recoveringbuilder

Yes agree with that, we were going to do a loft conversion on our cottage and as long as we weren’t putting dormers to the front (road facing) side of the property we didn’t need planning just a building warrant.

Yes you shouldn’t pay vat .

What are you wearing on your feet going upstairs?! We have an oak staircase and if you go up and down with either trainers or slippers there is no noise.

Considering the way retirement age is going up it would make sense to train up older‘apprentices’ because at 44 you still have a lot of working years ahead but as @ProDave says these short courses fall well short of proper training. I think back to 2007 when we were building our last house and a chap who had previously worked beside my husband had started up his own business doing plumbing. My husband booked him in to do ours however when it came to the point where we needed him he was unable to lay all the pipe work and was only interested in fitting the bath , whb etc. My husband ended up laying all the pipe work himself, learned through watching and helping plumbers. A few years later he did a bathroom for a relation of his who we had a friend in common and it appeared he was still struggling with the pipe work as apparently he made a right pigs ear of it.

I thought I’d nothing to do today but phone an electrician who did some work for us last March just before lockdown, needing power into the garage which we’d spoken to him about. Couldn’t get him on his mobile so phoned the house and got either his wife or mother who told me he couldn’t work unless it was an emergency! need to see if I can find another

Yes these should be fine, we had a good few from b&q and other like places and I just recorded them on the list of what they pertained to and were accepted, most were under £100 but as you say they soon mount up.

Ah @Amateur bob nice to see you back, did you eventually get your planning permission?

I don’t know why everyone seems to think Scot frame are the only kit firm about. We originally asked them to price up our drawings for us but they weren’t interested and although they took the drawings they never got back to us, they are also owned by a big firm now so you don’t get the personal service that you will find with other kit firms. The firm we used were great and they even came out to the site to look at progress. They also did an erecting service at a good price which resulted in us not having to lay out over £16 k in vat right at the start of the build.

Still trying to get my head around all this, heard back from Hetas today, wanting me and the installer to communicate with each other so I have answered his email questions. However it was still annoying me what @PeterW had said about the figures on the EPC so I did some digging around online and found a post by a man who does EPCs. He said he had a few complaints from people regarding their kwh figures and at first he suspected they wanted the figures to be higher so that they would get paid more through the RHI scheme however he contacted a colleague who did heat load calculations for installers and he soon discovered where the discrepancies lay. He states that installers have to calculate on a worst case scenario,so they have to make a calculation that assumes the heating will be on 24/7 365 days a year, he also says that the RHI would never pay you for this as they prefer to pay some money to a lot of people rather than a lot of money to a few people so the calculations for RHI payments are not a true picture of your heat demand and are just taken as an average. So this left me thinking that the two figures on my EPC would always be conflicting. Considering the installer never saw this EPC it makes me wonder if he didn’t do any calculations at all for this house and took a guess based on previous similar sized properties that received RHI payments.

Latest development with this saga, have filled in a complaint form to Hetas who the installer is registered with and awaiting further word back from them. Previous to this I had emailed firepower heating who are the distributor for the stove in this country and gave them a rundown of what had been happening. They answered with a recommendation that I contact the installer again. Hetas had by this recognised that communication between us and him had broken down so I didn’t try again to contact him. Got another email from firepower today asking if I had contacted the installer, I replied saying no I hadn’t and that I had gone to Hetas, I also told them that we had spent the last few days in a house which wasn’t being heated properly and had resulted in frozen pipes in 2 of the ensuites, very quickly she came back to me and said she had spoken to the installer and that he would contact me shortly. I then receive an email from him questioning the performance of the ufh(which he didn’t install) Quote; Can you check the following and let me know. * What is the target temperature of the boiler * Power output of the boiler. * The manifold will have a mixer on it that will control max temp to the UFH what is this set to. There maybe an issue with the valves that control the delivery of heat to the manifold. (heat height selector and UFH mixer valve) So it appears he is trying to pass the buck, we are confident that the ufh is working fine when it gets the temperature required from the tank and how would he explain the fact that there’s not enough heat to heat ufh and upstairs radiators?

We recently changed to octopus energy, they ask for a meter reading every month and you can pay more if you’ve gone over what your monthly direct debit is, still not like paying a monthly bill but because they’re keeping track of your usage you don’t get any surprises when they suddenly say they need to up your payments.

It burns well although needs a hoover out about every 3 days which we put down to the amount it’s burning, it did go out a few nights ago without warning ( an alarm is meant to sound if there is a problem) and on inspection we found the pot that the pellets burn in was all clogged up. when we had the new motherboard fitted the cover of said had melted!

