Cheryl was pleased with herself, getting the first load on just half an hour after walking in the door at home, but we were then dismayed to find horrible, brown gunk welling up in the washing machine.

I tried cleaning every part of it by hand, anywhere i could get to and did a rinse through, but still the problem persisted, so I eventually got on Amazon and found this Service-it Washing Machine Cleaner by DR.Bechmann, I bought it based on the Amazon reviews saying that it had worked, and indeed, I have just finished using it and it has also worked for us. A simple wash of the detergent tray and round the door seal and then pour the contents of the bottle into the detergent tray and run a 60 degree cycle.

Perfect, as one of the reviews on Amazon says, you can’t see what it has cleaned, but it smells fresh and really cleaned it out well. We will be using this regularly now, it is only £4.79 so not going to break the bank and it keeps things clean.

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You may or may not know the situation we are in, we have extended the back of the house and combined two rooms into one. In doing so we have demolished two previous extensions and made the whole thing into one. In terms of the under floor heating this meant that there were four sections to the floor, the original to the house, two parts from past extensions and one I fitted to the part we extended. This means that there were differing qualities of work. Really I should have scrapped the two floors from the previous extensions, but time and financial constraints meant that I had to make do.

The joists therefore did not match up in terms of their widths or where they run. This makes the planning of the underfloor heating rather difficult.

However, I am jumping ahead a little here, I started off by lifting all the old floor boards, some original and some chipboard.  We then cleared out all the debris from under the floor, debris that had been left from the build, by electricians and plumbers cutting things out. The purpose for this was two fold, if you have ever crawled under a floor you will know kneeling or laying on a broken brick is not something you want to do too regularly! and in addition the clearer your underfloor the better your air flow will be, especially if like us you are going to insulate under your floor it is critical to maintain a good airflow.

As I have just said we were insulating under the floor. The ideal way to do this is by cutting solid insulation such as 100mm kingspan to fit between the joists, this is a very costly exercise and would have cost us in the region of £650 just on insulation alone.

I therefore came up with my own variation on a solution that has been used by others, that was to use rockwool style insulation held up by chicken wire. Fortunately B&Q were (and still are I believe) running an offer on rockwool insulation where you can get it for £3 per roll. Using this offer the insulation cost me just £25 (les actually as I bought too much!)

The idea is that you tack chicken wire in a trough form between the joists, making use that you use enough fencing clouts to hold the chicken wire securely. Also making sure that there is no chance that the bottom of the trough will be anywhere near the ground under the floor thus maintaining an air gap.

We then laid the rockwool into this trough, and then covered the top of that insulation with foil backed bubble insulation. The purpose of this was not so much to insulate, although it does have some insulation properties its self, it was more to utilize the foil to reflect heat from the underfloor heating pipes back up into the room rather than having it carry on down into the insulation.

We taped the foil insulation together with aluminum foil tape, which if truth be told was a right pain as the tape we used was the stuff you have to peel the back off. Once adhered to the foil it is great but it can be frustrating getting the backing peeled off. We also used this tape to tape the insulation to the joists making, ensuing that we left a 20mm gap between the insulation and the top of the joists.

We chose the John Guest 30Sq Meter Hot water insulation pack from Screwfix. Mainly because John Guest is a well known make who we trusted, our research showed that people who fitted it were happy and the pack contained everything we needed to complete the job.

When the kit came, we found that the clips that come with the pack are designed for solid insulation, you twist them into the kingspan. This would be a very quick and simple way of securing the underfloor heating pipes, however, in our scenario with the insulation we used, these were no good, so I bought some normal pipe clips an we secured these to the joists.

The main problem when laying the underfloor heating pipes is the planning. Deciding what pattern the pipes should take, on a single room system there are two loops, these should be as close to the same size as possible. You also want to try and get the first run of the pipe, i.e. the hottest pipes across doors or windows, or in the areas where you will mostly be walking.

Once you have planned the layout, you will need to cut notches out of the joists to allow you to loop across each joist, we designed the system in such a way that we kept the notches to a minimum, basically one at each end of the room.

Laying the pipe is a very frustrating task, the pipe has been coiled since manufacture and all it wants to do is go back to its loop, so it really is a two man job if you can, once holding the reel and un-doing its coil action and the other laying and clipping the pipe in the desired pattern.

Once you have the pipes laid, they have to go into the manifold, you should consult a plumber to connect this into your central heating system. They will also need to add a room stat, this allows you to run the underfloor heating independently of the central heading in the rest of the house.

We then laid chipboard flooring over the top of the insulation and pipes, we made sure that we measured and marked the underfloor heating pipes so that we did not screw through them!

We have a 35Sq meter room, with one wall totally glass and the main part of the ceiling glass, the underfloor heating system copes very well with heating the area up. We have easily had it up to 25°C and I am sure that it will go higher, but I melt at those sort of temperatures so we keep it down to 20°C

All in all we are very pleased with the result, hopefully the insulation under the floor and the insulation in the walls and roof space will compensate for the glass wall and large orangery window we have in the roof.

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You will see from the pictures that we got the second zone installed and then the flooring laid on top. I have roughly drawn where the pipes are as a visual reminder more than anything else. I can not think of any reason I will be drilling or screwing into the floor but you never know.

The system seems to be working very well, we  have easily had it to a toasty temperature, even though we need to re-do some wiring for the boiler to enable us to use the under floor heating as a separate zone to the rest of the house.

We have also re-connected the old sink into where the new one will be in the centre island so that we have washing up facilities for the next couple of weeks until the Units come and I get chance to install the kitchen.

