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If safe to live there that’s a good idea pending planning etc. if you do decide to demo and rebuild depending on which self build route you take it may allow you to save money eg site clearance which you can perhaps do some of yourself and gives you time to stockpile great deal/purchases. I demod and rebuilt and had over a year to do the demo myself. Saved £tens of thousands doing so.

Thought you lot would love this as a bit of historic trivia Popped home over the weekend to help my dad with a bit of building work. Found out he's been having a few issues with getting an EPC certificate My grandfather John Lowe was a chemical engineer at Lankro Chem Ltd who had a number of patents including foamed phenolic resin (expanding foam) (https://patents.google.com/patent/GB1604657A/en) . Back in 1978, with the help of the his company he created a number of insulated foam sheets, every sheet was handmade in his lab. My father who when converting the old stables he lives in now to a house installed under them under a screed floor in what was apparently the first recorded instance of insulating under concrete slab in the UK. The EPC surveryor is currently having histerics and doesn't know what to do as it predates all records of this technology being used. Dug up some old photos of it being installed and can't use it as they aren't time stamped and then go lost again after explaining that cameras back then didn't do time stamps.

We have cooling! When I looked last night, the Outdoor temp 24hr average menu item (sensoComfort Installer menu) wasn't displayed. I've looked this morning and it's now there. Looks like it needs 12hrs or so to start calculating the avg. I can now manually enable cooling. Planning on using it via timed mode to make use of solar PV.

Not exactly. I was responding to these points: You're talking about control theory problems that arise out of system behaviour - time constants, cycling, flow temps, etc - but my experience doesn't agree with that. My point was that I can push one button on the ASHP controller and leave the cooling system on for days if needed, without any further intervention. Even without any form of thermostatic control, it will happily keep the downstairs area pleasantly cool without me having to turn it on and off or adjust flow temps to keep things comfortable. The question of manual control is a bit of a red herring in my response. I control it manually because I want to choose when I consume energy for cooling, not because I have the problem with automated control that you describe. I may eventually get around to installing a timer (and maybe even a thermostat), and perhaps control it via Loxone. But at the moment, it works perfectly well just turning it on and off when I feel it's needed. Sure, but my comment was in reply to Nick's regarding his problems with control theory issues like time constants and temperature stability. You have an interface problem, which, while frustrating, is not what I was talking about. In the warm weather leading up to the big heat wave recently, I was running it most days during daylight hours to use as much PV as possible. I forgot on the odd day but it didn't make much difference. Even without intervention, it takes a good couple of days for the slab to warm up when the weather's hot. A couple of days before the record day, I started leaving it on 24 hours day. I left it on continuously for maybe 5 or 6 days that really hot week. Edited to add: Hence, this: ... is not my experience, despite the fact that I have to manually choose to turn the system on. More generally, if I know it's going to be a warm day, I'll turn it on if I think of it in the morning. It takes a few hours to kick in, but the slab time constant is so long that even if I forget on a hot day, it doesn't make that much difference. The cooling's been off now for a few days and the floor is still slightly cool underfoot despite the temperature having been in the 20s this week. I do think that concrete, and presumably similar surfaces such as tile, are just inherently more comfortable in warmer weather.

I've done a renovation job and a new build, and would always now lean towards demolition and starting afresh if the numbers stack up. Living in it for a while sounds like a good plan. A year will fly by as you get a feel for the plot and go through the planning process.

