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There will be a pair of newts doing synchronized back stroke....

God how I wish my dogs could do it I’m sure they would have the same sense of urgency as we do! Yes you’re right it can be a lonely place a building site, we get very few visitors even the family don’t visit because I suspect they can’t comprehend how we can live in a caravan, my son in particular thinks we should just buy a house and settle ourselves down but for the money we had we were only going to get a small house and we’ve tried that already and it didn’t work.We too went and looked at an ex council house just after the foundation was poured and it didn’t go as planned, but we decided to continue and I’m sure in the end it will be fine but you do get these moments when it all gets too much, for me writing it down did help and all your words of encouragement are much appreciated

The clay was dusty: and in today's brisk wind, I almost needed eye protection. So now.... Tomorrow tarting the hole up and popping it in. That should be a laugh.

'Surviving' sounds as though it's a struggle whereas it seems to be a simple and effective solution in my house. The reason we keep the internal temperature high is because that is what Wendy likes. The primary heating is via the electric towel rails in the three bathrooms. In our view the rooms you want warmest are the bathrooms so it's an effective way of achieving that and then extracting from those rooms via the MVHR. The EASHP in the Genvex Combi will increase the supply heat to the other rooms if required. So primary heating is from the towel rails. The problem with quoting PH alone is that it is a maximum requirement for space heating of 15kWh/m2/yr which may result in a whole house heating system being needed but when the specific requirement is significantly less that 15kWh/m2/yr there are novel ways of achieving that without wet UFH. Decrement delay is mentioned a lot but it is not simple to model and how important it is to achieving a comfortable heating/cooling balance is going to be dependent upon the wall and roof construction, shading and weather. What are the effects of ventilated spaced surfaces within the wall construction or having the house shaded by large trees all day or living where it is always windy. Not so simple .

Yep, had my own wobble this week. I tend to have a depressive episode around this time of year (second half of August, first half of September) and sort of know to discount it a bit. Last Sunday (19th) I went up to the site to try to finish off fitting the membrane on the west gable but what with the slight depression and it being the first day I'd been able to work at height for a week I was already feeling a bit frustrated. My safety glasses (needed most of the time for the reading bit on the bottom) kept misting up under the midge net and the scaffold tower was being awkward to put together and I rather lost it - threw a few bits of tower down pretty hard breaking one platform and one top ladder section. Haven't been up to the site since except to check that no other parts of the scaffold tower are damaged and to pick up post. Through the early part of the week I was pretty seriously thinking about giving up on the whole project. On Wednesday I went and had a look at the outside of a cheap ex-council house that's up for sale and started thinking through what I'd do with it, etc. Since then I've been thinking on two separate tracks at the same time: if or if not, while trying to do useful things to get out the depression cycle, which I am but still feeling a bit fragile. E.g., today moved most of my office stuff up from the living room to the small bedroom as that'll be a lot easier to heat in the winter. So, yeah, maybe this forum needs a Mental Health section. Whatever, reading and talking on here has helped. Thanks all. More amusingly, either I'm reading this wrong or you have very well-trained and dexterous dogs…

why the trial hole to ascertain what ? if you should concrete it or not ? just dig the hole and order the concrete not concreting it in will only cause you to worry that you should have. £ 300 for concrete is probably the amount you just saved by digging the hole yourself why scrimp at a major point. I thought you had already been monitoring the water level at a different hole before you started. Get it dug lad, get it in, fill with water, order concrete, take pics, have a beer, pat yourself on the back.

