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Heya , I'm 'self-self building' small dimension timber frame structures [Doug Fir] to learn how to eventually build a house ... car tyre and gravel foundations , 63 by 38mm studs , joists and rafters - sheep's wool + straw bale insulation , tyvek and slim board cladding for walls and the roof , - with 8mm timber panelling and clay plaster frames on the inner walls and cathedral ceilings , plus oiled 20mm boards on the floor ... refurbished 2nd hand doors and windows .

It's good practice to have an obvious local switch to isolate it for maintenance. This will be on it's own circuit so the rcbo is all the "fusing" in needs. Don't try turning it on until he has fitted the correct switch.

If a person expels 0.7 kg of CO2 a day, and a house, 10m by 6 m by 5 m, has 300 m3 of air in it, that is 375 kg of air. After a day, one person would have increased by CO2 by 0.18%. So about 5 days to start noticing anything. Or a day for 5 people. Apollo 13 got back OK, and they had greater problems than just CO2.

LaChab_01.pdfLaChab_02.pdf

We have a 15.5kWh Seplos Mason battery, it comes as a kit from fogstar here and it cost £2550: https://www.fogstar.co.uk/collections/seplos-mason-kits/products/seplos-mason-280l-and-x16-grade-a-eve-lf304k-battery-bundle You do need to be very careful assembling it, it's not for the faint hearted. Personally I think this sort of thing belongs in a garage, even though they are the "safe" type of cells (Leaf ones are the dodgy "vent with flame" type btw) It connects to a 3.6kW Sunsynk hybrid inverter, and for the moment there's no PV. This has been handy as I've had a mid-certified in/out elec meter put inline, so I can calculate the efficiency. In our case we get an overall 76% round trip efficiency. While this sounds dreadful, this encompasses charge, discharge, and also standby stuff - I think it's to be expected. There's 3 of us at home, in an all elec house with a gshp and elec car. We use on average in winter £2.50/day of pretty much exclusively "go" electric. Without the battery we'd pay another £4 ish per day in winter, but I'd need to try a lot harder to actually work out payback though. And the entertainment value is worth it alone 🙂

Yes, external heat loss walls only.

We have a couple of portable CO2 monitors that include an alarm feature. Not mandatory down this neck of the woods yet but a damn good idea. In a power cut all is well for a short while unless you start lighting candles etc then the air quality falls off a cliff (according to the monitor, not so easy to detect yourself). I’m sure it would take a good many hours in an airtight house with a non functioning MVHR to become a serious health issue. In our case we’ve bought 11-12 hours of extra MVHR if we lose power with an Ecoflow battery that kicks in to power the MVHR in the event of a power cut - mainly so we don’t have to open any windows and throw the heat away.

Glad to hear it seems working.

@Clark Kent Have you considered what is called "skirt insulation" - where you dig a trench round the outside and make it a French Drain * with 300mm (say) of insulation up against the outside of your house to a depth of (say) 600 or 900mm? The mechanism is that the soil temperature at that depth is pretty stable, and the ground under your house heats up over time because the thermal path away is now much longer. Having a warm ground reduces your heat loss downwards. You lose less on the neighbour side because their house extends around your boundary to them, heating up the ground there. Contraindications for this may be eg that there is a high water table, and water movement may steal your heat - which is what the French Drains can be there to divert to keep your patch dry. * French Drains are at their simplest gravel filled trenches with the gravel wrapped up in weed membrane. Easy to do if you need. I put a loose laid path of heavy slabs on top - you get a free hidden route to run pipes and cables.

Oh, couple of photos from the inside of the vents, and the damp reveals that are still drying out - you can see the mould on the caulk around the trim that I need to clean once again, fingers crossed for the last time this time!

The Higroster vents finally arrived from Brookvent last week (delays at the Brevis end apparently), so I spent a few hours over the last couple of days fitting them. As I mentioned, the windows didn't have trickle vents before, so I ended up making a couple of templates from MDF, one for inside and one for outside, then removing each opener in turn and routing a slot into it. All went well and they're now fitted to all bedrooms and the lounge and playroom downstairs. I also removed the PIV yesterday and stuck it on eBay. I'll be keeping an eye on things over the next few weeks but initial signs are good - much less moisture inside the bedroom windows last night and the reveals stayed dry, which is better than the night before. Thanks again for the advice!

Welcome, It sounds like you have a very detailed idea of whats going on , no doubt your professional experience will be useful :). That image has piqued my interests, do you have any more of what you are building/ built so far?

As you say budget is the key thing here (unlike grand designs mostly)and you need to max that out in insulation, saying that the first inch of insulation gives the biggest payback (diminishing returns principle) so perhaps IWI linked to overfloor insulation and a floating floor over would be a good start 🤷‍♂️.

