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My life wouldn't be worth living if I cooled the house down when it reached 24C. The other day Wendy used the pyrolitic cleaning function in the oven and the kitchen temperature went up to 25C, Wendy was basking in there.

It Was.

There are some big advantages to a caravan with the living room in the middle and a bedroom at each end.

I once watched a Ukrainian tap dancer break his leg. He fell into the sink.

We’re sharing our static caravan with our 14 year old son (as tall as us) and 12 year old daughter. Both hormonal ? But we are genuinely enjoying it most of the time. Helps that we are all used to camping and helps a lot when at least one person is out ? Occasionally the 14 year old loses the plot in his tiny room with 2 foot 3 bed, sitting doing homework on his bed with his sports kit everywhere, and shouts “This caravan is too small!” We all agree with him and move on.......

can't wait for the long sun filled days again..... just gives you more energy.

If you have a pile of Euro pallets take them in your trailer to the local pallet yard, their worth £5 each, the ordinary ones are £3 each. Then use the money to buy a real staircase.

Hi All, I was curious of your thoughts on this recent collaboration between 6 different american ICF companies. What window sealing strategy would you use below....see the the link below the picture for the answers (Take your best guess first though) Here's the short report. https://www.icfmag.com/2016/09/weatherproofing-icf-walls/

You need a slower rpm drill the bigger the hole. Slow drill = more torque. Way better for coring. Core drills are usually more powerful too, over 1000W.

This is the only halfway decent photo I can find of the site at all. All the photos I can find are to prove the site is not overlooked, so look away from, rather than towards the site. This photo is taken from the south of the site, the stable building on the right of the photo is the end of the garden and once the stables are knocked down the new house will be sited behind it on the south facing lawn. The photo is taken from the bottom of a field which is part of the view the new house will enjoy. Now I realise we don't have any photos of the site, I will take some with my phone, as I want some anyway - and I can manage that! DHDreamer

I think the pallets sound like a great idea, personally I would go for two per rise just so it feels more "normal". Plenty of bracing and a hand rail and it may end up being a permanent feature...... But seriously the transition from a ladder to stairs really is a great day ?

I managed ok too - but only because I had an apartment in Edinburgh and let the hubby do the living on site in a caravan thing! I did that at weekends only. The thought of trying to get 'office ready' in a touring caravan every day held no appeal whatsoever and it probably saved us from a divorce too!

Been a while since I posted but the garage now has doors, a full roof, gable end cladding (timber to the front, UPVC to the rear) and most of the fascias and things on - 2 ridge tiles (front and back) but the cold weather kicked in and I don't want to be setting ridge tiles in the cold as the mortar would probably get damaged and I know I can frost-proof it but to be honest the membrane has only had 1 rainstorm it could not cope with and the leak was only via a batten nail hole. I'll get a selection of photos to post. I am also about to start the rear extension which I hope to have done by spring.

Just a small point Don’t core drill with any drill that hasn’t a slip clutch So easy to brake a wrist or worse

I've done this also, easy peasy.

My cheap one has a clutch. First time I jammed a drill and it operated I thought I had stripped the teeth in the gearbox.

By chance I have the very Bosch SDS+ (note the +) The key thing to look for is soft start - sometimes called a clutch I think. The Bosch has a switch built into the handle (marked 75%). It spools up slowly and disengages instantly when ( for example) you hit a bit of rebar. For that one feature alone I am eternally grateful. Other makes have the same feature, but it tends to be on the slightly more expensive versions. Your wrists will thank you one day.....

