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https://www.theheatpumpwarehouse.co.uk/shop/heat-pumps/air-source-heat-pumps/7-kw-panasonic-aquarea-high-performance-mono‑bloc-j-generation-1-phase-r32-wh-mdc07j3e5/ Panasonic 7kW for £2.5k + the Vodka And Tonic. Reverses for cooling without much thought / input, but if this is a let property you’d need to decide the merits of cooling (or just not announce it until you perhaps adopt the property later down the road?).

Hi everyone I’ve been keeping a low profile over the last few months dealing with LA to get full planning agreed on our new build proposal. Finally after 10 months we’ve got the green light to proceed. we (me & the wife) are building using an insulated raft with ICF walls clad in natural stone with a slate roof & oak porch & embellishments. (Similar feel to the attached images). I was hoping to invite opinions & recommendations on interior design layout. The current plans show a vaulted ceiling to the rear over the family room, the light grey areas upstairs show where the ceiling height slopes from 2.8m to 1.5m where it meets the walls. We are sat on a 1/4 acre rectangular plot, the front elevation facing NE. Looking forward to any view points or critiques. Thanks

Good, hope it turns up quickly. Says 'out of stock' so that is a good sign.

I drove past there yesterday. Can't you find a similar model on eBay. What is the model number. Is it this one https://www.diy.com/departments/bosch-laser-distance-measurer/3165140791830_BQ.prd

Well that didn't go to plan. I thought it might take 6-12 months to find a plot so I am more than happy with 3 weeks! First quotation in connection with the build has arrived - £1600 + VAT for conveyancing fees. Higher than I anticipated but suppose I had better get used to that feeling.

Maybe draw a line under it now?

Of course the Approved Inspector will not be employed by the local authority which employs the planners so that'll be a long corridor....................

correct. Yeah i'll crack on tonight, insulation washers and 100mm screws. Its just to hold it until my battens are up, at which point i'll fix the battens in place with 125mm screws.

Above or Below may be better to avoid confusion.

Firstly, I would keep an alternate heat source. We never know when we might get power cuts or breakdowns in heating systems. Plus, there is always the aesthetic value of a lovely log fire! We have visited lots of friends homes where they have either built or renovated to get large open spaces in their living areas. Our hosts will often take us to some cosy room or corner where they feel more comfortable. Large open spaces impress people but living in them is not the nicest experience in my opinion. I am not a lover of kitchen diners as I like to leave the kitchen behind when I eat my meal and do not want any guests around when I am cooking. Each to their own. I would not buy a house with such a large living area attached to a working kitchen. Another thought is the North East facing aspect. If you have the option could you not orientate more to the South or West to make the most of the light and sunshine that comes from that direction? After living in a South facing house I would never choose to live any other way! Good luck with whatever you choose to do.

I would echo that, we have a stove in our lounge, it's a little over 6m X 6m, but with a cathedral ceiling 6m tall. First time we had our stove on, we filled as we were told by the installer, spent the next 4 hours trying to dump the heat, windows and front and back doors open, it was cold outside. If we light it now it's the bear minimum logs in the stove with minimum air.

I'd use an offcut of basement wall capillary board - the dimpled plastic stuff that you put up against a tanked wall to prevent damage. I'm sure somebody on here will have a square metre sitting around somewhere. It will stop damage to the PIR and also direct water away.

Seconding this. When thinking about remodelling we got big sheets of cardboard, put them up where the walls would be and painted them. We've kept one up to see how much of a pain the doorway position is. I envy people who can see 2D plans or 3D renders and visualise themselves in it. I need to inhabit the space.

So this government has gone from the 'Greenest Ever, with the then lead, Dave, putting up a wind turbine on his home, to one that is happy to pollute rivers, reduce building standards, allow some houses to carry on burning, can't auction off a wind turbine site, and will let us buy ICE vehicles for an extra 5 years. Same government that is backing Tata to build a Giga factory in Somerset to make batteries. (expletive deleted)ing shower of shit they are.

I think with battery, my utilisation has jumped to about 99.ish percent. Today I kicked the ASHP in to heating mode and set the house thermostat slightly high for the PV production period. Not sure I need the heating on, but it's just about free due to PV and starts to heat the floor up slowly after summer UFH cooling. So combining dumping heat into 60T of concrete (my floor) and when heat pump in an off cycle, any excess goes to battery. As @SteamyTea missed your mistake, I will correct it, 1600kWh not kW, as in energy usage not power.

