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Where a design service like this is being supplied, it's appropriate to add VAT. If you could get everything on the same invoice, it should be zero rated. Can you have them issue a proforma invoice for the design and only invoice you properly later once they're ready to bill everything else? Whether they'll go along with something like that depends on what the likely delay will be between doing the design and invoicing you for completing the other items. Alternatively, could they invoice you for everything on one invoice, with a separate payment schedule taking into account the different stages?

May be more of a case that getting older is unhealthy.

Just had something very similar on a property near me and the builder went through a lateral drain whilst digging founds and didn’t spot it, and pouring the foundation they ended up with concrete in the drains. Cost £18,000 to resolve… Bigger concern is that your neighbour is digging over or near a lateral drain or sewer. If that is the case they need a build over agreement and your neighbour will need to do that at their cost not yours. Minimum will be repair and lintels, worst case is they need to move the drain or re-lay it.

I think your architect has picked up on design features from those other houses but has taken the idea just a bit too far. I think if it was simplified a bit it would get through and be cheaper to build as well. On another issue: Our house has some tall triangular windows in wood and maintenance is a pain. A scaffold tower helps but the steps make it hard to move from one window to the next. I would go for metal clad or upvc.

Our design is about as far from the local street scene as you can get. Think chocolate box 16th Century cottages right next to ours: a sharp Scandy design. The key thing - for us - was the micropolitics. In this case we knew (through our architect) of the LPA planner's preferences. And he (the planner) has a weak spot for passivhaus design and sustainability. So, without promising that we would work to that standard, we promised to aim for it. All the informal local feedback we had was about the passivhaus design - and the built in sustainability. A SUDS design for example that had a water garden built in to the roof discharge, leading to a small attenuation pond , its overflow goes into a pond set on the existing spring line. I'm not arguing that that's the route you should take; merely to look for the planner's triggers. And then use them. And you can get a hint of those by reading his (hers) Delegated Reports. Worth the effort every time.

These properties are within half mile of my plot. I didn't get any objections because my property isn't overlooked or overlooks any other. This style isn't normal of the architects design, however we were trying to make it work within the confines of the footprint pretty much. This is why it steps back on several areas. What we were originally going for was to bring the front of the house inline with the centre left gable and just have one prominent gable where the front door is. The architect then stipulated that this may be more expensive than demolition and rebuild. The house is currently a bungalow. Interior has 11ft ground floor. The loftspace is currently 10.5ft to the ridge and we wanted to go upstairs. There is also an annex atthe back of the house that is simply joined in the proposed drawings.

?? @Ferdinand changing the name is easy but you pay for someone to paint the name on per letter so it needs to be shorter!

I think both. There should not be condensation under the composite cladding, so MVHR should be irrelevant. I should add that I have found reps, even at exhibitions, to be rather ignorant of their own products, as well as their aspect of building. I expect this is because there are very different skills in selling and technical understanding, and they may not have been briefed on what doesn't suit in selling. Easy though if your product is wonderful. How so? The cladding sits on a steel purlin but then there is the layer of foam. The only link to the outside is the screw that comes from outside and into the purlin. On some cladding systems even that is partly concealed on the outside. Some very approx sums: About 3 screws per m2, and they are say 8mm diameter on the outside 50mm2 per 1000x 1000mm: ). 0.005% But heat on the inside is contacting the screw not the head, so even less. Composite is good. You can also use built up systems, where any thickness of fibre insulation can be added. This may be the only option if the roof is thick (and heavy) and there is no crane access. PIR is more idiot proof but more difficult at details. PIR is almost impossible to change if damaged by , say, a falling branch. On cladding: I recommend only buying top quality products. This may be an unfamiliar name but big on the continent, or a big name. The cladding you see in agricultural adverts is usually much lower quality, in thickness, galvanising and colour coating (product and thickness). Only PIR or rockwool type filling is suitable, and cheaper products may have a more flammable material. Also there is 'non prime' cladding': 'seconds'..don't go there for a house. For plain metal sheeting, some suppliers offer the best down to the worst.....depends what the client wants. More than you wanted to know at this stage perhaps, but important if looking at prices.

Personally, i am not keen on the design, and i think it looks like an expensive and pain in the butt build. However, the planning officer is a typical tosser. As has been said if there is no particular street scene than what is the problem ? His own view. IMO he should not be allowed a view. It either meets policies or it don't.

It's not a pretty elevation at all, can't imagine there's many areas that would fit in with! I would have a discussion with the planners first - there's 6 different window geometries on the front elevation, looks like it could be easily rationalised, the proportions of the walls around the windows is also very clunky looking, is this style something that you've asked for but isn't necessarily what the architect usually does? Strikes me as a bit off in terms of the detail and style...

