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Blimey. That sounds like an STD.

@JSHarris has been kind enough to lend me his airless paint sprayer recently, as I've started decorating at the build following on from the plasterers, wherever feasible. I will put some more info on the blog in due course, but wanted to put a note in here in case anyone was thinking about this. I've got a lot of surface area to paint and it's particularly tricky in the upstairs bedrooms where the vaulted ceilings reach 4.7m at their high points. Even with a scaffold tower, painting up there is challenging and I really didn't fancy doing it with rollers. First off, it's messy, more so than the promotional manufacturer videos would have you believe, but no more so than many of the youtube videos I watched on the subject. I wouldn't want to do it in a small room or one with lots of stuff in it, particularly for ceilings, as being able to move about with the sprayer seems to be fundamental to the technique and being able to keep the nose of the spray gun at 90 degrees to the surface being sprayed. That said, for getting the white mist coats onto the plaster skim, it's nothing short of miraculous. Masking takes a couple of hours, depending on what you need to do (large windows in my case) but once the sprayer is up and running, you can get a large room, walls and ceilings, done in half a day as it dries incredibly quickly. I've stuck with contract white for the ceilings - it gives a nice opaque, super matt finish that I really like and makes the sprayer the obvious solution. For colour coats on the walls, I'm using rollers. This is for a couple of reasons - first the sprayer is a thirsty beast and it would cost a fortune if I sprayed the vinyl emulsion, and secondly I'm not sure I could mask effectively enough to retain the white ceilings without overspray from the colour. It also means that I get some texture on the walls, making it easier to touch up any paintwork in the future. If anyone has a new build with lots of bare plaster walls and empty rooms to paint, I'd certainly recommend a sprayer for the mist coats. Do prepare to get messy, though.

I considered ground source. The pipe that you bury and the antifreeze to go in it exceeds the cost of the heat pump. The other consideration is noise. the GSHP unit will be in the building purring away. I chose a monoblock ASHP instead, it is pretty quiet, but the main point is the noise is in the unit outside, not in your building.

I got over 2acres done for £450 december last year

Look at it from a heatloss point of view. Assuming an outside/inside differential of 20°C then with 150mm of PIR or equivalent on all six surfaces the heat loss is about 340watts, plus say 180watts for 6m2 glazing, ventilation of 0.5ach with no heat recovery is about 200watts. So about 720watts, then subtract input from solar/bodyheat/appliances. Do you really need a GSHP?

I think that'll be dependant on the pan. That thing your holding, IIRC, is the bit that sits on the threaded bar to stop metal meeting porcelain. Some ( most ) pans come with captive fittings which stop that happening, and I've noticed a few frames have come with kit which ends up redundant / binned.

The Passivhaus standard isn't for a house that needs no heating at all, although some do tend to make the mistake in assuming that's what it is. A house that needs minimal, or modest, amount of heat in the heating season probably best describes it. We could heat our house using the heat pump in the MVHR coupled with heated towel rails I think (it useful to have this as a backup heating system if we ever need it) but we prefer to heat the ground floor slab, just from a personal preference. We both find the air from the MVHR with the heat pump turned on a bit dry, but I guess that could be resolved with some sort of humidifier easily enough.

It's a funny one - I bought a property recently (the first I'm actually living in) and it had items that needed PP but didn't have it - the Solicitors just pointed it out, that's all they really do. Legals don't have time or inclination to go taddle on building owners to the Council - life here would be very different if they did! That's fair enough, shame about Brexit mucking up their plans ?

I know you can for building regs but not sure that works for PP, especially when you know that it doesn’t have the right PP and the work was done relatively recently. Anyway, they went for a second viewing but have got cold feet due to Brexit so they are staying in their rented bliss until Brexit concludes one way or the other.

You are most welcome. Tell me about the tool storage (phhhhh) : it's a real issue. I hate constantly moving mine because I can't make the / haven't got the space to put them somewhere and leave them there. I have a shipping container ear-marked for tool storage later, but it won't be long before the LPA bends my ear about it.

We also have the Build Zone / BBS combo, no complaints so far - our inspector is great.

ASHP should not be noisy if you pick one that is plenty big enough so its always running at low speed for your heat requirement. with garden space you have for GSP --a bore hole would only way +that will end being 3 times the price of ASHP system main thing is to get building insulation as good as poss then you will need so much less heat to start with at size of floor you quote i doubt its worth either --UFH as you say and a simple electric inline boiler and economy 7 . only if you want to use ashp for cooling of slab in summer might it be worth it lot more tecchie people than me on here who will direct you better

I worked through this problem a while ago when, luckily, @JSHarris was writing about the issue. For 146 sq m (our house area) I drew the conclusion that it wasn't worth it. The discussion is on this board - somewhere - not sure where, though - so long ago that I read it that I can't remember which thread. But I do know what you mean about liking the idea of GSHP. There's something elemental about it: something deeply connected.

