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Our design was provided by Tanners (Eire) . One sentence in an email from him about the foundation design saved his fee many times over. The design 'type' is called an Insulated Raft. - One of the consequences is - for example - that we have had no heating at all in the house so far this year - and the ground floor is tiled throughout. We used ground improvement columns - not piles - because they cost about one third (£6,500 ) that other piling contractors were threatening to charge (10m by 10m house, 64 'piles' ) Heres the build-up from piles upward

Physics explains it all.

Our piling design included Foam Glass blocks at the head of most of our piles to get over the problem you raise. (Those supporting a structure outside the 'lived-in' envelope didn't need the foam glass blocks )

I have long moaned about my roughly 75kWh "non heating" electricity use each week, and finding out what it is and how to reduce it. I have finally made a start tackling that. The under stairs cupboard contains a lot of essential stuff most of which is on 24/7 so seemed an easy place to start. This includes satellite tv receivers, the printer, and all the network gear including the router, VOIP phone base unit, NAS storage etc. All stuff than needs to be on 24/7 but I know it consumes a lot of power. So time to measure it. I rigged up a couple of extension leads to power all this kit from one plug and made a loop of cable to allow my clamp ammeter to measure the power consumed, and came up with a total of 0.5 Amps, rising to 0.6 of the printer is printing. That's 120 VA If I assume most of it will be a poor power factor, lets take a guess that it translates to 100W as seen and metered by the electricity meter. that's 2.4kWh per day or 16.8kWh per week or 22% of my "non heating" usage. And at the present capped electricity rate of about 33p per kWh it is costing £289 per year to power that lot. So thoughts are turning to how to power that lot by adding more renewable power? Being an almost constant load and low power, and all together in one place, this seems a possible candidate for a little bit of off grid renewable power generation with a small amount of battery storage. Initial thoughts? A 12V system based on a large leisure battery for storage, charged from a few more solar PV panels and also a small wind turbine. Rough costings: Cheap "500W" wind turbine £150, leisure battery £100, solar PV panels £200 Add in sundries and that is going to be about £500 of expense. Theoretical payback of 2 to 3 years perhaps. So I expect that will be the main content of the thread, to design such a system, work out if it will actually work, and cost it properly, including an estimate of battery life and periodic replacement costs. The choice of PV and a small wind turbine to charge the battery are to try and get more generation in the winter. And it will once and for all confirm if a small cheap wind turbine is any good in a domestic setting. Control will probably be an Arduino Nano. All it has to do is monitor the battery voltage, switch out some generation or switch in a dump load if the battery voltage gets too high, and switch on a mains charger if there is insufficient renewable power and the battery voltage gets too low.

I would do a sketch cross section highlighting: vapour barrier vapour permeable membrane over facial ventilation and rridge ventilation Thickness of insulation and insulated plasterboar See what Building Control say. You might want to put something on top of the rafters at the eaves so you don't see the underside of the membrane between the exposed rafter ends. Eg WBP plywood or T&G boards?

Workability mainly. Stopped the bricklayer whining.

I am currently paying about £4.60 a metre plus VAT for 9 x 2 C24 from local merchant. Similar price from Jewsons. Timber seems to still be falling in price.

The sand was from Kernow Mixers in Cornwall. Mix is something like 1:1/2:4 cement:hydrated lime:sand.

I've not used them but Google found... https://plumb.build/product/47-x-225mm-9-x-2-tanalised-carcassing-timber-c24-6m/1422 £1647 Inc Vat for 55 but includes free nationwide delivery

Great site for all things paving and drainage. This is their page on French Drains. Perhaps bookmark their index https://www.pavingexpert.com/drain03#french Index https://www.pavingexpert.com/pavindex Option B would be the one on the left. The middle option is possibly better if it was all clay and you get standing water. Right hand one is for dispersing output of treatment plant.

I did method B But the No 1 question when trying to drain wet land that is lower than the adjoining plot, is just where are you going to drain the water to? I hope you have some area that is either lower, or drains well, to drain all your water to?

I went with B for our basement perimeter drain. Reason being that it will prevent your clean gravel from clogging up. The gravel does the work 90% of the time anyway, with just heavy rain needing the pipe to kick in, unless you've a high water table. It's easy enough. Just make sure your membrane is wider than it needs to be.

With the insinkerator, it has a rubber top where the plug goes that stops anything bigger than a pea going down unles you force it. The mechanism itself doesn't have teeth or blades, just a couple sliding notches that somehow do all the work. Anything hard tends to bounce up and down rather than get jammed in the baldes. I think the older ones were notoriously prone to blowing up from an errant teaspoon.

You could look at TVHeadend which will run on a RPi, as long as you don't want any of the encrypted channels. I run it on a RPi 4 with a TVHat for terrestrial TV, but it can be used with satellite receivers. Pretty low power consumption although it's a bit nerdy to set up.

Paying about £32 inc for 9x2 C24 currently in 6m lengths so that’s pretty good price. Downside is there will be about 1.8 tonnes and you would need a flatbed wagon as it’s likely fork lift loaded and your delivery costs will negate any saving.

Me to. Still use them, especially this one. Means 'stop blocking the empty fast lane of the dual carriageway'. Unlike this one: Which means 'I know I have been a complete twat and purposely held everyone up, but I am more important than you'.

Probably some of it could be. Certainly a few things are USB powered so 12V USB supplies would work, but they are tiny, almost insignificant loads. No hope of that with the bigger loads like the printer and satellite box.

Did this exercise over a decade ago. I have virtually no parasitic loads now. Rather than look to power it renewably, is there anything that can be properly switched off i.e. printer. How about a bit of electronics that senses one half of a co dependant bit of equipment that turns on the other bit i.e TV and satellite box or sound system. As nice as it is to have everything instantaneously available all the time, a few seconds wait is not a killer. Was only 45 years ago we had to warm up the TV.

As much as everyone says it won't work, this^ is how I've set up our system on an ASHP. 270l TS, with PV diverter *and* tappings for a boiler stove which isn't installed yet. At "normal" ASHP DHW temps there's enough in the tank to provide a 10min shower without the heatpump cutting in, but if SWMBO has an extended shower the ASHP will happily start, hold and start to restore the temperature during the aft end of said shower, and be fully recovered after a <30min burn. In electric costs it's working out less than half the cost of the previous 9kW shower in the other house...

We have a small loft area in the top V of the vaulted roof that is inside the thermal envelope (warm roof) but separated from the room below by the floor and ceiling, and the only "ventilation" of that space is leakage around the loft hatch. I never find the air stale or in any way damp when I go up there.

With a dual stat setup and an oil boiler, you’d struggle to not get DHW almost on demand tbh. A TS is a beast for producing DHW, and the heat goes almost directly in / out. With an oil boiler you can size the TS smaller and it will then recover faster, but if ST and / or PV are present on an install you’ll typically want to size a TS significantly bigger to harvest that ‘free’ energy. A TS will give a diminishing output vs an UVC, so needs careful thought and consideration, but if @Gone West has oil as a parachute, they’ll never ever be stuck for DHW with a TS. A 15-20 minute burn from the oil, from cold, and you’ll be able to jump in the shower, assuming a 200L TS vs 21-26kW boiler. To maximise the performance, I always specify a 28mm high recovery DHW coil with my TS installs. Trevor at Cylinders2go can get pretty much whatever you want specc’d / made to order.

All the above. Just make sure of the robustness of the roof ties. If still nervous, a vertical timber bolted down the wall will provide extra stiffness. All tgat assumes that you are not hoing to be hoisting great loads off the roof.

Yes, but over the life of the vehicle, the extra fuel costs of an AWD will probably be more than the cost of redoing the driveway. Plus the drive is simply not pleasant to use. If it was up to me solely, I would probably get an AWD and leave the driveway as is, but accept that in winter even an AWD might struggle to get up it. But SWMBO is really not happy with it and I now see where she is coming from.

I’ve eliminated rads upstairs and the wood burning stove for similar reasons. We also eliminated 2 bathrooms and redesigned our plans which reduced the house size by 80m2. We’re still putting in PV but I am in two minds about the battery storage.

The W [watt] is the power, kWh [mega joules] is the energy required. If the W is 'on' for 1000 hours, then that is 1 kWh of energy [kWh or MJ] is just power multiplied by time (the k just means multiplied by 1000).

At 4mx4m you do not need piers, the wind loadings are pretty small unless this shed is in a particularly windy location.

3m³/m².hour @50Pa and 3 ACH are not the same thing (something I forgot earlier) The first is based on total area and the other is on total volume if I remember correctly.

The roof will provide bracing if you tie the timbers in to all 4 walls. The corners will obviously be strong as they too are braced in 2 directions. It's the middle of the walls laterally and vertically that'll be weakest. It really is SE territory for an official answer but I guess you're not going down that route. Have you any dimensioned drawings/sketches of plans and elevations what you plan to end up with?

