Drellingore

I have detailed the rationale elsewhere, but it's all for nought now anyway - after signing contracts with Grand Designs, and her already having begrudgingly agreed to go ahead, the wife has put the kibosh on it. Which I'm gutted about. 😢

Thanks for the very detailed and considered thoughts, @Gus Potter. This insurance malarkey sounds a lot more complicated than I was expecting... And I don't know why I was expecting it to be simple! We need the public liability insurance for the Grand Designs film crew. I think getting that in place as a separate item, and then giving the overall package more thought is the way to go. We do have an architect and an SE involved, so hopefully that makes things easier and the exposure smaller.

Anyone got any recommendations for folks that can provide only public liability insurance for a barn conversion site? Protek are asking for a list of stuff that's longer than both my arms and my legs - like estimated costs to rebuild the 18th century barn back to its prior state. They're refusing to separate out the public liability insurance, which I need by Wednesday 20th ideally. Instead they want to quote for all aspects of insurance. When I've done this for my IT consultancy businesses, some of which had their own offices, this was a trivial box-ticking exercise and I'm pretty sure was just a matter of filling an online form. Are any of y'all aware of someone that makes it this simple?

I went down the route of getting a licence for about €1k, and it's a reasonably complicated app for which you need a lot of data - if you've not got the data to put into it, you won't get any value from it. I used ChatGPT and Gemini Deep Research to infer values for moisture curves and the like. Our architect and I designed a build-up to model, and it passed - yay! But then I changed the colour of the external wall and it failed. Then switching the orientation from north to south went from one failure to 48. There are a lot of things that I think I can do better myself, and this isn't one of them. That, or the build-up we're proposing really is terrible.

Because I've already done it for him.

So I've told him that I'm not paying the remaining 25% of the fee because the deliverables contained significant undisclosed errors. Am I being unreasonable?

Does Penny ask you to punch a lot of people? 😆

If you care about the pennies, the pounds look after themselves! Or something.

We think it'll be fine - the hemp block is apparently more water-permeable than wood fibre for the same U-value. It's a shame I can't do it on the free app, because getting additional confidence would be worth paying the price of an hour of ChatGPT guiding me through the process. I'm not sure that peace of mind will be worth a €1k software licence though!

Ta @MikeSharp01! Can you make a recommendation of the folks you used? I'm going to ask the architect to ask the supplier if they want to contribute towards the cost, seeing as the information will be useful for their future sales and marketing.

I don't suppose anyone here has a copy of WUFI Pro and would be willing to run some calcs for me, would they? The architect wants to use hemp block as part of the build-up for some flint-and-lime walls. The manufacturer doesn't have WUFI data available, so we were going to run the calcs ourselves to make sure we won't ha ve a problem with condensation. Only problem is that the free version of their software doesn't allow you to specify custom materials, which means I'd need to pay €1k for a year-long license when it's only a quick job that needs doing.

I'd be inclined to agree with this, but in this instance you're not allowed to see the PHPP model itself unless you also buy a licence. So this calculation is normally 'behind the curtain'. Removing them drops the heat demand by 6kWh(m²a), or about 28%.

Case in point: when doing SAP calculations, I just noticed that the Passivhaus consultant appears to have accidentally added over 100sqm of extra walls that don't exist to the property...

We need a 'tin hat' on a 27Lx10Wx8H metre building. Good point!

Is it normal for trades like scaffolders to offer cash discounts? Coming from the world of enterprise, it seems a bit dodgy. I've never withdrawn £20k in cash before...

There's a few reasons: You get a letter so suppliers can say "as featured on Grand Designs," which allows you to negotiate discounts Suppliers don't want to look bad on national telly, so give you better treatment If we Airbnb the second building, then we've just got a free advert on national TV It'll be nice for the kids to be able to watch and one day hopefully show their kids The barn is a non-designated heritage asset, and so it'll be nice for future generations to know about this stage of its evolution It's much less work for us than trying to self-document the journey as a vlog or something The wife works in interior design and interior architecture, so it'll be great promotion for her career We used to watch Grand Designs when we first got together nearly twenty years ago, thinking "I'll never be able to afford to do that." So it's kinda nice being able to say that now we've 'done it' (obviously assuming the project succeeds!)

