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Yes, we moved into our new house on Monday last week, pretty much 9 months to the day since we broke ground and 15 months after we purchased the plot. We know we’ve been very lucky with our build. The weather has generally been in our favour and we had no supply issues or delays. Above all, we’ve had some excellent people working for us without whom we could not have achieved the build. There are too many stars to mention here but if you look through the blog you will see them all get a shout out for their excellent work as it happened. Ahead of the move, Mrs P. did a superhuman job getting everything packed, and the move itself went relatively smoothly, with dry weather and no mishaps. Amazingly, Mrs P. also managed to unpack most of those boxes within a few days, though we do still have some residual boxes to deal with in due course. Moving in day: As we all know, moving house is always a stressful business and moving to a new house is no different. But it is a relief to finally get in - there is always the nagging fear that some disaster will strike at the last minute while the house remains unoccupied. But of course, all was fine. Is our build complete? Not quite. We have some minor electrical and joinery items outstanding, both inside and outside; we have the garden landscaping well under way but some distance from completion as you will see from the photos below. Beyond that, there is a list of jobs of the sort you’ll have following any house move: curtains, blinds, wardrobes, shelving, etc. - but these are ‘house move’ rather than ‘house build’ tasks imo. We do still have to obtain Building Control sign-off and there’s a VAT reclaim to do. On the BC front we had our ‘As Built’ air-tightness test performed by Richard Harris of Peninsular Energy Compliance this week (highly recommended). The result is 1.16m m3/m2 at 50hPa on the envelope basis. Virtually the same figure for Air Changes per Hour , as our envelope area is 583m2 and our volume is coincidentally 580m3. We are very happy with 1.2 ACH. Air-tightness test under way: We have been in the house for a week now and we are really happy with the way it feels and works for us. It’s warm, draft-free, well-lit, quiet, and comfortable; the layout and spaces are working just as we hoped. We are both sure we are going to really love living here. The plant room is (to me) surprisingly warm, running at 25-26 deg C due presumably to the amount of heat-generating equipment in there. I raised this as a separate Build Hub topic but the consensus seems to be that it's not an issue, so I shan't worry. As a side benefit, it does make a splendid clothes airing room. https://forum.buildhub.org.uk/topic/46744-hot-plant-room/ Energy use The combination of solar panels, batteries, ASHP and insulation levels seems to be working well - in our first week we used 0.7kWh from the grid and exported 63kWh. Not bad for February. I need to work out our best tariff option but that’s a job for the future. Enough talk, time for some more photos (some taken just before we moved in)... Kitchen/dining/lounge: Hall: Bathrooms - master ensuite: Shower room: Guest ensuite: Bedrooms Master bedroom: Guest bedroom: Bed 3 / hobby room (Ok, so we still have some unpacking to do.) Landscaping - plenty to do yet. The layout is literally as clear as mud to me... I'm sure it will all be fine in the end(!) And finally... Troy likes the new house - it still has yogurt pots that need licking out Dashboard: Contractor days on site this past two weeks: 15 Contractor days on site since build start: 587 person days That 587 days is well over the 500 days which requires HSE being notified of the build using form F10 (which we did). HSE have not spoken to us or troubled us at all and the F10 notification is simple and costs nothing, so I would recommend any self-builder do so - if you are unfortunate and have an incident it’s surely means less chance of getting into hot water if you registered properly. Budget: I confess that in the final weeks we have gone a bit beyond our self-imposed budget contingency and dipped slightly into savings, but that is really down to choices we have made about the quality of the fit, e.g joinery, kitchen, bathroom equipment etc., and also the extent of the landscaping we have chosen to do. We could probably have remained well within contingency had we needed to but luckily we had some leeway. Plan: We did it! Conclusion: Overall, we set out to use the entire proceeds of our previous house sale to buy a plot and build a better house, and we believe we have achieved that. Thanks once again to all the dedicated and skilled people who have worked on our house and made the build a success. Especial thanks to Mrs P. who indulged my yearning to do a build provided brilliant design input and kept the whole show on the road throughout - a truly wonderful person! That then dear friends is the final blog! Thank you for following us and for your kind words of encouragement and support through our project.

Yesterday we moved into our place, started in 2018 still not 100% finished in 2026, I estimated it would take me 2 years, 🤣🤣 thanks for all the advice from fellow buildhubbers. What we bought, what we have now.

