Week 6, Day 1

Week 6, Day 1:

  • Ongoing progress on the below-ground blockwork walls.
    • The perimeter walls are now complete but the internal walls need to be constructed to the same level before the floor can go in.
    • Some of the internal walls (e.g. either side of the hallway) go all the way up through the house to help support the roof and are constructed using a single skin of 140mm blocks.
    • Other internal walls are only there in order to support the floor beams, to avoid them having to bridge an excessive span. There’s such a “sleeper wall” across the middle of the Living Room.
  • Delivery of the concrete beams for the beam-and-block ground floor.
    • The blocks to in-fill the gaps between the beams arrived on Friday (Week 5, Day 5).
  • Further work to back-fill the trenches for the GSHP collector pipes.
Week 6, Day 1

Week 6, Day 1

Concrete beams for ground floor being delivered

Concrete beams for ground floor being delivered

The concrete beams for the ground floor, supplied by Stressline, are more sophisticated than they appear at first glance. The longer beams have a wider ‘T’ section and more steel reinforcing wires as per the photos below.

3300mm concrete floor beams with single steel reinforcement wire

3300mm concrete floor beams with one steel reinforcement wire

4300mm concrete floor beam with dual steel reinforcement wires

4300mm concrete floor beam with two steel reinforcement wires

5200mm concrete floor beams with triple steel reinforcement wire

5200mm concrete floor beams with three steel reinforcement wires

Week 5, Day 5

Week 5, Day 5:

  • Back-filling the northern GSHP collector trench with a layer of sand and the excavated soil together with a green polythene marker tape about half way down.
  • More work on the below-ground cavity walls.
  • Fixing the last piece of steelwork, the post for the corner window in the north-west corner of the Living Room.
Week 5, Day 5

Week 5, Day 5

North-west corner post

North-west corner post

Completed below-ground cavity walls on the southern side

Completed below-ground cavity walls on the southern side; 100mm blocks and a 250mm cavity. The steelwork is deliberately in line with the inner skin of blockwork, allowing for a full-thickness layer of cavity wall insulation (which will be Ecobead Platinum) to prevent thermal bridging.

Steel columns attached to blockwork using Ancon Teplo-L tie

Steel column attached to blockwork using Ancon Teplo-L-Tie, with a much lower thermal conductivity than a traditional metal cavity tie.