Ah, of course

Same as a cooker switch 👍

Your concrete base needs to finish 150mm higher then ground level. If not the bottom of your external cladding will get wet from rain bounce.

Still need the wifi thermostat controller though. Im not a fan of an unattended fan heater though. For saftey reasons that is. Ive got one in the office, but only use it when im in there.

Not sure anybody with any sort of leadership charisma has either. If they had (both Charisma and thought it through) they would probably have risen to the top and we would be following them down the road of really solving the problem. As it is we follow the leaders we have more from a sense of bemused curiosity about what great big; blunders, errors, failures, cock ups and wrong turns they are going to make next than anything else. It's our fault though because as Jefferson said: “The government you elect is the government you deserve.” So to somewhat massage a phrase from classical antiquity 'we are sheep led by donkeys.' Time to become more like the lions and start snacking on the donkeys perhaps.

But many people cannot afford to do that! No VAT on any materials to insulate and if people can reduce their heating load that’s got to be a step in the right direction.

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.

Does it (expletive deleted). I camped out by a babbling brook once. Noise kept me awake all night. I now look for places with familiar sounds to camp near. It is the absence of normal you have to be wary off.

Probably white noise Vs noises of single frequencies. Rain, falling water, waves etc tend to be white/random noise. Machinery can have a distinct series of peaks which can be annoying. Ironically fan noise can be quite white, quite a few people use desk fans to fall asleep to, but it is also easy to generate distict peaks that van be annoying by having things like support struts or louvres that interact with the rotating blades. Compressors can also make a distinct buzz. But the main thing is individual sensitivity. People can live under a flightpath or by a railway and still be bothered by the heatpump next door.

Maybe I've missed it but let's resolve the structural side of this tree thing. 3 questions. What kind of tree is it? How far is it from the tree to the closest point of the proposed extension? +/- 300mm for now. What kind of ground do you have? In your own terms....clay/silt/sandy?

You drop the boiler flow temp on the boiler controller or at the boiler it's self. There should be buttons to push or knob to turn at the boiler

Yes, entirely normal. After about 1/2-3/4 turns most LSVs are for all intents and propose fully open. Because of this only small adjustments should/can be made.

I appreciate that the typical experience is that sub contractors can be inconsistent and not necessarily able to complete a job in the time they sign up. I believe (and have experience of) that if the drawing package is drafted to communicate what and how to build from the tender stage onwards the tradesmen can build without issue. The subbies I would like to work with are able to dedicate a team of tradesmen to complete each fix in weeks not months. What’s the rush? Less money spent on interim rent, less uncertainty for me and my family and last but not least, the excitement of moving into a home I’ve designed and built.

I'm preparing to demolish the house into which the water supply goes, prior to building the new house. We're still living in that house and will live onsite in an outbuilding during the build, so need to maintain the utilities. The water meter was inside the old house so I wanted to relocate it out of the house and agreed with United Utilities it would go in the street by the stop valve. UU agreed that the supply to the current house (built in the 1960s) could be replaced under their lead replacement programme. I did it all at the same time and the way it worked was, I paid UU £82 survey cost for the meter relocation, paid a private moling company £785+VAT as described above, they submitted paperwork to UU to demonstrate the work had been done, UU paid me £550 grant under the lead replacement programme, and I paid UU £183 to remove the old meter from the house and install the new meter in the street. I got quotes for the moling, and they did the connection in the street and installed an Atplas box over the stop valve and all UU had to do was screw on the new meter. It all went very smoothly. I only talked to two moling companies and the other one was more expensive and was going to do less - they were just going to install the new MDPE pipe and leave me to arrange a plumber to bring the new supply into the house and were going to leave UU to do the connection in the street. This would have left me with having to coordinate work to ensure continuity of supply. Very happy with the moling company I chose and UU were easy to work with.

Have a conversation with Ecology BS. As you own the land already, especially with PP, it has a value so you may find you don’t need a cash deposit. Thats what we did. as such the cash they’re releasing to you is always an amount that’s less than the value of your project at that stage. id imaging a plot in Sussex with PP has a significant value to it. That would be your deposit. search Ecology on this forum you’ll find many have had excellent experiences with them, including me. we’d already bought the plot and demolished the existing house, then applied for the SB mortgage. We used cash reserves to go a few stages before drawing down money as and when required.

An infrared mirror might be an invisible solution.

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!

Hmmm, also included pulling through about 15m of armoured cable and connecting to our existing supply. Still seemed a bit steep tbh, especially as they haven't actually finished the job and then effed off for Christmas. Though TBH I'm fed up with the whole process now, just seem to be surrounded the whole time by f@ckwits and just want it all finished. To top it all I am paying 12.5% to a project manager who just seems to be a glorified email/WhatsApp forwarding service.

So definitely not twist the wires together and wrap with electrical tape?