AliG

Hi, I am guessing it is 5 bedrooms plus an open plan living area as otherwise it seems a lot to fit into 180m2. It could be that your hot water needs are the most important, especially if well insulated. Do you foresee multiple showers being used simultaneously as that will make a difference. A 10m shower is around 100l of water and a bath around 100-150l depending on how big it is. Assuming you are storing water at 60C and using it at 40C then the amount of hot water required for a couple of showers or a shower and a bath is maybe 120l. Thus the usual size of UVC in this size of house would probably be 200-250l. If you thought 3 showers/baths could be used at once then I might up it to 300l. This has some quite useful information on UVCs. http://www.thermsaver.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Thermsaver-Excelsior-Brochure-2015.pdf If you have a bath and a shower a 250l UVC is going to need about 25 minutes to get back up to temperature using 20kW of heat input. This is why you need a larger UVC so that the water isn't totally cooled down by the cold input as you use it. If you expect to use more water than this in one go you need a larger UVC. So I would say you are probably looking at 250l and possibly 300l if you plan to use a lot of water at one time. This will have a 20kW coil so I would expect you to need a 30kW gas boiler so that you can heat the house and hot water at the same time. Gas boilers are a lot less sensitive to being sized correctly than ASHPs. If you aren't going to be a heavy water user I would consider an ASHP, I am not sure how the costs are with LPG. As to PV you may limited by the amount of south facing roof you have, I would perhaps figure that out first. You will be able to generate around 200W per square metre of panel. They take up a lot of room. The standard used to be to go for 4kW, most people probably end up between 2.5 and 5kW depending on space, costs and whether or not it pays for itself in electricity savings.

Hi, Just completed a lockdown project. We have a downstairs bedroom for when we get too old for the stairs, but for the moment it is the gym. If I had known it would be a gym it may have been a little larger. There is a lot of space given over to an en suite and a wardrobe. One thing we are finding, if anyone plans a gym, is that the French doors make a massive difference. You can open them to cool down and take stuff outside to work out there. Also we have a path all the way round the house, so can run laps, it is about 120 metres. It wasn't used much until the lockdown. My wife and daughter go to a Crossfit gym and they roped me in about 18 months ago to do it too.Must admit I feel a lot better for it, although no lighter. As we cannot go to the gym, the trainer now does Zoom classes with us. We were finding the wooden floor was too slippery and prone to being scratched by the weights. After a bit of research I reckoned the best combination of cost and function was to get a roll of rubber flooring and cut it up. I got 12sq metres of 8mm rubber for £175 delivered. Rubber tiles would have been at least twice the price and foam seemed like it would not last. We already had 2 ticker rubber tiles under the big machine. Anyway, three hours later here is our new gym. It was hard going, the floor weighs around 8kg a square metre. I have double sided tape to fix it in place, but I am going to let it settle for a bit first.

MBC are expensive and timber frame is expensive compared to block work, but that figure does include the internal walls, first floor and roof joists. I had a look at that cost estimator and it is a bit odd that it says it includes internal plastering but it doesn't mention joists, ceilings and internal walls. What you can find is that you have thousands of pounds of small items that you never thought of. You could be a few hundred pound for the mastic man for example. Then there is burglar alarm, scaffolding(not sure if that is in the wall cost estimator), light fittings, door thresholds, extractor fans, temporary stairs, bathroom mirrors, tv/ethernet/wifi. The list goes on. I do think you could also double the professional fees. Some people are being quoted thousands for just soil investigations. You will need plans, warrant drawings, structural engineer etc which could easily double that figure. Net net the £1500 figure is probably a decent rule of thumb. Plus or minus on that will depend a lot on the finishes and the amount of insulation. A set of oak and glass stairs could be 4x the price of a set of softwood painted stairs. Fully tiling a bathroom will cost £1000-1500 versus a splashback that might cost a few pounds. The amount of land you have around the house and need to landscape will make a big difference. Hard landscaping and retaining walls are very expensive compared to grass.

