Benpointer

Thanks Simon. The lights are Orluna Cloud Butterfly spots from Amos Lighting in Topsham https://amoslighting.co.uk. Liz at Amos Lighting was very helpful. The spots are indeed a quality item - they have a lovely look and feel to them. It's almost a pity they are high on the ceiling and will hardly ever, if ever, get moved!

Thanks Craig, and your help with our slam shut door lock challenge* is much appreciated - I will let you know once I have had chance to speak to our chippie to see whether we can use your suggestion. Thanks for coming out of you way to see us.

They are mural shower panels from Showerscape: https://www.showerscape.co.uk

No, that's a wardrobe and dressing area. Wardrobe yet to be fitted out of course 😂 Behind the dressing area is the master ensuite (separate room).

Yes, we moved into our new house on Monday last week, pretty much 9 months to the day since we broke ground and 15 months after we purchased the plot. We know we’ve been very lucky with our build. The weather has generally been in our favour and we had no supply issues or delays. Above all, we’ve had some excellent people working for us without whom we could not have achieved the build. There are too many stars to mention here but if you look through the blog you will see them all get a shout out for their excellent work as it happened. Ahead of the move, Mrs P. did a superhuman job getting everything packed, and the move itself went relatively smoothly, with dry weather and no mishaps. Amazingly, Mrs P. also managed to unpack most of those boxes within a few days, though we do still have some residual boxes to deal with in due course. Moving in day: As we all know, moving house is always a stressful business and moving to a new house is no different. But it is a relief to finally get in - there is always the nagging fear that some disaster will strike at the last minute while the house remains unoccupied. But of course, all was fine. Is our build complete? Not quite. We have some minor electrical and joinery items outstanding, both inside and outside; we have the garden landscaping well under way but some distance from completion as you will see from the photos below. Beyond that, there is a list of jobs of the sort you’ll have following any house move: curtains, blinds, wardrobes, shelving, etc. - but these are ‘house move’ rather than ‘house build’ tasks imo. We do still have to obtain Building Control sign-off and there’s a VAT reclaim to do. On the BC front we had our ‘As Built’ air-tightness test performed by Richard Harris of Peninsular Energy Compliance this week (highly recommended). The result is 1.16m m3/m2 at 50hPa on the envelope basis. Virtually the same figure for Air Changes per Hour , as our envelope area is 583m2 and our volume is coincidentally 580m3. We are very happy with 1.2 ACH. Air-tightness test under way: We have been in the house for a week now and we are really happy with the way it feels and works for us. It’s warm, draft-free, well-lit, quiet, and comfortable; the layout and spaces are working just as we hoped. We are both sure we are going to really love living here. The plant room is (to me) surprisingly warm, running at 25-26 deg C due presumably to the amount of heat-generating equipment in there. I raised this as a separate Build Hub topic but the consensus seems to be that it's not an issue, so I shan't worry. As a side benefit, it does make a splendid clothes airing room. https://forum.buildhub.org.uk/topic/46744-hot-plant-room/ Energy use The combination of solar panels, batteries, ASHP and insulation levels seems to be working well - in our first week we used 0.7kWh from the grid and exported 63kWh. Not bad for February. I need to work out our best tariff option but that’s a job for the future. Enough talk, time for some more photos (some taken just before we moved in)... Kitchen/dining/lounge: Hall: Bathrooms - master ensuite: Shower room: Guest ensuite: Bedrooms Master bedroom: Guest bedroom: Bed 3 / hobby room (Ok, so we still have some unpacking to do.) Landscaping - plenty to do yet. The layout is literally as clear as mud to me... I'm sure it will all be fine in the end(!) And finally... Troy likes the new house - it still has yogurt pots that need licking out Dashboard: Contractor days on site this past two weeks: 15 Contractor days on site since build start: 587 person days That 587 days is well over the 500 days which requires HSE being notified of the build using form F10 (which we did). HSE have not spoken to us or troubled us at all and the F10 notification is simple and costs nothing, so I would recommend any self-builder do so - if you are unfortunate and have an incident it’s surely means less chance of getting into hot water if you registered properly. Budget: I confess that in the final weeks we have gone a bit beyond our self-imposed budget contingency and dipped slightly into savings, but that is really down to choices we have made about the quality of the fit, e.g joinery, kitchen, bathroom equipment etc., and also the extent of the landscaping we have chosen to do. We could probably have remained well within contingency had we needed to but luckily we had some leeway. Plan: We did it! Conclusion: Overall, we set out to use the entire proceeds of our previous house sale to buy a plot and build a better house, and we believe we have achieved that. Thanks once again to all the dedicated and skilled people who have worked on our house and made the build a success. Especial thanks to Mrs P. who indulged my yearning to do a build provided brilliant design input and kept the whole show on the road throughout - a truly wonderful person! That then dear friends is the final blog! Thank you for following us and for your kind words of encouragement and support through our project.

