AliG

I have removed the house photo. Really I don’t think the builder is likely to see this and even if they did I don’t think you said anything that they would be upset about. It is just a genuine question.

I think you didn’t attach the pics

Is that an upstairs room? If so I would wonder if it was blocked gutters causing water ingress. The picture is quite shadowed so it is hard to say. Any damp would be coming from outside most likely so I would check outside. Otherwise it might just be movement in the building, plaster has no give in it and cracks easily.

You’re right I have looked at putting in an electric panel heater and indeed have tried one which did the job. If it was me I might have done this. But all the panel heaters I have looked at have horrible timer systems. They purport to have various apps etc but seem to be extremely fiddly to program. Unless you spend close to the price of adding a new radiator. It is a lot easier for my parents to have a radiator connected to the hall loop so it works off the same thermostat. Indeed running the flow lower would improve efficiency and save money. That’s the plan once the radiator is in place. Assuming something like 500kwh a year of output from this radiator, it saves around £75 a year using the ASHP vs a panel heater so it will soon pay for the modest extra cost on installation. I have been quoted around £500. It will be within a couple of feet of the manifold so is a very easy job.

It's the glass. My hall and my parents' hall both have enormous amounts of glass and are double height. I did, however, tell my mum to leave the kitchen door open and it made a noticeable difference tbf. Although of course she doesn't like it.

Heat loss isn't affected by height, just the external areas. Halls aren't normally designed for 21, and normally rob or borrow heat from every room attached to it. Yes, but a double height hall has twice the wall area and one of the walls is entirely glass, so it has much more heat loss than a normal room of similar size. Do they have thick carpet? Have increased the flow rate in those loops to give more energy out. Run those loop 50% higher, so you get a lower dT (differential temperature). Then move the curve back down to lower flow temp. I have never been above 35 and we have UFH at 300mm centres. Various issues. Late 70s parents like to keep the house ridiculously warm. It is uncomfortably hot for me. They don't like the hall being colder than other rooms. The weather compensation curve was set to run the flow between 35 and 45C ramping up from 35C at 5C and above outside to 45C at -5C outside. I can see from the Heatmiser thermostats that the UFH rarely runs for more than 15 minutes in all the other rooms in the house. So for all the other rooms the flow could be 35C or indeed probably less. It is a tiled screed floor. The hall is an issue for multiple reasons. Many of these reasons will apply to any hall. 1. Double height means that there is a greater wall area to lose heat. 2. It contains about 30% of the glass in the whole house. 3. There are no UFH pipes under the stairs or in the understair cupboard 4. The pipework running to the other rooms is insulated, further reducing the floor area available to heat the hall (TBH I hadn't realised ow much area would be lost to this). 5. The only heating upstairs is electric bathroom radiators, so some heat is also lost to the upstairs rooms. I guessed it might be an issue and had the installers reduce the pipework to 150mm centres. The problem is that because of the lost floor area mainly due to the stairs and UFH runs to other rooms, you are trying to heat the whole volume from only around 8sq metres of floor, the total floor area of the space is 18sq metres and it is 5.5m high. At 50C flow, this has an output of around 86W/m2, so only around 700W. I calculated that the space needs around 1.2kW when the temperature is -5C (The whole house only needs 3.5kW at this temp). So we need to add around a 2500BTU radiator to the space (Maybe 3000 to allow a bit of overhead). This would produce 500W of output with a flow temp of 45C. @ChrisInKent likely has some of the same issues as regards to heat requirements for a double height hall versus the amount of floorspace available to produce heat from UFH. Although as I have said this issue would require an extra radiator, or closer pipe spacing, not a larger ASHP. What does that mean? Sorry typo - Heat the hot water faster.

