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Water is deepest at 900mm, so it was handy that SW gave the cheapest road crossing quote. I installed a black duct for the electricity, all the way from the joint hole, to my meter box, with a draw string, so SSE just had to pull their cable through and terminate it. I installed the grey duct and SWA phone cable that Open reach had supplied from the joint hole up into the house. No complaints from anybody.

There's probably good reason smoke and CO2 alarms "protrude", to do I imagine with air/smoke flow. Having them "flush" could cost you seconds when it counts.

Isn't that what washing up bowls are for?

Very impressed with my aluminium, powder coated stuff, extremely well made and fits the look of the house well.

The design is not controversial. I would be very surprised if they could find good reason to refuse.

Seems strange when we have a housing shortage (as long as the plot is big enough?) and the council get more in council tax.

A mouse or bankvole or two every night, a rat or three every week, baby ducklings when available, the odd mature wild duck, moorhen feet and beaks in the summer, distressingly - swallows and redwing in season Avoids GCNs - bugger- and dislikes frog . And still has the temerity to moan like an oft abused refugee when we get up in the morning- got us well trained

They need to see the smoke to work and the smoke will not get into a recess easily. I have Aico and they are fine. I guess yours will be more obvious with the mirrored ceilings everywhere?

I don't see why it cannot be replaced. It is not listed and neither are you in a conservation area. Get a decent scheme designed and submit it, as I cannot see why it should be refused. What the planners and neighbours "like" or dislike has little bearing on things, it is a matter of policy and a refusal would need robust justification.

I think there is only 1 phase as the surrounding electricity poles have 2 wires.

There are smaller discrete alarms but are retrofit only as they are not hard wired. Ask your BCO if they will accept them. They also come with a recess fitting that makes them even smaller. Search Cavius or Lumi-PlugIn

Could clad it with something like this which is low maintenance Other option is a Weber render.

You can soften PLA in a cup of hot tea :-) For Halloween I printed some stencils flat (1.5mm thick) and then dipped them in hot water to make them soft and formed them over the pumpkin we were going to carve. Few seconds later they set up to match the shape of the pumpkin.

i ran a course of marmox under kit leaf. http://www.marmox.co.uk/products/thermoblock and armatherm under the steels https://www.armatherm.co.uk/applications/armatherm-column-base-thermal-bridging-solution/

Stair box is very good But you will need to be very certain of your measurements If you use a local timber merchant and the stairs don’t fit It’s there problem not yours Hardwood timber frames are very expensive and require a lot of looking after The supplier I have come across is John Carr Ive a friend who has a workshop and makes timber frames for a living But isn’t using timber on his due to maintenance

I am almost sure we will use CAT6 to all our switches and power anything there with PoE if you used a deep back box you could get enough processing power behind an ordinary switch to do most anything! I am experimenting with mesh networks, based on THESE, and THESE self powered switches to see what I might make them do around the house.

Perhaps not what you mean but.. Standard lighting wiring doesn't provide a neutral at light switches (the blue wire is used as switched live). You might consider running three core + earth down to switches so a neutral can be provided. This might allow a wider variety of smart devices to be fitted in the switch box.

I think this is where function should override form. Think of what it's doing! Just fit Aico and be done with it.

The whole voice recognition thing poses a fair few privacy and potential legal conundrums. It does seem clear that speech recognition that is built-in to a device, and which doesn't rely on powerful external processing power, just doesn't really work very well yet, as anyone with this feature built-in to a non-internet connected car can probably verify (my experience with Toyota and BMW systems was that they were pretty hopeless).

And you believe that?

One thing to do is strip the fan and clean the blades properly. We had a big ventilation fan that was very noisy until it was stripped and cleaned and the rotor was rebalanced using a file and it was much quieter. Other option is to make some square deflectors and fit them at angles just in front of the unit to try and absorb and deflect some of the sound.

Or They know they can't. Almost the definition of agricultural engineering.

Progress on site has been a bit slow so we have combined the last two weeks together, and also the guys packed up early on Friday for their long and well earned Christmas break. Over the last two weeks you can see them taking down the last of the shuttering and getting it off site. So that is the end of the poured concrete for us which is a big milestone and you can now see the full extent of the basement / foundations. The next step was to put a fillet of mortar all around the outside of the kicker to get a smooth edge for the membrane, and then prime the outside of the concrete in black. Then they have started to put on the external tanking membrane which has been a real challenge in the wet and cold. At one point they resorted to putting the membrane in the digger cab and running the heater to get it flexible and warm. They managed to get the left hand side wall completed and the first job next year will be to put the French drain around that side and backfill with clean stone so they can get around to the back and continue the tanking. They then need to build the internal walls out of blockwork and then the beam and block floor ready for the Timber Frame. So given a really wet autumn progress is pretty good; the guys have worked really hard and though it has taken longer than we thought, we are pretty happy. Now it all depends on the weather in January! The waterproofing guys inspected the concrete and declared it 'near perfect' so looking good for the warranty. Also the BCO and Structural Warranty folks all seem happy so that is comforting. They seem impressed, as we are, with the quality of the work and the attention to detail - which, given the weather, is a huge credit to the guys on site. And whatever the weather they are cheerful and work really hard. Are there any convention out there on how you treat your contractors? - we make sure to drop off cake or cookies to them about once a week, and even mince pies for Christmas! It also looks like we have finally got some drawings to sign off from the TF company so just waiting on our SE to agree and we can push the button to get it into production - so likely to see it in Feb. Similarly with the windows - we have a complete schedule that looks good and though it has taken ages the window supplier, the TF supplier and our Architect all see to be in agreement - fingers crossed they all fit!!!! And they are on 12 - 14 weeks lead time so likely in March! So wishing all of you following our build a Happy Christmas and we are looking forward to further progress and an exciting New Year! On the video front see https://www.dropbox.com/sh/th9f6e3cel5dm1q/AAAfsWdAH184J75bCNUUtzVra?dl=0 for the weekly videos (Week 12 & Week 13 just added - but not too exciting). And as an extra special Christmas treat the entire 13 weeks of 2019 Groundworks videos are compacted down to a 3 minute video summary named 2019 ( https://www.dropbox.com/s/jbvjhdxn1dyrufm/2019.mp4?dl=0 ) Its much too quick to capture the detail but it give a really rapid view of the progress we have made this year - starting after the demolition in October. So still a way to go - but moving forward is so much better than having your soul ever so slowly destroyed by the Planning process! So From This To This

