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This may be of use to some people and of interest to others. Certainly I could not find much information before I embarked on our build and it was a bit of a leap in the dark. We designed our house with a swimming pool. It is quite an extravagance but my daughter and I really enjoy swimming and messing about in the pool and it is a luxury I have always fancied. The pool has now been up and running for the past couple of months and I am extremely pleased with it. The installers did a very professional job. As always I tried to make sure that there was as little maintenance as possible required. The filtration system by a company called DA-Gen is all automatic. In the last two months all I have had to do is put a pool cleaning robot like a Roomba in the pool every week and it polishes it up. Other than that there has been abolsutely zero maintenance. The installer told me that historically they would visit a pool once a month. They will probably visit mine three times in the first year and then less after that. The main job will be changing over the chemicals, and just checking everything is working. The pool automatically tests the pH level and adjusts as necessary. The pH is set at 7.2. The chlorine is set at 0.5 ppm which is the same as the local drinking water. The pool creates chlorine from salt when necessary and there is no chlorine smell or taste. The pool is from a company called Niveko. It is a one piece polycarbonate pool and came as a single piece on the back of a truck from the Czech Republic. The pool is 8.9m long, 3.4m wide and 1.3m deep. Thus it contains around 40,000 litres of water. I spent some time at the pool in the gym and reading advice from owners in America on what size to buy. Traditionally pools are twice as long as they are wide, but I wanted a pool that was long enough to swim lengths. Having tested out the gym pool I reckoned I needed at least 8m. If I could not get permission for this much floor space I would have investigated an endless pool where you swim into a current. Depth wise people recommended that a deep end was pointless as it was impossible to stand and play games. we often stand and play water volleyball and the depth is working out perfectly. More depth would just be more water to heat and more ground to dig out. I would recommend 1.3-1.4m depending on your height. I read up on various kinds of pools. A discussion with one company that build traditional tiled/concrete pools suggested a cost of £200,000 which was ridiculous. You can also have a liner pool where you build a concrete shell then use a waterproof liner inside. This is cheaper but needs replacing every so often. I also investigated building a pool from ICF. Although this seems like a good idea, I could not find anyone with expertise in it. Eventually I came across these polycarbonate pools. I liked the design as it has EPS insulation around the outside. The pool could also incorporate a built in cover. Around one third of the heating cost of a pool is due to evaporation. This also keeps humidity down. Finally the smooth finish compared to a tiled pool makes the build up of bacteria much less likely and reduces the need for cleaning and chemicals. It also means no sharp edges on your feet. The total cost for the pool, dehumidifying equipment, filtration, ventilation etc was around £80,000. The real cost is the 80 square metres for the pool room, plant room and changing room. This probably added around £120-150,000 to the build cost of the house. The building work was not complicated much by this, a deeper area of foundations was dug and the pool sits on a concrete slab similar to the ground floor of the house. We did find once we dug down that there was some underground water and it had to be tanked. The pool and ventilation were then put in place below floor level and covered up whilst building work continued. The pool sits on top of 150mm of EPS with a further 50mm around the outside. Historically a pool was a big negative on a house in this area, making them almost impossible to sell. The reason was massive heating bills and maintenance costs. Also they made your house smell of chlorine and the humidity would destroy your house. One thing that prompted me to write this is that we have our heating now all working as it should. I noted on another thread that they had not insulated the circulating hot water system. This has been done now. I thought that this was causing unexpected high bills for heating hot water. However, I have since realised that perhaps the main reason was that the pool, hot water and UFH had all been connected in series to the boiler. Thus when any one of them called for hot water from the boiler all the pumps ran. This was pumping hot water to all 4 UFH manifold in the house every time the hot water or pool called for heat. By my calculation the loops contained towards 200l of water which was constantly being circulated and heated unnecessarily. We have now separated the circuits and gas use has dropped dramatically. Before building the pool i tried to use @JSHarris heating calculator to calculate the cost of heating the pool. After a bit of messing around I decided that a pool was not different to any other room. The reason that pols historically use a lot of heat is that they were often put in orangeries or cheap extensions. Effectively you are trying to heat a large (80sq metres in my case) room to 28c all year round. These rooms often had single or double glazing. My pool is in a room as well insulated as the rest of the house with triple glazed 0.7 U-value windows. The area below the pool has 0.1-0.15 U-value, the walls 0.14. The heat recovery system is 90% efficient. The calculation said that the pool would cost around £500 a year to heat. Frankly even at £1000 I would have been pleased. Anyway I have been on holiday this week and checking our gas usage now that everything works as it should. We have been using 7-9 units a day depending on how much the pool is being used. We have been using 75-100 kWh of gas per day or around £2-2.75 a day in gas. Hot water is around £1 a day, so the pool seems to be coming in close to my calculation. I am very pleasantly surprised. This is heating the pool to 28C and the room to 24C when the pool is closed and 29C when it is open. The outside temperature has really dropped to around 15C. The humidity is kept to around 60% when the pool is closed and 65-70% when it is open. All in all it is a big extravagance but one I am very pleased with. It was great in the hot weather a few weeks ago, my daughter and her friends are loving it and hopefully I will get many years of enjoyment from it. In terms of things I would have done differently. We were a bit tight on the plant room and stuff just fits. The changing room door is quite close to the pool and the frame gets wet. We should have sloped the tiles back towards the pool so that when the kids jump in the water would run back naturally. I bought a squeegee to push excess water back in. Everything is pretty much finished, just some mastic around the room edges required. Heating costs may fall a little as the bottom edges of the windows have not yet been sealed to the floor and had compriband insulation outside, so we are probably leaking a bit of air. Pictures - Concrete pad awaiting the pool. Pool and ventilation below ground level. Plant room. These are the filters and chemicals, the dehumidifier/heater is behind the door. Changing room. We came up with the idea of building the bench out of wood effect tiles so it won't be affected by water. Changing room shower. Pool today after the kids were playing in it. Cleaning robot. The pool has two large colour changing LEDs that provide a great effect at night.