Nah. What I've learned this far in the project is that I do a better job than most (but not all) of the professionals we've paid. If I have to do the legwork to then hand it over to someone qualified to rubber-stamp, that's better than spending weeks waiting for someone who has multiple priorities and little incentive to come up with novel solutions. It seems the construction industry is full of people that only do things the way they've always done them, and think everything else is impossible.

😆 Cheers for the all the insight into SAP, folks 😉 I gather that over the years one of the things that has changed is that Kevin McCloud is involved in the commissioning process now. This means that they filter out all the things he doesn't like, so he's not forced into the position of having to present something he disapproves of. Guessing we're not Grand Designs fans here, then? I saw a thread previously accusing it of being "woke", which I found rather curious having worked for a Bay-area tech company. I suspect my definition of "woke" differs quite significantly from the average self-builder's 😄

'ello folks, Is Elmhurst's Design SAP 10 the go-to for DIY SAP calculations? I need to do SAP calcs for our barn conversion, and we ideally need to get to 110+ for the best possible interest rate discount from Ecology Building Society. We were previously aiming for EnerPHit standards (Passivhaus for conversions), but we'd need to go through all the palaver of certifying to get the discount from the mortgage lender. I want to try the calcs myself rather than paying someone else to play 'thermal battleships' via an email exchange. We appointed a certified Passivhaus professional, and feel pretty let down by his dogmatic ways: for weeks we've been asking about solar glass, and he eventually delivered a design that required 77% opaque shutters on every window, including north and east-facing, which would require a new planning application. He refused to look into solar glass ("it'll change the quality of the light" and "I've never used it before") and then wanted to charge an extra hourly rate to do the thing we'd been asking for for weeks. So I got a Passivhaus licence, and within twenty minutes had proven that solar glass would mean no shutters required while staying within heat demand and overheating limits. BTW, for folks that remember my journey to this point: Grand Designs have commissioned the episode. Paperwork is to be signed next week.

Dunno, other than the structural engineer and the architects say so. It's not very thick (I've gotten through it with a pickaxe, for example). It's in the category of things that I'd like to be consulted on and informed about, but not responsible or accountable for deciding

Has anyone here bought/used a compact tractor in the process of their build? I've been thinking that a compact tractor with a front-loader and backhoe would be useful. Lugging materials around, moving pallets, some minor groundworks, maybe breaking up concrete... On that note, Spons reckons we'd expect to pay £5k to get someone to break up the concrete floor of our barn. Add in a few more jobs of similar size, and then it'd be more financial sense to spend low-five-figures on a tractor to do it which can later be sold on. Am I totally mad, or have other people thought about this? The bit where I know I'm mad is that I'd like an electric one, but I can't see that being financially viable!

Ha, yeah, I've read that

I'm also late to this, and I assume @thefoxesmaltings is busy enjoying their wonderful new home instead of checking BuildHub! TBH while we were waiting agonising months for planning to make a decision, watching Grand Designs was too painful. How were the Grand Designs team to work with? We're considering applying, and our architect suggested that he'd heard the film crew can be a pain in the backside, for example asking for things to be delayed until they can get there to film them. Is there any truth to this? Also, did you manage to negotiate any discounts on the basis of potential TV exposure for suppliers? Huge congratulations on not only achieving a great result, but doing so with no disasters, on-time and under-budget. Very impressive stuff, and inspiring. We're doing a conversion of a heritage asset so I think we'll need to expect more unpleasant surprises, but it's nice to see that it's not always a case of ballooning budgets and calamities.

Ha, looks like just asking it bog-standard questions might work better in this instance than using Deep Research! I wonder if we should start some sort of UK open source document template repository for self-builders.

Has anyone written or seen a biodiversity protection method statement? This is not to be confused with the biodiversity enhancement plan: the protection statement is how you'll not make things worse while building, and the enhancement is how you'll leave things better once you're done. We've got the below planning condition, and annoyingly it requires a bat survey before we can do anything on site. I'm guessing that these conditions have started popping up in response to the Environment Act 2021, but that the substance of them may well have existing in older documents with a different name? I would've thought protected species would need some bureaucratic backside-covering before the most recent changes? Our ecologists are great and we are very happy with them, but if this document is going to be a load of generic copypasta then I'm tempted to save myself a few hundred quid. ChatGPT's Deep Research has found a few rural developments in my area that were asked to provide similar documents, but as the documents are required post-approval for the discharge of conditions they don't seem to be publicly available anywhere, unlike documents that make up the main planning application. Here's the condition that we need to satisfy: