SteamyTea

Welcome You can make a shell look like the finished product in a weekend then, tell us the secrets.

All those allow air to pass through, so making the external walls of the building is very important.

What type/s of insulation are you using?

As it is a workshop, go with the @joe90 method.

Why I suggest A2A and Evocents.

Can you design the pods so they have their own Air2Air heating and ventilation, then PV on top to help power an Ecocent type water heater? How are you going to get rid of waste water? If you can dig a very large trench, they at least you can put in a lot of insulation, but you need to cost it all up.

Because anti vermin mesh is put into any vents. Called 'best practice design'.

You can make a building airtight with a very well fitted polythene VCL in the inside. But if the external air is allowed to pass through the insulation, your only U-Value is the thickness of the VCL. Why buildings are wrapped in a breathable, but windtight layer on the outside. Then there are all the junctions that are hard to treat, or can easily fail. A squirt of silicone may get you through an airtest, but it is not a long term solution. Brick, block, page coats, render and plastering all fail somewhere, sometime. It is why no one ever retests their houses, ignorance is bliss. I am not having a go at traditional methods, TFs can fail as well, mine had when I moved in. Hard work finding where all the leaks are.

Seems to me that some of this is stopping the air that is inside from getting out. What you need to do is stop the air that is outside getting onto the insulation. I don't know what method you are constricting with, but assume that the first external layer (be it OSB, Block or Brick) will leak and the windproof wrap is not that good.

Just find your own competent plumber, it is not a difficult thing to do, unless you have some non-compliant components i.e. soldered joints on ST system. Or dump the ST, replumb the store so that the HP heats via the lower coil, then fit PV. Sell the ST on eBay. You may loose money, but you will have a better system. Consider a claim against the original installer.

Report the neighbours to the council, on a regular basis, just wear them down.

Don't change the law, whether you like it or not. As Sumption said the other day, the law is not opinion.

Pretty sure that is illegal. I think there are now very strict rules about waste disposal, so worth finding out about them. https://www.gov.uk/managing-your-waste-an-overview

Perran Trusses in Redruth make a lot of stuff. You may struggle to get a delivery for end of July from anyone though.

Grand a week rent. Two years of that and you could buy a country cottage.

Even the Dutch don't speak Dutch. Just speak in German after drinking a pint of vinegar, sounds the same then. Dank U

They generally do, it is the fear of 'missing out'.

We should start a new topic on this, I often wonder how much money is spent on a plot when you consider that there may be several people interested in buying it. When I was selling a place I had a vendor that went quiet for several weeks, so decided to sell privately (sacked estate agent). The new vendor quickly arranged for the survey to be done. The surveyor said "I have this places booked in for a fortnights time as well". So that would have been an extra £500 or so, for the same report. So my estate agent never told the original vendor that the place was off the market, wonder if he charged the guy a fee.

The stamp duty holiday is going at end of the month, this has artificially compressed the selling period, and people with lots of cash think that they have a right to buy quicker.

Welcome. Buying a home is a strange thing, most people seem to buy where they already live and work. This may seems sensible, but can limit your choices somewhat. My first home was close to family and work, cost quite a bit and was totally unsuitable. Then the second one was 20 miles from work and family, was better, then third was 150 miles away from both, was even better still. I just got a new job locally. Finally I moved 300 miles from friends and family, but close to a beach that is good for surfing, not that I do that these days, but it is nice to sit on. So my advice is to widen the area you are considering, avoid property 'hot spots', avoid 'schemes', reconsider work option, and save, save, save, cash is king. Self build is expensive, more expensive than renovation, you can easily spend £50k before you have bought the first cubic metre of concrete.

You may want to go 100mm deeper and put 200+mm of insulation in. What do you consider the minimum qualification is for an 'engineer'?

House has been uninhabited for a number of years. But knowing the power of the oil burner could be useful. The heat loss calculation for them is easy then, and won't change. Just need to know what they are made from and how thick and air leaky. Just don't get side tracked into thinking they will 'store energy'. Just simple conductance and wall area is all that is needed. Why? Do you like the damp.

Nor are combi boilers, most people take very little interest in the sizing of them, or the flow rate they can produce.

There seems to be some misunderstanding about 0°C. Much better to calculate on the kelvin scale, then you will see how little the CoP actually drops. The biggest enemy is really humidity at ~4°C, this is when air will have its highest humidity levels (note humidity not relative humidity), this is why ASHPs are oversized, once above or below that temperature, the CoP often rises. They work by extracting energy by cooling the air that passes though them, if they cool some water, then they get extra energy. If you had to choose a temperature scale the zero point should be the lowest temperature that the refrigerant gas can go to, but that is all a bit academic. But as @IanR points out, the DHW is the real challenge, not the space heating.

You have a new design house, the UFH was designed in from the start. An old place, with a 'normal' plumber specifying UFH, it would run the system at a higher temperature.