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Blogs

Renovation of Ellesmere Bungalow.

The story so far.

We bought the bungalow in 2018 to move my elderly parents closer to us following Mum's stroke.  While she recovered, they needed help most days, i was spending a lot of time travelling back and forward so it made sense to move them closer.  As they lived in Windsor, we could not afford to move that way and I was very suprised when they agreed to our suggestion to move closesr to us.  But it has proved very valuable in the years since.    I think we were very lucky in that when we start
The Fun Irish (House)

2nd Foundation Completed!

Finished the Kore Passive Raft Foundation this week. Just in time as it's currently sleeting it down out there! Cold enough to make a pour more difficult. they set in a 70mm rebate for the lift & slide door and also cut out the kore to let the concrete out to the edge (up to shuttering) for a steel post to carry the blockwork over the two corner windows. We'll insulate around that later. the Kore went in really fast, then rebar, ductwork for the kitchen island and getting it finished before
South East Cornwall Low Energy build

SWMBO returns!!

Apart from the “picture from the mound” timelapse blog entry, there’s not been much of an update since mid September 2022. So, get your preferred hot drink (maybe a SteamyTea), and settle back for the next instalment.   Where were we? SWMBO was still in recovery from her foot infection - you remember? The one that might have killed her? The second floor ICF had been installed, and the concrete poured. I’m still going to spare you any pictures of the foot, but here is a concrete pump tr
Energy Ideas

Adding extra mass to buildings

As many of you know, I have been sceptical that adding extra mass to a building will stabilise the temperature.  This basically comes from when I studied this back in 2008. Just to reconfirm my suspicions that regardless of construction type, the air in a building will react more to external inputs than internal inputs i.e. solar gain, ventilation and a heating system versus thick stone, brick or concrete walls. To retest this idea, I worked out the amount of energy that is needed to c
The Fun Irish (House)

1st Foundation Completed

Concrete was poured via a pump on Monday. Finally have a Concrete sub foundation!  Took delivery of the Kore insulation for the actual foundation. Lots of angles sheets, L shape and other ones. I've 88 silver EPS boards too in packs of 8. They needed 2 men to move, the others could be handled one by one. The delivery driver helped offload as getting a forklift and driver for 4 Pallets (@150kg each) was going to be expensive and on too much short notice to arrange insurance for me to drive o
The Windy Roost

EPC, Air tightness, snags and a push to finish

Around 11 months ago, we started from a stripped site, the treatment plant was in and running the cabins / static so drainage just required connecting up. we had to wait for the warrant to be amended (change to the certificate of deign) this  held us back ma month or so until the BCO just said "get on with it, we can sort that later"- top guy!!  If we had waited for the amended certificate of design we would still be building, it took him 5 months to get it to us.    I've document
Little Stud Barn

new year - it was supposed to get better

I really hoped that now we are progressing after our suspended floor saga that things would get better, but something somewhere is determined to make sure that doesn't happen.   The only change is that this time the things that have gone wrong are not build related. Firstly, my brother, only 63, died of a heart attack with no history of problems.  I spent 5 days with him and his wife / kids in intensive care hoping against hope that he would pull thorough, but at 6am 6th Feb his h
Back on the self-build waggon...

Battery Storage Update - 2 years in

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,
The Windy Roost

2M² Plant room

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
Energy Ideas

Heat Capacity; What it is.

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
Energy Ideas

Insulating Panels; Part 2

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
Energy Ideas

Insulation is really easy

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
The Fun Irish (House)

Groundworks - muck out, hardcore & Foundation Screws

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
Energy Ideas

Insulation Panels

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
Deep refurb and extension

Building Control

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
Deep refurb and extension

Planning

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
Deep refurb and extension

Strip out

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
Deep refurb and extension

Keys

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!)    
Little Stud Barn

Wet weather, BC, SE, Drawings, cost and more wet weather

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
The Fun Irish (House)

Site Insurance - The first or final hurdle?!

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
The Windy Roost

6 Months, so we got plastered

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
Back on the self-build waggon...

That'll do for 2023...

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.  
The House at the Bottom of the Garden

How an MBC WarmSlab Has Actually Performed based on 6 Years Data

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

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