ANY build method, done properly with attention to detail will give similar results. We are timber frame and achieve those sort of results. Heat loss calculations, and proven by actual experience, says our house will need a maximum of a little over 2kW heat input when it is -10 outside and +20 inside. You should seriously be aiming for something similar. We originally planned 2 stoves, but only fitted one as you will find out in a well insulated house, it is near impossible to keep one part of the house cooler than others so the one stove does a good job of heating the whole house. In such a well insulated house, a stove needs to be somewhere it can circulate heat all around the house. Your open plan area would be good for that. But put one in the living room with the door shut and you will cook in no time. I would not fit conventional chimney's. A stove just needs a twin wall flue system up through the house and out through the roof. Then you can choose withing reason where to put the stove later on.

When we were planning our layout, we went to the beach, with tape measure and a stick. Marked in the sand, the real size of the building and doorways. Checked how things flowed, or didn't, made changes in the sand. You can add things like dining table, bed, sofa etc. Did this a few times, worked well for us. Also for room sizes, use you current house, fiends houses and show houses, to compare your proposed room size, to see how it feels, big or poky, also take account of furniture you want move to the new house.

>>> I don't think that a mechanism exists where the developer can be fined, other than for not complying with an enforcement notice. Well the LPA could probably 'invite' the developer to make a specific contribution / design changes in exchange for not having the building razed. Maybe that's what will happen. But it also means, in general, the UK needs to be more sophisticated with penalties and to stop having 'fragile' laws like CIL - where one slip means you get nailed. Life is complicated enough without the state deliberately (or stupidly) setting up mantraps. In this case, the planning deviation is undoubtedly deliberate rather than by mistake - in which case the developer should be punished. But it begs the question what the LPA were doing while the building was being built. "Asked why it did not act sooner, Greenwich said it was not until 2022, when building work was finally finished, that it became clear that the breaches to the planning permission were more than just external." Yeah, right. I'm sure the LPA will have demanded a big chunk of cash from the developer for planning and a regular review wouldn't have been out of order for a development this big. So I think the LPA takes at least 1/2 the blame. Maybe, by not challenging the build as it progressed, the developer even hoped that the LPA was tacitly agreeing.

I do agree, why pull down the whole building ,the only thing wrong with the building is that it doesn't do what they said it would . So I would take the position that the developer needs to bring it back closer to the original design that planning was passed on , if there was to be a parking spot for every flat then grant permission for the bottom 1 or 2 stories to be converted into parking and the extra retail space that was also promised. The disabled access issues should never be allowed to pass by with just a fine no matter how large the fine is and should be resolved regardless of cost to the developer.

that's the beauty of our language isn't it? i'd say it's still overboarding but under the rafters and internal to the rafters. then you could also use 'on top of the rafters internally' to describe what you're doing but that could also cause confusion! i think the way you described the full make-up from external to internal gave the best description of what you're achieving. and i understand the requirement for brevity as we're all busy people (apart from @Pocster as the only thing he's busy on is handing out virtual biscuits) but sometimes you have to put all the details so there's no ambiguity in the written word. so you'll often see someone state 'build-up from external to internal is ........' and such.

Demolish is a very stupid solution if there’s not a great safety problem. The property is 80-90% OK and BC will have signed it off as a safe build. By all means fine the developer so much that they will never think of doing it again - say 3x the saving they made. Our society is getting dumb with it’s overly punitive ‘lose all your CIL benefits if you make a tiny paperwork error’ - style penalties. Sure, punish but don’t actually kill them. Also LPA’s are arrogant enough as it is.

Dont forget to mark on the new boards where the timbers are hidden! Don't ask me how I know why this is a good idea... 🤣

I can't foresee a problem. Will that let a little air upwards and any water down? I think so.

I've deployed a load of pi3 at work running my PHP/mysql data input system on chromium to feed our ERP and production planning system. I think this PI 5 might just be overkill! Good to see the price is still attainable and hopefully they have a good production run so plenty of stock available.

My feeling is that in the real world DHW cylinders lose a lot of heat by conduction down the connected pipes and this isn't taken into account in tests.

It's costing me too much, simply as that. And the occupants tend to leave it on for too long ("as it's still cold outside...") not getting the concept of a buffer. Well, currently still need to do the EWI, so despite 350-400mm EPS under slab, 3G windows, 400mm loft roll and SIPwalls in the new extensions, there is still an unacceptable heatloss. So I think I need a bit more than 6kW and have previously been advised by installers that I'd need at least 10kW. I simply don't want to go down the usual route of undersizing the unit and having to upgrade it. Presume this grant only covers new ASHP units? Can we still source new units (say via ebay) and then get MCS installer to fit (at exorbitant cost?). I scanned the BUS blurb but it was not that clear on this.

