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We had our first air tightness test today and achieved 0.25 ACH!! 🎉 Absolutely chuffed to bits with that. We have spent a lot of time taping every possible penetration, but I was still anxious in case we hadn’t quite been as scrupulous as needed.

Yes - we did. Get an electrical cert which includes the PV. Ours was in the garage, so on the garage elec cert, then go through the application process with the DNO. Ours was with NG. You obvs have to fill in the forms and your inverter needs to be G100 compliant. You can find the certificates on the inverter database. On the forms you can put down that it is a self install, there's no requirement for MCS. Then just apply for Octopus Go - I think they still have the admin charge but essentially they contact the DNO to make sure you are registered with them and then it should go through with no problem. I think I put a link to a Victron forum about this on another post a month or so ago- from that, I think that suppliers are not allowed to insist that the PV is an MCS install. If you need the link, I'll try to find it again and repost it. Simon

Yep - everything is connected to everything else!

Dunno wot you all fink, but this is sooooo much better than following Grand Designs..... Its not often that I read and re-read many posts as carefully as I do this series.

surely the plumber is working backwards? If boiler and burner are running for now, just throw a pump in it. *then* look at the other stuff. Seems he's got his OFTEC profit head on... And if no-one is likely to take a hammer to the oil tank, leave well alone. Whilst it may be a little more brittle than it used to be, that's more likely just the surface drying out, like grey car bumpers do.

You could present the sellers with the problem and your view of it and allow them to investigate whether they have any solutions.

If I remember correctly our Jeremy even had his council tax paid for by incoming PV payments over and above his outgoings.

Now that I’ve looked at the block drawings I’d walk away. I wouldn’t want any aspect of my house relying on someone else’s land but nor would I want any aspect of someone else’s house relying on my land. Everything to do with our house is in our land. It’s easy to get over invested in a plot of land as you can start to see your finished house etc. It’s what I did on a previous plot but my wife hated it. We found a much better plot that very day. My dad used to tell me that if there’s doubt about something then there’s no doubt. So I’m with Russell, walk away.

Time to walk away, it looked overpriced to me.

Brilliant. When @joe90 had his done, I watched the meter recording it as Old Joe ran around with a tube of silicone. I found one leak (air intake to the WBS), but forgot to mention it, but that is because I am a bastard.

Hi all, I’m Welshdrum, I moved to Carmarthen in 2021 and bought a small holding from the early 1900s, I have very little diy skills but am learning as I would need to be a millionaire if I paid for all the jobs I needed, but for the big stuff I get the pros in

Hi, I’ve been a member for a while but have been mostly sitting, getting frustrated, waiting for our planning decision. 2 weeks ago we finally got our approval for a strawbale house in the village of Minard, in Argyll and Bute. Now we’re moving into the building warrant stage and at least this time, we’re prepared for a wait - our planning took ten months after being told ten weeks. I’m a bricklayer by trade and this one is going to be the last house I build. 61 years old and I’ve had enough, but definitely looking forward to getting stuck into this. Graham Walker

I have fitted them 14inch in 2 customer houses. One house had 4, 3 flexi tube and 1 rigid, the rigid is a lot brighter than flexi so I would go with the 10inch rigid in the middle. If it has no windows now, even a small amount of light will make a huge difference.

Were you having a moment? Sorry, couldn’t resist that 😂

Top class. I love cellulose.

Great result! You'll benefit from all that taping for years to come.

Well done. Great result. You should be very proud.

Have you thought of resilience bars as you are thinking of adding another layer of plasterboard? As @Iceverge says, density is not everything. Sound proofing is as much to do with creating destructive interference patters for the soundwaves to interact with themselves and increasing the linear path that the sound energy travels. The longer the path, the greater the reduction. It is an inverse square law, so for every doubling of distance you half the intensity.

Don't get hung up on the density of insulation for sound proofing. The main job of fluffy insulation is to dampen the reverberations or "drum effect" in a cavity. Concentrate on sealing each and every air path. Perimeter, board to board, wiring holes. Downlights are a disaster. The add some fluffy insulation for reverberation. Then add mass. Denser insulation of course helps but it's an expensive way to add those extra kgs. Standard plasterboard, soundbloc and OSB are all about the same price per kg and mug cheaper than insulation. If you're feeling really cheap sand in bags or plasterboard off cuts will all help if shoved between joists above the ceiling. Finally decouple the floors although this is more important for impact noises. Strips of carpet or rubber above the joists and resilient bars underneath.

Hello, Had a tortuous route getting planning. Ended up going to committee and was all very negative comments from committee members so was fearing the worse, but much to our surprise a majority voted in favour. Think the lack of a 5 year supply may have played a big part. Pre-commencement conditions discharged and build underway. Another obstacle since started had 3 other plots on the site for self build but no takers. People seem frightened of the whole process and unaware of build costs. So left with a big problem to solve.

