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Retaining wall up and I graded the ground back to smooth it off. We’ve also put the treatment plant in yesterday.

My take is we have to do what we reasonably can. That is somewhere between the environmentalists that think we can all stop burning oil tomorrow and we only carry on doing so because we like doing so, and those that think it is all a load of nonsense. If for no other reason than we can't just go on burning oil because it will run out. so lets be sensible and transition to renewable energy as quickly as we reasonably can. What continues to bug me is WHY such high figures keep coming up for fitting heat pumps? Yes if you have to completely change your heating system then costs can add up, but as a self builder building a new house, whatever system I fitted i wanted under floor heating and a hot water tank. So it was literally choose an oil boiler and an oil tank (no gas here) or an ASHP. There really was no additional cost, in fact I think my ASHP cost less than an oil boiler and tank would have done. With the grants for ASHP's at the moment I see exactly what happened with solar PV and the FIT. Installed prices to customers were inflated to it was largely the installers benefiting from grant not the customer. When the FIT was scrapped, solar PV prices fell, and without the MCS cartel being mandatory, anyone could fit them. There should be no ifs no buts, oil and gas boilers should be banned from new builds now. As i have shown, there really is no price penalty to pay for an ASHP in a new build, so there should be no need for any form of grant. Just write it into building regs, no fossil fuel boilers.

I've been involved in a few jobs where they've kept maybe a few walls from the ground floor. It' never worth it, demo and do a new build.

Ages ago I wrote a spreadsheet for doing what-if comparisons to see whether it was better to invest in more insulation in the walls, roof, floor, fit better windows and doors, or fit a better MVHR system. Others have found it useful and I've been reminded that I've not re-posted it over here, so here's the latest version. It should be self-explanatory, you fill in the cells with your wall, roof/ceiling and floor areas, add the areas of each door and window, put in the U values for each and, if you can, get hold of the met data from the met office for your area (the data in there is for West Wiltshire, right on the border with Dorset). This isn't a thorough modelling tool, it just looks at heat loss fairly accurately but doesn't take into account heat gains, although there is a crude way of doing that by drawing a line across the seasonal plot at the point where you don't use heating and you can very roughly assume that anything above that line will be heating. Please feel free to ask any questions, but bear in mind I wrote it back when I was designing our house and haven't used it for a couple of years. so I may be a bit rusty. Heat loss calculator - Master.xls [edited to add latest version of the spreadsheet]

If I was dictator for a week I would: 1. Tackle planning reform with a sledgehammer. Make it very easy to build wind farms and solar PV installs, pumped storage and grid upgrades. 2. Reform house planning. I've said it before. A walk-in, same day service to rebuild your house. Trying to retrofit old houses is a waste of time. With enormous cost you might get an existing houses to enerphit standards. Much cheaper to knock and build a new passivhaus of an economical design. That's where we need to be. 3. Then build as much renewable electricity generation as possible and sell it at a cheap rate to compete fossil fuels out of the market. 4. Build houses well above historic flooding levels, well above sea level, able to cope with months of heatwaves and low water supply levels. Tropical downpours and hurricane wind levels. Climate change is here. No point in pretending it's not.

It's a closed shop with rigid rules and carefully designed ways to exclude newcomers and stifle innovation There is a government subsidy And much of the market is retrofit, which is a different design skill that many installers (in part understandably) don't like, because it involves them taking risk and responsibility rather than painting by numbers. So we end up with poorly yet over engineered system designs replacing many unnecessary components causing more disruption than necessary and thus costing more, which is easily disguised in an unnecessary or unnecessarily extensive hot water system/pipework replacement/buffer tank or whatever, and the grant.

Agreed too. The less money you have, the shorter your "return of investment" horizons are. If you only have a couple of £ per month spare you simply can't afford to tie it up for years not to mind decades. Have you considered a patio heater just over the work bench in the garage. No point in heating the whole shed if you don't need to. I think @joe90 did something similar.

Spent a lot of time testing different fixings in aircrete and these came out on top https://www.ukbuildsupplies.com/85mm-insofast-fixings-for-drywall-and-insulated-plasterboard-pack-of-20 drill a hole in your ply but not the block and hammer it home. I drove one of these 50mm into an aircrete block, stood on the block and tried to pull it out as hard as I could and it never shifted

Just give them what they want see/hear on any drawings. No more, no less, then do what you feel fit. If anyone says anything later, just say that's still to be done, a job for later.

Yeah currently I have 5m of PVC pipe just running along the ground and dumping the water on the grass.

