Leaderboard

Have you ever looked into eating fermented foods such as kefir, sauerkraut, etc? Supposed to be good for people who've been through antibiotics and have yeast infections.

My self build health status. Fatter Balder Greyer More anxious Stressed Wrists Fooked Ankles Fooked Knees Fooked Faith in humanity severely damaged (apart from the people on here) Apart from that i'm in great shape.

Terry, so sorry to hear of your state of health, I am sure others like me wish you a speedy recovery and being more able to enjoy your new build. Another good example of shared knowledge that this forum provides, look after your health and recognise when things are going wrong. Life ain’t easy.

A reminder to everyone: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/05/15/mother-of-four-killed-digger-helped-renovate-garden-in-laws/ stay safe

I’m physically fitter doing this self Build. In the last four weeks I’ve taken delivery of the insulation and the ICF block, this has involved me walking up and down the drive, a round trip of 200m, 170 time’s carrying the stuff. Im doing the labouring as it saves me money. As others have said getting quotes that are realistic can be a challlenge. Mentally I’m a fairly chilled sort of guy, nothing gets me down, mind you, everything takes longer than you think and this can be a problem for others around you, my wife is always pointing out that “you said x would take four weeks, it’s taken you six weeks”. The finances can be a challenge, stuff is expensive and you do need to shop around. On the plus side my wife has just been made redundant after 32 years at the same firm, so she get a reasonable redundancy packeage and I get an extra pair of hands! The aim now is the complete the build on or below budget and be mortgage free with a bit left over.

Well it sure did nothing for my husband’s health although I can’t blame that on the build. He was always convinced that breathing in general crap from sawing wood and the like kicked it all off however. So physical health yes and no, mental health yes and no. I think the stressful times outweigh the euphoric times tbh but it’s important to embrace the joy when it comes and there is joy albeit it’s sometimes difficult to retain a sense of perspective at times. This forum is good for technical advice but provides general counselling and support too . I think I would call it character building but the sense of achievement when you reach the end endures.

Oh god I have a funny one about sacking a painter, it probably won’t sound as funny in print, but I still chuckle as I think about it. So the painter had well and truly annoyed me, so he was going to be leaving from a top floor window if he ever showed up, i spent an hour going around the house and collected all his tools and stacked them in the drive for if he ever showed up, an hour later he appeared so I made a sarcastic remark about being 2 hours late, he made the mistake of saying something stupid back, so I picked up his tools, buckets rollers steps and proceeded to throw them at him across the road, tools flying everywhere the road littered with rollers and brushes, I launched a couple of milk crates at him but he was managing to bob and weave as the barrage of things rained down. As I was in full flow a van pulled up with the carpet layers on board, one of them lent out the window and said to my mate who was leaning on a shovel watching “should we come back later “. Cool as a cucumber I turned round and said, hang on lads I will be finished in a minute. Well You had to be there to appreciate it. One of my most outstanding moments in life.

I wish I was.

My only tweak that I am currently thinking of is to double up on the Willis -- mainly to remove a single point of failure, but also allow me to put in more heat overnight (E7) if we do get a long sub-zero spell in the depths of winter. At the moment we have almost nothing in our design that requires regular (££) maintenance. We need to clean the MVHR filters quarter and replace the secondary filter on the MVHR annually. That's all really.

I don’t think they are talking about ICF in general its because you have a basement the correct method is to place a batten in the concrete before it sets, then spray the surface with a retarder this stops the top couple of mm from setting too hard, when the concrete is green you pull out the batten and power wash the surface of the concrete to expose the aggregate. The indent left where the batten was gets filled with a water bar, and your next pour adhered to the aggregate I think your basement is only 3 sided isn’t it, so with a good French drain and dimple mat you probably have nothing to worry about. On a different note it’s funny how structural engineers differ in my icf system he has not specified any starter bars and I have asked him twice.

That's very useful to know, had I known that I think I might have looked at the Combi rather than the Premium 1L, as it does seem to be a very neat package.

