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Hi, last September we found a plot we liked in South Cambridgeshire and started to look into doing our own self build. This is something we had considered doing when we retire, but plots that align with our requirements are not super abundant, so we decided to do it now instead. We are looking to build a Passivhaus two storey dwelling and have it certified. Energy efficiency is important to us and so is having a home at the end that is really comfortable to live in. A few months later and we have exchanged contracts and are a couple of months into a planning application, awaiting the final outcome any week now. We started the journey with an architect, but two months into the relationship we realized our timeline would be heavily affected by the fact that we were not totally aligned and not fully listened to (despite very lengthy email threads back and forth) and decided to learn how to do the architecting ourselves, and hire any experts we needed to help with things along the way. But having a third party handling it all for us was... too low touch for our liking. We'll be managing the build ourselves, as we've decided against having a main contractor. Maybe we'll need a project manager at some point. We've been reading the forum and learning from you all, hopefully we contribute something back soon!

Well, it's been nearly 9 months since we moved in, and I didn't leave a list last time, so here are the parts of the last list that still needed work. As you will see there still remains a lot of stuff to do. You'll soon learn why they're still here 😞 more stone work - still on the list but much reduced rainwater soakaways - still on the list rainwater collection system - decided after deliberating a lot to leave this out for now as it's not a condition backfilling - partly done, still on the list concrete lego brick retaining wall - delivered, to be fitted Flooring - en-suite and "attic" room left to do Wood cladding - still on the list Fit internal doors - one last door to do Fit en suite - basin and bog outstanding Build MY garage - still on the list A green roof system, because its on the planning application, and may be required for certificate of completion (unless someone can enlighten me as to how to avoid this, and be able to delay the installation) - still on the list, but good news on the completion element for this below. Back in August 2025 we moved into a building site, and worked hard to get the remaining bedrooms completed before our first Christmas for which SWMBO had invited MY family. Not sure whether to label this action as bullying, blackmail, fraud, spousal abuse or whether another specific crime was committed. But, we got there, and a fantastic Christmas was had. Also during this time, we managed to secure a buyer for our old house. We had decided to stop calling it home to start the process of removing 29 years of emotional attachment to the place in which we brought up our two children, and in December we removed pretty much all the remaining furniture in readiness for Christmas and what we thought would be a completion on the sale in January/February of 2026. You may recall me asking questions about a retaining wall which was holding up the new buyers getting a mortgage. Now, this wall was not a part of the house but on our boundary about 2 feet or so away from the side wall of the house. It has a crack in it and the lender wanted it repaired. We had requested an SE to come give us a report, hopefully to tell the lender to stop being a d1ck, and we had arranged to meet them on the 6th January. We arrived the day before to find it difficult to open the front door because there was some plasterboard behind it which had come from the landing ceiling at the top of the stairs. This had been caused by a leaking water pipe in the loft. Subsequent water bills showed that 28m3 of water had come through the ceiling - we now had a major water leak insurance claim repair to deal with. And the upshot of the SE visit the following day was they said it did need fixing. B0110cks!! So, now instead of a completion in Jan/Feb, we were looking at a completion in 3-6 months. We then found out that the retaining wall was our liability, and not the people who owned the land behind it. This put a huge dent in our plans. Everything we had planned to do in the first half of 2026 (work on the house and a ski trip) went on hold as we got someone in to repair the wall (in March, once the rain had stopped) and to deal with the insurance company who thought it was a great idea to appoint two separate companies to complete the drying out/repair work - WHAT COULD GO WRONG? We sat down, and reworked our plans for work on the house. This has been limited to work that we could carry out with little spend because either it was something outside in the "garden" (read mud bath), we already had the materials on site, or the materials required were not hugely expensive. What have we been up to in between complaining to the insurance company about the lack of co-ordination and progress (WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT?) We bought parts to start finishing off the rainwater drainage pipework, which also allowed us to do our first bit of hard landscaping, some steps down to one side of the house, and starting off the path as well. We still had a lot of stone cladding to complete, so once the weather improved, I set to completing most of this. There are still a few odd bits and pieces to do once the balcony and connecting bridge have been completed (one of the large ticket items that is on hold). The other main area of work has been the en-suite bathroom, where we spent a little bit of savings and created a service wall on two sides, got it plastered and painted, and also installed the walk-in shower. After a bit of back and forth, SWMBO agreed to a wall hung toilet pan (thank you to those who responded to my cry for help). So, the en-suite requires said bog, a basin and vanity, tiling behind the basin, flooring and a door to be completed. All materials on site or on order, and the plan is to get on with that over the next few weeks. So, where does all this leave us? Well, the bits of good news we've had:- - our BCO visited just before Christmas and gave us a list of things he'd like to see before he issued a completion certificate, and on that list found that the green roof was not required to be fitted, but just some documentation about what we proposed to put up there. I know what many will think, but we will probably still install one at some point, but it does mean we can delay installing it until after completion. - I mentioned we secured a buyer for the old house. Well, they have stuck around through all our tribulations and we will be completing on June 5th. Come mid June we should have the following major items to complete, and the funds to do them: Balcony including balustrade Connecting bridge to balcony Balustrade by internal stairwell Exterior porch floor rainwater soakaways - still on the list concrete lego brick retaining wall and backfilling Flooring - "attic" room left to do Wood cladding Finish the en suite - as outlined above Build MY garage - still on the list A green roof system Once all that is done we might also be ready to clear the site of the touring caravan we used for the first four years of weekends and holiday time we spent building the house and a lot of left over building materials. I'm glad to say there is very little of that as I resisted the "order 10% more than you need" rule, and am pleased to say it only bit me twice in extra delivery charges. This has meant we have incurred zero cost for skips/clearaway etc. and, no, we have not buried it all in a very big hole in the 3 acre field we bought. There's still a lot to do, but as we approach June 5th with lightened hearts, we have a much clearer view of some form of end game, with may hours to be spent creating a new garden around our NEW HOME!!

