Page 23 of 67

Progress on the kitchen

January 6, 2014 / stephen

The shell of the kitchen is now more or less complete. We are ready to start plastering in here. It will probably be a week or so until we get into here since we still have some plastering to do in the old part of the building.

It is difficult to take photos in here and convey the sense of space. The photos below are from a number of different angles in an attempt to provide an overall impression.

This is looking from the kitchen towards the older part of the building. This wall used to be part of the old barn. The upper opening is the balcony from Jo’s upstairs office into the kitchen. There is a doorway (but no door) between the kitchen and the hall as well as an internal window (probably no glass) that looks along the line of the staircase and the upper landing. We have rendered this wall with sand and cement since parts of it were loose.

This is the view from the balcony into the kitchen and lounge.

This is the view from the balcony looking down into the kitchen. The doorway in the distance is into the utility room.

You can see into the lounge (and the beginnings of the new fire place). As well as a doorway into the lounge, there is a large internal square window. The roof trusses are exposed throughout the kitchen and lounge.

This is the view from the top of the stairs. You can see the internal window into the ktichen (the edge of the opening is lined up with the edge of the kitchen units). You can also see the balcony in Jo’s office which overlooks the kitchen. There are a couple of props to camera left where we have made the new opening between the porch and hall.

Water leaks!

January 6, 2014 / stephen

We have had a couple of problems with water leaking into the building – one from under the floor and the other through the roof.

When the new concrete floors were laid in the extension, a 75mm insulation board was put down first and then 75mm of screed on top. The underfloor heating pipes are fixed to the top of the insulation boards and the screed is laid on top. The hot and cold water to the bathrooms, along with the heating for the towel rails, is run underneath the insulation. We pressure tested all of the pipework before laying the screed, but unfortunately it looks as if we have a leak in one of the downstairs bathrooms. The underfloor heating is fine since it is maintaining pressure (if there was a leak the pressure would drop) and the floor seems to have started to dry out now that we have turned off the water to this part of the building. Next job is to dig up part of the screed to find the leak. This shouldn’t be too bad as the wet marks in the floor are giving us a clue where the leak is! The last place to dry on the floor is probably where we will find the leak! A job for this week.

It looks as if the leak is under the floor in the bottom right hand corner. As the floor dries out (we have turned the water supply off to this area), it slowly reveals the location of the leak. The water has travelled along the gaps in the insulation boards under the floor and then soaked through the concrete screed.

The next problem is in my study. Rain appears to be getting in the joint between the roof and the wall. The roof here is a simple mono pitch roof. We have increased the height of the lead upstand on the outside. This has improved the situation, but rain is still clearly getting through. We believe that the rain is soaking into the exterior stonework and then running down behind the lead. One way of solving this is to treat the exterior stonework with waterproofer – something like Clear Cladding from Belzona. Unfortunately, all of the suppliers have been closed over the Christmas period, so we will have to wait until the new year before addressing this one.

It looks as if rain is penetrating the joint between the roof and the outer wall. The roof here is a mono-pitch. Putting an additional lead upstand has helped, but the rain is still soaking through the plasterwork.

This has dried out a bit over Christmas, but clearly rain is still penetrating this part of the roof joint.

What happens if you drive over a hose

January 5, 2014 / stephen

Yep, another hose bites the dust. One way or another, they don’t seem to last very long.

At least this one is connected to an outside tap!

Mmmm…this is what happens if you repeatedly drive over a hose pipe! I am not sure how many hose pipes that we have damaged during the build. We normally cut the damaged end off before it becomes too short and it is thrown away.

Weather station

December 30, 2013 / stephen

It has been quiet over Christmas, so I have taken the opportunity to move our online weather station. Although it has been up and running since January, it has been in the back garden of our house in the village rather than down on the farm. However, now we have a broadband connection and power, it seemed like a good idea to move it.

I am still not quite sure of its final resting place, but for now I have put it at the far end of the sunken garden. Longer term, it is likely to be placed in the back field. I have put power and an ethernet connection there, so this is easily doable. However, that connection is currently being used to power the builder’s cabin, so it might need to wait until they leave site (probably in 3-4 weeks time). For now, the edge of the sunken garden will have to do!