Should I even call you darling? Probably not, but as you (not you specifically, sitting there in your ‘should have been put in the wash weeks ago’ dressing gown, I mean the buildhub fraternity) have been so great a moral support I can’t help feeling some degree of affection. Anyway, there’s no chance of me drawing breath this week, or any week till we move out of the ice box (AKA rental - and thats the polite version, I now have a different name for it), so if I’m going to mark the year in point it has to be now, as a year ago on Tuesday I clambered up onto the roof of da Bungalow and started sliding tiles at my mate Steve. I miss him. He’s not dead or anything - though his dress sense would tell you otherwise - but he’s off the project and that isn’t comfortable. He buggered his shoulder blocking up to damp and hasn't been back working on site since. He still visits to let me know that it’s not up to standard and we should be further on, so basically all the things I know already, but it’s not the same as working together. That was rather fun. In a twisted way. So, how far has a year got us? Insides are plastered out and oven ready for our mist coats, which hopefully start Monday. I’m hoping we’ve no buried leaks or missing cables, time will tell. Outside a small groundwork’s team are half way through connecting the house to the drains. When I dug down to find the capped sewer pipe it looked closer to the surface than I remembered - which featured in the playlist of yet another sleepless night. I’ve quite a wide repertoire of tumble dryer worries, yet another talent courtesy of the build. Thankfully it turns out my water level did me proud and the poo pipes protruding from the house are at the predicted level with respect to the sewer so happy days. It’s really odd building a plastic bag to live in. OK, it’s a well insulated plastic bag, but it’s still a really big plastic bag. It’s beautifully illustrated by our breathing ceilings. We continued the hideously gaudy coloured VCL up the side walls and over the ceilings, putting in as few staples as we could to reduce the number of penetrations. Eventually the house itself was sealed up bar the missing front door and loft hatch. We took the precaution of putting the first layer of loft insulation up to avoid condensation on the ceiling VCL, using “Industrial polypropylene strapping” stapled to underside of the joists before the VCL was put up, so the strapping took the weight rather than the VCL. It worked a treat and even allowed insulation to be laid even where the VCL hadn’t been done. Standing upstairs a weird thing constantly happened. The VCL above us very slowly rose and fell - it was as if the house was breathing. Oddly mesmerising. I should have recorded a video. But there was no time to stand and look. The plasterer had lots in his books so couldn’t get to us till the end of January, so we took that as our target. We had no way of knowing if that was doable (it wasn’t) but the concept was that by setting a target we’d go faster so we charged up the cattle prods. I thought I knew it would be stressful being driven by such a deadline. As in so many build things I had underestimated badly, however. Some things went better than I’d expected. I’d planned to pull in the wires myself but instead Steve the Sparks (the confusingly named son of Steve of the buggered shoulder who did the demo and the founds with me) did it all in a couple of days. The speed of the man, but oh, the radio! He was the first of several with the ubiquitous Makita site radio playing ‘80s stuff. We’d been a no radios site till then. But we had by then lots of fluffy insulation, so I relented as long as it was on indoors only and relatively quiet. And having said yes to one it’s a lot harder to say no to others so the tackers (plasterboarders) and the plasterers all followed suit. Did I really need Bananarama on a loop in my head with everything else whizzing round? Another thing that went well and a quicker than feared was pulling in the water pipes. On the odd moment I was alone on site it took very little time to actually pull the HEP2O pipes through. OK it left a mess of tails above the cylinder but that could be left till after the tackers started. A lot of things got categorised as ‘after the tackers get started’, which was sensible but not always satisfying. The theory of radial plumbing, no joints buried, I found seductive. However the theory floundered when it met the Aqualisa buried shower and bath controls. That continues to cause me angst and will do until I’ve finally accepted that I’ve dealt with the last wet patch (yes, technically it’s called a recurring nightmare). One thing that didn’t go so well was the vent ducts. It wasn’t helped by the fact that I’d decided to go for 90mm rather than the smaller version and we’d ended up with 253mm metal web joists (pozis) rather than the 304mm I’d planned. It also wasn’t helped by a glulam blocking the ideal route from the main house into the loft above the downstairs bedroom. So it was a fiddle, (polite version) and the pressure was on as the duct itself only arrived on the 28th of January, mostly due to a supply issue. I’d thought long and hard about duct routing, but things are never as one imagines. The MVHR unit will sit in the garage next to (but not touching for fear of noise) the wall of the downstairs bedroom. All duct pass through the loft above said bedroom and then enter the house itself. That loft is a disturbing piece of modern art. I’m glad that I will never see it again (fingers crossed). Fifteen 90mm corrugated white tubes bound together wrapped in fluffy brown insulation snaking through the trusses. Where they pass into the house there is a Quatermass of airtight foam, as if the house was punctured by the hydra and it bleed green goo. Getting the insulation up there was surreal. It’s a v restricted space and the only way to do it was to poke my upper body through a gap in the ceiling VCL and distribute the insulation. It pretty much fills the loft now. When I start sleeping properly again I’ll have nightmares about all that. It wasn’t all bad news though. One bit that worked really well was taking all the ducts for upstairs straight up the front gable wall, with the ducts insulated but never passing through the VCL. The bit that didn’t work was the downstairs ducts getting over the glulam. It meant they started their journey into the house with a tight s bend. The corrugated outer skin helped prevent the pipes pulling through the holes in the wall and floor that enabled them to dive down into the posi layer. We also discovered a downside to our very heavily engineered joist plan above our main room. We are very keen to have nice, stiff floors upstairs with little movement. So we ended up with pairs of 147mm posis with only about 240mm gap between each pair. Looking at it there was literally more joist than gap. Felt good to walk on. Getting ducting through however… On top of that we had a flue to avoid, and a barrier formed by two well insulated pipes that run from the UFH manifold to the cylinder via a diversion due to steelwork - another obvious bit that I failed to anticipate. Thank goodness the bookends (the guys doing the solar pv/inverter/battery/UFH/heat pump/UVC/etc.) suggested getting the cylinder in when they did. We call them bookends as either appear to be unable to work without the other. Odd world, innit. So, with those pipes too in place it’s v congested in various areas. Much swearing and jumping up and down onto stepladders and skinned knuckles later and the vent pipes were done, with all 15 vent ducts poking out into the garage like some 1950s comedy alien being. An alien that sits and waits, and when I walk past it it spits distilled water onto me. Seriously. Yet another ‘I’d never have imagined that’ moment. I'm guessing that the warm, wet air from the house is being sucked through all the vent pipes by the passing breezes. The garage is unheated. When that air hits the bit of the ducts in the garage some of the water vapour condenses onto the inner walls of the ducts. As I walk past I cause a disturbance which makes the condensation coalesce into droplets that then fall on me. What a fabulous illustration of how much an MVHR unit needs a drain. Anyway, eventually, meaning two weeks later than hoped, we were ready for the tackers. I’d amassed a long list of ‘I’ll do that when the tackers are here’ tasks, oh my, will I never learn! To start with there was a constant stream of questions from the three guys. All of them reasonable, but they tended to be neatly timed so I’d just start picking up tools to do something myself when I distant “Geoff” would be heard so I’d put everything back down and toddle off to find which bit that particular tacker was staring at. Originally we’d planned to put an OSB layer on all walls and the upstairs ceilings. I'd gone for raised tie trusses to reclaim some of the ceiling heights lost early in the design process. The idea was that the little sloped bit at the top of each wall would be hidden by the extra layer of studs and insulation. It was designed to the millimetre. Mistake. The tackers assured me they would be careful of the ceiling VCL, and indeed they were. The few times they caught the VCL or when it needed easing they called me in to bring my repair tape. (Note to others - put spare VCL at corners, it’s so easy to make it too tight for the tackers). So they convinced us to ditch the ceiling OSB idea. Only if course, I’d factored in the thickness of the OSB into my calcs for the raised tie trusses. So when the walls were boarded in a couple of places the roof bracing was just a tiny bit too low. I should have allowed a contingency but hey ho, double boarding the walls sorted it where needed. Fortunate to say the least. Plasterboard changes the place. We’d spent weeks amongst soft, spongy walls, with insulation sitting behind and in front of the VCL. Very quiet. Lovely in fact. But plasterboard puts all the echo back and then some. Plus it finally shows the rooms for the shape and size they are. Sounds daft given how long we've spent in those rooms but seeing them plasterboarded was a bit of a shock in places. The best example of that is the hallway. Drawing layouts and trying to imagine spaces only gets you so far. We designed in a double height space just inside the front door, nice straight stairs on one side. Bit of a sort of gallery on the other. But it’s huge. I knew all the dimensions by heart but I still didn’t know how big it was going to turn out. We are going to have to get creative to get it feeling right. Fortunately for me our principle aesthetics consultant (i.e. J) is brilliant, so I just know it’ll turn out well. The plasterers were a dream. Tidy, polite, quiet (if you ignore Bananrama and Simply Red constantly playing in the background) and they also did a super job. A pleasure to work with. The only wrinkle was the ergovents. I installed them in their plenums precisely as per the instructions. What a shame I didn’t check with the plasterers first. The instructions said the vents should be either flush or max 1mm below the plasterboard, which I super carefully did. The plasterers started when the upstairs was boarded, and they took one look at the vents and said “no”. They need 3mm to 4mm proud. Turns out the instructions are really targeted on the continent, where, apparently, they rarely skim. We skim. We need more depth. Thank heavens downstairs hadn’t been boarded by then. All but one upstairs I could get to from the loft, slitting the VCL (I really must remember to go back and repair those slits) adjusting the brackets so they could be skimmed properly. The downstairs ones were easy to adjust, ahead of boarding. The plaster has reduced the echo a bit, and as it’s drying and its colour gets lighter it’s given an even better impression of the rooms. The plasterers were much less high maintenance giving Rolly and me time to put the wood cladding on the rear gable (massively more time consuming than expected) which meant that the three skylights could be fitted. Fantastic. I borrowed a leaf blower from Rolly. The intention was to do a half arsed leak test using a temporary loft hatch. Never did get used, we never put the time aside, there was always a short term deadline hogging the priority. We'll find out in time whether it was needed. Another one for the ‘hope’ list.

