Leaderboard

Perfect, it definitely sounds like it isn't more expensive than radiators and probably easier too. Gives me something to go back to OH when he starts complaining about costs! I've made a note of the suppliers suggested. Agree we need to make sure we are well insulated, it would be great if we could ditch the rads upstairs completely- like that suggestion. Also useful to know about keeping the whole downstairs on the same zone, all sounds completely doable. We are in between architects at the moment so once we sign up with the new architect we can discuss this all with them. Feeling a lot more confident about it now. Been told plans should be approved this week, so fingers crossed! Great blog @Thorfun your house looks like it is going to be fabulous!

So the technical analysis. The wheel is rotating at 32 rpm, so with the 17:1 gearing my motor / generator is doing 544 rpm. At that speed it is generating a disappointingly low 3 volts. I didn't attempt a proper load to measure what power it would produce as I know it would be tiny. If I short circuit the motor, the wheel does slow down slightly, but not as much as I would have thought. I think (certainly for this speed) the motor I have is a poor candidate as a generator, but it was the only one I had. My flow rate looked poor to me, so I re measured it. I am getting barely 1 litre per second. But it's not a pipe blockage or lack of water, that is all it will deliver at that height. Drop the pipe down to the bed of the burn and it's back to 2 litres per second. Baked bean tins are poor "buckets" for this application. Roughly 50% of the time the delivered water hits the side of the tin rather than go in it, which will add nothing to the rotation of the wheel. conventional square buckets are what's needed with any overspill just dropping down onto the bucket below. I am unsure if I will take this further, it does at the moment seem like it's never going to be a source of useful power. I might look at turbine ideas instead?

Insulate the hell out of the house and just have UFH on the ground floor. Forget about upstairs - maybe electric towel rads in bathrooms.

Make sure your ground floor is well insulated, 150 to 200mm PIR. After that you need a 6/7/8 port manifold, pump and mixer, the UFH pipe, wiring centre and a set of actuators. Pricing as above I did mine £1100 most my bits came from Outsourced Energy. Treat the whole ground floor as a single zone, operated from a single thermostat, something like a wired Salus SQ610. Try to go clever with phone app control and loads of zones, you will rack up costs and they are pointless as the time to switch on and have a warm house can be 6 or so hours. Keep it simple the boiler or heat pump will be happy and so will your pocket now and in the future. If you try to split the UFH heating you will need a buffer. Do the floor at 150 to 200mm pipe centres. Download LoopCad and have a play and design yourself.

The guidance is all online here

I have a similar sized house. When we renovated (last year) we installed UFH downstairs, radiators upstairs. The UFH kit (pipes, manifolds, actuators, stats, control unit etc) came in at £1200 (supply only, we self-fitted). We did get a quote of £500 for someone else to fit it for us. Boiler, UVC and 5x radiators upstairs came in at just over £5,000 (fitted). I never broke it down but I guess £1200 wouldn't be too far off what a set of downstairs rads + pipework would have cost to have fitted too.

They normally come pre-primed so it won't make much difference. If you are doing it all in summer then this will help you. At the end of the day the timber is going to shrink - just leave it for a year and then sort it all out with caulk when it has stabilised.

@Tennentslager - alas we don't live together so I can't take the photos at the moment, but can update this post in due course. But basically, if you are in the loft, you can see the wooden rafters and the underside of the slate tiles - nothing else. I'm assuming the gaps where I can see light from outside coming through the slates is normal, perhaps they are not all perfectly smooth etc, but they are all overlapping so no water appears to be coming through. @joe90 - that's great, thank you, I'll check the link too. Sorry for the delay responding to you both, I don't appear to get email notifications from this forum when people reply (will look for settings now whilst I'm hear).

Best bit if advise ever

Theres trade advertisers on ebay still advertising kits at the same price as they were at the beginning of the year. Theres a number of sellers advertising various Renusol mounting parts. Midsummer have restrictions on Renusol parts but no restrictions on Fastensol mounting, if youre happy buying chinese. Clearly things are busy but I dont think its non functioning. Based on the fact that people didnt start buying PV until the sun came out, probably best to forget your PV for now and buy insulation. Once everyone starts buying insulation in the autumn, buy your PV

