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You know the answer don't you! You have two choices, let the render progress, but the window frames may not be fully sealed. In reality, have you checked your window contract fine print as to what length of guarantee you have on the glazing units. If you use good mastic the frames should be ok..pragmatically. But again look at you warranty, often now the sealed units are not warranted for the same length as the frames. If you get a failure in a sealed unit your warranty may be rejected if you have not fully sealed the surrounding frame. There are no friends in the desert these days, check the fine print on the window warranty!

In the"old days" A first time self builder with no experience could save at least 15% on the build cost of a house. Now in the old days the market was rising, thus the value of the property also increased by on average, say 10%, over say a 2 year build time. You had to be a complete idiot to lose money on a self build. So even if you were not that good your self build could return a tax free return of up 25%, but nine times out of ten you would not lose your shirt. The market has changed a lot. @saveasteading who has decades of experience pointed out.. and I agree, much of the profit for the volume builders now lies in the land transaction, the actual building of the houses are not the main profit element, the house building is just a means to and end, basically a bit of a hassle! Now if you buy a serviced plot on one of these serviced schemes, the seller (developer) has already taken off the cream of the profit, you as a self building then are looking at marginal profit, but carry much more risk. Self building in this case is not going to make you lots of money, it may give you the house you love though and if that has value for you then it's viable. Now say you do a house that sells for 300k. You'll be lucky to clear 20k after all the taxes etc if you sell it on , if your motive is to make money, you'll have to risk dealing with a builder, a huge amount of personal time.. etc.. the reality is you are likely to be better off if you just do a Saturday morning shift in Aldi, you may even get a pension contribution! I've had the good fortune to talk and meet with @Square Feet who has some ideas about how we get back to making self building more attractive, not least financially. It's early stage ideas, will take time to develop, but looks promising. The reality at the moment is for your average self builder the financial risks are high vs the rewards. There are still a good few very well off self builders who don't really mind if they make money of not. But the whole idea is to encourage young folk to self build and improve their financial health which results from their own hard work. But as above.. it really is the case.. you are better off at times doing a Saturday shift at Aldi!

There are lots of smaller developers who do less formulaic developments. It is not just a choice between Taylor Wimpey and self-build. If you were able to offer fully serviced plots with OPP similar to Graven Hill you may find a market.

I think we might have cocked up! Our Norrsken windows are due to have a fine silicone finish on the outside of our windows but we are about to start our renderers and timber cladding fitters. Completely forgot Norrsken were coming back. Obviously I will phone them tomorrow but does anyone know if it’s too late?

I have fitted some and doing some on a small shed tomorrow. Eaves depth 50mm ish to suit gutter. I try to cut the flashing as little as possible as it's the first area to rust and bending is difficult to make good. How complex is the roof? I have only used the foam fillers they do let a bit of ventilation through but stop most of the insects. Never seen the z profile used for ridge unless maybe more commercial / Industrial buildings. Roofing is normally 0.7mm as it's stiffer when walking on. (If flat enough, it's still a slide when wet) I have bought from Cladco they are good quality and never had a problem, but we are close enough to collect small orders as well.

Absolutely...but not sure about the timing. It depends how mature you think "passivehaus" is. When these things are new they are typically silly expensive and don't stack up. If deemed a desirable outcome then sometimes governments act to skew the market by offering bribes. Some of us benefited from that with the early adoption of PV. We paid a huge amount for our 4kW system in 2011 but it still worked out a good investment through FIT. Those adoptions encouraged the industry and panels are now widely available at an affordable level. My take is that passivehaus is still immature and won't make economic sense for most. But this thread suggests that for some (Nationals?) the difference is quite low. My experience on a single custom build is that its still a significant premium and wouldn't be worth it in a purely financial sense - but we still choose to do it for other reasons.

Your proposal invites discussion, that in itself is healthy. I think it's fair for you to ask the question, most of us on BH won't take a negative view of this as you are exploring if you can benefit the self build market, and if you can make a living out of it and a bit of money then your are justified, a fair days pay for fair work. Here is bit of context and bit of my background. The first 20 or so years of my career were spent being a builder, some of that was building houses for self builders. I had generally 6 -8 full time staff then sub contractors. Depending on the time of year I may only have had four subbies, then at times up to about twenty folk working on one site. To keep them all working I would normally run one big project and say a couple of extensions, attic conversions at the same time. This allowed me to manage resources, deal with changes, cash flow, maybe planning and BC delays. You should be pretty familiar with how this works given your background. When I got to near 40 I could see the writing on the wall personally. My wife and I parted, my German Shephard died and I was left living in my lovely self build on my own with this huge weight on my neck of the business and my duty to my employees. I shut the business, paid all my staff the redundancy, phoned my competitors, told them I was chucking in the towel and pleaded for them to take my lads on. Some did! Now I also squared up all my builders merchants.. some told me, even my accountant.. you are limited Gus, if you walk away you'll be at least £100 - 200kk better off. But I paid the money as I knew my personal reputation can't be valued. Now I was lucky as I sold everything just before the 2008 crash. I then trucked off to university to become a Structural Engineer, graduated, trained and now my consultancy is in October this year going to celebrate it's tenth anniversary. But part of my success is my contacts from the old days! I am still in contact with my old suppliers, they give me names of good creditable builders, as they remember I squared them all up. One of my ex employees is now a BC officer in my local area, his wife, who used to inspect some of my project is now a Senior in BC. They are consummate professionals and remember me as "not a chancer". In summary, my own view is that if you want to build a sustainable business in the construction industry it's going to take 5 years living on the edge, another three years to stabilise, it's really only in the last couple of years that I've felt I've arrived, lots of repeat business and a huge amount of experience under my belt now.. 40 years! Ok, the above is not a rant.. it's intended to let you see there is no fast buck here in the construction industry. Developing an app is not going to work long term, unless you have lots of contacts and an already established business that brings in the bread and butter. Let's say you are digitising and facilitating via an app the procurement and build process, that's just using modern tech, the game remains the same and the profit loss sheet still stacks up the way it pretty much has over the last 40 years. The tek has changed, but the fundamental principle of turn over is vanity, profit is sanity has not changed, you may also want ( I suspect you may not) but just look at Ruskin the common law of business. But the bottom line is that it looks like you want to project manage, use your QS skills.. with a fancy app. To make a living out of this, you need do the basics very well, get repeat business, you'll need to have lots of contacts, cash in the bank, be legitimate, have insurance etc, and be very good at what you do to be able to justify your 10%, your app ain't going to cut the mustard, the app is your potential cream, your USP that delivers that extra profit. I think you need to have look at your business model in term of the app. But if that stacks up for you then it would be welcomed by not least myself and folk on BH.

