Finally made a start in earnest. The original plan was to stick build on site, but the cabin builds opened my eyes to the winds up here, and established concern for getting the house airtight.
I priced ICF, and although the costs are higher in the begining I think, I can self build for similar money, but get a far superior product. This is a budget build, most of the nice to haves have been dropped. The only redline is we want to ensure this is future proof, so all on the ground floor.
You think getting planning is the final hurdle, and then you start talking to building control, structural engineers and steel manufacturers! Thank goodness we didn't have to talk to builders as well, as we had made the bold decision to do it all ourselves. I am a plumber by trade with a weird niche sideline of repairing solar thermal systems so i have some site experience. Having worked on a lot of new build single plot sites and with a variety of builders, project managers and architects I ass
Three years, two planning applications and an expensive appeal later we began preparing works. And no we didn't get permission for a new build. Instead we got planning permission for an 11m extension, basement and loft conversion of the old existing house, plus a large stable block in the back field.
The new design involved extending the rear of the house out 4m as three stories and then a large flat roofed single storey a further 7m, which will sit over a 30sqm basement.
This old house turned up for sale with a largish four acre plot at the back. Our "plan" was to knock it down and build a modern ICF passiv haus on the land, and also keep horses and pigs on the land. Well you know what they say, if you want to make God laugh then tell him you've got plans....
Well, it's really happening.
HID left work last Friday, spent the weekend fixing the horses fencing, but it didn't matter as he can now work on the build.
I've created a very detailed project plan for his for 3 days and intend to keep this going as he works much better this way.
This will approximate timings which will no doubt go out the window.
We did have an issue last week, he had dug a trench, we had torrential rain and one side fell in, some of our soil is
Well, everyone is back from holidays today and my Structural Engineer made a comment about the Ground Investigation Report I've been digesting all day. Turns out my soil is very poor despite hundreds of houses being constructed all over the rest of the estate 25+ years ago, I'm the one with a problem now! I'd have to dig / excavate nearly 2 meters of soil to reach sufficient bearing capacity which means my plans to start groundworks next month are almost dead. If you see results like mine....RUN
We moved from Manchester to Cornwall 6 years ago and we are very happy with the overall location. Our existing converted barn, was converted by the previous owner and is very nice but is built on three levels and has 4 double beds, kitchen, dinner, lounge and snug and 3 baths so it is far too big for us when we retire. When we bought the house I always say we chose it for the working barn apx 300m2, not the barn we live in. We are building for our future in the hope that we can continue to li
Despite watching lots of Grand Designs, building a house wasn’t something I’d ever considered until about 18 months ago. Fast forward to today and we’ve bought a plot, instructed an architect, and I’ve traded my evening telly time for browsing the Buildhub forum. So how did we get here?
My partner and I want to start a family but agreed that we wanted to move into something larger first. We drew up a list of what we wanted and started our search. After months of searching / viewing w
I am in the state at the moment of wondering why......
I never realised it was going to be so complicated to get all the paperwork sorted just to lay some blocks with holes in for windows and doors and a roof on top and preferably some heat, cooking and washing facilities, but I would even have considered giving up on those at some point.
Due to the complete lack of time we decided that the builder (HID) would take voluntary redundancy and early retirement and then build
So I'm in the middle of the sales cycle for my Home. The first buyer pulled out but after a month I lined up another. The market is doing well enough despite % increases. So I had the estate agent around today to perform a valuation, the Surveyor comes around on Monday for 90 minutes to inspect the property and I'll be ringing the solicitor to get an update on where the contracts are at! I'll feel a lot better with them signed and a move out date to close the deal (hopefully!).
In the mean
Prompted by @haddock's query here:
and my few charts to show what has happened in my house, I have finally got all my data together and after looking at dozens of charts, have reduced it to two that show the most useful information about my house cooling, or heating.
Initially thinking that the difference between internal and external temperatures was the best base to chart against, I soon realised that it shows hard to understand results i.e. a larger number, the colder it is.
Since the last blog, a lot has happened in a relatively short time. The last blog was Stage 1 of the Amenity block, needing cladding and the roof, and as I'm sat here early in the morning , with the wind constantly blowing 20MPH, 2mm rain p/h. and a toasty 8 deg. inside the static, which is our home now - yey. The Cabins are complete. A lot of work and a move thrown in to the mix since the middle of August.
The cabins are stick built on site, under the supervision of Building cont
When we first decided to self-build in 2014, Jan and I visited quite a few passive house builds and talked to various experts; we soon decided that a low energy approach was broadly the way to go for our build. One of these experts, a passive-house evangelist called Seamus O'Loughlin, emphasised that a conventional heating approach (where boiler demand is based on some central thermostat set point) doesn't work well in a passive house, because the time constants of a high-thermal capacity low
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
