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I am not picking on you, as an experienced builder I always went full plans as if the planners/building control want xyz it will be noticed at the planning stage and once passed the BCO can’t change it. Your lack of window would have been pointed out before you started work and if the planners passed it without, then that is what you are entitled to build. I have made no assumptions and if you remember I posted a long time ago that I believed full plans were better than building notice.

This thread is a good example of why full plans rather than building notice is a good idea for those not in the know! The window issue would have been specified at the beginning along with all the height issues.

This is how I set mine up for PH levels. MVHR Calculation.pdf

This is why attention to detail when building gets you much better results than most houses even with the same insulation spec.

Check out @lizzie's install photos of recessed, plastered in LED strip on these two pages:

Our air source heat pump has been in operation for five months, over spring and summer, so it is a good time to review the performance and efficiency of our Caernarfon 18kW Eco Air Source Heat Pump (ASHP) from Global Energy Systems. Most ASHP owners in the UK use Mitsubishi, Hitachi or Daiken ASHPs, so it should be interesting to see how a British manufactured ASHP, supposedly made for the British climate, will perform and compare. As part of this video, I’ve addressed our coefficient of performance (COP), performance and efficiency, the control panel and settings for the ASHP, noise rating and some general thoughts. As I am not an ASHP expert and still trying to learn, I look forward to receiving your feedback and comment. I always take all the feedback you guys at Buildhub have to offer on board, and find it extremely enlightening. I will do a follow up video in autumn and winter to provide a full performance and efficiency comparison. YouTube: Additional information and data sheets: http://myhomefarm.co.uk/air-source-heat-pump-efficiency-and-performance-review

@Big Jimbo why not find another piling company? all companies will charge you mobilisation plant costs mine was about £1200 i had 29 piles to 8m for £12,000 I asked 2 companies for quotes and both said that the ringbeam was a loss maker as they took to long and made more money from just the piles.

It must be otherwise it would be sitting outside of the BCO's remit. That will have nothing to do with it. The BCO has no interest in such matters. Stop making assumptions and just ask him why he wants it putting in.

I feel you. I'm the same. I pm you my piling contractor number, give him a bell. You might be a little bit far out for him but worth a try. He certainly will do as much or as little as you want and is Used working with difficult customers (me) Local piling companies always more value then the national ones.

No, 58. But alas had a stroke after finishing my place, won’t ever work again but planning volunteering at a local college.

Eclisse pocket door frame kits come in two thicknesses 100mm and 125mm. These are the thicknesses of the finished wall not the frame. So for a 100mm thick wall the metal frame supplied is 73mm thick and you use 73mm thick studs elsewhere in the wall (and above the door pocket). https://www.pocketdoors.co.uk/unique-features/

I think the Daikin Altherma 3 should be OK with SunAmp UniQ PCM58 based on this: https://twitter.com/eLEJOG/status/1192735318543339522 Can you wait 6 months? SunAmp seem confident about having lower phase-change heat batteries on sale then, but also I gather there will be newer monoblocks on the market soon with the next refrigerant gas. I'm tempted to wait and live with our gas boiler for one more winter...

Would need to be a parallel link from the mains - potentially a larger bore as you’re effectively creating a local hydrant. Check with your local fire officer - they are normally amenable to a cuppa and a biscuit...

+1 No stud required. The plasterboard screws to the metal pocket door frame using self tapping screws. Think some came with my door kit. Do not replace with longer or over tighten these screws because if they go too far in the sharp points will scratch the door first time you open it.

Most of them you do that. Check the MIs

If it’s tiled it needs to be sound and strong - you cannot have it flex. A pocket door will only need 75mm plus then board on either side - they don’t have a stud (or if they do it’s only 20mm thick.

I can assist by providing the Volumetric Design Calculations that were produced for my MVHR systems. These were produced using two different approaches for the design target levels for each room - the DIN standards and also the BR Part F Requirements. The reason the bedrooms have different flow rates is basically because they are different volumes... Note, my house is located in England @Bitpipeand I went through the same brain twisting being experienced by @ProDave and I produced this note to rationalise my thoughts at the time. I hope it helps you ( note, the figures quoted were early in our design process and sizes changed during development of the build and the Helios Tool is an online app for calculating design volumes according to the DIN standards) .... I have been contemplating our MVHR designs and it is very clear that both designs are completely dominated by the BR Part F requirements for whole house ventilation. Table 5.1 (b). - for Eastcroft = 364m3/hr and for your house 372 m3/hr ( depending on your measured GIFA). Anyway it seems to me, and to others, that though we will have demonstrate that our systems can meet this requirement for BR , we would never operate the system at this level and the system would be set up for something completely different. Unfortunately, it is this system sizing that most of the less experienced retailers focus on when they sell their systems and thisn drives a requirement for these systems to be sized and operated at this level. I am fairly sure that where Zehnder are coming from by insisting that Eastcroft requires two Comfotair CA550 units, so that they run quietly at a much lower operating point they will never see again after the BC have approved the installation. I have also come to realise that though the DIN designs managed to produce from the Helios Tool are correct, for what I entered but I have probably entered some rooms that may not require individual extract/supply air and this has potentially oversized the system, though DIN does seem to be able to take into account the practicalities of operating systems at various levels - Moisture Protection, Reduced, Nominal and Intense ventilation So, realisng my lack of MVHR experience, I have trying to found some practical and sensible technical approach to sizing MVHR systems and even tried to get a copy of the DIN standard (no joy, it costs 140 euros). Finally, I came across a recent Passivhaus document that was actually highlighted on ebuild only within the last week. I attach a pdf version of the Chapter 5 which provide practical and passivhaus approach to sizing MVHR systems see http://www.ebuild.co.uk/topic/16037-how-to-build-a-passivhaus/page__pid__121081#entry121081 So, I have quickly used this simplified and practical approach to re- look at both Eastcroft and your house. For your house, if we just take the quoted extract rates for your kitchen, Ensuite bath, two family bathrooms, utility room and cloakroom this gives a Extract Requirement of 240m3/hr. Then for supply, I reckon you have nine habitable spaces at 30m3/hr = 270m3/hr. In any case, your house will only have 4 occupants and this should also be taken into account. So, taking the Standard (or nominal setting as per DIN) as 0.3 ACH = 0.3*853m3 ( the volume of your house from Helios) = 255.9m3/hr and the Boost Rate = 1.3* 255.9 = 332.6 mm3/hr. So these "passivhaus" recommendations are not too dissimilar to the Helios Fan supported airflow volumes, according to DIN, on page 4. In Part F the boost rates for extract volumes are for kitchen =48.83m3/hr, cloakroom/toilet = 21.6m3/hr and bathrooms = 28.8m3/hr. so the passivhaus recommendations are all higher except for the cloakroom /toilet which was 20mmm3/hr This starts to provide a little more confidence about sizing of our MVHR systems, rather than to start and finish at Part F Requirements . 38167 HRV Volumetric Design 2015-4.pdf How_to_build_a_Passivhaus_Chapters_5_to_9(3).pdf

@Mr Alan just make sure you both enjoy the journey otherwise it’s not worth the effort, I enjoyed my build but I,m tired now ?

I got another sample today. They do the profile I want but a bit more expensive... does anyone think the quality is significantly lower for the middle ones than the left ones? I don't want to pick profile over quality, but if it's not that significant then...

Intended to do just that fella. Not many people want a shed that big, so before i sell i can stick a wc and shower in, and although it might not get me any more money for the house, it will be a bonus Gym etc for anybody in the future.

my suggestion is when you lay your concrete base -put bog pipe in there just under surface _and any other service pentrations (service ducts )- block up-and cover with thin concrete --then easy to open up later, even if you don,t connect to drains at this time --easy to dig soil later work out your drops now

http://www.greenbuildingforum.co.uk/newforum/comments.php?DiscussionID=11461&page=2#Comment_193433 There's some quibbling further down the thread on how the volume is calculated when the ceiling is higher.

