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I found this relatively straightforward guide to the difference between heating demand and heating load. https://sustainableengineering.co.nz/qa-with-jason-explain-heating-load-vs-demand/ there is also a discussion here http://public.wookware.org/gbf/newforum/commentsbb9a.html?DiscussionID=13647 on GBF looking at the same issue. Essentially the two values don't have a direct relationship, and you need to know that the Passive House Planning Package (PHPP) & passive house concept generally, has this concept of treated floor area (TFA) which differs from the more traditional floor area - but not significantly for most designs, in ours TFA is 139, and actual is around 150, this is used in PHPP for calculating both Heat Load and Heat Demand but that is where the similarity between the two ends. Heating load is: the number of Watts you need to pour into the house across each square meter of the building's TFA to keep it at set point temperature at the coldest point of the year (it has no time dimension so its an instantaneous thing). In our case this is 8.268W/m2 according the our version of PHPP. Given we have 139m2 of TFA we have therefore need a heating plant capable of delivering: 139 x 8.268 = 1149W or 1.149kW (Which on reflection is bonkers small but that is what PHPP says it is) and as you cannot get a ASHP below 4kW that is the size we we will need. Actuallly in our case, assuming we could get the flow temperature above 42oC space heating via a heat battery in the MVHR would be enough in our case but we have UFH in the slab anyway and will use that. Heating demand is: the total amount of energy required to keep the house at the set point temperature across the whole year, based upon: the average outside air temperature (OAT) each day / week / month (monthly and annual for PHPP) the amount of gains & losses from things like Solar gains (N/S/E/W + Horizontal / Ground) and internal heat gains (people / things / operations - EG Washing up & running the fridge and your mega sound system!) Here is what that looks like for our build in our version of PHPP : So we have will use 1465 kWh/a which comes out at 10.512 kWh(m2a) using the monthly method on our 139m2 TFA given a coefficient of performance (COP) of 3 we will need to pour 488kWh of electricity into our ASHP to keep the house at set point (without cooling - cos PHPP says it won't be a problem, even if I think it will) at 30p a kWh that comes out at £146 pa. Does that clear up the differences for you?

I am embarking on the unique and ambitious project of building.....yet another timber framed garden room based off knowledge from the internet. Yes I know, done to death! Over the weeks of researching I found this sub full of really helpful knowledge and thought maybe there would be a benefit to me being part of this community. I've done lots of DIY from joinery to electrics but nothing as big as this or that has put all those skills together. Should be exciting...

The other tip I got years ago to stop wood splitting when nailing close to the end was blunt the sharp tip of the nail (turn it upside down - sharp side up on a hard surface and hit it once with a hammer to flatten the point) - it's always worked for me (I think the theory is it crushes it's way thro the wood rather than forcing the wood around the nail which then forces it to split if close to the end)

I did a study on staircase design on https://originaltwist.com/2018/03/16/modern-floating-staircase/ Here's an extract that might help ... about the ratio for a 'comfort stair' Tradition has it that a comfort stair is 7” x 11” for rise and going. Rounding up slightly that’s 180 x 280mm. B.S. regulations give ranges for rise of150 -220mm and 220-300mm for going G. The ratio of rise to going gives an important angle which here would be around 33 degrees and must not exceed 42 degrees. You’ll need this angle to saw off the ends of the beams. The distance H between your two floor levels will set the rise. Find which whole number divides into H to give a rise R near to 180mm or what you prefer. That whole number is one more than the number of treads but note that the bottom tread might be a platform like the one on the sketch above. Tread thickness T. B.S. regs state that a 100mm ball must not pass between stairs or guards so if we say that the open gap between the treads will be 98mm then T = R – 98 or more. The Going overlap. B.S. regs state that the overlap on open stairs must exceed 16mm but too much spoils the design, as you will see when you draw yours. So tread width W = G + 20 will do for a start. So the treads will be something like 300 x 80 in section. As for length just bear in mind that stairs over a metre wide must have hand rails on both sides. I think 85cm looks about right. Length of box beams L. To make life easy you could set the top of the box beam level with the top of the top tread, so; The base of our triangle is (no of treads -1) x G / R and then just use Pythagoras to get the longest length of box…. or, frankly, just draw it and see what you get. The drawing will reveal what angle to cut on the ends of the box beams too. Make a note of all your numbers then make a drawing of the side elevation to scale. Sketchup is perfect for this and is free and easy to use. Note the intersection of the top of the angle iron, the beam and the back of the tread. N.B. Sketchup can repeat copies easily so draw and colour just one tread then copy it upwards by the rise and then across by multiples of the going.

