AliG

Hi, I spotted an opportunity to save money a while back and in areas where we are not using the space all the way to the roof I changed from PIR insulation between the rafters to rockwool above the ceiling. What I did not realise though was that the MVHR ducting has to be in an insulated space. So now we need to insulate the MCHR which loses almost the entire saving. The installers have recommended using 50mm foil backed insulation wrapped around the ducts. This is fine, but I wondered if in areas where the ducts are installed just above the roof trusses and the loft insulation was pushed under the duct work could be just add another layer of rockwool that covers the duct work? This would be a lot faster and cheaper, but there is more risk that bits of the duct aren't covered.

This company do very nice doors, similar to Hormann but more options. I have a Ryterna front door which again is very similar to Hormann. They are very nice doors but very expensive. You are probably talking around £2000 for a door including VAT, delivery etc. http://www.rkdoorsystems.co.uk/index.html

We had a couple of wastes that were too far from walls. Basically they should be almost hard up against the wall. The builder simply dug the screed out around the waste and put in a bend that was then screeded back in. Even if you have UFH it should be fine as it won't be behind or close to the pipe. What kind of toilets are you planning to have. Most toilets nowadays are back to the wall or wall mounted. This means that the cistern is inside a bulkhead and the waste disappears into it. If the waste is far into the room then the bulkhead hiding the cistern will end up really deep and take up a lot of space. If you have a close coupled toilet where you can see the cistern sitting on the back of it then they are usually designed to have the waste either inside the wall or tight against the wall behind them. You can get ones with a side waste or even a bottom waste or you can use a swan neck connector, but again the WC might end up well into the room or a large amount of waste pipe will be on display or you may need to box in a large area of the room. In the long run you are probably better digging up a little bit of the floor and moving the pipe. It is better than having a pipe on display in the room or having to box out 300m of the space in a small room.

Originally I searched for crystal chandeliers and used images on Google. However, I now know that some people list them as RH style chandeliers. Once you find one, you can find others from the list of similar products in the search. I got around $20,000 of lights for $5,000. We also got hall lights which are Moooi style lights. The originals would be £20,000, we paid about £2500. The original price is a joke, the are just stainless steel frames with LEDs. I don't see any real element of design in all these lights to say that you are breaking copyright, many companies make similar looking lights. All this tells me is that the markup on nice lights must be ridiculous. These prices include shipping from China.

Resurrecting topic. My MVHR was in a warm space but I decided to change from PIR to rockwool on flat areas of ceiling so the ducting is now in a cold space. The MVHR supplier has quoted £1540 for 50mm insulation and 20 rolls of duct tape to cover 150m of MVHR ducting. looking online it seems that maybe only 25mm is necessary. Can anyone point me to insulation that they have used?

I am trying to hold off pictures until we are finished, but I think this is useful for other members. We bought a light from Aliexpress for $760, the same light at Restoration Hardware in the US is $3896 for a member or $5195 for a non member. It looks the same to me! The lower picture is from Restoration Hardware, the upper is our light and table just delivered today. Oh and most importantly on Valentine's Day, my wife likes it and the table, she was particularly unsure about the table.

I didn't know the thing about a vestibule improving the BRE rating, I don't think that is a thing in the SAP rating. Typical arbitrary system, most vestibules are too small to be used like an airlock in this way. I'd check that you haven't made the landing a little narrow outside the bedrooms upstairs, I'd want to stay at least 1m wide and ideally 1.1-1.2m for a landing. @Nickfromwales is right on the en suite. Put the toilet under the lower ceiling like the sofa. Keep the door where the wall is highest. Also you need to think about getting a waste down from the WC and at the moment it is placed over the middle of the kitchen. The other bathrooms are stacked better. I would make sure your architect has allowed for MVHR and soil pipes as they are a pain to fit in.

