So it's mid-2019. After 4+ years of trying to find an 'oven ready' place that suited us, we finally gave up and went the alternate route. Build our own. Found a bad house in a great location. Main downside was the small garden, but you unless you're absolutely loaded you can't have it all. And of course the real estate agreed with our timelines.
"Yes, if you buy in may 2019, the design will take you into december, and you can probably start early Spring, and maybe even be done before
We are building a four-bed detached house in the south of England and for a whole host of reasons (well mainly privacy!) I thought I’d try a blog in a slightly different way. I’ve been making notes of “lessons” we’ve learnt along the way and I thought I’d try and write them up whilst we progress before hindsight has the chance to alter them too much! Some of them are things I wish I’d known or realised beforehand, others are just little things that have worked well for us, but hopefully they m
The OVO portal does have a publicly available RESTful API, but because the UI makes heavy use of Javascript (JS ) scripts to do the webpage renders and these make JSON callback to the OVO server, so it is quite simple to use your favourite scripting language to automata downloading data and aggregating it into a database or equivalent.
I have written down-loaders for Python, and NodeRED (based on node.js) but I currently only maintain the latter. In essence your script will need to
Just a few progress photos of the inside and how its been moving along since the builders left after completing their work:
First job was the warm roof, literally just to get some of the 100mm boards used up as i had no where else to put them
I was also trying to get as much of the dusty bits out of the way before opening this room up to the rest of the bungalow, so removed the outer bricks from under the bathroom window (the blocks will b
As I have discussed on earlier podcasts and various topics, I have a Willis-based configuration for heating our low energy house, and control is implemented with a dedicated Raspberry Pi using a custom NodeRED application for our underfloor heating and SunAMP-based hot water. This system logs a lot of instrumentation temperatures every half hour and also any significant events such as turning on and off pumps and the heater.
Our electricity supplier has been OVO for the last 4 years
PV to hot water and heat storage controls schematic:
This system only uses the excess PV power (unless the Solic 200 button to use any power is pressed, and then it will allow any power for 90 minutes).
There are three output choices. Firstly to the hot water tank immersion until the tank reaches the temperature set point, then to one of the two storage heaters as chosen.
Although some people have mentioned that the Solic 200 (other types I
This is the latest system we have:
There are 4 CT relay clamps, 3 for the EV charging, (and one will be for battery charging), which are set at different PV output levels depending on the month of the year which decides what rate of PV needs to turn on the charging of the EV. This relates to a 3kW charger and the expected power requirement for the EV on a particular month and the expected production using the PGIS web site calculator.
The summer 3.6kW
I've been looking forward to getting to a point where I can park my car in my driveway again, and finishing my July Post with a part 2 here to mark a finish to my Driveway project finally! Took a bit longer than the two weeks I was hoping!! I just finished adding up the damage and it was @ €7.2k all in all. I think the length of time increased the costs as there were days where I couldn't get to use the compactor and I had to get it back a few times to progress the project on. Some notes observa
Greetings on a miserably rainy Sunday October morning. Perfect weather for catching up on some blog writing!
As the title suggests this blog will be about our external coverings of the house and, by the end of it, the outside of the building will be pretty much finished allowing us to crack on internally.
We started many months ago by battening the outside of the buildings. As we are having external blinds and they have a requirement for fitting the blind cassette we need
Thought I'd do a short blog on the Polycarbonate tunnel we built.
Our big field suffered with no storage, and location meant containers were very expensive to transport. so one option was to build a polytunnel, which we have planning permission for. again due to location, 500m from the coast 73M AMSL I wanted something sturdy. so looked at off the shelf packages. in the Highlands and Islands the PolyCrub is seen as the mecca. Designed in the Shetland isles, guaranteed to withstand 100
As promised another update, following many tweaks and a firmware upgrade from Solis.
So the existing problems were:
Whenever the battery isn't at 100% SOC, it pulls an amount of power from the grid, somewhere between 60W and 100W
Even when the battery is actively charging, it still pulls the same 60-100W from the grid, regardless if there is enough PV power to charge the battery and cover loads at the same time. Once the battery is 100% SOC and im generating PV
I’ve been meaning to provide an update on the progress of this build for a while, and I find myself with a spare couple of work hours 🙂
At the end of December 2021, we left you with 95% of the lower floor walls complete, and looking forward to getting the first set of steels installed. Of course, last winter’s weather, including some furious storms, had a thing or two to say about that, which included me going down at short notice and staying in the local Travelodge (other chains ar
Forgot i'd done this for some reason 😂
Been a long time coming, but finally decided to get on with it, heres a few before and after and during pics, I did use wall anchors too but for some reason didn't bother taking a photo at that point.