Sorry for threadjack - it happens it's not meant to Sign up here https://heat-engineer.com/home Pay £12 and use their online tool - all you need to know is house dimensions and u values for the fabric of the building It will give you your heat loss at pre-determined external temp and annual energy demand

Hello! Thanks for letting me join the group. I am currently renovating a 1960s bungalow with a dormer which was added in the 80s! I have renovated 2 properties previously but this one is going to be home. I was working in hospitality until 2020 then lockdown gave me a break to reassess what I wanted to do in the future. As it was impossible to find tradespeople at the time I ended up learning to do most work myself with ongoing help of family and friends who are in different trades. I definitely surprised myself as I love it!

Mine is in it's own compartment in the top of the unit. It really is a simple job to take the pump out, recondition it and put it back. No need even for gloves. You do not need to get involved in the "contents"

Agree, wouldn’t go near a poo tank with mechanicals in it. Only advice I can give if you are going down that route, would be get it installed by a competent persons, then signed off by klargester and then take out a maintenance contract so someone else has to deal with issues should they happen. With an airpump system, quite honestly I wouldn’t be worried about putting gloves on and pulling out the pump and bits.

4g/5g then Starlink, alternatively you may have an ‘air fibre’ provider in the area, worth checking.

£299 plus £20 shipping then £75/mo. Starlink has really improved the latency averaging under 30ms so web pages load quickly and works well with Teams/Zoom if you need that for wfh. I would check to see if you can get 5G access from three. We live very rurally but can actually pick up 5G from Three from the local town which is down the hill into the valley below us. However, three, in their infinite wisdom claim we are outside the coverage area. I bought a three unlocked 5G router from eBay and a three data SIM and it worked. We’re getting 60Mbps download, 20Mbps upload with reasonable latency. Plan is to test it for a few months and if it’s reliable ditch Elon.

We went for fermacell walls & PB ceilings due to both the weight of fermacell & the lack of requirement for impact resistance. The insulated timber frame was supplied by PYC & used smartply on the inner face. It feels really solid, is great to hang things off & adds to the racking….but the edges aren’t as clean as I had hoped. I am not sure how to make them super sharp, maybe FST on all the edges would work. The house is remarkably quiet, the combination of warmcell, a CLT first floor & (possibly)the fermacell) really works.

The whole coverage thing with mobile signals is a very complicated subject and one that is hard to get full information on. The new EE mast "near" us is in fact about 3 miles away, would be line of sight if some trees were cut down (a whole forest of them) However not all providers offer the same service. My main phone provided by 1P Mobile used the "full" EE network, and that gets a good signal at home and gives 4G and voice no problem. Network Cell info is a handy app to have on your phone, and this tells me it is getting it's signal on "Band 20" one of the lower 800MHz bands hence it goes further. I also have an "activity phone" Not usually used as a phone but rather as a small tablet it has mostly navigation and walking apps. To enable it to access a bit of data, it has a bargain basement sim with RWG, another provider that "uses the EE network" But, being a bargain basement service it does not offer either WiFi calling, or VoLTE (voice on the 4G network) The result of not using the full EE service is that phone does not operate on band 20 so rarely gets a signal at home, and then it is very weak. So that service would be woefully inadequate as my main phone All that is a long winded way of saying you really don't know what you will get until you try it.

You missed an opportunity there. I would not touch a biodisc with a shitty stick especially when the stick us covered in your neighbour’s shit. The issue with them really dawned on me when I saw a cross section of one at the NSBRC.

Try EE 4g broadband with an external antenna. If this doesn't work or isnt fast enough then 'Starlink' is the best option. This will give you 150-200mb. The downside is the kit costs £400 and the monthly cost is £75.

Update - My choice is: - shared system with outflow drain on my land. Neighbours unwilling to pay for new easement (just want to update existing with informal signed letter, not update deeds), so solicitor costs on me if they agree to me getting a solicitor to write a new one. Will be Klargester biodisc. Will likely pay 1/3rd costs despite contributing 1/4 towards system size but TBC. - individual system; more cost, more upheaval, more input, more independence...If I go individual I will be using a company who does everything very 'by the book' to protect myself, and use a Marsh system which I'm happy with. I'll update once there's any progress but awaiting a legal letter from the neighbour now 😕 Hoping it just says they're serving notice that the tank will be decommissioned in 1 year's time, as we all agreed...

