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Well, some you win. See below. Dear Mr & Dr Simpson, I refer to the above matter (our claim) and all previous correspondence., and all of you for making the process a little less painful.Having now completion addition enquiries I am please (sic!) to confirm Insurers acceptance of the claim. The amount claimed was set out your email of 26 July in accordance with the estimate from Durisol UK in the sum of £1,298.34 inc VAT. Labour was confirmed to be free. The policy carries an excess of £250 and so the net settlement is £1,048.34. There was an element of luck in our claim, I think. Lancaster University has a full scale weather station (if you use the M6, you will have seen the windmill as you drive past the university grounds: the weather station is there). The guy who maintains the data has an office round the corner from Debbie's. His brief email (below) was important. [The wind] seems to have been averaging up to 11 m/s (~25mph) during the night. We no longer measure gusts but looking at some older data with the wind in a similar direction, you can be pretty sure it would be regularly gusting at least 1.5 times the average. From memory, it was particularly gusty, so the highest speeds may have been more like double the average. This is pretty unusual for July - especially from that direction. (Signed Dr. xyz) And the advice given in this thread. So, a big thank you to @Barney12, @JSHarris, @Stones, @Russell griffiths @Onoff and all of you for making the process a little less painful. As well as putting some lead in our pencil. A moment's reflection Without your support this claim would not have been made - we felt like shrugging and carrying on - head-down-keep-going-itis Without supporting data we would not have been able to demonstrate exceptional weather circumstances - and how many of us have direct access to a fully qualified meteorologist : and if we did would we also be in line of sight of a national level weather station? Durisol did not think hard enough before drafting their website content I'm thinking that we are lucky. Most people without access to the level of support itemised above might well have either not claimed or not had access to data to support their claim. And so failed in their application. That's why the companies win: lack of verifiable, objective data on the part of the claimant. The sheer luck of living within sight of a full-blown weather station...... I'm off to buy a decent dash cam. Any recommendations?

I think that the PassivHaus standard is the best that we have available to us at the moment - it is specific and measurable. "As built" performance can be compared with/evidenced against "designed" performance to make sure that the building has been built to the required standard. Compare that with the big developers throwing up houses, rigging it so that they meet building regs (e.g. siliconing all the gaps, air tightness testing, getting a pass, and then removing the silicon before decorating) and then only being required to prove that a sample of their houses meets regs. Right now, my view is that the PH industry seems to be populated, in the main, by people who care about what they are doing - architects who want to design to the PH standard, certifiers that do a thorough job of certification, builders who care about air tightness etc..... It's not (yet) been invaded by the get rich quick merchants that we have seen around the RHI technologies. As Craig says: It really is up to the individual whether they want certification or not. I don't think it adds to the value of the house, at the moment. An alternative, perhaps contentious view, is that paying for certification helps to maintain and build an industry which is generally going in the right direction.

If anyone is looking for external lights, we've just installed 14 of these https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B01G78W4M0/ref=pd_aw_sim_201_1?ie=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=GRNK773S4VW5WKM28PZE At £15 each they're a bargain, seem well made and look pretty good in our opinion.

Tell the pair of chubsters they'd best lose a few pounds if they want a crap round your place!

For me personally, I fail to see the the attraction of passive certification. My priority is to build a home which is cheap to run and very healthy/comfortable to live in, I don't think this is rocket science and I do not need a badge to tell everybody this! Further more i don't agree with only being able to buy passive certified products to gain certification and pay a large premium for this ( i feel as self builder i am already being ripped off everywhere else!) sorry for the rant, its being a shit day on site

Glad it's all blown over now and that we could be here propping you up...

I'm currently with Iresa. I think they host their website on a ZX Spectrum. Alas the earlier model without the built in tape drive.

Dead easy. It is well-instrumented and demonstrably uses less primary energy than the PH criterion. QED I agree that some consultants make a living out of making it all seem impossibly difficult, and so complicated that only someone who charges a small fortune for their services can possibly ensure that a house meets the PH standard, but not only is that BS, it's also contrary to the general principles that were expounded by Bo Adamson and Wolfgang Feist when they came up with the idea.

