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Wait until you get to work closely with the upper echelons of the building world, as in the news making ones. Watch the cheapest contractor, with no track record get the job based on price. Sit in awe and watch as specialist consultants are brought in to advise you how to do a job you've done for 35 years. Watch said consultants pander like a puppy to every little architectural design quirk requested and the pair of them have a love in. Further despair as the consultant bends the rules on or even openly flouts respected codes of practice as "they're not law" and end up with said code of practice being dumbed down at its next edition. See these projects years down the line and quietly chuckle thinking "I knew that would never work/not get used/actually be a hinderance to the end user". And the best bit is there's never any come back on the people responsible for writing the spec or their stupid, enforced, unworkable ideas and omissions. Oh, and watch it happen on the next project. And finally wish you'd been born 10 years earlier so as to be close to retirement and that final release.

Why are scaffolders so difficult to deal with, my ex-scaffolder took to texting me at 5:30 in a morning and demanding updates on progress. In the end I’ve shown him the door, mind you, I’ve had value for money out of him. In the future I’ll be using my own to finish off the few bits. So here’s the photo of the house without the scaffold. In the next couple of weeks we we start putting in the rest of the windows, the scaffold was in the way previously, making it difficult to handle the largest 5 doors weighing 250kg each.

This general thread about fitting the wc that you might glean some bits from:

And another thread with loads of info:

My stud walls were built first and attach in essence only to the ceiling and walls. Floor was poured after the stud walls were done. When I was playing with how the frame was going to go in I sat it on the floating sole plate of the stud wall. I then though notched out the sole plate and screwed to the concrete floor. I didn't have UFH close to the edge though: I was lucky depth wise as where my frame went was an old doorway I blocked up (with 9" blocks). The depth is so great I resin anchored studs into the back wall and used hex extenders: Just found this old pic looking through where the new bathroom door is through where the old doorway was into the cloak in the hall: Glad to say its changed a bit!

Here's a rubbish picture of the novy in situ with the extractor on the lowest height position. Each hotspot is in front of the slider control, i.e. parallel with the line of the extractor. I have found it to be very effective; my MVHR extracts for this room are also located about 1.5 metres back from the hob so rising steam isn't a problem. I'm very pleased with it.

Btw, I'm pretty certain now my diy extract system, following Jeremy's lead is working. Doesn't maybe clear the sometimes explosive, initial "release of gas" but all good thereafter. The planned inline pc fan should provide an extra boost (poost? ? ).

A bit here:

You don’t need to bolt the frame to the floor. Glue the sole plate down, then use angle brackets to hold the frame back against the wall. I’ve got a full set of Geberit wall hold back bolts and fixings somewhere as I build between the studs. The weight on the bottom holds it down

Length of 2" deep timber, (same width as vertical battens) glued to the floor maybe, pushing against existing stud wall. Geberit frame feet screwed into that? @Nickfromwales.....help! Pretty sure some on here have used the odour extract facility...

Shouldn’t need it as a Sigma frame comfortably fits inside a 95mm stud wall.

You could add battens to your wall studs to deepen them a bit?

I just used the term 'one bedroom dwelling'. The notes that came back from the planners said that they were assuming that it was prefab, but they noted that this had not been specified either way. PP was granted with no conditions or objections.

H114 doesnt have thd odour extract facility to connect to your MVHR I don't think unless you diy it like Jeremy and now I have. This page gives the current frames and usefully the flush plates available: https://www.geberit.co.uk/products/installation-systems/geberit-duofix/

Ignore the sales sites, go direct to the technical pages on Geberit website. https://catalog.geberit.co.uk/en-GB/products/CH2_100901/Systems/Installation-and-Flushing-Systems/Geberit-Duofix/Frames

Slimmer too. Think we had this discussion before ref your stud depth.

