AliG

The price of mains gas has less overhead in it than the price of electricity. Thus the price of gas is likely to actually go up more than electricity. To keep things very simple, if you assume a COP of 3 then gas boiler will be cheaper than a heat pump if electricity is more than 3x the price of gas. If you assumed 90% efficiency for gas, then the ratio would fall to 2.7x. Two years ago electricity was roughly 13p/kWh and gas 3p. Thus gas was cheaper. 4.3 ratio. I think I had a fix at over a 5 to 1 ratio. Today electricity is roughly 28p and gas 8p. 3.5 ratio, gas still cheaper but less so. I would guess with the next cap gas will go up more than electricity and the ratio will be around 3x. So we will be getting close to parity. It is unlikely that the COP on different heat pumps (assuming they are correctly installed and working) would be different enough to be worth the cost of changing. I suggest that you look at the amount of electricity your ovens are using. The use roughly 1kWh/hr they are on. So assume they cost 30p going to 40p+ per hour. That alone is going to be hundreds of pounds a year. I suspect that cost is disguised by your PV in the summer, but not in the winter. I would be looking at getting a Eddi/iBoost/Solic to use your excess PV to heat your hot water which would materially reduce your consumption. I am not sure, but a quick Google suggests that LPG prices are more like 70p/liter. They should be pretty much directly linked to gas prices which have soared again in the last few weeks as Russia has restricted supply. Thus LPG costs around the same as mains gas and with a COP of 3 it is unlikely to give you much of a saving over your heat pump. If your house was built in 2014, do you know the U-values of the walls and roof. Ultimately, energy costs are currently high and the best thing you can do is save energy. I would be looking for the best return energy saving ideas. Traders spend all their days trying to arbitrage between different fuels and it is unlikely that this will provide a sustainable benefit. You could easily switch to LPG and then as the proportion of renewables in the grid increases it becomes more expensive than using electricity over the next few years. I would also look into getting some kind of time of day tariff so that you could get much of your heating use during the night.

I don't think 15000kWh is excessive assuming it includes heating, hot water and general electricity usage. The best thing to do is get yourself on an Octopus Go type tariff and then run your heating and hot water as much as possible during the night. I recently did this and shifted over half my electricity usage to overnight at the cheap rate. In your case, I would try to heat our hot water tank during the cheap period and counterintuitively run your heating with the thermostat set 1C higher during the night than during the day, so it would run overnight and then the heating would switch off for most of the day until the house cooled down. We have gas and I am considering just using the immersion to heat water from October onwards as it will be cheaper to do this during the night on Go than it will be to use gas during the day.

Historically builders just used the 8mm strip. You need the PIR too to reduce cold bridging

I pretty much agree with these comments. 1. You are underestimating how much the ceiling will encroach on the bedrooms. When you step out of the beds on the left hand end rooms, you will have 5ft ceiling height. 2. The master bedroom layout is weird and needs to be redone. A bed with your feet under the eaves will be very very constricting. there is plenty of room to fix this. As mentioned the dark corridor to the en suite would not work well. 3. The sitting room and bedroom off the plant room is bad design. I'd maybe look to lose the side door if you don't need it. Then you can move equipment into the area where the door is and close off the plant room past the entrance to the sitting room and bedroom. 4. What is the small room upstairs next to the stairs? If it is storage, I would make it a laundry room. 5. I would steal a little space from the bathroom for the small bedroom. 6. You have drawn quite small furniture onto the plans. It looks like the beds are only 1.5m wide and the sofas and chairs are only around 700mm deep. Most nice sofas are closer to 1m deep. Wouldn't;t you want a kingsize bed at least in the master bedroom.

My friend recently bought a hosue from one of Scotland’s biggest house builders. The whole development uses thin cheap looking roof tiles which you can spot from some distance away and considerably cheapen the look of the houses. Same with PVC rainwater goods. The extra cost of powder coated aluminium guttering and pipes will only maybe be a couple of thousand and it will look so much better. I’d maybe also consider should it be black to match the windows. Reconstituted slate would probably be a more expensive looking alternative to concrete tiles. I am not sure of the cost difference. Often for these items it is things like the brackets and edge trims that cheapen them.

3000-3500/sq metre is not necessarily high nowadays, but would include architects fees etc. My parent's house is in this range, but a part of that is below ground costs for drainage etc. Also it has almost the same ground floor area and roof area as well as a similar kitchen cost and landscaping cost in a smaller house. Some of the numbers are crazy. 32000/61000 for light fittings and installation. Looks like you have a lighting designer. I did this myself and sourced all of the larger more expensive fittings directly on Aliexpress where I reckon they cost around 20% of the UK retail price. I would say 20-30k might be reasonable depending on the design. We have big fancy lights in the hall, lounge, dining room, study, WC, master, master en suite, bed 2 and bed 3. All other rooms are GU10s that cost around £75 each fitted today. Looking at the renders there are way more downlight shown than needed. We have 4 downlights in bedrooms that are over 4m x 4m. The kitchen has 16 and is around 70sq metres. I see a lot of LED strips. We have a few, they look nice but are expensive and don't provide great light. Are the renders the actual finished lighting plan. I don't see any impressive looking lights that I would expect for this kind of money, just loads of downlights. 39k for a labourer. A lot of this cost should surely be in the individual items. What is the labourer doing over and above helping with these already priced up items? 25/30 skips. My parent's house at 2/3 this size is 2/3 finished and I think they have had 4 skips so far. Don't forget that everything that goes in the skip you will have paid for! Edge strip insulation by JGUHEDGE or similar approved - My builder used this, the architect specified 25mm PIR. This thin insulation creates a bad cold bridge. 145 White PVC-U Marley - To build such an expensive house and then use PVC guttering would be a shame. Contractor 2's heating costs are insane. We used our own heating contractor. £5000 for wall tiling seems quite low. Suggests only half tiling, again cheap considering the cost of the house. £80k give or take for AV installation. Beyond crazy. I assume this maybe includes projectors, speakers etc and it would still be crazy. I would not dream of letting a builder spec this stuff. How will you know how to work it. Will you have to pay someone by the hour to reprogram it. If you don't know how it works yourself it will be a nightmare to look after. Is it going to make your life easier or harder. What is the point of having sensors in all of the rooms connected back to some management system? Who will look after the management system? What benefits will it provide? I would seriously consider what you want to achieve and if what is necessary. Some of the choices seem a bit cheap for such an expensive house - concrete tiles, half tiling, PVC guttering, On the other hand, some things are way over the top for the size of the house, such as the AV, lighting and heating systems. Try to get a better balance.

I don’t think 4 guys can lift a 467kg window. Plus it is about 500mm above ground level at the moment. They did the other windows manually.

All the windows are in and they have started to plasterboard. It is going so fast I am struggling to keep up with ordering lights etc.

I think these pictures say it all Builder said it just took a couple of hours and he needs a drink.

Seems like they don’t have a leg to stand on reading the deeds. You can’t use machinery but that wasn’t planned anyway. There may be some argument over whether wheelbarrows etc constitute foot traffic. My view is they do as they are pushed by someone on foot. To not be foot traffic the vehicle would have to be carrying the person. No doubt there is some legal precedent on this matter.

The manifolds in my house put out so much heat that the rooms where they sit have never had the heating on. Considering it is a very small space, it won't take much to warm it up, I don't think there is a realistic way to cool it down. The heat would have to go somewhere, unless you want to cut a hole in the wall and put a vent in, but then your heating efficiency will be reduced. In winter when the heating is running that cupboard will be toasty warm, maybe you can make it into a drying cupboard.

Monster!

Microwave is definitely more energy efficient at least for small items. Imagine a pie you could heat it in around 5 minutes at 900W in the microwave maybe 0.1kWh , but it would take around 30 minutes in the oven, which would use around 0.6kWh (I assume it uses more energy at first to warn up the oven). Of course if you heat a pie in the microwave you are a monster and know nothing about food.

Yes, the oven is one of our largest users of electricity and I am sure we are not alone. They generally use around 1kWh an hour. An air fryer being smaller should use somewhat less electricity.