No apologies needed. As self builders sometimes the pressure of managing everything just gets too much and when things go wrong it's usually our closest that bear the brunt. I recall a renovation where we had sunk everything we had into it and needed it finished desperately in order to sell it before we ran out of money just for day to day living. Our 10 year old had got used to coming to site with us most weekends as we scrabbled to get done. I gave her the job of painting a short length of cast iron downpipe with some black gloss. She did ok with that but didn't put the lid back on the tin. I picked up the dust sheet without noticing and poured black gloss all over the indian sandstone patio that had been freshly laid only a couple of weeks before. I do admit to ranting excessively, not directly at her but just how unfair life, god, the world and everything was. It was the straw that broke the camels back so to speak. Later that day, having dropped her back home and returned to site, her elder brother rang to say he couldn't find her in the house. A frantic search all over the village ensued to no avail. As we widened the search with the help of neighbours and decided to alert the police, a call came in from a nice lady in Cambridge who had found her wandering the streets. It seems she had packed a bag (including an OS map for reference!), boarded a train (unmanned village station) and traveled a few stops into Cambridge with the intention of going to her aunt's house. She had got upset and thought all the problems were her fault. Boy did that bring home the important things in life and certainly gave me a new perspective. We never let ourselves get into that situation again and despite many a frustration over the years you just have to press on through it - worse things happen at sea!

UPDATE……. so after emailing and posting the letters by hand, the builders truck arrived at the neighbours yesterday. This morning I was doing some work outside and the neighbour called by and said the builders aren’t starting Tuesday now. They (neighbours) put a halt to it to clear up what’s going on. Said builder said he would deal with communications, they didn’t know what was involved with access or PWA. Didn’t want any bother so it’s paused until further notice. It was the first amicable conversation about it. So the builder is available for work now if anyone is interested 😁 In the meantime I’ve painted the fence, walls have a had a coat of brilliant white, jet washed and pointed slabs and oiled furniture. looks lovely for any future photos 👍🏻 Thank you

Well, I bit the bullet : 1 tonne moved a hundred meters or so . Ladies and gentlemen, I give you The Age Appropriate Wheelbarrow (Branding deliberately removed by AI )

Finished

Thank you all for your contributions. We have sent 2 separate letters. First one for the PWA and second one for access, trespass, legal action etc. We will see what happens on Tuesday when they arrive. Got so much going on at moment with work, Scotland plot, holidays, it just really wasn’t needed now. Myself and partner discussed it a few months ago saying that when we get notification, despite not wanting it built, we will be amicable and let them have access with conditions but the way it’s all been gone about. One working days notice on work comencing and been spoken to way I was is not how I expected it. I’ll go and enjoy a 3 day weekend now before battle 👍🏻

Time to drop anchor and grind them to a halt. Sounds like they need a bit of bringing down to earth, along with the boisterous builder. If this is how they begin, christ knows how difficult / arrogant they'll be as they get comfortable.

Mainly watertight now. Almost finished the front section and one gable

DON'T PAY ANY MORE! Write to them explaining that the work is not satisfactory and you will be withholding all further payments. Attach the photos. Reserve the right to claim all expense to rectify.

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.

Well I'm chuffed to bits with the performance of our new self-build house. With another 6 weeks to go before mid-year our 2026 electric bill has balanced out. By mid-year we should be in credit by about £150, so maybe £300 for the whole year. That is for DHW, heating and domestic load. 2 people in permanent residence, with guests, 200m^2, thermostat set at 21.5c throughout. We run a sauna but not an EV. Contributing factors in approximate order of importance: High levels of insulation in floor, walls, and roof (MBC high performance timber frame) Very good air tightness (0.8) Large solar array 3kw facing SE and 6kw facing SW with no overshading from trees / chimneys etc Octopus Flux tariff Tesla Powerwall 3 battery 5kW ASHP UFH Triple glazing Each item has value in itself, but they also complement each other e.g. the UFH reduces heating temps which increases the efficiency of the ASHP which reduces demand which . . . I just need to tell Octopus that they need to set up a Direct Debit to pay me : )

Vanity was an Italian import, but imo the hung pans look very exclusive. Plenty of shapes and sizes to choose from.

I know CVC are crazy busy atm. Just swap from 92mm round to ‘oval’ (rectangular) duct to pass the steel and then covert back to round. Done it plenty of times. Some examples of my MVHR installs… Hope these examples help. 👍

I had to hack out around our UFH pipes after a change of stair plan. It was easy enough to chisel out the screed and I had a steel bracket fabricated that straddled the pipe and attached to the concrete below with injection resin studs.

Update. I have found no evidence that a decoupling mat provides benefit on a well constructed concrete or screeded floor. Our screed has one tiny visible crack and of course it will stop moving. That on an area of over 300m2. All rooms were already formed in stud, and had foam perimeters so the screed is not stuck ro walls. Had a tiler in to look. He has agreed to quote without a decoupling mat, and will include a flexible adhesive. He has never seen a case of a cracked tiled floor due to absence of mat. Moral I think is: Decoupling mats are for poor quality newbuilds, or a rushed programme or 'peace of mind'. It makes money for the seller and tiler. Btw the tiler also says the dips and ridges that look rough to me are just normal, and part of his job to lose by double buttering. Ie no latex levelling. A good day so far.... now let's see his quote.

As above. As soon as outdoor temp exceeds desired indoor temp we shut all doors/windows and turn the MVHR down to its minimum setting. When the outdoor temp drops below indoor temp of an evening, we open all doors/windows and turn the MVHR up to max. Currently 33.7 degrees outside and 22.5 degrees inside. No active cooling but we do have external blinds which are game changers I reckon.

Just to report, our underfloor cooling is working nicely: 31 deg C outside, 23 deg C in the house - even with the lift and slide doors open. Beautiful day here in Dorset!

I have followed this exact advice. Job's a good 'un.

I've refrained from posting on here for fear of asking stupid questions, but I have concluded that on this occasion, I really could do with some guidance. As you know, we let our first brickie go as his work was substandard. We waited nearly 8 weeks for the new one to start and he started Monday. He is making good progress and aside from not listening to me or reading drawings where service lintels are supposed to go, it's ok. However, when he started, I was really surprised that he did not build up the corners of the house using a laser level, to ensure that the height of the first course would be correct. Instead, he started at one end and made his way down the 24m length. He is now at dpc level on the internal leaf and he is 22mm out from one end of the house (excluding garage) 17m to the other end. Alarm bells are ringing in my head again and I don't know whether I should raise the issue. It's driving me mad that I have to deal with such incompetent individuals. I also had to explain to him that he had missed out the lintel for a back inlet gulley. His response "you don't run a soil pipe into the back of a bottle gulley. You put the sink waste through the wall and into it." Clearly, he is wrong, but I am just the dumb IT Programmer who knows feck all. Just after some help here, as I really don't want to sack another builder and start again.

