I try not to be too negative, but...

Part of the purpose of this blog is provide a warning to people (like myself) who might be considering building, about some of the things that can go wrong. I've talked about the underfloor heating I am putting in. One of the requirements for this was to have off-peak power. We had allowed for 3-phase power, but off-peak wasn't something we originally planned for so it needed to be a variation. In addition, because the local electricity board don't provide a meter that can simultaneously provide 3-phase and off-peak, we would need to have three separate meters installed. This means we needed a larger meter box, which means a variation to be done before the brickwork was completed.

That's okay, I got in early. I let the selection consultant know what we would need and asked her to get back to me with a quote. I have had some trouble with email not getting through to her so a week later I phoned and sent it again. This time I faxed it as well. Then I phoned to make sure she got my email: yes, she got it, it shouldn't be a big problem, wouldn't even need to be a variation. Sounds too good to be true doesn't it... and it was. It turns out the email she had received was another of mine in which I said that Eden's electrician would have to do some pre-wiring. So a month later I look at the meter box and think, "That looks a big small..."

Oh dear, I discover the problem -- she never got my email. Okay, I try to remain calm and try to find out how we can fix this problem. Obviously the meter box will have to be replaced with a larger one, but it's not too big a deal since the gyprock isn't up yet. I once again send a detailed email and fax it to her, then phone to make sure she has got it. Two weeks later, after reminding her a few times, she finally gets back to me this afternoon. Yes, she says, they can fix it. It will cost about $450. Okay, that's not too bad, I think.

"So that's to put in the new meter box?"

"That's to put in an extra circuit and run the wires from the heating coils back to the meterbox."

"No, that's what Eden's electrician is doing, I need you to fix the meter box."

"Oh, that's not what Mr Sandwich got a quote for..."

Of all the useless balljuggling... Why? Why did I send an email? Did anybody read it? Why get Mr Sandwich to get a quote when he has no idea what is required? I can't believe they spent two weeks getting a quote for completely the wrong thing.

After a few minutes she gets back to me. "They say it will be cheaper to get your other electrician to do it, he can just put in another board."

I'm pretty sure no other board is going to fix anything. They need a bigger meter box and they need the electricity authority to install three meters. I have serious doubts even now that they know what is required. Must phone them again tomorrow ... and try to stay calm...

Fix those bulkheads

Well Mr Sandwich said he would fix the bulkheads and look, the very next day they have been adjusted so they now follow the cupboards much better. Impressive.

Also the electrician has been back and put in most of the light switches and power points.


And they have started tiling. Yesterday I met the tilers and they did the screeding. Today they put down the porch tiles and the floor tiles in the bathrooms. Check out the Smartile grate.

Cupboards up

Now the overbench cupboards are up in the kitchen it's looking more like a kitchen. They've put these bulkheads above the cabinets though which:

1. don't line up very well with the cabinets, so they'll have to fix that up, and
2. DON'T give the impression that the cupboards go all the way to the ceiling (like the sales consultant said they would -- she even saw our cupboards and said, yes, it will be just like this). Ho hum.

And now, the underfloor heating story continues. So now I've talked about in-slab heating and in-screed heating, but there is a third kind of heating cable I needed to install. This is because the vanity and toilet parts of the three-way bathroom were not set down, so can't be screeded (or they would be too high). So in this area we need a much thinner cable at closer spacing which the tiles are laid directly over the top of. Here you can see I've started laying out the cable. The floor needs to be very clean so the tape will stick. We use spray adhesive on the floor to help the tape stick too.

Once all the cable is laid and taped in place we put a fibreglass mesh over the top and glue it down to protect the cable (and stop it moving) during tiling. Here you can see it ready to be glued down, before I stuffed the electrical connections into a hole in the wall of the bathroom next door.

Carcasses and cabinets

Well the second fix carpentry is well underway. We have doors hung and door furniture -- we are now locked up. Check out that lime green. Yesterday they delivered the cabinet carcasses and today they fitted most of them and most of the window and door architraves. It is really looking like a house.