I found a table that gives the different products for each application https://www.just-insulation.com/downloads/celotex-rigid-insulation/celotex-promotion/celotex-comparison-matrix.pdf Two products with the same thickness and the same conductivity are equivalent. So Kingspan K7 has conductivity of 0.020 W/m.K. K7 board is very overpriced for the extra insulation it gives IMO. Celotex GA4000 with conductivity of 0.022 W/m.k is around 1/3 cheaper. Other similar products are available. To get the U- value - First divide the thickness by the resistance, so for example if 100mm thick 0.1/0.02 = 5 This is the R-Value. Then 1/R-Value is the U-value 1/5 = 0.2 So 100mm of K7 has a U Value of 0.2 If you are combining products, you can calculate the R-value for each product, add all the r-values together than put 1 over this to get the overall U-value. 100mm of Celotex GA4000 has a U-Value of 0.22 So a third extra money gets you 10% better insulation. K7 is only worth the cost if you have a height restriction and absolutely need the insulation to be as thin as possible. Thicker lower spec insulation may be better value or just modestly lowering the target insulation level. Similarly K18 is top of the line board and very expensive. My architect specified the absolute highest level of everything insulation wise and then I adjusted it all depending on value. You would think they are on commission from Kingspan. Assuming your rafters are 200mm deep, that is a lot of insulation and will be very expensive. Also Kingspan does not come in 200mm thick boards which doubles the labour costs to install it.

Thanks for coming back to us. I wish I had done this exercise with my house but it was all approved before I started posting on here. I am sure people would have come up with some good ideas. If you have a concrete first floor check how much clearance you will need for services. I asked for 2.8m ground floor ceilings then lost 100mm as we had to lower the ceiling to fit cabling, pipework etc under our concrete first floor. Especially if you have MVHR where the pipework can take up a lot of room. I wouldn't worry about the extra heating cost of high ceilings, it would be negligible in a well insulated house. We have a few double height spaces and they feel so nice. Well worth it if you have the space. 12sq metres is enough for a bedroom, but I would want it to have a built in wardrobe on top of that. Partly it is personal preference, I hate free standing wardrobes. But I do think a fitted wardrobe tends to be more useful. By the time you put a wardrobe/drawers/desk in these rooms they won't have room for more than a single bed. I think a house of this size would be expected to have at least 2 nice size double bedrooms. It would make the house a lot more saleable, of course you may never plan to sell. Other than the nice big utility room, you are quite short on cupboard space which is one of those things that makes a house more liveable even if it isn't very exciting. I'd maybe be tempted to make the office slightly smaller and put a hall cupboard in along the wall between the office and entry for coats/shoes etc. Another thing that you could consider is doing away with the entry. Again it is a bit of personal preference. Our last two houses have had a vestibule as does my parents'. We found that they were so small you ended up standing in the hall with guests at the front door and the vestibule a kind of no man's land. You have a much better sized one here. I have done away with it in the new place and just open into a large hall. I think this will work better, but as I haven't moved in yet it's only a theory. I think an entry is one of those things that people expect a house to have but may not be necessary. Partly they were due to doors having very bad insulation and draught proofing, but this is no longer a problem. I would certainly move the doors from the entry to the hall over towards the garage so that it is easier to get into the house. As it stands at the moment, if you opened the door and were standing at the leading edge, you would be blocking people's route into the house due to the doors being off centre. Final thing to mention is the fireplace in the living room. We designed our house with three fireplaces then discovered that we had to have much smaller than expected fires as they generate too much heat in a well insulated house. They also are shockingly expensive. A nice hole in the wall fire might cost £2-3000, fitting is very expensive also. Then you have the cost of the chimney, then you have to get the gas from the boiler to where the fire is. This all adds up to a cost of probably £5000+. We are routing the gas around the outside of the house as people did not like to route it through the house although this is possible but again expensive due to strict regs. Assuming that you want a fire, which is a nice feature, you might consider pushing it out through the wall which will give you more space in the room and also having a rear flue which is a lot cheaper. It depends on if the chimney is a feature you like or not. We kept the chimneys but they are fake now!

