Leaderboard

Only for offsite systems or kits. Stick build is a load of timber from the BM and will come on account or with credit card guarantee. Plus it is from stock so can be bought just in time. ditto masonry.

Very pleased with our wood floor upstairs. It’s not as dark as the picture shows. The second picture is how it matches against the top tread of the staircase which is yet to be oiled. It’s clearly going to be different but I’ll get it close based on some trials I’ve done. Also just about finished the bathroom downstairs. I have the loo, sink and vanity unit to fit this week then the complicated looking shower! The doors, linings, architraves and skirting arrive this week so we are getting close! End of May is the plan for moving in. Stupidly we are also doing the Cateran Yomp (54 miles in 24 hours) which is on the 8/9 June. We did it last year and I can barely walk for two weeks after it!

Hi everyone. My name is Alex and I am building a new timber frame building in Co. Antrim, NI. This is my first self-build and am just getting started with the foundations. I'm looking forward to sharing my experience and learning from others who have done, or are doing, the same thing. Any tips or advice are certainly welcome and much appreciated. Cheers!

Great idea. Lots of old stone buildings do that. There are lots of little details I love about our house this view of the wall inside to outside is one of them.

With my fairly thick walls (400mm) I created angled reveals which allow more light and look really nice.

Thick walls look nicer too in my opinion. Our walls are 490mm thick from outside face of the cladding to inside face of the painted wall. It’s given us deep reveals internally which is partly why we chose this build method. Everything has a more substantial solid feel about it.

Thank you. That worked well and I may also use the same solution to mount a mini split unit whose rear mounting bracket is only 350mm wide. The instructions say to use wall plugs but I suspect it expects to be mounted on masonry.

We visited that house after the roof had been repaired. I just rang Richard Hawkes, told him about our plans and asked if we could have a look around. He is a very nice, helpful chap and was happy to show us the various technologies he used. It was a long time ago but IIRC the house was a test bed for several unusual things such as water cooled PV and paraffin wax phase change panels in the walls. He also used glass chippings in the concrete floor which he had polished, looked great.

I would never mount a CU on plasterboard fixings. Mark out the exact size of the CU on the wall, cut that shape out of the plasterboard, and extend the cut out sideways to reach the centre of the adjacent studs. Fill your hole now with a sheet of at least 12mm plywood, securely fixed to the adjacent studs. Fix CU to plywood. I would probably even attach a batten to the inside of the plywood in line with the mounting holes so the screws can go through the plywood into the batten. Fill joints and paint plywood.

Hi. Just a note to say hello. I've been a member for a while now but only recently started a new build in Scotland. Hope to find some useful advice and tips here. Thanks in advance!

I used my theodolite’s optical plumb to sight over my corner markers and help get my strings in position. 3D printed some adjustable string holders to move the strings into position easily. Now I’ve transferred the points to strings it’s time to strip the top soil and add the type 3.

No, just trying to work out what might have happened to cause the problem in the first place.

Mostly I would say labour costs and profits.. There is a big downturn in work. some contractors are very quiet and some are tendering at very low margins to keep turning over. That affects the wages of all operatives

Some prices are definitely down on the peak. Rebar, framing wood, and osb are good examples. Stuff that is still high, concrete, aggregates, labour, windows. I noticed builders are now quoting in the £2000 to £2500 per m2 range last time I checked it was more like £3000 to £3500 per m2. I don't know if this is because prices have fallen for materials or if they have reduced a large buffer they had for jobs because it was impossible to predict material prices and availability. Overall I am happy I have waited the year before starting, but who knows another war or escalation of the current one could cause prices to rise again. I also don't think inflation is completely gone and as soon as interest rates drop I think we might see more inflation. One thing that is definitely better is the availability of product and the willingness of suppliers to compete.

Thanks for the interest - my situation is it was something I was interested in about eight years ago or so, but at that time there was a lot of confusion over Class Q, I had seen a few concrete barns come up at auction and it piqued my interest. However time has moved on and I am in a conventional house now so my interest is somewhat academic. It was a coincidence really because I had been watching these guys run a DIY channel primarily based around woodwork, but one day they suddenly announced they were going to buy this farm and do a Class Q! Having done quite a lot on the planning side I offered to help with general advice but it turned out they just didn't have any interest in the subject and left it all to their PC (something I had strongly urged them not to do!). Anyway it ended up costing them a lot of money and time unfortunately but they did finally get full planning in early Feb. I know the channel looks a bit larger than life these days but I have seen all their apps so I can promise it is definitely real. The position now is the channel they operate is a bit more geared to 'lifestyle' than it used to be, originally this build was going to be more serious with design and planning talk but that all seems to have gone now. They have no time to answer questions ofcourse so I came back here hoping I could get some answers and also that it would benefit people considering a barn conversion, it's not often you see one in the flesh like this.