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0143624420975707 > A whole house retrofit in-line with current Building Regulations reduces the heating demand and emissions by 65%, and lowers the input electrical demand for the heat pump to under 1 kW Not bad going, honestly.

I've always found the best way with water / sewerage companies is to start with a phone call, if you take that route. But I think that potentially you are overegging this, and having slightly too many unnecessary kittens. Grab the other end of the stick - by the time whatever process that you have to deal with your .. er .. output gets to the 'property' it is no longer agricultural, commercial or domestic waste. Your treatment system has turned it into stuff that is no longer waste, and therefore OK. In fact Clause 5 specifically (on one reading) allows what you need. The clause does not say you can't install apparatus, it says you can't install apparatus that puts out pollution. Treat the bolded phrase as a compound descripiion: ..Not to install or use on over or under any part of the Property soakaways septic tanks or 'any apparatus that allows agricultural commercial or domestic sewage or storm sewage overflows or Hazardous Substances to enter the ground surface watercourses or the Aquifer'.. Since your apparatus will not allow it, and will only put out manna smelling of roses, it is therefore permitted for you to install that apparatus, and it is not caught. With one bound you are free, or rather you were never constrained. *If* you can get that clear and obvious reading confirmed for your worries' sake. And Clause 7 merely bans the act of actually doing what the approved apparatus prevents, which is fair enough. I would suggest talking to a local specialist solicitor (ie one who has done this before) or perhaps an agricultural land agent or MRICS for 45 minutes to establish what the clause means (written down in English), and then to the EA to see how they want it implemented, if you need an exemption, and whether they will give you one. That should include the technical standards you are required to meet, and how it may be regulated. Don't take the EA as gospel at first hearing - they may give you the gold-plated version that you can do otherwise. In principle if someone gets arsy you could install your apparatus in a runoff proof concrete basin, or on a waterproof membrane, to hold back any unacceptable escapes should they ever happen. HTH F

@jack Thank you for your comments 🙂 The design was specifically for the plot, and tailored to suit the orientation. I have posted it on here, and I shall be interested to see what the comments are - it may all change, particularly if there is something that I haven't thought of! It is a serviced plot with Planning Permission, but I will clearly have to make sure that I get the Conditions approved. As soon as contracts are exchanged on the plot I will put in the assumption of liability, before I submit the application to clear conditions. Hopefully I have got that in the correct order?

Yes, he also spotted a VAT mistake made by my builder which gave me an additional £1k.

Yes, and the same as 2,862 kWh of natural gas, gasoline, timber or coal. A kWh (not kwh) is derived from SI units for distance, mass and time. The real unit of energy is the joule [J] and is very small, the force needed to move a kilogram 1 metre. If you move that mass and distance in 1 second, then it is known as a watt [J/s] If you carry on doing that work for 1 hour, then that is a Wh. It is often easier to think of energy as gasoline or diesel in your fuel tank, and the engines power is the rate that you use up that fuel.

Don’t underestimate the cost We settled on an arts and crafts design for the roof While they do look nice and will st your build apart from others Our trusses and loose rafters will cost around 12k Another thousand on lead 13 K on slates Laboure would cost a fortune I’ve been on it two weeks and I’m no where near finished I spent two days cutting birds mouths into the trusses prior to the crane arriving

Well I went with @Temp's suggestion and ended up with sand from Cornwall. With the shipping it cost a fortune but I had already bought the bricks and had them approved by Planning so no way of going back. I bought 2 tonne bags. Material was about £80, shipping £175 (2 pallets). I will need 2 more. I think it will dry a bit lighter than the photo but you can see in the foreground the colour of mortar made with our local sand would not have worked.

If you want the full 4M ridge height under permitted development, then you have to move the building. It probably needs planning permission, and it won't help you now, but the advice would have been apply for PP for the replacement workshop BEFORE you dismantle the old one.

I think the problem is, they do not frost up enough to have to worry about it. It is only us that want to extract the last 2% efficiency out of them.

It is surprising just how significant this can be. I played around with the spreadsheet a lot for my own house and additional insulation to the structure made little difference. Hence the argument can be made that the ROI for additional insulation is so long that it may not be worth it. Airtightness however does make a significant and tangible difference to heating loads and as such is well worth pursuing if one is that way inclined.

Make sure you give clear instructions.

The title of this thread is mis leading - I had to delete my original post .

Where do I get one of these steep driveways?

If you get it wrong, do you end up in Low Wycombe?

Delboy will just have to learn to reverse park !