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All done - just need to keep cars off it until we get the entrances paved next week. Then I can render wall, hang gates, plant hedge, turf front etc... I keep telling myself that we’re almost done ?

Sitting here bored. I found these for you.

Hi everyone, The names AndyT and I work for Sunamp Ltd. - will not be selling on the forum but if you need information or advice I would be pleased to try and help. I have been in the renewables industry for 10 years - my 4 bed detached home with 4 adults is in W-s-M (hard water area) is used by Sunamp as a live test house. Robert Llewyllen (Fully Charged) filmed at my home - you can see the episode here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9upXeTMHUqE Economy measures added to this house originally built by Second City are; cavity wall insulation, 300mm of loft insulation, all external doors and windows upgraded, 3.5kWp Solar PV with excess generation diverted into a 5kWh SunampPV heat battery pre-heating hot water into an Intergas ECO RF30 with weather compensation and in-comfort control. My Miele dishwasher is fed with pre-heated water, I have Economy 10 off-peak and have monthly direct debits of £35 for electric and £10 for gas. You can view my dashboard here http://wattson.energyhive.com/dashboard/AndyT lots of interesting data. Also just started testing OpenTRV / Radbots and Loop energy monitoring. Looking forward to chatting. Kind regards. AndyT.

Kitchen almost finished

What to they do for a seal? The ones I have (just looked at a spare, slightly different design) have had seals on the rear of the thing to seal against the tiles/wall. The spare I've just looked at has an O ring in a groove on the back, and judging from the annular rebate in the one pictured I'd have thought a seal may fit in there? Ours also had a back nut with a big flange to hold the thing in place and pull it back tight to the shower wall board we used. The elbow sat back from this and would never had been able to pull the fitting tight up against the wall, it was a good 50mm back inside the wall.

Hi Thanks for the quick replies I'll try and answer your questions: The plot is is on a slope (about 5 degrees) and has about a 1m of sandy clay before hitting bedrock. The front of the house will face west, I've attached a picture of the view looking west. It is on the Isle of Eigg they have their own integrated renewable energy system (solar, wind and hydro) that supplies electricity to the island. Each house can take up to a maximum of 5KW from the grid. As this is not the national grid but a small self-contained system run by the island at present there is no possibility of individual house being grid-tied to it. Building the timber frame on site is very much something I want to consider. Has anyone got any contacts for this so I can explore the possibility. I have only spoke to timber frame kit manufacturers so far. This summer we hope to be in a position to get the access road laid and build a self-contained office at the bottom of the plot which we will use for accommodation during the build which I will eventually use to work from. Bulk materials are usually brought across on a local landing craft then there are various vehicles around to take the material across the island. I've also attached our current idea for the build. Thanks Elevations.pdf Roof Plan & Section.pdf Floor Plan.pdf

Or a no. Our planner said that he gets so many applications with little supporting information against the planning criteria or local plan. In his case if they were difficult or marginal and they ran out of time, they usually were refused - they went with a start point of yes, buy if they were hard to justify and they didn't have time they were justified in refusing. Our design statement went into all the various criteria and the local plan - which the planner said made his job much easier as we had interpreted it properly and fairly. So if there is a big queue of work, you can do a lot to make a planners life easier. Could be worth reviewing the application to make sure it covers what the planners need and adding if needed?

I think that is/was the official position with Visonic but I think it's changed as they are available on Amazon now. I put our Visonic system in 10 years ago. The panel has a lot of functions most people will never need which might make it confusing for people to set up but we're very happy. We used their Quad series wireless PIR sensors which have very good battery life if you turn off the LED on them using the link inside. They seem to work through multiple walls. We only use the key fob to arm and disarm the panel so it works much like your car alarm. Lock the front door, press the button on the key fob and you're good to go. You can have it call you with the alarm status. The panel we have is mainly for wireless sensors but also has a wired input and output on the back. The output could be used to control an electronic lock and the input for wired sensors. I think the output can also be controlled by a spare button on the key fob. The range on the key fobs doesn't seem isn't huge - about 10 meters through a wall or two. I don't know anything about range extenders.

On a previous house we needed a retaining wall aprox 3m high and found out that any structure used for retaining would require engineering drawings if over 1m high, so we built 3 terraces all aprox 900mm high with a very light slope aprox 3m wide and built timber planters on the relatively flat bits and turned it into a veggie garden, it worked very well as each flat area was sheltered by the one above. Just bear in mind a group of terraces will take up more land than a vertical method.