AliG

I paid up front for things that had to be ordered up front with a deposit. So when he ordered the windows, which required a 50% deposit, I paid that. But for general building work he billed me at the end of the month in arrears and I paid him. A few times he asked for it a bit earlier to help his cash-flow. The builder will pay sub contractors, staff and for materials in arrears so there really shouldn't be much that needs paid up front.

Hi @Trw144. I have around 900sq metres, a pool and a Heatstar. The good news is that if the pool room is well insulated and triple glazed it won't cost much to heat. I reckon mine is around £500 a year. I also reckon that the pool pump and the electricity for the dehumidifier cost more. My electricity bill is larger than my gas bill which is pretty unusual. First question - do you have mains gas? I have a standard Bosch 42CDI system boiler. It is exactly the same boiler I had previously in my much smaller house and it easily copes with heating the house and pool. I have considered what I would do at some point in the future if I had to replace it and boilers were banned. On the very coldest days of the year I use 450kWh of gas (sub zero temperatures). So at worst I am using 20kW per hour. I reckon with a few improvements to insulation and air tightness that were missed in the build I might get this figure down to 400ish. Thus my thinking is that I would maybe need 2 heat pumps to replace the boiler. As I am above the normal 16kW max. If I look at my pool it seems to use around 50kWh a day. This heats the pool and pool room which is an area of around 85 square metres. This is a rough estimate from how much gas we use when there is no one at home. I have never quite figured out how the Heatstar sets out to warm up the water. Rather than constantly warm it a little bit it kicks in for maybe a minute every few minutes. Maybe it is dependent on how much energy you supply it and I have it connected to a high output boiler. The temperature of the water is very constant anyway, it just happens that I notice the boiler firing off and on. As you say, when you open the pool it kicks in to heat the pool room. Just in case I have UFH in the pool room, it has never been used and was a waste of money. The room sits at a constant 22C and the Heatstar kick in to warm it up to 30C when you open the pool cover. The reality is I don't usually spend enough time in the pool for it to warm all the way up and don't really notice the air temperature. After a few minutes in the pool you feel quite warm as it is set at 29C. Looking at my original quote there was a 13.8kW ASHP, I suspect that you need this size to hit the minimum spec of the Heatstar coils, even though the pool doesn't require this much heat. Pool heat pumps seem to be a lot cheaper than house heat pumps, so you are probably looking at £3k ish fitted. Ex your pool room you are going to have 500sq metre of house plus hot water. This is probably going to need a 12kW ASHP depending on your insulation. I looked into solar thermal and everything I read said it was a bad system with a lot of maintenance issues and not to bother. Better to use PV which will power the pool ASHP in the summer. I looked into GSHP and the cost of installing the pipes was laughably high. I think I was looking at something like £26,000 for a system. You will probably want three phase with all the extra elections in the house. The issue with this at the moment i you cannot get a smart meter to be on an Agile type tariff. I hope to be on this eventually. The pool filter pump runs 16 hours a day and the dehumidifier all the time. You might be able to time it so that more of your electricity use is at night, especially if you also have an electric car to charge. I have looked at the Tesla power wall and I don't think it pays for itself, but the Octopus Tesla energy plan might work out well simply because a pool uses a lot of electricity and it cuts the average price paid. You have to have a Tesla though! Actually checking again, this might save about £1000 a year in electricity, but the Powerwall is around £10k installed and lasts around 10 years so it doesn't really work.

I resisted the urge to say big pipe fans

This will be a massive anti climax for pipe fans. I went out with my auger and hoe. Cored out a hole and hit the pipe in no time. The pipe is the rusty brown area in this picture. It was only 65cm deep. This would put the bottom of the pipe at 1.05m So I called the SE. He said that he had just heard back from SW and they had checked at the nearest valve and believed the pipe was 1.5m deep. We decided it wasn't worth arguing whether we put a strip 500m deep below our raft or 1m deep to protect it from a possible water leak. They have agreed with our position of the pipe. Now we have to finalise the redesign and go back to the council to get approval. Everyone tells me they will do it as an amendment, so let's see. The planning officer has historically been painfully slow to deal with. Then we have to get MBC to redesign the frame and foundations.

When I priced it up the foundations and slab were looking like £5000. Then you have almost 40sq metres of single ply roof - That is £2-3k fitted. Add in joists and guttering and you are looking at about £5k for the roof. Mine was for a parapet roof which is more expensive. 25 square metres of rendering at £40 a square metre is £1k 25m of double skin block wall at £50 a square metre = £1.25k I think I assumed a little more for the walls due to the taller parapet roof. Then you have a side door, windows, main door, electrics, tap etc. Steel beam over door. Probably around another £5k. I assumed an expensive electric sectional door, so savings can be made here. Then if you have a main contractor do it he will mark all these things up 12.5%. So I was ending up at about £22k I think. I spent a bit more time doing it accurately originally. I was shocked by the price of the foundations and roof. You can no doubt do it cheaper. But I don't think you'd get much change out of £20k. A lot of people like to quote £x for materials and £x per day for labor but no one round here seems to work that way. Everything is priced per square metre which tends to be more expensive.

