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I remember what they said about rejecting the euro. It’s just scaremongering by big corporations that take big contributions from the EU. The bbc should no longer be state funded. It’s a joke. Id be worried if I owned a small business relying on Eu imports or exports to the EU. Big business will be able to ride it out and switch suppliers. Look at the change in attitude from merkel and macron in the past 2 days and how it’s as impacted the £. They stand to lose much more than us. Thank god that useless idiot may has gone. She is not fit to run a corner shop. I honestly think it will be a soft brexit and they will treat the removal of the backstop as a victory. When few in England, Scotland or Wales care about it. Id personally prefer a hard brexit. I despise what the EU has become. That doesn’t mean I’m a “racist bigot who hates foreigners” as the bbc and guardian say. It means I hate excessive taxes and closed markets. The European council and the unelected arrogant bureaucrats want a European superstate.

First thing, they are Aico alarms, imho the best you can get. Don't discount that there may have been an issue, did you have any heating on, anything that could be smouldering? They will trigger long before a room is full of smoke. You should really have a heat alarm in the kitchen, not a smoke alarm. Being Aico you can swap the kitchen ionisation alarm for a heat alarm just by sliding one off it's base and sliding the replacement on. No need for an electrician. Aico sell a clever switch that you can link into the system that when pressed will identify which alarm has triggered, it might be worth getting one of those fitted.

Sometimes questions are raised as to whether it's worth increasing insulation levels and often there seems to be confusion as to what the "ideal" level of insulation is, or even what a "good" or "reasonable" level of insulation might be. I'm not sure whether or not the non-linear impact of improving insulation, in terms of the effect on the heating requirement, and hence running cost during cold weather, is widely understood. I've heard comments like "it's not worth improving the insulation from 0.16 W/m2.K to 0.12 W/m2.K because it would be 30% more expensive and only reduce the heat loss by 25%". Most of the time this is incorrect, because homes have heat sources all year around, from the occupants, incidental heating from appliances, solar gain and even pets (a medium sized dog is probably a four-legged 40 - 50W heater). So, I thought a really simple example might help some gain a better understanding of this non-linearity, and illustrate better why some are so evangelical about trying to improve insulation levels (and reduce ventilation heat loss, too, but I'll get to that another time). Let's build a pretend house, that for simplicity has no doors or windows and is a rectangular single storey box with a flat roof. For simplicity we'll assume it's on raised piles, with an air space underneath, just so we can use the same insulation level on all six sides and to make the sums simple. All I'm doing here is making a comparison, so this is a valid way of illustrating this effect. In our rectangular box house we have an average of 100W of incidental heating, coming from things like internet kit, a PC, a cordless phone base station, a TV, a phone charger, a few lights and a handful of intermittently used kitchen appliances. This is a pretty low figure - I struggle to keep our house background load below about 200W, without any lights on. The box houses two adults, giving out around 80 - 100W each and a dog, so lets say there is 220 W of heating coming from the occupants. The box also has a heating system that can deliver whatever power is needed to maintain a temperature of 20 deg C inside, and its night time, so there's no solar heating of the walls. Outside it's 5 deg C, a chilly winters night. This rectangular box is 10m long x 10m wide x 2.5m high inside, so has a total wall, floor and roof area of 300m2 and an internal floor area of 100m2, so fairly average in size (a bit bigger than our current 3 bed bungalow). So, we have a temperature difference between the inside and outside of 15 deg C (20 deg C - 5 deg C), an internal surface area of 300m2 and a constant incidental heating level of 320 W (220 W from two adults and dog, 100 W from electrical appliances and lights). First, lets see how much heat we need to put into this box from the heating system, if we have U values for the walls, floor and roof of 0.2 W/m2.K (K is degrees Kelvin, the same units as degrees Centigrade when only temperature difference is being compared): The total heat loss power, in Watts, can be calculated from the U value, the area and the temperature difference, so for this first example we get 300m2 area x 15 deg C temperature difference x 0.2 W/m2.K U value = 900 W. There is 320 W of heat coming from the occupants etc, so the heating system would need to deliver 900 - 320 = 580 W in order to keep the house at 20 deg C under these conditions. If this were by direct electric heating, then the heating cost would be about £2.09 per 24 hours. Next, let's see how much heat we need to put into this box from the heating system, if we have U values for the walls, floor and roof of 0.1 W/m2.K , in other words, we've made the insulation twice as "good", so might think we've halved the heating cost: The total heat loss power is now 300m2 x 15 deg C temperature difference x 0.1 W/m2.K U value = 450 W. This is what we'd expect, double the insulation effectiveness and halve the heat loss. However, when we now take away the incidental heat gain from the occupants, etc, of 320 W, the heating system needs to deliver 450 - 320 = 130 W in order to keep the house at 20 deg C under these conditions. If this were by direct electric heating, then the cost would be about £0.47 per 24 hours. So, by doubling the insulation level we've decreased the heating cost by about 78%, not the 50% that might have been expected. This is a very simplistic example, but it does illustrate why doubling up in insulation can give a far greater benefit than might be expected. It also shows why, when you improve the level of insulation you can reduce the heating requirement down to such a low level that for a lot of the time you don't need any heating. In that last example, turning on a few extra lights could heat this imaginary box home to a comfortable temperature on a cold night, whereas with only half the insulation it needs something that delivers 446% more heat.

