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A lot of my build is great. Some of it no so much but I was able to sort it/work around it. End of the day I won't recommend the builder to anyone, so his loss possibly. It's why I have trust issues with trades, always disappointed in some capacity.

Thanks @torre. I don't follow what you're saying, but your comment makes me think I could have aluminium bits made up to match the roof & conceal the gutter, which would be attached to the plumb cut on the rafter feet & look something like this.

If the brickwork faces south west and is a large wall, a fair amount of water will get in. If a stepped tray is difficult, do it horizontal and a coat of Stormdry on the remaining triangle of brickwork for belt and braces.

I'd like something like this:

To me they're very different, because with my design I have a neat sloped roof panel that's at 42 degrees from the highest point to where it ends, with a gutter concealed in the 42 degrees slope. With the arch tec's first draft drawing, the gutter is tacked on to a projection from the roof edge. So the drawings show this:

I’m in this position too. I’m certain I'm being pushed quotes heavily oversized, and I don’t want a system that keeps turning on because it’s not been properly calculated and sized. I just have very little time outside of work to do it whilst also keeping tabs on the work being done (where I keep identifying issues that need my attention immediately 😭). following, and will update as I progress myself.

Cut along the red line, to leave to chipboard under the stud wall. Then put a piece of wood (18mm plywood or similar) under that existing flooring, wide enough to be 75mm under existing and 75mm on show, and screw / glue it by fixing down through the chipboard into the plywood to form a connecting ‘tongue’ of plywood. Then your new flooring will sit on that, which you then glue and screw, and job done.

One of the nicest things a client said to me ...we were a subcontractor to them but with design input, they being a bigger contractor, was..... "you are not always the best price but always the best value." He retired. His successor use someone cheaper and handed on some of my suggestions. They went bust. Sometimes expertise is doing simple things well. Such relationships are more difficult to find on self build, because you don't know each other. Fundamentally though the real expert may not have to charge more, because it's easy for them.

erm....the other £70bn is engineered and just finds it's way out of the public purse and into the hands of c****. Same thing, year in year out. That's why in the UK we're switching off streetlights to try and save money. #utterlyfeckedandnothingwecandoaboutit

So if that's heated - have you accounted for the net input this provides to the building. If the space has insulated external walls, the heat in this area is added to the building internals.

Looks like you could vent below your drip into the gutter as the equivalent to over fascia vent if you had a simple gutter fixed outside

I was happy to install YY, until the merchant said they just don't sell any of it! 3-core flex it is. I just observe segregation where things like long LED strips are in the mix, so the DC runs are not bunched with equally long runs of AC stuff; unless it's a small bit of LED which doesn't really seem to ever care how you run the cable.......no complaints yet, so I'll belay starting to panic before bedtime. This. Under-volt = over-current, and then the LED's are on a shorter lifespan. RIP.

That's SELV, Safety Extra Low Voltage, old boy What someone says when a random Welshman on the 'interweb points out that they've spelt SELV incorrectly 🤦‍♂️😆

That projects out almost as much as the previous detail though? Very little in it, from what my Pentium 1 brain is looking at. Ultimately you will get a solution to the remit you have provided, so if you have specifically asked for the least projection solution possible then the AT needs to sharpen his pencil; however if you just said "give me a secret gutter" and no further information re particulars of how you want this to be presented have been forthcoming, then you must be willing to accept a draft revision (for discussion) at the outset so you can see what you 'don't like' and then request changes to arrive at something more inline with your expectations. This is self-build and feck all goes right first time plus...we're only human too. The issue I constantly struggle with is getting exacting information from my clients, but it's not because they don't know what they want, it's more about things getting lost in translation; folk simply don't know what the options and possibilities are, so they need to see something in front of them so they can say "close, but no cigar yet....let's discuss!". That's why I choose to work with a select few (patient and pragmatic) people, as they get the haywire between my ears. We arrive at solutions very quickly, with zero friction or fuss, and all whilst sharing the same common goal; get the client the best things we can for the least amount of time / money spent. Every damn day is a school day. I don't care who you are, how old, how experienced, if you can't be open to a bit of collaborative thinking and discussion (2 heads blah, blah, blah), and be patient whilst the answers begin to form into a thing or shape you like, then how would anyone ever get to the finish line with hair and sanity still intact? It's not a war, or a battle, it's a team effort; all you need are good team members to work with. So if the right solution doesn't jump off the 1st page of a thick book, best to not shit the bed methinks. Share your findings, google search images, likes and dislikes, and discuss! Then the juices will start flowing Then it'll be the best house it can ever be. Tres bien.