I did a few rough calculations about the impact of drinking softened water (I've been on a low sodium diet for years) and concluded that much of what's been written in the past about the apparent risk of drinking softened water is almost certainly scaremongering for most areas in the UK. Harvey have a couple of sections of their website that deal with this, that's worth a read: https://www.harveywatersofteners.co.uk/blog/health-effects-drinking-softened-water and also here: https://www.harveywatersofteners.co.uk/water-softener/faqs/why-it-considered-drinking-softened-water-could-be-detrimental-health . To put this into perspective, it seems important to maintain a balance between sodium intake and potassium intake, from all I've read. If you have a diet that's very low in potassium, or have a water supply that is very hard, then there may be a slightly elevated risk. I asked some questions as to whether it was OK to use softened water in our boiling water tap (an Itho, which isn't sold under that label in the UK any more) and at first was told that it wasn't OK. I then tracked down the original manufacturer of the softening filter and obtained the specification for it from them (not easy, the thing had been re-badged twice). What I found was that the softening cartridge filter that was supplied with the tap was in fact a sodium ion exchange resin cartridge that was pre-charged with sodium, so was giving out softened water that was much the same as that which comes out of our ion exchange softener (which is a Harvey unit). I went back to the tap manufacturer and asked again about using softened water, highlighting that the specification of the softening filter they supplied with the installation kit was actually a ordinary sodium ion exchange resin unit, and they wrote back saying that there was no problem using softened water with their tap at all. I was left with the feeling that their original insistence on using their (very expensive to replace) filter, and not connecting a softened water supply directly to the tap was probably a marketing ruse so that customers would feel obliged to carrying on buying very expensive, custom branded, replacement softening filters from them every six months. As far as taste goes, then I find that tea made with softened water and the boiling water tap tastes better, and doesn't have the nasty scum, than tea made using a kettle and our local fairly hard water. I suppose it's a matter of taste, but we lived in Cornwall for many years, then South West Scotland for a few years, so we're very used to the taste of tea made with very soft water, and found the taste of the hard water when we moved down here pretty unpleasant.

We have a Quooker (same model, I think) and were advised to use unsoftened water. We're in a moderately hard area I believe. Descaling is actually a really simple process. The scale doesn't build up on the element - it just falls off in little flakes and sits in the bottom of the unit. If you have any diy skills at all, it's a simple matter to take the lid off, tip out the water with the scale, and put it back together (you must use a new seal, which I think they provide at least once for free if you ask them). We had a problem with ours about two years after installation. I can't fault the quality of Quooker's after-sales service - the engineer was here for 90 mins diagnosing and then fixing the problem.

Yes you will need an Sds drill and any will probably last the entire job, personally I use Makita but thats just because it was on sale and I like the brand. But if you intend to do anything over a 50mm core I would highly recommend hiring a dedicated core drill for the job. Coring is a very quick way to ruin even the very best Sds drills

I managed ok in my static (only because I left SWMBO back in Bristol ?).

Just get a non MCS electrician to move them and say nothing, Your output will go up a bit, if the FIT provider queries it, you have cut down a tree and reduced the shading you were previously getting

OTOH, the earlier it starts the earlier you can sell saying “yes. it's been complete for warranty purposes for more than 10 years now”. Since the chance of making a successful claim is fairly slim that actual seems beneficial on balance.

I complained about mine to Buildzone as they dated it 12 months before when I had sent the council the form to carry out the completion inspection. It wasn’t complete at that point but the council had asked me to do that to trigger an inspection to help me understand what still needed to be done. They decided to use that date but did alter it to the completion date when I explained the circumstances. With @PeterStarck‘s build they backdated it to the watertight stage so it seems like they make it up as they go along. If the policy isn’t put on risk until they issue the certificate and you certainly couldn’t put a claim in before the policy was issued I’m sure, I don’t understand how they can reduce the term in real terms to whatever they like. 10 year cover means 10 year cover surely, unless there is something in the small print that says something different, if you take too long for example.