Well, another update. The house is sold again, subject to contract, another cash buyer with no mortgage. We're happy, have got the price we wanted, and hopefully this transaction will go through OK. The current prospective buyer has seen the covenants and isn't bothered by them, so now we just have to go through the paperwork again. Thankfully it looks like we can re-use much of the paperwork from last time, so it is likely that the pace of the sale will be governed by the buyer's solicitor. It's also possible that they may be able to save some time by purchasing the searches from the previous buyer - that may well knock a couple of weeks off any delay. Fingers crossed that we don't hit another hitch - this house selling lark really is a damned stressful business.

Hope in a new Scotland we will see repopulation of the Highlands...plenty of room and beautiful. Might mean motorways and train lines but why not, population could easily grow by half comfortably in the long term. Closer ties with Scandinavia including flights and ferries too...we are far to south east centric. How the devil can a police sergeant and a nurse afford a reasonable house down there...it's crazy. It's not as if you don't need them and with a joint salary c£70k you *might* get a mortgage of what...? £200k. Even in Glasgow that gets you a very nice house in a nice area. In London you get not a lot...

I am submitting details to the council for a pre-application advice before i submit in full. I have put together a description of what i am wanting to do with a block diagram of the plot, including a max ridge height, but no elevations as i think that would be too detailed. Does anyone have any advice on good things to include and things not to include.

Exactly what makes it fun In my mates 19' x 5' above ground pool, we used to do the washing machine. 6 or so of us would all walk, then jog around the outside until it was up to the edge and then just fall over ( all of us half pissed on very low-quality wine I hasten to add ) and there would be body parts everywhere. I don't think anyone really realises just how much fun a pool is, and I bet your kids are thinking themselves very lucky. Good on you for spoiling them. Forget about running costs, its not about that. Oh, and damn you for having such a bloody nice house.

About 90% of our insulation is cellulose, really just chopped up old newspapers turned into fluffy fibres, so 100% recycled. It's hard not to use things like EPS and concrete, but in the house itself we only have EPS where we really had no choice, as the load-bearing insulation under the passive slab. Likewise, our 100mm thick passive concrete slab almost certainly has very little more, maybe less, concrete than a conventional strip foundation. The only really low concrete system I know of is the Segal system, but that comes with the penalty of needing more underfloor insulation in order to achieve the same sort of low heat loss in cold winter weather, where the undercroft temperature could be a fair bit lower than the ground temperature. Not hard to overcome, but needs a bit more floor build up.

@ultramods The pool, filtration, cover, Heatstar etc was about £75,000, it might be about £80,000 today. I just had another think about the costs of the extra space as I was calculating them on the all in cost of the house. The house is costing around £2000 per square metre all in to build, but that includes the pool, walnut staircase, a lot of landscaping, architects fees etc. Actual build costs are probably more like £1500 a square metre ex these. Thus I guess you are looking at 80 square metres at around £120,000 plus the £80,000, so £200,000 in total. It may have been a bit more due to the extra digging etc, so say £120-150,000 or £200-230,000 in total In fairness that would buy a lot of gym memberships but just having access whenever you want and not having to swim around other people's kids, swimming lessons etc is lovely. I'll edit the cost above.

