners (the two vertical edges and one horizontal edges of the doorway, and also the corner of the linen cupboard). We had to open both of our doors to let out the cloud of fine gypsum plaster dust to slowly drift out of the house!!

The next job was to put on the skirting board, but not a traditional wooden kind, but, made up using more fermacell material, cut to produce a heap of 100mm wide strips. We recycled many of old left-over pieces we had lying around on our sheet rack and from doing the current covering of the Cloakroom’s walls. But before gluing and stapling them on to the bottom of the walls, we passed them through our table router which had the giant quarter turn of a circle router bit and adjusted so that it sliced off a glancing chunk of the fermacell, to make a smooth and slightly elongated curve at the top of the skirting board pieces.
We went around the whole room, which adds up to about 6metres in total, gluing and stapling each piece in place. The only section that needed special treatment was the section underneath the Vanity Unit, because it is where the fresh air comes out into the room. So we make a special piece where we curved up and over the “hole” and then filled in on either side with smaller lengths of the skirting boards.

We then sanded the three outside corners, to make a gentle bend around from one line of skirting to the next line. All these skirting boards will be ultimately covered up with the glass fibre resin combination, going right across the floor and making a waterproof sealed surface.

Next, we filled in all the staple holes, rubbed down the occasional joins, and filled in the five inside corners and smoothed down by using a 32mm diameter pipe, to produce a gentle rounded contour. We did the same with the floor to skirting board edges but this time used a 50mm diameter pipe so the fibre glass and resin covering will smoothly curved around up the edges, to make it nice and easy to wash the floor. We went around putting a little bit more on the vertical contoured corners, to help fill in small gaps etc. and then rubbed down using a piece of sandpaper stuck to a short length of the 32mm wide pipe so that we could end up all nice and smooth.

We also have been testing various combinations of fibre glass and resin on test samples of the chipboard flooring material, to see how well it sticks down etc. We also painted fermacell pieces too. Then, we coated some of them with the finishing “top-coat” to see how slippery it could be to walk on. The test revealed that it is very well stuck down and the white top-coat is not that slippery when it is dry.

So with that in mind, we proceeded to prepare the fibre glass matting for the floor, tearing pieces off the roll, to put down three layers in total all over, with one layer going up the skirting boards around the edges. We needed to achieve this task of painting the resin into the glass fibre, in such a way, that we can reach over to apply the resin without stepping on to any “wet” parts. This meant that the pieces of matting had to be arranged so that each portion of the Cloakroom was completed fully, before moving along to the next section. We decided to do the area under the toilet first, then do the vanity basin section next, and then the middle section and finally the doorway area to finish off. These jigsaw pieces were bundled up and put into a line, ready for the actual application of the polyester resin. The doorway had an strip of 12mm plywood covered up in parcel tape, to make it non-stick and screwed down so the edge of the fibre glass can be terminated neatly to approximately where the sliding door will hang. This 12mm thick plywood strip is a guide to control how much glass fibre we should put down and we are aiming for a gentle slope going up when exiting the room. This will provide a double useful feature; one for keeping in any water spills and secondly, to make the transition from the hard, and much thinner floor covering, to the much thicker carpet and underlay that will be put down in the Hall. So, we had a pile of torn off pieces of the fibre glass matting, getting narrower and narrower, as we get closer and closer to the “barrier” defined by the 12mm plywood strip. This task took several hours to get right!
So after lunch, we got on with the job of mixing up the resin, we put in red colouring dye, to give it some interesting shade of colour and mixing batches, one for each section. We had five mixing pots so we started with 1.2kg of resin, put in 12ml of hardener and got on with the three matting pieces next to the toilet wall. We discovered that we needed to mix a further 500grams to finish off this section. Them, we proceeded with a 1.6kg of resin, to do the section under the Vanity unit and then moving across to the middle section with another 1.6kg of mixture. The last section of the floor had a 1.5kg of resin and then finally, an additional 600grams to build up the slope in the doorway. This took about three hours to complete this task, making sure that all the layers were pressed down, using the metal ribbed roller, to get rid of air bubbles and make sure the resin is well mixed with the glass fibre. All the skirting boards had plenty of resin brushed on them as well, as we were doing each area.