My faulty Brink Flair unit has now been returned, and I bought and installed a DucoBox Energy Comfort 325. All of the problems I attributed to the Flair have now gone away. This is as good a like-for-like test as you're going to get, everything is the same - same house, same ducting, same vents, only the main unit has changed. Just for completeness, I want to mention two additional (objective, measurable) tests I did on the Brink Flair in the last days we had it, using a CO2 and humidity monitor. Why didn't I think of this earlier!! I placed the monitor inside one of the supply vents, luckily we have two through-wall vents which are perfect for this (https://www.ventilationland.co.uk/en_GB/p/uniflexplus-wall-manifold-rear-connection-1x-o90-mm/9744/) so the whole monitor can sit in the incoming airflow. We then left it for a few minutes so the values could settle down and we could get a general background reading: the RH was about 55% and the CO2 was about 450ppm. First test was a humidity test: I boiled a kettle in the kitchen and let the steam be sucked into the extract valve. The RH jumped to 70%, then went back down again. I also showered, and again the RH shot up to 70% (see attached graph). Second test was a CO2 test: I disconnected the flexible noise dampener which is connected to the Flair's extract port, and breathed into it several times. The CO2 reading at the supply vent briefly increased, from about 450 to 485, then went down again. I tried this again with my partner, and the CO2 reading went up to about 540 PPM. (This one is difficult to show on the graph though, as the unit only logs every five minutes, so the brief peak isn't logged. It's difficult to keep breathing into the extract!) This can only be because there was a leak inside the unit. This does echo the results of my smell test, but is more objective and can't be written off as me having some sort of super-nose! I consider that to be proof that the Flair was faulty, despite Brink's inistence that it wasn't. The new Duco works as expected. I've done the same tests, and showering makes no difference at all to the moisture levels of the incoming air. It's been in for over a week now, and the RH in the house hovers around 44 to 54%. Even while boiling a big pan of potatoes there's no moisture on the kitchen window, whereas with the Flair it would be dripping wet. With the Brink Flair the humidity in the house was always high. The 55% mentioned above was only acheived because we had left the above-window vents open, and aired the house out every day by opening the windows for several minutes. Until we started doing that it was always above 60% and would jump to over 70% when cooking/showering. I must say I'm really disappointed with Brink. They showed little interest in the problem, I had to nag them constantly, and were almost totally unresponsive, and it seems they closed my 'case' several times. If I hadn't kept the pressure up they would never have responded. Which is a shame, as I really liked their products otherwise.