Yeah but i wont put any drainage, or electrics in untill i finish my bungalow. In the meantime i can power it with an extension lead. So, i build my shed now, no electrics or drainage. Then start my planning permission. Complete it and get it signed off. Then if i wanted to run some power and drainage to my shed and get it signed off. The one thing i do not want to do is screw up my CIL exemption.

Does dial up still exist? Either way im sure that wont be the case. The day BT becomes nationalised is the same day their planning on striking, so nothing will work. Pocster - I think that a combination of the two is the way to go. Get yourself a small network cab with a patch panel and network switch and route everything to it. Solid core with facepates or keystones to places where its needed and for everything else use stranded cable with both ends crimped to RJ45 connectors which can get connected to the network switch.

its manchester for nairobi , no wood boring bettles in uk and wood worm don,t like osb just dust them off -it will be fine bear in mind OSB is not thick enough to make shelves that will have weight on them,unless you going to have brackets every 12" needs to be 1"thick plank or blockboard

@Russell griffiths Adding 20mm of PIR to a build up with a U-value of 0.14 reduces it to U = 0.124. A reduction of 0.016 will save (very) much less than 1kWh/m2/year.

That's a nifty tool, A basic punch down tool would do the same job, just 8 times as slow. In the video their using a keystone module. That's not a bad way of doing the connection but it is still reliant on having a patch cable between the solid core cable and the device. Where as you can buy a RJ45 to connect straight on to the solid core, (they teeth are slightly different in the connector compared to standard connectors) The only downside to crimping the solid core cable is the lack of flexibility and the connection isn't as good, so constant wobbling may eventually break it. As for choosing the cable type. Personally i went for cat5 for the same reason PeterW said, the increase in speed isn't necessary in a home unless your streaming 4K video maybe or moving large data. But the bottle neck can then be your network switch or hub, or you could accidentally have used a cat5 cable somewhere in they system and forgot about it. My favorite approach is to use link aggregation on my home server using multiple cables.

That's a lovely build and a very helpful blog. Looking forward to spending a bit of time looking through that. ?

It will be interesting to know if this is required now to support the application, or will be conditioned for pre commencement. Could save the OP a bit of hassle and risk of £ spent if it's a pre commencement condition with app granted.

In my case yes. Having dutifully set it up for SAP and produced all the paperwork he wasn't interested. So after it was signed off I reset it all for PH levels.

Surely that's the shortest conceivable complete sentence. It is almost perfect, bettered only if it had punctuation. No?

So this exercise is more about me knowing is is correct then.

I’ve been where you are now Rus The initial sap is a waste of paper I went elsewhere for the final sap As Built and still scored 89 without MVRH solar PV I was truthful about everything Others perhaps arnt We had a planning condition that we had to score 24% higher the the national average We had water harvesting and a massive array of solar panels as part of our planning With decided not to fit either and exceed all insulation spec I thought Em we may have problems at the end Paid my 100 quid and received my my detailed report the following day The Sap is at best a rough guide

Are they doing the internal fit? If not, stairs are not in the scope of their supply.

1.4 for the roof would be terrible. Are you sure that was not 0.14 which is quite reasonable?

Just make sure the new outbuildings do comply with permitted development rules. If you are feeling rich it might be worth considering an application for a lawful Development certificate after building them but before starting the planning permission. I think the CIL may apply to large out buildings? If that applies to you check out the exemption for self builders. If the exemption applies you need the paperwork signed off before any work is done on site.

Here is someone who installed AC without getting PP and a neighbour complained after 3.5 years(eg just before the 4 year time limit on enforcement). https://www.revk.uk/2018/07/air-conditioning-at-home-planning.html Interesting read. For example... but he didn't need one in the end.