Cloakroom Floor main fibreglassing done (1)

Cloakroom Floor main fibreglassing done (2)

We did come along and lay down another heap of glass fibre strips across the doorway, to build up the gentle slope, to raise up the surface so that it meets the carpet and underlay out in the Hall.

Cloakroom Raising the threshold

This is the basic floor covering, which we will double check for bumps, sand the surface to make it smooth and then apply a finishing coats, perhaps two coats, to provide the waterproofing seal to the whole room and 100mm up the walls. This final “top-coat” will be done later on when we have finished routing various conduits going over the Cloakroom before we install the ceiling fermacell boards and complete the whole room, including painting it and the walls with our colour scheme. Once that is all done, we then will do the final coat of resin on our floor!!

So talking about conduits, we did that task of putting any conduits up inside the ceiling space, see Installation of a Variety of Conduits from Tech Cupboard for details.

Next, we installed some lighting conduits up inside the ceiling, short 40mm flexible conduits that goes from one lamp position to the next one, and then another short length to connect to the outside world in the Hall, to join up with the controller board out there.

The final job to do up there, is to build an air ventilation module that will allow a circular “pretty” vent to be installed in the middle of the ceiling and then a 100mm diameter flexible pipe to come out the side of this module and goes through several joists, heading towards the main ventilation ducting that runs right around the whole house, up on the First Floor, inside the triangular void space. We constructed the module using pieces of left-over floorboards and glued and screwed it together to form a box. We then slid inside a piece of flexible plastic sheet, it is only 2mm thick and we cut it down so it fitted inside the box, but push it into a curve to help guide the air flow more gently around the bends. We also put in two little side wings as well, to guide the air towards the output pipe connector, which is actually a sweep right angle bend, with a socket sticking in the correct direction, to take our purple flexible pipe that will go through the joist as mentioned above.

Cloakroom Air collector

The last piece to put in is a small bracing wooden bar across the box so that the “pretty” air vent cover can be fixed up against the ceiling surface later on after everything have been painted.

Now that we got our air vent module built, we push it up into the correct location, approximately centred in the middle of the room and marked off where the air socket is facing the webbing of the joist. After taking it out again, we proceeded to saw a series of 114mm diameter holes through five consecutive joist. We wanted the flexible purple conduit to poke up just before our main Air Duct which runs around inside our triangular void space upstairs. We drilled two overlapping large holes through the floorboard so it produces an elongated “oval” hole for the purple pipe to slide through at an angle and reasonably pointing towards the future Air Duct.

Cloakroom Air collection in place

Cloakroom air goes through joist and upstairs

We slid back the air vent module and screwed it in so it is all flushed with the bottoms of the joist and then pushed the purple pipe into the side socket and sealed it up with aluminium tape.

That concludes all the conduits and pipes that lives up in the ceiling space, so we could start the process of installing the fermacell sheets up there to cover up the joists .. at last! But, one of the first tasks to do, is to glue a strip of “2 by 1” batten around the edge of the walls so that we had a something to enable us to screw up the ceiling boards. Sometimes, the walls are positioned in between joists and there is nothing up there to secure the edge of the fermacell.
Next, is cutting smaller pieces of the fermacell material to build up the jigsaw pieces to slide horizontally into each section. It was quite an effort to work out the precise order. We took advantage of the joists running across the room, to act as a wide battens to allow us to butt together the two edges of the fermacell and have it nice and tight and flat, without having to do any major sanding. We got it organised so that we had only one tongue and groove joint to do, connecting the piece above the Vanity Unit and the two pieces over the door entrance. We ended up with four pieces.

The next task is to drill various holes for the three lamps and a giant hole for the air vent. We didn’t want to have to cut these holes upside-down so we did it while we had the pieces loose.

Now, it is time to glue and screw them up! We used our construction PU glue because it has a much longer working time, to allow us to slide the pieces around, to get them joined together and hooked into place, before we screwed any of the four pieces. We even pre-started the screws while each piece was lying on the floor so we didn’t have to used two hands to hold up a screw and drive it in. It helped enormously, so much so, that we are considering buying another piece of equipment to automatically drive screws in, by just using one hand – the screws are held in a long strip which automatically feeds into the screw driver!!