Anyone thinking this will happen in a few weeks appears likely to be disappointed. The latest NICEIC trade rag just came through and had this to say. It also doesn’t mention the problem of uni or bi directional switchgear. Anyone who has had an RCBO consumer unit fitted in the last decade is very very likely to have it full of uni directional devices. These are not permitted to be used where current potentially flows in both directions. Bi directional rcbos have only been readily available for a couple of years, if that. They are still not standard fit for most people. Usually only fitted to solar pv or EV charging. Europe has very different switchgear to us.

1200mm gives me this dream scenario, much like Dave.

Diplomacy isn't working. You can't repeat the action and expect a different result, so stop him from doing any more work and ask him if he's interested in the rest of the job (or not). His response will be what decides your new direction / next decision. Tell him straight, no quivery top lip, that you have slept on it and cannot accept the discrepancy. End of feckin chat. If he shrugs his shoulders and packs up and fecks off, good riddance. If he decides to offer up a solution to rectify, then tell him it has to be removed on his time and not yours as it should have been right first time. Stop tolerating useless assholes. I wouldn't get away with this, how can he????

There was a recent article in the IStructE magazine just about this and promoting the use of C16 timber. It's pretty well available in Scotland (in EU metric sizes, CLS Canadian lumber standards are slightly diferent in dimensions for example) and for years I've used it where I can. The U value regs in Scotalnd quite often drive the timber external wall stud thickness on a basic timber frame house, call that a major developer type house. You can use C16 at a deeper depth so you can fit a decent thickness of insulation between the studs. The deeper stud in C16 still delivers the strength and deflection limits you need. The problem can be that C16 significantly reduces timber connection performance one you get into transfer beams and anything (say goal posts around openings) that needs to resist sideways wind loading. There is a practical side to this. What you don't want to happen is that the builder mixes up the timber grades on site. When I'm designing I try and make sure that the deep timbers are C24 if I have to use that grade, the shallower ones C16. You never mix grades of timber of the same size. The same applies to steel buildings in terms of bolt grades., you make sure it's not possible to fit the wrong grade of bolt into same sized holes. You can't make it totally idiot proof as a designer but you can try your best.

But it is not. It is a very big water tank, and if the ground moves a tiny bit, the slab and or walls could break and it gets very messy and expensive. And you will be indoors now, not outside., so damage and repairs are x3. There are a lot of failures of swimming pools and contractors have gone bust and Engineers had very expensive claims. And some of these are for proper designs: the ground we live on is very mobile. If the results of the boreholes are encouraging then you will save cost on the amount of concrete and of reinforcememnt. If they show poor ground then it really is essential to know that and design to suit. Is it still 27m long as previous posts? that is big and not to be dabbled with. How much do you want it?

They are, though I don't think this is really an argument that can be used against wind turbines or similar. The amount of concrete used in them (even if massively expanded) pales into insignificance compared to other big projects. Concrete + steel are pertty good in the end. Steel can be endlessly recycled pretty much. Using ground concrete as filler for other things is relatively good compared to many of the other things we do in terms of materials recycling. I believe ground concrete can be used in place of virgin sand/aggregate when making new concrete at least in a decent percentage of use cases. Concrete over its life absorbs a lot of the CO2 put out during manufacture and if we can switch from gas firing to renewable heat we lower the carbon footprint a decent chunk. A lot of more renewable building methods have overinflated/misreported environmental credentials once the full lifecycle is considered and once those things are considered concrete really doesn't seem that bad, especially given it's about the cheapest construction method. At a societal level spending more for a more environmental construction method may mean less money for more beneficial environmental spending.

Thanks for all the advice. In defiance of @dpmiller I bought the Bosch pair for £110 which I think is a pretty good price. I might get some bigger batteries but I quite like the light weight 2ah ones given that I am no spring chicken these days.

You are going to gasp in horror, but this is my absolute favourite tool storage box (now bear in mind they're being used almost on a daily basis). It's something that does just work. https://hultafors.com/en-gb/products/tool-bucket It's been so popular, they now sell a tool organiser to go in the bucket. I have 6 of these buckets 😲 I've even had customer say what a good idea as their other trades are coming in and out with loads of boxes. For example, one of mine just has the drill/driver/screwdrivers with bit sets and a drill roll, the other with have the sds & multi-tool etc. While I'm working away I'll have an empty one where I throw bits of rubbish as I go, including pipe off cuts, old screws etc. and then it's brilliant for the odd emergency when I'm removing old pipework where I can grab the bucket to collect the always expected run out of water from said pipework.

I would agree with this and the need to evolve ever more effective prompts. Naturally AI supported prompt engineering is a thing as well although, so far, the Human in the loop remains - once they start prompting themselves who knows. However, I am not sure of the exponential growth in the model's capabilities themselves. Three other things seem to be emerging in the region of AI that also merit our attention: Firstly, it seems to me that the eco system is perhaps where the real explosion is. The number of other technologies, techniques and spinout applications is growing very fast EG in the areas like increasing use and application of vector DBs and all its variants (Hybrid Indexing etc), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and all its variants (Embedding free RAG, Chain of thought RAG), agent frameworks ( Swarm etc), structured knowledge stores, synthetic data engines and model side retrieval. Of those variants today not all will survive contact with reality and many more will emerge. Interestingly some of the early front runners in this sphere are reaching the end of their useful lifer already - Langchain is, for instance, being shunned because it is seen unstable and poorly documented as developers move over the likes of PydanticAI, Pocketflow & LlamaIndex. This tells you a second order story around the rush to get eco systems tools out quickly but skipping essential QA steps which leads to a broadly experimental feel rather than a sound production basis. Some argue that this because the LLMs, in the hands of developers, can create tools at an alarming rate but few are built well enough to live long! Secondly, although we still live in a gas guzzling age where the size and power of the global scale models makes huge demands on memory & energy the size of really powerful, sometimes task specialised, models is falling fast as mathematicians and engineers work out ways of squeezing them into ever smaller memory spaces. This will, admittedly somewhat hyperbolically, eventually bring the full power of the models onto our watches. Thirdly, as the HAL - "I can't do that Dave", example above illustrates some would argue that the control of this technology is getting further and further behind the bleeding edge. Perhaps we might conclude that while there are burgeoning combinatorial opportunities in the first two, eco system and small models, the third is somewhat being neglected, pushed into the too difficult box by politicians or being briefed against by the tech companies. It always was and always will be ..... until AGI!