@Sjk I'm in the exact same situation then you are. I just phoned them up and asked where they want the samples-As i am in a conservation area as well, Planning Officer told me to keep samples on site for him to inspect. So I just left it with a neighbour there if the officer drops by on a short notice. Just 1 Piece of Roofing sheet(mine is standing seam metal -sample is just a 1mx0.5m sheet/ cladding sample is just a piece of Larch board ) Like @the_r_solesaid , companies will usuall send out samples if you for example need a window frame sample and a picture wont satisfy the Planners. The Rest of the Planning Conditions I done myself and just handed in application for discharging them. In regards to Technical Drawings - thats what I am trying to find out at the moment as well. Had some quotes from architects that seemed rather insane. Same counts for Structural Engineers who is calculating the Drawings. So I am keen on finding out some news about that too.

We survived with two kids in a caravan in the garden for 18 months. Just.

I would not be happy with no mechanical fixing at lower edge if this stud wall has a door frame as part of it , just asking for long term problems .when people bang doors you should use a thermal gun and find out where the UFH p[ipes are ? then fix lower rail so you miss them .

Thanks @Pete and @PeterStarck. There's a balance to be held between stairs and ladders. I'm happy with either (or both). The motivation for this post came from meeting one of the people who regularly walk-in past our build. He isn't the fittest guy in the world, but he is intensely interested in what's going on. And always contributes sensible ideas. There's no way he can manage a ladder. And it won't be long before I will be wanting to walk upstairs with kit in my arms - i.e. hands free. There is also a simple design driver (restriction). The stairs go past the top of the wall that supports the staircase. And quite where they finish is , as yet, undefined. Hmmmmmm, yeah, I know..... So a flexible set of 'stairs' is an attractive idea. Flexibility must not compromise safety. I've quite a bit of re-usable 8 by 2 and 6 by 2 knocking around, and too many pallets to ignore. I feel some tooth-sucking coming on while finishing the mezzanine today. (the one where I made a 30 mm mistake  on Thursday)

The peak is the maximum at any given point in kW so max power at a given point the 945Wh is power generated over a 15 minute period. It is the way enphase reports.

We also use gas for heating hot water during the winter and running heated towel rails as the excess from pv rarely generates enough on winter days. Maybe it would be better to have had a heat pump and be all electric but then these do have efficiency issues with getting water up to temp for DHW. I don't have an answer whether it is ultimately cheaper or more expensive but at the time it seemed a fairly simple solution. We already had gas on site so no connection cost. I think we used under 4000kw hours of gas last year and about 5000kwh electricity. We generated 5000kwh of power with pv.

We got quotes in from CRL, Buildzone, Protek and LABC. CRL were over £7K. Warranty plus BC. Went with Protek, the cheapest. Paid just under £2.5K for warranty plus BC. Likely to need the warranty for re-mortgage purposes at some stage. Our building inspector has visited once so far. He has done the foundations / groundworks inspection via Facetime. And his office are pretty diligent about staying in touch. And I am diligent about sending updates and photos. Next inspection will be drainage, probably in the Spring. By then though all the insulation will be done and he won't have seen that. He requested photos. We are happy with him so far though as he has been as responsive as we have needed him to be and gets back to us when asked.

That's the winner folks. PU expands and fills the voids, just be sure to have a wet rag to hand to wet the timber and the floor ( as its moisture cure ). Much better than gripfill as that doesn't 'squish' out at all. If you grip fill a timber down and whack it off the next day, you'll see the snake like trail where you applied it with very little area covered. After bonding down and finishing the stud wall framework, get some 75mm Obo ( masonry ) nails and whack them through the 44mm timber until 20mm is left proud for additional mechanical fix ( if the wall is very long ).

Four kids in a motorhome for a year would send any sane person over the edge.

It's really a DHW device, but that's all that's needed for a passive house, as heating really isn't an issue worth investing serious money in, as the requirement is so low. The Sunamp can provide DHW at around 58 deg C from a relatively small box, that can be heated up by excess PV generation if available, or boosted by E7 for two or three hours overnight if needed. We've been guinea pigs for the technology for around three years, and recently installed their latest model, which is simpler and has about double the heat storage capacity, but I have to add that it is still a work in progress, and the control system needs a bit of refinement. However, Sunamp are supposedly developing a new control system that may address some of the irritating failings of the current system, and once that is available the unit should be very good indeed. For heating, it's dead easy with a passive house to just fit UFH inside the ground floor insulated slab and use that as a massive storage heater. Charging this up at night, using E7, works very well, and is now how we run ours. We have a programmer to enable the UFH charging during the E7 period and a room stat that determines whether or not the UFH actually turns on and heats the slab. Some days in winter the slab doesn't need any heat (it's not heated up at all for the past two nights, and may well not heat up tonight, either), other days it does, and once warmed up it slowly releases heat into the house for the next day or two.