We put up the piece over the Vanity Unit first, then the Toilet piece next, then the middle piece and finally the fourth piece over the door entrance way. We put plenty of glue on all the joists and battens, plus also the fermacell joints as well.

Next, we went around filling in the edges at the top of the walls, to form a gentle contour between the wall and the ceiling, at the same time, filling in the little gap that we had at the top as well. We used a 32mm diameter plastic pipe to shape the tile adhesive mixture, because we got loads of it, but also, it is very easy to rub it smooth afterwards.

We also put up our white concentric ventilation cover, in the new large hole, screwing it into place, plus also, we put in three flush fitting LED lamps too.

The next job is to rub down all these fillings and apply additional treatment to areas that didn’t quite “do the job” first time around. While these are drying, we carried on making the heat exchanger module for our Hot Tank.

Now reaching this point in our Cloakroom, we proceeded to spray the walls and ceiling, with the first coat of white emulsion paint. Our very useful sprayer machine is a powerful machine and did a quick work of covering all the walls and ceiling. We took down the air ventilation grill and put little plastic bags over the three LED lamps and sealed them up. They still glow brightly so they are still helping us!
After the first coat, we went around and gently rubbed all the surfaces and discovered several missing holes which didn’t get filled in. We also spotted some of the joints between fermacell pieces that also needed more attentive work done to them too.

Cloakroom first coat of paint (1)

Cloakroom first coat of paint (2)

Cloakroom first coat of paint (3)

The second coat is now on and we are nearly there. The surfaces is much smoother now, but, we still spotted unfilled holes !! So, we carried on and filled in those little holes and rubbed the surfaces down again smooth.

It is now ready for the final coat of paint and doing the wallpapering. Our next job is to clean and oil the exterior cladding and oak frames.

22 June 2024
Installation of a Variety of Conduits from Tech Cupboard

Today, we spent all day installing a whole load of a variety of conduits, all coming from the Tech Cupboard, but going off to many different destinations, to serve the different rooms up on the First Floor. We wanted to get these conduits installed, travelling through the First Floor joist space, to route the various diameter pipes through some of the joist and then pop up into the edge of each of the rooms.
The first one we did was for Work One, which is situated near the Great Room end of the house, over the Kitchen and Bedroom One. It had a mains 230V conduit, a low voltage DC conduit, both of these were using black 20mm plastic pipe, and a third bigger flexible 40mm wide conduit, to hold a number of ethernet CAT6 cables, and even perhaps a fibre optic cable as well. All three needed to to travel from the Tech Cupboard, starting at the ceiling line, and also avoiding the Steel C-Channel structural steel element that joins the steel legs together, drilling holes through the webbing, the middle part of the I-beam joist, and getting through some noggings as well. They came out of the Tech Cupboard, cut across the Hall Two, and then across the Cloakroom, before shooting upwards through three holes that have been drilled through the CLS timber and floorboard.

Work 1 Conduits through ceiling

Conduits arrive upstairs (1)

This was the main reason for doing this task now, is that we wanted everything that it going over the Cloakroom, to be implemented so we could mount up the final element, the ceiling and get it sealed and ready for painting.

But, once we started this task, we felt that it would be a good idea to complete installing all the other conduits that serves the other rooms upstairs. So, the next destination was both Work Two (located over the Entertainment Room) and Work Three (that stretches over a whole bunch of rooms, like the Bathroom, Tech Cupboard, Knick Knack Cupboard, Bedroom Three and the Utility Room as well). We needed another double set of the three conduits like before, which are located much closer to the Tech Cupboard this time. It needed only to come out of the cupboard and immediately bend upwards just outside the doorway, in Hall Three, to go through five different holes. The sixth hole was only another couple of feet away across Hall Three and goes upwards near the metal leg. All six holes were drilled through the CLS footplate similar to like the other place.

Work2 & 3 Electrical conduits

Conduits arrive upstairs (2)

The final conduit that we needed to put in, is a 20mm black pipe which will supply DC power cables and one House Bus network cable, all the way up inside the Skylight Chamber. It went straight up through the floorboard, right next to the metal leg and then straight up this metal leg until it is right up high enough to reach the Skylight Chamber, a solid box that will cover up the ventilation extraction points, the solar panels and also provide lighting for these spaces upstairs.

