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Most likely I would buy a bungalow well away from the SE England, probably in the West Country. So if you know of any remote, no other buildings within half a mile, bungalow with an acre or two I could well be interested. It's not that I'm unsociable, well I guess I am really, but I would like to live somewhere where the only sounds are birds singing. To make life easier we are both singing from the same hymn sheet .

I've mentioned before about why I think that directly connecting any IoT device to the Internet is extremely dangerous, but if you don't believe me then watch this video. IMO, you should only open at most: an HTTPS port to a locked-down webportal and a strong authenticated SSH port, and possibly a VPN.

A busy November saw all the trades coming good, albeit some were cutting it fine for the moving in day – 30th November – However, we have moved in with all the services up and running. Having said that, BT and Openreach have missed the deadlines and as a result we are without any internet, phone line or TV for at least a week! Also the master bedroom built in wardrobes are still be fitted. The landscapers have finished their work, providing us with a patio area and a driveway area which will see plenty of activity. Look closely and you should see the hedging that has been planted. 330 separate plants in all. This was a planning condition and the hedges are a mixture of Hawthorn, Beech, Holly and Maple. Locally referred to as native hedging. The turf will be laid next Spring. Our Air Tightness test was conducted by a guy from Perth - a good couple of hours away. We never set out to achieve such low levels because we didn’t want the capital outlay of such a system as well as the infrastructure it requires. Our score was 4.9 which in our eyes is very good. There are a number of minor jobs which I need to do such as touching up the paint work here and there; re-oiling some wood in places but all that can wait until we have given the whole place a deep clean. The main external jobs outstanding are the erection of the oak framed porch and the downpipes. Both of which should be completed within the next 10 days or so. Anyway, this was not a self build in the true sense of the words but it was project managed by myself and built using a main contractor and sub contractors after the TF had been erected. I hope you have not only enjoyed reading about our project but have found some useful bits of information within the blogs in order to assist yourselves with your projects, whatever that may be. Overall my experience has been a good one. It hasn’t been without its difficulties, such as additional unforeseen expenditure and additional expenditure as a result of our mistakes, or due to us changing our minds! Such examples include ordering the wrong door frame - we failed to realise we hadn't ordered a threshold suitable for level access - a mistake that cost us £1k. Changing our minds over the 3 toilets we had ordered. They simply looked lost in their respective environments so 3 new ones were ordered at an additional cost of £850. A failure to get a full grip of the scaffolding cost an additional £1k and a failure to budget correctly for the foundations and dwarf wall for the carport cost an additional £4k. Final facts and figures - Build schedule – 6 months from the day the TF arrived. Cost per sq metre - £1850 – includes everything, and I mean everything - from the scaffolding through to the landscaping and it includes the car port and porch [ still to be erected] but not the land or fees. Only two skips were used throughout the build – everything else was removed by us to the local dump or burnt on site – best investment was a £25 oil drum which we used as an incinerator. Thanks for reading - Paul.

Sounds like you got it sorted but just for info... usually a bigger aerial (higher gain) is better than a small(er) aerial and an amplifier. That's because amplifiers add their own noise. One issue is that a very high gain aerial can be very directional so very important to point it exactly right direction or you loose all the gain.

A satellite dish won't work in the loft. If that is the exact wording of your planning condition,. put the TV aerial on a free standing pole or attached to a shed, i.e. "not on the outside of the house" My satellite dish is away from the house because of the trees, it is actually clamped to one of the jacks of a wind up radio mast trailer

Often have to put a bung in either end of the run. Sometimes with external runs you put a bung at the far end and fill the whole underground runs with water.

They will probably just make you test each run individually. Having sealed IC's just meant the whole lot could be done in one test.