I just expanded for a bit of fun. The building industry is not full of nice folk. I'm representing a Building Contractor and Client in Scotland at the moment that has been pretty much been ripped off by a small bunch of very well known designers and one " SE? Engineer". This bunch have been on my radar for a while with designs that I've checked and found them wanting as they are incompetent and downright dangerous. The Engineer is puporting to run a limited consultancy company..but there is no record on companies house? The "Architect" is moonlighting it appears.. I'l find out in due course if he and any of the others involved are insured or not. So yes my suspicion is at the moment that my poor Client is a victim of a bunch of chancers puporting to be Engineers and Designers. The Engineer in question is well known in Scotland, big player..in the business papers and so on.. hiding in plain sight, seems he may be a chancer and a fraudulant actor! I'll catch the fu.ker and have his house off him if I can to get some of my young Clients money back. This could be one of your kids, excuse my lack of mercy.

Not ever, just on this property. Quite please with our Stairway to .....

Ditto. 2016 Welcome! Fast Forward 10 years: 1 disaster, two new hips, endless (expletive deleted)ety(expletive deleted)ety(expletive deleted)Ups later (most detailed here) we have - Passivhaus adjacent plenty of south facing glass (cleverly covered by our intelligent, thoughtful architect) still some solar gain less hair than I started with more entertainment value from BH than I could ever have expected no money Deeply grateful for all the help I've been freely given here

Just to update you installer offered a full refund after the issue got escalated via the bank through Section 75 so looks like he now fully agrees to his installation failures after months of denials.

I have used "3CSharedServices" for the building control for my (solo) self build in Cambridge city. I am currently at first fix and the next inspection is for completion (still some distance ahead). I have been happy with them all the way through. Happy to provide more information if you like. Dreadnaught

Hi folks! Gema's other half here! Thanks for the warm welcome. RE PH certification - it's a relatively minor incremental cost given everything else (especially since we are doing all the design work - so it's really just the certifier cost), and we feel it's actually pretty good value for money, given the extremely detailed review and guidance that comes with it. As for the architecting, it's been a steep learning curve, but well worth it. We found trying to iterate over the design with an architect more tedious than helpful, but maybe that's because we are the ultimate control freaks. Let's just say the architect wasn't loving it when we rocked up with full daylight simulations (using Rhino + Ladybug Tools) and resizing & relocating all his windows, for example. Never mind asking for some up-front PHPP modelling and being told to wait, as that'll come during "detailed design". I'm sure there are plenty of good architects out there, but certainly not the one(s) we found. On the [visual] design side is probably where an architect would have been most useful as we aren't normally the creative types. However, we found our mojo and have concocted something we genuinely like (and is simple-ish to build).

Love a bit of PWA. My daughter had a right fukcnt of a neighbour. Very nasty piece of work. When the neighbours builder just turned up out of the blue, and started taking the fence down between the properties, (That i had paid for and put up), i had to pop over and have a word. I told him i would give him a hour to put the fence back up, or i would cut his fingers off, and post them through his letterbox, to his wife and kids. I made him empty his wallet. He had about £80. I took that off him, and told him that was my charge for me having to come over. Dont worry, i did it all while remaining super calm. I then made the neighbour appoint a party wall surveyor. I objected to the surveyor, and appointed One of my own. The neighbour had to pay. The surveyor i appointed was an old friend of my dads, so i told him to make sure that he did not agree about anything with the other surveyor. This ment that the neighbour had to pay for a Third surveyor for a final decision. Cost them over Six grand, and Six months by the time it got sorted. Then they had to pay for a more expensive builder, because the One i had chatted to refused to come back. Oh, the fun of being young, and a borderline nutter. Fun times. To me your neighbour sounds like a proper w.........anker. I would be hurting the tossers wallet, and hard.

Affixed my ceiling boards to resilient bar across the joists obviating the need for lots of noggins with added acoustic performance as a bonus (bungalow). Resilient bar is cheap. @Nickfromwales provided the suggestion.

For completeness, I have always managed risk pragmatically, wherever a client has expressed any such concerns. For one current project I spec’d all the ‘wet plant’ to be housed within a newly created GF plant area, and in that footprint I specified a recessed area in the concrete of 30mm. In the middle of the recess, back to back with the utility wall, sink and washing machine, I installed a trapped gulley with a back inlet for 50mm waste to feed in. Note: the white self-adhesive stuff is Radon rated peel & stick barrier, as there was a very high Radon risk here. PITA to do but very necessary. Here is where the washing machine up-stand will eventually connect via 50mm waste. Then I shuttered it with EPS / tape / foam (mummified it) before the pour. The idea being that this can be easily moved / removed after the pour if needs be (for fine tuning height of gulley etc / wiggle room). The finished article, post pour. Note the sand shuttering around the UFH pipes, cheap and simple / effective; just hoover it out after the pour, final fix the manifold / pipes in their forever positions, and backfill with cementitious SLC LINK This was an MBC raft, so they pour the SCC concrete and then return the following morning to cut / scabble the recesses out very accurately, so in that area we now have a 30mm L-shaped recess as a bund for management of any leaks. The plan is to use moisture resistant cement board for all of the wet plant room walls and ceilings, caulking joints etc with intumescent acrylic sealant to attain A1 fire rating too. These bottom of the cement boards will go down past the DPC under the stud walls to meet the concrete in the recess (eg TOC -27mm) where I’ll use 3mm packers to hold the boards just above the rough concrete to create a void for the SLC; this is to ensure the SLC will completely envelop the boards to arrest any future movement / feck any waterproofing up. The boards will effectively be ‘submerged’ in the (~5mm layer of) SLC, and the SLC will naturally run back under them to fully close the purpose made gap. Belt and 500 braces for £2 worth of packers. This will also detail airtightness at the external wall, where the tapes are meant to meet the slab at TOC; plenty of CT1 behind the cement boards at DPC level +/- 15-20mm. Then I will self-level the whole recess, banking it up at the far ends of the room by just 1 or 2mm max, to create a smooth graded surface which arrives at the gulley pot from all corners; The walls will all get smothered with liquid tanking solution, and left to cure fully for a couple of days. No need for steep falls like a shower tray, as gravity and a 25/30mm bund means water can only go into the gulley. Aim is for a burst pipe or failed EV etc to be nothing this room cannot handle. It’ll all get painted with heavy duty 2-part garage floor paint, white on the walls and grey on the floor to make my OCD happy, and lots of it, to create a fully maintainable and presentable, watertight finish. The trap in the 100mm gulley will need to be maintained (kept ‘wet’) to prevent stench; in this instance this will be topped up routinely by the washing machine output. Note: the utility sink will NOT discharge into that 50mm up-stand and into the same gulley, but instead into the adjacent foul pipe rising to the FF, which will also collect the kitchen sink from the adjacent room. This means zero food solids or other stinky stuff will ever sit in the gulley in the plant room floor and create a stink; the only thing the plant room will ever give off a whiff of will be laundry / washing powder. The fact that folk use their WM’s every day, or every few days minimum, means the trap will be wet year-round. If the topology doesn’t lend itself, then you can run the water softener regen discharge into it instead; as a source of daily, clean water. I prefer to not rely on a self-sealing trap in the slab, as I will always want the full flow potential of an uninterrupted 110mm arrangement, vs water squeezing through these socks. Such units are available from decent manufacturers if a retrofit is your only option LINK. Avoid cheap / unbranded units as they’ll let you down eventually.