We applied to the council for our name early... have had it for at least three months now, and still not started on site, except for services. Turned out electricity and water like names when you come to get your services installed.

The bituthene liner seems to be an accepted detail for a solid wall. I only found it in a blog by a self-builder in Aberdeenshire, and it seemed 1. to be a standard procedure and a great idea. 2. to be accepted by Building Control. We have not submitted the design yet, and welcome any comments from anyone who has done it or knows more. There seem to be several manufacturers and specification levels. As it is not a dam or water tank I think the thinnest will do fine. Adhesive is applied to the wall first, then it is stuck on to the bottom metre. it should overlap with the dpm at some stage, and underside of slab seems appropriate. This photo seems to be inside a water tank or retaining wall , and there is still a concrete slab and dpm to go in. The cheapest I have seen so far is "Hyload" £186 inc VAT for 15m roll, and including primer, so at about £10/m is a considerable cost. Probably tricky to fir to a masonry (not very flat) wall.

Did you end up with a Manx Cat?

Looks like poor workpersonship to me.

No. But with some qualification. There is a good technique of tearing and patching wallpaper - the idea is that the tear feathers the edge, and while the patch won't disappear under close examination, used discreetly it can be an appropriate way to get around awkward situations. A good tear is less obvious that a bad cut. Lining paper will probably make the best of this, and it won't work at all on heavily embossed of blown vinyl papers. Caulking the gaps is a sign of desperation (though there are situations where things do get tricky for even the best decorator). Most caulks shrink a little as they dry, so a second application can be necessary. Some people make the mistake of thinking that the paint itself will act as a filler for small gaps - it won't. Also, many people would say that if proper wallpaper is to be applied over the lining paper, the lining paper should be hung perpendicularly to the proper wall paper - ie. the lining paper is hung horizontally. But why are the walls being lined? Are there defects, or variable surfaces on the walls? If it is simply going to be painted over, then to my mind it will always look like painted wallpaper - I'd rather have a poor wall with a good paint job. If the walls are in poor condition, lining may be the best thing to do, but you will see the joins. But if possible, just paint the walls. If it's new plaster, give it time to dry, then apply a thinned coat of paint to prime it, followed by a couple of normal coats.

Unfortunately, decorating seems to be one of those trades that if you own a paint brush, you can call yourself One. I have seen some shocking work from people who i know have been doing it for years. Post some pics, lets have a look.

Your complaint about their work is subjective, why not upload some photos into this thread to illustrate the state of your walls before they started and then another showing the job in progress. Is it possible the walls are in a bad state of repair and your expectation about what decoration can cover up is unrealistic? Your request for advice would be helped if you used less emotive English, if they turned up on time and worked a full day then I do not how their work ethic could be described as "absolutely disgusting".

My point is that there are trade-offs and no easy answers whatever technologies we decide to employ to reach some kind of suitable environmental balance (I'm personally cautious about using the tired net-zero phrase here. I think it's problematic because in a lot of environmental science, the term 'environmental impact' has come to mean only a consideration of greenhouse gas and/or global warming potential, but our use of resources has many other consequences that unfortunately get ignored - until it comes back and bites us further down the road). It's very easy to be dudious about statements without backup figures and one of the real problems we face is a lack of transparency so it's almost impossible to make a fully informed decision beyond some headline figures, or a simplistic single goal. Whilst on an individual level, a heat pump using, for instance (see this example study for figures), almost 10 times the amount of copper (40kg v 3kg), twice the amount of other metals, including aluminium and steel, almost 3 times the energy derived from natural gas (ca. 1400MJ v just under 500MJ), and nearly 2x the amount of electricity (504MJ v 294MJ), may not seem like much, as soon as you multiply that by lets say a rough 1.5 million units a year in the UK, not including the rest of the world, then you potentially end up with consequent issues elsewhere in the eco system. Regarding the greening of the grid, yes it has made significant steps, but just as with EVs, its a mistake to simply look at point of use figures because there is still a significant proportion of the heat pump efficiency that merely makes up for the inefficiencies of the grid. But again knowledge an understanding of this is lacking, even in some circles where, in my view, people should know better, they simply brush it off as irrelevant to the overall goal. Sometimes they even go as far as to allude to renewable energy being free so we should just build massive over capacity - yet this ignores the energy and environmental cost of the infrastructure and activity required to build and maintain the over-capacity. Much of this simply goes back to the principle that we should first be reducing consumption and improving efficiencies, then looking at what remains to deal with using technologies. This would ultimately be the most environmentally friendly way to do it, surely?

Ha, I meant not overheated ?

