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I put an offer in on a plot well over 6 months ago, only to find it was subject to probate 🙄 however, after a long wait it is finally starting to look as though the purchase may go through. I have a design sorted I think, and a timber frame company lined up. I'm talking to builders, and will be starting to get quotes for groundworks & windows soon, but I'm still a bit nervous about whether it will all go ahead. My partner thinks I'm mad, and is very negative about the whole thing, so I'll probably be spending a lot of time on here looking for reassurance and support! The biggest problem for me is that I have been stalling for so long that I'm finding it a bit hard to get going again at the moment. I'll post some more specific questions on some of the other threads. Kim Hopefully soon to be the proud owner of a 0.2 acre serviced green-field flat building plot in Devon

Is the temperature dropping as much in the lounge overnight as the bedrooms? Has the lounge had the heating on for longer than half an hour to heat up the fabric of the room more? As you say the lounge and kitchen will have a lot of heat input from ovens, TVs etc over the day. I am guessing that your house has 100mm of mineral wool in the cavity which is the bare minimum required to pass building regs. This gives a U-value of around 0.28 which is very poor today. The maximum roof U-value in England is 0.18 and the maximum window U-value is 1.4 Assuming these numbers the room will lose around 75W an hour through the walls, 35W through the window and 30W through the ceiling with an outside temp of 3C. If for example the bathroom or hall are not heated then further heat would be lost to these areas. I assumed a room size of 3.5x2.5x2.4m and 1.5sq metres for the window. These will give a rough idea. You can probably double the heat loss including ventilation losses, but this would be a guesstimate. Thus the room will likely need around 2-300W of energy to keep a constant temperature during the night. I am assuming a 21C internal room temperature and 18C differential to calculate heat loss. The heat loss is directly proportional to the differential, so if the outside temperature is 12C as it has been during the day recently, then the heat loss halves versus 3C night time temperature in the last couple of days. The day also benefits from solar radiation and heat generated by activity in the house thus requires a lot less heat input. Assuming that the room has a volume of 20m3, that is roughly 24kg of air. The energy required to increase the temperature of 24kg of air by 1C is roughly 24Kj. So to heat the room air by 3C requires 72Kj or only 20Wh of energy. However, assuming 120mm of blockwork/plaster. The outside walls of the room weigh around 1500kg. The specific heating capacity of this would be around 1Kj per kg. Thus to heat the walls up by 3C would require around 4500Kj or 1260Wh. I don't know what size of radiator you have in there but say it has a 3-400W output. It could easily warm the air by 3C in half an hour (20Wh required versus 150-200Wh of output), but you would need to run it for 3-4 hours for the walls to be up to the same temperature as the air. Once the walls are up to that temperature then you will only have to overcome the 200-300W heat loss, but initially you have a large deficit to make up. Net net at 3C outside during the night, if the heating was on for 12 hours, I would expect it to be actually running for around 75% of the time. (Very dependant on the radiator size assumption). The size assumption just affects the time the radiator runs for, the amount of energy required to heat the room is the same it can just be provided faster by a lager radiator/higher flow temperature. Basically you cannot run the heating for half an hour and expect the temperature not to drop quickly on a cold night. If you ran the heating for 4-5 hours in the evening I would expect to see much less temperature drop as the walls would be up to temperature. Their relatively high heat capacity would lead to a more constant air temperature. Basically set the thermostat at 21C at 5pm and leave the heating on until 9 or 10. It would not run constantly, but it would run a lot of the time whilst the walls warm up. Then I would expect a much steadier temperature during the night. However, the poor insulation levels of the house mean that even then I would expect it to be somewhat colder by the morning as you have quite a lot of heat loss at 3C outside. If the walls have not heated up and are materially colder than the air in the room, due to their dramatically larger heat capacity they will take energy from the air and cool the room down during the night.

@pocster yes, I'm hoping to do some of it myself. I'll be learning on the job a lot of the time, and I won't touch plumbing or electrics, but I reckon I can put the cladding on the single storey extension myself, for example. I'll be attempting to project manage it too - I have managed a number of projects before, albeit a while ago, but this could be a bit more challenging. @Radian yes, the plot is lovely 🙂 and the scope for a lovely garden is the main reason that I put the offer in 🌺. There are two big oak trees that I will need to be careful about, this is a general view of the plot, but I will also post the plans as @Iceverge suggested.

The cleanest of the grey water (bath, shower) could feasibly go to smaller soakaways. That might be a 'good thing to do', but won't reduce the digester and drainage bed size which is based on number of bedrooms. You will see discussions on here of tanks being held down to avoid floating in high water tables. The drainage must struggle but it seems to be permitted. I suggest you now do a percolation test or 2 or 3, in the likely location for your soakaway (which i should warn will be about 60m2! This is easy and is in the building regs. It is well explained in jdp (a drainage supplier) website . Search " percolation test jdp". This won't be definitive but will show tbe feasibilty.

Amvic 300 blocks with an additional 100mm EPS on the outside. Was a lot of work but hopefully worth it! (The plastic washers were later rebated in and covered with 25mm thick insulation discs before rasping and rendering)

Put a T&E to pump location to control from Loxone relay.

I have two very initial ones. 1) upstairs shower enterance looks crowded, i would look into the layout of it. 2) i would really think about putting bi folds in the kitchen out the the garden, adds £££ but would really make it a nice space. Edit: got nosey and figured out where you are, great location and have visited the main builders site a couple of times professionally.

tap up @ETC as he offered to help members with designs and, from what I've seen so far from other posts, his ideas have been brilliant.

There are about three different types of CAT6A though, not all have screening. U/FTP, F/FTP, F/UTP etc. Also some are solid core and some are stranded. Always go for solid-core, but I never understand the pro-cons of the shielding options. Somewhere I read that shielding on network cable can be a bad thing (unless you use the proper shielded plugs/keystones which involves more work) as otherwise the sheilding acts as an antena and it's worse than no shielding at all. Our electricians used a mix of: https://scpcat5e.com/bulk-cables/category-data/hdbaset/hncproplus-6a-lszh-cat6a-category-bulk-data-cable-low-smoke-zeero-halogen. <- quite stiff, nightmare to terminate and I'm not sure they have correctly terminated the shielding. https://scpcat5e.com/bulk-cables/category-data/cat6a/cat6a-category-bulk-data-cable-augmented <- easy to terminate, no sheilding, does the job.

No I'd still use 6a. sure you can't get as much in a duct and it had a larger turn radius, but it's a lot more robust for contractors to pull through the building. And the screening on pairs supports 1wire and tree in the same jacket with minimal cross talk as Dan says. We did also have a lot of skinny 8 core security wire which is a nice fallback for digital sensors in really hard to reach places like door sensors in door jams.

Thats exactly what i did. 2 TV locations, office and loft I think. Apparently fibre is good for audio equipment, reduces electrical noises and improves sound (or so the guy I got the bluesound powernodes from reckoned). None of what I put in is terminated though, and may never be. You have to get the right type of fibre with enough fibres for it to be useful though.

Hi and welcome. Every journey starts with a single step

Sketching it out helps a lot. Create a draw.io diagram, import your floor plan and make it semi-transparent, and then start planning out your runs. I found this helped me. I also used a consistent approach between rooms: - Cabinet to touch pure next to the door, then daisy chain from there. - Blue & blue/white for window DI's, Brown and brown/white for door DI's - etc.

If you want value, the little entrance "extension" will cost more per square metre than other bits of the build and add little of value. Consider designing the layout so you can add a second floor and another bedroom to the single storey rear annex.

Lay the stone wider than you need and then let it slope away. That is how a road is built. Or do your ground raising first. And stone against it.

Just for another experience here, I have a 3P smart meter from Octopus, works without issue every 30 mins reporting readings.

What comes out of a digester is not domestic waste any longer. In my opinion you would not get in any trouble.

It very much goes on DHW requirements, and flow rates etc are vital as are usage patterns. For example in your instance I would go for a pair of 180 litre slimline tanks in a tandem arrangement. That allows an extra volume when you need it but isn’t included in your standing heat losses. There are a lot of moving parts in the design of this sort of system and one size doesn’t fit all - you need to start from base principles. I would also consider if you’re not going to keep this and want it saleable in 3-4 years then go with a single large tank (300 litre min), and a 28kW heat only boiler with a 100 litre buffer tank for the UFH assuming this is in solid/concrete flooring. Benefit of gas and a buffer is you can also run towel rails off it, and if you put an immersion in both DHW and buffer you can use them as dump loads for PV.

I'm going to add that your roof is beautiful. It may be a little wavy here and there but it's made using quality materials that attract a heavy premium if faithfully reproduced today. Your biggest gains will come from loft insulation (including the loft hatch), draft exclusion, double glazing, and a correctly set-up heating system. Draft exclusion includes sealing between floorboards and also filling gaps under skirting boards as well as around all service penetrations through walls (e.g. waste pipes). Do you know if your cavity walls are filled with insulation?