Heat islanding is real and was an issue we encountered when installing solar (we had maps for heat islands within London and would reduce our predicted generation accordingly. We later made our own more accurate heat island maps based on actual generation figures.) Although each individual energy input is miniscule, collectively it has an exponential effect as Aircon has to work harder and harder to cool the same air. In a city there is no cool air to pull in due to all the Buildings / roads / concrete infrastructure transfering heat to it too Some studies suggest that large deployment of solar pv panels might actualy cool the air slighty, and it seems natural a no-brainer to install PV and Aircon together . Frontiers | Solar panels reduce both global warming and urban heat island

Update: (or "Christ, the f*&K up gets worse") We ordered a wall hung toilet. Having cut a hole in the skimmed plasterboard I was reminded that there was another pipe (behind that insulation in the picture) in the way of mounting the Grohe frame. Feck it. So, tomorrow, I pick up another bunch of bends and create the latest water flume (not open to the public for rides!!) to re-route that downpipe, from the cloakroom above, towards the corner (to the left) so the frame will fit in to allow the wall hung toilet to empty into the visible socket on the right in the picture. Also, the brown pipe will be replaced by a Y junction, and so the white waste pipe and black boss will also have to be refitted. Time for a🍺

If you go wall hung, get the pan and frame on site before you set up the pipework, as the height of the flush pipe and pan connector are important.