http://passivehousepa.blogspot.com/2012/12/earth-tubes-heating-and-air.html is worth a read on this - they've used corrugated PVC pipe which is slit at the bottom, which provided they're above the water table means that condensate will immediately drain out of the pipe. Instinctively that's a far better way of approaching the problem for me than silver coating, sumps, etc. In any case, people really need to have a think about what one of these units actually does before getting too excited about what it does. It's essentially a very high COP preheater for the MVHR - which itself is a 90+% efficient heat exchanger. So the biggest single impact of fitting one is that it will significantly increase the temperature at which your MVHR discharges air to the outside world. In colder countries this is actually worth quite a bit since it eliminates the need for a defrost heater on the MVHR, but in the UK climate the power used by one is trivially small so not worth worrying about. If you're only using it in winter for pre-warming air, of course, you won't have any mould issues due to the lack of condensation. That just leaves the summer cooling/dehumidification. Problem is, at normal ventilation rates it doesn't actually provide very much cooling at all - and increasing the flow rates requires a much larger/longer tube than you would otherwise need for the same impact. Compare the price of an earth tube with that of an extra PV panel which would provide the power for quite a bit more cooling, and I think the maths is pretty clearly against it. Actually, I'm not convinced by that: if we take an average-ish UK house (100m2) insulated to Passivhaus standards, it will need ~1500 kWh/year of heat and going by the Clark/Grant paper ~3,000 kWh/year of hot water. That would take 5,000 kWh/year of gas or roughly 1500 kWh/year of electricity (varies with a number of factors like air temperature). That's £284/year for gas or ~£250 for electricity going by the fuel cost values in SAP10: essentially no difference in running cost. Gas is cheaper for bigger or higher consumption houses, but the standing charge starts to hit you very badly in small or very well insulated houses. If you have PV and use the Smart Grid functionality on the heat pump, then the break-even size of the house with gas is likely to go up a lot due to the dominance of hot water in the total requirements. The difference in capital cost between a gas boiler or a small ASHP is also pretty small - particularly for monobloc units which are probably easier than a gas boiler to fit and mean there is no need for mucking about arranging for a gas connection to be moved. IMHO, this means that if you have a cooling requirement then ASHPs probably beat mains gas for any properly insulated structure that isn't stupidly big, and even if you don't think you'll ever need cooling they're probably worth considering for any house below about 150m2, more if you have PV. We're planning to rebuild our current house and replace it with something at about Passivhaus standard of around 180m2, and despite the fact that we're on mains gas at the moment we're planning to shift to heat pump only with no gas connection. This is largely driven by the desire to have some sort of cooling (my wife is from the USA and grew up with air conditioning, so hates heatwaves here). I've been playing around with the numbers for a while and I really can't get anything other than a small ASHP to work - the requirement for a second system to provide and distribute the cooling if we try any other way of doing it is just a killer for the economics.

I think they can work suprbly @Dreadnaught, but you need to avoid thinking about them like external windows. It is about what yo want to let through ... light, views, colour etc ... and what you want to keep out, and from which spaces and angles. Tints, stained glass, shapes eg whole walls or vertical or horizontal slits at eg eye level or not eye level, are part of your toolkit. Personally is have a special love of etched glass and modern stained glass used as a screen, to give a view through but also a foreground focus. Go for it. Ferdinand

You’re not the first and won’t be the last to experience the real lows, and men are less likely to talk about it. Having somewhere to talk about it, or read that it’s not just you that is having problems, is the start to being able to find a solution for yourself. Keep talking.

Thinking out side the box,like I do instead of using one of the in roof kits to fit your panels in, how about having a full GRP tray under the panels our roof build up will end up with a full osb sheet under our roof covering, so I was thinking about having a complete fibreglass tray resin bonded onto the osb with any brackets bonded in an upstand all the way around covered with a flashing to match the metal roof covering any thoughts.

I made a set of plastic plates on a cnc machine with banks of close fit holes for each group then sealed this plate to the DPC and then ran a bead of polyurethane adhesive around each pipe to make a perfect seal. The Bi was happy.

Tough lads. Did you ever find out what happened to the glycol they drained off from the ST system?

Are they in the loft? Worth putting some traps up there in case with their favourite hole no more they shimmy up the cavity and exit roof bound.