Pulling the final trigger... to selfbuild To do a self build you need to know yourself well, your strengths, weaknesses, talents ,resilience and be honest with yourself, because when you start there is no going back as the commitment is to big and you are very soon in deep, mentally and financially. We were in our mid twenties when it all kicked off, young but ambitious, I had been laboring for plasters and brickies for a few years and was becoming a dab hand at both. Done an extension on the terraced house we owned but wanted a big house in the country. We were close friends with another couple that were interested in a building project and he had a small amount of building experience as well. So the search was on, a huge county pile we could split into two, farm with barns, an old school ? we looked at a few places and in the end found a detached cottage with lots of barns set in two acres. (£72000 how things have changed) The rest is history, we both sold our current properties and put the money together and a deal was done. We got the cottage habitable in a couple days as the local travelling community had been in the and removed all the pipe work and lead off the roof etc. We were good friends so we all moved in together, after 9 months the relationship started to get tetchy so me and the wife brought a static and moved into that, by doing that it saved the friendship. We had already decided on how the property would be split up in advance and I was well underway doing my barn conversion, some of which I had to demolish as I had too many joined together ( crime of the century now). Our friends were converting some of the other barns but were getting low on money so they sold the cottage and used the funds from that to carry on. After lots of ups and downs we got the whole place done , lived in it in its completed format for a year and then got divorced, and so did our friends, they got there side all completed and ending up divorced as well. So there you go you may think it will strengthen your relationship going through all the work 7 days a week for an end goal, but it can destroy it. Think before you leap and work out a budget and add 30%. Buy toys straight away, diesel mixer, dumper and JCB, you need them from day one

Done a large self build barn conversion in 1983, lived in a static on site for 2 years, frozen water and gas bottles, misses and three year old daughter. Daughter has just secured demolition job / plot and I will project manage it. Already started cleaning up old stock bricks for the walled garden, yet another mixer purchased! Im supposed to be retired, I just never seem to learn.

Wishing you the best. Persevering works. Usually.

Thanks @Bozzait's a pig, 1960's with nothing likeable beside from the plot and location. I am also considering living there for a year first to get a feel for the land before committing to the rebuild as (if the wall is safe) it is liveable.

Welcome, The financial risks of renovating an old property are much higher than demo & rebuild. But a new build can rarely replace traditional features, obviously. if the property has stunning traditional features, & you require limited layout changes or major refurb eg electrics plumbing roof etc your balance of risk swings towards refurb. If you are looking at major refurb of a pig of a house, I think the balance of risk swings towards demo & rebuild. Agree 100% with @saveasteadingposting pictures will be helpful in this scenario. Many renovators here often say with hindsight they’d wish they’d demoed and rebuilt.

Welcome. What is the construction? Cracks may be less significant than you think, if it is stone. What part of the country? A commercial builder will almost always want to demolish and build new. A very hands-on self-builder may be able to save the structure and money....but there are risks. Let us help. Pictures will endear you to the forum.

Yes because the Type C is purely that it has a higher peak curve so when a motor kicks in then the device won’t trip. Most inverter drives don’t actually need it but the MIs still seem to reference them.

No as long as there is a vent stack higher than the water level in the highest WC

"Can't take a joke", @ToughButterCupposted on April 1st. Ha. Well, here's an interesting one. Looking at the date for the starting post - March 2021. Well hello from July 2022. NOW we have the full work done. Of course I didn't have building regs yet. No soil testing done. I didn't have the full SE and Mechanical design yet. No discharge of conditions (roof tiles.. ) But .. a year+? Wow. Mostly people not moving their ass until prodded MANY times, and I felt I was pretty pushy at times. And my money became worth what - 25% less? Anyway. I now know all I could reasonably know as an amateur/buyer. Tender is done and has returned. I can still theoretically afford it. The provisionals could cut down the price by maybe 20% (if I go for IKEA throughout, no smart home etc) It's quite interesting that "finally" I am at a stage where the 'build' route is a bit clearer than the "buy" route, since of course the house we'd buy has not come on the market yet, no idea about its hidden flaws, its EPC rating etc. Not to mention that buying will cost time as well, buying our "plot" (+house) the first time took 6 months from offer accepted to keys. It will certainly be a worse quality house, or a more expensive house. One important difference I think I'm picking up on is that many people here do 50-80% of project managing themselves. Instead my approach has been pretty much ultra hands-on during the design, but intending to just hand the builder +QSthe plans and going 'call me when you're done" as the default. Certainly I intend to be much more present, and I still have some work around kitchen/bathroom/AV design but the basic structure of the house should (?) be oven ready, but not boris-style. Or am I dreaming? As I noted in my topic elsewhere - I think a lot of the choices have been narrowed down in design to such a degree that outrageously wrong choices are hard-ish to make, assuming the builder is good-faith doing their best.

