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Subtle details will cost you money, do you have the budget for an architect that will include lots of nice subtle design features. they will look amazing, but this is where your £100,000 overspend goes. just read the rest of the posts, with your budget I think you need to forget the expensive architect immediately.

And perhaps they could call it CIL, SDLT and Capital Gains Tax. @ 50 average sized (88m²) dwellings per hectare at £135/m², CIL raises £594,000 for the Council + 5% SDLT to central government, which comes straight off the Land Value, paid to the Land Owner, who then pays (Sale price - £25,000 - business offsets) * 28% CGT. You'd struggle to find another business asset that gets taxed as highly comrade.

These numbers don't stack up! Single digit percentage premium on price for a far superior, longer lasting product. As per my earlier comment, if a house has 3, professionally fitted bathrooms and a professionally fitted kitchen to a medium spec, the client will spend more on these than the shell. All four will probably be changed within 15 years. You need a shell that will last that long. You can build a shell for less, agreed, and ICF doesn't suit everyone, but saying it is at least double the cost for negligible performance gain is poppycock.

Read the terms - it's a bait and switch. Price is £X...but only after you contract do they tell you the actual price. They also don't trench. "cable must be run along walls" means then only thing they'll do is nail a cable through walls and along walls. No basements. No digging. No hiding cable. No mounting chargers on posts etc. Their base price is one hole through the wall, tying into the meter tails, and bodging an ugly cable along the outside of teh house to an EV charger nailed onto the wall on the pish.

Possibly a loss leader, they win some loose some, but ultimately they want you buying their electric, they may also be able to lease a car to you?

Fatigue is the main cause of mistakes by a self builder One that springs to mind was putting 22 mill pipe work in for the HP Luckily I hadn’t got round to insulting it I put the ducting in the wrong place in the floor for the kitchen island and realized while I was marking out for the HFH Back boxes for all the stats to shallow I did the same thing on our previous build Same friend pointed out my error Rushing Im sure there’s more Oh Just ordered some oak Wrote 200 instead of 2000 Supplier phoned me to ask if I was making beer mats 😁

not adjoining their existing land and land away from the farm is never going to be farmable due to the issue with moving the equipment needed. There is little ag land available except in huge parcels as farmers give up, getting 5 acres of good ag land by your land is like finding hens teeth.

The heat pump will almost definitely have a flow switch which is activated on a low flow condition in order to self protect. Mine (not mitsubishi) doesn't measure actual flow, I can hook up an external flow meter, if I felt the need, but if it senses min flow via the switch, it shuts down. I have an external heat meter to see what the actual flow is. Are you on glycol? Either way have you checked condition of what is being circulated? If glycol based is it turning into a soup m Looks like steady decline in flow rate, for both the high and low peaks - do you have zones switched off, or heating fluid getting more viscous?

I went for MKM as 4x bags of Cotswold chippings costs me half of what StoneWarehouse charges me :)

I had similar flow rate issues with my ASHP (different make and model) when first installed, and the only way I solved it was to buy and install an in line flow meter so I could see what flow rate was being achieved regardless of what the sensor said. In my case it was only an on off sensor (enough flow or not enough flow) and I needed a real reading to see what was going. on. I solved it by adding a second external pump to increase the flow rate above what the inbuilt pump could achieve. The fact you have an actual measure and it has been decreasing, suggests there is an actual problem. Which again is where an independant flow meter would help.

It's a practice with (I assume) a good reputation and demonstrable work, and located in Winchester. There's certainly an element of this.

Everybody here is correct. It depends on what you want, where you are, your budget, your own skills. I've seen very basic drawings by the end user put in for planning and getting approval. They should not have been, but it was a basic extension and uncontroversial. Or you could have every detail covered: but that is not necessary for planning....and perhaps not for construction. Some architects plaster their drawings with generic statements, often repeated. 'By others' is fair enough. I don't want an Architect or architect designing electrics or plumbing or any structure that isn't standard and off a table. £3k for concept and planning? More if the building has complexity or the site is unusual or needs reports for planning. £15k is for a one-off design with complexities in design and for planning, and any special details thought out. Or an Architect on a roll in a wealthy area.

Lazy architects do this. A good architect will - if appointed to take the drawings to tender stage - will specify EVERYTHING. If you’re faced with a sample drawing that says that an element is “by others” don’t use them. Sometimes I think that most posters have hired very poor architects (if they are even architects!). There are good ones out there and they won’t cost the earth.

