Plumbing a new house - price

P

powerpack

Guest
Hello

I am rebuilding a house from scratch. The roof is now going on - hence time to pin down plumber. I have had a quote from a plumber. The list is 5 en-suites, 1 main bathroom , 1 utility bathroom ,1 kitchen , 1 utility room , 1 cloak room, 1 hot press, 7 bedrooms, 2 sitting rooms , 1 study. The kitchen will have under floor heating and a solid fuel cooker. the rest of the rooms will have radiators. The house will be zoned into 3. The house will also have an outdoor oil burner. The main sitting room will have a back boiler. Outside will have 3 taps. The price is 5700 for labour. The plumber will provide me with a list of what he needs. Is this price OK ? What should I be doing at this stage to avoid mistakes. The house has a deep private well. All advise will be welcome and used.
 
The labour price is very difficult to gauge - is there pipework in place for rads and/or are you redoing everything from scratch.

You seem to have the zone idea right but putting underfloor in the kitchen only. You need to do a search of the threads here and elsewhere about underfloor heating and the fact that you need the heating on all the time to maintain the heat. You then also have complicated control/mixing equipment to control/feed the underfloor as it does not need to be as hot as the water feeding the rads. It would make more sense if you wanted to go that way to underfloor heat all the day/living/bathroom areas and rad the bedrooms. Think of it this way you want heat in the kitchen, bathrooms and hallways in the morning. The boiler is firing all night to keep the kitchen at a comfortable level(setback) and then it comes on full blast in the morning to heat the rads - think of the oil you would be using.

With five bathrooms you should invest in a large min 300 litres steel glass lined cylinder which would be run as a pressurised system see www.rvr.ie for idea of prices.

Also
do you want showers (pumped or just standard pressure) in each ensuite?
what sort of quaility bathroom suites do you want prices range from €220 to €2200 and beyond?
Perhaps you should think of getting a dual coil cylinder and have the solid fuel heat some water for you.

The best way to approach this would be to sit down and write out what you want as a consumer ie loads of hot water, energy efficency, easy controls etc etc and then take it from there.