We now have a neat line of conduits, all with their labels, anchored up near the ceiling, four coming from the low DC power section, three fatter pipes positioned over the Network Patch panels and the further three pipes anchored over the mains voltage consumer units.

Tech Cupboard DC & Network conduits in ceiling

Tech Cupboard mains conduits in ceiling

This concludes this task of having conduits, empty at the moment, ready for wires to be threaded later on, and all we need to do next, is to put in a couple of lighting conduits between the three lamps and to install a extract air vent boxing up inside the joist space above the Cloakroom. Then we are ready to install a fermacell board across the ceiling, round the inside corners and get the surface ready for painting.

13 June 2024
Installing Utilities underneath the Cloakroom and Beyond

We started putting in the Utility pipes and ducting underneath our downstairs toilet, which we are calling by its traditional name of a “Cloakroom”, which is a very odd name as there is no evidence of cloaks or hats or sticks at all!
We wanted to make progress on implementing an actual toilet, fully flushing and everything, including having a working hand basin as well. So to achieve this goal, we needed to make sure that we have installed all the necessary pipework, and air ducting, that goes under the floor, to the other Ensuites behind, including going upstairs too.
Our downstairs Hallway have various Utilities travelling down its length, the major Air Duct travelling down the middle of the house and both hot and cold water in the side branch. So this is where we need to “tap-off” several feeds to each of our surrounding smaller wet rooms, like the Ensuites, toilets and shower room upstairs.
So, we started by putting in two manifold “distributors” in a line, and connected to our pressurised cold water. Each of these manifold units comes with three 15mm side branches so we have six in all. Four of them will be heated up by the hot water and fed to the following destinations; the Shower Room upstairs, the Toilet’s basin upstairs, Work Room Three’s Sink upstairs and the Cloakroom’s basin.

We installed a length of 15mm plastic water pipe, insulated in 75mm thick tubular foam for our cloakroom downstairs and left it sticking out of the wall, ready to be fed through holes in the wall boards when we get that far. The other end will be connected to our hot water mixer / heat exchanger unit which is located in the hall, along with a motorised valve so the computer can control the flow of water going into the basin. Then we did a second hot water 15mm pipe wrapped in more of that 75mm foam insulation material, went up inside the wall space to the First Floor joist and then sideways to head to the back of the upstairs toilet and then turned upwards and be ready for plumbing into that basin. There are two more hot water connections, the shower and workroom sink, to be done later on as these don’t cross our Cloakroom.
The other two 15mm connections are straight direct cold water feeds to the cistern for the upstairs toilet and the cloakroom downstairs. They were threaded through the walls from under the floor and is now waiting for the equipment to be installed.
Then we put in a 32mm wide waste pipe that connects to our main waste stack, drilling out a side connector and inserting a rubber bung that has a 32mm hole to take the waste pipe coming from the basin. We terminated this pipe 6inches off the floor, sticking out of the wall that separate the cloakroom from the Linen cupboard. Again, we will have to drill a clearance hole through the wall boards when we come to fit them up.

Cloakroom Water supply

Now it is the turn of the air ducting.
The air ducts needs to travel all the way to the far Ensuite (number Two) and we decided that we needed to build the framework for both Ensuites flooring so we had legs to attach these tubes to. See
Ensuite 2 floor framing (2)

The following air tubes to install, were the orange flexible 50mm diameter conduits. Another long one to take fresh warm air to Ensuite Two, to approximately half way on the back wall, ready to plug into a left, and right, distributor, one for the Vanity Unit, and the second one in the Shower area. These are much slower and are used to provide a constant room temperature gentle air flow to keep the room fresh and dry. Of course, this utility will slow right down, or even stop, when one is having a shower. Anyone would feel a draught when one’s body is wet all over, one would feel the chilly breeze!!
A similar air conduit is installed for Ensuite One, to swing around and terminate about half way in the middle of the back wall, opposite the entrance way.

The next orange conduit is for the Cloakroom and then the Linen Cupboard, needing only short lengths but this time, we connected a right angle bend on the ends and carefully positioned it so it points into the room. The Cloakroom will have this fresh air come underneath the Vanity unit, again slowing right down when the room is occupied. The Linen Cupboard had the 90degree bend pointing upwards near the back of the floor and this will provide lovely fresh warm air constantly inside the cupboard and keep our linen dry and fresh.

