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Very difficult No vans no trailers Even attached a car 5 bags of rubble per year The here to help guys search for anything that isn’t household and don’t help Covid Obviously When my brother in-law died We cleared his garage They wouldn’t let us tip a 5 kg bag of dried up artex Classed as building waste It’s not surprising there’s so much fly tipping

Another factor that appeals to me is the psychology of 'actively doing something positive' when otherwise being at the mercy of factors outside our control. It's impossible to put a monetary figure on that. The recent price cap hikes are killing the joy of cooking meals, having baths and watching movies, when all the while a meter is ticking away in the background. Mention is rarely made of the other uses the funds available for the installation might have. Foregoing a few holidays, for example, might cover the cost of a small system and restore the joy. Like holidaying at home.

Exactly . Why everyone is concerned about ROI on these things baffles me . Suppose it’s 15 yrs or indeed 5 yrs . Does it matter ? .

Something we are often asked on here Myself and my wife have been getting the roof ready on her workshop All the facias on yesterday except the front pike Hoping for brickie to come and finish the last 550 bricks today Cancelled last night So we where there and mixed up by 730 am this morning Answer to the above We got them laid and four lengths of Facia on by 5pm today No chariot for raking out so my wife made do with a piece of timber with a nail knocked through

Not being one of the wealthy of the parish, I think it does matter. However, we take the view in attempting to measure the typical cost, that if the system lasts 7 years it will have cost us £1.50 a day. How much of what we produce we use, we are not sure, but I bet its more than 3kWh a day.

Another layer of plasterboard to bring the wall out?

As above or you would need a aluminium or plastic angle to cover the batten before wall panel goes on

Yes, I poured it down and capped the flue. You could ventilate externally and apply IWI to the full chimney breast.

Batten the wall and bring the wall panel down on to the tray would be my suggestion.

Not for me, knowing that fuel will only go up in price and my pension income is limited was a big driver for me to well insulate by new build, helping the planet was second on my list.

Phew!

They are probably 70 years old I guess, as it has been re-roofed at least once. My own house has similar and they seem to be 90 years old and the only problems are at bolted gutter connections. So I think I agree that we leave the insides alone. Clean and probably drier than I would have imagined. It reminds me that my dad (joiner) told me that all leftover paint from every job used to be tipped into a barrel and mixed, then used to coat the insides of gutters. Whatever colours went in, the resulting colour was khaki.

Be aware that even within the same LA there is a wide variation on the approach taken to temp habitation. We were refused despite having almost everything done, and all sign offs of electrics and invented cylinder, mvhr etc. Also in Highland area. Depends on your inspector I think.

Agree with @ProDave, we got temporary habitation at the beginning of lockdown as our garage was on the same building warrant and wasn’t finished. It worked out fine as the inspector pointed out anything that needed done to get full habitation and he never returned, we just had to send him photos.

Ours is a little bit bigger and the ASHP has been calculated at 8Kw. 3 phase adds some complication but for £1000 more it’s worth it even if you don’t use it initially. For us to get 3 phase it was going to cost many thousands compared to £750 for single phase so we went single phase. If the transformer ever gets reinforced I might revisit it. I put big enough ducting in to pull 3 phase cable through.

If you need a 13kW, I would be looking to spend the difference between a small and large heat pump to reduce the heat load for the house. May be worth posting your build spec, insulation etc, lots of good advise will be coming your way. With energy prices the way they are, you need to do anything to reduce heat demand.

It costs nothing to apply for a temporary habitation so why not do it. Think of it as a pre completion inspection, you might get some guidance on how you ar doing and anything that needs completing / correcting for completion.

I must have been fortunate to live in Cambs and Perthshire as never had any trouble getting rid of stuff. I generally start off with trying to give stuff away for free on Facebook Marketplace.

I saw a nice load of what looked liked timber trellis fly tipped the other day. I was thinking, they'll be wishing they'd kept that to burn soon!

I paid for the shell to go up (brick and block) and found plenty to do around them, did nearly everything else but the brickies were worth every penny.

