Jeremy Harris

Teenagers of either gender try to look older, I think. I remember going on holiday with some friends when I was around 17 and us all having a competition to grow the best moustache (droopy moustaches were fashionable at the time). Our main motivation for wanting facial hair was so we'd more easily pass for 18 in a pub...

And by different rates, we're talking about following the half hourly wholesale price fluctuations, which is the primary reason the suppliers want people to fit smart meters - they want to remove the risk they currently bear of having to guess what the ,mean price will be over a period of time and use that to set their tariffs. The half hourly tariff variations, when they come into force (which they certainly will for those with smart meters) will vary between somewhere close to zero pence per unit in negative wholesale pricing periods (it does happen that the price goes negative at the moment) to around 30 pence per unit at peak times. Often people won't be able to avoid peak times - for example early evening is very often a peak time, and most people will still want to eat, watch TV etc. The main problem with smart meters is that domestic suppliers will end up with less freedom to choose than they might think. It's great to think that the grid can be better balanced (which is what this is about, fundamentally) by dissuading people from using electricity at peak times, by charging them very high prices, but a lot of people simply won't have much choice but to pay the high rates, unless they invest in something like battery storage, or switch to using bottled gas for cooking, perhaps. They'd also have to give up boiling the kettle in advert breaks, or at the end of sporting events, as those are traditionally peak rate times, too.

That should be fine, as air will bleed out through the vertical pipe. Our problem was that I had a similar arrangement (minus the pressure reducing valves, as we're on a controlled pressure supply) but with the pipe and three ball valves horizontal, and very slightly lower than the softener flexi pipe connections.

Good points, @pdf27, describes what we did for the first 10 years or so after getting married (for the second time), buy cheap, run down places, do them up and save every single penny we could. I suffered an early set back by getting married young, having my wife leave me and consequently losing over half of everything, so had to start again when I was in my early 30's. As a working scientist I was never well paid, (although the job satisfaction and fun factor at work was tremendous) and my wife (the current one) was a paediatric nurse, so we weren't well off, and didn't move out of rented accommodation until I was 33. In many respects I doubt our situation was much different to younger people today, TBH. When we first bought a house mortgage rates were around 8 or 9% and quickly rose to around 14% or so, which seems unthinkable today, but somehow we managed. One advantage was that we got used to spending vast amounts on our mortgage. so when the interest rates started to drop I chose to keep paying the same every month - made a massive difference to the total amount we repaid, and ultimately saved us a lot of money, as well as paying of the mortgage years early. My income didn't rise much above my wife's until I took the decision to accept being moved into management in the mid-1990s, where my pay quadrupled over a period of about 15 years, and as I was on a final salary pension that made a hell of a difference. The downside was I absolutely hated management, but saw it as a necessary evil to be able to do what we wanted to do in retirement. My really lucky break was David Cameron being elected and introducing austerity, and I didn't even vote for his party. That gave me a fantastic stroke of luck, in that I was allowed to retire at 57 with a full pension and gratuity, so I escaped the stress of being a bloody manager and had enough money to start seriously thinking about building a house and living as we'd always wanted to. My job meant I had to moved around the country every 3 years or so for the last 18 years or so, so always ended up in pretty horrible houses in the main - we were never likely to stay in one long enough for it to really matter too much. It's good to see younger people choosing to save and self-build. Saving is, I think, the key thing. It takes a hell of a lot of discipline to do it, and the rewards are often a long way off, but the combination of saving from an early age and making damned sure I had a decent pension (I can thank my late father for drumming the importance of a pension into me, time and time again) put us in the position where we could eventually start to self-build when I was 59. We simply couldn't have done it before then, both because of lack of time and funds.

I thought they stopped making Capri's more than 15 years ago?

You don't need the ground anchor kit with that tank if using concrete. Those wedges around the base key into the concrete ring you pour around the base and hold it down. Our tank was pretty much exactly the same, and is set below the water table, so we anchored it down using concrete, as it looked a better bet that using their ground anchor kit, which was a galvanised angle cross plus some galvanised chains, IIRC. Concrete just seemed easier, as we had a mixer on site. One tip, if using concrete, then make a chute down the side of the hole, just dug out of the ground, so that it's easier to get the concrete right to the bottom with the water filled tank in place.

Our guys dug a stepped hole for our conical tank. Looked easier to dig to me, plus it allowed them to pour concrete around the bottom to secure the tank in place (it's held down by those wedge-shaped projections at the bottom of the cone - they lock into the concrete ring poured around the base).