Had the same thing with an application for an LDC for an extension on a warden's house on a scout camp site. I had shown a covered area with a floor and open sides as requested so that canoes and other gear could be dried under cover. The council refused the LDC citing that it was a veranda. From what I can remember I put walls up resubmitted and got approval. The scouts then didn't bother with the walls. Madness.

34 dBa is about the level of a person's whisper But whispering can be annoying. How loud is an oil or gas burner flue btw? I have a mental trick. Listen to heavy traffic noise in the distance. Think waterfalls. One is annoying because people are doing it to you, the other is calming because it is nature. I haven't tried it with heat pumps yet.

Foundation designs are based on tree distance and type, but at the mature height, not the height at the time of construction. More likely was ignorance of this at the time, because tree problems have increased more recently. I've met bcos who knew nothing about the subject. The tpo however is all about the health and significance of the tree. Building over or cutting a large proportion of roots will damage it significantly. Also, building near a tree can cause it to readjust asymmetrically and just look bad.

Can you raise funds for a complete rebuild? Doesn't have to be grand designs (infact it's better if it's not)

Q1: Yes. Q2: Tell the Planning officer. Listen. Why take an unforced risk, when all you have to do is some paperwork? Use the inevitable delay to plan.

Just be aware these things can bite you and very hard. I recall a case in 2002 of a small baptist chapel getting permission to be converted to a dwelling. It was the usual rural chapel kind of thing - corrugated sheeting on a timber frame. A fair amount of upgrading had been agreed with the planners but essentially it was a conversion. However, the owner went too far, taking down the frame (because he said it was rotten) and re-building the walls in blockwork along with a new roof. The Council served an enforcement notice saying that this was now a new building not a conversion. Being in the green belt it was not appropriate development. The owner went to appeal and lost. The Inspector stated that the original planning chapter had been closed by the extent of the works and what was now there had to be viewed as something different. The owner wasn't allowed to re-instate the original building and had to completely demolish all the new work. He was however allowed to retain the original concrete floor slab. To date that concrete slab still sits on an empty overgrown plot.

Pictures(s) if the manifolds, pumps, valves and any other controls please.

Generic stuff available at Screwfix https://www.screwfix.com/p/flomasta-pipe-sealing-cord-80m/2272v

It seems a big expense for a relatively small space.

Only that you have no house and have costs but no certainty of permission to build a new one. There are no tricks. it has all been thought of. However, its worth realising that builders seldom buy to renovate, and would prefer to demolish because of the constraints in the existing building. Then the zero VAT thing comes in too. But you can't assume that you will get permission to demolish unless the building is unfit for purpose. Erm, not necessarily. Permission is not certain enough.Again, Please concentrate on doing a good job, and not looking for dodges.

But...as a rule of thumb I say that a single storey building costs the same, per useful m2, as 2 storey. This doesn't apply for a very small area though, as the stair takes up so much space. on one or both floors depending on arrangement. Miss out the stair and mezz, save 1/4 of your cost, and lose ...not an awful lot of floor. This means nothing of course if it doesn't provide the accommodation you want.

Hi George. Can you let me know any more about this? For all.. when you get into truss design it becomes a very complex animal. Even more complex when you start to use cold formed cee sections. The nature of trusses often suggests long spans. If you have a truss with bolted connections.. these connections can often slip as they tend to work on a 2.0mm oversized holes and in shear rather than tension and shear on say a standard steel portal frame. This can lead to unpredictable behavoir. Once we enter this world as SE's we start to worry about things collapsing with no warning. Buckling of the frame, not just the individual bits but .. rafters / column interaction as a whole becomes a big issue. We call this in plane buckling where the whole structural frame buckles and falls down suddenly. Now this may seem like me being a bit geeky.. but if you are converting a portal frame barn shed in England, I think you call this class Q.. you do want your SE to understand what in plane buckling means? Ask them if they know about it. If they don't then point them to the SCI guidance and start to wonder if they are competant to undertake this kind of design. I have various bits of software to model structures. Some is main stream off the shelf that all SE's use. Some is more bespoke that I use when analysing complex problems. I have some pretty high end stuff for FE modelling, and cold formed steel design, don't often use it these days as my current Client base can't afford to pay for the analysis. It can take at least a week to set up a good FE model that you can present for other Engineers to verify. But always I do some hand calculations to make sure any computer model is on the ball park. You NEVER trust what the computer says and you NEVER trust anyone else's computer model, always check by hand to make sure the forces / stresses and material resistances are within the range you expect. A good SE / Architect / QS etc can look at things and say.. that looks odd.. if it does not look right it probably is not.. only a human can do that... smell the fishy stuff. Now AI is miles off being able to replicate what an SE does, Architect's etc are safe too. SE's, Architects spend many years learning how to make things work.. but a big part of the job is being creative and design things that are buildable.. AI just can't do that as it will always be behind the human curve. It won't know how to make things buildable unless we tell it how.. for every job and every different set of circumstances. Even if we could then market forces.. prices of materials, labour availabilty and local cost. The complexity of programming for a relatively small market I think will make it not viable finacially .. it ain't going to happen any time soon where AI takes over our jobs, mind you it it can make invoicing folk easier.. quite happy with that.