They say alcohol is good for snake bites. That's why I always carry a snake! (W C Fields I believe).

I run a recycling centre for unwanted ales. Just doing my bit for the community

Would it be petty to think that many of your deliveries could accidentally block his driveway.

I'm on my way home on the train, I might have time in the next few days that I have off. What's a lot more exciting though is Peter Davison is sitting facing me one table away!

No wonder this bathroom never gets finished ?

You can't criticise the scale of the man's vision(s).

Who's ASHP is it..?? Mine (and the one @readiescards has) needs the pipe stats to control the ASHP, so it may be that yours has internal controls.

Yep my bad - they are different to the ones I've used as they only have the one O ring.

@DeeJunFan I've ended up going for BPC - I got away with one unit with 90mm ducting instead of standard 75mm. Went for a Vent Axia Kinetic Counterflow Unit. I have the ducting all in now, just waiting on the system itself and I'll get it in too. Got there in the end. Thankfully I don't get any calls from Beam lol. We're building in Hilltown. I do play guitar yes, I used to be in a few blues bands but nothing this past year or so...normal life has ceased to exist since the build started lol. @Declan52 tbf at the show the guys were helpful and even the Beam salesman was helpful enough, just pushy as frig. @Stones Yeah I heard a few more horror stories and thought not for me! Thanks for the heads up. @Visti That is advice to live by in this game!! Thanks for your help everyone, really appreciate it!

Non-contact IR thermometers are calibrated for a specific surface emissivity, usually around 0.9, as that's about the emissivity of painted surfaces, concrete, etc. Something with a very low emissivity, like a shiny pipe, or especially a chrome plated surface, with cause a vary large under-reading. A chrome-plated surface, for example, will probably have an emissivity of around 0.1, maybe less, so the error will be very large indeed. The fix is to put something like a bit of masking tape on the surface. That will have an emissivity that's close to 0.9 and will conduct heat well enough to get a more accurate surface temperature reading. Worth noting that something like a matt black surface will cause the opposite effect, and make the IR thermometer over-read slightly, but not by much, as a perfect black body has an emissivity of 1, and a mat black surface is not going to get to this level, so the error is probably only going to be small.

Concur with much of the above. We had ups and downs but they happen in all areas of life, we just chose this path rather than have it forced on us. Now I'm almost, almost finished (last bits of landscaping etc) there is a lot of satisfaction that we did it and that is rewarding - also, warts and all, I know this house inside out and I own all the success and mistakes. Bank account is empty, car is knackered but we came through more or less intact. I don't think I could every buy another house as I'd probably be more stressed worrying about what horrors were lurking behind the walls etc..

Not at all uncommon, I think. If you want a reasonably well-balanced view of medical research data, then Cochrane is pretty much the gold standard, I think: http://www.cochrane.org/ If you have any spare time, and an interest in it, you can help as a volunteer. If you have a background that has involved peer reviewing scientific papers, then you can be even more useful. Cochrane is staffed largely by volunteers, who give their time freely, solely to try and better sift out hard evidence on a wide range of medical treatments.

For the benefit of those reading this who are still at the early planning stages I would say that it's important to realise that the process is like a marathon rather than a sprint. However you decide to manage the process, whether you're still in full time employment or retired, make sure that the way that you're doing it is in a manner that is sustainable over a long period of time without putting yourself under unsustainable levels of stress. My own self build holiday home is only small at 71m2. The build itself only took 8 months but the whole process from first meeting with a Planning Consultant to finally finishing the externals on the 1.5 acre garden last weekend has taken us 5 years.

