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That used to be the case but VAT notice 708 was altered in the last few years or so and now site investigation work (as in physical work not a desk exercise or just visiting the site to have a look) ‘should’ be zero rated by inference due to the wording but only once PP is approved or at least others have found that this is the case but that might be their good fortune as it’s very grey in the VAT notice. @Adam2 maybe call it foundation prep or something more closely aligned to the actual build. Failing that maybe ask your foundation supplier to include it as part of their scope of services? Here is the relevant section of the HMRC internal manual that may be useful to read: https://www.gov.uk/hmrc-internal-manuals/vat-construction/vconst02500 The number to call is at the top of the first post here (see below). When asked say DIY Housebuilders Scheme and you should be directed to someone who can answer questions without needing to be VAT registered. You may be on hold for a while as the call volumes are always ‘exceptional’ ?.

With a whole acre is there no chance of keeping the original house and dividing the garden to hive off a plot for yourself? It would be a lot more cost effective than knock down and rebuild.

A lot of the members here have got houses built to an equivalent energy performance to Passivhaus, but without formal certification. For example my house has an MBC twinwall and passive slab, Internorm windows / doors and Fakro roof lights, etc. My attitude to Passivhaus itself is that it is a "designer label" in that whilst I agree with the underlying energy saving principles and have built my house to them, I think that the actual scheme itself and certification is overly bureaucratic and by itself add no value. IMO, the most important thing is for you and your architect to understand your true underlying goals and to design a house that you will truly enjoy living in. Don't allow yourself to be lulled into a design that looks good on paper, but a year after you move in you keep thinking to yourself: I wish that we had done that differently. For example, many architects seem to love "acres of glass" which results in a loss of privacy for the occupants: if you don't own the overlooking sight-lines, then you can't control overlooking. Also large windows can a greenhouse effect that can be expensive and difficult to mitigate, especially if such measures are an afterthought. The energy design of a house is important, but a very common mistake is to fail to understand that achieving the cooling goals can be far more challenging than the heating ones. Put simply, with current technologies correctly applied it is fairly straightforward to build a house that is cheap to heat in the winter season. It can prove a lot more difficult keeping the house cool enough in the other three seasons. 6m² of glass can generate over 3 kW of incident heat on a sunny autumn day and +3 kW will turn an average room in a zero-energy house into an oven in hours. Many of the members here are willing to host visits, and this can be a very effective mechanism for you and your partner to get a good gut reaction as to what would work well for you and what wouldn't. In our case, Jan and I have lived in our new house for a year now, and we can truly say that if we could redo this again, the things that we would consider doing differently are very minor.

my god there are bees in it - what are rockwool doing - that's disgusting treatment of animals. I bloody hope they don't claim to be vegan free!!!

Yep - manually open a valve to trigger the pumps but ignore the boiler is a good way to clear air from a system.

Out with the rag then:

Before - two or three wraps on the olive. Looking at that sludge I would also plan to put a mag filter in the circuit somewhere and whack inhibitor in after running some system cleaner through it for a few weeks. Look on BES, they have a Cura branded one that is really tidy and cheap - their inhibitor and desludge is good too at about £3 a bottle.

A wrap of ptfe round the existing olive will never do any harm either.

@ProDave back the flooring onto a piece of mdf/ply and mitre the front edge, a piece of solid oak mitred and fixed to give the edge. as for the standards, where the door is, rebate slightly more depth than the thickness of the door and beyond the margin for facing, fill with oak. alternatively, if fitting planted stops then a full oak facing slightly more than the depth of the margin.

Hi Robert, welcome to the forum. Friends of ours had a low energy Touchwood house built several years ago and are very happy with it. We designed and built our own house to PH standards using the PHPP. As others have said make sure you have the internal layout as you want it, as you will have to live with it.

You can get oak stair nosing with a groove at the back but I don't know if it would fit with your floor.

I think that @willbish got his zero rated.

I thinks that's what I'll have to do. It remains unclear what the sanctions are for this breach. They haven't even asked me to put it right! It's in South Bristol Bishopsworth area. I'm not going to slag off the excellent planners we are blessed with here. They maybe stalking this forum (he said paranoidly)

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I built to “passive hous” principles but not interested in certificates. Mine is brick and block, traditional cottage, and I had a main contractor (who was brilliant). I am a retired “builder but did mainly kitchens , bathrooms and loft conversions. I was very hands on with my build and did all the carpentry, plumbing, tiling etc but not electrics as it needed signing off but I laboured fir the spark to save money. Having been on this forum has been a gold mine of information . I was lucky with my contractor, (some here were not) a local chap with a very good track record. Our build is all my own design and there is very little that I would change if I did it again. I think the main difference between “other” built houses and self build on here is the attention to detail which makes all the difference. Airtightness is a major thing with passive hous and very worthwhile getting right as it can be near impossible to correct it afterwards.