no - the spa has its own heat pump. It’s basically a big hot tub so a closed system driven from its own a2w pump. We are going to put some insulated plasterboard to reduce bridging of the steel lintel…

So how are you heating all of that,is that included as well in heat pump sizing? Depending on how you have calculated ventilation losses there can be plenty of room for error both ways. Is your thermal bridging any worse than the glazing U value? If not impacts aren't much worse than the glazing? If the steel is insulated on the inside most likely not a huge issue.

Going to answer my own question here.. I guess my heat losses is worst case rare day not the average…. has anyone else ended up oversizing? Or tracked whether their heat pump was oversized?

Is it not likely my heat losses are bigger than calculated not smaller? As they don’t account for inaccuracies in installation, thermal bridging etc?

Hope I’m going to use all of it! I’m the idiot putting an 8x3 in ground swim spa in so that’s a fair chunk of the floorspace as well

Erm, no? The red line is exaggerating the issue, and the only thing I would improve upon here is that the two insulation layers should meet, and not be separated by the flooring / deck boards as shown. The cold element of the steel is the edge of the upper 'toe' so is marginal at most (imho). Not if the airtightness is detailed correctly Attempting to use the PB layer as your AT layer is not a robust plan afaic, so maybe I have misunderstood you in that respect? The detail shown doesn't show an AVCL, so one can only assume you have not yet crossed that bridge with your AT and that's why it isn't detailed, yet?

Even at 490m² at -3 your figures sound high. You possibly have better U values to me, your form factor will definable better than ours. So unless one side of the house is all glass, 9kW maybe a little high. At around 200m² we are 3kW. So 2.5 x 3 is 7.5kW, nudging 8kW (including DHW) at -3. So if Panasonic do a 9kW, I would be looking at that with some wiggle room. The bigger you go the bigger the pipes, flow rates to accommodate etc. So definitely wouldn't be looking at 16kW. But you will build houses big - are you actually going to use all of it? If not why not 2x smaller heat pumps in cascade. Then you can modulate down to 2kW and all the way up to 12kW+ should you need it.

Whats the difference in modulation between the two??

I’ve done my own heat loss calculations for our new build. Verrrrry roughly the spec of the house triple glazed windows 0.76 average 200mm cavity with eps beads at 0.15 Doors averaging around 1.0 Floor averaging around 0.1 roof has 304mm blown cellulose 0.12 going for high level air tightness mvhr the build is big - gross floorspace over 3 floors is circa 490sqm. We are going Panasonic aquarea. Wall mounted fan coil cassettes upstairs, UFH on ground floor. We have selected the Panasonic m series tcap because it natively supports dual zone (useful for cooling) Crunch time - I need to now select the heat pump. My calculations are coming out around 9kW. Heat punk is around 9.5kW. MCS installer is coming in more conservative around 12.1kW. I suspect we are somewhere between 9.5kW and 12 but we do have some unfortunate thermal bridges such as a big piece of steel over 8m of sliding doors. These thermal losses aren’t accounted for in my calcs. my dilemma - do i go for the 12kW model and hope its enough or jump up to the 16kW model?

If you’re worried about noise/interference then surely CY is the choice over SY

Depends which end of the telescope you are looking down so either a great way to while away a decade and spend loads and loads of cash or a tiny thing not remotely likely to be a problem and still a very long way off.