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Hi, just adding my 2 cents as an architect. I think an L shaped, U shaped or H shaped floor plan would provide you with a far superior living space - I wouldn't get hung up too much on area to perimeter ratio. What you're think your saving in cost you're also losing in unnecessary circulation spaces that wouldn't be required with a more efficient floor plan. I wouldn't want to say much more without knowing the particular site constraints and opportunities - views, wind, orientation etc.

Yet another option is to put loxone audio in your rack. I have a tall Middle Atlantic 20" deep network rack. There isn't much in this rack currently but I have - Bottom half set up as shelving. - Unifi router/switch/patch panel. - Loxone audio at the top (mounted on one of these https://www.network-cabs.co.uk/product/ad-tek-products-1u-19-inch-rack-mount-din-rail-panel-bracket-with-cover-406) Works quite well, and saved adding an additional "box/panel/cabinet"

I don't know whether there is a way to assemble the whole thing using bolts You could certainly have that designed but it wouldn't be a straightforward design and as you get smaller the influence of bolt holes removing material becomes more significant. I charge maybe £300 for a beam design... because I don't do it very often I'd probably charge £900 for a truss! Unless I could push almost everything onto the fabricator. or they have to be welded, in either case doesn't sound terribly time consuming You need to consider than a standard beam size required very little fabrication time and labour is the key cost. So with a standard beam you are mostly paying for materials. A truss only has a moderate reduction in material cost but many more times more fabrication. Each member will need cutting and prepping, lots more welding, flipping it over, weld the other side etc. Easy to handle - no lifting equipment required. A beam lifter is maybe £50 for a day. It's a minor thing. If it's prefabricated then no benefit. Easy to deal with services (the same as web joists). True but this doesn't really save any significant money. Can be left exposed and would look OK as opposed to a steel beam. A nice beam doesn't look too bad. A bolted truss would look a bit shoddy. A nicely welded truss could look good but a bit of a dust trap! Also need to consider fire proofing. It's not outside the realms of possibility. I'd say probably between x3 - x8 the cost for a standard beam.

Well, I'm unashamedly in favour of home storage, even though it doesn't make much financial sense at the moment. It's just a year now since my 9.5kWh battery got commissioned, with a 3.6kw solar installation. So I have a full years data to go on. House is a well insulated 180m2, pretty much passive build. Our heating is from a 3.5 kW split air to air unit and has no problem keeping the house at 22c summer and winter. Electrity consumption total from grid 2814kWh, of which 339 was charged at peak rate and 2475 at low rate.. So I've used 2138 kWh at low rate that I would otherwise have paid the higher for. Of that 2,138 I estimate 1,600 ended up in the car so just 538kWh went into the house. .3794 - .0714 = .308 x 538 = £165.70 which sounds pretty dire. But that calculation ignores the 7mWh of solar generation. Of that 7mWh I only managed to use 4mWH the remainder went into the grid at of give away prices. So adding the 4mWh of solar I was able to use all of which was generated during the day 0.308 x 4000 = £1232 Annual saving is in the region of $1232 + £165 = £1397 given my system outlay was 6.5K that's not such a bad return. More importantly the energy exported added to the renewables component of other peoples electricity, helping to reduce co2 production. Regarding battery cycles. It's still an emerging technology but the data on Lithium Phosphate suggests they are going to last a long time. 12 year unlimited charge/discharge warranty is not exceptional. The company I got my battery from is now trialling a battery to grid pilot to use home storage to help balance out grid loads. This has to be the way forward in decarbonising the grid. True 9.5kWh is tiny but hopefully in the future the 50kWh in my EV will also be able to help. Tesla use Phosphate in the base model 3 and the data so far is suggesting that they may well last the 20 year life of the car. A figure of 2 to 4 times the number of cycles expected from the NCA batteries used in the other Tesla models GivEnergy have an integrated inverted battery package (13.5kWh) for £6650 just as an example of the current solution costs.

That's us - you and me both (and a good few others) - told off @Square Feet..... join the ever lengthening queue of us CamelCaseIlliteratesWhojustCan'tGedditRight You should listen and watch and LeArN fROm the Maestro at work. You BaD mAn . Phhhhhh.

