Leaderboard

July 2013 Douglas (Doug) came into my life. We hadn't even quite completed on the purchase of the plot then. So in the early days he sat on my drive waiting. Time for me to fettle him a bit, service his engine so he was ready for action. It wasn't long before we started working as a team. Sitting in his big comfy arm chair, pulling his levers, and his rams responding to my commands. We had some good times together. Clearing all the scrub from the plot and grubbing out some tree roots. First real test was preparing a pad for the static 'van. Then preparing the proper site entrance. Then the real fun started. Getting services on site, and digging the foundations, that was the biggest single job, shifting over 200 tons of soil in the process. Next was all the drainage, including putting the treatment plant in the ground. That had him reaching at almost full stretch down into a big hole in the ground. Then all the rainwater drainage. The last job was leveling the site and basic landscaping, Spreading all those heaps of soil about to make a flat and level(ish) garden. Then the work was done. There's nothing more to do. Our time together is finished. Time for Doug to move on to new challenges in a new location for a new owner. Today was the day he departed and I can honestly say not without a bit of sadness. I sat in that seat playing with those levers for a total of 164 hours in the time we were together. Here he is about to depart for adventures new. I had no trouble finding a buyer. I already had an interested party lined up, the man that bought some of my scaffold a few weeks ago said he might be interested. You may also recall I recently discovered a structural defect that needed some welding. I faced the choice of find someone to fix the fault, or be totally open an honest and see if the new owner would buy Doug knowing the fault and what needs doing to fix it, at a reduced price of course. And that is what happened, the new owner has bought Doug knowing he needs a bit more TLC before he is ready to embark on his next adventure, helping a self builder on a croft about 15 miles away realise his dreams. And to anyone reading, buying my own machine for this build was absolutely the right choice for me. It has been so handy to have the machine there for whenever I needed it, not to mention the cost saving compared to hiring a machine.

My brother has been having awful condensation problems creating mould in a 13 year old flat. When I visited I found that they had all the air vents in the windows closed and the en suite fan timer didn't keep it running after you switched the light off. He had no idea what the vents were for. I can imagine if you gave my mum a house with MVHR the notion that it shouldn't be switched off would wind her up, she is always trying to turn off the extractor fans. This has made me think that there is no consistent way to pass on instructions for how everything works in a house. You might get some from the builder, but they rarely get passed on to subsequent owners. Even then the percentage of people who actually read instructions appears to be negligible anyway. This is increasingly a problem as technology moves forward. Technology can do more and more for us, whether it is drive a car or ventilate a house. But often it is the case that people either don't care or can't understand how to use it, thus a lot of money is spent on technology to no benefit or even that makes things worse if used incorrectly. Unfortunately everything has to be pretty much automatic and foolproof if possible. Look at the poor guy who died in the Tesla. I would be terrified letting my wife or my dad try to use an autopilot system, it would be an accident waiting to happen.

Hi All, Hoping to get close to passivhaus standard with our proposed build but wondering if the flue from a small gas system boiler will compromise the air tightness. I know a balanced flu draws air in from the outside via the outer tube into the burning chamber but is that chamber sealed to prevent air being drawn from within the building?