Our situation was similar. First house was a two up, two down, Victorian terrace in a deprived area (Redruth, Cornwall) as it was all we could afford. I sweated for two years learning DIY skills and fitting a new kitchen and bathroom to an existing very rough single storey extension at the rear, and we luckily made a profit on the sale, so moved to a very run down, even older (1761) semi detached stone cottage, that I literally had to gut internally (it had a major Radon problem, so I had to break up the concrete ground floor, (on my own, with a bit of free help from a friend and Kango borrowed from work), fit a Radon sump and ventilation system, then a Radon barrier and lay a new concrete floor (all mixed by hand in a small electric Belle mixer). I spent five years doing up that place, new kitchen, creating an upstairs bathroom, and we lost £20k when we sold it as my job moved right at the time of the property crash in 1991/2. By luck we managed to afford to buy a new semi in South West Scotland, only because prices were a bit cheaper than Cornwall. I also had a pay rise and we managed to save some money, so within a year we had enough to buy our first detached house in Portpatrick, a three bedroom bungalow that had been a self-build (a serial self-builder in fact - his second build). The only reason we could afford to self-build now was because we had the combination of an inheritance plus the gratuity from my pension. That paid around 2/3rds of our self-build costs, meaning we only needed a fairly small mortgage. This was helped by the fact that I'd opted to pay around three times more per month off our old mortgage for around 7 or 8 years, so we paid it off early, but whilst doing that we had no holidays and ran cars that were ten to fifteen years old. By a combination of hard work and good fortune we've finally been able to build a house we've always wanted. The penalty we've paid is living in houses we hated for years, living on a low income in order to pay our mortgage off early and doing a great deal of work ourselves to improve most of the houses we've lived in, with some of that work definitely increasing the value of the house. Even our finished self-build took five years, because we ran out of money so the finishing has taken forever, with me saving up from my pension in order to buy materials, and me doing the lion's share of the work myself, where I could.

There seems very little evidence to support those assertions. Take the matter of costs. Several long standing and prominent members here are building on a very low budget, some literally doing as I had to do for the final three years and only do work after saving from earnings (in my case pension) in order to be able to pay to do the next bit. We have few members who have just paid for a turn-key package (only one that I can think of from the top of my head) and most fall somewhere between doing all the work themselves and project managing plus doing some work themselves. I think you're making broad generalisations without solid base data - take a look at the members of this forum that are actively building and see if their builds reflect your assertions.

I wonder where the RICS surveyors get their data though? We haven't had our completed house surveyed, and even if we had I'm not sure that we'd have been able to give a surveyor a full breakdown of costs, or if he/she would have asked for it, so I wonder how accurate any data from RICS would be?

Our initial ground works were very complex and untypical (900 tonnes of soil removed, big retaining wall built, borehole drilled for water, etc) so I'd ignore the basic ground works time below. The rest are just the best I can remember, really. Ground works, to level plot with water, drainage and electricity supplies in, but no house foundations = 5 months (should have been 7 weeks - things went horribly wrong with the borehole drilling). Foundations = 4 days, including installing the UFH pipes in the slab. Timber frame erection to weathertight, but with door and window opening sheeted over and roof membrane and battens on, but no slates = 4 1/2 days Door and window installation = 1 day (a bit less than this, but they came back for an hour on another day to fit one incorrectly supplied window). At this stage the house was secure and watertight Installation of frame inner VCL board and filling walls and roof with blown insulation = 5 days Installation of in-roof solar panel frames and wiring = 2 days Installation of roofing slates, barge boards, soffits, fascias, guttering and downpipes = 5 days Installation, wiring and testing of in-roof solar panels and inverter = 2 days External cladding of frame = 7 days First fix plumbing, wiring and ventilation system = 4 weeks (largely me on my own - could have been a lot quicker!) Plaster boarding and skimming all internal walls = 2 weeks (with me installing acoustic insulation as the guys were boarding out) Internal wall and ceiling decorating = 6 days, one chap working on his own, just emulsion on all walls and ceilings Second fix electrics and testing = 1 week Internal joinery = 8 weeks (8 days for joiner to fit frames and internal doors, the rest me working on my own fitting skirting and architrave, all oak, so took longer). Travertine flooring on ground floor and in bathrooms = 3 days (local tiler, working with one labourer) Bamboo flooring = 5 weeks (me working on my own, should have been a LOT quicker) Kitchen installation = 3 weeks, two weeks me working on my own fitting kitchen units (should have been about two days) 1 week delay for the stone masons to template then come back and fit the stone work tops. At this point I really stopped keeping track of time -things really started to drag out as I was largely working on my own. Sorry I can't put costs against these elements right now, but I may have a go later.