There's lots of things going on with house construction. Unfortunately there are loads of snake oil salesmen and manufacturers sales claims being treated as science. Most people rely completely on gut feeling. Amusingly this covers the entire spectrum of building types. Starting with the guy with the reflective wrap around sunglasses. " It was first used by NASA don't you know, ,researched in zero gravity, AI and smart watch connected. It will predict the hot water demand using quantum computing" In the middle there is the trusty local builder, "my dad did it this way like his father before him, hammer a 2 X in there and an bit of mortar and she'll be right." "Stick with what you know" At the other end is the hairshirt hippy. "Straw bales and reclaimed beachwood, gotta let it breath MAN" "Align the floorboards to the energy lines MAN". "WiFi gives you cancer MAN". Of course they're all right........and they're all wrong. It's a roll of the dice really........ They rely on belief and faith and it if works for them, I've no objection. However I would be wary about spending my cash on what someone else "believes". @Carly Lawson if you believe that durisol is the most environmentally friendly choice (I don't know BTW) and having that feeling is enough for you, then go for it. However, if you want to actually build the lowest environmentally impactful house then that's a different thing.

I've got a LuxPower hybrid inverter one that *asks* to connect to the cloud, but can be set up not to, and can still be managed locally using https://github.com/celsworth/lxp-bridge (optionally + HomeAssistant). Pretty skunkworks, but it does at least work when there's no internet. Local security is also important. Some inverters set up an insecure wifi AP by default - prior to this one, I had a Solax that would throw up an unencrypted AP where the password was the SSID - so anyone can stand outside your house with a mobile phone and control your inverter. The LuxPower one was slightly better than that by default, but can be configured to act as a wifi client, rather than AP, which is much better - altough direct modbus, or even ethernet, would be better still.

+1 but i would say that goes for any build method. our TF company built us a great structure and then went bust a year later and some on here also lost money. so you can never be 100% certain of a company. there have been a few threads about this on here and i'm sure quick search will yield some results.

You are asking good questions and seem to have a feel for what is good or bad. May I ask, is the 'build you are dreaming' , something like this? will all the MOT type 1 have to come out and be replaced with new??? No, unless it is mucky. I very much doubt that a farmer used Type 1 though. More likely something much cheaper, although it should be plenty to support a domestic floor.

Well it isn't difficult for them as the AD to Part H says: Pumping installations 2.36 Where gravity drainage is impracticable, or protection against flooding due to surcharge in downstream sewers is required, a pumping installation will be needed. 2.37 Package pumping installations are available which are suitable for installation within buildings. Floor mounted units may be particularly suited for installation in basements. These should conform to BS EN 12050. Pumping installations for use inside buildings should be designed in accordance with BS EN 12056-4. 2.38 Package pumping installations suitable for installation outside buildings are also available. Guidance on the design of pumping installations for use outside buildings may be found in BS EN 752-6. 2.39 Where foul water drainage from a building is to be pumped, the effluent receiving chamber should be sized to contain 24-hour inflow to allow for disruption in service. The minimum daily discharge of foul drainage should be taken as 150 litres per head per day for domestic use. For other types of building, the capacity of the receiving chamber should be based on the calculated daily demand of the water intake for the building. Where only a proportion of the foul sewage is to be pumped, then the capacity should be based pro-rata. In all pumped systems the controls should be so arranged to optimise pump operation.

We also set our reveals at 60° see

Hi, yep totally agree about AI but from a newbie perspective it was certainly interesting looking at all the other information it pulled in. It seems that based on historical data, the information is correct is regards to ecobrix/durisol being more eco friendly and that the over all costs are reduced using woodcrete as apposed any of the EPS or polystyrene ICF systems. From the looks of it, there really is not much in it as afar a coats go, maybe only £5 or £6 better off per square meter with woodcrete, but that's only if it's like our house with render and no cladding. I guess it really comes down to if you want to save a little money, be eco-friendly and support British manufacturing. I have a bit of a soft sort for that because my mother had a terrible time and lost her job 6 year before retirement when the company she worked for closed down and moved all it manufacturing out of the UK.