I had the same restriction as mine was a Class Q PD Conversion, so no opportunity to insulate around the outside of the columns. If you are only getting a small amount of insulation around yours you need to give this some serious thought. Steel conducts heats 22 times better than concrete, so the equivalent cold bridge, if it were in concrete, would be 22 times the size. With your current plan I don't see how you are going to avoid condensation on the steel frame, and possibly forming within your walls. You can see the base of the columns wrapped on mine, but this just thermally breaks the UFH from the columns so it doesn't pull the heat directly out of the floor to the ground, but it hasn't broken the cold bridge from the column to the ground. As you say this is almost impossible. My internal columns ended up full encased in a sprayed on, closed cell foam insulation to exclude them from the thermal envelope and ensure no moisture could get to them. Here's a before and after.

I would try the council naming dept as they have to approve names to get them onto the post office database. See if they will let you do that now. We didn't live on site but frequently had vat receipts sent to the delivery address instead of our rental, so we put up a post box on the fencing. The postman probably found it easier to find "Land south of the church" than our final official address. Even now PayPal and Amazon have "(house on right of church)" in the address field to try and avoid problems.

I'd be inclined to start sending some Mr Whippys through, may get them to rethink their strategy and fix it schnell machen?‍♂️

It's probably a clay pipe they have broken then and don't know how to fix it?

why..?? We’ve had these since the 1900’s and never had issues so why start now ..??

10m pipe run for a monobloc ASHP. Further for a split system (up to 50m).

Shelly have a couple of humidity options. They're nice because they need very little tinkering to get them up and running. You can get started with their own built in web interface, but they can also push their data to whatever device is being used for logging via HTTP or MQTT. There is a battery driven wireless sensor - https://shellystore.co.uk/product/shelly-ht-white/, but they sell an adapter to run it off a usb cable. Not the best option to sit permanently under a floor though. You can also combine their basic wifi switch with a humidity sensor (https://shellystore.co.uk/product/shelly-1/, https://shellystore.co.uk/product/shelly-temp-addon/ and https://thepihut.com/products/am2302-wired-dht22-temperature-humidity-sensor)

Funnily enough that's one feature I currently don't use at all so far. The mvhr has whole house humidity and I find that sufficient for the simple things this far. What are you connecting it back to? There's several 1-wire options, or I'd look at what's well supported in esphome I've used BME280 in microcontroller projects professionally, but wouldn't particularly recommend it.

+1 for natural wood, I got a sample of the aluminium vulcan board tbh I was a wee bit disappointed.

Scary! Ruswood was way over when I priced a few years back. I ended up getting my cedar from travis perkins of all places who sourced it from a supplier in Glasgow.