Hah, easy mistake to make, no worries. Thanks for the pointers @Gus Potter. Yep, some more calculating to do, for sure. To pick out a few things - Yup, makes sense, thanks. I guess one approach in the absence of data about how the uplift / lateral forces would split (which I assume is quite dependent on specifics of structure shape) would be a sensitivity test; I'll see what I can knock up. I don't know if you've taken it into account or not, but the straw bale walls are (or rather, will be after this winter 😬) rendered with lime plaster externally, which adds a lot compared to just stacked straw bales, or even stacked-then-compressed bales. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0950061821006711 has some experimental results vs lateral loads, to see the kind of difference it makes. The detail for the door (and window) supports is 4x4 timbers anchored to the box beam either side of the door, running up to the roofplate where they are similarly anchored post-compression. So it's pretty much a portal as you describe it, I think? I've got the ones for the doors landing directly over piers (the ones for the windows *might* have to cheat a tiny bit, or I might have to dig a bit more ground out, but I'd like to think I'm finished digging for the moment 😅). Normally it's lime render right up to the posts, with clay plaster internally, both at a nice curve that increases daylight penetration; I don't mind losing that if I can prove the structure needs it for stability, but less keen on adding it "just in case", since it would lose those features. I actually had the same thought on my initial read-through. A few (or many, depending on what numbers end up saying) guy ropes into earth anchors wouldn't be the end of the world, and easy to fit - or retrofit, if things started going wonky. If I'd gone with piles, I'd be tied down into the earth already, of course, but it could easily have been £1K in steel to do it. Got the final two piers in, at least. Lots of rejigging to do, still need to turn a load of the blocks, etc, but hopefully no more digging. Soil away to the HWRS at the weekend, I think.

We used stairplan, seem midway between stairbox and a fully handmade carpenter job. All very positive, even though they couldn't deliver to NI and I had to travel over in a hire van to collect.

Minor thing, but watch out when the ufh is laid, as I'm assuming you wouldn't want it in the larder? A neighbour's builder made that mistake and he (neighbour) nearly had a nervous breakdown over it.

I would check your building regs on the requirement for ventilation. Unless your ICF build is really badly done, your airtightness is very likely to be better than 3m3/m2 @ 50Pa. Certainly in Scotland that mandates balanced mechanical supply and extract (MVHR). The point to find out is now, then you can plan for it.

Wood burning stoves is a marmite topic on here. There is nothing wrong with one in a well insulated modern house as long as you fit a room sealed one, that takes it's combustion air in via a duct direct from outside, rather than from the room. Beware not all stoves with an air in vent take both primary and secondary air from outside. Check carefully. Our main reason for having one is a good supply of free firewood. If we did not live somewhere with plenty of free wood we might not bother if we had to buy all the fuel. Appreciate you wanting a house specific to your needs, nothing wrong with that. It might be worth planning a way to floor over the vaulted area should you want to make way for another bedroom, i.e. design the structure to allow that should you want to. A hot water tank really needs to be as close to the kitchen and bathrooms as you can. Probably a little airing cupboard incorporated in your en-suite complex could achieve that.

Sounds like you've really thought about this and happy to take on suggestions. Re the burners. The house you are about to build will be far more airtight and insualted that the one you built 17 years ago. It's a different way of living and thinking about heating. You're talking anywhere upto £10k for those two burners. That's an expensive backup plan! At no point have we regretted not putting a burner in our icf house. I can imagine how uncomfortably hot it would get! We have three 3kW blow heaters as emergency backups if the ASHP goes down. And in reality, it would be 2-3days of no electric before we got in to difficulty. If you spec everything right, your build will only lose 1-2c every 24hrs in the depths of winter if your heating is off.

So you have 2x3kW Willis, confused why you think you need 11kW heat pump? Unless you have poor insulation and are using additional heating not mentioned you should need no more than a 6kW heat pump. Most manufacturers seem to use a lot of common parts on a 4, 6 and 8kW units, but when you get to 11kW you are looking a big unit. A new ASHP doesn't need to cost much, I paid £1300, from eBay. I elected to DIY install and do what I wanted, not be pushed in a direction I didn't want to go, like loads of zones buffers etc. If you can set up a Willis heater, an ASHP should be easy enough.