My parents have a similar sized house 0.14 U-Value, less than 1x air changes, MVHR, triple glazing and get by just fine with an 8kW heat pump. We actually upsized the heat pump to heat the hot eater faster, 5kW was good enough for the heat loss calculations. However, they have a double height hall with a glass wall. It accounts for a very high percentage of the heat loss in the whole house (I think around 1/3 from memory). Even with the UFH flow at 50C it struggles to heat the hall to 21C when it is below 0 outside. The flow could be much lower for all other spaces in the house, I turned it up on the weather compensation curve for this reason. When I calculated the output from the floor area, I discovered it was not enough relative to the heat loss of a double height room. We have asked for an extra radiator to be attached to the manifold and put on the half landing. That seems to be what they are getting at, but that would be fixed by adding a radiator, a larger ASHP would have no impact on this issue at all.

This is actually part of what caused Brexit If you ask me. The EU insists on all member countries abiding by similar immigration rules. But the UK was seeing some of the fastest population growth in Europe whilst other countries were seeing population declines. Strict adherence to arbitrary rules irrespective of circumstances is never a good idea. The freedom of movement rules could have been modified to take into account population growth targets.

I'd say that looks a bit expensive, by 10-20% the two doors would cost around £2000 to buy including VAT. Maybe if they split the quote into supply and fitting costs it would help. Depends on how much work is involved in fitting them.

I don't disagree with that, although the issue existed before this latest debacle made it worse. It is a spectacular failure for the Tories to campaign on reducing net migration only to see it explode under their management. Irrespective of whether you agree with their policies, they campaigned for one thing and achieved the exact opposite and have unsurprisingly been punished for it.

Yes planning is devolved. The guy is currently the local Labour councillor so does ave some impact on planning issues. Nevertheless, Labour describe this as their "Plan for Britain" and their Scottish manifesto has on it "Planning reform to get Scotland building" It is not unusual for devolved policy to be similar to England and Wales policies. It is Labour policy to ease planning and build more houses everywhere in Britain. There is a good chance that Labour will form the next Scottish government. The point anyway is that politicians are hypocrites. It is clearly Labour policy to encourage building houses, but how many Labour MPs, or for that matter MPs of all parties with similar aspirations to see more houses built, have simultaneously stood for more building on a national level whilst being against specific building on a local level. This use of local planning as a way to canvas votes is the very reason that planning rules have to be changed to reduce local political interference.

Two posts as this is separate to my above point. Assuming a roughly 100 year lifespan for a house, we need to build around 300,000 houses a year just for replacement. In the short run of course whilst houses are in short supply they are less likely to be replaced. A target of 400,000 a year would be needed to keep up with this and population growth and maybe eat into the shortage that has been created by building only 200,000 a year for many years. The number of households has also been increasing driven by the increase in single person households. The trouble is that planning alone won't achieve this. There presumably aren't enough people available to build 300,000 houses a year, there are not thousands of unemployed tradesmen at the moment. It requires a bit of imagination. For example could prefabricated social housing be built? On site build costs are high and quality variable. Maybe something more standardised and mass produced could be created. The broader picture is that the shortage of housing/building land is in my opinion behind an enormous amount of problems in the UK. People do not realise how the cost of property impacts the cost of everything. Supermarkets, cinemas, pubs etc all have some of their costs driven by development and building costs and this is passed on to consumers in higher prices. The combination of this plus overpriced housing reduces everyone's standard of living. It also drives up taxes. Infrastructure invariably costs way more to build in the UK than elsewhere. The government also spends a fortune on housing benefit which is rising with increasing rents. To fix this I would propose whatever measures necessary, planning is one, to not only encourage house building but all kinds of infrastructure. NIMBYs should not be able to excessively delay wind farms new railways etc. This is costing everyone money. Now lots of people have mortgages audit is dangerous for the economy to have house prices collapse, but if there was a road to gradually reducing the shortage over time by building say 400,000 homes a year you could see house prices and rents rising below inflation over time with people gradually getting better off. It would be a very slow fix, but the problem has been 30 years in the making.