If you’re not driving the digger then your opinion doesn’t matter. if you have an experienced operator and a good groundworker then they will know exactly what to do. don’t interfere too much, sit on the dumper or work the laser, but trying to over manage lads that do this every day won’t go down very well. You won’t know how the corners will hold up until you start, you might come across a big patch of loose backfill,have the shuttering to hand you will dig all that in two days, you need a site visit the second you get 4-5 m of trench to full depth. you do not under any circumstances want to have to go back over it, so you need depth sign off the same day you start. what do you mean by shutter and pour multiple times. that all needs digging in one go and pouring in one hit the following day.

Norrsken admitted they had some website errors and the door is incorrectly showing as 33db instead of the correct 22 or 21db. They are going to replace the door itself at their cost to the acoustic version but just waiting on info from them. Will update as I get more info.

This is a good example of why we need a bit of nuance in the debate. You can quite truthfully say that China are building a large number of new coal power stations every year. And if it suits your agenda, that's the end of the sentence. The bigger picture is that these plants are in part replacing older, less efficient ones, and are acting as backup to an increasingly renewables dependent grid. So that China's emissions are actually falling. Good luck finding that level of analysis in the Daily Mail or GB News.

All the talk is about banning social media for under 16, just ban it all together. So much miss information told as a truth, and then the algorithm just points you at similar rubbish. People that don't have science background just lap it up. Sat next to guy on the train he was telling me that people are daft having solar especially in Scotland, I told him how much I had exported so far in March, he was was quite shocked. Also told him what I paid for it as a self install, he expected tens of thousands, not the couple I actually paid.

Drill a dozen 6mm holes and pump it full of "PIR in a can", eg Illbruck foam <20 mins per window, job done

Just to give those who have contributed to the thread an update - we have proposed to the council we would make good potholes in the unmaid road and provide a electric cart & charger and this was their reply: "I think that would probably be acceptable on balance. As we’ve said previously, the question is whether the refuse collection arrangements would amount to significant harm to residential amenity – if there is evidence that the issue has been considered and addressed in some manner, then a case could be made for approval despite be contrary to guidance. The provision of a pull-cart and improved surfacing would likely meet the tests for the imposition of conditions. In short, I think we would have a difficult time refusing the application on these grounds if a pull-cart and improved surfacing were proposed and conditioned."

