After experimenting with different quantities of the Nutshell natural pigments we finally got around to applying them today. We've protected the front door with Osmo UV protection oil which has also enhanced the natural grain and colour in the wood. For the softwood frame we've applied the same oil with a mix of black and ochre brown Nutshell pigments and, with some suprise I must admit, the result is great and looks almost indistinguishable from the oak door. When you consider it only took half a hour of playing with the pigments to arrive at the right colour mix I think this is what you call a result. Very satisfying as well, certainly beats choosing the right colour off a paint chart in B&Q!
Work installing the insulation carried on today, but with a new secret weapon. A friend mentioned in passing that he'd used an electric carving knife to cut foam in the past...so we've borrowed the carving knife and it has made light work of cutting the Non-itch slabs. Bear this in mind if you want to install Non-itch and make sure you have an electric carving knife to hand, after all who uses them to carve up meat anyway!?
Saturday, 30 May 2009
Friday, 29 May 2009
Insulation
With the plasterboard finally starting to be installed the time has arrived for us to insulate the timber frame. We considered using thermafleece and warmcell but ruled both out on cost. Instead we're using Non-itch batts (http://www.greenspec.co.uk/html/product-pages/ybsnonitchcavity.php) made from recycled plastic bottles. Unlike glass-fibre the Non-itch is totally non-toxic or irritant and can be installed without the use of gloves or facemasks which has proven a big bonus now that the warm weather has arrived.
With 150mm thick timber frame walls this insulation, which has similar thermal properties to mineral wool, gives us a U-value better than that required by Building Regulations. It also gives us a good opportunity to a by-product of the recycling industry, after all why put your plastic bottles etc in the recycling bins if you're not prepared to buy a few recycled products?
The downside - the Non-itch has proven difficult to cut. A long Stanley knife has performed best but even that has resulted in a fair bit of embedded energy and a few blisters, largely down to my normally sedentary occupation nodoubt! However, we've installed almost half of it over the last two days whilst also sorting out the veg patch, testing the woodstain, deciding on doors and meeting the builder, along with the usual tidying up of site etc.
With 150mm thick timber frame walls this insulation, which has similar thermal properties to mineral wool, gives us a U-value better than that required by Building Regulations. It also gives us a good opportunity to a by-product of the recycling industry, after all why put your plastic bottles etc in the recycling bins if you're not prepared to buy a few recycled products?
The downside - the Non-itch has proven difficult to cut. A long Stanley knife has performed best but even that has resulted in a fair bit of embedded energy and a few blisters, largely down to my normally sedentary occupation nodoubt! However, we've installed almost half of it over the last two days whilst also sorting out the veg patch, testing the woodstain, deciding on doors and meeting the builder, along with the usual tidying up of site etc.
Wednesday, 27 May 2009
Woodstain
The new front door is white oak which we'll protect using Osmo's UV protection oil, a natural product that we picked up on our last visit to the GreenShop. We couldn't afford a white oak frame to go with the door, neither could we afford a hardwood backdoor. Both are softwood as a result. Rather than have a huge palette of wood on display we want to ensure that the softwood door frame and backdoor look as similar as possible to the oak front door. So we've been looking at woodstains.
We thought B&Q and other DIY stores may have suitable water based and naturally made products but it's no big suprise to find they don't. Instead they stock Ronseal and Colron 'extremely damaging to the environment' products. We didn't bother buying them even though being evironmentally friendly has (once again) made life more awkward for us.
Instead we've visited Footprint building in Bristol, as they stock eco-fiendly wood stains and treatment. We've bought two glass jars of Nutshell pigment that Footprint reckon is perfect for mixing with the Auro oil to create the shade of stain we require for the softwood. So we'll try a little eco-paint alchemy tomorrow.
We thought B&Q and other DIY stores may have suitable water based and naturally made products but it's no big suprise to find they don't. Instead they stock Ronseal and Colron 'extremely damaging to the environment' products. We didn't bother buying them even though being evironmentally friendly has (once again) made life more awkward for us.
Instead we've visited Footprint building in Bristol, as they stock eco-fiendly wood stains and treatment. We've bought two glass jars of Nutshell pigment that Footprint reckon is perfect for mixing with the Auro oil to create the shade of stain we require for the softwood. So we'll try a little eco-paint alchemy tomorrow.
How's your Swedish?
We took delivery of the pellet boiler yesterday - it's big and very heavy! Turns out that the boiler, auger and hopper are all made in Sweden. As with a well known Swedish furniture superstore, we shouldn't have been suprised to find that there was an element of 'flat-pack' in the delivery!