Ok so in my very humble opinion you are making this far harder than it needs to be. I cant chat long as I'm sitting on my hotel bed waiting for the misses to get ready so I can go out and get wasted. In yhe vid he has a centre drain, yours is at the end, work out your preferred fall to this drain and set it down (I think you have already done this) mix up a load of screed, if you want to modify it you can add a bonding agent to it or even some 10 mm stone, mix up all you need in one go don't be fu###ing about you will be very busy in a minute chuck it all in and compact very well, use timber or a level to scrape to desired height DO NOT WORRY IF FINISH IS NOT PERFECT. you are trying to get correct fall not a surface good enough to varnish, when you are happy you have youralls you can then go over it and give it a good polish up fill in all the voids, if you want shiny use a steel trowelled finish if you want a bit of grip buff it up with a plastic float. Hurry up I'm of for a pint and a boogie, I expect it finished by Sunday night. Chop chop. While ive been slowly typing you have replied. Take your auto cad and print it out chuck all you mix in like I said refer to your drawings and scribe into the top of the mix your two long fall lines use a straight edge and edge of trowel, you will end up with a screed mix that has a 4 section triangle thing if viewed from above. Check your measurements 324 times ( I put that bit in for you ) look at it a couple more times and adjust if needed, polish up and fill in any little low spots and shave of any high ones. Open a can and drink to my good health.

Won't be st/st at that price that's for sure. Anyway, going with MY plan and the exotic pea shingle mix No.4. The angle will be like lace when I've finished drilling it. YES I have been warned!

I can't be bothered to read all the previous posts but why are you trying to form this with a concrete mix, i have formed dozens of shower and wet room floors all to falls and we use a screed mix,slightly wetter than you would screed a whole house just form the falls using a spirit level and a few bits of 2x2 cut to the required lengths chuck all your mix in and level with the existing floor area. Scape down your fall heading to the drain just keep dragging your level over it checking you have the fall you want, trowel up to a good finish ready for your tanking. I will try to find you a vid as I have very few pics of work I have previously done. All wet rooms in oz are like this you will struggle to even buy a shower tray.

Richard Hawkes, we were responsible for the certification ?

Yes, very nice house and family to boot.

... And in bed asleep by 9. Only 4 more threaded rods to extract. I'm quite excited.... More in't morning

I fixed it, in the past few hours I have removed the tiles, taken down the stud partition, levelled up the wall, Re-boarded, retiled, regrouted, refitted the toilet to now only have a 2-3mm gap to seal... (Either that or I realised it was me being daft) ? P.S - side fixing toilet brackets are a weird bastard of a thing, hopefully I'll have the hang of it by the 7th toilet in this house! P.P.S - thanks buildhub, sometimes just posting your ridiculous problem is enough to help make you think about it enough to solve it!

Just what I was about to say. Like this:

I feel your pain, currently running around the house taking MVHR measurements with the anemometer that I borrowed from the forum and a big card cone to focus the airflow. Son (12), who is naturally good at maths but generally disinterested in anything technical other than his XBox or phone, asked what I was doing. I explained that the device measures air flow in m/s and we can convert that into m3/h by knowing the cross sectional area of the measuring probe - all stuff he's doing in y8 maths. You could see the eyes glaze over rapidly, he thought I was going to test a smoke alarm by setting fire to the card... +

I've dug out the paperwork from March 2010 and my memory of the cost was wrong. The fee was £1874.80 + VAT. This was for Pre Construction Assessment and Final Assessment and did not include drawings, Psi calculations or certificates for airtightness etc.

Another good outcome. Well done for sticking to your guns.

That is absolutely spot on. People go into science because they are curious and interested in stuff, and, perhaps more importantly, they aren't too focussed on earning loads of money (a look at the adverts for scientists in the back of your weekly "comic" soon shows what the pay is like!). Teaching science is challenging, but no more so than teaching maths, I think. I remember hating maths, and not being able to understand what on earth integration (and differentiation) was about, until I was fiddling around with a project at home and needed to find the area under a curve. All of a sudden the concept of integration became clear. One bad side effect was that I went back to school and spoke to the maths master about it, saying how I'd suddenly grasped what calculus was about by looking at something practical. Sadly, he was from a pure maths background and dismissed my suggestion of having some practical examples to illustrate maths and put me at the back of the class for having the temerity to suggest something..........