There is a bit of terminology to learn. Energy is measured in MJ (megajoule). A joule is the standard unit for energy and when converted to base units of kilograms, metres and seconds is very small. Why the M for 1,000,000 is added at the front. Now no one, apart from us nerdy scientists, use MJs, and domestic energy is metered and purchased in kWh. MJs can be multiplied by 0.0007778, or divided by 3600 to end up with kWh. The k just means 1000, W is watt and h is an hour, which is 3600 seconds. Power (W) is the rate that energy is used. You can think of this as your miles per gallon in your car, with energy being how many gallons are in the tank. If your car does 40 MPG at 60 MPH, and your tank has 8 gallons in it, you can drive 320 miles over 5 hours and 20 minutes. A unit of power is called a watt, which is actually a J/second. Again a small unit, so a k is added. A k is 1000. This gives the more normal kW for a power rating. Boilers, heat pumps and even wood burners all have a maximum kW rating i.e. 6 kW. Radiators, UFH and fan heaters also have a power rating. (This can get confused by some people talking old imperial units of BTU and BTU/h, but we went metric in ,'73, so tell them off) Where it starts to get confusing is a house will need a varying amount of thermal power to keep it at a steady internal temperature. This is caused by external temperatures rising and falling during the seasons and even during the day. This can be overcome in a number of ways. The easy way, and the way old heating systems were set up, was to fire up a boiler at full power, heat some water, pump it around the house to all the radiators, which then heated the air. When the house was up to temperature, the thermostat turned the boiler off. When the temperature dropped a few degrees, it turned the boiler back on. These days we are a bit more sophisticated and try to deliver enough energy to match the losses. This keeps the house at a steadier temperature, and used less energy overall. You will almost certainly read on hear about weather compensation (WC). This is just a basic feedback system that knows what the outside temperature is, how much power is being delivered to the house and for how long it may be needed. All that can be boiled down to a few numbers. The main numbers you need to know are the thermal losses for each room. Once those are added together, you get a number for the whole house. It is usual to size for a worse case i.e. -10°C outside. This gives you a maximum power requirement (heat source kW). Most of the time, you will be heating the house when it is way warmer outside, so the second number you need is about how much the heat source can be turned down internally. This is called modulation. Gas boilers have quite a high ratio, sometimes 10 to 1 i.e. 12 kW down to 1.2 kW. Heat pumps are not, generally, so good and are often in the range of 3 to 4 to 1. There are ways around this, but that is for later. The other thing that is important is domestic hot water (DHW). There are two ways to do this. Heat water only when it is needed (instantaneous), this requires a lot of power, often over 25 kW. Or Heat and store in a cylinder. This method takes longer for the same amount of delivered hot water, but used less power, often in the region of 3 to 6 kW. If the heat source is delivering both central heating and DHW, then this needs to be taken into account. With modern combination gas boilers, they are sized to deliver enough hot water, and rely on boiler modulation to deliver lower power for the space heating. Heat pumps, generally, rely on being only slightly oversized (which improves efficiency most if the time) and run a space heating time slot and a DHW timeslot at different temperatures and different times during the day. There is a lot of detail in heating design. So questions to ask are. Maximum house losses. Room by room heat losses. DHW reheat times.

IMO, do NOT use this person for anymore work, particularly above ground. I had someone do some work for me recently who I can heartily recommend, based RG6 4 postcode area (S Reading) PM me for details

They also import the coal - not energy self sufficient. We don't have much coal as proven reserves, so you are saying the policy is build coal powered power stations that rely on imported coal. There is zero business case for that sort of project. Why would anyone spend there money on that. A power station that has been shutdown and not had preservation maintenance completed will be good for scrap only. All the rotating equipment (turbines generators, pumps, fans) will have bowed shafts, the bearings and seals will be no use. Think the l'm for coal lobby, live in a make believe world, that doesn't exist. I will bow out now.

China is building new coal, but not much and as some is replacing old coal the total growth in thermal capacity is very modest. About 60Gw (out of nearly 3,500 Gw total) against 90Gw of wind and +300Gw of solar. As you can see even though energy production is rising the share by fossil fuels is falling. For all the people who say "why shoukd the UK do anything, China is the important one" - China is doing something. They installed more wind capacity in one year that the entire UK grid (some 45Gw is, depending) and more than 4x in solar. LNG imports were falling (luckily for them) and oil was falling though it did rise slightly last year, mostly due to refilling stockpiles (wouldn't that have been a good idea). I believe actual use of liquid fuels fell.

To summarise: We should want to reduce dependence on imported fuels. Given our current situation and available resources by far the quickest, cheapest and easiest way to do this is to build more solar, wind and battery storage. Everything else is more expensive and slower.

no idea about plant watering but we have sucessfully installed 15000litre underground potable tank with pump controlled by pressure switch/pressure tank. filters before tank. Once in house water goes through 3 stage filter then UV - feeds into hot water tank (set at 55° - which as far as i know will kill anything) /hot taps/shower and cold taps/washing machine/dishwasher/toilet cistern. Water not completely clear with tanins still present but not bad at all. Think this will improve however over time as found about 6 weeks ago groundworker was incapable of following clear instructions regarding tank overflow - I've done a temporary fix - another job on list for summer! Once we have built kitchen we'll have reverse osmosis supply to kitchen sink and bathroom basin. Once all in we'll get RO sample tested (and UV only for interest). I'll be astonished if any issues but better to be safe before drinking. If calcs right reckon a full tank will last at least 50 days without rain. Might add another tank for additional storage and/or a connection (dryer season only) from a second roof not currently utilised, and we do have back up supply if really needed. I found the numerous 'uk rainwater harvesting companies' pretty useless and arrogant - most are just ticking boxes / playing at it imo. and found lots of info on Australian/US sites - they are way ahead - and worked out for myself along with significant assistance from pumpexpress.co.uk who suggested schemes and products - which we bought from them. definitely worth talking to. The potable tank from elsewhere - shop around and be careful.