Pleased with how it came out, not only looks better than before with the conduit for the wire which is now buried, but should also save some £££.
The plinth in
What a journey that was, lying builder and a few no show days caused the finish date to slip, and following a 2month delayed start, but I got there in the end!! Good things come to those who wait eh.
So the outside shell of the building is now completed, and yesterday I started work on the inside.
The lean-to roof was extremely close, but just squeezed it in with a slight pitch modification. This leaves me with essentially 3 sections of wall to clad: Near sid
Results for us as they come forward...(and not what I expected)
Our Cool Energy inverTech Air Source Heat Pump CE-iVT9 4.3kW-9.5kW has been on standby only, for the last few weeks, and I have measured the power consumption. It appears to use about 0.1 kWh an hour. That's about 2.25kWh a day in 24 hours.
We use a Solic 200 to direct our excess electricity produced by the PV to the hot water immersion.
Whilst the Solic way of heat the hot water uses more energ
A short blog to show my Mini spilt Air2Air install, in the Windy Roost Static.
I looked at installing a wood burning stove, but we have zero trees on site, so when I looked at the costs of twin wall flue, terminals, flashing, creating a heat shield and making the caravan tidy plus the hassle of getting wood / coal, the costs were adding up.
A quick question on here - Build hub, some options were suggested and I decided to go with the a cheap Air 2 Air heat pump from Appliances direct.
It’s been over a year since we got our completion certification and we’re still mopping up tasks in the garden and generally cleaning up. It occurred to us that some aspects of the discovery process of the build may be off use to others on BuildHub.
It’s too hot in here: Thermal modelling limitations.
Our thermal modelling done as part of the design stage SAP suggested we had minimal thermal gain problems. However we suspected that thermal gain from our east facing windows would
After following others journeys into the self build world for years, it looks like I'm finally about to embark on my own after several soft starts. The first major work is to realign the driveway and I've opted for paved over other styles and to do most of it myself. I got a driver & digger to take up the concrete driveway and grass and pile it up and hired a grab truck to take it all away. Less than two days later I was left with a barren front garden! Since then I've been figuring out a fe
We use 4 phases from rainwater to flushing the loo with it and they are:
Collecting, separating and storing in bulk tank.
Fine filtering and storing in barrel.
filling the gravity tank in the loft
Filling the cistern
This is not the only system that is possible but one that works with our property limitations.
This design and its controls take into account freezing conditions.
We use two 12V pumps run from batteries and PV.
To finish my 22 days on site. I started timber framing, decided to start on the amenity block, as this will initially be for our washing machine and dryer, plus some storage. My aim was to get water tight -ish. before I had to get home for the weekend.
The poly tunnel (constructed this visit) - is my cutting shed, I set up my chop saw and worked to my cut list.
This was proof of concept on my build plans, and it needed tweaking, the roof to wall junction has been modified and will
My dual roles for the first 10 days of the June / July trip was to get ready for concreting.
This breaks down into two slab / raft foundations for the Cabins, 1 slab for the amenity block, and some backfilling of the treatment plant, and while I'm at it, concrete for the Polycarbonate Polly tunnel. another blog to follow.
In my opinion, the structural calculations for the slab rafts were well over engineered. the slabs will be ground bearing (rock) foundation and thinner slab,
Wednesday 26th June, I spent most of this day travelling, in my van and my two helpers for the next few weeks.
The trip is 433 miles door to door, the goal before the boss arrives for 9 days was to get the caravan (home) connected to the treatment plant. plus get ready for concrete. other blogs to follow.
To connect the Static I needed to install the treatment plant, install some of the drainage for the pods, confirm with BC he is happy and basically crack on with
This info relates to a DIY rainwater harvesting system, not a commercial system, and therefore the water must not be drunk!
You should be careful using rainwater not to mix it with mains (Potable) Water as it is not suitable to drink and you could poison your house supply! To be clear birds poo on your roof and then it rains. However there are ways to elevate the problem in a DIY system so there is no smell or colour problems but it still cannot be drunk!
You should n
