Pressure (air tightness) test completed

Spent last weekend back at the house working on the remaining first fix work scope that is my workscope. The data engineers and electricians are done with their first fix workscopes now. Despite working hard all weekend with mum & dad providing very welcome support it felt like visible progress was limited. Best progress was made on the central vacuum system with outlets installed in half of the 10 final positions now. Routing all these services continues to be challenging, even when you think you have it all thought through actual conditions on site are different and you have to re think what you are doing.

Data cables ready for termination

Central vacuum pipe in recreation room

Back to back socket - recreation room  & bedroom 4

In the shower & utility rooms we did make progress on some of the plumbing. This is probably the most congested area in the house since everything really comes together at this point. Hopefully once we break out from this area things will progress a bit more smoothly . We also installed a temporary toilet & sink in the shower room as we are getting rid of the portaloo to save some money on rental.

Temporary toilet and sink in shower room

We did have one big milestone this past week and that was the sucessful pressure test of the house to demonstrate its airtightness. In our SAP calculations we had assumed a figure of 2 m3/m2/hr and surpassed that with a result of 1.84 :)  It is someway off Passivhaus standards but we have never been working to that standard, just using it as a guiding principle. The results is well above average even for new builds in the UK and exceeds the stringent Canadian standards as well so we are very happy with that. Along with avoiding thermal bridges, airtightness has been one of my focal points during the build and we have put in some additional effort to ensure that we  ultimately have a very energy efficent house which is the real goal. there were a few places identified where we have some small leakage into the house and we will deal with those as we get ready for plasterboarding.

Blower door used for pressure test

The joiners have also been back working on installing the necessary dwangs for plasterboarding so we are now ready from a woodwork perspective for plasterboarding

Dwangs in lounge

We still plan on starting with the plasterboarding a months time but it looks like we will have to stage work to gives us time to get the first fix workscope finished off. I am back agin in a couple weeks time and then Heidi has 5 days at the beginning of September.