epsilonGreedy

The premium for building in London? Mine was cheaper an involved more work.

The Windsor Castle fire, pretty sure that was restoration related.

A concern over thermal expansion stress being induced into your floor slab?

@TerryEwrote a blog entry for his house but a with 1kw heating requirement his house sounds like a Passiv++ example. Also worth noting that from other posts @TerryEcalculated that the heat capacity of his plasterboard is about the same as the heat capacity of his floor slab, this might be due to a 3-story design?? https://blog.ellisons.org.uk/newbuild/heating-the-slab-an-overview/

The absence of a plant room in my design is beginning to feel like a problem. I was hoping to box in the basics of the UFH manifold and pump under the stairs of the open plan sitting room as this is a good central point in the house and would avoid a UFH Clapham Junction at the main internal ground floor door threshold.

Hey that is excellent, just ran the numbers for a theoretical version of my house. I nearly doubled the whole house heat loss to 3kw, reduced the slab to 80mm and insulation to 150mm and get a required floor temp of 25.2. The spreadsheet seems to assume a ground bearing slab, would a beam & block suspended floor introduce a large error? Ok and I imagine that at some lower temperature point there is a cross over where pumping costs exceed the improved COP savings. Just to confirm, heating water enters your UFH slab at 40 degrees?

Ok his is interesting, would the ASHP efficiency (COP) be improved if it was set to run at the ideal temperature for UFH alone? I ask because I have read that in the super insulated @jsharris house his UFH slab runs a smidgen above ambient house temp, whereas in my less than passive new build I assume my slab would need to run a few degrees higher. Which leads to the question what would be the ideal circulation heat from the ASHP to whack 20kw hours in to the slab during the overnight economy 7 period between say 2am and 7am?

The more I consider ASHP I realize the basic installation is very simple. Am I correct in thinking the complexities are further downstream with buffer tanks and other gadgets needed to raise the luke warm ASHP output to that required for DHW? If I wanted to build in support for later adoption of ASHP and coupling to UFH what is needed? Here is my guess: High capacity electrical circuit of say 5 to 8 amps terminated on an outside wall socket. A pair of water pipes routed from the external wall through to a point close to the UFH manifold. A control wire conduit with either a mouse line or multi-core general purpose control cable. [Edit as per @ProDave] Concrete base slab for ASHP [Edit me] Planning permission in a conservation area [Edit me] Is it really that simple? Where would a timer and the thermostatic control go?

For obvious reasons I have been thinking about how vulnerable a part built house is to fire. I assume the risk is highest mid way through 1st and 2nd fix when the internal structure is open and has lots of exposed wood without the fire retardant influence of fitted plasterboard. I am struggling to come up with likely triggers...

So far I can only offer a small error with significant consequences for my muscles. I wish I had paid the JCB man for an extra hour on foundation dig day to create separate mud piles to segregate my silt sub soil from the high quality top soil. Six months later I have to mine mud mountain on site to expose seams of top soil layered between sub soil and dried out turf.

Yacht engines suffer as well when charging batteries at anchor, something to do with cylinder bore glazing because the engine is effectively running at a fast idle and pushing just 0.5 kva into the batteries. A well matched home generator should work harder and avoid this danger providing charging stops before full charge.

Was the conservatory added after the initial build? I ask to establish how much wiggle room the warranty provider will have.

This looks like a big variable that needs to be quantified, a post in the CanalWorld forum suggests home generated electricity from a diesel generator costs between £0.50 and £1.26. https://www.canalworld.net/forums/index.php?/topic/63233-cost-per-kwh-using-a-generator/ Another source based on a big 12 kva setup for a farm claims £0.25 per kwh assuming red diesel at £0.72. Unless your battery bank is large your generator will be running at an inefficient low rate. Your premise for a small scale offgrid solar/battery setup is your frugal kwh consumption rate so it is misleading to compare against the average UK bill, from your earlier posts you will be in the lower 10 percentile of UK consumers. The cost of housing a generator needs to be factored into your comparison. I assume you will want the generator remote from the house, large enough to work around and service in all weathers and nice an dry to preserve this vital piece of kit. This sounds like a very small garage or very well built shed. What about annual servicing? Plus the generator will not operate faultlessly for 10 years.