Perhaps not much cost in materials, but the time is an issue, it's yet another project I could do without right now! I was pondering that option this morning. It's a premade timer hatch casing and ladder so fixed dimensions. It's annoying as the available joist opening is 1180x750ish. I wanted to put in a Dollar Hobby ladder which needs 1200x700 opening - just 2cm too large! So our builder went for the next size down (Lyte LELW3) which requires 1130x 550 opening, and only has 510mm clear width inside the casement. I could temporarily remove the hatch I guess but I the it will result in a lot of making good. Ho hum. Let's see what the return shipping cost is and maybe I'll suck it up

An Oscar 600 offroad is about £650 a week ex VAT for the hire, a spider crane is roughly the same. An MRTA4/6 is about £350 per week ex VAT. There will also be a cost for the delivery and collection of about £150/£200 each way that will need to be factored into any cost calculations. The MRTA4 and the forklift/telehandler attachment is generally the best option and what we find tends to work best on most self builds. But you do need to be aware of the lifting table, as 600KG weight lift is 0.5m without boom extension, you need to take this into account and the height being lifted as well (especially if lifting from outside), as you may need the bigger 800 offroad or the 1000 plus or the 1400 but you need to be really aware with these as they are solid wheels and you'll need solid ground for them to work on. In addition the weight of these needs to be taken into account, as well as the window weight. It will require scaffolding amendments but these are generally used for the larger items, most other windows we will distribute to the relevant rooms and use the largest opening upstairs for example, to lift the entire pallet load to that area. As they are 1st-floor windows, which are usually packed together. On heavy items, which are generally quite large in width and height, we will also use the MRTA811

I’ve used Hilti green lasers for years One feature I find invaluable is the scanning feature Click the receiver three times and it will find parallel Up to 100 meters Invaluable in bright light

It’s years old, I would expect to pay £450 for a new one.

Outside rotating level with a receiver inside any laser that does two different planes at the same time.

Thanks Joe, much appreciated 👍

Hi Ruggers Weather comp is not new tech, used in Europe for at least the last 25 years. I was in your mindset before we started our build, to the point we installed enough back boxes for a Heatmiser thermmostat in every room and bathroom. However, once you build to Passiv level insulation and airtightness, you will find that the house, as a whole keeps the heat in. Trying to seperate rooms as zones is very difficult to near impossible, in fact, over heating the first floor is probably a bigger concern, as is any room with South facing windows. If I did it all again I would fit air conditioning units and use them to heat in winter anc cool in Summer, powered by PV. as much as possbile. I ended up with a UVC because we wanted the ability to run three showers at the same time. in reality it rarely happens, and a 222 would almost certainly have done the job, without the stadning losses of a cylinder. Yes, we are on PDHW with a solar cylinder, so has two coils, both connected to the boiler, so our re heat time is approx 12-15 mins. As others have said, the other reason we ended up with a cylinder was to have somewhere to divert excess solar PV to. We dont use any gas to heat water from about April - November, and we are in the Lake District. I did look at using a cylinder from ACV that is in effect a cyliner in a cylinder, and the 'jacket' water is used to heat the domestic water, so that would mean we couldhave used PV to heat both the heating water and shower water, but I struggled to find any plumbers/heating engineers with nay experience of using them. It would seem we ware about 20-30 years behind Europe in our approach to heating houses. We fitted a Belgian MVHR system, and it is normal fot it to integrate with the heating and colling system and also the window bilnds etc. to control shading/heating/cooling of the building as a whole. Not that we have, but we should have!!

Atag manual has all the numbers, snapshot attached

I didn't go decentralised in the end, but did install two units instead of one. A small and a large unit. The small one does the two bedrooms and two en-suites. I only have to boost the small one when we use the shower.

Almost ready to cover up with APR and plasterboard. I used Kilmat as @Nickfromwales suggested to help with any noise. The clips are 40mm clips used on 32mm pipe with foam tape wrapped around to reduce noise transfer. The pipe exits the wall within a 100mm square from the floor and the wall. At the other end you can see the pipe exit at around 500mm from the floor and with H and C written just above where I am going to send the water feeds through. I think those holes are 60mm higher than the waste hole and 80mm apart. The plan is for the feeds to then split inside the room to feed the two basins as that puts fewer fittings in the wall. I'll need to use elbows on the feed pipes as the wall cavity is only 70mm and the bend radius is 120mm/80mm for 15mm/10mm pipe. I could exit the wall at an angle but I think that could look bad.