All very good advice here, I agree with almost every word. But you really do need to check the deeds. If you don't have them you can get a copy from the land registry. The reason for this is to see the specific wording. Sometimes this kind of easement may say for maintenance or some such. If it explicitly allows for building work or for any reason, then you can send it to the solicitor and they should really give in and that should be the end of it. If the easement is more restrictive then you may well have to argue that it is an easement by prescription looking at the legal guidance posted earlier. You should still win this, but it will be more difficult. Frankly the solicitor doesn't seem much cope. He basically put in the letter that they are trying to use this to get around planning laws. I can't imagine it will look like a genuine effort to enforce the easement correctly to a court.

Thos prices are crazy. For my parents' place the same work for the ASHP was quoted at 11500 (9kW Panasonic ASHP, but same size tank, expansion vessel etc). 12kW is only slightly more expensive. MVHR including ducting for a 180sq metre house was 7,000.

Electricity should be cheaper during the night for the foreseeable future as there is a considerable drop in demand overnight. Maybe not as cheap as Octopus prices it, but much cheaper than during the day. I would expect the war in Ukraine to end at some point and gas prices to fall back to a more normal range. They are considerably higher in Europe than in the US now, although the US has been rising too. Failing that over time the proportion of renewables in the mix will continue to increase and the impact of the gas price will lessen so prices will eventually fall, it is just a question of whether it takes one or two years versus six or seven. In the meantime I will enjoy my cheap electricity from Octopus. I have probably cut my costs by around 40% versus the capped variable price. I'll enjoy it while it lasts.

Same here. As i expected asking people to run things during the night on Octopus is a massive imposition as is asking people not to turn on lights during the day and not to set their thermostat at 23C.

Does it not have a quarter turn type lock? If it doesn't and they insist on one, you could just buy one and drill a hole for it. https://www.amazon.co.uk/sourcing-map-Triangle-Cylinder-Thickness/dp/B07BPWPM5C/ref=sr_1_28?crid=LZKDVJ91GIQ&keywords=triangle+lock&qid=1655830032&sprefix=triangle+lock%2Caps%2C92&sr=8-28

My three-phase smart meter works fine. I appear to use a very similar amount of electricity to what I was using with my non smart meter before so have mo reason to believe that either had any issue netting off my PV. If I look at my half hourly consumption data I can see it going down to almost nothing when the sun comes out. Mine was installed by SMS. For some reason they forgot to send someone to instal the gas meter. I don't know about other suppliers but for them the people who install normal meters can do both, but three-phase are installed by specialists who don't do gas. I then had to wait 6 weeks for the gas meter and they couldn't set it up fully until that was installed. TBF the guy tried very hard whilst he was here to find someone available to come at short notice and install the gas meter. I would note that my electricity meter is inside the house and gas meter outside and there are two cavity block walls with PIR inside them between the meters. As I suspected the gas meter does not connect to the electricity meter so I do not have smart functions for gas.

I got a WiFi plug so I can check standby usage of different devices. A TV really should be using less than 1W on standby, I haven't seen one above that in a long time. However, audio equipment seems to be pretty poor in comparison. I wouldn't be surprised if it was the surround sound system, depending on how it is set up it may not go easily into a low power mode. Mine uses a lot of power. When I looked into it most amps only have around 50% efficiency, so it uses a crazy amount of power when it is running. More efficient amps are very very expensive. The other device that I found was heavy on standby consumption was an old Wii that we have, seems to use 10-20W on standby.

The issue is the lack of space. The window has to come through this area (outside the window fitted here)

I just fitted a standard plastic meter box to the fence and they connected up the site supply to that. SP Networks the local DNO seems to be very flexible and helpful.

House is flying along (other thang getting in the sliders) They have almost finished the render board and first fix. Next week they will start on the plasterboard and the render. Mum and dad sold their flat today for crazy money, thought we might have missed the peak of the housing market. So that takes a lot of worry away and will help to pay for the cost increases on the new place.

Having looked at it again, the glazing robots work well when you have a nice flat area. The issue we have is that we have a 1-1.5m area around the house which MBC asked us to dig out then a big jump to the rest of the garden. This area also has a lot of the soil piled up ready to fill the hole back in. The glazing robots really struggle to carry weight at the side, they are counterbalanced to carry it in front. But with the window being so wide, it is hard to get a wide enough flat space to drive it around the house. Thus the crane is probably our only option, if we can get it for a half day hen the cost will be similar.