Commisserations on your roofing cowboys! You have my sympathies as we have also had our roof 'fixed' only for it to leak more. Can anyone reco.mend how to find a good roofer?? Struggling to find reliable trades & have been burnt previously even with extensive research & local recommendations. Is there any sort of guaranteed trade association?? I'd be grateful for any tips!

We have an old lime torched roof, where bits of mortar have fallen away over the years and as such you can see day light, results in more slipped slates, but (that part of the roof, at least) is bone dry.

When my brother bought his house, over 25 years ago, he asked me about stripping and reverting his roof as from the loft you can see daylight spots in many places, however when it rains it never leaks 🤷‍♂️ so I said wait till it leaks and it never has 🤣

the trouble with a roof leak, is where the water appears through the ceiling is usually a long way from where the actual leak in the roof is, and even with water appearing from multiple places it could all be a single leak in the roof. The only way to find it is a good look around inside the loft space with a torch when it is raining heavily and persistently. Only when you locate the leak can you move forwards and deal with it. It may or may not be related to the recent work.

Walking on a roof is perfectly acceptable and I have done a great number. If your roof is leaking then the felt is knackered. The mortaring they have done is crap (in my opinion) the ridge and hip tiles should have been lifted, cleaned then re bedded on new motor, not buttered as they have done. If I had quoted for this I would have looked inside your loft to assess the felt condition and possibly recommended strip and re felt and batten using the same tiles if they were ok. I have done this on numerous houses. Best of luck getting a cowboy to give you’re money back I am afraid

It should be fine to walk on. A dry ridge / hip setup may have been better as it does not rely on mortar joins. Maybe the battens and / or rafters are rotting? Can you see it from the inside? Any daylight?

The term isn't that relevant really, the principle remains the same. Besides, the five year fixed parliament act was repealed in March 2022. Elections can be called at any time.

Ours is a 5 year, fixed term, parliament. It takes an act of parliament to have an election before that. The last few elections shows how little regard this government has for parliamentary rules and law.

I did say this quite a while back Gas boilers on new builds next Watch this space

Not at all "oh dear" A touch of reality. I have long said it is pointless telling us all to get an EV until the extra generation capacity is there to charge them, and preferably from green sources not just burning more fossil fuel to charge your "green" EV Same for heat pumps, we can't make them, install them and provide the power for them quick enough to all have one in such a short time. And a realisation that bringing old buildings up to modern building standards is not possible for an affordable sum. So at last, we might get a plan to go green in a proper thought out, progressive manner as fast as we can sensibly achieve without crippling the economy or pissing off the electorate. Such a realistic, achievable plan is far more likely to be taken on board and acted on by the public than some unachievable plan that stands no hope of being achieved. I am a lot more confident today that we might actually manage to go green in a sensible manner now. Well done for having the balls to make these changes.

There are only a few doing that, and they criticise everybody other than themselves. As I mentioned before, I wonder what they do as jobs, if everything they do is perfect, and how much they expect to earn.

Hah! It's amazing to see the forum is still in full flow with the architect bashing. It's amazing the misunderstanding of what we actually do, fees are not just based on the time taken to do a task, I can do a house layout very quickly, but only because I've accumulated years of knowledge, worked with various planning departments, worked with different build methods on different types of sites, have appropriate insurance, have a network of consultants to deal with any scenario etc etc The fact is that buildhub continually perpetuates the myths that architects only draw pretty pictures and don't have construction knowledge - and that percentage fees mean that architects don't have incentive to keep budget in mind etc. It's just a nonsense and the old heads who dominate the forum giving out poor advice to people at the start of the process which can never be rowed back from. Really the main reason that I stopped frequenting the forum, I'm amazed that there are still some who bother wasting time helping people and trying to defend a profession against ignorant misinformation. The number of times I've heard on here that construction drawings are just a copy and paste exercise is crazy - especially post grenfell and in the throws of brexit. In the case of the op - there are a number of options, whoever you decide to use - make sure that it's someone you can get on with, you're likely to deal with them for a reasonable amount of time. You get good and bad in all walks of life, look at previous work, maybe speak to previous clients. Go and visit the neighbours one which you want to mirror and make sure it's what you actually want too - building is expensive so make the most of it!

Not to be sniffed at .

The massive tilt wasn't on the approved plans 🙂

I have a spare Tin Hat if you need one.....😑

I’ve ordered an 8gb one . Bound to sell out so will stick on eBay for a small profit .

@Sparrowhawk Distaster strikes at my end. Thanks for pointing out my error and the heads up @Nick Thomas Can you all for give me please. I just use my own name.. not forgotton that yet.. but time may tell as I age .. further.