Prior to the election I got into an argument with our local Labour candidate, now MP and a Facebook group trying to stop a new development being built a couple of miles away. Funny how labour policy is to try and ignore local objections, yet he was massively in favour of them in the run up to the election. My argument was that the land where building was proposed was within the bounds of Edinburgh (inside the city bypass which is normally considered the boundary of the town with greenbelt on the other side). Thus it has access to buses, shops etc and would be a much more sustainable place to build than out of town. Local residents have got up an almost 1000 people Facebook group and similar number of objections to a new development. Their objections are nonsense in my opinion. Edinburgh has a target of 35,000 houses to be built. A lot of land has been allocated to this target outside of town on the greenbelt where there is literally no infrastructure at all, no schools, roads, buses, nothing. The locals' argument is that it is hard to get registered with a doctor locally and into the local school (just built with a nearby development) and that traffic will get worse. I pass through the area all the time. Traffic is much less bad than the main area of development around the airport and it there are no doctors with capacity for the 35,000 houses due to be built no matter where they are in the town, so this is in now way a reasonable argument to not build in this area, it is just a straw man argument from NIMBYs. I put up a very robust argument against every point they made. I doubt they will get permission this time, but I reckon they will five to ten years down the road. Indeed every contentious plot of land in the town in the last 20 years has ended up being built on, just later than expected after years of arguing. Perhaps this shows what a real waste of time and money it all is. Usually stuff gets built eventually.

The extra £20k is for better pictures than the ones I drew up.

Looking at this from another angle, so to speak - The design presented is unnecessarily fussy and expensive to make (not 30k expensive, but not easy) Looking at it, I was trying to figure out the best way to dal with the angled wall. Having considered it, I think the best thing to do would be to plasterboard in the area and out doors on it. Anything else leaves you with the odd shaped spaces on display and multiple heights of cupboard that just don't look right. I doubt you actually need all the shelves and you are just trying to fill in the spaces. Boxing them in with plasterboard would look better. Then you could add drawers in the space to the left and under the window. I think it would look better if they were the same height. Excuse the hand drawn perspective. Basically the little triangular areas aren't a lot of storage so just box them in. Alternatively take your existing design and box in the space above the cupboards in plasterboard.

I would buy the doors at the very least. Painted MDF/ply is highly unlikely to have as good a finish as a factory applied coating. It can be done but then would probably be as or more expensive than buying the pre finished doors. In terms of the carcasses they again can be bought relatively cheaply online. You maybe have more flexibility making these onsite and then finish inside is less important so making the interior from MDF etc would be OK.

We ordered that kind of stuff from diyhomefit. There is also a company called Lark and Lark that offers a similar service and I have seen a new company called Fittingly but they don’t quote prices. I’d guess the cabinetry would cost around £7000 but the angled pieces would be an issue. You’d probably have to cut them on site. If you could make the design work using DIY Kithcens range of cabinets then it would be somewhat cheaper but I don’t think they would be flexible enough size wise. Then you can basically fit it yourself. It’s not difficult, or pay a joiner to do it. Personally I would not go down the plywood/MDF route. The finish is just not as good as a factory finish.