Hi @Tumble Since insulating all the pipework and turning the system on I have had no condensation issues

You should however be aware of the limitations of an LLM (large language model) such as ChatGPT before making too many decisions based upon what it says. For example here is a case of a lawyer getting in trouble because he relied on ChatGPT which fabricated court cases that never happened: https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/27/23739913/chatgpt-ai-lawsuit-avianca-airlines-chatbot-research

Hi all Hoping for some guidance or moral support here. We have a void behind one of our bathrooms as in the picture, mainly due to the height of the roof. According to architect plans, I have built a stud wall as designed. My problem, if I have one(?) is that the wall hung toilet frame is so far from the rear wall (600mm) I can't attach it to it. However the very poor instructions that come with this villory and boch frame seem to be saying I can screw through the studs and into the frame to support it. But they don't supply those screws. And I think it might be referring to metal framing. My questions 1. Does it sound like I have understood the instructions correctly? 2. Am I missing an obvious way to support the frame? 3. Any suggestions to solve my problem!? Thanks!

We had holding tank at the previous house shared between 8 houses. This was due to the distance to the main sewer. It was oversized which caused us no end of grief as the tank only pumped when it was full enough. The problem arose that the top would form a crust and the pump then displayed an error and stopped pumping. We solved it by simply lowering the level that the tank would be pumped at meaning it would pump more frequently. It was quite dear as was the pump control system. The other issue we ran into was lenders trying to treat it as a septic tank. This caused significant delays for some of the owners when they sold their houses. I realise your situation is different but worth being aware of some of the issues that can arise.

Wise words, if only I had known...

I pump into my sewage treatment plant. It’s been installed 2 years and has been faultless. It is silent in operation. In theory, in England at least, the tank should be big enough to take 24 hrs of waste in the event of a power outage, but when I discussed this with our BC they were clueless and didn’t care on the issue. My tank would take 18 hrs worth of output in normal use. I have a timer that sets it to pump for 5s every 40 minutes. It doesn’t sound much but these pumps are beasts and 5s is about 30L. That means the treatment plant receives a nice rate of input throughout the day rather than heavy flow at bath time (for example). This is a benefit to the tank. Also if cleaning agents are held in this way then they have a bit of chance to neutralise / dilute in the pumping tank. So, that’s my experience. It’s better without, obviously, but don’t discount it as being too bad a thing if it simplifies the rest of the install.

Ours (Geberit) came with adjustable top brackets that secured the top of the frame to the back of the wall. I added extra bracing and strapped that to the wall half way down the frame then some CT1 for the face of the plasterboard. I don’t think there’s any danger of these frames not being secure my concern is more about the tiniest movement popping the tiles off.

Does anyone have any links to the statistics on domestic battery fires? AFAIK there's more chance of the tumble drier going up in flames than a 'solar' battery Put it outdoors in a second 'kiosk', adjacent to the one doing the mains? Metal-clad if possible. Mine will go in the shed / outbuilding, as is my plan for my current clients project; (20kW battery per phase / 3ph + ~16kWp of solar). I've not just looked at risk mitigation for this myself / my client(s) as the kit is sizeable too, so I'd prefer not to lose any of the GIA of the actual dwelling either so will mount / locate remotely. Cables will be oversized from outbuilding > boundary kiosk > dwelling accordingly to minimise voltage drop to the nth degree, as a 35mm2 cable isn't lifechanging sums more than a 25mm2 plus leaves room for 'more' if downstream bulking of battery system is deemed advantageous (~1900m2 residence with indoor swimming pool, sauna / steam-room et-al). I'm putting a guesstimated size system in and will recommend running the home for 12 months to gather statistics, so will always consider a structured battery / solar setup that can grow. I dislike the notion of sizing to take advantage of a particular electricity providers 'offering of the day', seems too risky for me to spend a clients money on (I have responsibilities as the Main Contractor and consultant, so my 'ideas' need to be robust before I convert them into an actual recommendation). I prefer knowns, so work on solar capture and look to store and utilise this pragmatically. IF a favourable provider / tariff then comes along downstream we can add that to the mix to maximise RoI, vs rely on it. @Russell griffiths, defo have the batteries as you and Mrs G work from home, just put them outdoors if you're that worried. Simples.

I wonder what it all looks like now. I saw a house in England a few years ago that had expansive sedum roofing and it looked a weedy mess to me.