I was in that sort of mood last night to fired something off. Not sure if I'll get a response. Thanks for everyones feedback - glad it wasn't jsut me. As I allude to in my email, her views are of course valid, but as 'expert opinion' to the government - I think it was woeful. The other contributors seemed to know what they were talking about and had some good ideas thankfully. But as stated elsewhere - why such a limited and unrepresentative panel? Dear Mr Golden, I am contacting you following the Committee session on 20th September 2016 on 'Greenhouse Gas emmisions', at which you were present. I would normally contact Mr Greene, but as you are part of the committee I thought I would contact you in the first instance - I'm such Mr Greene will be glad to be spared another email from me. I should explain that currently, my partner and I are building our own house near Largs - and I mean building quiet literally. When reading the transcript of the session, the contributions from Sue Roaf started to make me wonder and by the end, I was rather concerned about her input as a so-called 'expert'. Why was she chosen to participate - what are her credentials in this matter that make her a choice above others who may be equally or more qualified? Also, given her long standing commitment to solar power, should an interest not have been declared? I had never heard of her previously but following my reading of the transcript, I looked into her background and found - not surprisingly - that she is a massive proponent of solar - to the point that as an expert, her opinion is clearly fairly subjective and possibly biased. In the grand scheme of things, her contribution was only one of many opinions being heard, but I would suggest that many of her claims are quite simply incorrect, or cannot be stated as fact. Others clearly were designed to promote her own agenda, rather than offer a balanced view to the parliament. Her contributions would have been really good as part of a debate, as they are in most cases, one view or side of an argument, rather than facts that can be proven conclusively. I'm not sure what can be done now, but given that we are building our own house and I'm familiar with almost all of the issues Sue Roaf raised and that so much of the evidence provided is, I believe, so flawed or subjective, I felt I should highlight this to you. Ultimately, politicians like yourself rely on such evidence when making decisions or recommendations - and so the standard of evidence should be very high. I believe Sue Roaf's falls way short - her opinion and evidence frankly is worth as much as anyone with even a basic understanding of energy efficiency and house building or design. I have provided commentary below on some of the more stand out comments below. Regards, Jamie “Homes are incredibly important to Scotland because citizens are important to their legislators.” what does this statement even mean? Has this been recorded incorrectly? This early comment drew my attention to subsequent contributions. “Now we are beginning to realise that, with the next generation of housing, we have created problems. For instance, in modern, light-weight, cheap-to-build, highly insulated timber housing with very little air movement, people are experiencing very bad indoor air-quality problems. Such houses often have big windows that do not have bits that it is possible to open. The solution is a small machine.” Her view on air quality is very subjective and cannot be relied on as - the magnitude of the problem should be quantified. We, for example, are building our house to high airtightness standards and fully aware of the ventilation requirements, which are also covered in any case in the Building Regulations. Houses cannot be built without the correct ventilation systems in place - the incorrect operation of the MHRV systems is usually to blame as opposed to a fundamental failing. This 'small machine' is a very sophisticated piece of machinery that not only circulates and introduces fresh air, but recovers heat from the stale outgoing air - you wouldn't be able to gather this from Sue Roafs contribution. I would suggest she completely misrepresents the system and those 'lobbyist-driven vested interests' would be able to mount a firm and strong rebuttal to her claims,with scientific data to back it up. “If we genuinely want the domestic sector to have a resilient and robust future that includes large emissions reductions, we will need to start ventilating houses naturally again, getting rid of the machines and running them on solar energy” - I am baffled why Sue Roaf refers to these as 'machines' - these are low energy Mechanical Heat Recovery and Ventillation systems. Their purpose is to do away with 'natural' ventilation as this is hugely inefficient - it is pointless building a house with high insulation and air tightness levels and then undoing all that work by opening windows or having trickle vents that let in cold air, and create draughts - something Sue Roaf refers to later. “People—myself included—can build or design houses that do not need much heat any more. That is the solution. One way of doing that is to incorporate thermal storage in the buildings, as we always used to in cavity walls, for example.” We never used to build thermal storage into cavity walls - certainly not by design. This comment baffles me. “We would probably do the citizens of Scotland more of a favour if we mandated for thermal storage to provide resilient heat over time than if we tried to force them to put in extremely expensive and often inefficient and expensive-to-run heat-pump systems.” This is a purely subjective opinion and should not be presented or taken as 'fact'. I would also love to hear how Sue Roaf plans to retrofit thermal storage in houses and measure the efficiency and cost effectiveness. “I do not know how many members have looked out of their windows and seen what I call the great eye of Sauron—the huge gas flame on the horizon—over the past week. For 10 days, millions and millions of tonnes of gas have been flared off. It looks like Mordor over there.” I've not checked, but suspect this is complete and utter nonsense - 'millions and millions of tonnes' in 10 days? Might be worth checking this out of course, but I think Ineos would confirm pretty quickly it's a nonsense claim. I'm surprised the Greens didn't highlight this. Incidentally, not one contributor mentioned in the analysis LPG as a fuel for combustion engined cars - something I've had in two of my cars and has virtually no support from any government, despite the far lower level of noxious gases emitted. A serious ommision from these 'experts' who think it's electric or nothing. “Singapore recently irked Elon Musk by refusing to allow Tesla cars into its market. It has done that because it does not have any renewable energy and the Tesla is a really big car that uses a lot of energy to get from A to B, irrespective of its being electric. Therefore, the simple message about the size of vehicles is critical.” This is quite simply wrong and misleading - there is no 'simple' message and to try suggest there is, is frankly disingenuous. Maybe Sue Roaf would like to speak to Mr Musk to get the other side of her one sided (and questionable) statement. “There is also the point about tariffs. There might be a tariff that reflects excess wind on a particular night.” - The less said about this comment, the better - but is the Scottish Parliament seriously relying on experts who will come out with this type of comment? Can you imagine a government or private company even considering such a proposition? Excess wind from Sue Roaf I think! “We need to take a new approach and say to designers, “When you design a new building, you need to put in a safe climate room for extreme cold, heatwaves and so on.” We can start incrementally by putting insulation into the roof of that particular room, installing double glazing to get rid of draughts and putting in a nice warm carpet. Making every building energy efficient will just not happen.” This final session is so riddled with inaccuracies it is almost beyond belief. Firstly - someone of Sue Roaf's standing should understand the difference between a 'roof' and a 'ceiling'. The distinction is clear, and important. Secondly, installing double glazing DOES NOT get rid of draughts. Again, someone like Sue Roaf should know this. Thirdly - there is no such thing as a 'warm carpet'. Yet - it has the feeling of warmth, but a carpet offers little insulation qualities and offers not additional heat source. Maybe I should pop down to Carpetrite and ask for one of these new 'warm carpets' and see the look I get! If only I knew about these new 'warm carpets' - I would not have bothered putting in 150mm of XPS insulation under our new floor!

