AliG

Hi, I have attached the elevations of my parents' house. The architect has created a very modern design as asked, which has a lot of glass. There is 72sq metres of glass plus two doors for a 195sq metre house which is a pretty high ratio. The plan is to have alu clad 3G windows. As drawn on the elevations, the largest windows are fixed panes 2.63x2.39m, I suspect this is too large but there is room to change this. All the downstairs windows are 2.63m tall. There is one set of sliders 3.64x2.63 for the kitchen. We have Rationel windows that we are very pleased with on our house, but the maximum height sliders they can make are 2.388m. I have also noted that if we want any of the downstairs windows to open, Rationel cannot make them. I would like to use Rationel as we are using an MBC frame and they can supply and fit Rationel. I thought the price was reasonable for the quality on my current house, Would it make sense to mix Internorm/Solarlux sliders with Rationel or will Internorm not be as expensive as I am worried about? Has anyone had MBC provide Rationel, was the price reasonable and was it worth it to get everything from them or should I not worry about getting the windows elsewhere? I checked out various suppliers, Idealcombi can go to 2.6m high on sliders, Nordan 2.588 and Velfax 2.475. The architect was very against reducing the window height, but it does seem to me that reducing it by 50mm would maybe give us a lot more options. I think the Rationel max height is too big a change. Also does anyone have access to the maximum sizes for different kinds of Internorm windows, I have struggled to find this. Maybe my best option is to get a window schedule drawn up now before the frame is signed off and get quotes. By expensive I mean much more than £350 a sq metre ex vat and fitting. Thanks Elevations.pdf

You could try the WC to where the door to the lounge is, then it would have a small window and you could do a double door into the kitchen The door to the lounge would be where storage is marked and storage would be just under the stairs. I am not sure which would be better and it may not work to access the storage, this might be an issue anyway as the height of the stairs all still be quite low where the lounge wall is. If the utility room is just for laundry and you don't mind tumble drying I think you could rejig things and make it a cupboard upstairs, I think you are getting there ?

i personally would still prefer the larger hall option. I would have suggested moving the utility room also, but I am assuming that you cannot move the door so it has to stay where it s.

I think that works better having another route into the kitchen. Moving the stair there would be an improvement, but I would check it can be built as it now rises up through the outside wall above the porch which may not work.

@ProDave it must be all the meters that are boosting your electricity consumption!

i know the smaller hall gives you more space in the living room, but every time you bring in groceries you are going to be walking through the living room to get to the kitchen. It does not make for a relaxing room to sit in. People would also have to walk through the living room from the kitchen to use the WC and to go upstairs. Basically you lose some of the living room anyway as it becomes an access corridor. Why is there a single outside door in the living room, it looks to really get in the way of placing furniture? You have a large room but very little usable wallspace. The hall layout also allows there to be a cupboard under the stairs accessed from the hall. Whatever you do, incorporate that little square at the end of the utility room into an understair cupboard. You need to do this as you should be putting cabinets/washing machine/boiler along the wall between the utility and the shower room and then that space cannot be used as it would be blocked off in the utility room. I would swap the en suite and study around in that area, then the door to the study could be more easily accessed rather than behind the table. I would probably the study/en suite another 200mm wider also. That dining table is drawn too large relative to actual size. Personally I don't like having a shower in the WC. If you don't go for the larger hall, I would lose the shower, make the WC more square and put a cupboard where the shower is.

The final plans are ready. The kitchen and bathrooms are not the final designs yet, but pretty close. floor plan.pdf

Thanks, I should have taken another picture in the dark as you see the wash effect better. Also it probably would work better on paint than tiles. They simply cut a channel into the edge of the ceiling and put an LED strip in an aluminium profile with a diffuse cover into it. A lot easier to build than the sideways wash if not quite as elegant.

The item I often try on this kind of thing is the magic sponge which is like very fine sandpaper. Do you think it is some kind of lacquer that has been damaged? That will be harder to fix. TBH I am quite OCD so would try and fix it, but if it is an outside door cill it is going to get dirty over time and I would probably live with it. We have rational doors and they have cills inside that look like that but are less shiny on the inside, they get a load of dust. mud etc on them over time.

We have the uplighters and I need to put them into the channels as at the moment they shine in a wavy fashion onto the ceiling, or maybe I just need to take the backing off and tape them down. I was too tight to buy the channels when they went in, but they don't look quite right at the moment. We have a wall wash via a channel cut into the ceiling, your design would be more elegant but quite a bit of work. Ours works well and is pretty well hidden when it is off.

We have the LED tubes in the garage which is 7x9. They are n a PIR which works well as they come on as soon as you open the door. The problem is that with sectional doors they didn't want to put them above where the doors would be when they are open and I do not find the garage is well lit. Doesn't matter for us as I don't spend any time in there but it would be annoying ifI was using it as a workshop. You probably need 6 lights to spread the light properly.