The weather station is a Weathereye WA-22 bought from Amazon (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Weathereye-Outdoor-Electronic-Weather-Station/dp/B001FXICF6/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1388403071&sr=8-2&keywords=weathereye). At under £100, it seems like a really good buy. It was also easy to set up too! The weatherstation connects wirelessly to a console unit. The console connects via a USB cable to a PC. The PC then uploads the data (via customised web pages) to an internet location of your choice. To be honest, I gave up with the software that was included with the package and use Cumulus software which works a treat and is free. You can download it from here: http://sandaysoft.com/downloads

My customised webpages will be found here: www.haggleysfarm.co.uk/weather. You can also use the “live weather” button at the top of this page. The data is updated every 15 minutes. The wind speed and wind direction data on the gauges page are updated every 60 seconds. Obviously you need an internet connection to be able to do this, but the data that it is uploading is very small, so don’t worry about bandwidth limits.

The cumuls software also allows me to upload data to the Met Office. This is done via the WOW (Weather Observations Website) site. This allows you to access the weather data from other personal weatherstation. You can find the Hagg Leys Farm site on WOW here: http://wow.metoffice.gov.uk/sitehandlerservlet?requestedAction=READ&siteID=388746002

I am using a small format PC based on a mini-ITX board to upload the data. It has no screen or keyboard, but I can log into it via Remote Desktop. This means that I can log into it from a remote location. This allows me to reset the weatherstation on reboot the PC without physically having to be onsite. One of my frustrations is Windows Update – it updates the PC and then reboots it in the middle of the night. I have now set up Cumulus to autostart on reboot, but it still occasionally needs a nudge. It is running on an Intel Atom processor and although a bit on the slow side, it works perfectly for uploading the weather information. It also uses only about 70W and is very quiet.

The weatherstation is temporarily sited in the far corner of the sunken garden.

I have had this weather station connected to the internet for the last year, but it hasn’t been on the farm. It has been at our house up in the village.

Problems installing the heat pump

December 24, 2013 / stephen

The ground source heat pump (and associated paraphernalia) was delivered last Monday. Over a week later and we are struggling to get it working properly.

While it only took 2-3 days to get all of the pipework in place, it has taken the same amount of time again to try to get the air out of the system. If there is an airlock in the ground loops, the fluid will not circulate into the pipework under the field and we won’t be able to extract any heat.

Through rather convoluted process, we managed to get all the air out of the system. This included flushing the ground loops with water to drive the air out, venting the ground loop manifolds and running the ground loop pump with no pressure (allowing the air to work its way out of the system). Once the air was out of the system, we checked the strainer only to find that we had picked up a lot of dirt while flushing the system. I guess this is what strainers are for!

With the strainer removed, you can see the amount of grot that has been captured while the system has been flushed. We thought that this would have been the cause of the “low pressure” alert on the heat pump, but sadly not (or at least, not the entire cause).

Our plan was to run the system with water in the ground loops rather than a mixture of water and anti-freeze. This seems to be our next problem – the temperature of the water is reduced to a point where it will freeze in the heat pump without anti-freeze. Unfortunately to get the anti-freeze into the system, we need to hire a pump. In the meantime, the heat pump displays a “low pressure” alert after 20-30 seconds of the compressor starting. Due to the Christmas break this is going to have to wait until the end of the week.

Top marks to Neil and Ricky from Sol-Air Renewables (www.solairrenewables.co.uk) who have really put some long hours in this week to try to get the heat pump up and running.

In the meantime, we are using the heat pump’s immersion heater to slowly raise the temperature of the water in the underfloor heating. We have put the heat pump into “floor drying mode” and this slowly raises the temperature over a two-week period. Even though the ground loops aren’t working yet, we will be able to dry out the floors.

Hopefully we will get some more progress towards the end of this week (most likely Friday).

The ground source heat pump is the fridge/freezer to camera right, the large round tank is a 500 litre hot water tank and the smaller tank is a 300 litre buffer tank (it stores excess hot water produced by the heat pump). Ricky has done a great job of installing all of the pipework. The guys installing the cast iron gutters at the weekend referred to it as “the engine room on the Titantic”. Mmmm. I might see the funny side of it once it is working!

Christmas Eve 2013

December 24, 2013 / stephen

In contrast to last night’s storms, today has been very bright and sunny. But cold – down to 3C.