As a bit of an aside I half considered this: https://www.gumtree.com/p/plumbing-central-heating/geberit-wall-hung-toilet-frames-x2-/1351844522 But tbh you couldn't get the missing bits and keep under a £100 each frame. Might offer him less.

@orkenny - Welcome, nice to have someone else from Orkney on the forum. Have you had a look at the local development plan and policies? If it is your ultimate intention to use the cabin as a holiday let / self catering you are going to need planning permission. If memory serves, you are going to need to show justification or requirement (increased visitor numbers predicted with RET [if we ever get it] has not in the past been accepted as justification or need). Even if building within the curtilage of your dwelling house (which may not extend across the entirety of the 0.8 acres you own) PD would not cover that type of 'use'. The easiest and quickest way to get an answer on the planning side would be to email a query into Development management, setting out what you propose and whether policy and development plan would support it. Usually a reasonable turnaround of such enquires. Alternatively, make an appointment or go to School Place between 09:00 and 10:00 or 16:00 and 17:00 and ask to speak to the duty planning officer.

Just been doing some rough estimates as to how much effect having a fairly powerful external extract fan has, in terms of heat loss when turned on. Air from outside has to come in to replace the air being extracted, so if it's 10°C outside (it was colder than that here this morning) and the house is at 21°C inside, then a 500m³/h extract is going to pump just over 1.8 kW of heat out of the house all the time it's running. If the outside air temperature drops down to 0°C, then that increases to a bit over 3.5 kW. Some of that will be made up by the heat from cooking, but almost certainly not all of it, as the heat from an induction hob mainly heats the pan, so it's easy to estimate the heat loss. A big pan, with an external surface area of about 0.25m² sat at 100°C in a room at 21°C will lose heat at a rate of about 265 W, so even two or three such large pans sat at 100°C aren't enough to come close to making up for the heat lost through the extract fan. The same goes for the heat from an oven. Heat will be lost at a lower rate than from a pan, as the surface temperature of an oven is a lot lower. There's also the issue that heat is being extracted from the kitchen, and unless there is a way to deliver cool air from outside directly to the kitchen, the cool air being drawn in via, say, the unbalanced MVHR, will flow into the living areas of the house, so cooling them down. Using our house as an example, the worst case heat loss rate in very cold weather (-10°C outside), is about 1.6 kW. An extract fan rated at 500m³/h, running on such a cold day, would increase the house heat loss rate to just over 6.8 kW. To keep up with this heat loss rate increase, the heating system would need to be increased in capacity by a factor of about 4.

Having met you a few times I can confirm that you are not Nick Clegg.

It occurs to me this might not actually be a problem? Even in our old not-that-insulated house any cooking tends to heat up the kitchen quite a lot. Given I've read various people here say that even visitors coming into their low-energy houses has a noticeable effect, sometimes triggering cooling systems, I'd think cooking has the potential to create a great deal of excess heat? In that case it's maybe not the end of the world if, during cooking, most of that heat gets dumped outside rather than being efficiently captured by the MVHR?

Once a layer of air gets thicker than about 30mm, convection currents start to flow, so heat will flow across that air gap from the air circulating within it (from the warm side to the cold side). Insulation usually works by making trapped air spaces small, so restricting the ability of air to move around within it. It's the reason than the spacing between multiple pane glazing never usually exceeds about 20mm, as if the gap gets bigger than this the insulation value starts to drop off.

That sounds about right. 1 tog = 0.1 m²K/W which is equivalent to a U-value of 10 W/m²·K which, in turn, is about the conductance from a floor to the surroundings above it. So 1 tog of carpet halves the heat flow upwards or doubles the temperature difference needed for a given heat flow. 2.5 tog would multiply the temperature difference by 3.5 which seems like about the point when a simple control strategy of keeping the slab at a constant temperature would break down.