Are you going to tie people down and educate them, clockwork orange fashion? There needs to be a willingness to learn which does not appear to be there for basic application let alone enhanced application.

A large part of the problem is where we're starting from in terms of what the general population and builders know and want (edited:) are willing to pay for. Since starting our project, several friends have undertaken significant building works. None have actually built houses, but one took a bungalow back to bare walls and added another storey, and two completed roof-off renovations including extensive extensions. All involved all-new windows and doors, and replacement insulation. I talked to all of them about insulation and airtightness, and all shrugged and said that their architect/builder was doing the "building regs" stuff. I encouraged them to go for better windows, but they weren't "in the budget". I encouraged one to at least add extra insulation to their loft bedroom, given that they were unsatisfied with how hot their current loft was during summer. Nope. Not willing to spend the money, don't have the ridge height, and in any event they're installing an air conditioner! Builders are even worse. We've all seen how disinterested many of them are in even following the rules they're supposed to follow. Most won't offer better standards even if they've capable of achieving them, because the buyers of their services value those standards at approximately zero. So all this talk of technical capability within the industry is theoretical unless and until it's backed up by law and oversight, imo. Until then, people will do what they've always done.

No it isn't. I think this is part of the problem. People get put off 'science' at school because it is so badly taught. Most is really easy.

I'm afraid that what you consider 'basic' is somewhere between rocket science and outright witchcraft for the majority of the population.

I'll raise you "Come on a journey with me and we'll go down all the side roads"

Can the title of this thread be changed to "how to fit a bathroom and make everything more difficult than it needs to be"

You're a retired government chief scientist with degrees in chemistry and... another (which I can't remember, sorry!) You worked in technical management at a high level for many years. You've had highly technical hobbies across a wide range of disciplines all your life. You're retired and have a lot of time to spend learning all this stuff, along with a brain that's capable of processing and retaining information far better than the average punter. Respectfully, you may have found it a "doddle", but I suspect many may find it otherwise. Also, certification is not just about airtightness, insulation and 15kWh/m2/year. It covers everything from undue thermal bridging (which ours has, despite being an MBC house - we missed this until it was too late, although a passivhaus consultant would have spotted it immediately), to MVHR efficiency and sound, to a hundred other little details. Yes, with planning it shouldn't be a struggle to meet certification if things are planned properly from the beginning, but I defy the average person with a job to do this without help and significantly increased costs. Someone above mentioned £2000 for certification. Looking at this flowchart, I think it's very optimistic to assume that the consultants' fees alone will be less than double that for a typical project. My rough calculations were that certification would add around £8-10k, and possibly as much as twice that, to the cost of our build. For example, if you don't use PH certified components in certain areas, it can be difficult or even impossible to get certified. An example of this is MVHR - if you use an uncertified product, you have to down-rate its stated performance by (from memory) 15%. That could easily mean the difference between a PHPP pass and fail. So you buy a PH-certified MVHR unit as we did when we were still considering certification, and pay at least a couple of grand more than would otherwise have been the case. I really liked the idea of certification. I believe it focuses the house-builder on details that they might otherwise ignore as being unimportant (specific performance numbers - eg, airtightness and annual space-heating energy) or too hard (modelling thermal bridges). I just couldn't justify the additional costs at the time, given that it didn't have any impact on the value of the house. It may be that in the longer term, the more general market will allocate a positive value to certification. Also, the Passivhaus is one of the ugliest logos I've ever seen, in any context, and there's no way I'd hang one of their plaques in my house. Was that this one @craig?

I think that's a problem the guy in the picture might have

To an extent, by luck, yes. The Durisol North rep (Jamie) was out straight away and has (with his lads) all but finished putting it right. Next week ought to see the end of the wall-build. The point I wanted to make earlier in the thread was that it is only by luck - in this case - that I could build an evidence-based argument to refute the Insurer's un-evidenced assertions. Luck - in the form of almost irrefutable highly local meteorological data - has played the most significant role. And who normally has access to that?