I think that £250 a square metre for the building is way too low. Have you calculated it just on the external wall area? Stone facing can be very expensive. What about the ceilings and joists and internal walls. I have a quote from MBC for a timber frame and that is about £400 per sq metre of house without the external walls. Admittedly you could be a lot cheaper if you reduce the insulation. Lots of small things soon build up. For example we were £60 a fitting for switches and lights. So imagine 10 downlighters in the kitchen, plus 6 sockets, plus 6 appliances. That is £1300 already, you'd be surprised how many electrical connections you need for heating, alarm, to the garage, etc. So you could double the electrics. Including wardrobes etc you will probably have at least 15 doors, each door is approaching £300 by the time you include the door, the ironmongery, the frame and the fitting. So you are probably a few thousand short on the woodwork. You also have to think of things like wardrobe shelves, window sills etc. You are short on the bathroom and flooring it you are planning to use tiled finishes etc. Landscaping can be very expensive, a driveway plus patios etc could all come out at £50 a square metre. Aluminium framed windows including bi-folds will be around 400 a square metre. You are probably looking at 50-100% more for the windows.

Hi, We don't have the completion certificate done yet for our house. The architect has asked me for the Gas Safe certificate for the boiler. Do you need these for the boiler and gas fires to get a completion certificate?

The pool has clearly been very popular in the lockdown period. In response to another thread re pools, dehumidifiers, corrosion etc I thought I would have a look around. Chlorine - As previously pointed out, the pool sits between 0.5 and 0.55 ppm chlorine, this is the same level as tap water. This compares to around 3 in a public pool, so 6x as much. There is no actual chlorine directly involved. When the pool was installed they dosed it with some salt, considerably less than in sea water, and there is a tube in the plant room which uses hydrolysis to create chlorine from the salt when needed. The water tastes neither salty nor is there any chlorine smell. Humidity - The room sits at a constant humidity level of 60% whether the pool is open or closed. When the pool is closed the room temperature is 22-23C and the water temperature is 29C. When you open the pool, the dehumidifier kicks in and heats up the air to 25-26C. As the pool is normally closed and the room is not overly warm humidity is not an issue and the room is quite pleasant to sit in. At the same level of humidity, 30C air holds almost twice as much water as 20C air. thus the air holds considerably less water than the air on a Florida summer day. The only time I ever see any hint of condensation in the room is in the winter, the door lock on the french doors is cold and water condenses on it. There is never any condensation on the window frames or windows. Rationel would not warrant them for use in a pool and recommended uPVC but knowing that humidity would be well controlled we ignored this. So my conclusion on corrosion risk is that it is minimal as long as you control humidity well, do not use chlorine and do not have the pool open all the time. However, to do this adds considerably to the capital cost of the pool. The pool cover and air handling equipment cost as much as the pool itself. Relative to the 5kg of sodium hypochlorite, it looks like it would only take 60g of hypochlorite to get my pool to 0.5ppm of chlorine. I took a picture of the door furniture where presumably corrosion would start to show. It still looks as good as new after three years. I think water damage is a much more pertinent issue than corrosion. The walls around the pool are tiled and we used special pool silicon to seal around the pool edges. The floor is tiled also, although as someone pointed out water does pool on the floor, because no one thought to give it a run back down towards the pool. Something we will do when it needs retiled. However, the builders did not seal the bottom on the door frame to the changing room (despite me asking) it only took a few weeks of use before it started to blow out and I got it sealed. Running costs continue to be very low relative to the historic scary costs of running a pool. Indeed they have probably fallen as gas and electricity tariffs have fallen. I reckon that we are running at around £1600 a year for gas, electricity and servicing, my previous estimate of the electricity use was probably a little high now that I have figured out the use in other parts of the house. One thing that I will be watching is the pool lights. We have 2x 36W LED lights in the pool. The original lights broke, one never worked properly. The installer said it was the fault of the builders for allowing the pool to sit full of dirty water for ages before it could be commissioned. Eventually I agreed to pay for the lights if he installed them, that was £800. On discussion he said that he is finding that LED lights break after about 5 years as over time small amounts of water get onto them and break the drivers. He said that this was a problem versus the old 300W incandescent bulbs. For all the time the lights are on if this continues the 300W bulbs may actually be a lot cheaper to run.

I will put an update in the original post.

Fixed price thankfully, but still annoying as they took forever

I don't know about the plaster, the guy who the builder got in to redo it reckoned they could have been fixed by the painters, but the painters didn't want to do it. Surely though it is the painters' job to fill around door frames, skirting boards etc. The builders had to redo pretty much every join in our skirting boards as the painters barely made any effort to fill them either. My wife wanted them fired.

Good point, in this case yes as the doors go into an ensuite and a wardrobe so the sound going under the doors goes into a sealed area, but the gaps around the doors go behind the plasterboard and into the walls between the rooms. Would think the biggest issue might come on wardrobes between bedrooms if they don't fill in the tops or another place they often don't fill is the back of the facings inside wardrobes. I have found in other places tiny gaps allow a lot of noise through, the house became considerably quieter when we put silicone around the edge of all the window frames on the inside.