We have a similar mix but stone floors in some rooms. Great as its warm in winter and cool in summer. They reckon you should keep the TOG value of carpet and underlay to around 2.0-2.5 in total. There are special low TOG underlays with TOG of 0.6-0.7. Beware, some carpets come in two versions, Hessian backed and foam rubber backed. Some shops reserve the right to deliver either version in the small print. You probably want the Hessian backed as the foam rubber no doubt increases the TOG a lot. In which case get the shop to write something on the order.

These may help = couple of photos taken ahowing my PV panel installation in an in-roof system. There is more info on the site, including more photos of mine and similar installations so just search

We have micro inverters installed below each solar panel, a long DC cable from there to our plant room where the main inverter is. AC run from inverter to electric panel is very short. Works fine. I had our solar installer try to convince me we need to mount the inverter next to the PV panels as the DC cable had to be as short as possible to reduce losses. His suggestion was to mount in the warm roof or bedroom (we have no loft space). I found a solar calculator that assesses losses including cable diameter and length, it showed the opposite of what the installer claimed. He said no more and just installed it as I wanted after that. Yes the inverter is warm, I see it as a positive in the winter, though the plant room does get a few degrees warmer in the summer due to all the plant and DHW cylinder.

Ours is fitted outside, on the North facing wall, which is at the back of the house. It's weatherproof, but as it's mounted under the eaves overhang it never really gets wet:

I have a mixture of carpet, porcelain tiles and engineered Oak on my floors. When the heating is on you can feel the warmth on your bare feet through the tiles and Oak flooring after around 90 mins. Carpet is totally different as it doesn't really warm up to your touch but you can still feel warmth. If you choose carpet then you must get the lowest tog rating for the carpet and under felt or you will block any heat from getting through. I actually prefer the engineered flooring under foot. It just feels nicer to walk on than my tiles.

I've just cleaned the house, so thought I'd time how long it took to clean the floors. First was a whizz around with the Dyson, took 12 minutes to do the whole house (130m²), and just about completely filled the dust bin. I then wet cleaned the travertine (roughly 65m²) with a microfibre mop, a bucket of Flash in hot water and a handheld cloth for the awkward bits. Took me 16 minutes to give the floors a thorough clean, clean up the mop, bucket etc and put everything away. Sitting here with a cup of tea it looks like the floor's dry already, which is surprising as, although its a sunny day, the floor cooling has been on for a couple of hours or so. PS: As @jack mentions, walking around in bare feet on a cooled floor is very pleasant on a day like this, especially after a little bit of work.

Even with a sealant, you have to be religious about wiping up spills to avoid staining. We have a large permanent mark in our kitchen where my wife took a rubbish bag out of the bin, put it on the floor, then went off and did something else. It wasn't picked up again until the next morning, and by then whatever had leaked out of the bag was well and truly soaked into the concrete. Oh, and stuff tends to break when you drop it onto concrete, but that's an issue with tile as well. It very fast to clean though - a large microfibre broom lets you cover a lot of space quickly. It's also heavenly in the middle of a heatwave when you walk in from a stinky hot day and the concrete sucks the heat out of your feet when you take your shoes off (the kids sometimes lie down on it when they come in). Underfloor cooling helps, and again, you'd get the same effects with tile.

If you have endless seasoned wood and or a means to produce it and want to use it as a source of additional or maybe primary heat go for it. Personally I would not use it as my sole means of heating, as when I go on holiday in the winter I can setup my gas boiler to take care of background heating and personally I did not go for a back boiler because it was going in my living room - I wanted all the heat in that room and didn't want the issues that back boiler stoves can cause (getting firebox up to good temp etc. due to water jacket cooing it things like this) I would consider a Bosky or Aga woodfired backboiler/oven but we have the means to heat the living space with a WBS and that suffices for us. My friend heats his house with a Bosky - he did have the oven version but eventually it was replaced with the heater/hob top version only. He lives on a farm so it was a no-brainer. Downside, however, is that it does his DHW too so he needs about a 45min burn in the morning to top up his 240litres of DHW - can make his kitchen a bit toasty in the summer, he does have 6Kw of electric plate heaters in the tanks too but he tended to chuck an arm-full of logs in and do it for free. Mind you - he also has a waste oil fuelled diesel generator that feeds directly into the tank heaters - also free. So many pro's and con's that this really becomes a full conversation.