You're wise to aim for this, because then the person knocking the wall down and making good is accountable for thinking ahead for the kitchen stage.

I would rather eat a breeze block than use rigid boards in a cavity wall.

I used something like these to screw through the frame into the stud work - https://www.screwfix.com/p/easydrive-hex-bolt-self-tapping-coach-screws-10mm-x-70mm-10-pack/9147T I also added a couple of noggins, top and bottom, behind the frame and screwed into that for additional support. Then CT1 the face of the frame before boarding.

Personally I think (some) architects are good for design and you have already decided on the design (mostly) so why not use an architectural technician to draw up your plans for building control. I also don’t like building notice and prefer full plans so you know from day one what’s expected.

The problem is you go can never really know how good response will be. Yes, some compnies reputation is better than others, but quite often that counts for nothing, or its some bizarre fault they dont understand. Id rather not put myself in that position in the first place.

You could easily get to 2-3 ACH50 with care. In any case airtighess makes no difference on a calm day. Without mechanical ventilation or a strong stack effect (heating on and windows open) your house will be stuffy. My advice is to stay away from ASHPs in your case. A gas boiler will fit your expectations much closer. Regarding the suspended floor insulation this is my preferred method. You can use cheaper mineral wool of course if woodfiber is out of your budget. https://www.ecologicalbuildingsystems.com/post/best-practice-approach-insulating-suspended-timber-floors

Im with you 100%. If i cant fix it myself, or at the very least, identify the defect myself, then it isnt getting fitted. Well, certainly not for anything important, like heat and power. Being reliant on "support" likely means whatever it is wont be working for extended periods if it goes wrong. I get that limits my options, but so be it.

I’d say that’s not quite right. check out https://heatpumpmonitor.org and quite a lot of systems pushing 4+ SCoP easy.

I disagree, with gas prices a third of electricity and ASHP generally having a COP of 3 or better they are comparable. Yes, you can self generate electricity but cannot generate gas. Costs for an ASHP are coming down quickly, why should an ASHP not give the comfort ? (Mine did) Usability, why? An ASHP needs lass maintenance than a combi (and no standing charge for gas supply),

We did have very very big beams though!!! With only a single subwall down the middle. Ground crews joked we were building a skyscraper, they hadn't seen beams as big in a house.

Welcome Jon. This is THE forum for people like us. We are all nice people on here, well mostly! Why not start a new topic - 'Repairing the Sentinel Kinetic Plus' and share the story so far. Any ideas why it stopped working? For it to fail completely usually means a fault common to both fans - so the controller somewhere perhaps or it maybe that if one fan fails the other is prevented from running by the controller.

I spent my first 11 years in a prefab at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell. My parents moved into it just after the war in the very early days of the AERE. They were very proud of it. The kitchen had a built in fridge and a clothes boiler/mangle contraption. The hot water was heated by a back boiler behind the fire place in the living room as well as an immersion heater. There were built in cupboards and wardrobes throughout (steel doors). Unimaginable luxury for my mother who had been bombed out of the East End of London. My father used to say it had been designed by engineers, but he was an engineer so he would say that. They were manufactured by the Bristol Aeroplane Company and erected by Italian prisoners of war who had decided to stay in the UK after the war. We talk a lot about timber frame on this forum, but shouldn't forget that there have also been unsuccessful attempts to introduce light steel frame construction into the UK residential market. And yet we are still building houses using the technically inferior bricks and mortar system.

Strip the swa right back to the wall , put the cable into a 45 conduit elbow, then into the bottom on the CU

If you have loft access which I believe you might, you can put a data cable up there going out of the facia board to a TP link external device. we are able to pick up the house wi fi from a great distance across the garden, well beyond 30m, but not measured it.

Yes ! it’s not been an issue . Only obvious limitation is if you do wish to speak to person at the door via the camera and app and are not home then a delay . For the money and size better than previous video doorbells imho .

Lay a batten on the last row of wall ties you installed and lift it out to clean off any droppings. if you put a cavity closer in you will need to put in a cavity tray above it to shed moisture to the outside, this could create a weak joint all around the building.

Been there, done that, got the tee shirt, I could write a book on it.

My vote is for the new Reolink - no subscription and PoE, so no problems with WiFi or power. And Reolink stuff is cheap (not that I'm cheap).

That doesn’t work as the concrete compresses the insulation and sticks anyway. That is the correct approach, or if it’s a new pipe then slide a length of 6” clay over the top and secure in place with some gun foam.