Australia is getting free electricity - will other countries follow? As one of the most advanced solar nations in the world, Australia is well placed to experiment with giving people free power - and if it succeeds, other countries may look to copy its approach By James Woodford 7 November 2025 Solar panels in Sydney, Australia Stephen Dwyer/Alamy Australians received a welcome surprise this week with the news that every household will soon receive 3 hours of free electricity every day, as part of a world-first initiative to share the benefits of solar power. If successful, it could be a model for other to follow in a future that will increasingly be powered by sunshine. The Australian electricity grid is zinging with excess capacity during the day thanks to solar power, but it is strained at night when people return from work and use most of their appliances. To address this, the Australian government says its “Solar Sharer” scheme will be rolled out from July 2026 in three states – New South Wales, South Australia and the south-east corner of Queensland – with the rest of the country joining in 2027. Australia is already leading the world in solar deployment per capita, with the installation of 42 gigawatts of solar capacity, equivalent to more than 1500 watts per person or about five times the global average, says Bin Lu at the Australian National University in Canberra. Another 40 GW of new renewable capacity will be installed by 2030. “As a result, there’s abundant solar power injecting into the grid in the middle of the day,” says Lu. “If it isn’t effectively used, it’ll simply be wasted.” But while four million Australian households have their own solar panels, the vast majority of which feed into the grid, people who live in apartments or can’t afford an installation are locked out – something this new policy solves, says Marnie Shaw, also at the Australian National University. “It gives everybody access to solar power in a very simple way,” she says. “You don’t need to buy a share in a solar farm. You don’t need a battery. You just use the solar power that’s already being produced by others. When you’re using power in the middle of the day, you’ll be using the excess power produced by your neighbour’s rooftop solar.” The idea for offering consumers cheaper or even free power isn’t entirely new. Several Australian power suppliers already have similar schemes that operate at certain times where there is excess renewable energy, as do many in European countries. What makes the Solar Sharer scheme unprecedented is its scale and blanket implementation, and that it is led by a national government instead of industry. Some wonder, however, whether the new policy will work in practice or if it risks introducing perverse outcomes. For example, Dylan McConnell at the University of New South Wales says it may disincentivise new solar installations. “You sharpen your pencil and start doing the calculations when you’re thinking about putting solar on your house,” says McConnell. “Then someone says ‘hey its free power for 3 hours in the middle of the day’, you might reconsider that decision.” He says some people might instead buy a battery and use the free power to charge that up. Others might be upset because the expensive solar system they have just installed no longer has the same value proposition. Administering the policy will also prove complex, and the government will need to make sure that electricity suppliers don’t simply hike the price at other times to compensate for the free hours, says McConnell. Another unknown is what would happen if there is a lengthy run of bad weather, says Alexandr Akimov at Griffith University, Gold Coast, Australia. “There is a risk,” he says, “that during rainy days, particularly when wide weather fronts cover the eastern states, that high daytime consumption combined with low solar generation could lead to spikes in daytime grid demand.” Because Australia is so advanced in its solar journey, its policies will be widely watched by other countries. Glenn Platt at the University of Sydney says that, as other nations get deeper into their solar rollout journeys, they will “definitely” have to confront some of the same issues. The big question, he says, is whether householders will actually change their ways as a result of the free power and move some of their energy-intensive habits like washing and drying clothes to the middle of the day. Evidence from existing free schemes in Australia is that shifting behaviours can be very difficult, especially for energy intensive heating and cooling. The greatest potential beneficiaries of free electricity are lower-income earners, but these are also the people least likely to own the smart appliances needed to take advantage of the free power in the middle of the day. “It means huge change, and we’re assuming that energy consumers will do certain things,” says Platt. “It’s less about the electrons and the dollars and more about the social experiment, much more about the behavioural change.” Article amended on 12 November 2025 We have updated this article to reflect that Australia leads the world in solar deployment per capita. Solar energy is going to power the world much sooner than you think Solar electricity is growing rapidly, but can it really dominate the global energy system? Here is what it will take for us to power the planet on sunshine By Madeleine Cuff 23 October 2025 The future of solar is looking bright fuyu liu/Shutterstock Is solar power going to take over the world? The past few years have seen a frankly astounding acceleration in the rate of its deployment, with total generation capacity doubling between 2022 and 2024 to supply a full 7 per cent of the world’s electricity. Just how high can that figure go? The first six months of 2025 saw wind and solar together pass a historic milestone, generating more power than coal for the first time and making renewables the world’s leading source of electricity. The driving force behind this “crucial turning point” in the energy transition, as the UK-based think tank Ember described it, was the growth of solar. It accounted for 83 per cent of the total increase in the world’s electricity demand in 2025, Ember’s analysis indicates, and has been the largest source of new electricity globally for three years in a row. Solar’s secret weapon? How cheap it is. It is the world’s lowest-cost electricity, with the cost of installing a solar system dropping in price by 90 per cent over the past 15 years. “Right now, silicon panels themselves are the same cost as plywood,” says Sam Stranks at the University of Cambridge. In other words, we have a plentiful and cheap source of electricity that can be built quickly, almost anywhere in the world. Is it fanciful to imagine that solar could one day power everything? At the most fundamental level, the supply of solar energy to Earth is almost limitless. Even once you factor in the efficiency rates of modern solar panels, supplying all of the world’s energy needs with the sun’s power would require around 450,000 square kilometres of land, a 2021 report from the UK think tank Carbon Tracker estimated. That’s just 0.3 per cent of global land area. Kingsmill Bond, one of the report authors and now at Ember, says that, while there are “trade-offs” when it comes to land use – solar may compete with agriculture, for example – “for most countries, there is plenty of space to deploy these technologies”. A new generation of panels The question, then, is what is stopping solar power from taking over the global electricity supply entirely? The first issue is that of efficiency. Silicon photovoltaic panels, which make up the bulk of the global solar market, currently convert about 20 per cent of the sun’s energy into electricity. By comparison, hydropower plants convert 90 per cent of the potential energy into electricity, wind turbines about 50 per cent and fossil fuel plants 30 to 40 per cent. In real terms, this means you need many more solar panels to provide the same amount of power that you could harvest from other sources. That’s why solar firms and scientists are hard at work trying to unlock more efficiency gains from solar panels, in the hope that an efficiency boost will deliver a double win for solar: even lower system costs and less demand for land. However, crystalline silicon panels are nearing the limits of the efficiencies they can achieve, with best-in-class cells now at about 25 per cent efficiency. “The practical limit for crystalline silicon is probably about 28 per cent,” says Jenny Nelson at Imperial College London. Pushing efficiencies above that will require a shift to what is known as a tandem solar cell, which introduces a second semiconductor to increase the amount of energy a cell can extract from the solar spectrum. Tandem silicon-perovskite cells are seen as the most promising option, with a theoretical efficiency limit of about 50 per cent. Real-world tandem panels won’t achieve anything like that level of efficiency, but could reach 35 to 37 per cent efficiency, says Stranks. After years of research, the first tandem silicon-perovskite solar panels are just starting to enter commercial production, and they need to be tested by industry to see how long they maintain their performance under real-world conditions. But Stranks is optimistic about their potential. He estimates that in 10 years’ time, they will become the dominant technology on the market. “On the face of it, they wouldn’t actually look that different from the roof or on the street, but they are producing 50 per cent more power than today’s panels,” says Stranks. “It’s a big change.” Not only would greater efficiency cut costs even further, but it could also unlock new deployment opportunities, says Stranks. For example, high-efficiency panels could enable solar roofs on electric cars, allowing their batteries to charge during the day. The stored power could then either be used for transport or discharged to the home for use during the evening, he suggests. Solving storage Such innovation could help to untangle one of the other major issues with solar power – its fickleness. The sun, of course, doesn’t shine all the time. For countries in the “sun belt”, including India, Mexico and many African nations, this is less of a problem, as the sun shines almost all year round and batteries can be used to store excess energy during the day for use in the hours after dark. This solar-plus-storage set-up is becoming increasingly cost-effective, with the cost of lithium-ion batteries dropping 40 per cent in the past two years alone, according to BloombergNEF. “Ultimately, the only advantage that fossil fuels have over sunshine as a source for electricity is their storability,” says Bond. “And, suddenly, that storability issue has been solved for 90 per cent of the time by a single technology, which is the battery.” But for countries further north, where winter days are short and grey, it is a different story. “[Solar] is an unbelievably, amazingly good energy source, with zero pollution, rapid payback of energy investment – it just ticks every single box,” says Andrew