If masking tape is pulling off the coating, they were badly done. I would strip the coating off and redo with a decent primer and top coat. It may be easiest to take the inlet and outlet off the MVHR unit and bag and tape the ends there.

We'll have to agree to disagree. Brother in Law did a large 300M2 property recently, and to a nice high spec < £1200 m2. He employed most trades.

Good plan Either way you still need an external seal, mastic / silicon or compriband (or similar) (I note they say on the section image that this seal is by others but that must be the installers as the drawing is from the manufacturer) and the EPDM under the window needs to be lapped up the rear of the frame, or when fitted the sill, somewhat to prevent water getting in. It is a poor detail in the way it has been done here by the looks of it but we cannot see how it is detailed. The occasional use of a a few packers looks wrong and the continuous sill sounds like a good outcome. Check the registration details of the installers (well the people you are paying) EG FENSA and then consider talking to them about the quality of work as they may well have sanctions they can use if the reinstall is not to your satisfaction.

Emin is regularly mentioned in similar Appeals, but not regarding size, in the Emin case it was held that the size of an outbuilding is not relevant for the purposes of Class E, but the building must be ‘required for some incidental purpose’ in relation to the dwellinghouse. Another case often quoted is Wallington v SSE & Montgomeryshire DC [1990] from which the notion that it is the incidental activities that should be reasonably scaled to the dwellinghouse. The size of the outbuildings should then be appropriate to those activities. ie. if the dwelling house can accommodate 6 people, then it would be unreasonable to build a recreational outbuilding that can accommodate 50 (exaggerated) people in the stated activities. There's not a specific planning definition, so take the Oxford dictionary. ie. "lower rank", which doesn't mean smaller. Primary use is dwellinghouse, subordinate use is outbuilding. The dwellinghouse can exist without the outbuilding, but the outbuilding is pointless without the dwellinghouse.

It is. I just wouldn't do it if you choose solid timber, instead of chipboard or engineered timber.

I think it is a little unprofessional to share the whole proposal without explicit permission. You could briefly describe the scope so the other architect can check you’re not mistakenly comparing apples & oranges. I accidentally copied a proposal from one SI specialist to another when emailing an SE. I was really embarrassed and apologised to both.

It’s a lot of money to to add details Lots of design ideas online I’m not sure what your budget is But we are sub 1000m2 for the second time Keep fees down is a good start Most of your design will be made workable by others Have a look at a typical Architects working drawing Foundations to be done by others Floors to be done by others Roof and steels to be done by others Modern design You will pay the Architect to add large runs of glass Be he or she won’t do the practical side of it Yes you’ve guessed it By others

Not this build but previous one, first self build 20 years ago. First house with UFH upstairs and down. Had planned bathroom layout (3 bathrooms) with normal rectangular 900mm shower trays and laid UFH pipes accordingly. I even drew on the floor boards where the UFH pipes were. But we decided 900 by 1200 shower trays would fit much better. Cutting the hole in the floor panel for the shower trap, yes of course in a different place than it would for a 900mm square tray, I suddenly wondered why there was a fountain of water coming out of the floor.

Including the technical drawings it was coming in at 23k

Confused! Where is the balustrade going to sit? Fixing through the lead to a sturdy timber (???) underneath the lead? The EPDM appears to fall down to the lead, and the lead rises to the tiles. Are you planning a pond? I think we'd have to know more about the alu section (and how and where the installer would intend to fit it - or does he expect 'others' to fit it?) before we could comment about its suitability. I hope there's a hell of a lot of packers close to each other under that bottom rail, or is the whole unit hanging on the sides? Looks v strange to me.

Sorry to lower the tone but down at our end of town we won’t have a plant room, we will have a rather forward thinking plant encapsulation system (a.k.a. a little cupboard at the end of the garage). We’ve streamlined our data centre, patch panel and comms distribution system, it’s now called a Wi-Fi router. We’ve also recalibrated our multi functional audio-visual experience system and using the latest 2018 technologies we’ve managed to cover all the current state of the art functions with a smart tv and sound bar. Oh and we’ll have one of those new fangled DAB radios too. We’ve pushed the home automation system boat out massively in that we will have a couple of hive bulbs so some lights come on when we are away in our campervan. Through dedicated use of exactly what we do already we won’t have any cat anything cables or PoE either so we will save a few bob too. We will however, most importantly, have a whizzy coffee maker. But not in the plant suite.