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Head purse??? Hand rampant rabbit??? Foot perfume???

Well I designed our build over 20 years ago ( in my head) and it was not until I met my wife ( who had a plot with an old knackered bungalow on it) that I had somewhere to build, we just turned it round 90' luckily my wife liked the design, we both love cottages and it's the Devon countryside. What's not to like!

Yes it would kill your SAP calculation. How often do you actually plan to use the garage as a workshop and will you frequently be opening the door to take cars in and out. Surely if so you are going to lose a lot of heat when you open the door. An insulated Hormann double door has a U-value of 1.4. That's going to be like putting a 10 square metre double gazed window in a room, one with poor draught proofing. The garage is going to have high constant heat losses. In winter the double door will lose around 200W per hour. It is also likely to be a big area. The heat losses from the fabric of the room will be 200W per hour if all of the floor roof and walls are external (assuming 6m x 6m garage) and they have an average U-value of 0.15. It sounds like it is maybe external but attached to the house by one wall. BTW if you are heating it and there is no room above it you'll need to insulate the roof or the heat losses there will be massive. So including air infiltration you are probably looking at 500W/hour to keep the garage warm in winter and a lot more if you open the door, although that will likely depend on the wind direction. Of course a lot of the time it won't need heating when it is warmer outside. So very roughly 12kW/day for half the year, call if 2000kWh. Around £70 a year, not drastic. I'd still be tempted just to run a fan heater when I am actually in there. If it's insulated you won't be heating up from too low a temperature and when you build up a sweet working you can turn off the heat. I find my integral , insulated but unheated garage rarely gets blow 11C no matter how cold it is outside, indeed it stays warmer than the conservatory! Edit - Forgot to mention a fan heater is a lot cheaper than UFH also unless it is already in the slab. Some people will tell you that putting a car in a heated garage will make it rust. Especially if you put a wet salt covered car in the garage in winter. Certainly heat speeds up chemical reactions but it won't be that hot and cars are pretty immune to rust nowadays. BTW I just assumed it's a double garage as it seemed in keeping with the size of your house.

The earth connection looks OK, and the COB LED in this unit seems to be direct drive, via parallel connected BP5132H high voltage constant current driver chips. This arrangement means that the LEDs on the chip on board (COB) are connected in series and driven with full wave rectified mains. A side effect of this is that, like some GU10 LEDs, it's possible to get a slight glow from induced current in the wiring. What is puzzling is that the earth conductor in a three core cable should act to reduce induced current in the switched line to a very low level. Clearly it's not doing this in your case, so it's worth checking that there is continuity from the earth conductor in the LED to the protective earth for the installation, as it's possible that the earth has been disconnected somewhere. If all is OK, then the fix to stop them glowing is probably to fit a double pole switch. Big Clive has some details about this type of LED flood light on his YouTube channel:

I am just making up my remote sensors for the new house and breadboarded up a 5 ds18b20 one-wire configuration. Just before I wnet off to the hospital, I dropped all waterproof sensors into a glassof hand-hot water and left them to cool. There was one bad outrider so I did an X plot of all five against the average temperature measured by the other four and got this response: I haven't given the curves here but they also show quite difference lag characteristics in responding to higher rates of change. What this tells me is that I need to batch check and calibrate my sensors before using live. They cost pin money in bulk form China, so this is probably well worth while if you want accurate readings or matched sensors. PS. I know that used the Averege, but what the hell. PPS. Another 10 on their way so I should be able to get a properly matched set out of these

All the insulation is down. re-bar tomorrow and the concrete Monday

The cladding really looks great and suits your house perfectly! Happy I could help with that- samples sometimes just are not enough. Keep up the good work!

OK to answer your original question I find the worst point on my sectional door for tightness is the bottom seals. I can't see any light around the edges, but if rain drives into the door it can get underneath it. This is due partly to the threshold not being entirely smooth. I have purchased a rubber threshold seal for the door to seal down onto and stop this happening. It would also help airtightness. http://www.garagedoorseals.co.uk/c-garage_door_threshold_seal.htm You would want some kind of break under this. Even 20mm of PIR like they use around the edge of screed with UFH would be better than nothing at all. You could put this under the rubber seal and I think drive over it without worrying about the weight due to the small width. The rubber seal would span across it. I have a Hormann/Garador 40mm insulated sectional door. It fits very nicely and they are not excessively priced. There isn't much difference between the different sectional doors from what I can see. They do offer a thermal kit to better seal the edges. I agree, integral/attached garage is way more convenient.

My BCO wanted to know why there 100mm of eps under my garage slab.I told it him it wasn't being heated, just wanted a stable enviroment to keep cars in. He was happy with that and asked no more questions. The intention was of course to fit heating, but as ive moved now, its doing exactly what i said, maintaining a stable enviroment for cars. All thats in there is a dessicant dehumidifier keeping the chill off and humidity at 50% The threshold still annoys me though. I cut the EPS away to the depth of the block paving that meets the base, but my biggest error was not insetting the base in front of the door. as a consequence, there is 6 inches of concrete outside. But given the slab area is over 60sqm, its probably not actually an issue. Its pretty snug in there as it is.It is exceptionally airtight.

