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The builders scaffolding came down and the roofers scaffolding went up all to plan. The new roofer has a good gang and they are working well on the roof. The weather hasn’t been great, we have had three storms Bert, Conall and Darragh luckily no damage to the build. We are approx 615ft above sea level and about 2.5miles to the coast as the crow flies so we get a good breeze coming in off the Atlantic. The wind has Brought with it some very cold spells that and the shorter daylight hours has meant progress has been a bit slow. The roof has been battened, breather membrane and counter battened, eves ventilation and we have some nice joinery on the gables, facia, tilt fillet at the eves for the last slate row and overhang. The slates are looking good and I’m happy with the hooks they are using, sometimes they are quite visible when the sun catches them but these have black tips that blend in nicely. The overhang also has some nice leadwork. The solar panels have just arrived and work will continue next year with the installation. The MVHR vents are installed and the Velux windows are installed, one window still needs its flashing kit completed and slate around so is covered up for now. Whilst the scaffolding is up I have managed to give the bargeboards 3 coats of wood protection with black stain. Finding time when its not too cold for the stain which requires 5 deg plus and keeping out of the roofers way has meant a little at a time but the gables are done and the facia on the North side is done with just the South to have another 2 coats. Im glad I’m doing it now not just because the scaffolding is up but also any drips of the very watery stain are not going on my cladding. We are ICF as you know and we have to be careful that the preservative is solvent free or it would melt the ICF blocks. Whilst the scaffolding is up we have also put the counter battens and insect mesh on the gable ends ready for the cladding next year. We purchased the insect mesh quite wide to go from the battens to the inside of bargeboards. Next job whilst the scaffolding is up is run some sealant in the small gap between the slates and the gable ladder, I have been told this is not done on most sites these days but due to our location the roofers have suggested we do it, so I purchased a huge box of baby wipes ready, I’m sure I will use them when we seal the windows as well. I have moved two empty slate crates just off to the left of the camera and started filling these with the half cut slates and the broken slates. The plan is to may be use the half slates around the bottom of the walls above ground level before the cladding starts, I’m hoping sticking them on will be the easy option, the broken ones will be crushed more and used as mulch on the ground around the edge of the building. We have paid the window deposit and the window openings have been measured, for one sliding door and 10 windows it took apx 3 1/2 hrs to measure the openings and discuss the window placement position and the sill positions and depths, and the sliding door placement taking into account the ffl after the insulation, screed and wood flooring. Some walls are being rendered and some wooden clad so the sills are different depths. We have 3 windows on one wall that face down our field and I wanted them levelled with a laser as well as measuring as these will be a big feature. We paid apx £700 for the measuring service and it will have been worth every penny. The windows are due in production towards the middle to end of February so hopefully before the end of March they will be installed. The cars that managed to sneak onto the photos for this catch up include our own Jensen FF back from the painters and a local customer popped their Jensen 541 in for a quick service.

Because the poorest people live in the poorest houses and taxing them more would be seen as unfair (IMO). Council tax is a way of taxing more for the bigger houses but perhaps we need to differentiate BETTER houses that pollute less fir council tax bands.

Why not a generator and some battery storage? You could, with a bit of simple plumbing claim some thermal energy from the generator. The main thing with off grid living is to reduce usage to a ridiculously low level. This will probably mean a total redesign if your home. May be too late to do that if you have planning already. Small, domestic, wind turbines are pointless. The physics is against you. It is very easy to think you can live with a log fire and a couple of lights, but realistically you want a washing machine (about 2 kWh per wash), a fridge and freezer (0.5 kWh/day), extractors, maybe off grid sewage and lights (another 2 kWh/day) and you have already used up your winter PV production. Find a decent mechanic and make a small CHP unit on a petrol engine (gasoline us 15p/kWh).

You are trying to make the system resistance similar everywhere. So if some parts are not getting enough flow, you have to increase resistance elsewhere, by closing the LS a little.

How I’d attack it would be set by whether it’s the RCD or MCB that’s tripping. Either way might be time for a kinetic type switch.

The blue car is a customers Jensen 541 and the grey one is our Jensen FF arriving back from the painters ready for us to complete its restoration.