Air supply for linen cupboard

The final orange one is being another 50mm flexible conduit to supply fresh air to the upstairs toilet, so it has to travel across the Cloakroom and then bend up inside the wall body (the wall that separate the Cloakroom from the Ensuite One) and then travel sideways inside the First Floor Joist space, to reach beyond the boundary of the Toilet, at which point, it will turn upwards and plug into another right angle bend, to poke out just underneath the Vanity unit like this cloakroom.

Air supply for upstairs WC

The final piece of air ducting to do, is another rigid 68mm brown pipe, for another high-speed hot blast, going to Ensuite One, just the other side of the dividing wall from the Cloakroom. This will also turn up inside the wall space and pop out around chest height too.

Air ducts under cloakroom

All these air ducts will be connected to our main Air Duct, using specially design “collectors” that draws a controlled amount of fresh air out of the air stream, concentrates it down to a smaller diameter, passes through either a water based radiator, or an electrical heater, plus also an air flow rate sensor and a temperature sensor too and then further reduce in diameter to fit either these 68mm pipes, or the 50mm diameter conduits.

This concludes this piece of work, putting everything we need underneath the flooring, in the Cloakroom, and we can now glue and screw down the floorboards at long last. We then can start building up the walls!

27 May 2024

Floor Framework for Ensuite One and Two Constructed

While working on the Cloakroom and installing various utilities under the floor, we realised that the two Ensuites behind the Cloakroom needed to have their wooden floor framework built so that we could route the various pipes and air ducts across and use legs to tie them down.
So, starting with Ensuite One, we got out our laser level line generator and got the laser line aligned to the doorway plank of CLS timber that is already there with then allowed us to see the projected line on the back wall. We marked the wall posts 20mm further down and this will introduce a very slight slope downhill from the entrance way, ensuring any water to flow away from the bedroom and towards the drain. We then cut a piece of treated timber to do the two side rails, measuring 1724mm and 1690mm (one of them had a gap to fit in). They were glued and nailed with 90mm nails on all the wall posts they covered. And then the back wall got it horizontal rail, measuring 2070mm and that got also glued and nailed too. We decided to divide the room up so that there are three further horizontal pieces to complete the floor framework. They measured 1650mm each (plus or minus a few millimetres!) and we then put three legs underneath each one. We rotated the joist so it flat and taking up less room, to maximise our plumbing pipes, especially the waste pipe coming from the shower area, so that we can have a slight drop in the pipe to encourage the waste water to flow away but still have plenty of height to allow us to connect this waste water to our heat recovery module.
So, each of these horizontal rails had three legs so we needed to cut nine pieces of the green treated timber and dipped the ends in more preservative solution and then trimmed them just so that they fitted underneath the rails and give a solid support for the framework.

Floor supports in Ensuite 1 (1)

Floor supports in Ensuite 1 (2)

Then, we tackled Ensuite Two and did the same there too. There was a couple of differences, one being that because this room is right in the corner of the building, it had two outside walls, with the vapour barrier membrane plastic sheeting covering up the walls. This meant that there wasn’t any room for having niches and a control box for the shower itself. Therefore, we went out to buy five planks of 89mm wide by 38mm and 2.4metres long pieces, and drilled five clearance holes using our drill press, to make sure that the holes are going in nice and straight and not veer off at an angle. We are screwing these planks through their wide direction so we needed 150mm long screws, hence why we wanted to make sure that we were straight. We screwed these planks 250mm above the concrete floor slab, to allow the horizontal floor joist to be safely glued and screwed without being too near the ends of the timber. The other difference, is that the middle cross rail had to be set at an angle. We did this so we could avoid putting a leg almost in the middle of the accessible region underneath the doorway in Bedroom Two. We needed to maximise this gap so we could fit our heat recovery module in, which could be quite large. So we shifted the end towards the hot water pipe that are encapsulated in PU foam and get the leg quite close. We ended up cutting the end with a 5degree angle and then putting the usual three legs underneath.