You cant say that without then following up with a 'funny story'.

McEwans can .....??? ?

Thank you very much @Nickfromwales. That makes sense. Spot on, Nick. I will be working in the coming months on the fate of that tree, be in no doubt. If the tree can be removed then I shall indeed be embracing PV.

Gearing up...the temporary, over bath "work bench/platform" , last seen for plastering has made a comeback:

I could quite happily "survive" in Peter's house! It's the free from draughts feel and overall quietness does it for me.

My point above, and with a chunk of decent decrement delay insulation below it you can also likely get away without the screed altogether. The remit is to be able to not exceed the required heat input and get the hysteresis to where there is little or no over / undershoot. This is VERY easy to achieve with a wet blended system utilising pre-blended ( at source ) low grade flow temps at or near to the required loop temps. IMO adding a thin screed is more of an annoyance than a benefit, as once you accept that you'll still need a constant low temp flow even with the thin screed, then why would you bother ? More expense beefing up the structure, more labour and materials, and your also then conducting heat downward into the substrate which again I think is pointless. IMO its slab or no slab, and if no slab its plates.

We used full height glazing to the stairs in this open plan room and another stair / landing which works OK. Like @Russell griffiths said, safety glass and this was also laminated for fall protection.

Duct heating has the virtues of being cheap and simple (=reliable) compared to just about anything else, but is never going to give quite as good control as something like a wet underfloor system which has lots of heat capacity and will inherently spread the heat around the whole house more evenly than something which can only supply heat over the MVHR ducts. It depends what your priorities are and how accurately you feel the need to control temperatures. One other option to consider would be mini-split air conditioners. They're very popular in the USA for Passive Houses (the US has their own Passive House institute that uses a different spelling), typically with one or two head units. Again, cheap and can provide cooling, and should be pretty reliable but depending on your house design shifting the heat around may be a challenge. Finally, don't assume that because you don't have a slab you can't have underfloor heating in a screed - plenty of systems out there that use a screed on timber floors, and you could even make it fairly thick to give quite a bit of heat capacity if you wanted to. The only real limits are the built up height of the floor (which might be getting quite big with insulation and 100mm of screed!) and the strength of the floor joists.

The air flow rate at normal MVHR background ventilation rates is low, typically no more than one whole house air change every couple of hours. We have a 1.5 kW duct heater/cooler build in to our Genvex. Yes it is just about enough to heat the house, and provide a bit of comfort cooling in hot weather, but it's extremely slow to change the house temperature and left to it's own devices the Genvex controller will just put the MVHR into boost mode in order to try and circulate as much heated/cooled air as possible. It does work, and because the house has a long thermal time constant we could get away with using it as a gentle background heating system, but I find the air a bit dry when it's in heating mode and downstairs there's a very significant benefit from having the UFH heating on. Somehow, having very slightly warmer feet adds to the perceived comfort level a fair bit.

With the sling over the bucket and between the teeth to stop the sling sliding off.

The major issue to address is the thermal time constant of the house. Insulation is a part of this, but perhaps more important is the combination of the heat capacity of the inside of the house (to a maximum of around 100mm depth from the internal wall/ceiling/floor surface) and the thermal conductivity of that same layer. It's also important to ensure that the insulation doesn't just have the right U value, but that it has a nice long decrement delay. The idea is to delay heat getting in or out of the house so that the natural diurnal variation in temperature isn't reflected by similar cyclic changes inside the house. In our case, the combination of a fair bit of sensible heat stored in the concrete slab, which also has a pretty good thermal conductivity, plus the use of a relatively thick layer of high'ish decrement delay insulation in the walls and roof, result in very slow changes to the internal house temperature. This makes it relatively easy to maintain the house at a steady temperature all the time. Most of the heat stored in our house comes from the slab and the plasterboard (plasterboard is better at storing heat than concrete - gypsum has a higher heat capacity than concrete).