We had a Build Zone 10 year structural warranty, who used BBS Building Control as approved inspector. I think it saved us a bit on costs (can't find the comparison figures), but our building inspector was excellent. This made the whole process pretty painless.

It was Cromar vent 3 classic. https://cromarbuildingproducts.com/products/vent3-classic/ I used the Vent 3 pro https://cromarbuildingproducts.com/products/vent3-pro/ on the roof after a recommendation on here and was really impressed with it. Roofs require a W1 class membrane which is basically how much water is allowed through. The TF200 I used was a W2 product which passes building regs on walls but as explained in driving rain water was getting through which I didn't like and which could be replicated with a surprisingly low jet from a hose. I appreciate that once cladding etc is on the walls won't have anywhere like the same exposure as they do during the build but I didn't like seeing droplets form on the inside where I had window openings and wet OSB behind!

Jet the hose at each of them, I did a lot of our walls with TF200 only to realise if the rain was driving it went right through but held water like your test no problem. I contacted the manufacturer who tested a swatch and confirmed it was as it should be and fit for purpose. I disagreed and replaced the lot with a W1 class roofing membrane from Cromar which doesn't let a drop in. Appreciate your membranes are roofing class but might be worth posting for others.

Insulation then the batten would mean you don't have to use long plasterboard screws. Still need long screws for the fixing of the batten though but you would use less of the longer ones plus shorter plasterboard screws so cheaper. You can have it insulated and batten then the spark can come in and do his thing. What kind of lights are you going for as these might need some timber to fix to depending on your choice.

Not sure if this helps, but I did my own building regs "full plans" submission, using LABC, and all the documents I submitted can be downloaded from here: http://www.mayfly.eu/2013/09/part-fifteen-the-site-is-finally-ready/ It may give you an idea as to what they need to see, although this will vary a bit with different build methods, I'm sure.

I can accept that there will be moments in the lifetime of any heating system that there will be "outages" due to breakdowns and possibly power cuts. I plan to have a Bioethanol type fireplace in the living room to give the backup in that instance. Only planning on about a 4kw version which I hope will provide a boost at the time of year that a flame gives a psychological uplift as well as an emergency to cover breakdowns and no power. I guess underspec does occur with conventional boilers and rads but I cannot ever remember hearing of any such situation in 30 years of home ownership. Could we one day get phone calls and emails bombarding us about being miss-sold heat pumps in the vain of PPI.......

It does highlight to me that there are possibly a lot of people that have been sold the heat pump solution by inexperienced people that either offer poor advice, incorrect spec devices for the property and or lack of knowledge by the installers when setting up and handing over the systems. Leaving a home owner high and dry for the winter is probably a very upsetting and sobering moment after such huge efforts and probably financial commitment.

Sadly this doesn't work well, as an ASHP shifts a lot of air, many times the volume of an outbuilding per hour. Also worth looking at the variation in the amount of heat available in the air for a given outside air temperature. The heat energy in the air is zero at absolute zero, -273°C, so air at -10°C has about 3.5% less heat than air at 0°C, or about 5.3% less heat than air at +5°C. The effect of varying air temperature isn't that great, in terms of heat pump performance, at least until you get down to the lowest working temperature of the refrigerant used (typically around -20°C for R410A).

Is having UFH that heats up quickly a significant advantage over having a system that just maintains a steady temperature? It's certainly a fair bit cheaper to just fit the UFH pipes inside a concrete floor slab, as the only additional stuff needed is the pipe and a bucket load of cable ties.

You also need to consider cost, speed and ease of installation and required floor finish. I had a quick look at the Wunda site and was surprised to see they showed a solution involving notching the top flange of an I joist floor, which I thought was a no-no.

If it Heats up quick it will cool down quick.

First, a warm welcome. You have a brilliant little project , and if the photo is to be believed, a demanding dog too. So, that makes two clubs of which we are both members. Joined the small budget club too eh? And if your labour really is free, pop up to J33 on the M6 and I'll be happy to reinforce your delusion. I'll pay yer mileage. Exterior walls - I don't really have a technical answer, but I would start by looking at what others in your area have done / are doing. Like I say M6, junction 33, 0900 sharp tomorrow morning.