Hogwatch update: Night 5 and a regular pattern is emerging as our prickly friend has arrived each night sometime between 10.40pm and 11.50pm, and then passes back in the opposite direction between 4am and 4.50am. Last night it ventured inside the house for the first time (lured by a few mealworm). No sign of the badger since the first night.

Commissioning is mainly getting the system balanced. There are a couple of airflow meters in the forum tool loan scheme for doing the flow measurement at each terminal. The process is a bit iterative, but really just needs patience, going around every ceiling terminal, measuring the flow rate and then adjusting it up and down to get the required extract rates from specified rooms (kitchen, bathroom, WC, utility, as in building regs), making sure the sum of the fresh air supply equals the sum of the extracts and also that the total background ventilation rate meets the figure in building regs. Forget about trying to run air conditioning via MVHR, the flow rate is way too low to make any useful difference. We have an MVHR that cools the air, but it's not very effective in warm weather at all.

and you will end up with what happened when a commitee was employed to design a horse you get a camel -

Yes, several here have done DIY install and commissioning. Not a difficult job, but the commissioning and balancing is a bit tedious. Better to DIY simple and tedious stuff, IMHO, rather than pay someone a lot of cash. I probably spent around three or four days on the MVHR installation and commissioning.

80-90% has to be the minimum and I can’t see how one below that is on the passiv database, don’t think it’s on the SAP one which means it’s not recognised for SAP scoring if I understand correctly.

It’s time to end the two party state and move to Proportional Representation.

You only have to watch any bbc debate. The Remainer will waffle on for 25 mins and the brexiteer will get 5 mins at the end where they are over spoken and attacked by the presenter and the Remainer. Its so obvious its obnoxious.

No, ADW are just a rip off, they were the most expensive quote we got for windows too. They took ages to return the quote too, so when they asked if I wanted to proceed I said, well first of all it took you weeks to return a quote and you're the most expensive by a long way. No thanks!

Nothing wrong with using laminated timber for windows. It's what I supply as standard. They do not twist or warp the same and are much more stable. Just be aware the scantlings are made from very fine finger jointed timber. Some people find the finger jointing offensive so specify no visible finger joints if you don't like it. Photo attached.

Yes, as there will be a slight tendency for the exhausted air to rise, although I'm not wholly convinced it's that critical.

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Sadly, like every other media outlet, they do report what they are given, and lobbyists (on all sides) are very adept at pushing out stories that support their own political and economic views. For example, over the past few weeks there have been a plethora of "no deal means this" stories. Dig around a bit and much of the time these are pure speculation, with little or no basis in fact. I'm not convinced that these stories emanate from wholly politically motivated sources, either. There is a great deal of heavy betting going on by those trying to profit out of uncertainty. If someone can nudge the market (doesn't matter which way) in a direction they want, then they can make money from that. I take the view that all stories in the media are at best exaggerations and at worst just plain wrong, until I can see enough solid evidence to convince me one way or the other. Journalists in general, including those working for the BBC and the Guardian, are getting increasingly sloppy about fact-checking before publication. Some of that is driven by the time pressure to get a breaking story out ahead of the competition, some is just lazy journalism. Holding a media outlet to account way after an event has near-zero effect, as the primary impact of any story is in the minutes and hours after publication. Few people even remember later corrections, let alone change their views as a consequence.