Ensuite 2 Wall depth exspansion

Ensuite 2 floor framing (1)

Ensuite 2 floor framing (2)

That concludes this little job on the side, to enable us to get the Cloakroom finished.

27 May 2024

Hot Water Tank Constructed, And Tested!

It is time to start making the mould for our Hot Water Tank this week. We took the material we used for the Cold Water tank and managed to reused most of the pieces. Only one was deemed to be too far gone.
We had a slight delay because our track circular saw machine had suffered an accident (it fell off the table!) and twisted some of the mechanisms. It is an old ALDI product of many years ago but we were very lucky to find a eBay seller that had collected up returned units (somehow!) and just for £50, we bought a replacement machine. It looks and feels brand new, with an original saw blade and everything.

While we were waiting for that to arrive, we switched over to doing work on the Cloakroom instead. We resumed the construction of the new smaller mould, measuring 600mm by 300mm and only 1700mm tall. We decided that we would follow the same design and method of assembly, because one of us (the thin one!) still can slide inside and screw .. and unscrew .. the various fixing points around the base of the mould and up both sides as well. We screwed on a chunk of CLS piece to the bottom board and tied a rope to it so we could pull off the final piece when the tank is constructed and we were disassembling the mould.
We routed all the edges to make them smooth and rounded, just like last time, to provide a gentle change of direction so the fibre glass has maximum strength going around corners. We put it on a large base and then filled the bottom edge with polyfilla to round that final edge that will form the flange of the tank.
The whole thing then got wrapped up in parcel tape, to act as a mould release. We switched back to using the clear sticky tape because we discovered that the brown parcel tape was too thin and it allowed a lot of the sticky to ‘leak’ through the plastic film and deposit it on the fibre glass resin. Our test tank didn’t suffer this fate and that used this clear tape. We had one whole roll left and a little bit on another roll. We almost made it! We had to use some of the brown tape but from a different roll which we hope is of a higher grade and not cause too much trouble. Fingers crossed!

We transferred the mould back to the Garage and put it back on the same spot as the previous tank! It really makes a mess on the garage floor and we will definitely will need to come along and grind off all these splash marks etc.!

We then cut off our giant roll of glass fibre matting sixteen pieces measuring 1850mm each, for which eight of them were folded up into a pile, and the other eight was torn at 165mm from one end. The larger pieces were folded up and put into a pile too. the 165mm cut-off pieces were then torn into eight 700mm lengths and sixteen lengths of 400mm, all in their piles as well. These pieces are the base of the tank, to make eight layers of matting in total. The other longer pieces will wrap around the tank itself, hence the 1850mm number, the circumference of the tank. The final piece of preparation was to cut off our woven glass fibre cloth a piece of 450mm length and cut the width in half, making two pieces of 450mm by 775mm. These will go on the base. Then, two longer pieces of 1900mm to form two pieces of 1900mm by 1550mm which will wrap around the tank, and almost reach the bottom of the mould (the height is 1700mm) but the flange will provide enough structural strength by itself. These woven cloth pieces are very good internal structural elements because they are made using a single fibre of glass filament and therefore, will provide more tensile strength, at the 90°C temperatures that this tank is going to have.

Materials staged for hot tank

We started really early the next day at just after 8am because we needed to put on two layers of what is called ‘Gel Coat’ which are extra thick resin which provides a solid layer of resin without any glass fibre in it at all. The problem is that we have to wait for this Gel Coat to solidify which can take an hour, before we can put on the second layer. Hence why we started so early!! We mixed in a lot of red pigment into our 5kg tin of special resin so we can see how well it gets painted on .. or not. The first layer went on directly onto the prepared mould and left to cure.

First Gel coat applied (1)

First Gel coat applied (2)

we then went off to have breakfast and do some of our morning chores while we waited.

About one and an half hours later, it was firm enough to allow us to put on the second layer. We mixed in a little bit of cyan colouring dye and it turned to a muddy brown colour !!
That is fine as we can see a contrasting colour so we can see where we painted etc.

Second gel coat (1)

Second gel coat (2)

This brought us up to approximately 12noon so we decided to have an early lunch and resume work at 1pm, instead of our usual 2pm.