are you looking at integrating via the serial interface or just using binary inputs to trigger boost? I considered the RS232 proxy approach, with an ESP32, so that I could keep the Comfosense while still allowing HA to read/set itself, but decided it was too much added complication, so just hooked up a dry-contact relay to the bathroom switch input. It would be nice to see the outputs from the various sensors and status of the summer bypass in Home Assistant though. Probably not needed long-term. The CA180 LUXE doesn't have any onboard display/buttons, so the Comfosense is needed to set the flow rates during commissioning, but after that its all stored in the CA180 itself so theoretically could run without it (or with something 3rd party running the reverse-engineered serial interface commands). I was initially using the Comfosense schedule to set some crude time-based boost that coincide with daily shower times, but now that the relay input is configured through Home Assistant, boost logic is based on CO2 sensors in habitable rooms, an air quality/VOC sensor in the kitchen, and humidity rate of change in the kitchen/utility/bathroom - I shouldn't need to touch the Comfosense much, if at all, going forward (assuming I have thresholds set up correctly).

The whole house is 200m2, the ground floor is 140 ish of those m2's. The quotes I had from Roth, Continal and at least 2 others, all seemed to go for 150mm spacing, is it just that they're a bit lazy? I tried one of the softwares mentioned on here (don't think it was Loopcad), but I really struggled getting the plan properly laid out.

The ASHP is going adjacent to the Utility Room, top left corner of that plan. The manifold in the middle would be about 10-12 metres away from the ASHP and 600mm higher than the closer manifold. I'm not against doing it in one, but I guess the supply and return pipes will be reasonably long. This could be shortened if I can pass them under the internal walls (in the Marmox blocks), but not sure if that's senslble?

I used loopcad via a trial app. UFH is very similar in a lot of respects to a radiator. A radiator you size to the room heat loss and target room temperature, each room has a radiator of a suitable size for the heat loss/temperature and the system as a whole is just about balanced out the box. The exact same applies to UFH, you size your loops in the floor to match heat loss and target temperature for that room. You can fill the floor with pipes but it's a bit like sizing a radiator to fit your longest available wall - you wouldn't do that. Can't see the dimensions on your drawings but guessing around 200m²(?). If so we are about the same size and only 7 loops. Our flow temps are also super low.

@BotusBuild I used 2-pack epoxy from Black Country Paints. It felt like a minefield once I started digging into what to use. Called them up and they were really helpful. Checked around elsewhere and they still came in very competitively, and I did value the support and advice over the phone - stopped me over-ordering and gave sound advice on the sealing I needed and tips on application. https://www.bcpaints.com/two-pack-epoxy-floor-paint-manufacturers/ I went for an anti-slip version and am very pleased with it.

Can the manifold at the 'middle' be raised to become the highest point of both sets of loops?

Ah, yes! Tired brain and long days atm, sorry.

The loops are fine as is, just need to come back to the central manifold location, and obvs make that a bigger manifold as required.

I guess a second manifold was added due to the floor levels? The Kitchen is 600mm higher than main part of the building with the Utility etc and the Living Room (lowest on that plan) goes up another 400mm. Would it be difficult to bleed with a manifold at the lowest point?

I tried to do a design myself, but getting the kinda complicated floorplan uploaded saw me fall at the first hurdle. Any tips? The space above has 3 ground level heights by the way.

Absolutely can be done yourself with resin paints. Trowels resin coatings are a little more tricky…

they don,t hire they out without an operator -- so its £100+ an hour

its not the 60,s they all want silly rate per hour and never break sweat

I used to but sold off bits to pay for the build If i did then it wouldn,t be a problem --they couldn,t climb out of it

A lot of Australian housing is serviced plots sold by land developers who build roads and infrastructure. Then builders have a number of home designs people can choose to have built on the plot or customise the design or even go bespoke. Obviously all differing costs. It does end up very low density and needing cars though which is not ideal.

How do you do your own if no knowledge. Is there a website or app?

Do yourself a favour and do your own design - there is zero room balancing by design. The design is for multiple zones/multiple thermostats, not single or limited zones for ASHP. Suspect you can easily delete a few loops by spreading pipes that transition through various areas.

Obvious question, is why do you even need a controller - once set what is there to adjust. MVHR commission forget, except filter cleans/changes