There is also potential for a lot of air locks, especially if you went up and down between the studs.

Gloves are a good idea, but both MEK and acetone tend to permeate latex gloves slightly and both DEFINITELY remove most types of nail polish! Just a wipe should give an idea as to whether it will remove it. Both acetone and MEK evaporate very quickly, so it's hard to get the stuff to stay on a surface for long.

The guys that fitted our stone worktops used either acetone or MEK to clean them after fitting, so I'm pretty sure they are OK on stone surfaces, just watch for spillage as both will attack a wide range of plastics, paints, varnishes and even silicone based sealants.

As cooling will make up a very small percentage of your 'climate control', id seriously rethink not having a slab. With primarily heating being required, and some sort of emitter necessary to facilitate that effect, look at how your going to deliver heat into the dwelling and how best to produce, store and emit that in line with what your heat source will be. Ive just spec'd a build ( Beatie PH ) with 360o EPS and no slab or UFH. Getting an ambient via a Genevex HP based MVHR system is being both difficult and unreliable. Luckily for me A.N.Other is doing supply and fit of the MVHR and they have to demonstrate that it will work. PHEW! @PeterStarck has a similar arrangement in a much smaller dwelling and is surviving with that, but admits he keeps his space heating temp quite high ( ~24oC iirc ) to ensure a constant ambient and again iirc he also fortifies that with auxiliary ( supplemental ) heating. With a slab you have a good medium to store for, eg, heat energy produced via PV > ASHP > SLAB in the daytime and allow that heat to dissipate gently into the house through the late evening / night time, dependant on your slab insulation and heat loss figures of course. With no slab and 'direct emitters' your heating will be nigh on linear to it being required so you may find yourself 180o out of phase with the 'free' energy you should be consuming and utilising to offset such demand. The B PH I refer to above is basically an EPS cage with very poor decrement delay, and has been a royal PITA to arrive at a space heating solution for. In the end I left the client and the MVHR designer to it, as I just kept on finding flaws in their proposal every time they submitted it for sign-off and ( deposit ) payment. Got on my tits in the end TBH, and now the guy has to fit a huge feature radiator in the open living space and keep it on, plus heated towel rads in all 3 bathrooms which all also have to stay on in order to maintain an ambient of 20,5oC. To get the bedrooms to 22oC they have advise fitting auxiliary heating or to light his 3kW WBS !!! P.I.T.A. The next one I get with the same remit, I shall not be taking it on. Way too problematic. Slab for me every day of the week. So simple, so effective and will cool sufficiently well as documented on his blog, and quoted above, by the beard of wisdom ( in a house that is 'live' and performing admirably ).

The problem with putting pipes in the walls is people like to bang nails and screws into walls to hang and fix things. In practice, cooling the floor works very well, better than I expected, and I suspect that's because air in an occupied house tends not to stratify very well, and is almost constantly moving around, especially with MVHR.

Out of necessity, the bathrooms have no windows (planners wouldn't allow roof windows on that elevation, and the first floor is room in roof). Bathrooms with no windows are fine, but I felt it would be useful to steal some light from the very bright hall, which has a 5m high fully glazed gable that's South facing and dead opposite where I've fitted that bathroom internal window. I used glazed bricks because they are much cheaper than very thick acoustic glazing (we would have needed something like recording studio glazing to keep "bathroom noises" from echoing around the large hall area) and also because glazed bricks added a bit of interest and looked a bit nicer than an obscured glass window. The other advantage they have is that they are hermetically sealed hollow glass, so there's never going to be a risk of a seal breaking down and condensation forming inside the bricks. The annoying thing is that glazed bricks used to be made in their thousands here in the UK, but now it seem you have to import them from France for some reason.

Yes, it's a Carrier 30AWH. the 6/7kW model, badged as if it were made by Glowworm.

Thank you SO much @Hecateh !!!!! That was just what I needed.... Xx

^^ The parts cost for that system are likely to be in the order of £5K so that is a HUGE installation cost, confirming my opinion of the MCS rip off scam.