So it’s almost 5 years since I bought my little corner of the national park and for the first time this evening after another weekend of slog I looked back at the house and thought.......shit......it’s actually beginning to look close to being finished. Then I remembered that tomorrow sees the delivery of another 120 tonnes of top soil (that’s over 500 tonnes now!) and the landscaping needs another month of graft. Oh and then there’s seeding and planting, the culvert needs building, driveway....OK just loads still to do ? But for just a brief moment in the evening sun I could see the finish line in the distance.

The real problem here is that the methodology for determining cylinder heat loss uses a tapping cycle that is nothing like real-world use, if the cylinder is kept hot most of the time. As an example, I bought a 260 litre thermal store that had a stated heat loss of 1.8 kWh/24 hours. In reality, when run at 65°C, the measured heat loss was over 3.5 kWh/24 hours. That was with a double thickness sprayed foam insulation layer that I'd asked the manufacturer to add, which should have reduced the spec figure of 1.8 kWh/24 hours a bit. The heat loss was so great that our services room reached temperatures of around 40°C, and the inside face of the door leading to it cracked quite badly. I added an extra layer of insulation, by making up an octagonal box of PIR foam, which was foamed to the tank, with all the joints taped, and that reduced the loss to around 2.5 kWh/24 hours, but it still didn't meet the spec. Reducing the temperature to 55°C reduced the loss to around the spec figure. I can say from experience of having both a very well insulated thermal store and a Sunamp in the same location, doing the same job, that the real world heat losses from the Sunamp are far lower than those from the thermal store. The 9 - 10 kWh Sunamp UniQ we have has a stated heat loss of 0.738 kWh/24 hours, so less than 1/3rd of the measured heat loss we had from the "super insulated" thermal store, accepting that, at 210 litres equivalent capacity, it's a bit smaller. I doubt that any 210 litre UVC has a real world heat loss much below 1.5 kWh/24 hours, though, which still makes the Sunamp twice as efficient.

Was driving home this evening when I got stuck in a jam on M25, as I was musing out of the window I noticed an ASHP on a farm building and observed the cable tray running from it to the building which, from where I was, looked crowded. It struck me that we have not made provision for the ASHP connections to the new house as yet and that I should get this aspect of the scheme into my head and onto some drawings. It looks like you need to get two well insulated water pipes, inlet and return, one condense drain, one power cable and probably a control cable, which I guess might be CAT6 or something simpler. A couple of thoughts struck me: Is there any limit to the length of the water pipes? Is it sensible to put them, the water pipes, into the slab, insulated, or run them outside the building. (I think that things which look like an after thought, such as pipes outside buildings should be designed out if possible) Can the condense drain run into the soak away or must it be piped to the sewer? Any thoughts anyone.

Thanks guys. You are just juggling so many balls in the air during design and construction that you are bound to drop one or two. In this case we used 110mm pipe foulwater pipe as an access path from the service cupboard out beyond the slab. I mistake that I made was using a normal 87½° bend to bring it up into the service cupboard instead of a Drainage 87.5° Rest Bend, or even a 45° and cutting the stub off at an angle. The normal bend has a radius at centre of around 110mm and 160 at the outer curve. This was enough to get a 25mm MDPE DCW feed up the other access pipe. It's really touch and go as to whether installing an ASHP will be cost effective, and there's no urgency. I was going to wait until autumn when I've seen how the house performs during both winter and summer before making the call. The issue that we now face if that Jan is now in JFDI mode and wants to get all of the outside paving done by a local contractor including paving over the run where we'd need to bury the pipe. It's just not worth having to dig up a trench across the new paving, so I guess that the sensible thing to do now is to fork out the £500 or so for the proper insulated pipe and get our paving guy lay it under the paving whether we end up using it or not. Time get the 9" angle grinder out. I've got to clear the concrete perimeter up the pipe -- yes, I know that I should have left a length of ESP along the trench line and had the concrete about 25mm depth over it, but again -- a Tardis moment. PS. Concrete trenching all done and outside of access pipe exposed. A combination of a 9" Angle grinder with diamond disc and a decent SDS drill to put "stamp tear perforations" across the bit wanted to chop out made fairly easy work of it. As Jan pointed out, the reason for our JDFI (army acronym -- Just F***ing Do It) mode is that we want our VAT back as the paving plan was part of our landscaping and implementing is a planning condition so the work is zero VAT rated if we do it before sign-off.

I did all the first fix plumbing in Hep20, and I've never done any plumbing before. We have a manifold system and it really is pretty easy. Watch a few of the videos and mine this site. Lots of information. I think the trickiest part was arranging the runs in the ceiling void. As we have four bathroom/en suites and single pipes to each fitting I tried to avoid tangling the pipes and they need supporting properly at regular intervals. Also if you have posi joists the metal edges can be quite sharp so need to take care when pulling the pipe through. Our ceiling above the manifolds looked like Clapham Junction!

Cladding Do something really horrible with the cladding, then ask the neighbours/planners if they still love your house.