No sliders here, I thought these doors would be sliders, but we just went for French doors. I was quite put off when I looked at a set of sliders and as soon as I went to touch them the salesperson said I had to be careful or they would break. I don't need that kind of worry. I must admit I do sometimes wish we had a wider window looking out from the kitchen, the TV/chimney got int the way. The easy one is the 3m window. I would make it fixed, the table is in the way so it is unlikely you open it to go outside. If you want air it could be a full height opening window. The trouble you have is sightlines. Looking at your house you have a quite consistent window width. Even in a fixed window you would probably want to split it into three sections. The good thing is that fixed windows have much slimmer frames. I actually find that as long as he window is large you don't notice the frames much. One the wider window, a big slider would have great sightlines, but it wouldn't match the windows above. You would either have to be comfortable with that or change the configuration of the top windows, actually I think ti would be just about OK. Personally I would go for centre opening as the natural walkway through the room hits the centre of the window. I wouldn't do three windows, it would be too off centre relative to the roof and top windows. It is either two or four for me.

Can we have some more information as the design seems odd. I am sure people can help once they understand what you want to achieve. The unusual stair layout seems to be because the porch area has a supporting wall for the outside walls upstairs, is there reason for that? Maybe to add interest outside? South, position of garden etc would help people. Also plans for the house, number of children, lots of visitors etc. I put it into a PDF and the scale seems to be 1cm to 0.323m on the ground floor an 1cm to 0.452m on the first floor. The ground floor area is 107sq metres and the first floor is 95 square metres so you have a decent amount of space to play with. There are a few design rules that I would try to stick to with a house unless there is a strong reason not to. I can't draw to save myself, but I can create a floorplan. Obviously these are just my opinion and sometimes planning constraints, budget etc mean you have to compromise. 1. Rooms should normally come off the hall and not other rooms, en sites are an obvious exception and maybe a family area off the kitchen (What is that room off the right side of the kitchen?) 2. Most bedrooms should have a fitted wardrobe. 3. The hall should have a cupboard for coats/shoes etc. 4. As mentioned there should be a minimum space around a bed. I would say 8-900mm to allow for the overhang of the duvet. 5. A window on the landing is good if you can fit one in. 6. Lots of small rooms will make a house feel smaller than it is - The study is 1.78m wide, the room off the kitchen is 1.62m wide, the kitchen is very large so there is ample space to make these rooms larger. 7. Try to have the door open into the room away from furniture so as not to bump into people as you go through the door and create a feeling of space (the kitchen door is in an awkward position) 8. Try not to have kitchen cabinets in front of the island unless for a specific non kitchen purpose. 9. Showers should be a minimum of 80cm wide and corner showers should be avoided unless necessary. Walk in showers work much better if possible. 10. Ideally doors open into a room and against a wall. 11. Try to keep all passageways/walkways at least one metre wide. 12. You probably need a larger space than you think as a plant room. 13. Don't put so many windows/doors in a room that there is nowhere to place furniture. 14. The design should try to take advantage of views and the position of the sun at different times of the day. This house breaks a lot of these rules. Upstairs - Do you need that many en suites, they are too small, particularly the master en suite? Minimum sensible size for an en suite is roughly 1.4x2.2m. In a 200sq metre house, I would expect the master en suite to be more like 2x3m. The good thing is there is plenty of room to do this. I would stick with 4 bedrooms, but you need to add wardrobes to at least three of them, possibly a walk in for the master and make the en suites larger. Offsetting this is you only really need 15ish sq metres for the area where the bed would be in the master, this frees up 10 sq metres. The bathroom is not large enough to have a shower and freestanding bath if that is what you are hoping. It would not need a shower if most of the bedrooms are en suite. Indeed if all the bedrooms are en suite and you also have a shower room downstairs you could do away with the bathroom to make more room for the bedrooms and en suites. Downstairs needs a complete redesign - Aim for a lounge, kitchen/breakfast/family room, study/bedroom with en suite, hall, WC and utility room(that un named room maybe is supposed to be a utility room). There is room for all of these, the kitchen is larger than necessary at the moment and the lounge is too long, that space with the stairs in it should be part of the hall.

I did thanks. I am just waiting for the report to come back.

I think my house runs at roughly 90kWh/metre a year, which is roughly half what my previous house ran at. Most of this is gas for heating. Changing over to an ASHP, would more than half this figure. Exactly, I think that in most cases we can fix things through the use of renewable energy, the main area where that is difficult is travel, but this is a relatively small part of emissions. Americans in general have an entirely different outlook on life to many Europeans. In many ways it is refreshingly optimistic and forward thinking, but it is also very brash and focused on just yourself. Most of them don't really get conservation at all. Thus in the UK having an SUV is still seen as showy whereas in America it is both considered a show of success and also a useful tool. They particularly struggle with conservation as they associate limiting yourself with being mean spirited and tight or poor. Their ancestors went to America for a better life of plenty and we are trying to ruin it for them. When some family members have been to stay, I have been simply gobsmacked at the amount of food they consume. They on the other hand are horrified that I might actually try and figure out how much people will eat and just buy that much food and not an amount extra to show my generosity. The British tendency to dislike waste fits in well in a world of conservation, and no doubt this helps us to move to lower emissions. In truth though a lot of it may be luck that people have been brought up to a different way of thinking as much as anything else. I was at the Porsche dealership the other day, they told me that the Taycan is now by far and away their best selling car. The vast majority they said are bought via businesses for the tax breaks. Thus lower emissions is just a handy byproduct of people trying to drive a nice car on the cheap.

