Jeremy Harris

It sounds like that's exactly what they are saying! They are using the fact that PD doesn't apply until after all the planning conditions have been signed off (or, possibly, after completion) as a loophole. I'd just cease communicating with them for now, as if there's further correspondence they will only feel the need to reply. How far away are you from completion? If it's only 6 months or so then I doubt very much if they will take any serious action, as they know full well that you could remove the fence now and replace it under PD the day after the house is signed off.

Not that easy, I'm afraid. Anything lower than about 30 deg C causes the heat pump to cycle too much and it will probably go into anti-short cycle mode, staying off for 15 to 20 mins even when there's a call for heat. Heat pump life is closely related to the number of start cycles, rather than the run time, too, so excessive cycling is quite likely to cause early failure. I tried to run ours into the UFH only and ran in to this problem, which is why the logic in our control system now automatically turns the valve to the buffer tank on whenever there is a call for heat. I think it's probably good practice to treat heat pumps like boilers, and try to arrange to run them for as long a period of time as possible when they turn on, and then leave them off as long as possible. Our 6 kW to 7 kW ASHP will modulate down to about 1.5 kW output, minimum, and that is usually far more than the UFH needs.

The planning officers views aren't really worth a thing in terms of enforcement, and neither are the views of the ecologist. If it were me I'd just say that I'm going to plant the hedge in front of the fence, in accordance with the planning approval, then sit back and see if they take enforcement action. Frankly I doubt they will have the appetite to do anything, other than a bit of bluff and bluster. Even if they did decide it was worth trying to take enforcement action over that might well take a year or two, and would involve them in some expenditure, by which time you'd have most probably got a hedge that would pass muster and get the enforcement action knocked on the head.

The annoying thing about poor workmanship like this is that it devalues the insulation - you could have used maybe half to two thirds of the thickness of insulation, installed properly, to get the same real world performance.

There's a baffle in the centre of the fresh air supply silencer, only because the inlet and outlet from it were inline, and I felt it might work better if there was a central foam covered baffle partially dividing what is just a rectangular box. I'm not sure how effective it is, as most of the noise problem we had before was on the extract side, so it may well be that just an acoustic foam lined box would work just as well. The egg box acoustic foam isn't very expensive, and I'd already bought some large sheets to line the inside wall of the services room, thinking there would be some noise from the MVHR unit itself (there's a bedroom next to it). The silencers were made with offcuts of this foam.

I've tied all our UFH zones into a single zone, with a single thermostat. The heating input is so low that I'm pretty sure I couldn't have got any energy saving by zoning at all.

The short answer is, no, it's not acceptable, but it is probably as good a standard as the builders know how to build, and almost certainly better than a lot of mass-produced new houses. Right now, there will be convection through all those joints which will reduce the effectiveness of the insulation, and may well introduce a condensation risk as well. You can fix things by going around and sealing all those joints with low expansion foam, and that's good practice with even a reasonably good fit with rigid insulation fitted between studs, as it's hard to get a good seal otherwise, anyway.

The abbreviations are right, sorry for not spelling them out - I should have remembered to spell them out the first time I used them in a post (not a bad bit of guidance for the forum, really, to do this). The waterproof gland for armoured steel wire (SWA) are like these; second lot down are the waterproof (IP66) ones: https://www.tlc-direct.co.uk/Main_Index/Cable_Accessories_Index/Glands_SWA/index.html The KMF is right, too.

The solution is to run the tails to a fused DP isolator switch and then run a longer length of suitable 25mm2 cable to the consumer unit. In our case we have the fused switch in the meter box, fed directly by the tails from the meter, with an 80A fuse fitted (so that blows under extreme conditions rather than the 100A fuse in the head) and then the house is fed by a run of 25mm2 3 core SWA that's around 15m long, as the CU is upstairs in the services room. The SWA comes in on the underside of the meter box, via a waterproof gland, and earthed banjo, and at the house end it terminates in a metal adaptable box with another gland and banjo. There's a Henley inside the adaptable box plus an earth block, with 25mm2 tails plus the earth fed to the CU that sits just above it.

There's some details at the bottom of this blog entry that may help: http://www.mayfly.eu/2014/07/part-thirty-one-its-slow-going-on-your-own/

The ones I made are lined with acoustic foam, the fire resistant stuff that is used to line studio walls. It's not that thick, around 20mm in the dips and maybe 60mm at the peaks. It did make a very noticeable reduction in the sound level, though. An additional thing that helps is to make the silencer so the internal volume is as large as you can get, as this not only helps to reduce the sound by itself, but help by giving a larger surface area of foam that's exposed to the sound.