You may be right about PHPP, @Ed Davies, I've not looked at it for a long time, and just recall that is used conversion factors for total energy somewhere in the spreadsheet. I know that SAP does use conversion factors for fuel type though, so the EPC rating is highly dependent on fuel type for a given size and standard of dwelling.

When I first started looking at self-building, I used to think that the cost tables in the back of one or two of the self-build magazines were a good guide and probably based on reasonable evidence. It didn't take long to realise they were very deeply flawed, for several reasons. Not that many self-builders are ruthlessly honest about their build cost - you see this most noticeably in that Charlie Luxton programme. I suspect a lot of people like to think they've built their house for less than they really paid, and leave out some things that realistically should have been included. The magazines seem to be the most oft-used source of build costs, yet they can really only get data from people that give it to them freely, and I wonder how many self-builders accurately assess build costs in the industry standard way? Or, how many self-builders actually agree to tell the magazines what their build cost? There are only a very small number of self-builders in any area, probably at most a few hundred at any one time in the whole of the UK, so the sample sizes per area will be small, and that will impact on the reliability of statistical data. Self-builders tend to end up building on sites that are often more complex/costly to develop than big developers, so incur higher costs in many areas, even just because of difficult access. Finally, there is an absolutely massive spread in costs just from the varying approaches that each self-builder will take, plus the cost of the inevitable mistakes many will make. I think it's near-impossible to put build methods into cost bands, as the magazine tables tend to do, just because averaging data with a high degree of variability is inherently flawed. My gut feeling is that most self-builds end up costing more than would be indicated for the area by the simplistic costing tables, and there will be a few exceptional outliers where the costs are massively lower than in the tables or massively higher. I think we once did an impromptu survey in a thread either here or on Ebuild that illustrated just how wide the spread in cost was. Not statistically relevant, as it was just a small sample, but interesting, nevertheless.

I have our 10mm softener drain pipe running for around 2m at a guess, it flows into an open bit of 32mm vertical waste pipe that is at the side of a cupboard downstairs, mainly so that I can check it's flowing freely. The overflow pipe is a larger diameter and probably needs a low flow resistance drain, as, unlike the drain pipe, the head is very low, just a few mm or so. I have mine connected a bit like @PeterStarck above, into a waste pipe (above a trap) but I do have some slight concerns about this. One of the known failure points on the Harvey-type twin cylinder softeners is the water fill valve letting by, which causes the brine level to rise and flow out the overflow. It's an easy to fix fault (just clean the fill valve usually, from what I've read) but I'd like to have some visible indication that there is flow from the overflow, rather than the indirect indication of high salt consumption. I may fit clear pipe to mine as a way of checking easily, without needing to lift the lid and have a look. The only other thing I can think of with mounting the softener higher up, is that you may need a way to bleed air out of it, depending on the pipe runs. When I was having problems with the ultrasonic flow sensor in the Sunamp PV shutting the unit down, I found it was as a consequence of having a lot of very tiny bubbles of air in the incoming water supply, and some of that was traced to air pockets in the softener. I re-arranged the pipework on the outlet side so that it was higher than the softener and that seemed to help.

+1 We have two 300 litre accumulators (used two because they fitted in a narrow space more easily) and they are in a narrow shed on the North wall of the house, so they stay reasonably cool. Bear in mind that the usable volume of water in an accumulator is very roughly half the stated volume, so a 300 litre accumulator really holds around 150 litres of water, the rest is the pressurised air the other side of the bladder.

IIRC, it was running back when there was a bit of a mass exodus from GBF when lots of posts were edited or deleted, for no good reason that many of us could see. At the same time I started receiving what can only be described as "hate email" from an extremist animal rights person, and that can only have come via GBF, because that was the only forum that had that particular email address at that time. I really should have gone to the police about it, because some of the personal attacks in those emails were vile, but instead I chose to just delete them all. Joiner and I had a theory as to who they had some from and why I was targeted, which related to someone having been looking at a whispered exchange between us where I'd stupidly mentioned the name of my employer. Our view was that someone close to GBF had put two and two together, got the answer five and then set me up as a target for animal rights extremists. Not nice at all - we'd previously been targeted and had to check under our cars every day for IEDs, as these nutters were going that far. Makes me glad to be retired. PS: For what it's worth, I'm vehemently opposed to animal testing, have never, ever been involved in it, and the closest I've come is doing voluntary high level ethical reviews, using HO guidelines, that were aimed to reduce or eliminate any need for animal testing.