The impact on my health was much the same, except my wife didn't really spot how bad I had got until things were really bad. I got in a bit better shape physically, apart from knackering my knees, a wrist and a shoulder, but mentally it was a very different story. I've never (as far as I'm aware) suffered from any mental health problems before, but there was a point in the build where I got very depressed indeed, to the point where I pretty much stopped functioning. That episode slowed the build down a great deal, as there is no quick and easy cure for depression; it takes time to recognise you are ill, that you need treatment and to adjust to the changes you have to make in order to cope with life. It changed me a lot, sometimes in unexpected ways. I've never liked working outside, for example, but now get a lot of pleasure from doing jobs like preparing the ground, planting and looking after the hedges and trees I've recently put in. A neighbour commented on this last week as he was passing, saying that our trees must be the best looked after in the village, from the time I spent working out there around them. For me it's therapeutic, not something I'd have believed possible a few years ago.

Well I think my build kept me reasonably fit physically, but made me mentally ill, but then Wendy has always said I've got problems.

Please update when you’re working full time, the build is going wrong and you’ve run out of money. at the mo, you are 1) on holiday & 2) haven’t started

I 'finished' over 6 months ago and I'm still knackered!

Physically I suppose yes up to a point where you end up doing too much. Mentally it will cause no end of lost sleep and stress. Plus it will definitely accelerate the amount of grey hairs you have or make the fringe retreat further back than you would have liked. Or if your really lucky both. But apart from that spending time outside in the fresh air will always have a positive effect on you.

Yes But No... But Hmmm... No, yes I mean it should but No

To be honest our twin SunAmp configuration + Willis for UFH is working very well and we are very pleased with it. OK, the planning restrictions on PV means that we lose 8 points off our SAP rating, IIRC, but the running costs are so low it's going to be hard to make a case for an ASHP.

@Nickfromwales has seen my set up and it’s pretty “homebrew” for MVHR. Vents are Toolstation - nice white metal variable flow ones that have an inner which we have fixed and then plastered in. Cost about £7 each. Plenums are made from various uPVC solvent weld parts - cost about £8 per room. Duct is standard 63mm black electrical duct. It’s nigh on the same as the expensive stuff and I used 3 rolls. So that’s £160 for duct. I have a Mitusbishi Lossnay MVHR from an auction that was brand new - this was the one rebadged by Kingspan as their own and if cost me £60 - the controller was £80..! Plenum is £20 of MDF, and I need about 4ft of 150mm duct to finish. So all in I’m at £500 inc the Vat for a full house system. It can be done, and at double that for an eBay MVHR you can make a massive difference. I’ve seen some of the DCV valves and they are very nice but surprisingly expensive for what they are - it was a 5v stepper motor, driving the vane, a PIC and a stepper chip with a CO2 and DHT11 on a stalk in the airflow to do the monitoring and it was basically adjusting up and down the flow every 15 seconds. It was also noisy as the vane only closed to 95% which caused a whistling at the terminal. From memory they were about £90 + Vat each and needed a transformer too. I’m all for leading edge stuff but I don’t want to be someone’s guinea pig for a ventilation system that if it went wrong would need me to rip parts of my house down to replace ..!

Remember he can’t force you to use welsh slate he can only specify colour anD texture etc, not the source. You are free to get slate from anywhere within the EU.

The goal has to be that the automation is not intrusive and the mother in law can operate the lights whilst pissed.

When we finished our house last December, I was mentally exhausted, and physically fit but tired. I am also a largely recovered Chronic Fatigue sufferer. (This is similar to being an alcoholic: there is no such thing as a recovered CFS patient; once you've had it, then it will recur if you recreate the right conditions.) So I suspect that the main consequence of all this long term stress was that my immune system got suppressed. This year I have been pretty continually ill. Cold; Hand Foot and Mouth Disease (HFMD); another cold; going to nasty bronchitis; start of pneumonia; antibiotics; a bitch of a systemic candida infection that has collapsed my energy levels. I am still largely bedbound, and still struggling to get over it. So I've paid quite a price for all of he mental strain. I regret that I didn't proactively manage the stress better: never allow the build to be all consuming; be hard about scheduling in a couple of days a week away from the build and take proper holidays to charge the batteries; be realistic about timescale. This all being said, do I regret building the house? Never at any time. It was the best thing that we did. We will have all of the benefits for the rest of our lives, and I will hopefully get over this illness in a month or so.