Here’s a photo that we haven’t seen before. If we ever sell the house, I would put money on the fact that the estate agent will take the photograph from here – it is beatiful rural view with no other properties in the background.

I haven’t taken photographs from this angle before – from the opposite side of the valley. It was a gorgeous day today (Christmas Eve 2013) – cold but sunny – but I only had my Blackberry on me. It will be worth re-visiting with a better camera.

Gutters on the porch

December 22, 2013 / stephen

The exterior of the porch is now finished although it still has to be pointed. The roof on the front elevation – over the kitchen and the porch – has also been finished. This means that we are in a position to get the gutters installed. In keeping with the rest of the house, the gutters are cast iron from the foundry down the road in Holmfirth. We are using pattern 46 gutters – 5×4 on the new extension (as the gutters are lower) and 6×4 on the older part of the property. We have put 6×4 on the porch so that it matches the front elevation of the house.

Once the gutters are in position, they are given a final coat of black paint. There is a sheet of plastic underneath the gutters to stop any black paint getting onto the ashlar underneath.

With the roof over the front of the kitchen and the porch now complete, we can put the gutters up. The gutters on the porch match the gutters on the front of the house – 6×4 cast iron gutters (pattern 46). The gutters come from JJ Longbottoms – the foundry in Holmfirth just a couple of miles away.

Master bedroom canopy

December 19, 2013 / stephen

We have started constructing the canopy on the front elevation of the extension. This runs from the master bedroom and across the top of the large square oak window. It is made of marine ply with a section of wooden gutter inserted towards the front edge. This will then be covered in Sarnafil (an alternative to lead) to make it waterproof. Originally, there wasn’t going to be a gutter in this canopy, howcver, since it is outside the master bedroom, we decided that one was needed to stop water dripping off it during the night. The drain pipe will run down the centre of the pillar and then into a land drain.

Up close, you can see that the pillar that is carrying the end of the oak beam has been pointed (only yesterday). The canopy will continue across and cover the large square oak window.

There is a canopy over the bi-folding doors in the master bedroom. The canopy will be made from plywood with a section of wooden gutter towards the front (the spars have been notched to accomodate the wooden gutter). The canopy will be covered in Sarnafil (a lead alternative).

Pointing in the kitchen

December 19, 2013 / stephen

While we have started pointing the outside of the extension, we have also started on pointing the internal part of the extension. The internal face of one of the walls in the kitchen was built using stone that we reclaimed from demolishing a couple of internal walls in the old part of the property. Since it was raining for much of yesterday, it seemed like a good idea to get on with this internal work. With three people working on it together, it only took a day to get this work finished.

We used the same lime mortar mix (based on Nosterfield River sand and hydraulic lime) as we have used on the outside of the property.

This internal wall has been built using stone from a couple of walls that we knocked down in the existing cottages. We are using the same lime mortar that we are using to point the outside of the building. The chalk marks on the wall are where the electric cables are placed – H + E = Hob and Extractor.

Installing the ground source heat pump

December 18, 2013 / stephen

The ground source heat pump was delivered on Monday and we have spent the last couple of days getting it installed. Most of the pipework is now installed, however, there is probably another day’s worth of pipework to go. The electrician is due in tomorrow to start wiring it up.

We hope that the system will be up and running (although in a limited capacity) by the end of the week. This will mean that we should have heat in the building over the festive period. Because we have laid new concrete floors these need to be dried out – and slowly otherwise we risk them cracking. We also want to dry out all the wood (particularly the oak) very slowly – otherwise there is a risk that this will crack too.

As you can see from the photograph below, this kit takes up a lot of space. We have done the best job we can of reducing the amount of space it occupies (including installing a couple of steel beams to hold the tanks), but even so the utility room does look more like a plant room at the moment!

If you are planning on installing this kind of kit, it would be wise to ensure that you have enough space for it. Our house isn’t small and we are struggling to provide enough space. It needs significant planning well ahead of installation time. This isn’t an issue that the providers make particularly clear when selling the kit (surprise, surprise!).

The ground source heat pump (the unit that looks like a fridge/freezer) is a Nibe 1145. There is probably another day’s worth of pipework still to go in. These systems are complex and take up significant space – this is starting to look like a plant room!

Hagg Leys Farm