Yep, plan to have one looking down from the landing onto the open plan living / kitchen area with a perch/window seat. Large Velux windows in the living/kitchen vaulted ceiling will offer a perspective outside also.

Probably an obvious comment, but remember it wil need to be safety glass if within 800 mm of the floor.

After delving into this a bit deeper, there is a get out of jail card for those wanting more PV than their local infrastructure will allow, eg for cases where the DNO has refused you a connection of say 6kWp. Solar Edge inverters can be used to get "export limitation", which guarantees that you'll never ever export more then ( iirc ) 3.8kW even if your array is throwing out 6kW. This is a great option for folk wanting to flood a mix of elevations, where realistically a spread of ( for eg ) ~8kWp over say 3 elevations ( or a mix of dwelling + outbuildings ) would never all receive sufficient direct sunlight to get up to or beyond 4kW after known consumption, but collectively they make the connected max kWp too much for a connection to be allowed. Also the SE inverter has a 12 year warranty and utilised 'DRY' capacitors so will outlive a lot of its competitors. Basically you can happily factor in one inverter change in the 20 year forecast whereas with others you may be on 2 at least. Also a good get out of jail card for those who have been told to pay ££££ towards infrastructure upgrades as for eg I have had a number of clients who have come to me in the throws of getting 3-phase upgrades to accommodate a whopping 9-10-11+kWp and I have then told them not to bother as they'll likely end up exporting with nothing to show for it, other than a big bill for PV and a big bill for a new supply cable to manage all the exporting ! RoI for PV can be very good when implemented correctly, but otherwise can be quite perverse. Forget FiT and Export, the figure you need to focus on is the offsetting of grid consumption ( import ) which ids the money maker. Get that aspect of the maths to the front of the table and right there lays the sweet spot. For a current proposal the ( sizeable ) PV installation is set to cost ~£12k, and the 25 year forecast shows total revenue of around £24k so a break-even at 12.5 years, and 12.5 years of 'free' juice thereafter. With an ASHP in the picture the heating will be provided at a factor of at least 3, so thats a heck of a lot of bang for the bucks.

I use two different methods, dependant on the quality of the slab. One is to put a 10mm notch on the floor and butter the back of the tile with the flat edge of the trowel ( for good floors which don't need too much smoothing ) and the second is where I put a 10mm notch on both the tile and the floor and then I can either leave them sitting up or squash them down a bit if there are highs and lows to traverse. Did that over a rough concrete slab in a kitchen extension where Magnet had fitted tiles for a £30k kitchen, and my tiling in the small extension made the customer do a double take as the "showroom" ( LOL ) fitters tiling was shocking.

Hi @Ed Davies this forum is pretty good at support. Just coming on here and off loading like you have can be quite cathartic. It also helps with self analysing why we are feeling like we are. For those people who are self building as a lone venture it really is a lonely place to be, and even for those with families it can be quite isolating, especially when a few things go wrong in close succession and it feels like a downward spiral. You just have to cling on for a bit until the storm breaks because it invariably does and things start to pick up.

Are you hiring them out @Christine Walker could make a fortune lol

Although this is Christine’s 3rd self build this is the first one where they have contracted most of the work out to a builder to do / arrange and whereas in the past they would have worked like Trojans themselves to catch up the builders don’t have the same sense of urgency. It’s not their build and it’s not particularly inconveniencing them so they don’t have the same motivation I guess. Frustrating I know.

We have a full width window between our bedroom and the double height space above our kitchen/diner. It was inspired by pics we saw of Trevor Nelson's house a few years back: I think the idea can be very interesting if handled well.