The average daily mileage is steadily falling and is now something like 20 miles a day. Most cars spend the majority of their time parked up. I live very rurally and our EV spends most of its outside the house. The issue is this new world of EVs, V2G, ASHP, flow rates, PV and battery storage, when best to consume electricity etc is far too complicated for your average punter to understand nor actually care about. Look at the complex discussions that happen on here about the most efficient way to run all of this. That’s the real barrier to adoption for a lot of this plus the cost of it all. Meanwhile typical housing stock is poorly insulated and badly built.

The one I looked at, different but similar oven, as soon as you selected any heating function with the big rotary switch, it supplied power to this control board. the relays then determined where that power went, to which element or fan. The control board was "told" which heating mode you had selected by 4 low voltage contacts on the switch sending a binary code to the control board. So turning the big rotary switch to off, killed all power regardless of stuck relays. In the case of my neighbours one, it was the oven fan permanently stuck on, not a heating element.

I am well off but tight and do see that we can do things to improve the environment with little personal cost or indeed a benefit. However, a large number of people think solar panels are ugly and care about that more than money, never mind the environment. Lots of people are also too lazy to do anything. This applies to many things such as recycling, electric cars etc. You either have to order people to do stuff (regulation) or make it so financially attractive that it overcomes their other instincts. Almost universally everyone I know who has got an electric car in the last two years did it as a tax dodge. None of them give a hoot about the environment.

Sadly I am surprised how unreceptive most people are to the argument that they might want to save energy or in general reduce waste for the greater good. It drives me crazy how much recycling we throw out due to the enormous over packaging of things. It is one of the few areas where I would argue for more government intervention, because people don't put enough value on externalities or long term issues so won't do anything about them themselves. My in laws are American and I deal a lot with Americans for work. They have even less concept of this with almost all decisions being made solely on maximising your pwn personal utility at the current time. I think we just have to recognise that this is how people work and try to work around it. We are unlikely to change human nature.

I think solar without a battery is really losing out. As for cost, I look at the system just as i would a kitchen or bathroom. Our solar+powerwall is saving/earning over £10 a day for the last few months. Not counting the FIT.

Personally I wouldn’t.

https://www.toolstation.com/screws-fixings/galvanised-nails/c107 "bright" means raw uncoated metal. edit: and these for the joist hangers https://www.toolstation.com/sheradised-joist-hanger-nail/p96841

To go off grid is no easy or that cheap a task. PV, plus batteries, plus generator, that can run a few days without complaint, i.e. continuous duty rated. What did the quote include for power supply. Ways to reduce is get someone yourself to do trench digging and backfill.

Have a look at reinforced foil tapes with acrylic adhesive. STERR and AT501 are good brands stick well and dont tear!

Screwfix do an aluminium foil tape.

Originally they would not have been painted on the inside, they have probably lasted a long time already and will do for many years without doing anything to them. They tend to rust more around saddles and connectors because dirt allows moss and grass to grow trapping moisture against the surface

Is there a risk that pollutants can leach out of the coatings? I thought part of the advantage of cast iron is that the surface rust protects the underlying material.

Bits from the radio about seaweed https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b066th2r https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01h2kvg https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0bf7n5y https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0017k3l https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000v7px

So go to your tool station website type in galvanised nails And a list appears 2nd on the list…. you need a hammer too.. bit I will let you Google that….

I did onto Dulux Bathroom paint, just scored it up with a blunt Stanley knife. Can't remember what tile adhesive I used, probably something cheap from Tops Tiles, where I got the tiles from. Been on the wall for 14 years now.

I think BAL Green Star and BAL Blue Star say they work on paint, but the problem isn't sticking to the paint, it's the paint not sticking well to the wall. Try sticking a block of wood to the paint then knock it off. If the paint comes off the wall rather easily you will probably need to remove it or at least really scratch it up good and remove any dust etc.

https://www.gov.scot/publications/building-standards-technical-handbook-2020-domestic/3-environment/3-9-private-wastewater-treatment-systems-infiltration-systems/

5M from a building or boundary, 10M from a road or watercourse.