The power outage was not caused by renewables. It was caused by a lack of preparedness in the rest of the system that allowed a cascade of isolated failures to multiply. This is it a great advert for more distributed generation and power storage on the system. With battery storage and grid forming inverters, the drop in frequency that caused the Spanish outage simply would not have happened. Batteries can respond far quicker to frequency failures than conventional rotational generators.

So no acid rain, the most polluting form of electric, yes it great. By the time you opened the coal mines to feed one coal power station and build the power station, you could have built 3x the capacity in wind - Scotland did.

Not much need for commentary : the pond is fed entirely from the roof run off. (SUDS) Cost? Absolutely everything inclusive : £5 or 6 hundred. Tops The sand (bulk bags) in the photo below is 'buried' under the garden as a filter for the roof run off. Its been working hard recently 😑 This is where that pipe in the photo above runs into the pond. Overflow from here into the pond in the field below our site ( The one with the GCNs in )

Ask @flanagaj what he paid, then pay more than that. Then you won't have to come here asking questions about basic design stuff, that should be in the drawings already.

Food for thought: Another way of approaching this is to ask. What would it cost you to get a washing machine repair Engineer? Say £50- 60 quid an hour? Ok they have a "down time" that they don't get paid for as they may be at your house for an hour then have to drive to the next job, but someone has to pay for that. Now typical rates for a structural engineer working under the IR35 scheme in the UK are about £350 to £500 a day, equates to £45 - £70 an hour as they get paid for a full 8 hour day. Much depends on experience! Go to a self employed SE/ Architectural Designer like me who has no employees then the rates are about the same except that I have overheads. These are primarily my software, my PI insurance and admin costs. Admin / business generating costs. Admin is admin, I pay an accountant, have to keep records, a secure data base etc.. but quite a lot of time is spent generating business that a contractor under IR 35 does not have to do. Turning now to say a small Architect practice with four or five employees that are innovative, expanding and so on. The overheads shoot up, often dramatically. How long is the string? Well it has no end. This is a summary for sake of conversation. It used to be in the old days that say Architect's, Engineers, Surveyors got a percentage of the build cost. But as the market got more competetive and folk like say MBC timber frame (the list is endless) came along and offered a design service then the main designers.. like Architect's, SE's just shifted part of the design work onto them. Now all that worked ok for a bit.. but now it's got to the stage where the lack of coordination is really causing problems. This is not helped by TV programmes ect that often suggest you can pick builder and design sevices like something off a barber shop menu and it will all be ok at the end of the day. My take: It's vitally important to understand what you designer is offering. Not just in terms of say doing a few drawings but also their understanding of how the design process works practically and how you go about communication to and finding the right builder. . I find that often once I explain this "added value" then many are happy to pay for a service that includes much more than drawings and some structural calculations. In the round once you become a competant designer then the rest is down to communication.. which is a skill in itself. 2% of a build cost for an Architect Take a house extension at 100k.. you won't get much for your two thousand pounds. take a new build at 300k with all the work that goes along with that, dealing with the roads, environments, water board.. all that stuff all for 6.0k. Just maybe but I would not do it as I know I would have to cut corners.. which will come back to bite eveyone. Quite often these days I break down my quotes / estimates into how long I'll spend on each element of the design. I'll maybe say.. two days to survey the site, at £xx amount per hour and so on. I find Clients embrace my transparency. It is very rare that they come back and say my hourly or daily rate is too high. In the round I don't think applying a percentage fee cost works anymore.. you have to be much more streetwise.

Which is why it hurts when good advice is totally ignored.

Quick update following the FENSA inspection. An independent inspection has now been carried out, and the installation has been formally assessed as non-compliant with Building Regulations (Part L - thermal performance). The key findings were: The doors/windows were installed with only ~20mm setback from the external brick face, which the assessor states is likely to cause thermal bridging Recommended minimum setback is ~50mm, or use of thermal breaks The frame was not properly centralised in the opening, resulting in insufficient sealing and lack of expanding foam, affecting airtightness Additional issues noted around drainage and water retention within frame Overall conclusion: installation not compliant, with thermal performance concerns validated. At this stage, I’m focusing on understanding the appropriate remediation route based on this, rather than speculating further. I’ll update again once I’ve progressed the next steps on the S75 side.

I've stopped feeding the birds. A lot of the food is lost to the ground and rodents clear it. Also i read that we are fattening up our resident garden birds in winter, which then dominate the birds we see less.. esp the migrating ones arriving after an exhausting journey.

I get apprehensive, still, after 30 years on the tools. Concrete pours are quite full on, even for the initiated. Maybe it’s time to reach out to a local groundworker to support? Would be money very well spent, because if this goes tits up it’s a 4-figure ‘catastrophe’.