House feels like it's finally getting there now the plasterboard is going on and plumbing is going in so thought I'd share some pics as I m feeling happier with progress tonight....

Staying a bit more on the topic- Fabric quality is reasonably foolproof. If you build a well insulated, airtight house then it will cost less to heat pretty much irrespective of whether or not the owners know what is going on. Not PH standards, but say low B on the EPC. However, MVHR needs a reasonable bit of understanding. It also needs servicing and could break down eventually. So would it be worthwhile building a house to these standards then having drip vents or some other natural ventilation system? Would they actually provide enough ventilation or do current standards depend on leakage providing accidental ventilation. Or is it just not possible to build a house that eliminates most of the costs of air leakage without resorting to MVHR?

I feel your pain volcane about unexpected battles. It's the sheer opportunism to fleece you of money from so many people, and completely unnecessary power trips that got to me before even a spade went into the ground. Watching a self build programme the other day (a repeat, but I love these programmes as there's always ideas and things to learn in them) and the poor guy had a heart attack half way through. Now they didn't blame it directly, but a certain agency were being bloody minded with him (an agency who seem quite happy to watch old buildings completely fall down into rubble but then impose massive amounts of sheer pedantry on the people who bravely buy and try to save the very same building - it being the easiest thing in the world to spend other peoples money of course) and it seemed to me that it can only have made his condition much worse. You often also see clearly that there have been tears. So without doubt there is a cost in this over and above money. But to answer your question. Yes, we're all crackers, but stubborn. You can't let the tin pot dictators beat you though. But we are still less crackers than the folks buying jerry built houses from the volume developers for double the price

Jacks point about reusable filters is something which is a feature for me about our final choice when we get to it - all these many different models and manufacturers around makes me think that in only a few years time, some owners may struggle to get the filters any more, so one with a filter which is cleanable and actually can be remade yourself seems a damn good idea.

Would be like a ploughed field in mins. An ordinary tracked 5/8t digger with the extension arm would have done the job.

On our application, we documented house key dimensions, and I see that @Barney12 has omitted these. A friend who is also a member of the forum told me that when he got his architects drawings (which had all dimensions detailed), he transcribed them removing all dimension info onto his own scale drawings (with the "do not scale from this drawing caveat") for submission in his application. Sounds like a very sensible approach given this dialogue. We had a spat with our LPA EO over the position of our slab -- it "had shifted 600mm towards our neighbours boundary" so they requested that we submit a minor-material amendment "document this change". On checking, we realised that our neighbour had moved his corner fence post 0.5m into our garden behind our laurel hedge and that the slab was correctly positioned w.r.t. the adjacent highway to its front, so we declined. They wouldn't admit any mistake, but they did eventually agree that "it would not be expeditious to proceed with the case" and closed it. What pissed me off was that there were no measurements to the boundary given on the plan, and it was behind a 1.3m deep laurel hedge apart from one narrow gap where we had take a sycamore out some years before and where they took their measurements to come to this conclusion. As to NMAs, the same EO asked us to put in an NMA because the front door didn't match the detailing in our application, so we agreed on this one -- also pointing out in our application that the front door wasn't visible from the public highway and the only reason that we had changed the style was that our window and door supplier (who was specified in a previous MMA to our application) had later informed us that this was the only style available in the range detailed in our application (and we had to use it because the attached side window had to match the others on the frontage and comply with our application). The LPA then rejected the NMA and as the case officer subsequently clarified "any change to the principle elevation is material", and "it doesn't matter that the door isn't visible from the highway; callers to the house will see that style is not in keeping with a traditional cottage style". We've just had a second EO visit and the officer didn't even notice that we've still to change the door! The whole process is crap, IMO.

Intergas gets a good mention here, but as I've stated here, and on EB, I'm a Baxi or Vaillant man myself. I've been around boilers for over 20 years and have based my findings around breakdowns / failures, longevity, dhw production and price. Viessmann are over priced IMHO, and likewise for WB. They both survive off their pedigree and following IMO, with WB being just synonymous with British Gas. Vaillant are very robust, well built and reliable machines, which seem to be free from any early / mid term failures. Baxi are my instant second choice below them, should budget be a constraint. The Baxis are a little cheaper but are also very, very reliable too and have equally good dhw flow rates. The vaillant 938 ERP is a heat-store combi with the equivalent dhw output of a small UVC. They're incredibly good at supplying hot water and don't suffer any delay in producing dhw, as regular combis do. If you want to be able to shower whilst other hot / cold outlets are used elsewhere in the house then this is the one to have

A new boiler will be called an RS ( room sealed ) appliance, unless you choose a balanced flue which I presume you wouldn't want. The combustion chamber, air in / fumes out ) is all entirely sealed to the outside atmosphere via the coaxial flue. Airtightness will only be compromised by making the penetration for the flue. I'll post some pics of the last MBC build where I had the same thing to do.

This is such a key point. What is just so frustrating about our long journey to achieve planning is watching so many people just openly flouting the rules and with no consequence. An "acquaintance" of ours has recently built a 20m x 12m shippon at his residential property to store his growing collection of garden machinery and a quad bike or two. He's in the park but like us cant be easily seen so just built it without even a thought to planning.

How long then can you leave green plasterboard outside, stacked against a wall but well covered with tarps whilst at the same time well ventilated? Also on battens to keep it off the deck. A bloke I know bought his last month but hasn't yet got it on the walls.....

Yes ... Familiar with that. PP required if the paving is not permeable. Peter Piper Premeditatively Picked a Protruding Private Portico Particularly Presenting Peculiar Permeable Paving Purposely to Preclude Planning Permission. Innit. Ferdinand

This is the other angles of the house, from the rear the lower white portion will be underground with rear patio doors opening on to the ledge level.