Benpointer

Hi all, Looking for robot mower recommendations. We have a relatively flat and open 1/2 acre (2000m2) grass paddock into which Mrs P. has dotted 15 or so trees. I can't be doing with a ride-on mower - had one in the last house and it just becomes a chore. So we are looking to buy a decent robot mower. Currently I'm thinking an appropriately sized model from Segway, Stiga or Husqvarna. Does anyone have any experience, good or bad? There are plenty of YouTube reviews but I don't feel I can trust them as most seem to be funded by the manufacturers. Ideally, I could do with a garden / landscaping site as geeky as this one, but I can't find RobotMowerHub.org.uk. Again, if anyone knows a good site? First World problem I know but... Thanks as ever. PS here's a couple of shots of our paddock, from last autumn.

Doesn't the VAT reclaim depend on BC sign-off?

Good grief, I reckon even I could lay blocks better than that!

The camera has now been claimed by @TDK so no longer available. Thanks all!

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Hi there, does any self-builder want a solar powered, 4G camera? Free to a good home (or plot!), 'buyer' collects from near Shaftesbury, Dorset or I could package and post at your cost and risk. We used it to provide site protection, remote management, and progress photos for our self-build and now we have moved in have POE CCTV installed we no longer need it. It worked really well for us - we only had a couple of days during this past winter when it ran low on power and temporarily switched itself off - we never bothered charging it, it came back to life the next day each time. Through the Reolink app you can move the camera around remotely too. I sound like a Reolink salesman now but this camera is free! You'll need to get a pay as you go data sim (cost us c. £4 per month) though. PM me if you are interested. Some photos of the camera and an example of the picture it takes:

It's a surprisingly difficult question to answer simply, for a number of reasons, mainly what's included in the build cost? What I can say is that we have done it for the amount we sold a similar-sized but less well-equipped house in the same area. That's taking account of the old house sale and new plot purchase costs, 18 months' house rental, planning, architects fees, utilities, the build itself, kitchen, bathrooms, solar PV and batteries, decorating, and landscaping. Then again, had we not moved we'd have been needing new kitchen, bathrooms, ASHP, and other expenses in our old house before long. Our per m2 figure is about £3,900, £3,200 excluding landscaping. We could have done it for a lot less but we consciously chose to spend what we had and made some expensive choices: bespoke single-storey design, zinc roof, upmarket kitchen, 3G windows, high levels of insulation, 15kW PV, 27 kWh batteries, oak joinery, etc. etc. We were lucky enough to be able to indulge ourselves, but that does mean our costs may not be a reliable guide, sorry.

We're really pleased with ours! People talk about MVHR payback but no one ever asks what the payback on a sofa is, and both are about comfort imo.

Loving those duct pipes. Brings back happy* memories. Well done! *Happy once they are in, not while they are going in. Huge amount of 3d visual imagining required in our experience. Worth it though.