Ah, I missed this one @Jilly sorry. Yes it's this strange balance. Absolutely intend to live in there yes. On the one hand, I'm sure that I would literally find fault with how high a lightswitch is up on a wall (I'm 1m93 tall, so whatever the builder picks certainly stands a risk of being 5cm down from my ideal. But would it bug me? (not when in alien restraints circling saturn..) But normally, yes, teensy bit, but certainly aiming for perfection is impossible, even if you truly decide every minute detail yourself. What do I know about truly the ideal height of a switch? My hand might be higher than average, but my kid won't reach that for 10 more years. My wife never gets there.. etc. Just a dumb example. As for ergonomics, well, yes, there certainly is a chance people are bad at their job, or uncaring, and won't do sanity checks like clashing doors. It's better I look myself but only the truly structural stuff is unchangable afterwards, which I'm not sure I'd evn be qualified for. And as a final thought, certainly when buying a current house, the chance that it isn't ideal is almost a given. Reaching a good standard even if I pay zero attention is not too unlikely, that's somewhat the point with 'turnkey', no?

You can get cheap little endoscopes off Amazon which are great for inspecting things.

Not really. All thermistors are 1-wire and connections (to a 1-wire bus using cat7 cable) are all hidden in the plastered walls. Even if I did have access to one, I'm not sure it would be easy to break open the thermostat and wire-in a third-party sensor. A lot of ASHP manufacturers have a Modbus interface, Vaillant only has EEBus which is quite limited. Vaillant promised a Modbus gatewat over 2yrs ago [1] but nothing is available (at least in U.K) yet. The only other option is to use eBus [2], but this is somewhat more complex and required a non-vaillant eBus coupler and then you need to discover the registers/operations available and I haven't seen any comprehensive documention for this (Vaillant clearly don't publish it as ebus, for them, is an internal protocol). @m0deller has had some sucess with this already though, so the issue with cooling not being contollable by EEBus is enough motivation to try to follow in his footsteps. [1] https://www.vaillant-group.com/news-centre/web-special-online-press-conference/neue-regelungen-fuer-mehr-komfort-neues-gateway-fuer-ausfuehrliches-monitoring-1-1680893.html [2] https://github.com/john30/ebusd

I see that it takes at least 24hrs for our slab to increase 1C in hot weather. ASHP then takes 5-8hrs to remove 1C depending on flow temp (adjusted automatically based on dew point) and ufh pump speed (which is was playing with). So while i am using manual control, and im annoyed i cant automate this easily with Vailant, like Jack it is only minimal on/offs required.

Easy solution: get rid of the dogs.

You manually turn if on/off though, right? That's what I'm having to do.. but my argument is that given I have temp sensors in the slab and I know all room and exterior temperature too, there shouldn't really need to be anything manual about it.

Amen. Blown cellulose is just too good to not use for these situations. I would not, however, go for I-joists, but would instead go for posi-joists eg so the cold bridging was as low as possible. Cellulose fills all the voids when pumped ( blown ) in, so no probs there. Also allows a place to hide MVHR ducts in vaulted ceilings , just remember to keep the ducts tight to the upper side of the inner chord.