I have a street at one side of our garden and have looked into this a little bit. A lot depends on the topography. Does the fence sit above or below the road? As people have noted if the road sits high relative to the fence then the sound may be coming over the fence. Is there a gap under the fence? Again sound would come through there Certainly making the fence heavier would help to reduce noise, you can buy blankets to hang over the fence and reduce the noise, but only if noise through the fence is the main source of noise. It might be worth trying to attach something temporary to the fence to see if it makes a difference before going to the time and expense of doing the whole fence.

It is a long running joke that the DM uses Celsius for cold temperatures and Fahrenheit for hot temperatures but today they are just trolling us by mixing them in the same headline. Maybe I should do a stupid DM headline thread.

After some discussion it was decided that we would set the base so that floor level is 150mm above the ground as people were unsure how to protect it from damp otherwise.

What COP would an ASHP get on the moon?

A good COVID conspiracy theory is that the pandemic was created to once and for all show us who the most stupid and crazy people in society actually are.

True. I have suggested that as an experiment I start a YouTube channel and just make random theories up with no real evidence at all. I actually suspect that many people have already cottoned on to this as a money making scheme. After a year I could announce it was all a big joke. The followers would no doubt think I had been nobbled as part of the conspiracies.

Too cheap to meter - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_cheap_to_meter

Watching the media recently, it has become increasingly clear that many scientists have opinions for hire. Either they like being on the TV or they hope it will make them some money. More rational scientists do not get as much air time. I am sure that the TV networks put out the feelers for a scientist who will agree with whatever scare story they want to promote today. The woman commenting on heat pumps on Jeremy Vine chipped in at one point that she used to be an archeologist, so clearly knew what she was talking about. But TBF it is very easy to get informed about almost any subject via the internet. There are many interesting science based YouTube channels for example that will explain things much better than the mainstream media. I am the vaccine expert at work, I am just interested and read a lot about it. I feel I know more than most of the commenters on TV. I am still cringing about Betty Boothroyd almost screaming on Sky that she had been promised a second vaccine in three weeks when she got her first one and they were putting her in danger by not giving her the second one. Quite what qualified her to comment on this I am not sure.

Much of the argument for hydrogen seems to be based on the belief that electricity will be so cheap and abundant that we can squander it on changing water into hydrogen and then changing that hydrogen back into heat/electricity etc. The end to end efficiency of this is only around 30%. There are even proposals to create e-fuels and burn them in clean combustion engines, which is even less efficient, around 16%. These would be crazy proposals if it were not for the belief that incremental electricity costs will fall considerably. Having looked into it, these do seem to be the only way currently to get to net zero carbon with current technology. If we only wanted to cut emissions by 90% then the use of hydrogen would be much diminished. The correct point to get to goes into the global warming debate, but people seem to believe we need to get to net zero or less. Note net zero is not zero, as it is assumed that around 10% of emissions are absorbed by forests. The other problem is that 10-15% of emissions come from agriculture and concrete/other industrial processes so cannot be easily eliminated. I did notice that much of the research into the use of carbon is sponsored by the fossil fuel industry which does make me a little skeptical. For example maybe we could plant trees to soak up the last 10% of emissions. However there is not much money in this, nor a dying industry to push for this so it seems less talked about.

Some positive news. Having provided our survey and the ground marker positions to SW they have come back to us and said they need to know how deep the pipe is as if it is much over 1 metre it could impact the foundation design. The surveyor told me he reckoned it was 1m or just a bit over, so this should be OK. SW say they are going to check to see if they know the depth but otherwise it might require a trial pit. They did not say that they accept our position of the pipe, but having said their concern is now the depth I assume that they are happy with our stated position. Whilst we wait for them to come back with their information I think I will now go out and just dig a post hole as this is a much smaller job and it should be pretty easy to confirm the depth. Once the pipe position is agreed we then need to go to the council and get an amendment to the planning.

OMG - My wife is flicking through the TV channels and Jeremy Vine is talking about this on Channel 5. He says that with heat pumps we will all be cold. Aarrgghh. I could put my fist through the screen there is so much stupidity being spouted by everyone. Jeremy - Won't it be more efficient to run my boiler into the ground. No of course not, do you really think a boiler encompasses as much energy as it uses. Then there is a guy on with the usual, this will hurt poor people argument. Saving energy helps everyone. Moral of the story is don't watch daytime TV or read the Daily Mail. But really it would be nice if the media made an attempt to sensibly explain things. People aren't stupid, but they do need good information to understand things.