1 mile is beyond range of 5G mm wave, very high speed, which has a max of 600m range, low band 5G would get there but is much slower maxing out at 50Mbs top end of 4G is in theory better but your speed will be all about how busy the cell is.

BT gave us one of those when we had a line fault. It never worked for us. There was so little diagnostic available on the thing I still have no idea if it was lack of signal or it was not enabled or set up properly. At that time I know we got almost no signal from EE which is the network I believe it uses. Only some time later did EE build a new mast closer to us that gives us a better signal, but even that is not brilliant.

If you are getting an adequate speed from the 4G / 5G network, I would not even entertain anything involving BT or OR and just seek out the best deal you can get from any of the mobile providers. But do check the mobile provider with the best deal does cover your address, e.g. three seem to offer the best deals but their signal is non existent here.

long walk to access plant room. double doors into main living areas look good. lot of corridors.

A straight stair ending near the back wall of the house is only an issue if like us you have room in roof with restricted eaves height. I thought your plan has full height upstairs so you will have no problem at the top. A compromise might be a quarter landing near the top, 90 degree turn for the last 2 steps?

With one bedroom and 1 bathroom downstairs make it Jack and Jill so it can be directly accessed from the bedroom as an en-suite or from the corridor.

I have manged to bring it down to just under 38 degrees.

If you had to pay someone to do it all I've be using a figure of about £100 a meter which would be £22k. Thought I would ask ChatGPT and it suggested... 35-50mm^2 copper Cable: £3,300 - £6,600 Trenching & Installation: £8,100 - £14,000 Total Estimate: £11,400 - £20,600 Of the Trenching & Installation it thought conduit and back fill would be £30-£50 per meter and labour would be £1500 to £3000. Not sure I agree with its breakdown but you also have a road to cross?

Comfort in use is largely a case of what you are used to. The going of our stairs is a lot more than the minimum. I can get my size 9's flat on the stairs entirely on the stair. Contrast that to many older houses, built before modern building regs where the going of the very short stairs is only about 3/4 the length of my foot. That now seems an insane design to me, but as a younger man used to stairs like that, I thought nothing of it.

I'm just shy of 42 degrees, and if I wasn't constrained with it being a renovation and ceiling clearances etc I would have gone shallower. That said it doesn't feel wrong, just not as perfect as you would want in dream build

Our house is 7M deep so only a bit more than yours and especially if you are having room in roof or 1.5 storey, as you say you may get into head height issues. For this sort of house a stair split into 2 with a half landing works well. In our case up 6 stairs to the half landing, turn 180 degrees and up another 7 stairs and you arrive on the upstairs landing at almost the highest point of the roof structure and no worries whatsoever about head height. I then took the available space we had, constrained by doorways downstairs and upstairs, and made the going as long as it could possibly be and I think we arrived at about 40 degrees. All easy to do with the Stairbox on line tools and that is who supplied ours. The challenge will be to design a two flight stair as a floating stair, I leave that for someone with more imagination than me.

Hand nail and blunt the end of the nail (presume 65x2.65)

Do as much research about the planning consultant as you do about the local area and housing developments.

Mine are 40°. They are too steep for my liking. They’ve been in place since November 2022, so I’ve had plenty of opportunity to use them whilst working on the house. If you can I would definitely have a shallower angle. One of the hard to get right decisions, which are hard to undo. We have a poured concrete staircase.

Ours is 36 degrees and feels right. As @Originaltwist says, Sketchup is brilliant for this, you can endlessly play around until you’ve got what you like and what fits comfortably in the space available. I’ve probably got 50+ iterations of this staircase including 3d renders whilst I played around and finalised the design. I should have added, we have a second staircase going up to the loft, that one is 42 degrees (and not compliant due to a bit of a balls up by the architect - long story) anyway that staircase feels steep.

‘Other suppliers are available’ (Pears and TK for examples) all use similar tools. Saves doing the Math and gives you lots of detail including 2D & 3D images. I ended up with 39 degree pitch which was more than I wanted having failed to identify the constraints at design stage. Having said that, it feels ‘right’ now it’s finished.

I used stair box to design mine and found their online design stuff easy to do.

Hamerite direct to rust paint is very good (just take of the worst of the loose rust off.

I'm being incredibly sarcastic! Feels like everyone around me is putting the up on their garden. Blowy North there are so many great bits on the forum I have come across over the months.

Round here they paint them red oxide and leave it at that. I wouldn't rub down too aggressively as you'll remove what galvanising is left.