Or they wouldn’t….. remember, most people can barely tie their own shoelaces. That is so true. And the really sad thing is that when I offered to create a course to help explain 'energy', no one was interested. Picture framing and reiki healing courses were popular. I am not even sure that the current energy prices are the real problem, they have gone from, on average, under 3% of household income to around 7%. That is after a few years of gradual decline in prices, the long term average has been 5% of household income, pretty cheap really. I think what has upset people is that the price rise came in one big hit, and the government grant of up to £550 (pensioners got even more) was soon forgotten. The media will always pick up on some poor sap that is totally clueless and spout nonsense like 'I have halved my usage and my bills have still doubled'. Should really be the medias job to challenge that nonsense. No amount of tinkering in the market is going to make a jots worth of difference to the domestic user. Much better to just invest heavily in renewable generation capacity. Near enough every household in the country was given at least £400, so that is £12bn, enough cash to install ~20 GW of PV (the quick and easy one to install). That would be an extra 20 TWh of inflation and political shock proof generation. Connecting up an extra 20 GW of distributed PV should not be a problem, it would take planning on behalf of the DNO, but they have a good idea already about what is possible. It would only take about 20,000 hectares of land, England is 13,293,000 hectares, so under 0.2% of the land area. It would also set a trend and highlight that renewables are going to be the major generation source. The above does rather sound like a nationalised power generation project, but the government is currently subsiding, one way or another, the private generators, so apart from political ideologies, which mean jack shit when you are shivering in the dark, we might as well just do it.

I’d like to offer help to anyone who needs help doing drawings or designing their home or extension. I'm a Registered Architect with some time on my hands. I use my iPad and an app called Concepts to draw and have already helped out a few Forum members.

They're harder to find, but you can get DIN rail mountable versions of these. I have a DIN rail unit with four relays.

Diversity is not usually applied to a single ring final circuit. It’s not really relevant. The circuit can’t be overloaded, because if the current surpasses 32amps for any length of time the breaker will disconnect. Ie if you plug in enough 2kw heaters. Each point on the ring is supplied with 2x cables. The key requirement being that each cable must be rated at 20amps or greater. Table 4D5 is the one to use here for twin and earth cable. Reference method 100 is probably the most likely result of acoustic insulation between floors. This gives a current carrying capacity for 2.5mm2 of 21amps and is thus acceptable.

That sort of thing should be fine. If I were starting again I'd use a lot more non-Loxone components, especially DMX relays. They're very cheap per channel and DMX is reliable when set up properly, especially where you're just using it for switching.

A very useful clarification, and if the aircon can handle the excess heat that's also very good. I'd say that was much less of a concern than with a separate external extract. The MVHR's extract fan will need to work a little harder as the air flow through extract vent in the cabinet goes into reverse & more has to be pulled through the other extract vents, but a Zehnder is doubtless clever enough to adjust for that automatically. I agree :)

I did think about this as it's a 36U rack so I have plenty of space. also running the speaker cables to the network rack would allow me to move away from the Loxone audio server in the future should I wish to. I could also put the amp for the cinema in the rack too. thank you so much for that link. I will definitely consider it especially as it's the same price as that cheapo enclosure I found and would be a neater solution I think.

PV inverter is in the loft and feeds down to the CU/batteries in the comms room. I had a long discussion with folk on here about where to site my batteries and, for me, the basement in the comms room was the most obvious position. Again, way too late for me to think about relocating them just to put another Loxone cabinet in when I could find another solution for the Loxone system. I do have 2.5m height to play with but that is from the floor so I could easily fit a LXN-2RE in under the LXN5 should I need it. could probably fit an LXN4 depending on regulations on the unit being a certain height etc. at the moment, it's just funds that are low and I just need to get it working so we can move in.

