All Activity

Take a look at this - I found it to be very useful back in the day and it does seem to fit with your request. Ignore the figures, they are 8 years old but the layout / format may assist. [Although details are included, the passage of time should cover any actual information being established and considered inappropriate.] Running costs to date.xls

@JohnMo @Nickfromwales @JpManning @stevenlee thanks for all the advice. Just wondering if you have thoughts re above? Currently thinking; Stone resin shower tray tilebackerboard floor and shower walls direct onto egger (with peel and stick removed) Taped and tanked joints Tiles on floor and shower walls. Assuming that works then wondering about backboard before or after the tray… inclined to go after. Thanks again appreciate all the insights.

I'd not bother hunting for anything clever, a plain spreadsheet does the job and you'll shape it to suit as you go. What worked for me was one row per invoice or receipt with columns for date, supplier, description, stage (groundworks, frame, roof, first fix and so on), net cost, VAT, gross, date paid and where the receipt is filed. Then a pivot table or a SUMIF by stage gives you a running total against your budget for each stage. A few things worth doing from day one if it's a new build: Keep the VAT separate and flag whether each item is reclaimable under the DIY housebuilders scheme. HMRC want proper VAT invoices with your name and the site address, and the claim has to go in within three months of completion, so file the paper copies as you go rather than chasing them at the end. Add a column for anything your builder or subbies have zero rated so you don't try to claim it twice. Take a photo of every receipt into a folder named by stage, as till receipts fade. Google Sheets is handy because you can add costs from your phone on site.

Assuming you appointed him correctly and he hasn't resigned then I would expect that legally he is still the PD. You could appoint someone else, or yourself if you wish but if the changes are minor then i'm not sure you are really going into PD territory. If he refuses to sign off at the end then you could appoint yourself as PD and sign yourself, it sounds like you probably have a better overview of the build anyway.

You don't really need the additional manifold as you can manipulate flow with the individual loop flow meters.

To save me reinventing the wheel, are there any Spreadsheets or other that could help me I simply want to record each item in my journey of self build with date, task, cost and VAT if applicable Thanks

Thank you for your help

Not sure all water companies are that keen. My daughter has just bought a 1912 terrace "oop north" and the United Utilities water map shows half the terrace served by a "private main" running through the rear pedestrian access from which each house has a service pipe. The pipe then turns down the side of the end house and meets a company main in the road. There is no evidence of wholesale replacement of that private main but there is a water meter installed at each junction which operates as an external stopcock. On enquiring, UU would connect her MDPE, laid at her expense to the meter for free (i.e from the kitchen down the rear yard and under the back wall) because her service pipe is lead. When I asked about the status of the private main they were unable to comment because "it's a private main"......

The "amendment to warrant" is a Scottish thing and wouldn't apply to England and Wales. Pass the helical stair details onto your BCO and advise them of the impact on the door. They can then check for compliance and incorporate the change into their job file. My take on the PD thing is that your architect executed the original design and you are building out that design save for a couple of minor tweaks. At the conclusion BC will ask you to fill in a form confirming the roles during the project. I'd fill in the architect as the PD and the builder as the contractor. Ultimately stating who held these roles is so that should anything really bad happen, blame can be apportioned which proved to be difficult post the Grenfell Tower fire. Unless your house falls down or burns spectacularly to the ground, that form will never be looked at again.

I agree with MikeSharp01 that you can go a bit higher, especially on a shingled roof where the water runs off more slowly. The thing I would watch is not letting the back of the gutter sit so high that water runs behind it and down the fascia in a heavy downpour. Keep a clear drop into the gutter and a steady fall along the run, and check it in the first proper rain before you call it done.

Some have different knockout locations/sizes. Probably doesn't matter in most use cases but worth checking if you have specific needs.

The boxes are basically the same, buy the cheapest & move on to the next job on the to do list 😉 I found superlec the cheapest for back boxes.

What about the cylinder? What's prepared for the cylinder installation? You say you already have the primaries installed. Who sized them and what size are they? And what's their length? What's the situation with the electrics? Is anything in place or does the heat pump need proper wiring in to the CU, or additional box? As an example, lets just get this priced up very broadly for you: 5kW heat pump, lets say a Panasonic. The L-series is the R290 unit and it comes with an indoor bi-block unit and needs 2 power supplies. Price for all bits including controls sensors. Lets assume you're running same direct flow temps across the whole system so no additional bits and bobs - £3800-4000 min up to £4600 depending on the deal you get. 250l Gledhill cylinder - £800 ex VAT Electrical installation - 2 supplies, 1 x 32A, 1x20A, plus circuit protection - Panasonic manual currently say type A rcd, but they're now recommending type B which can add £100-£150 to the bill each, single supply 4 core from indoor bi-block to heat pump. It's a day's work probably including testing and building regs £700-£1000 depending on cable runs etc. and a decent tidy installation. You'll need some other bits and bobs like anti-freeze valves a 3-port to divert to DHW and other things, say £300-400 minimum. So roughly lets say £6000 just for your basic bit of kit. Labour wise expect about £5000 at least. Why? Reasonably speaking, there's a base to prepare with suitable condensate disposal, pipe runs and fittings, plus pipe insulation, you got a couple of days for the cylinder especially if not going for pre-plumbed, then you have system filling, pressure testing and commissioning, including balancing ufh loops etc. If you have a plumber who hasn't used the kit then expect lots of huffing and puffing and swearing to actually navigate the controls and set the system up properly. Then there's all the MCS admin, OFGEM bus grant, DNO, building regs, commissioning certificate. Proper commissioning of a system with UFH in an energy efficient house takes a lot of time to do it properl. If you use an MCS Umbrella, then the going rate right now is about £1500 for their services to take over the design and commissioning and paperwork. If you were doing this all yourself, then you could just about do it within the BUS Grant figure. By comparison a decent gas boiler, lets say a Viessmann 200-W and cylinder on PDHW and commissioned to run efficiently on your UFH system would cost about £6.5k, if not more. The £12k before BUS Grant is therefore no too bad, in my humble opinion. I'm in the business, am MCS certified and designs and installs heat pumps. So the idea that it's only going to cost you a few grand is quite frankly cuckoo land. But there is also the fallacy that installing a heat pump is just connecting up a couple of pipes. If you read through the majority of posts here on BH from those who have done it themselves, there is a huge amount of tinkering. modification, rectification of their systems, which is part of the learning process. Even if they give the impression it's a 2 minute job, there's a lot of uncounted sunk cost. What were your expectations of cost here?