Fortunately the boiler and auger were fully built in 3D, it was just the galvanised hopper that came flat-packed with a box of rivets, a rivet gun and a set of instructions. Unfortunately, and unlike the Swedish furniture, the instructions hadn't been translated from Swedish. But they did came with a reasonable number of photos, so with some of common sense and engineering know-how we managed to work out what goes where.
Now that the hopper is assembled we've left the plumbers to get on with the job of connecting up the pipework and installing the flue.
Fortunately the boiler and auger were fully built in 3D, it was just the galvanised hopper that came flat-packed with a box of rivets, a rivet gun and a set of instructions. Unfortunately, and unlike the Swedish furniture, the instructions hadn't been translated from Swedish. But they did came with a reasonable number of photos, so with some of common sense and engineering know-how we managed to work out what goes where.
Now that the hopper is assembled we've left the plumbers to get on with the job of connecting up the pipework and installing the flue.
Wednesday, 20 May 2009
Biomass boiler
The boiler is almost here! We ordered it from the builders merchant a couple of days ago and it's just arrived in their local depot ready for delivery to the house next week.
We decided very early on in the project that we wanted to use renewables to heat the house, and as a ground source heat pump was ruled out due to problems with the slope (and cost!) a biomass boiler was the obvious choice.
Biomass boilers burn wood or other 'energy crops' (see http://www.nef.org.uk/aboutus/energycrops.htm) instead of oil, gas or coal, using a renewable product (after all it grows on trees!) instead of a hydrocarbon that has taken thousands of years to produce. This makes them a great low-carbon heat source.
There are a range of boilers available including some very hitech ones from Scandanavia, with suitably big price tags to go with all the whistles and bells. At the bottom of the price range are UK made boilers that look like they've been made by a few well meaning bearded men in oily boilersuits in a shed somewhere.
As for the wood fuel, some biomass boilers will burn everything from logs down to woodchip. As a result these are manually fed, making them fairly labour intensive. To automate the wood fuel the simplest solution is to use wood pellets, uniform pellets made from compressed woodchip. This allows the fuel to be stored in a hopper and then transferred to the boiler from a bulk storage hopper via a screw-conveyor or blower.
To make life relatively simple we've gone for a mid-range NuWay Ecoflex boiler with a small 400kg hopper. This 'should' provide us with enough fuel for a week mid-winter so we won't be making too many trips to the boilerhouse to refill it - I hope! With a high level of control the boiler will run much the same as a conventional gas or oil boiler - so there's no need for us to manually light it.
It will be very interesting to see how the boiler performs, especially as the nature of using a solid fuel means you can't switch the fuel supply off in the same way you can gas or oil, so controllability of the heating could be fun!
We decided very early on in the project that we wanted to use renewables to heat the house, and as a ground source heat pump was ruled out due to problems with the slope (and cost!) a biomass boiler was the obvious choice.
Biomass boilers burn wood or other 'energy crops' (see http://www.nef.org.uk/aboutus/energycrops.htm) instead of oil, gas or coal, using a renewable product (after all it grows on trees!) instead of a hydrocarbon that has taken thousands of years to produce. This makes them a great low-carbon heat source.
There are a range of boilers available including some very hitech ones from Scandanavia, with suitably big price tags to go with all the whistles and bells. At the bottom of the price range are UK made boilers that look like they've been made by a few well meaning bearded men in oily boilersuits in a shed somewhere.
As for the wood fuel, some biomass boilers will burn everything from logs down to woodchip. As a result these are manually fed, making them fairly labour intensive. To automate the wood fuel the simplest solution is to use wood pellets, uniform pellets made from compressed woodchip. This allows the fuel to be stored in a hopper and then transferred to the boiler from a bulk storage hopper via a screw-conveyor or blower.
To make life relatively simple we've gone for a mid-range NuWay Ecoflex boiler with a small 400kg hopper. This 'should' provide us with enough fuel for a week mid-winter so we won't be making too many trips to the boilerhouse to refill it - I hope! With a high level of control the boiler will run much the same as a conventional gas or oil boiler - so there's no need for us to manually light it.
It will be very interesting to see how the boiler performs, especially as the nature of using a solid fuel means you can't switch the fuel supply off in the same way you can gas or oil, so controllability of the heating could be fun!
Saturday, 16 May 2009
Reuse, recycle
Along with making Hillside a more pleasant and warmer place to live, we want to be wise in our use of resources, reusing and recycling as much as possible. This was always our intention, even before somebody had coined the phrase 'credit-crunch', and before every TV programme and magazine had latched on to being thrifty and making use of things that would otherwise be thrown away.
