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Does anyone else remember when you could buy rolls of EPS about 1mm thick. You stuck it to your wall, then wallpapered over it to "insulate" your walls.

Hmm, the relationship between the supplier and their credit card merchant is nothing to do with you - and most certainly should not be used as an excuse to put you off using credit card (if I'm reading rightly). If what they say is true, they should move to another provider. Re: Section75 - interesting but nothing much we mere mortals can do about it tbh. I pay virtually everything I can on credit card, paying it off every month to get the benefit (I have a Flybe card). I avoid ever paying anything directly from my bank account except any contractors.

Thats one of the most disappointing front doors I've ever seen

as promised, Shes a beauty

Yes.

As promised. She's a beauty

@jackI use mint, having no insect screens or mosquito nets. 4-6 sprigs (say 8-12") in a bottle or vase on the sill in rooms which are often most often open to outside. We have one in the conservatory and one in the kitchen. Strip the lower leaves, and these can be used themselves in several ways (look up on tinternet). When the sprigs grow mini roots they are no longer effective, so plant them back into the mint bed to build the stock and get some more. One lot will last 2 weeks or so. It makes a significant difference for us in the number of insects coming in so we have given a whole raised bed over to mint. I am guessing the mechanism is that the aromatic scent will deter insects from entering - which says you may need to try for a few weeks to see the difference. Try it and see. @recoveringacademic can have a mint pot in his winter garden :-). Other plants may also work, but none are so easy to grow. Apparently if you chew a mint leaf before going to bed it helps deter mosquitos, and perhaps your roast-lamb loving beloved will be even more passionate than usual. Ferdinand

I think for us this will be a must. We already have two bees nests (hives?) in the outbuildings which I really don't mind (although the corner of the workshop is a bit like Heathrow!) but I don't much fancy inviting them to live in the dormers of the main house! We also have a hornets nest in the woods off to the side of the garden and I'm going to have to be honest; they scare the sh*t out of me!!

Ta. Funnily enough I found that last night once I knew which terms to Google!

For membrane, try https://www.roofingsuperstore.co.uk/product/dupont-tyvek-uv-facade-50m-x-15m-roll.html It has BBA cert for open cladding.

Yes, if its a proper breather membrane it will provide full weather protection. Obviously common sense needs to come into it as it won't take a snow load etc. Your main issues: UV resistance (difficult to assess quality?) is an insect barrier required? Colour of the membrane will probably need to be black or dark grey This 'Grand Designs' build did just what you've been looking at but they had a coloured membrane and no insect barrier that I could see: http://www.walesonline.co.uk/lifestyle/welsh-homes/grand-design-eccentric-mr-strangeways-10061276

Buying tools is the one thing I can allays justify as they'll make me money. Also, having the right, and good quality tools, makes me work quicker, so a no brainer. Ive used my mates £200 chopsaw and its dire, compared to my £630 beast. Double compound means I'm not having to feed the wood in in any particular orientation too, so speeds up the cutting process. Same applies across the board, even down to the humble hammer . Go buy it ?

Tidy!

1 down only 5 more to go ?

The earth layer will be around 8 deg C below about 0.6 to 1m, not 4 deg C, and may well be warmer than this. The earth under our passive slab stays at around 9 deg C, and all the caves in South Wales I've been in were around 8 deg C, perhaps a bit warmer in the really deep and dry ones, colder in the ones with active streamways. A rough and quick calc suggests that you need more than 100mm of PIR around those columns to mitigate the thermal bridge to an acceptable level, there seem to be so many of them that the surface area is large, and the thermal conductivity of concrete, plus the relatively thick section suggests a fairly high heat loss without very good mitigation, plus a substantial condensation risk. I think 150mm of PIR might be the minimum, plus a very well sealed VCL, then cosmetic cladding. I think that taking the roof off and removing the columns, then building inside the tank may well be the better solution. This has so many advantages, that it seems almost a no-brainer, especially as the new roof structure could be made lighter, allowing greater spans, and yet still retain an earth covering to maintain the external appearance. The construction of this tank will have been driven very much by cost, so the cast in-situ floor, walls, support columns and roof won't have been engineered with domestic use in mind, and the roof is almost certainly massively over-engineered, to allow for the deep earth covering, and possible machinery use surcharges on top.

We have a Panasonic air rad upstairs running off our ASHP and it can provide cooling to the bedroom in summer or additional heating in winter (UFH downstairs only).

Just to be absolutely, transparently, clear, I have never, ever, not once, suggested that anyone should keep all their windows closed if they have MVHR! Yes, opening windows will unbalance the system, so just turn the damned thing off when you do this, to save wasting energy..............

Build an upside down house :-), though that may be approaching the issue from the wrong end.

By way of update, I am now committed down the Bosch route- if I want everything to match, that is! Picked up a couple of bargains (oven and hood) on Gumtree. Oven is a couple of years old, looks brand new, and the (glass) hood is still in the packaging. £110 total spend so far. Holding out for a matching hob if possible now. My £2k kitchen budget suddenly looks much more achievable

@lovo, one comment that I will make is that architects seem to love having walls of glass in a house. Yes, you need glass for passive light into the house. Yes, glass opens out a room into a view, but I've also seen designs with houses with huge openings onto a row of neighbours' back fences and run-down backs of houses. So yes, have windows where they work for you and provide positive views, but don't have them just because some architect wants to make a statement. Just remember: Glass loses typically 8x the heat as the same area of wall. When the sun shines full-on into a window there's ~1kW/m2 of heat incident on the glass surface and may 50% will find its way into your house. Most passive-class house have more design problems dumping this excess heat than maintaining warmth in the deep winter months. If you can see out then your neighbours can usually see in, so maintaining privacy can become a real problem. Many of us have realised that once you start down the route of building your own house, that it's more an issue of attention to detail and thinking through the design issues to achieve this ~1kW base heating in the depths of winter and have therefore chosen to go down this route. You have to think of the house as a system and balance the components and losses -- for example there's no point in spending a fortune on super U values if you have a house that leaks like a sieve. Read some of the testimony / blog examples here and use a typical set as a starting point and vary the costs in a balanced way to seek the optimum that you want. The sorts of issues that you might need to factor in are that you might end up spending £50-80K on architects / project manager and other professional fees, and £100K on other trades + materials on top of the core structure. You need to decide your pace of build and how much are are able / willing to commit, and where you need to spend your hard cash. For example we chose to split our work between a specialist timber-frame (TF) supplier who supplied the slab, TF, insulation and contractually guaranteed air tightness, a reputable local builder who did all of the groundworks, drainage, stone skin and slating, a reputable specialist window supplier. We used the builder's preferred contractors to do the specialist work such as electrics and the slate flooring. We decided to do most of the planning submission, all the architectural work, the overall project management, most of the procurement, and most of the internal works ourselves. This gave us the best value and exactly the house we wanted, but we are both retired and have the time to devote to the build. This split would have been impossible for us 15 years ago (when we both had work commitments). Mark Brinkley's House Builder's bible is quite a good intro to some of these trade-offs.

I've read a lot about the benefits of passive house design over the past few years on ebuild and other forums, but not much on any negatives. My biggest concerns with passive house design have always been around air quality and internal temperature. I really struggle in stuffy environments. I even open windows in winter. I was researching the above and stumbled across this. http://repository.tudelft.nl/islandora/object/uuid:88fd72b2-f7ab-45ea-a403-ce367801cf3f/datastream/OBJ/download