A room full of cabinets.












Put it all together and what have you got? A kitchen... sort of.








How can you tell that you are a perfectionist?

They have put in the vanities now (still no screed -- they keep walking on the heating cables and breaking the cable ties; I should check that the cable resistance is still correct) and you can see my marking was slightly wrong. I forgot about the kick box.
So I rewired this part. Check it out.

Wiring the floor

I have to backtrack a bit now. Those who know me well know I can talk about thermal mass and energy efficiency at length, but I'm not going to go much into that just now. Let me summarise my position here: I am interested in good design and energy efficiency and I am happy to invest my time and effort doing some modelling to investigate worthwhile options, but unfortunately (since I am not a millionaire) I am largely limited to implementing ideas that are cost effective and can pay for themselves in a reasonable time.

I originally wanted to put hydronic heating through the slab -- ie. pipes through which water is pumped -- and the primary reason was to enable access to the huge thermal mass tied up in the slab and footings, in a kind of semi-passive cooling system. Unfortunately this turns out not to be cost effective, and that's primarily because of the huge amount of pipe (they use plastic plumbing pipe) that is required. In addition the engineers want the slab to be an inch thicker, and use thicker reinforcing mesh.

So, in a not-particularly-clear segway, I decided instead to put resistive heating (ie. electric heating elements) in the slab. The reason I decided to do this is because it costs about 30% what hydronic would cost. Of course it only does heating, which isn't the main reason I wanted hydronic, but since you can run the heating off-peak it still seemed like an attractive option. And I can save half by installing it myself. And by 'myself' I mean, I can get my friends to help me :-). It's a good thing they did too because I never would have managed to do it in one weekend by myself.

There are a few simple rules to follow when laying electric floor heating. The most important one is DON'T CROSS THE WIRES. I got great instructions from Eden Comfort Conditioning about how to install the wires. They advise to generally try to run the cables parallel with the top bars of the mesh, use plenty of cable ties, don't go under walls (might end up with a dynabolt through it), and when you get near the end of the roll, unroll it to see how you're going. (This is even more important for the in-screed heating -- see later.) That's because each heating cable is made to order and can't be cut. It has a 'cold tail' which joins onto the heating element, and the entire heating element must be embedded in concrete.

I also prepositioned some plastic conduits for digital temperature sensors. Long-time readers will be familiar with the pain I've since been through to make sure (belatedly) that I can actually push the sensors into the pipes as far as I need to (the longest one is 8m). You can see the plastic conduits under the mesh here. They all come up in one central location (in what will be a cupboard) so I can connect them to a digital controller.

I decided to heat our large open-plan living area (kitchen, meals, family), the hallway and bathrooms. The hallway because it runs the length of the house and I figure it will help to keep the whole house warm. For reasons I don't completely understand Eden Comfort usually put higher power output in the wet areas. They were very helpful so I really didn't want to argue too much, but I really would have preferred to put all the heating cables in the slab because then they would all be done and out of the way now. And I wouldn't have to learn how to install cables in-screed as well, which is what Steve and I have just done last weekend (I think I must owe Steve a whole house of help by now).

You see the wet areas are normally set-down a little during the main pour to allow the plumber to get the slope to the drain just right by pouring a screed before tiling. So in-screed means we attach a light mesh to the slab and then attach the heating cable, much like as we did to the mesh in the slab, but this time at 100 mm centres (vs. 200 mm centres in the slab). It's much easier to see the kind of patterns you end up with. The blue part is a waterproofing paint where the shower cubicle will be. I have marked out the vanity and toilet and you can see we have not heated in those areas. You might notice it gets a bit wiggly in the shower cubicle. That's what happens when you get near the end and find you have an extra metre or so to use up. This was the second bathroom and we had already learned our lesson. We had to redo the first one because I got to the end and had another 2 m to use in a much smaller room than this one. You can see what I mean when you see how wiggly this is!

