Where on earth has that 2 years vanished?
So coming up on the 2 year installation of the inverter and single module battery, and as with most things these days, the gradual improvements to firmware over time have made a huge difference.
So at the last update I'd managed to get the power leakage down through an offset, and the whole system was a lot more accurate, but nonetheless still had a small amount of leakage throughout the day which was averaging around 0.5-0.6kWh,
Just a very short blog to show the windy roost ( not fully finished, is a self build ever?) plant room. I'm quite chuffed I got it all to fit, and I think it's quite neat. It's full DIY and house's the UVC and combined buffer, UFH manifold, MVHR unit, inverter, consumer unit, network hub. All in 4M³. Plus storage to come.
Yes, the printer doesn't fit, but it's coming to its end of life so that's all it's getting for now.
Jobs to do:
Ceiling
Insulate MVHR ducting / box in
Heat capacity is a really simple concept, confusion comes about because it get mangled beyond belief.
Some of this mangling is actually physical i.e. we change the shape of a heated object, and other mangling is with words i.e. not knowing much about the subject.
I like to stick with the physical, it is easy and, more importantly, you can put descriptive units to it.
To start with, let us look at the two types of heat capacity.
Specific Heat Capacity
It has been a lot warmer this week, which is nice, but not so great for doing comparison testing. While my house stayed within half a degree (17.4°C instead of 17°C) the outside air temperature was 8.5°C warmer (8.3°C compared to -0.1°C) over the test period (20/01/2024 to 24/04/2024).
But no matter, I still run the tests with just an air void and the void filled with a product called Fillite, which is hollow microspheres made from silica.
Basically the same pattern was observe
Why do people get so hung up about thermal insulation, it really is not difficult.
The main thing to remember is that the power, in watts (W, J.s-1) that passes though a material is approximately proportional to three things, conductivity (k, λ), temperature difference (∆T) in kelvin (K), and thickness in metres (m).
In arithmetic terms, the thermal conductivity of a material is written as W.m-1.K-1, or W/m.K (as I have never found a way to write a superscript negative sign on m
Everything kicked off on January 8th 2024 finally after 8 years of faffing about and trying to line up finances, finding someone to sign off building regs and a year of selling the old house eventually succeeded.
There was about 120 tons of muckaway judging from the number of trucks. The guys brought a 17 tonne digger and were glad of it. The big roller they didn't use in the end but went with a more compact diesel unit. hardcore was added and leveled.
The trickier element was gettin
It has been a cold week, so just after 12:30 on the 15th of January 2024, I started a small, but limited, experiment.
This was rather prompted by a comment by @Garald who wanted to insulate at the back of his book shelves, and mentioned our favourite insulation, multifoil. @Gus Potter also has a project that may benefit a thin, easy and cheap to make, insulating panel. I think I also made a comment to @saveasteading about this experiment, but can't remember in what context.
Now I hav
After obtaining planning, i got my building controll aplication under way. I had 2 options
- Pay £1100 for Building Notice
- Pay £900 for Full Plans.
Everyone on here recommends full plans, and it was a cheaper fee. I knew i'd have to either pay for the plans or do them myself. I opted to do them myself after loads of research on this forum (particiularily inspired by @HerbJ )
Here's my version of Herb's spec.
Building Regulation Specification Redac
I used the knowledge of this forum to help me work out what i wanted to build. I was told repeatedly to knock down and re-build, and i kinda wish i'd of gone down that route now, but i decided to stick with what i had and make it work. With that said, i'm not paying much VAT, i'm doing a lot of the work myself, and the trades i do employ aren't VAT registered anyway. The 0% VAT incentive of going new build wouldn't have been quite as much as a game changer as i thought it might be.
I
The strip out continued through the months of July and August.
The old shed coming down
Loft insulation out (the itchiest job known to man)
Cielings down
Conservatory down
Floors up
Loading up the skip with non burnable stuff.
And burning the rest
The old garage briefly
before being sold, dismantled and collected
We picked up the keys to the bungalow on 27th June 2023 after a 6 month sale of the our previous family home, a 3 bed semi reovation we completed back in 2019.
It's a 1930s, 3 bed detatched bungalow in Norfolk, set on a plot about 800m2. It had been empty for just over a year whilst a probate of a probate went through.
We already had planning in about 2 weeks prior to completing to get the ball rolling (hence the blue planning notice on the fence!)