This weekend, thanks largely to Brian and his van, we were able to collect 40 paving slabs and a load of decking for reuse somewhere in the garden that would otherwise be thrown away. We haven't decided exactly where we'll use them, but as the slabs weigh 40kg each I'm not planning on taking them up the Hill!
We've also just installed the recycled glass bottle insulation into the 1st floor - funny how it looks so soft and fluffy yet is definitely not something you want to snuggle up into unless you want glass fibre stuck in your face.
This weekend, thanks largely to Brian and his van, we were able to collect 40 paving slabs and a load of decking for reuse somewhere in the garden that would otherwise be thrown away. We haven't decided exactly where we'll use them, but as the slabs weigh 40kg each I'm not planning on taking them up the Hill!
We've also just installed the recycled glass bottle insulation into the 1st floor - funny how it looks so soft and fluffy yet is definitely not something you want to snuggle up into unless you want glass fibre stuck in your face.
Thursday, 14 May 2009
Plumbing
The plumber has been busy over the last 10 days, and his 'first fix' is almost complete. There's now an array of copper pipework weaving it's way through the floor void and walls at Hillside, with a combination of hot and cold water pipework, heating pipes and the pipes that will distribute the harvested rainwater to the WCs.
To allow the plumber to do this we've had to spend a few late nights finalising exactly what radiators and sanitaryware we're buying, and earlier this week we delivered the shower valves to site so they could be installed into the stud-work walls. Great to finally be buying something that's not a basic construction material. That said, we've still been buying some basics - this week it was insulation to put in the 1st floor below the underfloor heating pipework.
Without insulation the heat from the pipes will heat the floor void and the ceilings of the rooms below, which isn't the intention as the heat should be rising into the 1st floor rooms. We'd planned on getting loft-type recycled plastic bottle insulation from B&Q but baulked at the price. So when we saw that they're also selling 200mm thick glass fibre insulation made from recycled glass bottles equating to £1/m2 we thought it was too good an opportunity to miss. It's not as pleasant a material to work with, requiring gloves and dust masks, but as we've got these it's not a problem.
We are planning on using the recycled plastic bottle insulation for the walls of the timber frame, which we'll be buying once the underfloor heating and screed is installed, hopefully before the end of the week.
To allow the plumber to do this we've had to spend a few late nights finalising exactly what radiators and sanitaryware we're buying, and earlier this week we delivered the shower valves to site so they could be installed into the stud-work walls. Great to finally be buying something that's not a basic construction material. That said, we've still been buying some basics - this week it was insulation to put in the 1st floor below the underfloor heating pipework.
Without insulation the heat from the pipes will heat the floor void and the ceilings of the rooms below, which isn't the intention as the heat should be rising into the 1st floor rooms. We'd planned on getting loft-type recycled plastic bottle insulation from B&Q but baulked at the price. So when we saw that they're also selling 200mm thick glass fibre insulation made from recycled glass bottles equating to £1/m2 we thought it was too good an opportunity to miss. It's not as pleasant a material to work with, requiring gloves and dust masks, but as we've got these it's not a problem.
We are planning on using the recycled plastic bottle insulation for the walls of the timber frame, which we'll be buying once the underfloor heating and screed is installed, hopefully before the end of the week.
Sunday, 3 May 2009
Shoots and leaves
May has arrived, and along with it the first of the seedlings have sprouted. Infact only the lollo rosso haven't sprouted, but that may be due to the seeds being several years old! We may have to get some more.
Elsewhere in the garden it's looking distinctly green, despite the building site. Okay, so there are plenty of weeds adding to the green but at it makes a pleasant change to mud! The nettles and brambles are less welcome, and they are something that has had yet another thinning out session today as I slashed and burnt my way through yet more of the bramble patch. Nice to find several apple tree saplings and even candleabra primula growing up between the brambles.
Meanwhile there's been some progress in the house this week with the arrival of the plumber, so we now have some pipework installed. There's a load more yet to be fitted but at the rate at which he's worked over the first 3 days of being on site things should move on very quickly. Let's hope so!
Elsewhere in the garden it's looking distinctly green, despite the building site. Okay, so there are plenty of weeds adding to the green but at it makes a pleasant change to mud! The nettles and brambles are less welcome, and they are something that has had yet another thinning out session today as I slashed and burnt my way through yet more of the bramble patch. Nice to find several apple tree saplings and even candleabra primula growing up between the brambles.
Meanwhile there's been some progress in the house this week with the arrival of the plumber, so we now have some pipework installed. There's a load more yet to be fitted but at the rate at which he's worked over the first 3 days of being on site things should move on very quickly. Let's hope so!
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