That's what I have done

We have them in all the bathrooms, the garage and the utility room in the new place. I wish I had installed more. they seem to work flawlessly, turning on the lights automatically when it is dark. I will check their power consumption, I am seeing 1-2w quoted on the internet. That would suggest they might use around £1-2 of electricity a year. The nice thing is that we didn't bother with light switches at all where we have them, so as well as the saving on installing a switch it is much tidier. Considering my family's almost total inability to turn off lights I wish that I had installed more.

More time to look at it now I am not sneaking a look at work! Before addressing the issues we have all been talking about re ceiling heights etc, I have noticed something. The original drawings had a wall at the first floor holding up the roofs with no support underneath it. I can see that this downstairs wall has been extended but still there is a 6m span above the kitchen with no support. Not only that, but there is nowhere to support the end of a steel there in the living room. Instead you would have to have 2 steels meeting at right angles and both over 6m long. It would make a lot more sense to move the living room wall to be in line with the east wall on the kitchen and make it blockwork to support one steel and lose the other. Unless you are determined to have that extra few hundred mils in the living room, this could probably save the best part of £10k. Also there is a chance that the steel will be very chunky and difficult to hide in the ceiling. My experience with architects is they will just say that this kind of thing can be sorted out. I can be it is very expensive. In the planning drawings, there is a step down from the main house to the area above the garage/kitchen of 200mm. I am guessing that this step goes away if you turn that area into rooms and it is a floor rather than just a ceiling. This makes quite a big difference when the ceiling height there was already compromised. I would check with the architect. You can probably lower the garage ceiling a little which would help at the front area, although you would have a step down into any room above the garage then, but above the kitchen you may be looking at less room again than shown. As @Dudda said, these could feel like compromised rooms. Really any room with less than 2.3m height at least over part of the room will probably feel uncomfortable. I really think you have to check the ceiling height on those areas. If this is right, then I would go with @Dudda's idea of a double height kitchen with roof lights and the cinema room above the garage where you can lower the ceiling to keep the head height acceptable upstairs. So if you have a cinema room above the garage, around 5m long, again as @Nickfromwales said you can work with the ceiling height and put a sofa below the low head height. I specifically designed the play area in the eaves of our house like this. However, you still need to have around 2m of head height at the front edge of the sofa so people can walk up to it and sit down. With this in mind the cinema room would only be 2.75m wide if you can keep the floor where it is now by lowering the garage ceiling and basically a non starter if you have to raise the floor to the first floor level as it would only be 2m wide. At 2.75m wide you would be able to sit far enough away from a large TV mounted on the south wall. I don't think the distances would make a projector worthwhile. The idea of having the bedrooms go right up into the roof I think would be very nice. What I said before about the lack of cupboards and the second and third bedroom being too small still stands. If you can't move the bathroom I would at least make it a little smaller to allow the second bedroom to be a decent double. I think you could move it by lowering the utility ceiling as well as the garage. If you lowered these to 2.4m then that would create a space roughly 7.5m long with a much better ceiling height at first floor level that could take the cinema room and bathroom and then you would have the double height kitchen behind them. I am not sure how I feel, however, about a step down into the bathroom, but maybe that is just me.

Welcome, a really nice design. I like the ground floor and would make minor changes. I see the utility room changed due to a supporting wall. I would move the door to the right swapping it with the kitchen unit that has been left sitting on its own in the corner. I agree the original stair looked better. Upstairs seems out of proportion relative to downstairs and the amount of public space. You have just 3 bedrooms and one is a small double and one a single. How about - Move the bathroom to partly where the cinema room is. It would fit in the area with full head height. You may also be able to fit a hall cupboard in here. The bathroom would work well with a Velux. The cinema room can move down towards the front of the house, I don't see why it wouldn't take up the whole space in there Then make the second bedroom larger by making the bathroom a smaller en suite. Punch a cupboard through the supporting wall from the small bedroom.