I'm not making any comment on whether it's a good or a bad thing but up here I've seen a not insignificant swing in quite a few people away from the union and towards Scottish independence. I think hard brexit would quite possibly be the last straw.

The Aston Martin man/luxury Moscow woman house is definitely unfinished and empty. One of the later episodes with the lift and lady in a wheelchair (very nice house I thought) might be empty. This is based on the fact that the level entrance isn't done so surely they can't be there. I can't remember the other one and maybe I'm mistaken. I'll check next time I go for a walk.

It seems to me that for moderately complicated household wiring and plumbing you need lots of diagrams of three sorts: Logical: nice layout to understand the logic of the system with high voltage/pressure at the top, current flowing downhill, cause and effect going from left to right as is often used for electronic circuits. Mechanical: showing the actual wiring with some indication of the layout, e.g., if there's a row of MCBs in a box then they're shown in a row on the diagram, as in @JSHarris's diagram in his water-treatment shed. Geographical: showing where the wires actually run throughout the house. At the same time software will need to know configuration information about the system. E.g., 1-wire sensor 28E3F2C7010000 measures the study radiator flow temperature. A key tenet of software engineering is the DRY principle [¹] = don't repeat yourself. If there's one file to update when a change is made it might actually happen; if there are three or four then it's likely some will be missed some times and the whole lot will degenerate into a mess. So, what I'm envisaging is a single text file (maybe actually split into multiple files but processed as one) which sets up the software configuration and also produces various diagrams which could be printed or viewed online. The online views could be “live” in that they'd show actual states of temperature sensors, valves, pumps, batteries, etc, at least as far as the main computer knows them. E.g., I think somewhere on her web site Elke Stangl had a version of these diagrams which showed the actual temperatures and flows in their heat pump system live but I can't find it now. Thinking about this sort of thing is why I'm not overly interested in the existing home automation systems. [¹] I shared an office and house with Dave Thomas when I was a postgrad student.

I just drew it in AutoCad, not because that was the best application for this sort of stuff, really because it's on this PC and I've been using it for years, so it was the easiest option. Pretty much any vector drawing application would do the job OK, preferably one that has a "grid snap" drawing option, as that makes it easier to get a reasonably tidy layout.

You have already posted this, by all means bump your original post but as a non-contributing member it will be frowned upon if you effectively spam a private site such as ours, so please don't spam our site with this again, it will lead to animosity amongst forum members.

Are architects all on commission from Kingspan! K107 "Kooltherm" has conductivity of 0.02 W/m K and costs, according to a quick Google, around £28 a square metre at 100mm depth. Cheaper prices may be available. You really should only use this stuff if you have a ridge height issue. As an aside, 75mm is a totally non standard thickness which would be hard to get hold of and be a bit more expensive for any given volume than 100mm boards. 100mm of Celotex GA4000 costs around £12 a square metre. Its conductivity at 0.022 is 10% worse, so it would have be be 10% thicker to provide the same insulation value. You could also substitute the Kooltherm based plasterboard for PIR based which would be about 10-15% cheaper at the same thickness. In this case substituting 100mm Celotex for the 75mm of K107 and PIR based plasterboard would save roughly 40% om the material costs whilst giving roughly the same u-value. I think at this rafter thickness you could also use 150mm of rockwool between the rafters and PIR below and be even cheaper again. You would have to check condensation issues. Alternatively you could use 150mm of PIR between the rafters and plasterboard below. Also if the rafters are 220mm deep is the proposal really to have a 25mm gap then 75mm of insulation then a 100mm gap then plasterboard/PIR below. That seems v odd. Also what do they mean, install vapour barrier on the warm side of the insulation, between it and the plasterboard, half the insulation is attached to the plasterboard, so that is just impossible!

One nice thing about our Loxone home automation system is that it effectively self-documents as you go along. That said, I still have a spreadsheet that documents every single electrical connection in the house, and it's come in really handy at times.

Smartarse! ?

Hi Joanna, I was brought up around the corner. Is it worth talking to the digger drivers who are currently working on the new builds across the road? It may be that since they are 'on site' so to speak you might get a homer done on the cheap...worth asking maybe.

Inside the door of our water treatment shed: I've also put together a folder with diagrams and explanatory notes for pretty much everything in the house. Taken a fair bit of time to do, but I suspect it would take longer to try and work things out by reverse engineering them at a later date.