Hi - and welcome to THE forum for self builders. We are building a passive standard house in East Kent and I suspect we now lean rather more with @TerryE than we did when we set out in terms of certification. Our architects are not PH certified bit I decided we could deal with that as we wanted quite an avant guard design from their stable and the PHPP software is not complex to drive after a 1 day course I felt I could probably tackle the main work, avoid the key pitfalls and get it verified by a PH designer.

Really pleased for you @Christine Walker..!! I would leave that butterfly valve open to the air vent, top up the pressure to around 2 bar and then ensure the bypass is closed on the boiler return mixer. I would also get them back to fix that zone valve and get everything labelled up properly

Hello Robert and welcome. What a pain with the other plot! Are you planning on doing any of the work yourself or do you want to hand the whole job over? Do you have a build type in mind (timber frame, brick and block, ICF)? Often the architect will have worked with a couple of contractors so this may be a good place to start. Passivhaus involves more than just gaining planning consent and a standard building regs application, so your architect will play a vital role. Make sure you have a good relationship and understanding of what both parties expect of each other. Have you seen examples of their work and talked to other clients? Also, do they tend to get repeat business? Demolish and replace is very expensive, so be very clear on exactly what you want and make sure that is what is delivered. I am a small scale developer in Sussex and will be happy to give you any pointers where appropriate.

Don’t worry about the wiring @ProDaveit is being attended to as we speak, installer did not do any of the wiring and resulted in us having to get the spark out at short notice just to get it going, he’s back now to finish off. thankyou thank you @PeterW hubby went through everything you advised and was up till 3am , air in the tank seems to have been the problem and it’s now working fine ?

We bought Internorm PH entrance doors and fitted them ourselves, although that was eight years ago and things might have changed now.

Yep, this runs off a plug top and the lights dim! I'll stick a clamp meter on it some time. 2.2kW motor rings a bell. When it was on the 3P converter it was wired with 3-core & earth 6243Y

One caveat on the single-phase motor- starting current is high and too much voltage drop can fry the motor so the rest of the garage wiring needs to be to-spec. A 3Hp motor will take between 10 and 13A full load but it's starting current could be double or even treble that.

I think @Russell griffiths has hit the nail on the head. My Internorm were supply and fit. The fitters who came did not have much experience - if any - of fitting these windows or passive principles....I think one of them even said it was like fitting any other window but that comment in the mists of time now Internorm are the market leaders ( I dont think they do supply only) yet the cowboys who fitted mine had not even watched the utube training vids properly judging by the c**k up they made of it all. Some fitters are better than others as is the way with everything from the slab/frame up. Its pot luck even with the same distrubutor they have several teams of fitters usually just hope you get the good ones who know their job and watch them like hawks having first watched as many utubes you can find on the particular windows you choose. At least then you have a chance of spotting anything going wrong.

The Civil war is very good. Another good series by the same director is Lewis & Clark. I'm interested in history generally and people/family members who seem to span historic periods. Once interesting fact is that John Tyler, 10th President of United States born 1790, still has two living grandsons! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Tyler

As a tip that may or may not be useful, a 22mm pipe bending spring fits neatly inside 25mm MDPE. Dropping one down (tied to a bit of string) to where you want a sharper bend, then heating the pipe evenly and gently with a hot air gun, then persuading it into a tight bend, works very well. You just have to hold the bend whilst the pipe cools down, when it will retain the set bend near-perfectly.

Rather than carve out a shape in the laminate, could you not have used the multitool to trim the bottom off the ornate carving so the laminate would slide under it?

If you go for the simplest solution (like I have) ASHP driving UFH directly, and heating an UVC to 48 degrees for DHW: Assume a COP of 3 when heating the UFH so that's 2200KWh of electricity @15p per KWH that's £330 per year for space heating. Assume COP of 2 when heating DHW so that's 1150KWh of electricity @15p per KWh that's £172.50 per year for hot water. The real figures will be cheaper than that, as most of the time the COP figures should be better than that, and you will probably find a cheaper electricity tariff than we can get up here (extra 2p distribution surcharge) The fact you can halve (or better) the DHW costs by using a simple unvented cylinder is what swung me away from the Sun Amp solution. Yes the UVC will have a higher standing heat loss than the sun amp, but that heat loss is more than made up by the saving in heating cost. Plus for half the year that "loss" is just helping to heat the house. The sun amp solution makes sense if you have a lot of solar PV so are always looking to use up surplus PV generation, are short of space, or the particulars of the install mean the standing loss from a conventional tank becomes an overheating nuisance.