It's possible that's enough damage to the cable to trigger nuisance tripping. The only way to be sure is to isolate the cable and see if the problem persists.. But it could just mean you're isolating the problem that's further upstream. It's a multiple test scenario. There was a stage when the grey pvc on twin and earth broke down and left an oily residue. I think they changed the formula. It was rather tasty to our rodent friends, I've seen them strip off metre long sections, leaving only the inner cores. It doesn't take much removal to trip an rcd if there is moisture in the air, opening a section allows capillary action to trigger conductivity through what can barely be seen. If it was in the live it would just vapourise the water, but the neutral to earth allows an alternative path and the rcd doesn't like that. My suggestion, replace.. And see if it's still a problem, then investigate further.

I just want to emphasise that I used to work for a small turbine manufacturer, we made a 5 kW turbine. It cost about £20k to install, and that was 20 years ago. Even on a good site, it would struggle to produce 10 MWh/year. Most likely half that, so no better than PV, except it works at night and in winter. I would, if going off grid, go with CHP, PV and a modest amount of storage.

I just want to emphasise that. The people that sell them tell outrageous lies about them. Think of them on yachts. There is always a brisk breeze and they can only trickle charge a battery and run a few lights. Inland the wind is many factors less. Nobody fits them on high office block roofs any longer, even to tick a sustainability box. I'm remembering construction exhibitions 20 years ago where there would be ten stands with the things, and Architects started specifying them. I refused to price them into jobs and it was an awkward argument. All these companies have gone. Solar and very big batteries ok, esp if you design the building for minimal demand. But if it's £20k for mains, take it.

Yes sorry I meant 1.7m high maximum. I wrote incorrectly above and only by reading again it looks so confusing. Thanks for your help

Thanks @joe90 good advice. Probably worrying about nothing as on closer inspection looks like the roof ladder is screwed into gable and rafters ends are nailed together but would rather air on the side of caution and double/triple check before closing it all up 👍

That looks like a party wall. Have you spoken to your neighbour about this? I'd assume the existing wall height would be included in the 1.8m max height limitation. If it's for privacy, I'd bring it out just as far as the second step in the wall, so you are not compromising any visibility to the road. And I'd keep it at the one height (e.g 1.6m high at the house and 1.8m high at the step down). Double sided, boards on both sides. But otherwise, what you are planning on doing is perfectly reasonable and won't need planning permission.

Any roof will lift off if not fixed one way of another. Straps aren't needed on a steel portal frame for example. But most houses are walls with a roof laid on top, and need tying, and straps spread the load nicely down the wall into timber or masonry.

They are having an overview in limited time, and will often miss something. They are not your quality control manager. Also they may assume that eg ties are still to be fixed. First impressions of your building are good and that may give false assurance that everything is done properly.

No there might be one or two but most on here think its a real thing and so also a real problem.

Thank you for tidying the thread Agreed column rads need more flow but as they have a higher volume of water content they will work well at lower temps provided they have diverters (to stop short circuit) and you accept a slower warm up time Trv’s don’t last for ever - yep cheap ones are rubbish but the other thing to consider is cheap lockshields can be very non linear and make a circuit hard to balance - either get ones with a decent valve authority or go the other way and fit TRV bodies with flow control function

You can see we have the brakes on in many areas but my depression really flows from the hill we still have to climb and too may people not taking it seriously - either 'its not a problem' or 'someone will come along with a solution and all will be well' seem to be the responses of too many fellow travellers.

dT is also related to flow temp - lower the flow temps the narrower the dT will be (for same circumstances)