It depends on who's paying I suppose. Lets work an example. Here's a quick sketch of 4 options and assuming a 3m high external wall. At say €150 per m2 of external wall there's over €11,000 of difference in build cost. That's before you account for the old blocklayers adage that every corner ads €10k to the house overall in added labour, waste and complexity. The "H" costs €80k more in that case than the plain square. Maybe not exact but I would be surprised if I was too far off. Departing from the perfect square isn't too terrible or even an "L" but once you look at other funny shapes they costs really escalate.

This is what I was trying to work out when I asked the question Ask @ProDave

@de devil tail your requirements are not particularly unusual and it seems you are not restricted in what you can build. So there should be no reason not to have a strong layout. There’s probably hundreds of house layouts online that would give you what you need or that you can tweak. again I’d refer you to Danwood homes website for ideas especially as it’s german/polish architecture. If you have budgetry limitations it is always cheaper to go up. Building a bungalow with a view to converting at a later stage probably isn’t going save you any money and a lot of hassle at a later stage. In the circumstances you describe I’d definitely just build a 1.5 or 2 story house. Well designed it doesn’t even have to be as big as 250 sqm to feel spacious. Just make sure your downstairs has potential future bedroom and bathroom space.

I'd go for something like this, it's a very undeveloped idea just a kind of conceptual sketch. There'd be plenty of scope to include a separate office room in this design too with some further work. I also have to young kids, and the advantage of a layout like this is that they can have their bedrooms in their own wing of the house when they're teenagers. While young they'd be in the bedroom close to you. Also a note, on your current floor plans your external walls are drawn incredibly thin - I would think they'd need to be at least 400mm+

No just a tile extension joint

In this plan of a duplex apartment the kitchen is 10'8" x 9'10" With the lounge/dining area 22'1"x13'3" but in order to maximize the rental income we built a stud wall partitioning off the area with a balcony as a bedroom and adding a shower into the wc. The door now goes directly in to the kitchen. The area is small, but workable, having said that I wouldn't want it in my own home that I was building!

Our kitchen is about 5 metres by 7 metres, so a little smaller than that. It makes a good kitchen / diner but although it does have a sofa and a tv in there, it is cramped as a living room, and I would not want to be without our separate living room as well.

How do you safely derate the circuit, what stops the wife or future owner plugging a 3kW kettle or hair dryer? What rules mean is you have to install bigger cables, not put a sticker (for example) on an outlet. Just move the majority of cable to above or below the insulation, then it's not insulated.

Correct. Keen to make the most of it folk would use a plug in rad or tumble dryer for an hour. Maybe extract 3kWh of useful energy. Word would soon spread that if you bought an A2A unit for £1000 you could probably get 12kWh of heating for free. Spread the cost of the usage across the other 23hrs of the day. The nett cost would be 0. Head into your local pub just after opening time and you'll have a line of men who can manifestly not tie their own shoelaces but can figure out a complex social welfare system with incredible accuracy. People will crawl over broken glass to get something for free. Like standing charges it's a disincentive towards energy efficiency. Can you imagine going to the petrol pumps and paying £4/litre for the first 20 litres and then £2/litre there after. The guy with the eco buggy subsidises the cost of the petrol station for the gas guzzling barge. I'll work an example maybe..........

So spend £7500 on storage to halve the cost of your electricity, maybe. Now I know there are some fantastic deals on ToU power, but are they going to outlast the battery i.e. 5000 cycles. As it is winter, and I am at home a lot at the moment, my usage and usage split has gone the wrong way. I use about 11 kWh/day, with 2 of those outside the E7 window. Now I could fit batteries and and shift some of the space heating i.e. less charge in the storage heater and run a fan heater more. Say that is a 4 kWh shift. So night usage will become (with the latest price increase) 5 kWh x 15p/kWh = 75p, day will be 6 kWh x 30p/kWh = 180p. Total a day 255p/day. As I am currently using 9 kWh at night and 2 kWh during the day, I pay 195p/day. So that gives us 60p/day to play with. Battery system at £7500 divided by usable charge/discharge cycles of 5000 is 150p a cycle (say down to 20% and up to 80%, which is actually only 9 kWh of storage). £1.50 will buy about 5 kWh of peak rate electricity. Even if you get 10,000 cycles, it is still a greater amount, by 75p/day, than just being on bog standard E7. And who knows what is just around the corner. We all thought that the 'challenger' energy companies would reduce the prices paid, all it has done is added a few billion to the overall pricing. Domestic batteries are a fun hobby, but quite an expensive one.