If you are making a WT for fun, it need not be expensive, or that efficient. When I worked for a small turbine manufacturer, I suggested that they just made the tower and generator. Let others make the 'sexy' bladed. People seem to think that is where they can improve over Betz, so let them learn. I still think that the idea has some legs, but it does require a stringent understanding of what loads can be placed on the generator. Also, rather than an electrical generator 'up top' why not a simple air compressor. Store the air in a tank, or lots of tanks, release through a turbine when needed. Can get a bit of thermal energy to. Only for small off grid stuff. Large turbines need to pump the juice straight to the grid. Less waste that way.

One aspect which is totally unclear as yet is how the providers of the plots manage risk and long term risk, of which they will get a lot more than before due to the extra upfront investment, and deal with the peculiar decisions of local authorities. Some people view plots as bottomless pits of tax money waiting to be harvested, others view LAs as bottomless pits of bureaucrat costs. That is not resolved. And in reality it is really really difficult. One of the interesting things about Gravenhill is how long it has all taken. Kevin McLoud’s street of 10 houses took iirc 6 years from first mooting. And Gravenhill was set up by the Planning Authority ... imagine a developer trying to do the same with hordes of yammering NIMBYs everywhere demanding that they are suddenly interested in the welfare of foxes.. Or look at something as allegedly simple as Build to Let. Legal and General have everything they have built so far targeting the top 10-20% of the market at rents about 1/3 above the General market afaik. And it is taking years longer than the initial commitment. The first lot of plots at Penkhull, Stoke the LA ended up spent 450k on getting them ready, then made 590k from the sale, with potentially 200k to come depending on a further road being built. Sales prices were higher than expected. Is it built yet ... project started in 2013. https://selfbuildportal.org.uk/case-studies/stoke-serviced-plots/ It is .. like everything ... about money and risk and matching the two. We do not have more than half the jigsaw imo. But then increasing self build to say 50k a year from 15-20k was always going to take a generation. Ferdinand

AlOx paint isn’t really needed in this situation - just a good primer and then a couple of coats of undercoat. Buy a “system” and it should all be fine - your local Johnstone’s Paints will make up any top coat colour for you from a sample or a code.

I routinely fit those switches as there is just no way of determining where a detection has occurred otherwise. They hush, and you can test with them too, great when you have vaulted ceilings. It's a tight fit getting 2 sets of cables into a smoke base, so try and find the last one to connect the cables for the switch as it'll only have a single cable at the moment. Be very careful that all 3 wires are in and tight if you go for one that has 2 wires in it already, and normal practice would be to tug on each individual cable after you're done tightening up to see if any of them just 'pop out' Just remember if you interfere with the smoke detection cabling along the rout through the house, and you bugger it up, you may have inadvertently removed the trigger wire from a lot of downstream detectors, so beware. Test everything thoroughly afterwards !

This is my first build admittedly but I'd like to think of myself as a hands on builder. I'd say half the self builders on site are in the same category. We were drawn here by the instant community mainly. I think a lot of people like the relaxed planning rules. There are 9 houses on our street and 4 are being built by architects for themselves. There are restrictions on the GIA, build height and location of the house on the plot (none too onerous and all available on the plot passport prior to buying) but not rules on design. If we want to finish ours in pink corrugated cladding we can. Rumour has it someone has designed a castle. On our road the 9 houses are similar sized but all extremely different. Hopefully the project is a success and if so should be widely rolled out. I disagree with the Golden Brick policy of prebuilding the foundations as it is very expensive and doesn't save much time or trouble. But I love the fact that plots are sold with services on site immediately and the Plot Passport planning system. Our planning cost nothing (included in the plot price) and was approved first time 2 weeks after application.

Kudox radiators are B&Q / screwfix rubbish. Avoid the touching of, with a barge-pole.... Paint is wafer thin and they chip / damage easily. There's much better out there for not much more money

In case not obvious, don't just put a 500ml bottle of inhibitor in. Calculate how much you need to achieve the recommended concentration. For Furnox F1 they recommend 0.5%. So for example on a 500L thermal store that could be 2.5L (FIVE 500ml bottles) depending on how the store is designed. Plus some for the water in the UFH pipes.