In Edinburgh there is a piece of land on the south side of the town which would be a great place to build houses. It is an ugly field and has had houses built all around it in the last 40 years, hundreds within the last 10 years. Thus it is within the A720 bypass and has good bus services making it very commutable. It is, however, greenbelt. I don't know why as normally the greenbelt is on the other side of the A720 bypass which is supposed to define the edge of the town. On the west side of the town (West Craigs) they are in the process of building a couple of thousand houses. They have also approved the "Garden District" which I think is 6000 houses. This was all greenbelt land and outwith the normal city boundary with absolutely no bus services, schools doctors etc. In fact it is very clear to see how far edinburgh will sprawl to the west towards the airport over the next 20 or 30 years. I don't like this because of the sprawl it will create. Funnily enough the local MP and councillors don't care at all about houses being built there in a less appropriate place not in their constituency. The residents near the land I am talking about have got up a massive NIMBY campaign supported by local MPs and councillors, the Facebook group has 831 members, the application has almost 1000 objections. Their main argument is that there are not enough GPs and school places so the houses should be built somewhere else. This argument is entirely bogus, as there is literally nowhere in the town with spare GP or school capacity, so this issue would be the same anywhere, but those other places where they are building are much further from the city centre its much poorer public transport which make them much worse places to build. They also complain about traffic, I drive past regularly and it is fine. They also complain that recently built houses have damp issues which obviously has nothing to do with it. They had a good at me saying it was a good place to build and I just went through their arguments one by one saying they were nonsense. NIMBYism is absolutely rife. MPs and local councillors should have very limited input into planning as no one ever wants anything built. I saw people objecting to a new warehouse development near Edinburgh airport. It actually had previous approval in 2009 with 0 objections. Now houses have been built nearby and there are dozens of objections to a reapplication for something that was approved already. Now of course there may still be shortages of tradespeople etc which need to be addressed, but the reality is that people don't actually want houses built.

Our house is skimmed at enormous cost. My parent's house is T&J. The T&J is a better finish in my opinion. The skim is much more prone to cracks appearing through expansion and contraction between seasons. Sometimes random hairline cracks appear in our walls, that look like stress cracks in glass. There are no joins under these cracks, simply plaster is very very rigid and prone to cracking. Skimming badly done leaves a whole wall a mess, we needed multiple areas replastered, at least with T&J the wall should be fine between the joins. However, I have lived in a developer built house where you could see all the joins in the taped ceilings, so it does have to be done well. We had a leak above one room and the decorator who repaired the ceiling did it immaculately and it became by far the best ceiling in the house.

So only 25mm PIR fits behind the joists. A couple of joists are too tight even for that. About 2/3 done. The hardest bit is the diagonal cuts where it won’t go behind the joists.

Yup gloves and long sleeves are a must.

My wife really wanted me to pay someone to do it but I knew they wouldn’t take a lot of care over it.

Started, first job is tidying up in the roof space. Removing insulation wrapping etc that had been left up there. I recommend everyone has a root around in their roof. Whilst the insulation has been applied to at least the 300m thick specified, if not more, it has been quite untidily fitted with some small areas missed, especially around pipes. I started to move it around to fill these areas in, then realised that I can see places I can stand more easily where the insulation is missing, so I will insulate the wall first then rearrange the insulation. I have been wearing one of these- https://www.screwfix.com/p/stanley-lite-pro-one-size-reusable-half-mask-ffp3-r-d/473kc What a difference a dust mask makes. Insulation is incredibly dusty and normally after I have been in the loft I feel like my throat has been sanded. It is extremely sweaty work, so I cannot wear eye protection, it steams up too much. My glasses keep falling off, I need to figure out how to use the dust mask straps to keep them on.

Thanks but I think the joists would get in the way. Also I don’t want to be building a frame up in the loft. For full disclosure the wife has been complaining about the massive pile of insulation in the garage and I have promised to do it this week so trying to keep it quick and simple. There is not a lot of air movement up there and the wall is air tight so I don’t need to worry much about air tightness. Mainly looking at losses straight through the wall. As the space is not directly outside I’m not sure how bad the heat losses are. However the wall shows as consistently cooler on IR during the winter so there is definitely some loss.

True, but I was thinking this would only be in the small area behind the joists. I suspect that loft roll might be better as it is not as firm so would only be squeezed where the joists are and pop out either side of them. I am not sure if I can consistently get 40mm PIR behind the joists. If I could I wouldn't have to stick it down, I could wedge it with the joists. I was thinking maybe 100mm loft roll partly squeezed behind the joists then I could roll another 100mm across the face of the joists and hold it in place with some pins into the joists. I guess I could use PIR then 100mm also. I have some thin PIR kicking about as well as the loft roll, maybe I need to experiment with both in the morning and see what works best.