Basicslly DG fitters of old were on a price so it was bish, bash, bosh as quick as. Surveyors would under measure so the window fell in with no drama. Fitters just covered the huge gaps with trim. No foam or Compriband. (Check out White Gold on Netflix ? ). Have a look at what I did wrt my bathroom DG window. Nov 9 onwards. Miles better than it was but I wish I had removed the window and brought it further in. No draught now but the air space can still feel cold near the window.

@Ed Davies I re-found the article suggesting a structured approach to it I was thinking to start from: https://www.loxone.com/enen/how-to-lay-out-your-smart-home-distribution-board/ The price of those Future Automation enclosures though. Oh my. EDIT: For that matter, the price of the loxone Terminal Blocks to go in it are also fairly shocking. Looks like something AliExpress could serve up at a order of magnitude lower cost.

Ok here goes. Alot of effort to get the planning officer to allow me to extend my existing property to about 5 times it original size + double garage, in the Greenbelt... Split my extant permission into 2 houses with a slightly smaller combined footprint than my large extant permission. Stuck it back in, and got refused. To be fair i had sort of , maybe, bullied him a bit about my first application. (Got a hooker to come on to him in a bar. Do the bizz, and got her to get some photos of him snorting coke from her boobs. Told him i'd make sure that his wife got the pics.) Only kidding (or am i ?) Anyway, stuck it in for appeal, and got refused. The planning inspectorate said that the extant permission was not reason to override Green Belt Policy. Fair Enough. Anyway, my permission for my big extension included removing my rights for any other buildings, schedule 2 part E i think. I came on here and said that i was going to put in for permission for some items in my garden. ie: snooker room, pole dancing room, dog kennel, reptile house, chicken shed, an actual shed, greenhouse, potting shed, workshop, etc, etc etc. The list ended up quite long, and all covered by my removed part E. Phone conversation with my planning officer yesterday. "Build what you like under part E. Finish them all, and take a load of photo's of the various structures. Do it before you start your planning permission build, and i will attach all of the photo's to your file, so ther will be no prob" I said. Am i best to leave some time between completing them, and starting my planning permission ? "Nah" he said !!!!!!!! i have always said that planning officers are top fellas. !!! I don't know if the photo's had anything to do with it. I have asked him to put that in writing, so fingers crossed i can get that out of him in the next few days, and get started. If anybody want's to visit my lap dancing emporium, let me know.

Patrick, your neighbours are going to love you, i think after dropping a tree on them and now waking them up your going straight down when your time comes. ????

Considering that about 90%of my neighbours are this lot : I think I will deal with their complaints in the afterlife.

Mate of mine bought a house of her. I said put a blue plaque up, but then, most houses in Bucks and Berks could claim she slept there.