The next stage is putting on the glass fibre matting and coating it with regular resin this time. We first coated the whole mould with naked resin to wet the surface and helps hold the matting material on. We started at the top of the mould and put on two narrow strips and rolled more resin on top. Then, wrapped horizontally our wide matting strip and wetted that down, followed by the second horizontal but slightly narrower strip, to the bottom half of the mould and down onto the flange as well. Then, we proceeded to do this again, alternating with the horizontally strips so that the join is always well covered. We did the same at the top of mould too, alternating between two narrow long strips and four shorter ones but rotated 90degrees, so, again, the overlapping joints are thoroughly covered and reinforced every time.
We did three layers of matting before we put on one of the two woven cloth layers. We then put on a fourth matting layer on top of that, before we stopped for the day. We were getting tired.

So on the next morning, again slightly earlier than normal, at 9am instead of 10am, we resumed our work of building up layers of glass fibres. We put on two more layers of matting (which are random short pieces of glass fibres) before we put on our second woven cloth. And then we finished off putting on the final two matting layers. We rolled the surfaces all over using an metal aluminium textured roller which is designed to colligate the various layers of glass fibre and the resin together and also make sure that any trapped air bubbles are forced out of the mixture as well. We have been doing this several times over during the whole job.

All layers applied (1)

All layers applied (2)

We left it in the middle of our Garage for a few days, to cure and harden, before the next job of removing the mould.

After a couple of days of curing and hardening, we tackled the job of removing the wooden mould. The first job was to trim the flange all the way around, using our wiggle saw and a piece of 25mm thick piece of wood as a guide. This will provide a flat surface for our lid to sit on when we have finished installing the various elements that will be dangling inside the tank.
The next step in removing the mould, is to unscrew the base off, which then gives us access to all the screws that holds the four long pieces in place. we had to crawl inside with the screw driver, to reach those screws!!

Undoing mould fasteners

All the way in…

Then, we could lever off each side in turn, taking out the wider ones first, and then the two narrow ones last. This left the bottom piece, the base. It is an 18mm thick OSB board and we tried .. and tried .. and tried .. to tug on the rope to yank this final piece out. But, it refused to move!

In our wisdom, we thought that we had given the bottom piece enough freedom to rotate out when it was pulled via the rope, but it seems to be well and truly stuck.

This means that we had to crawl up inside and use various machine tools to the board .. but it was very nervous because we didn’t want to damage the fibre glass and its waterproof coating. So, we slowly hacked our way through the layers of the OSB board, pulling off small strands and eventually, we manage to reach through and get a crowbar in to lever one larger piece off, which then allowed the crowbar to reach in and lever the second half off!! O Boy !

The destroyed Top of Mould

But .. ..

We had after all scratched in several places, and gouged one spot deeply, plus also one of the corners seems to have lost a piece when this stubborn board finally popped out.

This means that we have to do some repair work so we cleaned everything, sanded the surfaces to roughen it up for the new coat of resin, blasted it with our compressed air and then give it a thorough wipe with Acetone to also help ?key? the surface, ready for the resin. We mixed 65mg of our red resin, dropped some cyan into it, to turn it brown so we could see where we had painted it and then mixed in 2ml of hardener to make it set in a quicker time, but also, to make sure that this resin will cure thoroughly and not leave a sticky surface at all.
We then crawled in with a light strip, and dabbed the affected areas.

Damage repaired

Now it is time to test it. We left it alone for the weekend and then poured in water to find out if we had got any leaks!!

Testing the hot Tank

But alas !!!!
We still had a single leak, near the top, about 300mm down. How frustrating that is !! Because, it is a learning process each time we step forward with the next version, but, the trouble is, this hot water tank, is our final version and we are not planning to make any more!! We have analysed the surface inside the tank and we got lots of horizontal grooves of varying lengths all over the place and we realised that these grooves were caused by the sticky tape we wrapped around the mould and it buckled up occasionally, especially when we were going around the corner from one face of the mould to the next one. in hindsight (how awful is that?!), we should have cut off these buckled up tape and stuck on a short piece over the top to make it all smooth again. As we say, it is no good knowing that NOW .. we are not making any more tanks !!
Phew!

Oh Dear! We have a leak

As you can see, we are going to have to crawl inside and carefully paint each of these grooves whenever we find one. It will be difficult but just about possible. O Boy!!

25 May 2024