Doing that in the current customers airing cupboard, down each side, switch set into the frame, so the lights come on automatically. Toying with putting one of those Kinetic switches onto the offside of the roll top freestanding bath ( with some 3m double sided tape, up high where it cant be seen ) to switch between some under vanity lighting so they can chill in the bath. The PVC windowsill has a 15mm overhang and I'm thinking to put some led strip under there so there's light from behind where they're sat in the bath, plus the under vanity LEDs at the front of the bath, but you won't be able to see where the lights coming from. Cool. Need to work out how to get the switch to flip-flop between spots in the ceiling and low level lights. Any idea on a solid state relay that will changeover ?

Hats off that is amazing looking.

Moot point. The assumption is it get finished in that time...

LED strips I might have been impressed...

I was just going to agree with you Jerremy But noticed I’ve gained an extra pip ?

I can see that my weekend is going to be taken up trying to work this out. On the plus side our house has a SAP EPC of A107, and an EER of A107 (minus 0.9 tonnes CO2/year), and is clad with larch grown 6 miles away and milled 3 miles away. On the minus side the frame timber came from Scandinavia, was built into frames in Cahir, Tipperary, Ireland, then transported here, the 300mm EPS under the slab came from Kore in Ireland, the recycled plastic "slates" came from Canada and we do have quite a lot of concrete in our retaining wall, and a bit in our passive slab. Other positives though, are that we are water-cycle neutral, in that we have our own borehole and dispose of our effluent via a treatment plant to the stream alongside. We do generate around 50% more energy per year than we use, though, and I worked out that our negative CO2 emissions equated to the CO2 sequestered by around 40 mature trees (more than would fit on the plot), plus around 50% or so of the energy my car uses comes from our own PV system. Be interesting to try and see how many years it will take to recover all the energy and CO2 that went into building the house.

Sui generis means of its own type, one of a kind.

And the verdict ... Fan had packed up. New guy went and got a new one and fitted it. He turned up at 12.30 and left at 5 and it was £400 plus vat. That was fine. That’s not the end of the saga however. He called us and said that after running the gas safety checks he needs to run after a repair it failed because it was leaking carbon monoxide at low flame (not high) so it needs a valve to be replaced or something and he needs to leave the boiler switched off until then. He’s coming back on Mon to do that. This is unconnected to the fan failure so looks like that was a blessing. He said that he didn’t think a new boiler was warranted in this case but he said that they generally look at what the parts would cost and if it starts getting above 500 plus vat they look at whether a new boiler is a better option. A new boiler would be 1800 - 2000 so sounds like that’s the going rate for Sevenoaks. He also suggested that a British Gas service contract was taken out. She used to have one. God knows why it got cancelled. She also said ‘oh I’ve got a plug in carbon monoxide detector somewhere, wonder where I’ve put it’ ???????

and toes and... and everything crossed! Well done....

Use some marmox on it: http://www.marmox.co.uk/marmox-dry-lining You can also get curved boards too: http://www.marmox.co.uk/products/curved-board Treat them exactly as a plasterboard when plastering.

Good plan. Mosaic into a corner is hard. I was starting with not very flat walls so I'm not too displeased with my first attempt at tiling except at the corner:

Just don't take to much amber nectar and get carried away and end up with this. Was this your first tile job @Nickfromwales

The mitred wall is not for the feint-hearted so that's the way I did the one you shamelessly stole. . Id have no beer that day. .

Dont forget to prime walls

Most panels are around 1.0m x 1.6m, at 285w per panel with 20mm between panels you need about 6m2 per kWp output. You cannot have panels higher than ridge line and for the usual fixings you stay about 0.5 m away from other edges, although fixings are available to go right up to the edge (wind uplift problem). @Russell griffiths 1kWp will yield about 900kWh/year but do not expect any significant output when you need the heat pump for space heating. Maximum production will be 7-8kWh/kWp/day in May/June. Dec/Jan might average 0.8-1.0kWh/kWp/day with frequent zero days

Haven’t seen or heard from the old company, recon they have cut their losses and ran! The new company’s price for the bit that had to be supplied again and fixing the island was only slightly more than what we had left to pay to the old company so if they do try to ask for more money at least I can counter claim for that...and the new carcasses we had to buy, the worktops were so unsteady we are lucky it was such a sh*t job cosmetically that we checked ? I can’t express how good the new company were, they fixed the other company’s work on the worktops that weren’t a *too* bad and redone what couldn’t be saved, really went the extra mile... well about 200miles up from Glasgow. Don’t know if we are allowed to recommend companies but Sigma Stone ltd from Glasgow were the excellent company (actual stonemasons with a background in memeorial headstones for many years)

In some respects it's little different to the old Code for Sustainable Homes energy related elements. One site near us had a planning stipulation that it had to meet CFsH level 4 (IIRC), but frankly it's a joke, as the developers may have complied on paper, but that is the very estate where I walked around with my thermal imaging camera a year or so ago, pointing out how crap they were, with large areas of missing wall insulation, no insulation at all in the dormers, large areas of thermal bridging around the doors and windows (that I suspect were really air leakage), etc. People living there are reporting energy bills that are more than double those estimated on their EPCs. I can't really see how any planning stipulation to build to a better standard would be enforced, as we can't even enforce current building regs at all well.