Tiles do however keep heat out. They absorb the first hit by the sun. There is another reason not to retile until necessary. When stripped back, you may find some deterioration of the underlying structure. Of course you would sensibly repair that at the same time. Costly. Unless there are big problems i would leave it alone, and get another 10 years out of it. Our roof 'needed' replacement 25 years ago according to a rival buyer. We have had a few repairs. Some tiles are slumping due to batten failure but are hanging in there. It is keeping the weather out which is its sole function.

I think that it has probably been as swift as it could be really, but I'm just fed up as it is the second time I have been caught on the wrong side of probate 😞 . I originally put in an offer on a house (project) in Aug 2021, and after about 8 months it was clear that it wasn't actually going to happen because the vendor was better off sitting tight as there was a dispute over the estate. With this, probate has been granted and we should exchange before end Nov if all goes well. @Ferdinand I quite agree, it wouldn't be worth risking my relationship, particularly since my partner is very nice 🙂 but it is more that he just doesn't understand why I want to do it. I'm an engineer, and I badly need a project, whereas he has a legal background, and is very risk adverse! We don't live together, and it isn't his money though, so we won't fall out over it; the main issue will be that he won't be able to resist going "I told you so" if it all goes wrong. I'm hoping to acquire plot 7 shown below

Re heat pumps and solar PV. DON'T think of it as "PV powering the heat pump" Think of it as "PV helping to power the whole ALL ELECTRIC house" Like many on here, we are in the country with no mains gas, so for our present house, designed to be well insulated and air tight, an ASHP made sense. The only practical alternatives were LPG gas or oil. I find is it easy to self use just about all our PV generated electricity just by time shifting big loads like washing machine etc to the middle of the day, and using excess otherwise unused PV to heat hot water via a diverter.

Agree. The top one looks 1940s/50s which looks like the age of the house; the other looks 1970s. TBH, neither of those dates qualifies as "old" - a significant fraction of the UK housing stock has roofs put on before WW1. Suspect that if you work on it, the 70s roof may suffer from broken tiles and it will be a self-creating piece of work. Concrete tiles have a shorter lifespan and do that. Unless you have rooms in the roof it is about insulation up there and attention to detail. Have a word with your Council Housing Dept about free schemes in your area, probably ECO3 or ECO4, or something local. Some elements may not be means tested. You may need to remove any existing insulation first if there is more than perhaps 50mm of it. F

I glued down all the groundfloor stud wall sole plates using PU gel adhesive.

The tiles themselves don't do much to keep the heat in. It is the loft insulation and how well it is fitted that does that. So changing the roof tiles at great expense would not reduce the heat loss. If your house is the first picture with the bonnet hip tiles, I would not be replacing that with plain concrete tiles like the second picture.

Rather than the specific details of a particular borehole it's whether there are several historical shallow wells in the area, less than ten feet deep, that could indicate a high water table. Where I used to live was, hundreds of years ago, the old coastline salt marshes and the geology changed significantly over short distances. Most of the pre 20thC properties in the area had shallow wells. PS It looks like the borehole details you linked to showed that they drilled 180 feet but never finished the well and that it is capped off.

Small, achievable steps. It will soon start snowballing.

You put 50mm insulation on top of the deck, then UFH pipes, then 50mm liquid insulation. As the ICF core is behind a fair bit of insulation, it's not a true cold bridge. E.g. on ours we have 175mm insulation on the outside and 75mm On the inside. The deck you've shown above is a composite deck with structural screed. You wouldn't normally do that here (unless e.g. a garage) a standard prestressed 150mm plank system (typically 900mm wide and spans up to 5m) that fit tight together and only require a little grouting (you break the top of some of the hallow sections to bend in your wall bars). These leave a fush deck and no need for all the extra rebar and structural covering that detail shows. In the end, we used an insulated screed (TLA) over tha slabs rather than PIR boards as there was little cost difference and I didn't have the time to level everything out and lay 200m² of boards

We're soon to install an oversized Zehnder CW12 duct cooler in the supply, taking a feed from the reversible ASHP. All supply ducting will be well insulated and has been optimised for low air resistance so we can potentially increase the fan speed if needed without too much extra noise. Not expecting huge cooling power, but if it can discretely drop a few degrees across habitable spaces we'll consider it a win. We've also made sure to have external blinds/solar control glazing on the south elevation, but don't want to risk that alone being enough. I'll report back on how it performs next summer. 😅

In case it helps, you might be amazed how out if level most slabs are, and how much us considered acceptable. If there was a roof on, you wouldn't notice. Agreed as above. Level off with sand. Fill sand or builders sand is fine unless you traipse over it in boots and mess it up. If you have a mixer you might add 10% cement to crisp it up, as it is only 1/2 m3. For interest, and continuous professional development, do you mind telling us what level 'control' was used. Is the middle low, or are thd ens high...and how thick is the concrete?