I find your reasoning a bit faulty here. When after 10 years you junk your first generator and knackered lithium batteries that is also money that will sit in a landfill for evermore whereas that £7000 mains cable will hmm at 50 Hz for say 50 years and zero maintenance. I get your desire to protest against lazy national institutions but don't let politics lead you to the wrong decision.

Long term boat live aboards are now switching to lithium and one reason for this is charge duration. At your stage of planning it would be easy to focus on net daily demand and capacity but in practice there is a big difference in having the noise of a generator spoiling your rural idyll for one and not two hours a day. The ability to whack a higher current into lithium is a real quality of life bonus.

The seller of my plot is obliged to return and finish the private road shared between 4 plots. My problem is that I would like to know what the finished level of this road is likely to be but the seller is reluctant to be drawn on a precise spec for the finishing work. He has been thoroughly decent on all other aspects of the plot sale and services installation, in fact he is badgering two of the self builders to crack on with a pending drainage pipe that will cut across the private road because he wants to avoid a subsequent dispute should his tarmac capping subside over the drainage trench. The current site road is comprised of a 400mm deep base of large grade rubble and leveled with a temporary finish of limestone/chalk MOT-1 type hardcore, this gets a bit sticky after rain but otherwise the site road is very stable when HGVs arrive in all sorts of weather. Some responses on another site suggest the the finial capping of the road surface will raise the finished level by about 75mm formed from: https://www.mybuilder.com/questions/v/15358/mimimum-depth-of-hardcore-and-tarmac-required-for-residential-drive Is this a sensible depth to base my calculations on?

Nice to see Victron equipment getting recognition in UK self building. Long seen as The Brand for marine leisure installations.

This is a bit tangential to self building as it just relates to our future temporary onsite laundry shed. The free hand-me-down 8' x 6' shed was deconstructed in a hurry down to its major panels and I am planning its reconstruction using unconventional methods because it was pulled apart in the wrong order. The reassembled structure will be held together with 90 degree metal brackets and I plan to reinforce the joints with fat beads of structural mastic (this is how modern yachts are stuck together). I am looking for a recommendation on the right type of mastic that will adhere to wood and form a nice fat bead along the 6ft internal angle between say the back wall and side wall frames. I expect the shed will be demolished towards the end of the year.

Just the pointy end, the heads are under other layers of the shed panels. This shed was a proper job built as a frame onsite e.g. the flooring boards went in last and hid all the screws binding the floor frame to the wall panel bases. I did not have time to reverse its original build sequence hence the torn out screws now exposed. This will just be our onsite laundry for 6 months hence it will be joined back together with some metal corner straps and some beads of structural mastic along the internal panel joints. I am making excellent progress with the @Declan52 hammer and metal fatigue technique but might have to resort to an angle grinder for the final awkward bits.

I am going outside to experiment.

Thanks all, a useful range of opinions. Living in a non signed off house for years is not a desired outcome, I was just assessing how difficult life would become if I took a gamble on featuring PV to solve my SAP challenge without planning consent for PV. In my case there is no mortgage or warranty to worry about. The feedback on home insurance cover is promising, i.e. if it walks and quacks like a habitable home it is insurable.

I inherited a well built garden shed from a pensioner who was moving into sheltered accommodation. Unfortunately it was not built to be taken apart and so in the rush to move it some of the major wall sections had to be prised apart and this has left exposed screws with the heads still captive. I do not own any cutting tool and want to buy something to slice off the captive screws flush to the wood surface. I think my options are a small grinder or an osculating cutter, these have popped up in my online research. Oscilating https://www.amazon.co.uk/Makita-DTM51Z-Multi-Tool-18-V/dp/B00QEBOE0Q Grinder https://www.axminster.co.uk/makita-dga452z-115mm-cordless-angle-grinder-18v-body-only-506185 The cosmetic finish is not an issue with this task because the surfaces with the exposed screws will be concealed once the shed has been reassembled.

Do you have a breakdown of the £46k?

I doubt if more than 1 in a 1000 consumers read the end user licence for any product or service, this is why the EU created a wonderful piece of legislation that frees consumers from the obligation read this protracted nonsense created by lawyers. The only revelation in this story for me is that classic customer voice snippets are circulated around internal Amazon support staff forums for employee entertainment.

When the home owners complained and protested this is how they were treated by Taylor Wimpy... What a grotesque corporate culture exists at Taylor Wimpy, customers who complain about their shoddy houses are branded as criminals.