I see this a lot as a planning condition. Typically Planners will require a 'scheme' to be 10% better than Regs based on CO2 emissions and/or fabric energy efficiency and also may dictate it's got to be done by the use of renewables. Distinct lack of consistency even within one planning authority! Self builders and smaller developers have to jump through the hoops but, as ever, the large, national house builders appear to avoid this type of condition, I believe the reason(?) is 'it doesn't make the development economically viable'. Ian

I would now be sending company B's bill, to company A

When we were building our house we took the hedge down to allow access for cranes etc. This left a nice large area of front garden which people thought nothing of parking in and then taking their dogs for a walk. One day I caught a chap parking and asked him what the hell he thought he was doing parking in my front garden. He was apologetic but said so you want me to move the car. I must have been having a bad day because I told him in no uncertain terms to shift it straightaway. After that several piles of pallets along the the frontage stopped further incursions.

Add 300 ml all round for the flashing to the stated area of the panels. Roughly for our 12 panels (3 Kw p) we needed about 16 square meters

We once had a worcester flue that the flue wasn't correctly installed (vertical that somebody cut short) and not sealing correctly and everything in the main exchanger was signs of corrosion gas valve, fan wiring loom etc. We ended up changing the boiler like for like in a few hours.

5 year old worcester, that's still a good boiler. I know worcester will come out themselves for a set fee think around £300, usually next day (sometimes same). They will give the boiler a once over and any weak parts that a prone to failing they usually replace aswell.

The problem with aluminium is when it's in contact with itself. Stack two sheets together outside and it will corrode quite badly in the anaerobic zone where there in close contact, particularly if it's also damp, This will be exacerbated if one bit of aluminium is anodised and has breaks in the anodising, for example where there are screw holes or areas that were punched out after anodising. Stainless mesh will be fine, and almost certainly won't harm the aluminium sheet. It you are worried about it, then space the aluminium cover sheet off the mesh around the edge with some reasonably thick (say 2mm) double sided foam tape. If it were me I'd not bother with this, as I've banged enough stainless rivets into aircraft aluminium over the years and never yet seen a corrosion problem. If possible, don't choose "marine stainless", 316, but use 304, the standard grade. This isn't that far away from 6063 aluminium architectural alloy, which is what the plate will be made of, and won't cause a problem.

No to brass, but stainless should be fine. Stainless and aluminium aren't that bad together, copper or brass with aluminium are. You want stainless woven mesh, coarse enough to keep out larger flies but not so coarse as to cause any significant flow restriction. You can buy small pieces on ebay easing enough, just search for "stainless mesh" and make sure it'e the woven stuff.

Get on board ?. Poor woman would likely be pushing up daisies waiting for you to finish getting your house to passive levels ?

Received with thanks. Went to sleep last night reading about the Norwegian Powerhouse building standard. Going to read every page! Cheers.

I don't think the law allows them to make it a building control issue. I think the only way they can do it is through the local plan.

The chap I wanted to do my tiling says he butters the back of wall tiles - his attitude is why not? Waiting for a bath and filler to arrive so I can finish the hole drilling in the floor - then tiling starts!

High praise indeed!

If the flue fills with water it drains out of the condensate pipe ... it’s designed to do that ...

The real issue here is the archaic practice in the UK of using ring finals. It's a hang over from the high cost of cable back in the 1950's, I believe, but there is absolutely no excuse to continue wiring new houses like this in the day and age. I was sorely tempted to wire the house as I have my workshop, all radials, with an all RCBO CU, but didn't as space was too tight where the CU was going to go (bad planning on my part). At least with an all radial scheme you have an indication when a line or neutral gets disconnected somewhere - the circuit stops working. When the same happens with a ring final the circuit carries on working, but with the cable potentially overloaded, as the protection device will have too high a rating (outlet ring finals in 2.5mm² T&E will typically have 32 A protection, radial finals in the same cable will have 20 A protection).

Best of luck Just heard from our tenants that they have to rent for 3 years before they can get a mortgage to buy it, so longer to wait than we first thought. It always used to only be 2 years of accounts for self employed to get a mortgage, now they want 3.