We massively overpaid for downlights when we built 11 years ago. I got a bit obsessed with light quality, so we paid a lot more than we really should have, especially given that many cheap LED downlights today probably measure as well as what we paid through the nose for back then. We should have bought decent fixtures with replaceable bulbs, then replaced the bulbs with better versions over time as they deteriorated or failed. The only upside is that we've had only one failure in that whole time. It's somewhere where it isn't particularly visible, so I haven't bothered checking what's actually failed - it could be the driver, which I can replace easily enough.

even at less than 4°C ? The fan speeds up giving a low pitched wooshing sound and could be intrusive at night next to a bedroom window.

There are different types of noise. There's the noise of the fan moving air, then the vibrational noise of the compressor, pump, and fan. You can reduce transfer of vibrational noise to the house by mounting the unit on shock absorbing mounts, on a frame that is not mechanically coupled to the adjacent wall or slab (it goes without saying you wouldn't mount it onto the wall). Also, many years ago someone (Jeremy Harris, I think) mentioned that flexi connections transfer vibration/noise unless they're installed with sufficient slack (e.g., with a significant downward bight), so keep that in mind. The noise of the air itself is much less likely to wake someone up. Same - we have an 11 year old, 5 kW Panasonic Aquarea unit. It's so quiet when heating the house that I generally can't tell whether it's on unless I feel for the draft from the fan. To be fair, I'm not generally out there when it's producing DHW in the cheap period leading up to 5:30 in the morning, when I imagine its louder. We also have large trees right beside us, so if there's any wind at all, the sound of the leaves rustling completely covers any sound from the unit. We're lucky enough that ours is installed on the other side of an attached garage, so we don't hear it at all.

Our 2015 4kw FIT system was professionally installed by an MCS contractor. I've added a second 8.5kw system and the 32kwh batteries. I read the FIT guidance so I knew what I could and couldn't do......I've also had disputes with our FIT payer so needed to understand the rules to resolve those!!! If youre on deemed payments then adding an AC coupled battery won't affect your FIT generation, so long as you don't connect it between the FIT inverter and the generation meter. If you connect batteries to your FIT inverter then you can do that but it's more complicated and will likely need to change the generation meter. The FIT guidance for generators covers all of the scenarios of adding batteries and making alterations. Ours is a 5kw inverter that can charge at 5kw and can fully charge the 32kwh batteries in the EDF 7 hour off peak window:) it did it for the first time last night!! It's got 5kw backup capacity so I've split the house circuits across 2 consumer units as 5kw isn't enough for the whole house. If you just want backup for short power cuts then 32kwh of batteries is likely more than you need. Like many batteries ours is expandable so you could add more if you changed your mind. We ran for the summer on 16kwh but always intended doubling that for the winter with a plan to run as much of our usage at off peak rates:) You'll need G99/G100 approval from your DNO, which personally I think is straight forward

Apologies, over attention to detail :)

@Alan Ambrose Have you done a decent usage analysis yet? You may find you need less than you think.

@Mulberry View Can I ask - what set-up will you use for splitting the flow from the HP? A ‘primary’ mini-manifold so you can control how much flow goes to each ‘secondary’ manifold?

Mine said clearly to glue down. Floating you have lots of air gaps and they hinder heat transfer. 5 years of heating and cooling, look as good as when installed

@flanagaj dropped you a message, I may be able to help.

Thanks Dillsue, I have read a lot of your posts about this topic. Did you self install as you seem to have a lot of knowledge about the subject? Our export is deemed from the onset so the 50% rule. Had not planned on running the whole house on battery storage for any length of time, just for short power cuts. If the Fogstar is available at those prices I could install up to 32kWh, I assume there is a limit on how much you can charge in the cheaper overnight rates limited by the inverter, did you install an 8kW inverter? What happens with the DNO approval.

That can be controlled by putting in crackbinducers, esp at doorways. Our own floor over screed is 12mm thick tongue and groove, including mm oak veneer. Glued down onto screed that has had 8 weeks to stabilise.

Mine is 400mm away from the outside of the bedroom wall, icf wall, you have to walk outside and get to within 1m of the heat pump to actually know it’s running. Panasonic unit.