Welp, storm babet has been and gone and it's all still standing.We got winds of ~50mph and plenty of rain, but it wasn't particularly noticeable in the garden - it really is sheltered. Got to four bales high on the bit I've been working on, drove those hazel spikes in, then got it all tarped up. Once the storm passed, I got the uprights for the window in, and (no pic of this) got the first bale down between them. Lots of notching. Managed to pick up an alligator saw cheaply, which is helping a lot with that part. Plan now is to get the rest of the walls up to four high and staked; get the windows in; then build the wallplate while the top of the wall is still fairly accessible. Ideally you do it while the floor plate is still accessible so you can use it as a template, but I was pretty tired of wood at that point ^^. I've got the dimensions written down somewhere. Once that's ready, I can haul up the bales for the final two courses; wallplate on; compress; build the roof; re-compress; build the floor. Then in spring, lime render inside and out. Pics - two before the storm, one after: The gap in the fourth course on the west side is *hopefully* going to turn into my bubble window, with a lot of shaping. I expect it'll be porthole-sized by the time I'm done.

@Sparrowhawk Distaster strikes at my end. Thanks for pointing out my error and the heads up @Nick Thomas Can you all for give me please. I just use my own name.. not forgotton that yet.. but time may tell as I age .. further.

Yes you were as it is your project and love what you are doing and your approach. I'm chipping in with partly my SE hat on in the hope you will make it safe but also to encourage you as best I can. On the other hand you have been on a course, know other stuff, taking an innovative design approach so we are all learning from each other. This works both ways.. I learn from you and visa versa. Where I think you are going off track I say so and try and justify why I think so. Think about this another way.. a garden room on average adds 20 -25k to the value of your house (think it was Which magazine that said something like that).. Imagine if you can do this for 4k, justify that it is safe and when you come to sell.. now you have pocketed 20k tax free, have enjoyed building it and using it..

Well done having a go at this. Unfortunately it's not a simple task... I can see you have had a go at calculating the sliding resistance. Call this the global behavior of the structure. I have not looked at you calcs in depth but you are missing two vital things, the first is factors of safety, second and fundamentally when the wind hits the side of the building some goes round the sides and some over the roof. But there is already wind over the top of the roof so you need to squeeze this extra air into the envelope around the building. This increases the air velocity and particularly a flat roof starts to act like an aircraft wing and the roof lifts up. The uplift forces are large so you need to deduct this from the self weight of the structure. Now normally the sliding check is fine and not the critical check as say masonry structures are heavy.. bales less so. The structure could also hold together and overturn.. roll like a ball. My gut feeling is that even with a bale building this will probably not be the critical check. What I think will be the critical check it to make sure that the columns you are forming on the front elevation are able to carry the wind loads as individual elements. Around the sides of the door and at the corners you could get very big uplift forces.. unless you make the roof very stiff. In other words I think that even on a windy day the front wall will start to skew sideways (you also need to transfer what are called shear loads and the bales I don't think will do this well).. then you won't be able to open the doors... take this as an early warning you have got it wrong. To sum up the above. Wind loading is complex, there is a lot to it and the knock on effects are significant. For me.. you have a limited life structure, not occupied all the time.. you could compare this to an open sided farm building in terms of sideways stability (your front elevation with windows / doors), a marquee or similar temporary structure. When we design these we take a more pragmatic view, settlements are less important. What we say is we need to stop two main things happening. The first is that it does not suddenly collapse (without warning) and second is it does collapse say in the wind that bits don't fly away and hit people first and then other buildings ect. I think you really need to stop the front of the building moving sideways and will struggle with bales. One solution that springs to mind is to make the frame around the doors very stiff and strong so it resists the sideways forces. We do this when making big openings in the walls of buildings that are intended to hold things up and stop the building moving sideways. You door frame could be a portal (two columns and a top beam very well connected together) or a box frame, I think this may be best to look at first... the box frame You could make the structural door frame a feature to compliment your attractive design? To get your head round how the sideways forces work make a portal or box model out of 3 or 4 members.. bits of wood. Hold it at the bottom and push it sideways and see what happens. Look carefully you'll get a downwards load at one side and an upwards load at the other... this uplift load is the dangerous one! This load needs to be resisted by tying down. Encouragement! I bet there are loads of folk that would love to be able to do what you're doing and can see you are making a great effort. If you can do this for 3 -4k materials folk will chew your arm off! One way of really understanding this and how it will roughly behave is to get a cardboard box (or a few), cut holes in it to the scale of your windows / doors. Make a roof for it and pin / tape it with match sticks ( to represent your Hazel sticks) to the top of the box. Tape the thing to the dining table and start to push it sideways.. see what happens. This can be great fun for both adults and kids.. before you test it to destruction observe it first or you'll use a lot of boxes! This might sound a bit daft but this is how we teach SE's! Keep posting!

He was one of the last able to sign up to the FIT, sadly gone by the time I was ready to do so. No such golden goose for us now. Until the end of last year I was still getting the FIT from our old house, that paid for all our electricity used in this one, but that went with the house.