The next two weeks are critical on the project, everything is coming together and the critical path is getting rather tightly scheduled. I need to get the final wall insulated, I will post about how I am going to achieve this with Kingspan. The final bits of plaster boarding and dot and dab plaster boarding done, all the tin work on the corners of the plaster work.

I then need to schedule the Plasterer to come at the end of next week, so that we can give it a chance to dry before putting the base coats of emulsion and a couple of top coats on before the units arrive on the 17th Febuary. That will then mean that I can fit the kitchen the following weekend.

What I have failed to mention in that are those small jobs that take up more time than you think, cutting out the sockets in the plasterboard, cutting out the holes for the down lights in the Orangery roof, cutting out for the light switches, decisions on skirting board etc, etc.

Here are the pictures of the final result of the under floor heating and the fitted floor. I will post another post with the details of how we installed the underfloor heating, the process we went through and what we used to complete the job.

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It all went very well. We took up the old floor and cleared out the builders debris, two full trailer loads. This will help the airflow under the floor ensuring that we don’t get and issues with damp. While doing this I made sure that there was sufficient air flow, the area of the house we are extending have been converted from several extensions, each time an exterior wall has been left intact without any air bricks. I therefore chopped out bricks to allow the flow of air throughout the underfloor. This was critical as the insulation would take up some of the space under the floor so it is essential the the airflow is maintained lower down.

After the cleanup we made sure that all electrical cables and multimedia cables were laid where we needed them and then installed the new plumbing, hot and cold water feeds for the taps to the centre island, cold feeds to the dish washer, washing machine and American fridge freezer, and the waste water pipes from each.

Then we stapled chicken wire between the joists to support the insulation and filled them with rockwool style insulation, ensuing that the chicken wire had sufficient gap under it to maintain an air flow. We could have used kingspan or similar solid insulation, however, this would have cost in the region of £500 and totally outside our budget.

Once the rockwool insulation was down we taped foil backed bubble insulation over the top creating a 20mm air gap between the foil and the top of the joists, this is where the underfloor heating pipes would be laid. The foil will not only add to the insulation properties of the floor but it will also reflect the heat from the underfloor heating back up into the room.

We then laid the underfloor heating pipes on top of the insulation, clipping it to the joists at relevant intervals to hold it.

We have yet to re-lay the floor or finally connect the underfloor heating up to the manifold and into the central heating system, but that is a job for next weekend.

Here are some pictures of the progress and how we achieved the underfloor heating install:

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I made my way to the property and opened the door to be greeted by water pouring through the ceilings in the dining room and living room (and little downstairs utility room). After going upstairs it was the same story, two of the three bedrooms had water pouring down the walls, and through the ceiling.

What is more worrying was the water was gushing our of the electrical sockets and light fittings, water has a habit of finding the easiest routes.

The central heating tanks in the attic had frozen solid,  but the water feed had not, thus meaning that the tanks were continually filling with water. The overflow simply could not cope and they were overflowing.

My advice to anyone with empty properties at this time of year is to make a daily check, if you have your central heating tanks in the attic make sure you check those as well. Condensing boilers are so much safer in this regard as you do not have tanks of water sitting around, however, make sure that the condensate pipe that goes outside is free from ice, otherwise your boiler will overheat and switch its self off.

I had left the central heating on low, however, with the loft insulation this heat had not stopped the loft from freezing. This in turn had stopped the boiler getting its water feed and thus it had over heated and switched its self off making the problem worse.

With temperatures of -11°c even with a property you are living in can easily freeze.

It will be a fairly large insurance claim to put it right, plaster has blown on walls, ceilings are coming down as the plasterboard is sodden, the carpets are ruined, and the whole place will need to be re-decorated just after I had finished decorating from top to bottom after a tenant left the place in a bit of a mess.

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The old boiler in the kitchen was a fairly recent upgrade, it has had a catalog of faults since its install and leaks inside had ruined all chances of it ever running correctly. During the install of that boiler, it seems that the fitters took several shortcuts meaning the that hot water circled round virtually the whole house before getting to the taps in the bathroom. Not great for efficiency and not great when you come to fit a new system and have to try and work out what is going on where.

In addition as the bathroom floor is tiled, the only access we had to the bathroom was from below, the good thing is that we have the plans for the kitchen so we could take down the ceiling in the kitchen to reveal under the bathroom. Although this looks a mess it really will not take too much to sort out. I will be plastering the whole room following the build anyway and I like me ceilings to be perfectly smooth with no artex which the old ceiling had.

While doing the boiler we did a good powerflush on the system, this took some time to do but it will have been well worth it. The amount of thick black debris that we removed from the system must have been impeding its performance and there is no way we wanted all that flowing through the new boiler.

When we took the old toilet and hand basin out of the downstairs toilet we uncovered the original parquet floor. This weekend I have sanded it back to the unfinished wood and it looks fantastic. I just not need to find something that will best seal the wood and then some form of lacquer to finish it.

The next step for the downstairs cloakroom is to find a suitable toilet and basin. I need to take care when finding these as we need to ensure that they fit into the space available. Then it is a case of a little tiled area and some painting.

Thanks to all who helped on this.

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It covers me for Gas, Gas Safety Cert, Plumbing, Drainage, Electrics and electrical safety. Which means that I am left dealing with general maintenance which suits me.

There is a monthly cost to the cover £29, however this is tax deductible and as things stand with how precious time is for us at the moment, this is  an investment to get time back more than anything else.

I will blog in the future about how it goes.

As a landlord I have been researching many aspects of property rentals, from legal requirements, to insurance, mortgages and agents who run fully managed services. I have noted that there are rather few sites with provide all these resources in one place that are also aimed at people like me who dabbles in this rather than someone who has 100′s of properties.

I am therefore wondereing if there is an opportunity to create such a resource.

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