No other pages! When I asked the architect for the EPC that was all he produced

I think iirc he wanted the epc before he started the job. At that point we had an epc that was what the house was expected to be if built as specced, after it was installed and details given to the person who was doing the epc we got the as built EPC which then gave the RHI figure . This was the one he was given

I’ve been looking it up, I can make a complaint through the mcs scheme, if what @SteamyTea says is right he should have made calculations for each room which looks like he never did, he was always in a hurry! He even forgot to register it with the scheme at the time it was installed and it was only one I applied for the RHI payments that I discovered that and he had to do some jiggery pokery to get it registered. I now believe he has known all along that it wasn’t going to do the job but has just been fobbing us off and making it look like we didn’t know how to operate it. I have a bee in my bonnet now and need to do something, I’ve spent all day checking the tank , turning heating off then waiting till the tank got up before turning it back on, it’s costing us over £300 a month to keep it going which wouldn’t be so bad if it was giving off a good heat but realistically the upstairs bedrooms are unusable!

Well I definitely don’t have that , but I do have this

Thanks @PeterW I can follow what you’re saying to a degree (definitely not as technically minded as yourself!) so my next question is; who made the mistake? if I handed this epc to the installer and he just looked at the bottom part RHI number without doing the calculations that you have done, is he at fault? Or is the person who did the epc at fault? The installer had all the house plans as well as the epc so should he have done an independent calculation? Has he been lax in just reading the bottom number? in other words who the hell do I go after??

Is this them?

This is the boiler

So today has been really cold, a freezing fog that hasn’t lifted all day.Really struggling to get the heat up in the house, have spent most of the day tank watching, it heats up to its temperature but as soon as a couple of zones call for heat within half an hour the tank is down to about 29 degrees top and bottom, at this point there’s no point in leaving the ufh on as the water isn’t hot enough to heat it and I know the fire will burn all day but never getting the tank up to temperature. I have looked at the epc and it says heat loss is 18.15kw . I have also looked at the spec of the burner and found that despite the installer telling us it was 18kw it is in fact 14.7kw with 2.2 going to the room and 12.5 to the thermal store. Something is not adding up here, I sent the installer an email between Xmas and new year telling him we were still having problems, I knew he was not working at this point but wanted to register the complaint as quickly as possible before our warranty runs out this month, of course he hasn’t answered! I have tonight sent an email to firepower heating who are the distributor in this country and told them about all the trouble we are having and I’ve also said I suspect the installer has made a mistake on the spec and that we should have had the larger stove. I will see what response I get from them , I don’t know what else to do but was wondering if the energy savings trust would have anything to say about this since the installer is on their mcs list and also that we got the interest free loan from them for installation. Or do I get an independent engineer to have a look and end up going to a lawyer with it, I just feel I am going to be paying back this loan long after the appliance is binned!

Hi Charlotte, I’m so glad to see you are doing all your research before making any commitments, there seems to be a sudden surge lately of people wanting to self build and going with what I’m seeing on other forums I can see a lot of trouble ahead for them , a lot of people have unrealistic ideas of what they are capable of financially and self building can be stressful enough without the additional grief of getting halfway through a build and not knowing how your going to afford to finish it. You seem to be going along the right tracks starting off with an affordable size of house, you have to learn how to walk before you can run and as is often said if self building was that easy everyone would be doing it! I wish you all the best in your venture.

Think it was mentioned in the program that it is limestone?

Still can’t see why a deposit is required?! I ordered a new set of doors couple of months ago, no deposit taken, doors were fitted December 23rd and invoice left for me to pay at my convenience, I’m really not comfortable with paying upfront for any building work.

Sorry but I wouldn’t be paying anything upfront, we went with a small builder and we bought all the materials, we didn’t pay anything until the foundations were in and blocked up to floor level, after all he will be paying his men in arrears so no need for money upfront, he will also have an account at his builders merchant which will be invoiced at the end of the month. You just hear so many horror stories!

In 2008 when we built our last house we wanted something for the studio flat above our garage, wanted one of these beds that folded up into a unit on the wall, guy came out from strachan fitted furniture, measured up and produced a plan for the said bed , a single wardrobe and a bedside cabinet with a shelf above it, nearly dropped when he said £17k! I had had a quote for a bespoke fitted kitchen and it was a large kitchen same price, needless to say we didn’t get the bedroom!