In my view that drawing is not intending to show a stepped footing, it shows footings at different depths. Where the section 'sections' the building there are no footings other than those show. To see the details of the step it needs to be a simple diagram side on of the trench / footings, or a section in the same plane through the side wall perpendicular to the walls shown. Not sure I'm explaining myself very clearly, but that section is through the (say) middle of the building, the step in the footings will be in the walls that join the two walls shown, I think!

Up and working. The mount I linked above is good as was the bracket. I had to notch and taper the top of the aluminum 50mm bracket to fit into the tapered cast alloy mount for the antenna. So far the service is proving rock solid. I opted for the €35/month 100mbps. It's dropped to €29 since. Sitting in my kitchen that's what I'm getting now.

To date my experience of Starlink has been excellent. The product and everything in the box is top quality and well presented. It works very well and is dead easy to set up.

Me, @Onoff and @Pocster. Trouble is everyone else is too nice to us, so we carry on.

I design stuff like this. There are many options. Best advice I can give you is to get an SE on board now, even if to provide a watching brief. If you don't then you introduce significant cost risk and uncertainty. You know there is a potential issue so the sooner you get that under control the better.

Stock piling is seldom a good idea. It ends up being in the way, at risk of damage from operations and the weather, and needing double handling. Nearer to the time of need, ask the BM if any increases are forecast, and maybe avoid 10% cost and store for a few weeks. But I did this recently with insulation. And we had to shift it to suit a change in plan. The handling cost prob equalled the 10% saving. Then there is cashflow. The VAT cost is sitting there needlessly. Spend your time in saving material altogether, through design reviews and planning.

indeed. and it is the contractor who would be in very big trouble for not declaring the income. The IR know when annual returns look imbalanced and the VAT computer spots anomalies too. Plus taxes do have a purpose. That customer is probably going through life complaining about government services, and the brown envelope brigade because that is what they would do. 'How much for cash in hand?' Oh just allow a 5% handling charge.

Have you considered splitting the house so kitchen dining runs front to back instead of along the back?

Hi, Was going down the route of Sips build with vaulted truss roof, contacted a few companies and picked a company for the kit that assured me they would build me a nearly passive house and build it in an efficient manor with no hidden extras, they told me in second week in January drawing for BC would take about one week, to cut a long story short nearly eight weeks later no drawings, very poor communication, I found another company and now going down total TF design with same U-values as SIP’s, price is 12k dearer but includes all windows and doors, all walls inside, fully plaster boarded inside, I phoned the first company to speak to the director who I could never get a hold of and spoke to the receptionist to say I had lost confidence in them, surprisingly he phoned me back in five minutes and totally understood my decision and apologised for lack of communication and said he was sorry for the delays and could not find an engineer that could do calculations for the steel work, I told him that I was sorry but if things are going wrong at this stage then I cannot let you continue with my build, I am now really glad I have swapped TF supplier…

As a literal self builder everything delays us, but we continue to slog away. There is a field where the footpath is going past our build as the farmer won't clear the proper one. But, you know you are progressing when the church people on the palm Sunday walk all commented on how much we've done. Since my last update last summer (remember that - heat) when it looked like this. It now looks like this We had a pretty major disaster last Autumn when a 70 mph storm came right over the field and a wall came tumbling down. For context that's the wall by HID and dog. To say that was a low point is a huge understatement. Comments over the dinner table included knocking everything down and reinstating the stables. The corner was left but we just knocked that down as well and when it was rebuilt then we've only gone up to 5 blocks so it's not such a wind target. Obviously, in hindsight we shouldn't have built one wall so high with no support and we are now going up one layer at a time all round. This disaster also cost us lots in money as the 'wall' is now on the rubbish heap along with the lintels. I've not got any photos after it fell as I was just too peed off. We also lost another month because the BCO wanted some technical details of the slab confirmed by the SE as he was concerned that we didn't have the right grade of mesh and it turns out that this was a verbal discussion and I couldn't find anything written down. It turned out fine, but it took weeks for the SE to get around to confirming this. It was only when I threatened to go to his office to discuss that they suddenly arrived. One corner of the site (not yet touched) is clay, everything else is sand and the SE had originally specced for all clay when the BCO said not necessary. The SE came to site and met with the BCO, but it was all a conversation with no official documentation. To replace the look of the barn we have a sloping flat roof and this middle wall is going to hold the joists for each side. These are 140 wide rather than 100. We are looking forward to having the temp window and internal door frames in place soon as that will really start to look like a house. We reckon that at our usual rate of progress that the walls will be up by end Sept. As we want to put the whole roof on at the same time we are going to put up temp joists to ensure that all walls are held together. Then we have a lot more concrete to break and the clay area to consider. Being a hands on builder can be satisfying, but it can also be very stressful and slow. Back again at some point in the future with another update.

I suspect the biggest risk to public health will be panels falling on people.