I am considering "back to plaster", not "back to brick". The other question for an older property is "unknown unknowns". If you suddenly find you need a new roof, or have a bit of rotten wall, or some joists with dry rot, or need a new septic tank which now has to be a poo-plant, that can each add anything from £500 to £8000 on its own, and it might be prudent to assume that you may have 1-5 such events happen. Or not and you get a holiday. ==> big, big contingency. To me eye, the central heating, rewiring, reglazing, and possibly bathroom costs look ambitious, whilst the kitchen may be generous (but I am a bloke and some people spend that x2 on a range.) And you do not have anything in for replumbing, or renovating the fabric to a higher insulation standard, or ventilation. Or external works eg any wall built from stone or brick will be about £100-200+ per sqm if you pay for it. So consider the possibility of 80-100k by the time you have done it, and added shiny bits. Vs what it will be worth also. Also @ProDave has done a number of similar things, and is in Scotland. And a well built old property is very different from a poorly built old property. Ferdinand

A CO2 concentration as high as over 1500ppm suggests that the unit may not be set up properly. As mentioned earlier, setting up and balancing an MVHR system can be a bit of a tedious process, and I strongly suspect that many systems are installed and never properly balanced. If this is the case, then there's a fair chance that both the ventilation may not work as intended and that the power consumption may be a lot higher. Blocked filters won't help, either. The normal outdoor CO2 concentration will be a bit over 400ppm usually, and the house should be sitting just a bit higher (ours is currently sitting at 439ppm, but the MVHR is on boost from cooking lunch). A CO2 level, with the MVHR running at the background ventilation rate and the house occupied, should normally be around 600 to maybe 800ppm (ours tends to sit around 550 to 600ppm with both of us in, but the house is relatively large for just two people).

Don't know if the contents of this is stuff you already know. https://www.historicenvironment.scot/archives-and-research/publications/publication/?publicationId=bd396452-624b-4b87-9ae4-a59500b4dff4

First thing is to look for any very obvious leaks. Damp and mould is really the secondary sign there is a problem. Then knock down and rebuild to modern standards.

I see a lot of these old "croft houses" in my travels as an electrician. The walls are typically 3 feet thick, stone inner and outer, rubble / dust core. Absolutely no damp proof course whatsoever in the walls and anything from poor to no foundations under the walls. That one looks pretty original with the wood paneling. Most have been "modernised" first with lath and plaster, and later with plasterboard. the mistake most people make is they line the inside with timber (usually no more than 2" by 2" and board it. Rarely do they put any insulation in, and almost without fail they leave the gap between the stone walls and the paneling open to the loft space so the gap is open to cold air. On a windy day if you remove a light switch or a socket you are greeted by a howling icy cold blast coming out of the hole. Most of these come with an EPC rating of E or F I have seen various attempts at "damp proofing" them. Some paint the stone walls about 2 feet up with bitumen, On one I installed a "device" that was a small mains powered box that connected to a thin wire laid all around the perimiter at floor level. Quite what that was supposed to do or whether it worked I have no idea. Do you really want an old cold damp house with small windows? There are better properties available or why not build a decent house, plots are a lot easier to find up here than many other parts of the UK.

A door needs to be accessible from outside. Here is my secret code, it is embedded in the shame.

Still in the pre-delivery stage for the battery system, but it will be AC coupled and limited by the equivalent of a G100 relay to prevent export, so it doesn't (as I understand it) need any specific additional DNO approval. Three phase would be useful for a high power EV charge point, if you really believe that you will have a genuine need to regularly charge at home at around 88mph or so. I can charge at 7 kW, but never do so, as I've not yet had a need to charge that fast, and charging at a lower power (typically around 2.5 kW to 4 kW) during the day means that charging is mostly free. In the 8 months of so that I've owned an EV I've never had a need to fast charge either at home or at a destination, as the car invariably ends up sat at a destination charge point for several hours, often overnight, so 7 kW is more than enough. An EV capable of a 250 mile journey would need a charge time of around 9 hours or so at 7 kW, which is generally fine for an overnight charge. Also worth bearing in mind that not many EVs are capable of accepting a 22 kW AC charge. Mine can only charge at 11 kW from a three phase 22 kW charge point, although it will charge at around 50 kW or so from a DC charge point. The emphasis on car fast charging has shifted to DC, as the weight and volume of an onboard 22 kW AC three phase charger is a penalty that many manufacturers think is unacceptable, especially given that there are few 22 kW AC charge points around anyway. Be extremely wary of running domestic loads on different phases, as there is a high peak voltage between phases (415 VAC). For this reason, you would need to split out the house supply by physical area, rather than load, when arranging the single phase supplies from a three phase incomer. Typically this would be done by floor, so the ground floor would be on one phase, the first floor on another, etc. The snag is that this most probably won't come close to balancing the loads, as most of the high load stuff will probably be on the ground floor. I'm personally far from convinced that three phase makes much sense, unless you have a very specific high power requirement that needs it. The loss of offset from PV generation is a big negative - having a three phase connected PV system means you need to synchronise loads across all three phases in order to take advantage of the power being generated. This is easy enough to do on a single phase supply, but not at all easy on three phase. I would guess that you would end up "wasting" at least half, maybe more, of your generated power, and importing from the grid a great deal more to make up for this.