You would be portrayed as the big bad landowner riding roughshod over the planning regs, alienating the poor neighbours and decimating the outstanding beauty of the countryside in your status tractor ? ?

We had the same problem, and I have found a pull switch that is much, much quieter than any other one I've heard. It just makes a gentle, single click, not the loud double click that most make. I've changed our switches for just this reason, they were too damned loud. These are the ones, from TLC: https://www.tlc-direct.co.uk/Products/CM2781.html

We just have UFH, with the pipes cast into the passive slab foundation, so only on the ground floor. Our absolutely worst case heating requirement, with everything in the house turned off except the heating and MVHR, no occupants, a set room temperature of 21 deg C and an outside air temperature of -10 deg C, is 1,600 W, though. In practice the house never really needs more than about 500 W at the most, though, as with a couple of hundred watts of incidental gain from appliances etc, another couple of hundred watts from occupants and an outside air temperature in winter that averages at around 4 to 6 deg C, the house doesn't really need much in the way of heating at all. We run the UFH from an ASHP, but that's not cost effective, as we will never recover the capital cost of the thing from the electricity it saves (we are all-electric, no mains gas here). If we wanted the best value heating system then that would be to fit a WIllis immersion heater inline with the UFH and pump, and just use the ground floor slab as a storage heater. Run from E7 it would only cost slightly more to run than the ASHP, and has the advantage that the capital cost would only be a couple of hundred pounds, rather than a couple of thousand for the ASHP (that difference would buy enough electricity for a decade or so of winter heating). We have no other heating, other than electric towel rails in the bathrooms that are automatically switched on and off in the morning and evening on a time switch controlled circuit (plus they have their own switches to disable them if they aren't in use). In theory we could heat the house using the Genvex MVHR, just as we use it for comfort cooling, but in practice neither of us like the slightly dry air that warm air heating tends to give. This is very much a personal preference thing though, as @PeterStarck uses his Genvex MVHR as their main form of heating and they are very happy with it. We had an open weekend a couple of years ago, where we we had around 60 people visit the house over two days, in groups of three or four, for an hour or so each. One couple had just completed a passive house build and had chosen to fit a tiny wood burning stove (a room sealed one, intended for use in canal boats I believe). I think this was one of the very lowest output units that was available, around 2 to 3 kW IIRC. They related their experience with it, when they lit it for the first time on the previous Christmas Day, when they had family around. Apparently the living room quickly warmed up to well over 30 deg C, and even with all the windows open it was too hot, so they evacuated the room, shut the door and left it with the windows open until the fire died down and the room cooled (which was the following day, apparently). When they visited our house they mentioned that they were in the process of getting the flue and air supply duct blocked off and having an LCD screen fitted behind the front of the stove to display a flame effect. If you want real flames and a low heat output, then a bioethanol stove or fire might be worth looking at. They don't give out much heat, don't normally need either a flue or an air supply (so good for airtightness) but they can be a bit expensive to run, if you use it a lot. As a feature, that's only used occasionally, I think they are probably a good compromise for those that really want to have the look of open flames in a room in a passive house.

I would be surprised if this condition passes muster under the six tests, as it imposes a method ... provide 10% renewables. It seems rather inept. The best form of saving under the R hierarchy is probably Remove, not Reduce or Renewable. So surely this would be met by eg adding in enough insulation to be 10% better than Building Regs basic? Then the 10% renewables are not required since the energy is not being used at all. Has one ever been appealed? F

Agreed. I had v similar condition and sent the LPA my own document which didn't spark any response. Of course the format was plagiarised from a similar planning application! Happy to send you both if you would like.