More intro. I’ll respond to any replies here but otherwise post in the appropriate parts of the forum. Conscious that I’m on transmit but, well, you don’t have to read it do you. We’ve primarily bought this property for the land, some 224 acres. We don’t yet have any specific applications in mind for it, at least not more than for a couple of acres. We would like to invite local farmers to graze their livestock (cattle but in particular pigs, we are in jamón ibérico de bellota territory and we have about 10k oak trees). Other than that, looking at, walking about on. Northern Europeans are not like the Spanish. We covet our castles, almost as if we are insular and want to repel the ‘other’. The Spanish are gregarious and like nothing more than to shout at each other from about 20mm away. Our Spanish friends think we’re mad. Our English friends are envious. We just seem to have a culturally different attitude towards space. We love people and resist solitude, but ‘our space’ remains compelling. We are in our mid-fifties so this kind of project is a (quoting Boris) ‘do or die’ opportunity. And look what happened there. We’ve been looking for the right place for a decade, driving around the whole of Spain, nearly 50 autonomous regions, every year for a month each summer. Only in 2018 did we find what we were looking for, our utopian Shangri-La. We are now the proud owners of a place that makes Stonehenge look like a ready-to-move-in Barratt home. But we have two lakes, three streams, a six bedroom ‘farmhouse’ and a separate ruina para reformar (ruin to rebuild). And enough land to detonate our own medium sized atomic bomb* without seriously alarming the neighbours. We have looked at a lot of regions before deciding on western Andalucía and only then started looking for properties. And then it took us four years to find just seven to look at. And when we found this dump we knew it was the one. All the others were better in every way except that we couldn’t justify demolishing them, they were too nice. But this one has the land and is a blank canvass. I will not think twice about taking a TS410 to a wall in this house, it is without any architectural or structural merit. I am an enthusiastic DIYer. I’m prepared to tackle anything within reason and I learn quickly. Mostly from my mistakes. But really this is a monumental shot in the dark for us. Most jobs take me about 17 times longer than a professional because I need to stop and stroke my beard (I don’t have a beard, that’s metaphorical). And I do have slightly more tools than previously advertised. We’ll need another shipping container. I just bought 1.5 miles of 50mm potable water pipe - man that is heavier than I expected. I am an innovator. I want to try new techniques, processes, materials, tools. I don’t mind a bit of risk. And I’m happy with a spade or a CAD system. I’ve got plans that make traditional developers roll their eyes but I ain’t a traditional developer. They know a whole lot more than I will ever know about how to profit from the construction of a conventional residential property. But we will, one day, wind up with a unique dream palace. Probably. Or a dump and us in bankruptcy. I am not a hippie; I don’t usually knit my own sandals out of lentils. But rural Spain comes with caveats, properties tend to be off-grid. So I am embracing this through the application of technology. I appreciate that this will be beyond the scope of this forum so I’ll concentrate more on the building oriented issues in my posts. But for anyone who might be interested, there will be an insinkerator processing kitchen scraps and other biomas to a black soldier fly larvae incubator which self harvest to a chicken coup where the roosting perches are mounted above hydrophobic glass which will automatically harvest chicken poop and pump it to an anaerobic bioreactor which will produce methane and carbon dioxide. Separately a pump will extract water from the lake which is used nightly by deer and boar as a drinking water source. I’m building the pre-filter in our garage in Cambridge right now. This will pass into a processing tank that will be fed with O3 (ozone) from a high voltage corona discharge O3 generator supplied by oxygen from an electrolysis unit and introduced into the untreated water via a nano bubble generator and Venturi. It will subsequently pass through a reverse osmosis filter and activated carbon purifiers and before entering the house as potable water, a UV-C irradiation chamber. The hydrogen from the electrolysis unit will be piped to the anaerobic digester where, under precise pH control via dosing pumps of sodium hydroxide and sulphuric acid, CO2 will be converted to CH4 which will then be compressed into used propane cylinders. The near pure methane will then be used to power a forced induction jet burner to top up the temperature of water in buried IBCs, encapsulated in CLC to power the underfloor heating system via a heat exchanger. And power a home made plancha for the shrimps. Right, all you builders out there, ignore this rhubarb. I need a solution to a problem and instead of paying someone ten times as much to achieve 10% of what I want, I’m going to do it myself. But the big challenges are those that the members of this forum tackle every day and I am just an amateur. I have only just touched the surface of what we are planning. Anyone interested in cellular lightweight concrete, watch this space. I know that we are going to enjoy this journey. You might not but you will have the luxury of ignoring (and not paying for) it. I really hope, on the other hand, that our ridiculous journey is interesting to you, and perhaps inspiring (or the opposite which might also be a service). And I really hope that I can learn from you experts because I really don’t even know what day it is. Cheers Al *not actively considering this.

Same price as secondhand walk on glazing. Is that the IT equivalent of making sure something is useful when you put it in a premade hole.

Won't Labour nationalise your network and insist that your neighbours can use it for nothing. Why worry about how fast the LAN is when we will be forced to use dial up because the repairs have not happened.

I'm going to enjoy this soooooooooo bloody much .... wait for it ......wwwwaaaait .... Stop over thinking it ...... Yesssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss, Get in !