They're doing WHAT now?

Oh boy, not sure how to start this one. First you need some background: we are having in-slab heating, the resistive kind. ie. a heating element embedded in the slab which is heated (off-peak) to release heat during the day.

I'll go into it more soon, when the rest of the cables are installed. You see part of it was installed in the slab, but in the bathrooms it goes on top of the slab, under the screed. Anyway, these heating cables need to be wired back to a control panel on the meter board. As this heating system is being provided by a separate company (not through the builder) they need to put this wiring in, independent of Coneheads' electrician. This other company want to do their wiring after Coneheads, so that... well I don't really know why.

So the electrician was there last Thursday. I phoned Eden Comfort on Monday (okay I should have phoned on Friday but I didn't think about it) but Chris said all his electricians were at Kangaroo Island until Thursday, and were all playing golf the following Monday. At this point the supervisor, I'll call him Mr Sandwich, was planning to get the Gyprockers (is that a word?) in on Wednesday but I told him what was happening and he said we could delay them, although on Tuesday he said he could only delay them until Friday. Luckily Chris had managed to schedule the prewiring for Friday, so that was going to work out okay. I decided to take Friday off to put in some more sisalation -- I should be able to cover most of the roof with one more roll.

Thursday afternoon I went over to finish off the speaker wire, because I was worried there were a few too many things I needed to do before the guys got much gyprock up. This is what I found when I got there. There was insulation up in all the walls, and half the gyprock was up, including half the ceilings. Both the garage and alfresco (the two main areas I still wanted to put sisalation in, because there won't be any other insulation there) had the gyprock up. I went to work on Friday.

I was so pissed off. I phoned Chris's electrician first thing in the morning and the first thing he said was that he had another job to get done today and mine would have to wait until Saturday! I laughed. I phoned Mr Sandwich too to ask him why they had already started when he told me they wouldn't start until Friday. He said, "What, have they already started?" I wonder if 'Supervisor' is a euphemism which really means 'Customer Liason'. I asked him to make sure they did not cover any more wires. Anyway, the electrician managed to get there in the morning to see what he could do, but by the time he got there all the gyprock was up. Brilliant.

Electrical

The electrician has been and done the first-fix electrical. Mostly what he has done looks good, there are just a couple of switches that look like they are going to be in the way (note for next time: you really should dimension everything, including heights for power points and windows). The only thing he's done which really irritated me is he has nailed down some of the structafloor catwalks I had cut. Now I had deliberately left these loose so I could move them, and because I didn't want people putting their stuff on them. So what has he done? He hasn't just nailed them down, he has run electrical cable down their length and nailed it on with clips. Git.

Oh boy am I running out of time. I have finished one roll of sisalation and started the next one, and I have rolled out 100 m of speaker wire and bought another one. As always I wonder if this (especially the sisalation) is really worth the effort, but you can feel the effect even on a cold day when the sun warms the steel roof for a few minutes. Behind the foil covering the radiated heat is much less.

Oh, by the way, many people are confused about which way the reflective side should face. The funny (and confusing) thing is that it really doesn't matter as long as there is an air gap next to the reflective side (100mm is plenty). The reason for this is that a highly-reflective surface has low emissivity, so one way around it reflects heat up and the other way around it resists radiating heat down, ultimately reaching a higher surface temperature until it radiates the same amount of heat upwards. It would presumably work twice as well if it was reflective on both sides, so it's a bit of a shame that it's usually painted on one side. Incidentally, the reason there needs to be an air gap next to the reflective side is because otherwise thermal conduction will ensure it is at the same temperature as the material it is in contact with.

I'm taking the day off tomorrow to do some more, and meeting the supervisor later so I can ask when it might be finished. He has the tendency to tell me what he thinks I want to hear, when what I really want is a realistic estimate.