By ‘leak filed’ do you mean a soakaway? If so you need a percolation test done to determine if the ground is suitable and where best to build it. Soakaway’s need to be 10m from a watercourse and 50m from a borehole and 15m from a house. The size needs to be calculated. Treatment plants need to 7m from a house. You also need to consider trees.

They may be asking for more drawings to justify exceeding the target decision time. Just give them the drawing requested, a traffic survey is unlikely to be taken into consideration.

It’s been over a year since we got our completion certification and we’re still mopping up tasks in the garden and generally cleaning up. It occurred to us that some aspects of the discovery process of the build may be off use to others on BuildHub. It’s too hot in here: Thermal modelling limitations. Our thermal modelling done as part of the design stage SAP suggested we had minimal thermal gain problems. However we suspected that thermal gain from our east facing windows would be a problem and indeed it has been. The first action we took was to put on a solar film on the outside of our east facing windows. After some research we opted for Johnson PD75 which claims to reduce thermal gain by 40%. It cost £1,170 so seemed like a good place to start. Well, it may have helped but by mid May it was clear it was not enough and we would need something more. We looked at air conditioning units and decided we would retrofit some. We hadn’t planned on this and the thought of messing up the clean lines of the build and the pristine plaster work did not appeal. Purely by chance it turned out that the false wall in our bathroom built at the request of my wife and much muttering from me (who needs somewhere to put a wine glass while your in the bath) was a saviour. It meant we had a service void from ground floor to second floor in which to route pipes to the internal units. We contacted Mr Harris and he kindly lent us the pump gear required for installation testing, so far so good. We identified the units with the best energy efficiency only to discover you are not allowed to purchase them without having confirmation the installation will be done by a certified F-gas installer. We wanted to do the main parts of the installation ourselves and just have the F-gas engineer do final test and connection. Sounds reasonable but we had a lot of difficulty finding anyone. Mr Harris came to the rescue again and recommended Artech Air who were unbelievably helpful. We ended up with two Midea Blanc units, a 2.5 kW for our bedroom and a 3.5kW for the open plan living area. Result – bliss, and a very reasonable bill for £1,800. In the long term they will add to the comfort of the house all year round. On a slightly different subject MVHR summer bypass. It sounds perfectly reasonable, don’t heat the incoming air form the outgoing air in once a set temperature threshold is reached. The incredible heat of the last month has made us completely rethink it’s use. If the air inside the house is colder than the outside air, then cool the incoming air ie you don’t want to bypass the heat exchange. Also when it very hot between 9:00 and say 20:00 don’t run the MVHV, there is plenty of air in the house and we certainly never felt stuffy. We set the MVHR scheduler to do this for us. Similarly in winter it goes off at 22:00 and back on at 07:00. PV We didn’t put any PV on when we built, the house should need such small inputs it simply didn’t make sense in carbon or cost terms, or so we thought. Two things changed our minds, the air conditioning and we bought an EV. Doing anything more than 4kW is a pain as it involves more certification and silly cost items like Southern Electricities £300 fee for observing testing on equipment that was already certified on the MCS database. Again we had not planned this in so it was a retrofit...grrrr. Very annoying as we were pretty smug about having thought through the whole build. Fortunately our standing seam roof made it as easy as it could be to fit panels and hide all the wires. With the panels added we are still in surplus on the air conditioning units, not cooling for free as we had to pay for the panels and inverter, but no additional utility cost. Bye the way this was done before some nameless psychopath started a war and energy prices rocketed. The house now sits at a very comfortable 23c while not drawing any energy from the grid. We even have enough surplus to charge the EV between 10:00 and 15:00 on sunny days at a very slow 6A. We also opted to put in battery storage which we ordered in February and has only just arrived, it should have been 8.2kWh but in the delay they manufacturer introduced a 9.5kWh version for not a lot of extra money. We’re not up and running with the battery as the manufacturers decided to change the inverter battery connection cables with the new model and there are no cables shipped with the battery. I must confess I found it very hard to see