Blakers at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia. “Unless you live in northern Europe, north-east Asia or the north-east United States, where you have plenty of sun in summer and not much in winter, [solar] is simply the best.” For countries that suffer long, dark winters, wind power can step in to fill much of the gap, says Blakers. But energy storage solutions that can bank power for weeks or months at a time will also be needed. Such “interseasonal storage” is still in its infancy, with few solutions operating at commercial scale. But pumped hydro, hydrogen and compressed air storage could all provide an answer to this conundrum. Blakers’s prediction? “Batteries take care of the short term, pumped hydro takes care of the long term.” Political headaches If anything, efficiency and storage are the easy problems to solve. “I think the bottlenecks probably lie in politics, consistency in policy, regulation, vested interests of other industries,” says Nelson. The climate-sceptic Trump administration in the US is a case in point. Earlier this month, federal officials cancelled a huge proposed solar project in Nevada that would have been one of the largest schemes in the world, just the latest in a series of actions to curtail solar funding programmes and block projects. But Bond believes the transition to renewable power is now all but unstoppable given its economic advantages over traditional generation sources. “Incumbents can hold back the tide for solar in individual countries and individual projects and individual years,” he says. “The current Trump administration is doing its very best to slow down the current deployment of renewables. But all it really means is that they then fall behind in the global race to deploy superior technology.” Blakers agrees, adding that solar energy may be the only way to meet fast-growing power demand from AI data centres. “Even in the US, it’s difficult to see solar being turned off even by a determined federal government, because many states like it, and it’s by far the quickest way to get large amounts of energy,” he says. The other major bottleneck for clean energy is logistical. Existing electricity networks need to be rewired to cope with huge, fluctuating supplies of electricity coming from new areas. A more flexible grid, which can cope with surges in generation and even tweak power demand in response, will help to maximise the use of green power. But delivering these grids of the future costs money. In the UK alone, energy companies plan to spend £77 billion over the next five years refitting the transmission network to cope with the shift to wind and solar. In lower-income nations, where grid networks aren’t yet so comprehensive, countries can move more quickly to build renewable-friendly infrastructure from the get-go, allowing renewables to penetrate further into grid supply. The 10 so-called BRICS nations – Brazil, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, South Africa and the United Arab Emirates – now collectively account for more than half of the world’s electricity generation from solar, according to Ember. A wider challenge for countries is to electrify greater chunks of their energy demand, from heating to transport. Such progress is crucial to cut fossil fuel use in other parts of the global economy. As Nelson puts it: “If we want to decarbonise the planet, then we need to electrify first.” Here too, lower-income nations are racing ahead of higher-income ones. China’s share of electricity in final energy consumption hit 32 per cent in 2023, far outstripping the 24 per cent electrification rate of the US and richer European nations, says Ember. A solar future? Despite the success this year, the technical, logistical and political challenges outlined above may slow the rollout of solar in some countries in the short term. Earlier this month, the International Energy Agency predicted that renewable power will more than double by the end of the decade, but is set to fall short of an international goal to triple capacity by the same date. The agency said policy changes in the US and the challenges of integrating solar into grid systems were headwinds to the expansion in renewables capacity. But energy market experts are confident that, by mid-century and beyond, solar will dominate global energy supply. “By the end of this century, it is pretty clear that we will be getting all of our electricity from renewable sources, of which the vast majority will be solar,” says Bond, estimating that as much as 80 per cent of the world’s electricity supply will be generated by solar by 2100. Added to that, at least 80 per cent of the world’s total energy demand will be electrified, he expects. Roadblocks from politics, energy storage and infrastructure will all be cleared out of the way to usher in the green power revolution. “The human condition is to turn energy into stuff,” says Bond. “We use energy for everything. And now, suddenly, we found this cheap, universal energy source – of course, we are going to figure it out.” Electric vehicle owners could earn thousands by supporting power grid Electric vehicles could store renewable energy when there is excess supply and give it back to the grid when demand peaks, but car companies disagree on the best way to do that By Alec Luhn 17 April 2026 Electric cars could make their owners money while they sit idle Maskot Bildbyrå At least 90 per cent of the electricity generation being built today is renewable. But solar and wind farms produce electricity only when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, so the power supply will fluctuate more. A pilot project in the US state of Delaware has shown that owners of electric vehicles (EVs) could make thousands of dollars each year by allowing their parked cars to serve as part of a giant collective battery that stores electricity when there is high supply and distributes it when there is high demand. Some data suggests that the average EV is driving as little as 5 per cent of the time. Otherwise, it is often parked and plugged into the grid. This means that, rather than building giant battery farms, electric companies could balance the grid by drawing power from these cars when usage peaks in the morning and evening, then recharging them during the day, says Willett Kempton at the University of Delaware, who led the project. EV owners could sell electricity at a premium while still saving the grid money. “An electric vehicle plugged in 95 per cent of the time that it’s not driving can provide storage for the grid at about one-tenth the cost of building batteries,” says Kempton. “[That could] help increase the reliability of any electric system and increase the capability of us to put more and more renewables on the system.” In the project, four Ford EVs owned by energy company Delmarva Power were retrofitted to supply electricity back to the power system through vehicle-to-grid (V2G) charging. Kempton and his colleagues monitored their V2G charging throughout 2025. Given the amount of electricity the cars supplied to the grid, each EV could have earned as much as $3359 annually if that energy was sold at the market price. When Kempton became one of the first to investigate V2G back in 1997, it made so much sense that he thought it would become a commercial reality within a few years. But almost 30 years later, V2G largely exists in a handful of test programmes in the US, Europe, Japan and China. A key reason for this is that reversing the flow of energy from the grid to the car turns out to be surprisingly complex, because it requires vehicle-makers, utility companies and governments to change how they approach EVs, says Kempton. The biggest issue is that power grids run largely or exclusively on alternating current (AC) electricity, while some household devices, including EVs, convert that AC to direct current (DC) electricity when they draw energy from an outlet. For an EV to supply the grid, the energy needs to be converted back to AC. Doing that without electrocuting anyone requires V2G components to be built to a safety standard. The simplest way to set up V2G currently is to install a wall charger that converts DC to AC under standards designed to allow solar panels to feed into the grid. A few car companies, including Volkswagen and Nissan, have been offering wall chargers that do this in some markets. But those wall chargers can cost thousands of dollars. So companies including Tesla, BYD and Renault have started developing EVs that convert DC to AC inside the car itself, and Kempton and others have been working on new safety standards for AC chargers. If that technology becomes widespread, it could enable V2G while adding only a few hundred dollars to the cost of the car, says Kempton. As things stand, there is a rivalry between DC V2G like Volkswagen’s and AC V2G like Tesla’s. This is similar to the format war between VHS and Betamax videotapes in the 1980s, according to Alex Schoch at UK electricity retailer Octopus Energy. Betamax offered better quality, similar to DC chargers, which are more efficient. But VHS players were far cheaper, like AC chargers, and VHS eventually dominated the market. “Our view is there’s a period of time where the market can deal with two different standards, but to really scale and get to mass-market, you’ve got to align on one,” says Shoch. “We’re firmly team … AC.” But for drivers to want to spend even a few hundred extra dollars on a V2G setup, there needs to be a buyback tariff that will allow them to make money supplying energy to the grid. In 2024, Octopus launched the UK’s first V2G tariff, although for now there are few car owners that can take advantage of it. To that end, it has also partnered with BYD to allow consumers to lease a charger and electric vehicle equipped for AC V2G. “Many manufacturers, the EVs they’re putting on the road are V2G capable, or the next generation that are hitting the road today or tomorrow will be,” says Schoch. “And you [will] suddenly have gigawatts of capacity that’s distributed all over the country.” V2G adoption could help balance the demand and supply on the grid in real time. But as more EVs with V2G chargers start plugging in, it will also put more strain on the existing electricity system. As a result, V2G will probably force countries to upgrade their power grids. A recent study calculated that it would be more cost-effective for countries to upgrade their grids all in one go, rather than upgrading them little by little as V2G gradually increases. Nations should “prepare the power system at a very early stage” for the coming V2G revolution, according to the study’s lead author, Liangcai Xu at the National University of Singapore. “I was surprised because I thought V2G can be a silver bullet, it can solve everything,” says co-author Ziyou Song, also at the National University of Singapore. “[But] the gap is kind of significant. We have to upgrade our power system decently [so] we can facilitate so much electrical-charging demand.” Article amended on 29 April 2026 We have updated this article to reflect that some household devices convert AC to DC.