If the quality of the work is not in question, then that is a positive. Quantity will come, but its better to stick with a crew thats at least turning out work thats to stay. Sit the builder down, away from everyone else and scratch the words into his brain, that you expect him to rally around and pick up the pace. Give deadlines, check every few days with him on how things are progressing and that works / trades are programmed in accordingly, and then just keep on at it. Leave them worry about logistics, and if they break a tile, they shall replace it so that should be of less consequence to you about how its done, just focus on when

Oh and as @Onoff said - fixed price quotes and lots of them. My plastering quotes for 400sqm ranged from £2500 to £5200 - and no - he hadn't transposed the numbers. The 2.5k guy has said about 2 weeks for him and a labourer. Another guy told me it would take 8 to 10 weeks - WWWWhhhhaaattttt? I told him not to bother pricing but clearly he gets work. I have a good excuse to tell them I'll get materials because of the VAT thing but I think that helps too as they can't rip you off on materials. However that is added stress - 'cos now I have to source price and buy the right stuff for delivery at the right time. Keep posting - we can support each other

Oh Lizzie, I so know where you are now. Stress - tell me about it. Hard to say but be ready for the stress to continue. We are doing something that is so important to us but so out of our comfort zone. Suddenly we are trying to tell people, who do these things every day, what we want doing - and it's still up to us to get it right. There's a mix out there and many who do want to help - often the smooth talkers are those who either want to rip us off or don't really have a clue either. It's a shame you are not closer - I have about 10m of that stuff down my garden that I have paid for but that was more than needed. I don't know if it was bought unnecessarily just to be sure??? (why not, not their money) or it was cheaper to buy by the 50m or whatever. Stress stress stress - it's the name of the game I'm afraid, but we have to keep telling ourself the truth, that it WILL be worth it in the end, This forum saved my sanity, if not my life, earlier this year. Yes, given the perfect situation , we would research, and know everything and do everything right the first time but that is just crackers. Even the experts get things wrong, miss things, find things they didn't expect. You Will Get There. I'm now getting closer to the end but, in some ways, I've got the most stressful to come as I am now responsible for Project Managing. I want things to happen in one way - but deliveries won't come when I want them; Tradesmen have other priorities (shock horror) and can't come when I want. People say they want to help and then think they can rip you off. The guy you need first can't come for 2 weeks and the next one is either next week or months away aaarrrggghhh. Keep the faith - You Can and You Will and we are all rooting for you

As Russel said. If you need to go deeper than your reach dig a shallow hole next to it. Your digger should be fine lowering it in the hole just make sure your blade is on the hole side. Also make ale sure you fill it with water before you surround it with the pea gravel concrete mix. If you don’t and it decides to lift you will end up with a very expensive mess.

This podcast and article will be useful background. It is with an architect called Allan Corfield who has structured his charges to give fixed payments per stage based on the work involved dividing up the normal total for a percentage of a given quote. https://www.houseplanninghelp.com/hph168-an-example-of-how-much-it-costs-to-hire-an-architect-with-allan-corfield/ His charges are probably towards te highish end in percentage terms in the example given. IIRC it seems to be based on the top of the normal RIBA recommended range.

Hi All, First post on here - I searched for Bora hobs and have read all of the posts on here so I have joined to share my two pence worth We are about to start on a new extension that will mean a new kitchen, so we have started to research new appliances (we have currently have Siemens appliances and have had them for around 8 years) We had watched loads of online videos of extractor hobs and were sceptical that CGI may have been used to show the steam flowing into the extractors. We had a demo a couple of weeks ago on the Siemens Extractor hob and also the Bora Basic hob on the same day - (had to travel 40+ miles to see them both) I desperately wanted the Siemens to be better than the Bora but it isn't - the Bora we demo`d was a recirculating model (but it didn't have the filters fitted as it was new to the showroom) The Bora was quieter and extracted better than the Siemens and the vent on the Bora is less obtrusive and quick to take apart for cleaning We are going to buy a Bora Basic Surface (BFIA) and have it exhausting through the wall, the Bora now comes with a totally black exhaust vent.