the funny side of this. House wiring We did this ourselves and got it tested and certified, but made no provision for an EV charger, inverter and PV. Fortunately we did put ‘Routabout’ access points into our floor intended to allow access should anything go wrong. We also have loose lay flooring which has made the four times the utility room floor has been up no drama. Providing access to fix and change is something definitely something that should be done early not as an afterthought, when we put the traps in we had no idea how useful they would be. Fixings and fastening Our build is ICF and while it’s great in may ways it does present some interesting challenges when it comes to mounting anything on the walls. The ICF system we used came from JUB and has a very tough vertical nylon strip every 150mm about 30mm from the internal surface. With a course thread screw you can hang things like TV’s but not heavy stuff cupboards. For heavy items it’s a case of drilling into the ICF concrete core 75mm internals and 170mm externally from the ICF surface. This makes for a significant cantilever, internally this is fine you just use big fastenings. Externally the problem is two fold, 1700mm cantilever and you don’t want any thermal bridging, this makes using big fastening as real no no. We ended up using four fastening types: Internally we used cheap and easy to use concrete frame fasteners for heavy stuff. For lighter stuff on plasterboard we used GripIt fastenings which do the job remarkably well. The largest size claims to be able to hold 70kg, but I wouldn’t trust it with anything like that. Externally we use Fischer ‘Thermofix’, expensive and not available in this country. Fischer say they don’t sell enough here to make it worth there while. It seemed lost on them that we were buying from Germany along with every other UK user of the fastening. For light external fixing we used pasta twirls supplied by JUB. Useless for anything heavier than a letter box. DIY cabinets We found we couldn’t always source ready made furniture that was the size we needed. Some friends run a bespoke kitchen business and pointed us a site “wood online” who make up panels to your specification complete with edging. Using a ‘Pocket hole’ jig and these panels allows you to create you own furniture simply and quickly at a fraction of the bespoke cost. We also found some very neat panel clips for panels that need to be removed for access. Garden We finally got round to sorting out the garden. It’s small, just 11m by 5m and like a lot of self builds it had been used as a storage area (dumping ground) during the build. As we’re getting on a bit we wanted to make it low maintenance and low water. Raised beds and a patio area seemed to fit the bill. As the house is a contemporary build and we wanted to the garden to complement the house which is white and two shades of grey. For the patio we have used 600 x 600 porcelain tiles for ease of handling and laying. Getting a patio right is not the easiest of jobs and I was not looking forward to. With the patio base prepared, materials were order, tiles on Tuesday followed three days later by 5000kg of limestone chippings. Of course it just happened to be one of the hottest weeks on record…returned the rapid set tile cement and bought standard set. This still went off at a frightening rate. Trying to get a large are flat and true is not as easy as it sounds even when you’ve done all the preparation. With the first slab set to the correct run-off the other tiles were laid using it as reference. Despite our best efforts to get it right, the first tile was just off and as a result by the tile the 8th tile in the row was reached we were using a significant amount of tile cement, about 10mm deep. The four 20kg bags of cement that should have done the whole job disappeared quickly and another 7 bags were required to complete the job. The hoop and wedge helped keep everything flush and the result is perfectly acceptable. Lesson learnt, do buy the expensive laser measuring and levelling gear at the start of the build, it’ll pay for itself many times over by the time you finish. I’ll know for the next build, however my wife may well threaten divorce if I mention the idea….

Struth, you're a difficult person to please, 870mm of Celotex and it's not enough for you. 😁

On our last build I thought I was being clever setting the gate code as 1066 But two young Brickies would ring each morning and say they had forgotten the code 😁

But you, like me, live in a holiday area. Where you going to go for a change of scenery and something different, Kiev. And many of them don't cost much, driving more gently has made a huge difference to my outgoings.

That is the problem. I had to explain to a customer (when I was involved in domestic PV), in January, that the reason his system was not very good was because he insisted that it must be installed on the NE facing roof. Was an IT professional, and a complete twat.