I'd never heard of a heat pump tumble dryer! Still I think outside drying when possible, plant room drying when not, will suit us fine. Just the two of us here - if you had a family of children I can see the need.

Thanks everyone for the rapid and encouraging responses. To respond to a few points: I have a Topdon iPhone thermal camera so I will try that when I have a moment. We do plan to run cooling through the summer, so I hope the uninsulated UFH pipes will indeed be a benefit then. Mrs. P. has already spotted that it's a perfect laundry drying room, and luckily we have enough space to set up some moveably clothes racking, which I expect will be a summer project ready for next winter. (We don't have or want a tumble dryer.) One other option I can consider if the heat does become an issue is moving the battery outside, just the other side of the wall it's on. Seems a shame that that battery heat would be going to waste though.

We have just moved in to our now build and it is all running at a very comfortable 21ish degrees... except for our Plant/Tech room, which is persistently running at 26-27C despite having no dedicated heating as such. There are reasons of course. In the plant room are: 27kWh of battery storage. 12kW inverter 300l HW cylinder The internal unit of a Panasonic 9kW ASHP The manifolds for 16 UFH loops Zenhder Q350 MVHR unit Many of the UFH pipes run from the manifold under the plant room floor and I don't believe they were well insulated, so that may be the biggest cause of the heat in that room. The plant room does have an MVHR extract valve, so some of that heat is being extracted and exchanged to the fresh air coming in to the house. The room itself is 1.8m x 2.9m and an average of 2.2m high and is insulated to the same standard as the rest of the house of course. Two questions: Should we be worried? What might we do about it? (I have been thinking about putting down a thinn insulating floor just to lessen the heat gain from the UFH pipes.) Anyone else have similar issues?

We've just had our As Built air-tightness test performed by Richard Harris of Peninsular Energy Compliance (good guy - recommended). The result is 1.16m m3/m2 at 50hPa on the envelope basis. Virtually the same figure for ACH as our envelope area is 583m2 and our volume is coincidentally 580m3. So c. 1.2 ACH which we are happy with. Reason for mentioning it on this thread is that we had Aerobarrier apply their treatment back in September when they reported an 81% leakage improvement to give a final result of 0.97 ACH, so lower than the as built test (but their test had masked off the doors and windows to protect them from the sealant). The implication is that without Aerobarrier our result would have been 5.4 ACH, which I can believe because the standard of membraning and taping up was not the best and I had to part company with the team engaged to do it. So +ve feedback from me for Aerobarrier.

Yes, thanks!

Good points... but not terribly helpful right now tbh.

Hi all, I appreciate this is not pressing right now but come the summer we'd like to run our Aquarea L series in cooling mode. Can anyone tell me how to arrange our set-up for that? My electrician is scratching his head. We have Heatmiser Neostat v2 room stats in most rooms - possibly unnecessarily but they are there now. I think I understand how they control the ASHP heating: temperature drops below X°C and they switch on causing a demand signal to the UFH actuator and ASHP, which fires up and starts pumping warm water through the UFH loop... until the room temp rises above X°C and the Neostat switches off, the actuator closes and the ASHP stops heating. So, what happens when the room temp gets above Y°C, where Y is 'too hot'? Do I need separate thermostats to control the cooling? Or should I have had Neostat HC/HC1 stats installed? And do these need two cables back to the ASHP, where we have only put in one? And how do I link in the floor sensors we put in a couple of rooms for protection agains condensation risk? Sorry for a lot of questions, I am struggling to find anywhere that explains how this should be set up. If someone could point me at a Panasonic manual that sets it out clearly, I'd be grateful. Cheers

Oops! This build has clearly messed with my mind. In my defence I can only say that our plant room hasn't looked as tidy as that... since the electricians got in there 😱

Hi Stoph, thanks for your kind comments. Our ducts were as per @garrymartin posted, although not nearly as neatly set out as yours. I need to do an audit as we haven't used them all but I am not sure which are unused - can't get on site today or tomorrow as the access apron is being done.

Rogue photo at the end for those who enjoyed the mud. 🤷‍♂️