Our design calls for some pocket doors - 6 in total - good for space saving, should look tidy. We decided to go with Eclisse and got them from the ever helpful Alan at Door Supplies Online. We will also get our door sets from him, to match, and he'll supply some matching architrave to finish the pocket doors nicely. Will post photos of the finished doors when we get there (probably September). In the meantime, we needed to install the pocket frames in advance of plaster boarding. It seemed too easy. But I am posting this because we had slight issues understanding how they fitted so hopefully this post will help someone else in the future. Him indoors built them so quickly I didn't even get photos of him putting them together. But he assures me that the instructions were straightforward to follow and they went together well. Top tip - don't throw out the bits of polystyrene that look like packaging. They actually help give it some bracing strength when lifting the whole thing into place (otherwise it bends quite a bit). The You Tube videos are also helpful. Our MBC structural openings were exact (to the mm) so we had allowed a bit too much structural opening (we didn't know how mm perfect they would be). We then had to pack slightly off the stud frame (offcuts of egger board and OSB). And also pack off the floor to ensure the door was fitted at finished floor level. Have allowed 20mm for carpet / underlay upstairs (and tiles to the bathrooms) so should be OK. The frames come in 100mm finished wall depth or 125mm finished wall depth. With 89mm stud walls this does give a bit of a conundrum, assuming 12.5mm plasterboard. We chose 125mm. And then Alan suggested putting ply on the frame as well to make it extra rigid. Also useful for subsequent hanging of pictures / toilet roll holders on finished wall - otherwise fixings might go through and result in scratching the sliding door. What we couldn't understand was that the pocket side of the door had a frame that was 125mm wide. But the bit the door closes on was only 100mm wide. For a short while I doubted the assembling ability of my definitely better half. Thankfully, a call to Alan set that straight. Though I am not sure I have been forgiven yet. There is a timber jamb (125mm wide) that fits over the 100mm section, making the whole thing 125mm wide. Now for the ply. It has been a bit of a juggle. Some need ply and some don't, some need double ply before plasterboard on one side to build out the stud work. And we need to match the ply on each side otherwise the door will be off centre in the total wall depth. Feels like overkill and probably is. But it will be solid! The ply attaches to the door frame itself using little screws (supplied by Eclisse). If you don't put ply on then these little screws fix the plasterboard. This door below has ply on the left hand side to bring the stud wall out to the frame edge. Then it will have ply over the top of that (and the frame) to match the other side. Then plasterboard. Toilet roll holder going on the other side and mirror on this side so will be strong enough for those. From the inside of the en-suite it looks like this, with one layer of ply. So, just plasterboard over the top of this. All the standard (classic) pockets are now fitted. Ply to go on the other 4 still so plenty of late nights in store before the plasterboarders come in. We are rather enjoying this bit though. Allows us to actually contribute to our build in a meaningful way, saves some cash, justifies the circular saw Christmas gift...... The telescopic pocket door is being saved for another day.

That's alot of insulation - over 600 bags of the stuff. They cut a load of holes in the MBC vapour layer ply. More holes than we ever imagined. Then they pump the insulation into the holes to fill up the walls (300mm deep) and ceilings (400mm deep). Some of it escapes. Easy to vacuum up though. Then they put the ply discs back in and tape over the holes. They have left us with some patches for areas of the ceiling they can't reach and for any they might have missed. Only found one so far. Sean and his firm - works subcontracted for MBC for alot of the pumped cellulose insulation for them - was fantastic. The house is definitely warmer inside now, and the echo is now deadened. It is so quiet in there. Can't wait to move in........

Heard an interview on Radio 5 last week, talking to a woman who makes a living from taking on 'eating challenges' and posting videos thereof on her YouTube channel. The world has gone mad!