The government aren't doing away with them, they are just tightening controls, eventually, as with gas boilers, diesels etc. these things will all be phased out in most areas - provisions for remote areas may allow for a relaxation of controls. Even if they ceased to sell such appliances they would almost certainly allow the reduction in wood burning appliances simply to reduce over time through appliances reaching the end of there life and not being replaced etc. It would also be very difficult to police. I think that they should simply control the sale of wood fuel. If you cannot run your wood stove on locally gathered wood that you arrange and process yourself then having a stove is not really worthwhile in my opinion. Limiting what people can buy from B&Q or the petrol station would essentially control WBS use. Also an outright ban on the sale of any unseasoned timber would help vastly. Asda had bags of green pine for sale, I had a look at it out of interest and wondered how many stove novices would buy it and chuck it on their stove that night. It said in small print on the bag that this wood was unseasoned and it would require to be seasoned. If only well seasoned hardwoods and smokeless fuel was available that would solve a lot of issues. I think there are many many stoves that were bought as a piece of furniture for the living room and get used on a Sunday night or Christmas day - yet the ONS decided to use the number of stoves that have been sold and multiply that by "average" burning hours which were frankly ridiculous and came up with these preposterous emissions figures. I know a lot of people with WBS's which just don't use them - they wouldn't even know which end of an axe to hold and have no clue how to, or indeed incentive to, sort themselves out with firewood - I think they buy some wood for special occasions and that is it. Fine, leave them to it, that is a nice thing. What about BBQ's/Firepits in the summer? It is probably fair to say a lot of BBQ's and fire-pits smoke away during the summer - more people BBQ and use fire-pits than run WBS's and the burn time is probably comparable for the majority of WBS owners as many do not have access to unlimited amounts of firewood therefor it is just an evening event and probably only weekends at that. Ban all the plastic tat they sell for parties, or stupid little solar rechargeable garden lights that last a season and end up in the bin, what an environmental disaster these things are, think of all these little cells now rotting away in landfills. People jump onto the things that are easy to jump at, like WBS and diesels, but look at the utter rubbish people buy for an event and bin the next day. I saw a car air-freshener the other day that resembled a small Pringles type tin with a grille on the top that the fragrance emanated from - I looked at this tray full of them and thought what a total waste of resources, time and money. Ban crap like that. I bet people exist who buy this tat yet lambaste those of us with a diesel or a WBS as being environmental disasters. I might write a book!

That is a good point. From the other side when I am planning to object to something, I engage the Planner early verbally with the violations of Planning Policy - as I know that ours do not look at anything in detail until the deadline for comment has gone. That way the Planner is hopefully primed to notice things that may be missed, and I may even get away without having formally to object (and so potentially to put a bomb under the relationship). Equally they have to listen to representations after the deadline, so if I am doing a PP I will engage periodically or continuously up until 2 days before decision date personally or via my consultant. Things do not always work out. I had one horrible experience when they put a time limit on a change of use, and issued a decision notice without even mentioning it to us. Had to renegotiate a complex lease to include break causes based on not getting a COU extension in 4 and 8 years. Ferdinand

This is a key thing when thinking about PV into electric or heat batteries: what's the distribution of sunlight over short runs of days. E.g., if two consecutive days are dull, what's the probability that the third day will be dull also. My impression, not backed up by any statistics, is that consecutive days tend to be correlated (if it's dull one day it's likely to be dull the next) but over about 3 or 4 days it tends to be anti-corrolated: if it's dull today it's more likely to be bright the day after next, and vice-versa of course. So if you're wanting to use PV to cover a lot of your energy use (for DHW, say) then it's worth having about three days of storage.