The simple and straightforward answer is that it is not at all difficult, challenging or expensive to build a house that meets or exceed the now pretty old Passivhaus standard, and there is little merit (other than bragging rights) in going through the very expensive certification process, in my view. As an example, I knew sod all about building, architecture, energy efficient construction etc, before embarking on our self build. I did some home work, learned a fair bit in the process, used no consultants or experts, and ended up with a house that exceeds the Passivhaus energy performance standard. It wasn't hard to do, didn't cost the earth, and frankly there was nothing technically difficult about it at all. The major issues were making sure that everyone working on the house paid attention to the detailing, nd overcoming a load of prejudices and plain old disbelief. There's nothing magical or mystical about building a low energy house, that's comfortable to live in, although there seem to be a host of "experts" intent on convincing the unwary that the only way to achieve this objective is to pay others lots of money...................

Sort of the same as peterw said but we wrapped our pipe with 100mm foam and taped up this left a void around the pipe about 20 mm in diameter, big enough to either put a coupling on or push a pan connection on. Fill any remaining void around pipe.

I am not sure this works as a motto.

When we built our last house we had already sold our previous so already owned the plot outright and had enough to get the house to second fix. It was mortgage provider who actually suggested applying to borrow the maximum amount we could based on income multiples (around double what we actually needed) so that when we needed our first chunk of borrowed money, we would be so far ahead of their usual stage release, we could get the equivalent of the 1st three stage combined. We applied on that basis, drew down what was required to finish the build then converted to a standard mortgage product.

+1 Better off in your hand, than in their bush.

Just a word of caution about delaying the draw-down of an agreed mortgage. To part-fund our build I needed to borrow around £100k. Rather than get a self-build mortgage (because they are expensive and attract massive fees from the few brokers that specialise in them) I opted to mortgage our existing house (we had no mortgage on it, and intended to sell it after the build anyway). I shopped around, and Santander, who happened to be our bank at the time, agreed to lend £100k without any problems, We paid the valuation and set-up fees, and were given full approval for the mortgage within about a month. I told Santander what the mortgage was for, and that we wanted to delay the draw down until we had used most of our savings, and they were fine with that. We went ahead and signed a contract with the main frame and foundation contractor, committing us to a stage payment plan. Come the time for the second stage payment, I went to the bank and asked to draw down the agreed mortgage. Santander then told me that their mortgage policy had changed and that they were withdrawing the offer, and wouldn't even refund our fees..................... This caused a load of stress, as we were committed to paying the contractor and had insufficient funds available. In the end I was able to secure a mortgage from another lender, although it cost a fair bit more in both fees and interest. It was one of the most stressful points of the build. Needless to say there is no way I would ever deal with Santander again. We did eventually get our fees back from them, but only after the best part of a year battling them via the regulator. We didn't get any other form of compensation for the additional costs incurred because of Santander's actions. The moral of the story is never, ever, trust any lender. Until you actually have the money in your account, assume that they will renege at the last minute and have a back up plan in place if they do,

Same for us we have a Melton Mortgage agreed, we had some capital to get started so have not drawn down from the Mortgage yet, but felt it was important knowing the build budget/costs and for piece of mind to get it sorted sooner rather than later. Once Melton were happy that all the warranties/insurance were in place and valuations done it was all really about loan to value.

I would suggest holding off any building works until you have secured your mortgage. We have found that the limited number of building societies that offer finance for self builds in Scotland apply quite a high 'stressed rate' of interest. Often the lenders provide rough estimates of your borrowing multiples on their websites, however it really once you have completed the affordability assessment that your have an indication of your potential borrowing from a lender. After decrofting our house site, we applied for planning and then put in the services and our access road. These works can be undertaken before you apply for a mortgage and in the worst case scenario your really only adding value to the plot. Electricity connections can be costly if you have to go back to a transformer. Just out of interest what are your drainage costs?

We have a valuer from the building society (@£80 a visit...) who agrees that the stages are complete and gives a valuation to release the next stage. We also have included the warranty report up to that point to show progress - no idea why but the Melton ask for it..! No architect involved ...

That would normally be an architect - signs a form from the bank and sends it in. The bank then pays out the associated installment. There may be other professionals allowed sign the form but check your local Regs for that. All those Professional Fees add up!