The painters were easily the worst trade involved in building our house, downright lazy. My wife found one taking a lie down in a room one day and I often saw them just wondering around dabbing paint on here and there with no particular plan. We had to have rooms replastered where they didn't smooth down the walls before painting. Something I only noticed recently while the builders were doing snagging and fixing hairline cracks is that the painters didn't fill the tops of the facings around most doors and also the sides where the facings are close enough to a corner that you can't see them. I have just finished filling in around the doors in our gym/downstairs bedroom as I believe this was creating a sound path that meant the noise from this room travelled right through the walls. The room has two doors and a double wardrobe so seemed particularly bad. The gaps were so large that I used an entire the of caulk in just this one room. So just because you can't see something doesn't mean it doesn't need fixed. Has anyone else noticed the same thing, or were my painters particularly bad.

Isn't it quite unusual to have the meter outside nowadays. I would expect it to be next to your consumer unit. Why put an ugly box outside your house. Very rarely does anyone come to read them and eventually they will all be smart meters despite people's complaints.

I used the Key to do this for guest access which I thought was pretty nifty

I believe that they work without they key. Our Ubiquiti PoE switch broke after less than 2 years and I replaced it with a much cheaper and smaller Netgear switch. The Key cannot see the switch, but there is very little benefit to being able to manage the switch via the app, everything such as guest access works just fine still. Apparently the built in power supply in the Unifi switches is a known point of failure, the Netgear has a separate PSU.

Yes. I would recommend putting cat 6 from each place you want an access point back to where the router will be. I too use the UniFi access points. Much better than the power line system you are suggesting. The are PoE so if you connect the cat 6 back to a PoE switch then that’s all you need. No power. I would also put Cat 6 cable to everywhere you plant to have a TV.

My wife saw it and was appalled.

Pretty much every week this series the budgets have been absurd. Also even when they tell you the final cost I am very suspicious that they exclude things like professional fees. Most weeks this year people have theoretical large amounts of equity, yet most people here find that it is unlikely you can buy a piece of land and build a house for much less than it is worth unless you do large amounts of work yourself. I could see some people making equity, but the average result seems out of whack with reality.

As @ProDave says it is so expensive to install that it is unlikely to be worth it

Birds have built a nest in our guttering and the render is filthy. I had a go with the jet wash, which I know isn’t recommended, but usually gets stuff off. It’s not working well on this. Also I need a taller ladder out to get to the top. Reading on line there are specialist render cleaning companies and they say you need to use hot water and detergent. I also found CT1 recommending Multisolve which is for cleaning adhesive to clean bird droppings. Would I be crazy to fill a bucket with warm water and Flash and brush that on to see how it goes?

In Edinburgh they charge £375 for a visit to do with building work which didn't have a warrant but it says it is reduced to £65 for window related work, which this probably comes under. Your local council should have a form that you can fill in requesting this, in Edinburgh when we had issues getting a warrant signed off to sell our house we found them extremely helpful. Assuming no structural alterations the regs that will apply will be for trickle vents, U-Value and safety glass. I found this from Clackmananshire Council which is probably pretty standard. https://www.clacks.gov.uk/document/2105.pdf

Can you tell us what kind they are to see if we can figure out what cabling they need?

I just had a look on Streetview, no one has done that. The inside width of the house is just shy of 6m and I think the porch area is maybe around 2.8m. I always thought that they should have made it a double garage with just a narrow entrance to one side.

I don't think it is, but that doesn't mean it is not a good idea to fill the holes. I am not sure about the best way to fill them. The biggest reason is not flooding, which is rare, but noise. We have a concrete upper floor but there are a couple of points I can hear noise coming from upstairs, I have realised it is because there are pipes drilled through the floor and I don't think the builders sealed them fully up.

It was, there have been some quite tough stories this year. Very sad that she also lost her son. I couldn't really understand why she couldn't sell her house, I guessed it was sold as they had already had a sale fall through and had quite a bit of time.

Very nice house last night. Another absurd budget. Also I do wonder how honest people are when they say how much they have spent as it seems consistently low. I suspect the don’t include professional fees and the like. Another house built with a full filled cavity with 100mm of rockwool. You could see the plasterboard being put on the inside and that appeared to be all the insulation there was. I would like to see some of the heating bills for the houses being built. Looks like that gives a U-value of 0.3 for the walls which is the maximum allowed in England. I am not quite sure how the English regs work, can you only go that high if other areas are better than the maximum?