Very good example in the first post. But I think dogs are a very expensive method of heating Way more than direct electric! My boss makes a point of inviting guests most weekends to his house in winter. I think it must be to get free heating I did a similar thougth experiment with my house design to prove the level of insulation it required to not need a conventional heating system. Of course, this means the house will most likely have an overheating problem when south-facing glazing is considered - hence the ducted air conditioning throughout. (It heats efficiently too.) There's quite a saving in complexity by not having radiators, UFH etc, especially when you consider MVHR requires ducting anyway, and with proper sizing and design the A/C and MVHR can work together with virtually the same amount of ducting. The main driver for my build (300m^2) is indeed air tightness, and we are taking great pains to minimise this with the SIPS supplier - getting this right ought to give us another 3 months per year of no heat requirement.

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I wasn't meaning to offend. It is more my disappointment that the plots are so expensive, and come with so many restrictions.

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If you buy white sand, white cement and lime and mix the mortar on site so no storage issues. I think you should be able to produce an acceptable colour without any grey and if you shop around the cost should not kill you. I think it is important as it is so focal. Beware idiot labourer using it for blockwork! Are you doing anything fancy with the brickwork - like stack bond or flush or raked horizontal joints? Spend a bit of time and make up a panel or two. What bricks have you gone for?

I would of gone underground for an extra floor - but what would I know ?

Hi and welcome to the forum. Nice to see more multiple plot self build projects, and unlike that well known one in Oxfordshire, sensibly priced plots. re the ground works, Ben sounds a practical chap, so he could do what a number of us on here have done, and buy your own digger. Then sell it when all the work is finished.

Welcome to the forum; you certainly have come to the right place for lots of information on a huge range of subjects. But dont forget that there are quite a lot of lasses here too! ?

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I would use a 50mm wide batten to cover the gaps all the way down and some stainless steel screws. Photo of what it would look like.

If you have a gmail email account, you can have multiple "different" email addresses all going to the same mailbox. So, create the account eg, myemailaddress@gmail.com and sign up with that. Then when it expires, use myemailaddress+1@gmail.com, and sign up with that. Then +2, +3 and so on. Of course, there's no guarantee that any specific site/app hasn't caught onto that and might treat them as the same account.

Sketchup works on IOS , bit of a learning curve, but eventiually you can do most things you would need. Has a 30 days free trial. After Trial ends, you can sign up for another 30 days trial with different email address . Just need a few emails over the year ?

If doing that, I first transfer a trivial amount, say £10. Only when that has arrived safely will I transfer what I actually want to.

I am of the opinion that all this doom and gloom if we leave is not correct. Not one prediction by the “experts” after the vote two years ago have come true. I liked the channel 4 Brexit debate last night.

DIY Kitchens mainly use PWS doors and make their carcasses. I havent seen their carcasses so I cant comment but I expect its fairly standard stuff - 18mm egger board with PVC edging. While I dont rate this spec as particularly high, for the prices they are charging, its not bad value, as a lot of high street retailers will sell the same stuff and charge a lot more. There is a perception out there that Blum drawer boxes are the gold standard. They are perfectly fine, but there are better products out there. English manufacturers use them mainly because of low cost and a very good distribution networks and ready availability. Unfortunately Blum's competitor products are not that readily available in the UK so which very popular on ready built European kitchens, very thin on the ground in the UK. Its largely down to the quirky nature of British kitchen manufacturing vis-a-vis the European manufacturers. Blum however have an excellent range of mechanisms for wall units. Coming back to DIY kitchens, the weakness there in my mind is the doors. PWS have had loads of issues in the past and the end result to the consumer is a complete mixed bag, mostly down to how good the retailer was at resolving the problem. I suppose the best way to look at DIY is this - If you are confident of the measuring up, confident enough to plan and get the kitchen install, DIY offers a very credible offering. Much better quality than what the sheds would sell you. Atleast comparable to what most high street independents selling British made kitchens would offer for very good prices. I still maintain that an entry level product from say Nobilia is a more refined offering, but DIY is very likely to have the price advantage.

Hi Everyone, I am writing a dissertation on the barriers to environmental sustainability in self-build housing in Scotland and looking for participants to help by completing a short survey. If you have carried out or started a self-build project within the last five years in Scotland and would be interested in helping out, it would be very much appreciated! There is a link to the survey below, it should only take a few minutes to complete. https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=DQSIkWdsW0yxEjajBLZtrQAAAAAAAAAAAAMAAArkAQVUMTZXNENZTEdQUEFGWUREMlRaRFFPMVhZNC4u Thank you! Nicola Mods - topic merged