I use my garage where I live most days and I absolutely hate it being detached and at the back of my house. I maintain my car on my drive so every time I need tools I need to run to the back of my house while leaving stuff on my front drive - not great in London where I once had my German Shepherd nicked! The garage is massively important to me and something I will use a lot as I love messing with my cars and fixing stuff. Garage size is approx 11m x 6m internal with a big 5 odd metre garage door at the front and then I will have double doors to the rear. The internal door (from house to garage) will be as insulated as I can get it or possibly 2 doors. I would love to be able to be in my garage in winter wearing a T shirt and be comfortable.

Progress!!! An Openreach surveyor came out this morning to check out the site. The long and short of it is that they can't go direct to the house above ground from the pole on the opposite side of the road as there are electrical cables in the way. As they can only go under, not over, these electric cables (apparently) and they would then be too low, then the only option is underground (result!). It might take 4-8 weeks to get connected but it looks like I've got what I wanted at zero cost - quite some difference to the £7k they originally wanted So the moral of the story appears to be don't go direct to OR but instead get your house address registered and then get an order in with BT for them to provide you with a line/service

Oh thing of beauty! Looks fantastic.

Looks great and judging by how long a self build *can* take, I think you've made fantastic progress. We'll done ??

Ok news update. It's a funny old world isn't it. So yesterday I turned up to a job that was a new build, very modern timber frame, timber cladding. I got talking to the owner and at break time told him my troubles and showed him our plans, he loved it. After work i bumped into a good neighbour who asked how things where going, I told him and showed him the plans. He loved it. so it must be I'm just an idiot. Meeting the the first guy did show me that we have designed it a bit to large as every one of our rooms was a good metre bigger than his in both directions, so going to try and squeeze it up a bit as I know the planners are going to have a fit when we send it in. And every metre is going to cost more dosh so it's going on a diet. Cheers russ.

how do I officially make it outside the heated envelope when it's attached?

There shouldn't be any capacitors on the AC side of the inverter, but with no protective earth (!) the earth conductor won't be doing anything useful. With a DC to AC inverter (or generator) you must provide a protective earth with an earth rod or other connection to a known to be good protective earth conductor, to make the installation safe. The installation should be wired in a similar way to a TT mains supply system, with a tested and known to be OK earth rod providing the protective earth at the supply end, in this case the inverter AC output side. In theory a floating supply "could" be safe, as long as there is no possibility whatsoever of an incidental connection, or leakage path, that could mean that the inverter AC output terminals are referenced to local earth. Frankly I would NEVER want to go near a non-earthed installation like this, though. I know people often completely ignore the instructions to provide a protective earth when running generators - that does not make it safe. (The above photo is a joke, before someone makes any comment about it........................)

Unfortunately that switch is only rated for up to 50 V, so not safe for use at 230 V AC. The switches on decent quality 13 A outlets are usually double pole, but worth noting that some of the cheaper types of 13 A outlet only have single pole switches.

A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse - Shakespeare’s Richard III, Act V, Scene IV Hello, and thanks for stopping by. Firstly, apologies for the title of this blog. I can’t really say that I’m a big fan of Shakespeare, but I was struggling to think of a title for the blog, and, like Shakespeare himself, I do like a play on words. By way of explanation, for those not from Scotland, the region of Fife (the location of our plot) is known as the Kingdom of Fife. And we’re trying to build a house in Fife. So it kind of fitted. To be honest, I'm quite proud of it. My wife rolls her eyes when I do things like that, but it keeps me amused and (mostly) out of trouble and I can now tell people that I quoted Shakespeare today. Coincidentally, after looking into the meaning of the Richard III’s words, I think it is very apt in the context of our self-build experience to date. It is those experiences (past and present) that I plan on sharing. I’m not one to overly expose myself online (stop snickering at the back) so won’t be going out of my way to give our personal details away, but I won’t be obviously obfuscating my identity either. So, the actors in my own play are me (full time IT Consultant, currently self-employed), my wife (full time carer for her mother), our daughter (now at Aberdeen University), and two cats. I’m not sharing our full names (I perhaps should have thought about that before choosing my username), but the cats are less concerned about identity theft – they are Ziggy and Fleur. I can share pictures of the cats on request, as is obligatory on the internet. Any requests for pictures for me shall be referred to a local shrink. Anyway, I’d better get onto why this blog exists… our self-build. I’ve already made a post to the Introduce Yourself forum, and that gives some background to how we got to where we are at today, so rather than repeat that here, here's a link: That should provide a good understanding of the past experiences I intend to share over the next days/weeks. And, once our build does finally start, I’ll continue to do so share our progress. I’ll leave this first blog post there. On the next entry, I’ll share information about the plot, including a few pictures.

Oh I see your point now, if they did any air leakage test, the garage would fail miserably. I think a conversation with the BCO may be in order then? Honestly Peter, nothing more than creature comforts as the garage will be my workshop too and something I've dreamed of having for many years.

Any grid system will allow airflow into the garage so you will negate the benefit of sealing the door and any heating benefit. I would also check that under Part L1 you are not causing yourself an issue with BRegs as the whole of the garage will need to be insulated to minimum levels and potentially included in any air tests as it becomes part of the heated envelope of the building.

Ooo, sounds good. Keeping the vintage Bentley dry? Ensuring the wine racks are kept at best temperature? Stopping the yoga mediation mat being too cold? Keeping the butter on the pole dancing pole ready for action? Do tell! Would have loved to have done the same!

It's an attached garage and the floor will be insulated and I'm hoping to have UFH in there too

I use foam snickers ones, and just bin them when they go 'flat'.