Top is probably 1950s, bottom 70s

Sharp sand and carry on …!

Sharp sand so it keys?

During construction our council wrote to tell me they expected us to be complete by date. We wrote back to say it wouldn't be complete until new date a few months later and they accepted it. Bear in mind they sometimes use sat images to look for signs of occupation. One option might be to claim only site workers were living on site from date but it only became habitable on later date. Let them have a small win and hopefully the won't backdate it further.

We recently moved in and notified the council despite no BC sign off yet. We moved from a larger house next door. They responded that they will now ask the valuation office for a banding but it could take 2-3 months. This is despite them knowing from August that we could be moving in within 8 weeks. From that I would assume that they are able to backdate. They also said that they would charge as soon as the property was habitable.

We had no power water stairs plater and they still backdated us

What is the mantra on here…fabric first! What you just explained is exactly the problem we have in the UK building industry where long term problems are built into properties at the outset.

A good SE is unlikely to hear of any such allegation, and usually isn't responsible for insulation levels. My business was mostly very big sheds. A slab over 25 x 25 or so doesn't need insulation. The walls and roof do. We had a relationship with a specialist manufacturer who promoted fibreglass throughout. They bought in pir sandwich panels if the client required, BUT insisted on complete movement joints in the roof every 40m. Why, I asked the development Engineer. The gist was that some huge building by someone else had (allegedly) big issues due to shrinkage of the pir within the roof panels. Crazing and crumpling of the roof and leaks apparently ensued. As there was a big legal case and a private settlement, nothing was published, but our people learnt what they could, and decided that they would assume shrinkage and design a sliding joint for roofs. We used sandwich panels a few times, without problems, but never dissected an older building to look for problems. Yes I think it shrinks. We did use pir under the slab for smaller buildings The pir has a plastic sheet over it so it isn't tied to the concrete slab, so there will be gaps rather than crazing. But perhaps the pir behaves differently next to the colder ground. Nobody has any incentive to check. If there are known issues they are not publicised. With this in mind, for our current steading project we used 2 thinner layers of pir, with staggered joints. The heat losses if any, will be minimal.

Is that vertical joint an expansion gap filled with some sort of sealant? More of that if so to fill the gap?

I paid about £6.5k labour iirc. We bought 4130lm of a mix of charred larch and standard Siberian larch so that’s about £1.57/lm I think! hope that helps. Although I think our chippie has put his daily rate up a bit since he finished our job so might’ve cost us a bit more if we were doing it now.

@Lord Greyabbey If you’d like me to elevate the rest of the elevations let me know.

Well I’d never done it before, and managed 130m2 750m of pipe in 1 & 1/2 days. Only needed the decoiler for the 500m roll, with 100m or 200m you can just uncoil it as you going by rolling it, it is a 2 man job though

@joe90 A lot of stuff in the area is similar i.e. all a bit forgettable, or else moving towards the modern white render/grey window contemporary box stuff which isn't really my thing either. Bit too clinical. This recent build is popped up for sale recently outside Belfast and piqued my interest - their 3 'dormer' windows in a real cottage style finish is lovely.

If you need some ideas, here is my attempt at the manifold setup in my garage 👍

Just incase anyone wondered about the workability of soudal fix all for sealing the internal window frame. I wouldn’t recommend it as it’s difficult to tool. Also I think caulk blends in nicer.

I'd be checking for loose terminal screws in the CU. L,N and E...

Termination is just as easy for Loxone devices etc, in fact I find the larger awg easier to deal with most the time. The patch panel IDC punch down was all done by my wife but seemed easy enough. Getting cat6a wall keystones is a bit of a faff, and the occasional rj45 crimped on a flylead are a fiddle until you work out the correct parts and tool, bit once that's lined up it's no harder than any other rj45. Just don't let a subcontractor try with the tools off the van. hot tip: don't teach yourself to do this 4 meters up a wall on a cold November day trying to get the CCTV in just before they strike the scaffolding.

You can do most the plumbing and electrics - save a fortune . I’ve written a book “ electrics & plumbing on a self build for numb nuts “ . It’s a great read - covers everything you need .its been endorsed and sponsored by this forum . PayPal me 100 quid and I’ll send you a copy .

We had a motorhome on the site that we lived in for 6 months awaiting completion, ahem.

Ours was 320mg/l so we had to have one really.