Oh absolutely! Remember “ i’m free “ not in an are you being served way ! 😂 . No budget limit ( well maybe a bit ) , no time constraint , no boss ( like my build ) so able to explore and experiment! . Create what I want . Equally my house is the sandbox and I’m the guinea pig ! . Perfect setup for the experiment!!

I know why you want to avoid the cloud, but for a little compromise and a good few grand saved, I have to say that Claude Code is probably at the front right now. Have you tried it? I've tried Deepseek, which is pretty bloody amazing too but the way that Claude can build an entire stack, spit out all the relevant code in files, plus the debugging capability just has me flawed. The other advantage is persistent memory across conversations and chat history, including file retrieval - so you can put in all your skills and provide a context that gets updated as you work. Deepseek gets a bit of a pain because as soon as you notice the context memory starting to degrade, you've got to create a new prompt with current context and paste it into a new chat. Really don't get on with ChatGPT. Last summer when I was designing a DB schema and doing it the good old fashioned way with manual normalisation etc. it was just taking forever. Put my requirements in along with a decent prompt and it spat out the schema in about 3 minutes including all the relationships keys and foreign keys in an svg too, plus it then writes all the sql. What's amazing is then how it points you to tools available and takes you through how to integrate and implement them you'd never have heard about without weeks of trawling various tech sites. It is absolutely incredible. Do you not find that you still have to do a little stitching in of code and a little nudging for debugging though? So you need to make sure the code is properly commented - that's been the thing with Claude for me is that it makes sure the necessary commenting is in there - Deepseek stitching in was a bit more painful as the line numbers it gave me were always quite a way off, well actually a lot as I still have a 3/4 finished app on there and I can't quite face going back to resolve the bugs right now. But I think with all these tools, you still have to properly keep them on track as they do tend to forget stuff and when you're dealing with mathematics and especially applied physics, you've got to be very careful.

You won't find a regulation that says what appliance requires a dedicated circuit. There's only a recommendation in an Appendix of BS7671 that states appliances over 2kW to have their own dedicated circuits. I personally wouldn't usually fit a dedicated circuit for a microwave, but would for a combi oven microwave. Whether it's freestanding or fixed isn't really important. Fact is, a lot of the combi ones are 16A supply - no plug fitted and none of the standard microwave are - they come with a plug fitted and usually under 1kW. There's not really a right/wrong answer, but generally it's dedicated circuits for ovens/hobs/combi ovens and everything else on the ring/s. Don't bother with 4mm2 radials, you're limited more on cable lengths/insulation derating than you are with a 2.5mm2 ring.

BCO and warranty provider (private, combined) walked past a load of faux pas, totally focussed on a few things. Council guys seem more focussed on the project, but also seem overworked. Double edged sword for council vs private imo.

If you want to be able to put in any smart light switch modules at the light switches then putting in oversize/deep back boxes is goint to help a lot. Second fix, but you might want some smart sockets in due course - e.g. for the outside sockets to turn Xmas/Garden lights on/off remotely from inside the house, or in awkward to reach locations. Cabling and transformer niche's anywhere for LED strip lights ? Wire for a video door bell ? And the non leccy stuff - cat6, speakers cables, HDMI, telephone (though POTS is dying), fibre internet connection. Run conduit where feasible Are you going to have a small network rack/cupboard/shelf anywhere ? (Router. switch, NAS, assorted hubs)

Sorry not answering your question - but more or an observation. Why are you installing gas on a new build? Install a heat pump and save your self a fortune in running costs. Add a battery/PV and save more. Our new build was completed in 2021, with gas boiler. After a year or so fully optimising how it it ran, I added an ASHP specifically for cooling the floor. Operated a hybrid system. Realised, with standby charge for gas and the great cop from a heat pump, the boiler had to go. Since added more PV and battery and pay almost nothing for energy even in NE Scotland. Gas is last century.

Ask for say at least 10.0 -20 k plus to be put into an account up front as part of a bond. Explain. You are willing to facilitate this but in no way are you going to be out of pocket if their builder goes bust. Explain you just don't have the time to go legal if they breach the agreement. Say if they erect scaffolding over your property without agreement you'll call the HSE. I strongly suspect that you'll end up coming out on the wrong side of this unless you dig your heals in now. The builder sounds like a chancer / bully and the designers (Architect's and SE) are very at fault as they should have advised your neighbour on how to avoid all of this in the first place. Say to your neighbour it seems like your design team are chancers and you have no confidence. Let them justify why. In my day job I would not allow this to happen at all by designing out this major issue. If you are soft now you will likely regret. If they are doing this now what do you think they are going to leave you having to look at from your side of the garden? Their proposal to build "over hand" is likely going to result in you looking at a mess, maybe drainage problems and so on. Also you need to look at their wall construction on the boundary .. if say a cavity wall are they relying on venting that to your property and so on.. you could end up losing a lot more than you realise at the moment.

I tried to start the conversation with them and they didn’t want to know. I was eyeballed by the owner just asking simple questions about what’s taking place and when speaking with the builder. They said nothing. She pulled him away, he was ready to start. ( how dare me ask questions) I didn’t bite but friendly and less formal is out the window already 👍🏻