Our tale of delays and woe is competing even with @pocster for time taken
From Oct - Dec progress has one again been delayed by weather, flooding, cold and in all honesty a bit of incompetence on our part meaning we are further back than when we started.
This period started well enough with the trenches for foundation filled ready to start building walls.
After digging down and down to the required depth (or so we thought) we started to place the cellcore read
So the site is almost ready to start, my house is sold, moving out this weekend. Got the last tree stump ground out so there's nothing blocking the foundations. But the reason we write some of these blogs is to vent frustrations and in my case today it's about insurance.
My site has Made Ground. I went through the trouble of getting a ground analysis with dynamic probing and there is good load bearing at 2.2 meters but it's poor above that. I switched Structural Engineers and Tanners in Co
It's been a while since my last blog, but we've not stopped, the days are shorter and the weather skipped autumn🍂 and dived into winter with a few storms and loads of rain.
Our windows are budget friendly triple glazed UPVC, and composite doors.
The external EPS was sealed at the cill with EPDM airtight tape, the tape has reinforcement in it and can be moulded, it does crease but creates a water tight junction and sticks like the proverbial to the EPS.
W
Properly chuffed with myself how far i've progressed this year, but its a good time to take a break i feel, before the last huge job of doing the new bathroom, hopefully next year.
Finished the external wall insulation off in the courtyard area, and got my new set of water butts all connected, should provide enough for the front garden and car washing (when i have the energy!) during a prolonged dry period. Just got the silicone to do on the corner and the join.
In my topic Modelling the "Chunk" Heating of a Passive Slab, I discussed how I used a heat flow model to predict how my MBC WarmSlab heated by UFH + Willis heater would perform. What I wanted to do in this post is to provide a “6 years on” retrospective of how the house and slab have performed as built based on actual data that I’ve logged during this period, and to provide some general conclusions.
In this, I assumed 15 mm UFH pipework, but we actually used 16mm PEX-Al-PEX pipework with a
So in the last couple of months we've moved on quite a bit for us.
We started on our next section of the build, to be the snug and entrance hall.
This is the sticking out part of the 'L' of the build.
We removed the roof covering some time ago, so at the start of July it looked like this.
Then the 4 layers of floor and internal walls were broken down
Still in the Sales cycle for my old house (3rd try!) but while I'm waiting I'll be doing site clearing work next month and I want to take a moment here to make final decisions on my wall build up as this moves the locations of my floor penetrations by 100mm.
Target U Values are as follows:
1. External walls U value = 0.1 W/m2K
2. Sloped Roof U value = 0.1 W/m2k
3. Floor U value = 0.07 W/m2k
This is based on PHPP calculations, they are more strict as my house is quite sm
Sunday in the Highlands, and the weather has a feel of changing, we've been so fortunate on the build so far, day 105 today, but the last week or so has been wet, windy, sunny, overcast usually everyday. So autumn is on the way.
July and August have been busy with the 2 cabins with around 100 nights occupied, that's over 250 people staying, and 30 +dogs 😂. The upshot being we can afford to eat, but the labour for the build has been affected with Mandy continually cleaning and washing.
So to recap: we bought an old house with a bit of land at the back. We tried to get permission to knock it down and do a new build passiv house in the backland. The council said no no no, we lost an appeal, then put in ridiculous plans for a massive extension with basement on the existing old house, plus a large stable block on the back land where we wanted the new build. Council said yes yes yes, thats fine, please go ahead....
Having never built anything major before, we hired a 9
I just noticed that my last entry was 1st June and now it's mid August.
Where does the time go.
Once again we've lost time on the build, HID did too much breaking and hurt his back and we got a new puppy who is a huge time waster. Although I WFH I also have to visit clients so quite a bit of puppy sitting going on.
Then there has been the weather, total opposite of last year.
So, down to what has been done.
The first main wall is now u
My previous blog entry ended at submitting the building regs in March, although they were not validated until 5th April and then refused on the 31st May. I believe my architect had complained on them taking too long so I am guessing when they found he had not included a turning circle for a fire engine they refused them as giving the architect extra time would have hit their own time targets. We resubmitted 1st June and finally had approval on the 5th July. A few conditions but nothing unexp
I'm kind of glad July hasn't been too warm, as its enabled me to get more done than i would have otherwise, but the rain has been the main issue, and surprisingly, hedgehogs which have been running all over the front garden, until they mysteriously all died, why i've no idea, felt very privileged having them here.
First bit done whilst the hedgehogs were still around, the bit i've been wanting to do the most, around the boiler and gas box, where the worst d