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. 🤷‍♂️

I’ve got to be honest, there are times when it feels like we are inching towards the finish line ever more slowly, with lots of jobs nearly but not quite done. Pulling together this regular blog is really helpful in that respect: Every fortnight I start off thinking there is hardly anything to say so it’s probably not worth issuing an update. But once I start to look at what’s happening since the previous blog I realise that we have generally made good progress. And indeed it’s a case of more good progress over the last two weeks. It does now feel like we are nearly over the line. Several long-standing activities have been closed off thank goodness. So here are some of the things we’ve made progress on since the previous blog. (Confession time: I meant to take more photos of the bathrooms, kitchen and lighting but seem to have forgotten to do so, so you’ll have to wait for next time for those.) Bathroom After our disaster last time with the wall hung shower toilet, my brilliant brother came back over from Sussex to hang the replacement, even though he had managed to break his foot in the meantime - that’s what I call dedication to the cause! The (revised and up-to-date) instructions we were given with the replacement WC pan said to tighten the wall bolts to 7Nm torque. Which seems really very low - the sorts of torque used on bicycle parts. Anyway, that’s what we did to the best of our ability. It was just about enough to stop the toilet feeling at all wobbly and the good news is nothing cracked, nothing fell on the floor, and the toilet seems pretty stable. Especially now it’s been siliconed around the edges - though I’m sure the silicon doesn’t add any strength at all. While he was with us, Chris also fitted the small hand basin in our ensuite, tiled and grouted the splashbacks, then fitted a lot of sound insulation into the stud work between the three bathrooms (they all back on to each other, so good acoustic insulation is a definite plus!). He also bailed us out of a looming problem with our porcelain tile skirting… Tiling We were getting increasingly concerned whether our floor tiler would finish off the porcelain skirting tiles before we moved in. The quality of his work has been great, but since Christmas it’s been hard to schedule any time from him partly because he’s been ill and also he’s got a lot of other work, I guess. So we agreed to part company amicably, we agreed a payment for his completed the work, and my brother Chris stepped into the breach. Chris then spent a long day finishing off the skirtings, which really meant doing all the tricky mitre corners which had been left until last plus a few straight runs. For a simple, relatively open-plan house we had a surprising number of corners! Chris then went round and grouted 130 m of skirting. Great job Bro! We decided to hire a recommended specialist silicon guy to apply silicon around the bottom and the top of the skirtings, 260m in total. He did a great job, and very quickly. He is certainly getting a good rate for it! But I’d agreed a fixed rate and he did it to a good standard so, fair enough… Specialist siliconing is obviously where the money is these days! Anyway, all our tiling and skirtings grouting and siliconing is now officially… done! Kitchen Chris the carpenter has finished off all the outstanding jobs in the kitchen, including the final fit of ‘wall of ovens’ in the alcove where they sit. I’d been pondering the best approach to ventilation and with Chris’s help we came up with a what I think is a neat solution - creating a slender recessed ventilation strip above the ovens which is there but doesn’t catch the eye. Chris also fitted the plinths which make the kitchen look finished rather than work-in-progress. The Quooker tap is now powered up in as well as plumbed in and we have been using it for the first time over the past couple of days. I have to say I’m really impressed; it works really well and feels and looks great too. Electrics Progress on second fit electrics has been frustrating, I think mainly because our electricians have got too much work on and they’re trying to juggle multiple jobs. Also to be fair, our installation has been more complex than originally envisaged due to choices we’ve made. The rate of progress hasn’t been a problem until recently but it’s begun to feel like we might not have the electrics ready to move in: However, our main man Darren was in this week and made good progress, and we now have power and lighting throughout the house. All the kitchen equipment is powered up and whilst there could still be a fair few jobs outstanding after we move in (e.g. external lights) it’s clear that the electrics are going to be working well enough for us to move in as planned on the 23rd. Yesterday Nick, the electric contractors boss, demonstrated the seamless switch-over from mains to battery by switching off the mains supply without causing so much as a flicker to the lights. I wanted to try it myself when we had friends round later but Mrs P wouldn’t let me: “it’s not a toy” apparently. I was wondering whether we would actually know if we had a power cut, but the battery app sends us a message to say the power’s tripped over to batteries and then another one when the power is restored and it’s tripped back. I was a bit worried that, with the electrical work ‘growing’ and there being a fair few extras that we’ve asked for, the final bill was going to be way over the original quote. So I have been badgering Nick to give us a revised quote. He has finally done that, and yes, it’s going to cost us a bit more than he first quoted but actually not nearly as much more as I feared. Which is a result! Joinery Meanwhile on the joinery front, the oak we ordered to use as full width door jambs and the pocket door frame sections have all arrived. Mrs. P. has Osmo oiled them, fitting has started and they should all be installed by the time we move in. Rear landscaping Lots of activity is now underway on our rear landscaping. We have a fall of about 1.5 metres from the house finished floor level to the far end of the “residential garden“ part of our land. As I am a wheelchair user we are naturally wanting to have step free access to as much of that as possible. The garden design we have involves level access from the house to a terrace seating area, then 1:20 ramps down to three different further small seating areas between planting areas. That obviously involves quite a lot of low retaining walls and ramped paths. So given we are in the middle of the winter monsoon season, it was clearly an ideal time to start work on those walls, paths and terraces! Ashley and his team have made great progress despite the weather, as you can see - although if their landscaping work ever dries up (ha ha!) they could probably get good employment as World War 1 battle scene recreators. Front landscaping If the back garden looks like the Somme, in front of the house the parking/turning area is looking much more civilised. We debated about how to finish the surface, considering a number of options, but in the end we’ve gone for simple tarmac. Gravel is a no-no for the wheelchair, resin bonded is too expensive, brick pavers we don’t like the look of and need regular cleaning. In a previous house we had hot-rolled grit into tarmac and that does look nice but we found it collects dirt and is a recipe for bringing grit into the house, so we’re keeping it simple this time. The base coat is down and the front apron is being done tomorrow(!). The aim is to leave the top coat until all the heavy work in the back is done, to avoid damaging it. Ashley has told us several times we’re doing it the wrong way round - we should have started at the back and worked forward - but having that base coat down is transformational for me - no more wheeling through lumps of clay or getting bogged down in loose type 1. Preparation under way: Troy anointing the prepared sub-base. "May God bless her and all who walk/wheel on her": Laying down the blacktop: First flower bed planted! Focus for the next two weeks: Moving in! Dashboard: Contractor days on site this past two weeks: 45 Contractor days on site since build start: 572 Budget: No change - over budget but within contingency. Plan: Moving in on 23rd February. Issues and worries closed this fortnight: Hanging that toilet Whether the electrics would be ready Finishing the skirtings Current top issues and worries: Packing! (I expect Mrs P. has it all under control ;-))