Interesting. This isn't my experience at all. I just have mine set to output 15 or 16 degree water (can't remember which) and turn it on manually when the house is too hot or there's a heatwave predicted. I run the cooling open loop - no separate thermostat. I don't care if the floor's a bit cold underfoot, but realistically the downstairs floor temperature never drops below 19 degrees or so. I had it running for a few days in a row when things were really bad a couple of weeks back and it worked perfectly. It's lovely to come downstairs when it's been hot overnight and feel the steel banister get colder and colder with every step! I do wonder whether having polished concrete floors helps. I imagine it absorbs heat from the air pretty well compared to, eg, wood.

Exactly what I suggested via PM , categorically avoiding making any high points any higher.

That is the plan. It could be as simple as a basic hardwood door clad to match the profile being careful with the depth of the door reveals so that the cladding is flush with the wall. Add a pull handle made from the same cladding and an automatic lock.

If the formal front door is made to look like a door but the second is a copy of the cladding it won’t be apparent. I built my brothers back gate onto a public path but looks like the fence so people are surprised when he disappears through it, he’d wanted it “hidden” to stop people breaking in.

If you think it will help 👍 Elec.pdf

I tend to take out and very lightly drill the square shaft where the grub screw has marked it in order for the point of the grub screw to go into something. For repeat looseners I'll apply low strength Loctite.

What about 1 network cable to upstairs to a switch, and then first floor cabling from this switch?

I'm still in the process (adopting the MVP/aka agile approach to house building!) but I would say key things that worked for us have been the following: Manage it yourself - if you have the time and enthusiasum, then it's a good thing. If you are OCD about finished product you are after, it's a must. Where possible stick with single trade on site at a time - yes, it takes longer but it's so much easier to handle any decisions that will crop up Don't scrimp on the things you cannot change - fabric first And if you are doing the first one of managing it yourself, live with the fallout of no escape for a long time... Biggest challenge we've had was groundworks in the wet winter from hell last year on a sloping site - with aesthetic, time and money implications... doing it again I'd start groundworks more like March

How long have you lived in the new build area? Our big advantage was that we have lived in the same village as the plot for 40 years. We knew people who knew people. I would not have said that before we started but that is how it turned out. A local farmer had, in another life, been a top notch digger driver for the big builders like Persimmon. My hairdresser told me this fact. A neighbour in the village was doing a self build (a huge house) we got chatting and he ( owner of a civil engineering firm) told us that his amazing bricklayer was looking to retire soon but would take on a bungalow if one came along. Yes, we are building a bungalow The local builders merchant has been a good source of information. One of the salesmen is a neighbour and he told us about a really good roofer - Keith. Now Keith should be a project manager because, not only is he an excellent roofer and fitter of solar panels but he recommended brilliant scaffolders, great carpenters, great solar panel supplier and electrician but he sorted all these trades out for us and had them all arrive on site on time. He even chased up the builders merchant if they were holding things up. The only major problem we had was the windows. As rookies we ordered them early and left the wrong drawings with them. They should have noticed, apparently, but didn't. We ended up relying on our brickie to build us out of a hole. The joiners learned a lesson for them to get the drawings from the architect not the client. All of our trades rely on word of mouth among the community here. It is a rural area and word will spread fast if someone is unreliable or shoddy in their work. We have been building through the wettest winter in a hundred years, covid and the finding of a four inch water main slap bang under the plot. The building is now water tight and we need to sell our existing property to continue. Bit nervous, now, reading the above experiences of selling in order to finish the build.