That I totally agree with. That is how my house is built and it seems ridiculous to build a massive concrete slab, then put down insulation, then cover it in concrete(screed) again, when you could do it all in one layer. Also you get much better insulation around the perimeter with the raft. It sounds like the price is correct unless you are able to DIY a large amount of it.

My wife is American, which I feel explains things without adding anything else. I explained that we could save £20 a year if we switched off the pool lights at the socket. I got a blank expression that said why are you wasting my time with this. Her view is that if you can afford it why would you care. My view is I will spend lots of money on things that I enjoy, I consistently take loads of family members on holiday with us. But I also enjoy saving money and not wasting it. Everyone is different. We’d all be a lot happier if we accepted that. I try very hard not to give people unasked for advice. No one ever takes it, it just winds them up. Live your best life and don’t get involved if you don’t have to. Ironically that is advice!

Yes! Getting off topic but- Different people have a different opinions obviously. My view is that we should use technology to be able to live whatever life we want as efficiently as we can. We are fast moving towards 100% renewable electricity supply. Progress has and will continue to fix problems. The lifestyle we live today would have used easily three times as much energy 40 years ago.

The 492Wh/mile is all usage divided by miles travelled. So running the heater for 15 minutes before getting in the car, which might use 1.5kWh is included in the energy usage. The car also preheats the battery if you set up the scheduled heating which would use a similar amount of energy. Most trips are short and energy usage in the winter is higher due to heating the car and the battery. It is an enormous car that can do 0-60 in 5 seconds. Someone at work has a Range Rover Sport v8 supercharged with similar performance, but which is smaller. It does 14MPG, so for a like for like car it is a massive improvement.

I already have installed simple cable in the laundry room for drying sheets. We found that they often got tangled in the dryer so didn't dry properly and people would just keep putting them back in the dryer. Persuading my wife not to average using more than one towel a day is a different matter. I reckon towels account for abound one third of our laundry.

Thanks for that very detailed response. I am just calling it a dehumidifier, but it is a massive box that also heats the pool using a heat exchanger connected to the boiler and supplies fresh air to vents in front of all the windows in the room to prevent condensation and improve air quality. The spec has been set up to remove an average of 2l/hr from the air and for a room of 338m3 versus the roughly 220m3 of volume that we actually have. So it may be that it is using somewhat less electricity than in the spec or it is over ventilating the room. The spec is based on an average of 0.5 changes per hour. It does indeed run for a short amount of time many times a day, but it also is tasked with quickly raising the air temperature in the room form 22C to the high 20s when you open the pool and start to use it. As I assume it runs off the humidistat, if the spec over ventilates the room, I would assume it uses less electricity in practice than the spec suggests.

I put as much PV on as I could whilst keeping the roof looking nice, I wouldn't start messing around with it now. I wasn't just thinking about my consumption, I thought it would be interesting for everyone to think which devices are the biggest energy hogs in the house.I have updated the spreadsheet and included the car which has averaged 492w/Mile since purchase. we would normally do 7000 miles a year. Device Consumption.xlsx

We used to have something like that in our old place that we were sent by the electricity company. I assumed that we would have a smart meter here, but there still are not 3 phase smart meters available. Just checked the consumption of the boiler which brings the total on my spreadsheet to around 14.5kWh a year which seems about right before adding in the consumption the Tesla.

It’s excessive relative to the average person but not relative to the size of the house. It is quite unusual in that the electricity bill is higher than our gas bill. It is more me just enjoying the process of optimising things and seeing if there are any obvious areas of waste. I am sure if my wife ran things it would be over 20000kWh a year and the gas bill would also be a third higher.

That’s just the cost of running a swimming pool. There is 40,000 litres of water in the pool, so it is dealing with constant evaporation from that. The room is kept at a constant relative humidity level of 60 and I have never seen even the slightest hint of condensation in the room. To be exact the metal lock on the patio doors does see water condense on it. Indeed it all looks as good as new after three years. For the last 18 days we have been running 39kWh per day of usage. Usage by the car will have been a lot less than normal, offset by more use from being at home. We have generated around 16kWh a day over the same period. I have had a stab at food cooking usage and I reckon that runs to around 1.5kWh per day so over 500 a year. All of us seem to eat different items for most meals otherwise you could cut this down a bit. The various heating pumps use around 40W when they are running. They actually display instantaneous usage on the pumps. In the summer probably three of these pumps run 3 hours a day for hot water and pool heating so that would be 360w say 65kWh for 6 months of the year and 9 pumps running 5 hours a day in the winter so. So 320kWh in the winter or around 400kWh a year. This is probably the vast majority of higher electricity usage in the winter for us plus a bit more use of lights.