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General

Build blog

How did we get here..

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
The build progresses - or maybe not

Wish I'd known everything that's needed before building

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
preparation

Selling up and Moving out!

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
Hourly Temperature Decay and Power usage: Statistics Heavy

Chart Time: Hourly Temperature decay and power inputs.

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.
Cabin Builds

Cabin builds

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
Heating

Update on Timeshifting to Minimise Heating Costs.

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
Main Story

Off to the races.

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
Lessons from the road...

Design & Planning

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
Design Note

Downloading OVO Smart Meter Data

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
Side Extension

Side Extension moving along, slowly but surely

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
Design Note

Update on Energy Use Based on 4 years of Actuals

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 energy use

PV to hot water and heat storage controls

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
PV energy use

PV EV charger control schematic

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
driveway

Driveway to Darkness - Part 2

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
External cladding

Timber Cladding, Zinc Guttering, Brise Soleil and External blinds

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
Poly Tunnel / Storage

Poly (carbonate) Tunnel

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
Battery Storage

Battery Storage - 7 month update

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
Blog - Upper Floor Wall

ONE (WO)MAN DOWN ...... (and an upper floor wall built)

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
External Wall Insulation

Another section of External Wall Insulation Completed

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
Side Extension

Extension completed on the outside

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
PV energy use

ASHP v Immersion with PV

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
Caravan Heat

Mini Split Air to Air Heat pump

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. 
Finishing off

Finishing off

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

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