Few observations here... for us we had already committed by moving into the house to be demolished and locating a caravan in the garden but had lots of delays which is where our stress was. Also felt queasy watching the old house getting flattened though, point of no return and all that. The build itself was fine - things you worry about tend to be OK and the things that catch you out are things you never thought too deeply about. e.g. I was super stressed about the basement (contractor 1) lining up with the TF house (contractor 2). No issues. But I never though the airtightness of the house would impede the resin flour pour (humidity was too high) and that caused stress. I think the number one stress is usually financial - do you have the cash and a reserve to build what you want and to deal with hiccups? Next up, do you know what you want and is it clearly described / documented and understood? The majority of trades can usually do what you want (within reason and budget) but only of there is no ambiguity. The best way to avoid that is to be present to be asked questions and to pick up on issues early. If you have very high expectations and are asking for things outside their norm, make sure that is understood at the outset and re-inforced as you go, but also be realistic on what is achievable on your budget. Don't ever be afraid to ask what's going on - not in a confrontational or critical way but in a 'I'm not entirely sure what's happening, can you explain'. Ask open questions such as 'what are my options here' or ' how would you do it if it was your house' - I found that a good way to get defences lowered and the trades were more likely to be candid if they did not understand the brief. Remember that every problem can be fixed but some errors you can live with and some you will want put right. Most importantly be there - I realise that's not an option for everyone but all my issues happened when I was away from site for a week or so (e.g. business trip). It will challenge both your physical and mental health - try not to over dramatise or castrophise what might happen. If you did that every day you would not be able to exist. Just do your research, accept that things can go wrong, always have a 'how can we fix this' mentality and you will be ok.

Build Vs buy: for us it was all about location. We could get a house the quality we wanted, OR in the location we wanted, but odds of finding both together vanishing close to zero (and the cost would be incredible). Plus we felt build (deep renovation) allows really meeting our specific needs like no purchase would Finally Pulling the trigger: mostly because after 2 years we were tired of talking about it and wanted to move on with our lives. At that point We'd realized a full rebuild would be about the same price but even better quality/choice, but couldn't face another 2 years to reset and replan so pushed us to go on. Still very happy we did, although with retrospect of course the COVID delay meant it went slower than we wanted after all that. Things that can go wrong. For me the underestimation was the energy it requires. Nervous energy. After 14 month build, keeping tabs on contractors and trades (or lack of) almost everyday, my nerves are shot. The financial side was kept in pretty good shape throughout really, but constant feeling of predicting what might go wrong next and putting stuff right when it does is unbelievably tiring. No idea how I could have insured or hedged against this, except quit the day job. (without a doubt the only way I could do a build again is if it was my sole full time focus)

I had a site, planning and tendered but the prices I received were not realistic. One builder I'd pinned my hopes on didn't even respond. Maybe the spec was too much, but I pulled out but hope to return in 3-4 years when I have more equity. I can extend the planning another 5 years in ROI easily enough for €65 so don't feel the investment is lost. So, advice - be honest about what you can afford and negotiate any offers with what you are comfortable doing yourself to get it within budget. Go for it! Get yourself the best people you can find, Federation of Master builders would be my go to and word of mouth if I was in the UK. Credit check all the big players. Solicitor Escrow account for big deposits if you can rather than hand the money over months in advance. Good insurance for you, your site and check all the contractors ones out as best you can. And use the resources and advice here to check anything you're not sure about. Photos and your questions can catch something quick enough to prevent bigger problems later on. Take lots of photos and videos of progress each day, handy for many reasons! Oh, and enjoy the journey!

Very well put I would just add to above Don’t worry about something that you can’t do anything about

If its a partial vacuum your own AAV should be able to deal with it by opening to let air into the stack. That is assuming it in the right place on the pipework and not sealed into air tight boxing.

As long as any smells etc can vent and also no vacuum can be created it will work.

Then they clearly have no understanding of number.

Some say, when I moved, the IQ doubled in both places.

I thought there we're a few more nutters out this way, as you wouldn't attempt somethings in the right frame of mind.

My barn was in Mentmore, but this plot comes under Chiltern & District planning area, and our dealings with them todate have been exasperating. You can't relocate your entrance, but we can tear up thousands of acres of woodland a put HS2 in at the bottom of the lane.

not that big a dug then, the bigger ones tend not to live too long. horses even worse they can go to 40+! 😥 and they're a lot more expensive, food, bedding, stabling. got a lovely big shed i could fill with cars but no, stables. people think you must have money if you have horses, unfortunately it's the opposite, you'd have money if you didn't have horses.