Somebody tell me if I’m wrong but you can forget having a mezzanine area as a bedroom, without a fire escape route not including those stairs you wont get building control sign off. I think you need to decide what this space is for.

We used wood fibre board on the outside of our frame/ roof, with blown cellulose as insulation underneath, then passiv OSB on the inside.

Oh we're all over the modelling software. I used a cousin of Fastrack for most of my day to day design work. The calculation of forces in an isolated structural system such as a truss isn't the hard part any more (although it can be time consuming and is now rarely done by hand)... what the engineer needs to know is what forces to apply to the model, in what combination and what the output means and whether it is acceptable or not. As yet you can't show a AI a house and get it to reliably work that out. It probably could one day but I won't hold my breath.

Don’t forget about VAT.

Depending on the soil type you may well need to budget for piling. If you can have a discussion with the local authority building control they may be able to give you a steer with zero cost.

“the tree is massively tall but the actual crown covering everything is super high up. the lower branches would just barely touch a proposed 2 storey development and if it was a 1.5 storey mezzanine approach i dont think it would touch at all. weve previously had successfull application to trim the branches before.” So what is important is the TPO tree Root Protection Area. Measure the diameter of the trunk 1.5m from ground, then times that number diameter by 12. Measure that calculation as a distance from the tree trunk, 360degrees That’s the circular RPA that you normally cannot disturb or dig and basically isn’t in play. If your proposed extension is within the RPA you’re very likely stuffed at least with dug foundations. And unlikely to be able to take materials, machinery across that RPA either. I have trees and know this because we had to build around the RPAs. And our trees weren’t even TPO’d.

www.philmac.co.uk Down near me and have stockists around the country. Have a good technical department Philmac Diplocks Way, Hailsham, East Sussex England, BN27 3JF 01323 847323 0800 590028

You'll probably hate this reply but I'm going to suggest you need to start again by collecting some basic information about your system and then taking it all methodically. what boiler do you have? Is it a system boiler/combi boiler with circulating pump built into it or is it a heat only pump with an external circulating pump in the airing cupboard or somewhere else? Can you look up the installation servicing manual of the boiler as you might find recommended delta T for the boiler on commissioning - for example an Ideal Logic Max should be balanced for an 11 degree delta T whereas an Ideal Vogue Max should be 20C. Fully open all your TRVs. From cold switch on your heating and run around to find out which radiators get warm first and which ones last. The one that gets hot last is usually, but not always, the 'index' circuit, which is the circuit with the most pressure drop, or in other words, resistance. While doing 4 above, check with your hand which pipe gets hot first on each radiator - this will determine the flow and return on each radiator. Your installer should really have installed them consistently with the same valves on each side but sometimes they get mixed up. If you're using K type thermocouples on your multimeter, try and get some clip on ones or get some clip on thermometers - they need to be on the pipe for a while. Then start to balance your radiators in the order that they warm up, so first rad to warm up first and then last rad last. You should find your lockshield will be more closed at the beginning to maybe fully open at the end of the circuit. Lots of videos on Youtube to help but some aren't honest about how tricky it can be to get it balanced right sometimes! Be patient. Be careful wit the amount you turn each lockshield. Many of the cheaper ones can be fully closed to fully open in less than a full revolution so it can take time to get it right. Don't be too perfectionist with each radiator - getting somewhere between 11-20C flow/return drop is pretty good. You might need to look at the setting of the pump if you have any external pump. HTH

Just use the stuff for 15mm, it’s just a tighter fit, that’s all I used, thick walled 15mm ID climaflex 👍🏻

Yes, the floor area is just the internal ground floor area, the bit that can lose heat to the ground. Again, yes, taking the total heat loss and dividing it by the floor area will give you the very worst case UFH output per m². In practice the house will have incidental heat gains from people (roughly 100W each) electrical appliances, heat losses from the hot water system into the house, cooking, solar gain and even pets, so this really is the absolute worse case heating demand, with everything except the UFH switched off and no one in the house, with no solar gain.