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Stop Press!! I know many of you were disillusioned with the UK house building industry but fear no longer as TW are breaking the mould and pushing the boundaries for sustainable green house building. They are now even offering double glazing!!! Not only this but 'quality insulation'!!! (What they mean by this is actually 100mm cavities). Made me smile on my rounds - good old house builders. The sad thing is they have waiting lists as long as my arm of unsuspecting buyers clamouring to buy a bog standard box about the size of a shoe box for obscene amounts of money.

As a longtime harvester of forum knowledge for a boat build I completed a while ago I am familiar with the bizarre ecosystem of online forums and the need to pan for the nuggets of gold amongst the crazy gravel and try and ignore (or resist the urge to participate in) the aggy clashes between dogmatic keyboard-pounders foaming at the mouth in dark rooms sometimes half a world away from each other. I was therefore very surprised when I found ebuild which seemed to be an oasis of informed and good-natured conversation populated largely by apparently pleasant people - with an added sprinkling of Obi Wan Kenobi build-gurus sporting almost laughable levels of in-depth knowledge. I was sad to see ebuild die, hope this place will be as good. The signs are positive. I'm building a small (not tiny) house in West Wales, solid wall with EWI. We are off-grid electrically already with PV and a small wind turbine (live on site in a caravan). We intend to have an unecessarily deep bath. We might not have a woodburning stove now (partly seeing sense, mostly seeing the price of decent room-sealed stoves). Our windows are going to be bigger than is wise. We don't really know what we're doing.

I would highly reccomendhttp://www.roofconsult.co.uk/articles/tiling/default.htm http://www.roofconsult.co.uk/articles/tiling/tips88.htm It's not the easiest website to get around, but there is some good info for getting started with roofing

May not be what your looking for but we just have installed 9 automated roller blinds - as well as push button control, the home automation will close them to avoid too much solar gain, and they will also open up in the mornings to try and wake the kids for school. We used a company called powered blinds and whilst they weren't cheap, they were a lot less than some others I received quotes from. They use somfy motors.

Lower CO2 emissions - than what? Double glazing - minimum allowable on new builds. Even most crappy Victorian builds have had double glazing retrofitted. Efficient boiler - again, compulsory on new builds. Water saving boiler - I don't even know what this is! Do they give you an ultra-low flow combi so that the shower stops when you turn on the kitchen tap? Quality insulation - again, to building regs, but not necessarily installed with sufficient care that it even functions that well. Then again, probably 95% of the population doesn't know or care about any of this. As a nation, we get the commodity house builders we deserve.

Jan had a sole-trader business making up-market curtains before she retired. She used to offer manual closers, and we have them on our curtains. Drawing heavy curtains across a decorative poll can require a surprisingly large force, so any automated system would need pretty high torque and be wired or have difficult to conceal batteries. Have you not considered a Roman blind? You can now get RF / WiFi controlled rollers where the motor, gearing and batteries are concealed in the barrel and there's a PV strip on the outer facing side which generates enough power in most uses that you don't need any external cabling at all.

You don't know Clive do you? ??

If you can find one in the U.K. then an add a motor is an option. You need curtain tracks with a pull cord. I had them in the barn and they worked very well but are quite noisy. https://www.amazon.com/Motor-Drapery-Existing-Add-Motor/dp/B01N8T8OLQ Edit: a review here: http://www.automatedhome.co.uk/reviews/add-a-motor-curtain-controller-review.html

I'll dip out of this one, because I think the basic concept is mistaken, as to my eye it looks like accepting a compromised - perhaps unusable - conservatory and trying to put a sticky plaster on it. People should not be living in a conservatory repurposed as an inefficient air to water heat exchanger. The better way is to catch it on the roof, and keep the living and heat gain separate. Make it a faux sun lounge which is suitable for summer use with a separate roof or canopy or put the conservatory where it belongs .. on the N side .. and have solar panels. But do you have a calculation of how much water can be heated by air extracted from a conservatory as a sanity check? According to my information x volume of water raised by one degree stores the same amount of extra heat as approx 3000x volume of air raised by the same one degree, and the volume of your conservatory is approx 60 cubic m, of which perhaps 12 cubic m are above head height, but there are many other factors involved, from insolation to efficiency of your heat capture process, at which point I decided I am offered more personal utility by going to bed. Though crudely that implies with 20% system heat collection efficiency you will need to reduce the temperature of all the air in your conservatory above head height say 10 cubic m by approx 15C in order to add 1C to the temperature of a 100l bath of water, ignoring running costs. Does @JSHarris have a suitable spreadsheet :-) Sorry for the ramble. Ferdinand

We have a slab

I wouldn't call you anal. But.......... "he speaks with forked tongue"..............well yes. (To much? Too soon? I'll get me coat )

People might argue that the washing machine is dependant on the nature of the guests. If it's going to be used by walkers / fell runners / hardy out door coves in general then it's probably more important than if the typical guest is a worn out electrical professional and his / her partner who just want to relax buy the fire and perhaps catch up on the latest shade of grey novel - no disrespect to any fellow buildhubers.

Got a good aerial shot of the place though.