I did wonder if the tilers should have known, but they seem to be doing a good job. The supplier came back saying to mix them, I did feel they should have told us this at the outset. The builders are quite careful when it comes to finishes. A few times they have highlighted ideas that we have had as likely leading to cracks by mixing materials for example and ways around this. One bathroom has a whirlpool bath which needs ventilation for the pump, rather than put a vent in the tiles I came up with the idea of ventilating it to the eaves at the back of the bath so you cannot see it. The site foreman cut a hole in the wall so he could crawl behind the bath and cut the holes. This is the beauty of building your own house, I hate seeing odd little vents and stuff.

They mixed them up and now they look fine. I think it was just bad luck that the first few came out looking like stripes and they didn't know that they had to mix them. I also suspect that it you take a picture straight on the middle tiles look a different colour due to the flash.

Hi, Tilers started on our en suite today where we have splashed out on marble tiles, something I have never dealt with before. Builder immediately had them stop as the colours looked odd. All the boxes of tiles have the same batch number/shade number but there are lots of different shades. They spoke to the supplier who said that they are supposed to be mixed. I only heard about it tonight. Before I speak to the supplier, is this normal for marble tiles? They are a natural product so I guess you get variation, but this looks pretty extreme.

There are indeed big tax breaks for buying electric and plug in hybrids as company cars.

I also test drove a Volvo XC90 T8 plug in hybrid. Unlike a Q7 it is available with 7 seats as a hybrid. However, I instantly dismissed it as the least nice of all these cars. It has a nice interior, but just feels like a cheaper car. Partly it is the lack of 6 cylinder engine, but also if you look around the bottom of the inside of the car it has lots of hard plastics. It also has more road noise particularly if it does not have air suspension. I have a spreadsheet where I calculated the fixed cost of all these cars looking at discounts available and depreciation. The Tesla is about 11k a year to run, offset by saving around £100 per thousand miles driven on fuel relative to a big diesel SUV. Tesla's are very expensive to insure due to high repair costs, but everything is insignificant really versus the depreciation. An Audi Q7 diesel would be around £8000 a year. A Q7 E-Tron costs £10,000 more than a diesel, this seems like very poor value and I suspect that you would lose the whole amount over 3 years so its running cost would be closer to the Tesla's.

Originally there was a Model X60 which was cheaper. It had the same battery as a X75 but the last 20% was locked out. They stopped selling these after a couple of months as to give people 15kWH of battery which is the most expensive part of the car without charging for it kills margins. Now you get a 75 or a 100. Until a few months ago 0-60 on the 75 was 6 seconds compared to 4.9 on the 100. So the 100 was faster as well as having more range. Now the 75 has almost the same performance and I think the extra range is overpriced. When you look at the price of a Tesla you have to consider what you’d have to buy to get similar performance. You’re talking a 14mpg Range River Sport V8 supercharged or the V8 diesel Audi SQ7. These are a very similar price. TBH though no one needs such a fast big family car. The first Model Xs from 2016 and early 2017 are a lot less well built and noisier. Mine is much quieter. A friend has an older one with a lot of wind noise. Our RR Sport was very refined but the new Q7 is quieter again. It is an incredibly comfortable and refined car. It is a shame it looks so dull. But it a great family car. One reason I changed was the RR was a little short on space. It was 4.8m long versus 5.05m on the Audi or Tesla. Adults can easily sit in the third row of the Tesla. I also test drove the new Discovery. It has a lovely interior and lots of space. However it is the slowest car you can buy for 60K by a long way. Range Rover now systemically lie about their car’s performance. They are generally somewhat heavier and slower than quoted. They quote 0-60 in about 8 seconds but it is closer to 9 for the V6 diesel. It felt incredibly slow. I know people here will say that’s fast enough but a 60K car should not have the performance of a 22K Golf. It also handled like a boat. Basically the 2.5 tonne weight catches up with it. The Audi weighs just 2 tonnes and it shows. I’d def recommend the Model X if you have appropriate charging facilities. Id also mention it’s enormous. As well as being very long I think it’s slightly wider than the RR a car already wider than a Transit. If you regularly park in a tight multi story for example cars this size are a total non starter. There are spaces it literally hangs out of on all sides. I don’t find it an issue but it’s worth mentioning