How the fossil fuel era ends – and four possibilities for what follows Ever cheaper wind and solar power means the decline of coal, oil and gas is unstoppable. The trillion-dollar question is how, and how quickly, their demise comes about ENVIRONMENT 4 August 2021 By Graham Lawton David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images When will the fossil fuel era end? While we don’t know exactly how the energy transition will pan out, the fossil fuel age is ending as it began, as we learn to exploit a vast, cheap, easy-to-use energy resource that is self-evidently superior to the existing options. Now, it is wind and solar power. “The peak of the fossil fuel era is here or hereabouts,” says Kingsmill Bond, a strategist at energy think tank Carbon Tracker. “The plateau is going to last a bit, but then go off a cliff.” How high the cliff is and what is at the bottom depends on which of the scenarios available to us we choose. For the various fossil fuels, however, it will be first in, first out. “Coal is finished,” says Andreas Goldthau at the University of Erfurt in Germany. Regulatory pressure, changing economies and the competitiveness of renewables are doing for old king coal. Energy special How we can transform our energy system to achieve net-zero emissions Fatih Birol interview: Using energy isn’t evil – creating emissions is How to understand world energy use – in 10 graphs Even where governments have tried to prop up or revive coal, as in Poland and the US under President Trump, they have failed. “The question is not how coal ends,” says Goldthau. “It’s more about how we manage the transition to give workers and mining communities a smooth landing.” That’s especially relevant in China, India and Indonesia, the biggest remaining coal-burners. According to a road map by the International Energy Agency (IEA), often seen in the past as an apologist for fossil fuels, old-fashioned, dirty coal power should account for 1 per cent of global energy output at most by mid-century if we are to hit net zero. Oil will stick around for longer. “The reality is, the world is going to need oil for decades to come,” said Occidental Petroleum CEO Vicki Hollub at the Climate Science and Investment Conference in New York in May. “There’s still going to be an oil market in 2050,” says Goldthau. “But it’s going to be much smaller.” The IEA forecasts a decline from 90 million barrels a day in 2019 to 24 million barrels a day in 2050, mostly driven by a switch to electric transport. This residual use of oil – to power some trucks, ships, planes and hard-to-decarbonise heavy industries, and to make petrochemicals and plastics – will be compatible with net-zero carbon emissions as long as we use carbon capture technology, says Goldthau. But even these uses will fall into the arms of the sun and air. “Slowly but surely, they are going to find alternatives to fossil fuels, though airplanes are going to be a massive headache and I think the last man standing is the plastics industry,” he says. Natural gas, now used extensively for domestic cooking and heating, electricity generation and in heavy industry, will follow the same declining trajectory as oil, albeit with a timeline that keeps it in the mix for even longer. According to the IEA road map, between now and 2050 gas demand will fall by just 55 per cent to 1750 billion cubic metres a day, replaced either by clean electricity or piped hydrogen gas. Exactly how and when the last drop of oil or whiff of gas is extracted is unknowable. But Carbon Tracker recently totted up the global potential of solar and wind and found that there is 100 times more renewable energy available than the world actually needs. Some 60 per cent of it can already be exploited economically, with that proportion rising to 100 per cent by 2030. Even big oil companies accept that their industry is slowly dying: Shell predicts an expiry date around 2070. Bond sees a day when people visit former oil refineries at the weekend, much as we now sip cappuccinos next to the gentrified canals and warehouses of a bygone industrial age. “Even the IEA, the great defender of the fossil fuel incumbency, is saying no new stuff, peak fossil fuel in 2019, decline from here on down,” he says. “If that isn’t the end of the fossil fuel era, I don’t know what is.” FOUR ENERGY FUTURES In 2019, Goldthau and his colleagues suggested four ways the energy transition could play out geopolitically – though, as ever, no one can say for certain which way things will go. 1. Big green deal A global consensus on the need for the energy transition leads to international agreement and close cooperation between nations. Clear policy signals encourage investors to take their money away from fossil fuels and put it in low-carbon technologies. Green finance deals help lower-income nations and petrostates with the transitions they need to make. This is the only scenario that hits net zero by 2050, the team concludes. 2. Dirty nationalism National energy security wins out over tackling climate change. Nations develop inward-looking policies that favour renewable energy sources where they are cheaply available, but also exploit whatever fossil-fuel resources there are. Global markets fragment, breaking the momentum towards a global green energy transition. Efforts to limit global warming to 1.5°C fail. 3. Technology breakthrough There is significant progress towards net zero as wind and solar keep getting cheaper, aided by further breakthroughs in battery and grid technologies. But the two tech leaders, China and the US, increasingly vie for global supremacy through green tech. They refuse to share technology and key resources such as rare earth metals, dividing the world into blocs. Europe and Russia become increasingly marginalised. 4. Muddling through A lack of cooperation and planning mean the world fails to limit warming to 1.5°C. However, renewables do get cheaper and grow fast enough to bankrupt many big fossil fuel companies, causing financial chaos. Different parts of the world, such as the EU, the US and China, increasingly follow their own agendas, with existing economic, geopolitical and energy imbalances reinforced. Ash from fossil fuel burning seeps into waste water at a thermal power station in Belchatów, Poland Kacper Kowalski/Panos Pictures EFFICIENCY’S THE WORD The more that can be done to limit the amount of energy we use, the more feasible the task of converting the world’s energy systems to meet a target of net-zero emissions by 2050 will be. The International Energy Agency’s recent report on how to reach net zero envisages overall global energy use falling 8 per cent by 2050, despite serving a global economy twice as big and 2 billion more people than today. Achieving this will require a string of measures to improve efficiency and check demand. This means everything from insulating houses better, to reduce energy requirements during cold winters when there is less solar power available, to making appliances more efficient and encouraging people to drive less even if they have electric cars. The danger is that big increases in energy demand from some sectors, such as video streaming, cryptocurrencies, gaming and private jet flights, could cancel out any gains. Many companies justify using more energy because they get it from renewable sources. But if increased energy demand is met using existing renewable energy sources that could otherwise be displacing fossil fuel generation, it doesn’t get us any closer to net zero. To make progress, companies must build additional wind or solar projects. A few, such as Apple, are now doing this.

Think we are going to stick with gas boiler set up for now after further thought. Concerned about the noise from the fan on the ASHP. Not really the overall dB but the pitch, think it would be unfair on the neighbours

Yes. Why I did it for a couple of years when I needed extra cash. Small capital outlay, very cheap insurance, and everything fitted in the boot of a mid 90s Corsa. Could earn 3 times the money in Harrow compared to Hemel Hempstead. Only got thrown off one job, but that was nothing to do with the decorating.

Was true in the private school educational system, but matron usually managed to remove them.

Bump.

Bump.

I would be very surprised if using an open coal fire was considered healthy.

1/ it's what Loxone Tree runs on 2/ I designed the house for me, not for you, nor your 93 year old mother. The whole point of doing self build is to get your own building that meets your own needs and wants. I believe I can put whatever wires I want in the wall and not have to justify it to the homogenous homes thought police.