The numbers I saw added around 1% a year to the growth in electricity demand. Demand growth has slowed considerably with efficiency efforts, so this kind of increase can be easily accommodated. We are talking about something that will happen over 30 years. In the next 10 years much of the reduction in emissions will come from converting road transport to electricity as well as the continued shift of generation to renewables The use of hydrogen is forecast more to be in the 2030 onwards period, even more in the 2040-50 period. It will be needed for the harder to eliminate emissions.

Either way there would be no carbon emissions using wind power and/or burning hydrogen. The reasons to make hydrogen instead of directly using electricity are mainly - 1. Hydrogen can easily and cheaply be piped. Thus if you can make cheap electricity in one place and use the power somewhere else then it may be cheaper to change it into hydrogen for transport purposes. The most extreme example would be to produce solar power in the middle east, use this to make hydrogen and then pipe the hydrogen to Europe. 2. Hydrogen is a good way to store renewable energy. Batteries can only provide small amounts of short term storage. Hydrogen would work well for longer term storage. I don't know about how the distilleries work, but it may be that burning hydrogen can save them replacing equipment or for some industrial uses it may be easier to get the high temperatures needed using hydrogen. I doubt this applies in brewing.

I have been doing a lot of reading on this for work. The thinking seems to be that heat pumps will be used where they can and if they cannot boilers will be converted to run on hydrogen. The existing gas network could be switched over to hydrogen, although the logistics would be difficult to manage. As an interim step hydrogen can be mixed in with natural gas to lower carbon emissions. Historically I thought hydrogen was a nonsense due to high costs and the inefficiency of adding the extra step to convert watering hydrogen, but the belief is that over time the cost of renewable energy will drop to the point where you can use it to make hydrogen at a reasonable cost. The newest wind and solar plants are coming in at very low costs which continue to fall. What will be interesting to see is if these drops flow through to end users. Forecasts for the falling price of hydrogen are based on wholesale costs of electricity in the £20/MWh range, around half of current prices. Of course investment will be needed in the grid and the actual cost of the electricity is only around half of the end user price of electricity. Of course if electricity prices drop that much you could also just use electric boilers. I also suspect from my reading that a carbon tax may eventually be added to natural gas to make it less cost competitive versus heat pumps as the carbon content in electricity continues to fall.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9436091/Homeowners-turn-radiators-10C-Britain-hit-climate-change-targets.html Even for the DM this is particularly stupid. I am sure it is just to pander to the commenters and clickbait. Read the comments for a laugh/cry.

Would it not be best first to find out how the roof is constructed. I would assume it is a cold flat roof. If insulating it you will need to make sure it does not impact the ventilation and lead to condensation issues. Also have you checked to see if you own the roof or does it belong to everyone in the building? You might be able to take the ceiling down and insulate a space above it so not lose any height. Or you might not. I would think the simplest solution might be taking down the plasterboard and replacing it with insulated plasterboard. 72.5mm insulated board would be a massive improvement and can be bought for around £15 a square metre. 15k for 50m2 is crazy money.

The good building guide suggests such a wall should be a one brick wall, using the bricks sideways to be 215mm thick. I cannot find any specific guidance on piers. Usually they are used to build garage walls and these receive considerable support from the roof. This provides some guidance and suggests that a staggered wall is a better solution than piers. Or that to be effective piers need to be on both sides of the wall. https://www.mbhplc.co.uk/bda/Structure-Free-Standing-Walls.pdf A 1m wall does not require BC approval. However, there is considerable guidance that they should be 215mm thick. I would be worried about my liability if I did not show I tried to comply in some way. Once my wife caught a local teenager walking along the top of our garden fence. This is the kind of situation that someone will bring up if you ask an SE for advice. Looking at the above document and considering the wall is only 1m high the stagger looks like it might be an attractive solution.

Just a few things. I still think you need a cupboard in the downstairs hall. You could put one in the space behind the sitting room door with a door on the diagonal wall in the hall. I would probably put the hot water tank in the utility room, there is lots of space and have the space under the stairs for storage, also your consumer unit, manifolds etc. The bed 3 ensuite is going to need a waste pipe coming down the corner in the kitchen below it. I'd put the toilet against the outside wall. The layout as drawn of the jack and jill ensuite with the toilet across the door is poor. I'd probably put the toilet and WC against the outside wall, the doors at the other end of the en suite and the sink between the doors. The width of the upstairs hall works, but the bathroom and dressing room are large. I would widen the hall by a couple of hundred mm and take it from the bathroom, dressing room and entrance to bed 1

I have a guy lined up to dig if I need to. As people are clearly missing pictures of large pipes -

By CAT survey and ground markers we can position it to within a couple of hundred millimetres. The pipe is also along the boundary of the site behind the house. We do not need to cross it or interfere with it in any way. The house will be 6m away from this at its closest point (this is only one corner of the house). I don't think we need any more accurate a position unless we have to. It isn't a big job to expose it, but I would not be worried about its position at all.