Our plot is very remote (couple of neighbours) and I love being in the middle of nowhere, mind there is always lots to do, cutting grass, hedges, collecting eggs. Etc etc. I love it (when I eventually finish it !!!,!,!)

One of the reasons I moved to the Highlands. Add the sound of water running through the burn to the birdsong and you get the idea.

No, the permitted development rules don't care if it's grid connected or not. They just need it to be removed if it's no longer used, presumably for the reasons @Temp mentions.

It is always a problem in small houses, but even worse when the place is longer and thinner. My house is 3.5m wide, almost a metre is taken up by staircase, leaving 2.5m. Pop a sofa in, and now down to 1.25m (ish). Put a TV in and you are about a metre from it. I don't have a TV. The point I was making, was that for the same area, layout can be a lot better than what I currently have. I only have one bathroom, and very little storage.

I also don't get the forever house. What is the objective? Things change as you go through life. Moving is fairly cheap and if you are lucky enough to always move somewhere more suitable, why not? I spoke to an older couple today who have a fantastic large detached house on 1.5 acres but they are looking for a new house which is central, easy to heat, lock up and leave, no garden maintenance. What they had before suited them with young children, but now has become a bit of a pain, so time to move on.

Whilst I agree that we should be increasing the minimum size standard for homes, there is some merit in finding ways to be more space efficient, too. As a student, my bike used to be hung up on the wall in the stairwell, for example, where it was out of the way and stored in a space that was otherwise just wasted (it was above head height). Back then, a friend had a neat little portable washing machine, that sat on the draining board when in use. No idea what make it was, but it was light and easy to use, and I always wondered why it hadn't been developed into a built-in product. Until we moved into this house we had an ancient Philips tumble dryer (used to be my mothers) that was a lot smaller than a standard one. One house we lived in didn't have room for it, so I built a shelf above the cistern in the downstairs WC and sat the tumble dryer on it. That was also space that otherwise wouldn't have been used. I always thought that architects and house designers could do worse than spend a few days looking at how boats are designed. There's rarely any wasted space onboard a small boat.

This reminds me. A 2-year post move-in check is to go around all of the sockets and switches to check the torque on all of the switch / socket screwed connections to make sure that none have deformed to the point of being a loose contact. I did this every 5 years or so one my old farmhouse -- mainly to check for dampness signs of overheating because we have 300 year-old stone walls -- but even so I'd occasionally come across a loose terminal thanks to deformation of the single core copper over time -- though the main deformation occurs on the virgin round core which is why I think it a good 2-yeear check.

Make no mistake self build is hard If it was easy everyone would do it Grand designs sort of skips past most of the bad bits Building the dream is closer to what your likely to experience But I think most would agree that the ends justifies the means I’ve taken apprentices on that thought it would be like DIY SOS Drinking Tea and playing tricks on each other I think we all need to go into this with our eyes open The contractors aren't your friends They are being employed by you and you have the final say on everything Betting having Grumpy old Bob on your build that knows his job inside out Than Jim who’s a real nice guy But turns up when he feels like it and doesn’t have clue

Optimism bias will blot out any negatives that KM or Grand Designs dish up. I've been thinking about @JSHarris point about it here, . I don't think we would - knowing what we now know - have started our build. But then I remembered Robert Frosts poem: The Road Not Taken. Another way, perhaps earthier, would be to say Curiosity Killed the Cat Had we not started - damn the consequences - I for one would never have forgiven myself. So for us it's a bit shitty now, no money, knackered, lots of mistakes to live with. More stress -in spades - to come. I know that now. And how many people do I know would give their eye teeth to be as privileged as we are?

The snag is that most of your domestic loads will probably be on a single phase, as it would be unusual for a house to need more than the ~23 kVA that a single phase supply can deliver. Ideally you want your PV to be connected to the same phase as the household loads, so that any PV generation offsets normal use. If PV is on 3 phase, then only around 1/3rd of the generated PV energy will be offset against the house domestic loads.