I spotted Ed's welcome arrival here a week or so ago:

I looked in there the other day, when sitting in my car and bored, so was using the tablet that doesn't have any ad blocking. What I found hilarious was that the top thread, which was absolutely massive, literally hundreds of posts, was about a poor chap suffering from serious health problems induced or exacerbated by particulates and smoke from his neighbours wood burning stove, yet the adverts at the top and bottom of the page were from a wood burning stove company! Bet that's one advertiser that didn't realise that their ad was being directly linked to hundreds of critical posts about wood burning stoves...

I don't doubt at all that most house buyers probably ignore the EPC. However, I didn't invent the way that SAP, PHPP etc use to compare different fuels, so rather than take another pop at me for just stating fact, why not take it up with the government (in the case of SAP) or the PHI (in the case of PHPP)? Might be more constructive.

The longest unsupported span is around 5m, IIRC, and is in the spare bedroom, where the joists only have one intermediate support about 1.8m in from one end over their just over 7m total span.

The odd thing is we have 18mm OSB on 253mm high Posijoists on 400mm centres, ring nailed down, and there wasn't any noticeable bounce, even before I laid the bonded bamboo. I didn't bother screwing the OSB down, but I did put loads of PVA on it. Initially I just sealed the OSB with diluted PVA soon after it went down, to make it easier to clean up (makes it a great deal easier to sweep clean during the build, I found) and then I went around and poured nearly neat PVA into all the OSB joints and brushed it in, before sealing it again with diluted PVA a few days before I bonded the flooring down. Not sure if that helped, but my thinking was that it couldn't hurt to try and glue all the T&G joints a bit.

Primary energy demand is the measure used, both by SAP and PHPP, and is not just the useful energy readings taken from gas or electricity meters, there are factors applied to fuels/electricity in order to reflect the efficiency of the conversion process from potential energy in the fuel to the useful energy delivered to the house. This ratio can be quite high for some "fuels", electricity being a good example, where the efficiency of both the power generation system and the distribution system is taken into account when determining the primary energy. It's primary energy that is used in the PH max allowable figure of 15 kWh/m²/year for space heating. The passive house standard really needs updating a bit now, IMHO, as we found it pretty easy to hit well under the 15 kWh/m²/year for space heating whilst using electricity as the fuel, which carries a high total energy to useful energy penalty, because of the relatively poor efficiency of the generation and distribution system (which is being revised in SAP, to reflect the increase in renewable and local micro generation in the grid, as being discussed in another thread).

@epsilonGreedy, it's probably worth looking back at the history of this forum, and it's immediate predecessor, Ebuild. I joined Ebuild in 2008, as a complete novice. Others here were member of Ebuild long before I joined ( @caliwag and @Temp immediately spring to mind). This forum is structured in the same way as Ebuild, but with a more robust management team and a determination to be fair, unbiased and non-commercial. We're community run and funded to keep the forum free from any commercial influences. It took me from 2008 to 2013 to acquire what I thought was enough knowledge to start a self-build. I was hopelessly optimistic about my understanding of the domestic building sector and the way it works, even after 5 years of research (and I'm a 65 year old scientist, so acquisition of knowledge is in my DNA). I cannot believe that there are any shortcuts for self-builders in learning how trades work, and what a self builder needs to know in order to avoid the worst consequences of the inevitable problems that will definitely occur in every build.

Probably not, unfortunately. Adhesive for PVC (which is almost certainly what the inflatable is made from) needs to contain a PVC solvent, often tetrahydrofuran or cyclohexanone , and it's unlikely that will be an ingredient in any butyl rubber cement (which is usually what bike puncture adhesive is). PVC pipe joint adhesive might work, depends if you can get a bit of PVC for a patch. If you can find some PVC pipe adhesive (the stuff used to bond solvent weld waste pipe fittings) then that will also have dissolved PVC in it, as a thickening agent, so you may get lucky and be able to do without a patch. The stuff does take a long time to dry fully, though, if you can get some PVC pipe adhesive locally then I'd suggest waiting around a day after doing the repair before trying to see if the inflatable is leak-proof.

When I was working I had a golden rule with regards to contracting. It was get the contract right at the start, then you will never need to look at it ever again. Once a relationship has broken down to the point where one or other side keeps referring to the terms of the contract, then things are usually doomed and both sides will end up losing.