It depends on rainfall rates as well. This is not related to annual rainfall. For example SE England gets occasional very intense storms, hence flooding in London, Tunbridge Wells and Hastings recently. Allow 0.022 litres/ second/m2 for London but just 0.016 along the more consistently wetter west coast. The point of the retention is to protect downstream. eg The Glastonbury Levels get flooded because water reaches there so quickly form the catchment area. Development. and farmers ploughing downhill. and streams being cleared cause the same rain to flow faster to one place. A particular location may have local rainfall effects but the map used is more general with rainfall isopleths, one of my favourite words. I would cut and paste the chart, but the new 'improved' Windows 11 doesn't seem to have a 'snip' function.

Wire brush the old paint off, should come off easily. Then paint in high zinc content paint, often sold a cold galvanising. Not cheap but will last another few decades without being touch again.

And/or drill a pilot hole.

same boat as you, did my calcs and the smallest heatpump was sufficient. In march we had no loft insulation and downlight holes all open to roof. It was zero outside at night and with flow temp of 35 it was too hot inside. 22/23. The cop was as high as 8.

Although I appreciate that this is a largely self build forum and ICF is predominantly advertised as a self build product, there are are a number of benefits achievable through using an experienced contractor for ICF works. The main one, and especially pertinent to this thread, is the relationship. A contractor will have long term relationships in place which aren't necessarily based on "sell sell sell". My main point is that everyone has a bad customer experience story from self building but that shouldn't be counted against the product. In our experience, ICF distributors offer different levels of service dependent on location and personnel. It does hold the industry back. Putting a professional between yourself and the manufacturer is a safety net. Try ringing up ideal standard about a bath. You'll get more joy from the supplier more often than not.

Look at ‘How a planner got Planning’ on here, it’s very useful. Could you consider building something small (ie ‘affordable’) and maybe extending later? Not all planning consultants are made equal. Try to get recommendations.

Something sadly often forgotten is the well being of the people on the site during the build. We have a concrete monster. 600mm thick cavity walls, 150mm hollowcore first floor slabs with 75mm concrete on top. 150mm concrete ground floor slab. Concrete is heavy, and sloppy and dusty and noisy, and unforgiving. I hated coring holes, chasing walls, fixing to blocks etc. At one point I was trying to make a 100*50mm chase for electric mains in a wall with a 9"grinder. I couldn't hear with the noise, I couldn't see with the dust, I couldn't feel anything with the vibrations and the couldn't breath with the respirator. Cruel and unusual punishment. Meanwhile my timber garage I really loved. Chiseling the timber, sawing the joists, hammering about 5000 nails in by hand. I grew a small beard, grinned at the swallows flying overhead, sharpened my pencil with a penknife and wondered why on earth Jesus bothered becoming a Messiah when he had a chance to be a carpenter.

Indeed, I was lucky I found it as of course internet research overwhelmingly throws up guidance for England & Wales. It may be that's why a few of our height limits are slightly taller, to compensate for the difference if the ground is only mildly uneven. My hunch is @China21is in England/Wales as they mentioned Class E and our permitted development classes are numbered rather than lettered. But thought worth highlighting for anyone who might find this thread in the future.

To humour myself I did go back and ask for a break down, here’s the response Heat pump £4,311 Parts and Fittings £5,510 – new 28mm runs of pipe to connect heat pump and hot water cylinder, pipe fittings, heat pump controller, feet, flexible hoses, external weatherproof insulation, Homely smart thermostat (more here Homely: The smart controller of choice designed for heat pumps (homelyenergy.com)), purpose built base for heat pump, electrical cable, isolators, new small fuseboard, waste collection. Installation £4225 – 15 man days for the works, this is our typical install time. They have offered a call but it’s so far off being reasonable I’m not sure I can be bothered.

You need to make the place a bit more upmarket. A new mirror will help them see what they are doing. I have found just the one.

I am hoping the labour is £3320 and yr finger slipped off the shift key! Presumably that is after deduction of the BUS grant? You can expect it to be silly money for any system with the Stiebel Eltron name on it (or Nibe for that matter). I have just paid around £7500 net for a Vaillant 12kW HP with custom 270 litre thermal store and 6 new radiators installed to a good standard with several complicating factors in a house nearly 3 times your floor area. So I would hazard a guess you are getting quotes from ppl who are either making an enormous profit or do not really want the job. Sounds like Oxon is an expensive county. Here in Devon we had scaff along the whole gable end to do similar on the barge boards. IIRC 5m wide x three lifts high was £400 + VAT, certainly nowhere near four figures. Other end is lower so carpenter did it from a ladder saving us a packet.

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