Good. Remember my opinion is just an opinion not advice. (/slopeyshoulders) I wouldn't turn it round ... I would actually treat it as double aspect with the rooms located for sun when you will be in them i.e. Kitchen mainly morning, living all day, bedrooms evening. One nice thing about the plot is that you have obstructions to the light away beyond the road on the sunny sides throughout the day and evening. F

It's about 21½°C throughout our upstairs in our house and 22½°C downstairs, so "no heat at all upstairs" definitely can work with a correctly designed and built energy-efficient house. On Jude's original post we actually use slightly more than this in this weather in a smaller house (4 double bedrooms) than Jude's. However, about 75% of our use is at E7 cheap rate, which mitigates this cost. We also haven't got an ASHP installed yet, so our heating is at a CoP of 1 rather than 3-4. 1300kWh suggests to me that the heating element is probably more than 1000kWh + at a CoP of 3 say means that the house is leaking about 100+ kWh of heat / day. Something is wrong with the as-built performance of Jude's house.

Thank you so much for all these insights. My conveyancer has tried to gain further clarification regarding the parking size however the council planning team won't comment as there currently isn't enough information and the sellers solicitor says they are not prepared to pay for further work to gain this. They said the plot is only sold with outline and if I don't want to continue with the purchase [almost ready to sign the contract now] they'll put the whole [plot and their house] on the market. When I originally saw it I presumed we'd both be able to park on the front because naturally that's where you would choose to park. There were complaints from the neighbours in respect of parking [despite them all having their own drives] and also the town council didn't want the planning to be approved on the grounds that the street could be over developed. Ferdinand has it spot on regarding it being on a corner plot and whilst I love the idea of turning it around Pro Dave is correct in that they might not permit an enclosed front garden - perhaps a hedge could get a bit out of control though. I don't have any actual measurements either - surely that should be standard prior to purchase? The sellers also used an agent to get this one through - not sure if that makes a difference or not. I'm happy to attach the previous refused plan if it would help. You are all amazing - thank you.

@AliG I didn’t say that I liked it ...!! ?

It's buried somewhere in either the Carrier or Glowworm installation manual I think, where minimising noise transmission by using long hoses is mentioned. Looping them works perfectly I found, as we can't tell from inside the utility room whether the ASHP on the other side of the wall in running or not. The only way we can tell is to look at the command unit display.

Make sure you soak the blocks before you start. Thermalite blocks are very dry and will suck the moisture out of your plaster and make it dry out to quick and it will crack really bad.

The boiler is a Greenstar 30i cylinder is 250 litres Will run all three bathrooms and UFH Quite comfortably Not sure about the upstairs heating as we have not needed it on since moving in

The manufacturer says Majcoat can be exposed for upto 8 weeks while Majcoat 150 can only be exposed for upto 4 weeks.........so https://www.siga.swiss/global_en/catalog/majcoat

The VCL is what it says, a Vapour Control Layer. It can easily be a part of the fabric and doesn't have to be a separate entity that's added on as an afterthought. Take our build as an example; our VCL is an inner frame racking skin of Spano Durelis. In an EPS ICF construction the VCL may well be the inner layer of EPS. With wood/cement fibre ICF construction the VCL could well be a cementitious parge coat on the inner face, before plastering. A VCL doesn't have to be totally vapour impermeable, it just has to have a permeance that is significantly lower than anything within the build outside it. The name gives away exactly what it does, control vapour movement, not necessarily completely block it. Finally, as ICF is a sandwich that may well have a significant amount of insulation on the inside as well as the outside (some ICF seems to be almost 50/50) then the concrete core is going to tend to sit at a temperature part way between the inside and outside temperature. Concrete is a relatively good thermal conductor (around 1.5 to 2 times more conductive than water and around 25 times the thermal conductivity of something like EPS) so it's likely that the core will be at a reasonably even temperature through its thickness with the greatest temperature gradients being through the insulation on either side.

In relation to the roof; I took a tile (given to me by the roofing company) to the Planner's office. The documentation - if you can call it that - was scratched onto the sample tile with a blunt chisel - the addressee, his department, together with my details and handed it in to the receptionist at the LPA head office. I had a nice time wondering how he might file the slate in his filing system. In relation to the windows, I submitted a brochure with the relevant page marked with a Post It. All very high tech.

All of these 'professional memberships' and "councils" are just clubs to make money for the boys. I have spent my entire professional career avoiding them to the best of my ability. RICS and Engineering council etc. are slightly different as they allow professionals to be chartered, but if I don't renew my subscription am I any less of an engineer? They offer nothing in return. Not being a chartered surveyor will probably be cheaper as he is not paying membership fee's etc. ask what his credentials are, maybe he was with a firm, went out on his own and decided not to sign up to the "clubs" I bet he is just as qualified, potentially better, than someone who comes with all the RICS stamps and accreditation. Look at the background of almost all these associations and it started out with a couple of people deciding to set up an organisation for "insert profession here" and offer some so called "service" for a fee once a year - then with good marketing have people believe that they must have said membership or they are no good.