Not if there is air flow around it., you could try DPC sheet https://www.screwfix.com/p/capital-valley-plastics-ltd-vapour-barrier-green-300ga-20-x-2-5m

Take a few pictures, we like pictures of roofs...will help everyone see what you describe 😉

There were two obstacles blocking me from proceeding with my build. After finding a professional who could sign off the compliance paperwork (I couldn't afford the Architect) I had a boundary issue which I agreed with a neighbour to resolve and then I had to add a window to the plans and submit them for approval before I could lodge a commencement notice and get going. Issue 1: When the house was built years ago a hedge was planted at 90 degrees to the house fronts but the land registry boundary was different, meaning when I go to put in a new driveway, some of this land is owned by the neighbour. This could be a major headache when selling the old house to fund the self build. The neighbour was very agreeable and it only took a few goes with the solicitor to get all the forms signed, get some mapping errors resolved and the land registry map THEN matched the Architects plans / assumptions they were drawn up with at the time. Simple fix but it took a call to the Land Registry office to get hold of the person who was dealing with the query. As they were on holidays for a week, the system automatically demotes unresolved issues from "waiting for attention" to "request for more information". They dealt with the issue the same day they were back and thankfully the revised map coordinates all matched and the file / folio was updated. Case Closed!! Issue 2: There were a number of planning conditions attached to the grant of planning permission. Some were protect trees, etc but one was to add a window on the gable end for passive surveillance of a public road. I've written about this before but the grant of planning was very clear that updated drawings would be required to be accepted as compliant before I could commence building or else!! I wrote to them in September 2018 looking to have this removed and told them why. Never got a reply to this date. I had other issues finding a path through the building regulations without access to an Architect. It was September 2021 when I got my finger out and had another go! I expected it would be a few weeks, it was an easy decision for someone to make, I'd get the ok in early November and I could start selling up / planning my build from January 2022. Christmas came and went, no word. I did reach a very lovely administrator who did reply to my enquiries but had no idea when a decision would be reached. There was a change in the law in December 2021 (Ireland - Republic Of) requiring responses to compliance issues to be made within 8 weeks. I assumed I would be fast tracked to clear the backlog but as January went and February was reaching the end I wondered if everyone like me was at the bottom of the pile as the newer applications would be given priority. I made that exact enquiry and it was politely suggested that if I resubmitted the same drawings they would THEN be covered under that new legislation. This was going to mean a winter build though, not what I wanted at all. But I needed that decision. So on February 28th 2022 I resubmitted the plans and waited 8 weeks. In the ninth week I had received no word from anyone but thankfully as it was a bank holiday they were running a day or two behind and on the first day of a two away holiday break, my first in three years, I got the word, the compliance submission was approved. Now, I had a fallback plan in mind where I could extend my planning by another 5 years - this was a hangover from the last crash, making it easy for people to extend planning due to that disruption - unknown to me however it was rescinded last year. I only found out recently. My planning expires next June 2023! I can only extend it if the building work is expected to be substantially completed by that time. Bit open to interpretation but I really need now to make a call to proceed or not. If I can get started by January 2023 I should be well ok. Later and it might get fun!! I'm on variable rate % on my current house so I need to get all my ducks lined up and sell to proceed. Anyway, long story short (amazing if you're still reading this!) but I can now lodge a commencement notice. That clears the way for my to realign the driveway, put in a new boundary fence to split the property and sell the house, and build on the side garden site I've been hoping to do for the last 7 years! My mortgage application has expired and a lot of the quotes have too. Can I still afford to build and find reputable trades to do the work? Remains to be seen but the plan is to finish all DIY on the current house, get it cleaned up ready for sale and go from there. 7 months of legal/planning issues finally over. I've read and heard of far worse but a window in my case has been partly to blame for a delay of 3 and a half years!! Certainly the last 7 months for sure but that's how it goes. But with a few really good people onside (land registry, planning office and solicitor) a result was reached and delivered. And I just started a laying a new Patio last week in frustration....!!

Bunch of calculations here for working out the potential. https://www.renewablesfirst.co.uk/hydropower/hydropower-learning-centre/how-much-power-could-i-generate-from-a-hydro-turbine/ This link tells you to determine the head available, which from looks of will be quite low. https://www.renewablesfirst.co.uk/hydropower/hydropower-learning-centre/what-is-head/ But a system that generates a few hundred watts, will cover the house base load all year.

We're going full plans but in 2 hits - 1. Sub-structure 2. The rest

You still need the plans to build it and you get the daft details sorted when plans are created and not when you’re stood looking into a hole wondering why it all doesn’t work …

An excuse for a new tool you say....