@Nevik This is an area of some disagreement, here is my take and experience, you will need to decide for yourself. "Proper heat loss surveys" can be utter garbage if the surveyor (for example) ignores fabric upgrades they cant see (which some do as a matter of principle) or puts in an unrealistic value for air changes, or miscellaneous other sources of error. The spreadsheet/software looks sophisticated, but as ever GIGO applies. Personally I wouldn't rely on a 'proper heat loss survey' alone unless you validate both the inputs and the calculation and also have some independent handle on air change rate. I had two done, one of which I paid for, and they were total nonsense because the surveyors ignored invisible fabric upgrades ('if we cant see them how do we know they are there' was their argument, an argument which I have heard from others since) and double counted room to room losses. To be tolerably certain I would have a survey done, then check (a) the u-values used (b) how they have treated room to room losses (they should be counted for for radiator sizing but not for whole house sizing, unless room to room gains are also counted) and (c) what value for air changes has been used if you can collect smart meter data from a season where you operate your boiler fairly constantly and are heating your house a good proportion of the time, then do various plots eg daily consumption vs degree days, average power over 3, 6, 12, 24 hrs and utilise what this tells you Do the rule of thumb calculation, although a divisor of 2200 or even 2000 is also suggested by some and there are arguments for various values in between, probably depending on the assumptions you make about boiler efficiency and location. For the second and third of these, if you can, make some intelligent assumptions about your boiler. If its very old then it probably has an efficiency ~75%. If its a condensing boiler but you have plumes of vapour coming out of the flue (ie the norm in the UK), then its not actually condensing, so efficiency might be ~90%. If its a modern condensing boiler, run at a FT of 55 or less, and there are no plumes of vapour, then it is condensing and might be running at an efficiency of 110%. All figures rough and ready. If you cant work out what assumptions to make, at least you can account for the uncertainty. Once you have all of that (if you can be bothered to go to this much trouble) then see what this tells you. If they are all tolerably consistent then you are good to go. If there are major discrepancies then I would suggest you might try to work out the explanation. In my case the discrepancy was a factor of two, the difference between 8kW (measured) and 16kW (calculated), a difference which has major knock-on consequences. If your house is low loss (eg ~3kW) it matters less because you are anyway going to be limited by available models and the need to have sufficient capacity to heat DHW, so you are probably going to end up with 5-6kW anyway. All that said a tolerably oversized heat pump is probably not a disaster unless it pushes you into consequential actions such as upgrading pipework, requiring planning permission or something else, all of which are more likely for a high loss house than a low loss house. An oversized pump will cycle more than a right-sized pump, possibly even at very low temperature. This does reduce efficiency, but nobody really seems to know by how much with modern inverter driven pumps (perhaps a topic for another thread sometime). Heat loss surveys will tend to overestimate because that's 'safe' for the installer. Whether its 'safe' for the customer depends on the circumstances as exemplified above. It sounds like your house fits into the high loss category in which case a sizing error might make a massive difference to the scale of works needed.

Good Guide here. https://www.paulheatrecovery.co.uk/mvhr-guide/ My pointers in no particular order. 1. Locate MVHR unit within heated envelope or build a dedicated insulated enclosure if this is impractical. 2. Don't be afraid to mix and match suppliers of ducts, units etc. 3. Locate Inlet and Exhaust terminals on an exterior wall but not by a bedroom window (noise). 4. Place room vents over a window opposite the room door. (avoids obstruction by furniture and is unlikely to cause a draft on a bed/chair) 5. A radial semi rigid ducting works well, ease of install, minimal cross talk, cheapish. 6. Don't forget about a condensate drain. 7. Locate the unit where you can service the filters. 8. Consider the noise of the MVHR unit. Suspend it by wires or rubber mounts in the attic. Bolt it to a solid wall or sit on a concrete floor to reduce vibrations. Leave plenty of space for rigid silencers (or DIY them). 9. Forget about meaningful cooling or heating form MVHR. It is really only a ventilation system. 10. Don't get carried away with smart controls/remote switches. We just set ours to 35% and rarely touch it. 11. A higher capacity MVHR unit will run quieter. 12. Don't be afraid to DIY the design. It's not rocket science. 13. Don't use floppy ducting anywhere. Semi rigid is fine. 14. Insulate the Exhaust and Intake ducts for condensation.

I fear squirrel incursion significantly more than I fear mouse or rat attack. Time to go sit in my garage cuddling my air rifle while trying to regulate my breathing….

I've thought (and been reminded) of 10 other things I have to do first. Finish 'wordle and connections', compost heap, visit the big project, get cat food.....

I’m worried. How long do we wait for @saveasteading to escape from the rodent ruled attic before someone brave and foolhardy dons a head torch to go in after them?