I have a Model X75D. Most of our driving is in town so range is not a big deal. We are between houses at the moment so we are using a Tesla Supercharger for charging. If you don’t have a garage you can put it in to charge or at least a driveway I would think seriously about it. In winter the range is hammered by heating the battery if it gets cold. The practical range of a X75 in winter is probably around 140 miles. A X100 around 175 I would guess. In summer the range will rise to 190 and 230ish. I do not think the extra range is worth the extra 20K on a 100. Other than the range there is no other difference. The 75 gets to 60 in 4.9 seconds and the 100 in 4.7. It is already scarily fast for such a large car. The P is a waste of money as you cannot use the performance. I waited for the 7 seater with folding seats. It made an excellent people carrier for 7 people over Christmas. The Q7 etron loses the 7 seat option. Other than that the Q7 is a lovely car to drive but I would probably stick with the diesel. I would expect Tesla to put a price cut through soon if the Pound stays strong. We have all the options except full set driving as that does not exist. A surprising number of features that are extras on other cars are standard such as soft close doors and self parking. The self parking is fantastic. It needs the autopilot option. I bought it on a PCP. Normally I pay cash but they guarantee you 49% if the new price after 4 years including for the options which otherwise would depreciate more. This reduces the risk that a better car makes it obsolete. If you want something smaller you will have the I-Pace or E-Tron both of which look nice but that is probably next year. We has a Range Rover Sport before which is a lovely car. This is better and not much more expensive.

I am still waiting for my FIT transfer to go through and over £1000 in FIT payments owed to me. The FIT provider sent a multi page form to fill in that had to be filled in by me and the buyer of the house with bank account details etc. It was a ridiculous amount of information. Also they asked for me to return it but they asked for info from the buyer, I just filled in my bit and passed it on to them and told them to send it in as I thought they might be uncomfortable giving me all their personal info. I don't see why it has to be any different to shifting over an electricity supply contract.

Is this what you need for a small tight area, concrete planer. https://www.hss.com/hire/p/concrete-planer-with-blade

No further comment necessary on the VAT. As you say he has you over a barrel. Generally the value of something like this is calculated by looking at the value of the land you own with and without the easement. Clearly without sewerage or water then the land value would collapse. However, you say that there is another option. Other people have quoted a cost of around £250 a metre to dig up a public road. Depending on the distance, if he is looking for £10,000 plus, I would have thought that digging up the road is probably cheaper. At least get the cost for comparison. Of course if he knows that this is your alternative he is going to want close to whatever this will cost. Digging up the public road will require permits etc, but not legal fees or negotiations with potential conditions being set by a third party.

I think the confusion here is calling the cost of professional installation "the MCS premium". I doubt a non MCS professional installation would be much cheaper. The £2000 saving is mainly due to going DIY not avoiding MCS.

I had a 4kW system in Scotland and generated just over 3000kWH a year. If you assume that half of this reduces your electricity bill at 13p per kWH then that is £195 of electricity p.a. You then get 3.93px3000 for the FIT payment = £118 And 5.03p x 3000 x 50% deemed export payment = £75 So £388 for a MCS system. On our new place we are paying £6500 for a 5kW system with black panels and a immersion diverter (forgotten the brand at the moment), priced over 12 months ago. You can probably get a 4kW system from a MCS installer for £5000ish today. £388 on a £5000 is a pretty good return today especially as it is index linked. Payback period is not the correct way to look at it unless you plan to sell the house soon. I did consider east/west facing as suggested on the new house, but my conclusion was that south facing panels will generate power much longer than east west facing panels. They will generate over more of the day but at a lower rate. A Sunamp type device to store the electricity is a better idea. Even if a Sunamp allows you to store all the electricity you use, you cannot run your numbers on 13p per kWH for electricity as no one would ever use an immersion heater to heat their hot water. The equivalent cost is an ASHP or gas boiler which is more like 3.5p per kWH for water heating. Having an ASHP is probably one of the best ways to increase the usage of electricity on a PV array.