Wire wool. that is a water pipe coming up through a sleeve ? keep stuffing it down, untill you cant get any more in. Rats or mice, wont chew through wire wool, because it makes there gums bleed. I'm not saying dont use poison, but it is always a shame that owls etc then eat the dead rats, and are poisoned. Rats need a food and water source. If you have either of them in your garden, such as a bird feeder, or a pond. Try and remove those. Best of luck. Getting rid of rats is much harder than most people think.

I tend to go with adapt and overcome.

The brickie and his labourer are now coming along to assist.

@flanagajI'm already feeling very apprehensive. Being a catastrophiser, doesn't help matters I'm not trying to make matters worse here, or suggest that you and your wife aren't capable.....just giving my take on it.....I attended the first and last pours (we had a couple as narrow site and had to work forwards). I had never seen it done before, was there purely as an observer to "mark the moment". Geoff had two people with him who were uber experienced and were used to working with the guys supplying the concrete. All calm, having done the prep and then super frenetic activity to make sure everyone safe and mix right, in the right place, levelled etc etc. There is no way that I would have wanted to be involved. I know for us all control of costs is important, but this is an area where, even though Geoff is capable, we really felt the benefit of having the experienced guys taking the lead. We can after all if necessary, wait for "the" kitchen, tiles but.....

Yes it looks like pilling blinding as there is a pilling rig there today so good spot @Mr Punter. So they drill core drill through the blinding and then put the piles in all very neat and tidy - no mud other than what comes out of the hole!

Good job you found it now rather than when the walls missed the foundations. It might be worth a spring clean, and delete (or hide away) all the drawings you have and get the architect to send new, clearly labelled 'construction issue'. Then issue them to anyone else who might need to change them. I have a warm glow from suggesting you check it in the twilight. "Yes I would, because people make mistakes." Let this be your mantra throughout. This all maters much more to you than to them. @SteamyTea your drawings are a great explanatory. In real life, I was going to say that the error would not usually be in having a non-square corner as a starting point. But with every little builder now having a Lidl laser, I guess that is quite likely.

We had a local surveyor, he came to site 3 times. 1. rough set out. footprint plus 2 m in all directions so we could strip the site. 2. Accurate footing set out, footings set out with metal pins on every corner accurate to 20mm in any direction 3. Wall set out, masonary nails put into footing concrete on corner locations, accurate to the mm.

Unless I've missed something, hempcrete still seems to be a niche product in the UK, so this newly published webinar on its use in European newbuild may be of interest. It's mainly focused on apartment buildings (with some office & commercial) rather than single homes, although there are a couple of examples of those from Australia (using a rebranded French system). Sprayed hempcrete, hempcrete blocks and prefabrication are all covered, applied to timber, steel and concrete frames. Start at 10' 50" if you want to skip the introductions.

It’s not just the cost, it’s the security of supply. There’s also a benefit for the treasury in the amount of tax that can be taken from producing it at home. And what’s to stop new licenses for exploration being granted to a state run company (other than them no doubt f’ing it up). Or the state could take a stake and leave operations to someone who knows what they are doing. Perhaps we need to start thinking about burning coal in the short term again until we can finish a transition away from FF. I’m seriously worried about the economy. Tax/costs are already at unsustainable levels for business, making the product unaffordable for the average consumer, yet the treasury is still going to need more of our money as it’s still bleeding cash. This is before the impact of this new war. We need to do something fairly drastic imo.

At the risk of repeating myself, that video is of non LiFePo4 batteries! It looks scary but that sort of thermal runaway is specifically what LiFePo4 batteries were designed to avoid. I guess that's why they are starting to put them in EVs now. There are many but this is quite a fun video:

Ok that sounds like a good move. Here is what I would do if I was you. Find the best and well repute self employed 3CX digger driver with their own machine that works local. Pay the extra. Get them round and ask them how to do it! Ask them how they want the found marked; inside, outside, centreline or all of the preceeding. Assume the weather is going to be pish and some marks get lost by accident. Set some pegs well outwith the dig so if the marks get lost you can run a string line to get you back on track. Work out what you are going to do if you hit soft spots. An experienced digger driver is going to be your best friend here. They may also say they will pitch up during the pour and can use the back actor to get the concrete in place. Make sure you take plenty photographs. Be careful not to over dig. There are some horrible examples on BH where over dig happens and it just makes things ten times worse, they fill with water, hit even softer ground deeper down. Go and have a look again at what your SE is expecting in terms of ground conditions. If in doubt ask. Ask your SE if they can be on the end of the phone or just come to site if you get stuck. Yes, I know you probably don't want to pay for an SE visit but at the end of the day it can save you a pile of worry and cash. You only get one real chance of making a good job of this so don't take daft risks. Take time placing any reinforcement mesh.. many ground workers just fling it in.. and you pay for it.. but it is worse than useless if not properly placed.

No time like now. The amount of jobs I start in the ground in the depths of winter is far higher than those which start in summer. It generally pans out ok unless there is a significant seasonal water table. Even that is generally manageable if less than ideal.