Not that that sort of price difference though. Saving a kWh is really not that hard. And it is not really a matter of never using that kWh, we can divert power, we already do. Say there is a supermarket chain that has 500 stores, and each store has 50 fridges and freezers. Probably save to say that the cooling load in a store is in the region of 10 kW, That is 120 MWh/day. Now shifting that by a few hours is easy enough, it is already done though a pricing mechanism. Change the pricing mechanism to a compulsory one. i.e. don't allow the supermarket to actively cool during the 5PM to 7 PM window, but guarantee power during the more stable 10 AM to 2 PM window.

If that's the case you need to insulate and do more air tightness work. I'm at nearer to 200m2 and using a 6kW ashp and it's really is too big. I would say a usable capacity of battery of around 15kWh. Then in winter you can fully charge on cheap rate and get most your days energy on cheap rate. I have 6.6kW of PV and most days in winter get very little electric from it.

We rarely use matting on flo screed

These are space frame trusses - you do see smaller ones being used e.g. for lighting rigs. Maybe the extra cost is justified in that case by the truss being lighter and thus easier to erect for temporary installations. e.g. https://www.ltt-versand.de/fr/structures-alu/naxpro-truss-black-label/fd-24-noir/24829/naxpro-truss-fd-24-longueur-300-cm-noir

That is tidal, not wave, generation. A totally different beast. To give you an idea of how much power is in a wave, this is Penzance on a quiet day. A 1 metre swell and for every meter of wave front, 2.5 kW is produced. That is a lot of wallop.

Double chord at the top because the chord in compression is liable to buckle, whereas a single large tension chord won't buckle. These are massive and as you reduce the size the relative cost of fabrication increases. A truss is used because the additional fabrication cost is worth it for the reduced material and weight saving (and some architectural value too). You wouldn't change a 300mm deep beam for a truss because the fabrication cost would many multiples of the cost of the raw steel. Many years ago when steel/iron was costly and labour was dirt cheap, you sometimes found small trusses. But aside from prefabricated things like metal web joists and roof trusses you won't find fabricated steel trusses at a domestic scale.

Posting this again.

Thanks. That makes sense. Foundation bit does scare me a little. I have been posting here and reading the blog and do appreciate the invaluable feedback and advice provided by all. From the point of purchasing and waiting for probate (for the seller) to finish till now getting I valuable feedback. , I have benefitted greatly by this forum and thanks to all those who comment for no apparent gain except to help others. I have already taken into account the point about cost and any modification needs to keep the cost angle in mind to bring any cost risky items within control. I intend to project manage myself (at least parts of it) as have done few other properties but DIY at that level is not my remit. Where i want to save cost is the procurement. Not trying to boast....we recently refurbished the bathroom and I was able to source the material (better than any quality found in typical UK bathroom showrooms) including stone bath, smart andriod mirror, smart toilet Stone one piece vanity unit at one third of the cost. Its the procurement which we need to sort out which will help greatly to make the project viable.

Nonsense. What happened to pragmatism. Guy is doing a temp job on a house that is getting demoed. Approved contractor? Go over to the EV Charger thread just now and read the contempt for "approved" and "certified" "clubs" - you will get some poorly trained muppet with a pipe shooting beads into your wall regardless. I guarantee you that the majority of this forums members (clearly not all), would be more knowledgeable and competent than most of the people who come to install it and will understand how a building goes together far better. Most of us on this forum build buildings, all in compliance with regs and building standards, of course someone can buy the approved material and blast it into a cavity.

I think it depends on the exposure where you are, altitude, direction of wind. I have come across examples of everyone one to none. My last house with plain tiles had every 6th row nailed ?

It's Ireland - we have 360 degree weather and views!

Play the fireplace video on an old Plasma tv. Radiant heat included.