Welcome Dave, The cost per m² is usually the net internal floor area, so the internal footprint of each floor added together. Our new build is about 130m², but has a ground floor internal footprint of 75m², and a first floor internal footprint of about 55m², because the first floor is room-in-roof. £1200/m² is certainly possible, but I get the feeling that a lot of self-builders end up paying a bit more than this. A fair bit depends on where you live, as a lot of the cost is in labour, and that varies a fair bit from region to region.

For what it's worth, we chose both our ground works contractor, and our main contractor, because they both provided a complete breakdown of what was and was not included, together with a detailed specification. The ground works company encouraged me to talk directly to their QS, to iron out a couple of minor issues with their quote. Both companies gave me enough detail to feel confident that we were going to get what we wanted, with no misunderstandings, and that's exactly what happened - we were very happy with the outcome from both. It has to be said that both these companies stood out from all the others, in that they actually took note of our requirements and specification and contracted to deliver to them.

I spent a long time drawing up specification requirements in much more detail than the vast majority of the UK companies I asked to quote wanted. Most just ignored the performance standards we asked for, even after having them highlighted more than once. I remember meeting with one local builder, who advertised that they offered a low energy build package, and finding out, after a lot of hard work, that what they were really offering was a build standard that barely met building regs, in terms of energy efficiency. Our decision to use an Irish company, despite the potential issues with contracting with a builder in another country, was primarily because they were pretty much the only builder that gave us a pretty good specification, with a performance guarantee. The latter is something that not one of the other companies we asked to quote would give. Having a builder working to a firm price, with a guarantee of no thermal bridges in the structure and Passivhaus standards of airtightness and insulation, together with the same builder supplying and constructing the foundation system, took a great deal of risk out of the build, as far as I was concerned.

I'd second just doing this over the phone, and do as jack says, far better, in my view, to keep things as informal as possible at this stage, and just spell out that you have a duty of care to keep the site safe and secure until the hedge has grown and become established enough to form an adequate barrier.

If you're going for permeable pavers, then don't use MOT1, as it's not very permeable at all, use MOT3, or crushed concrete, or something similar that is permeable.

It depends on whether you're required to comply with SuDS or not ( http://www.susdrain.org/ ). If you are (and we were, it's not in our planning permission but is in the planning policy that applies to all new developments) then you need to ensure that water cannot run off from any hard landscaping (drives, paths etc) and leave your boundaries. If you have a non-permeable subsoil, like clay, then you can either: - Make the area under the paving permeable, by digging out to a fair depth, fitting drainage crates for surge storage, arrange for that collected water to drain away somehow and use permeable base to lay permeable pavers over this, or, - Fit drains around the edges/bottom of the hard surface to collect any run off and either feed it to a suitable drain or collect it in some form of surge storage system that can slowly drain somewhere. We installed twenty heavy duty Aquacell crates, wrapped in terram, just above the water table and about a metre under our drive. These drain into a thin layer of soil above the clay that has a pretty slow drainage rate (long percolation time), but this is OK as the surge storage capacity we have is about 3,920 litres, so we can take the maximum storm rainfall OK without water running off into the lane. The alternative is to use a combined sewer, that will take surface water as well as foul drainage, but I'm pretty sure that most water companies are now either restricting this, or refusing to allow it altogether, because of the capacity problems it creates for them. Whether you opt to use permeable pavers or non-permeable with edge drainage really comes down to the topography. We have a drive that slopes down to the lane at the entrance, and a linear interceptor drain across the entrance wouldn't have been able to take the flow under the max rainfall from the table in building regs, so we pretty much had to use permeable pavers with drainage underneath. Permeable pavers aren't the only solution to complying with SuDS, though, and there are some other options on the Susdrain website.

That sounds about right. You can almost certainly reduce that by 1/3rd by switching the pump on and off with a timer if you want. There are problems if the pump is off for too long, as sludge can start to settle around the holes that the air comes out of, increasing the back pressure and stressing the diaphragms, but when I looked around I found that at least one system on the market uses a 30 minutes on, 15 minutes off timer and that system uses the same sort of pump. I've made a simple timer that fits inside a watertight single gang socket box, with a solid state relay that's timed to switch the power from the socket on and off to this time schedule. I've yet to install it, but the hope is that it will reduce the power consumption without adversely affecting the life of the pump.

Clean water should be fine to get the right back pressure, so with luck you should get a reasonably good reading from the meter over 24 hours. Inside these pumps there's just a pair of coils driving a semi-linear spring-mounted, armature back and forth, and this armature drives the centre of a diaphragm. To get power pulses at a reasonable frequency, the incoming mains is just half wave rectified, so the coils are only energised for one half of each cycle. It makes for a fairly reliable design, as there are no bearings, commutators or what have you, but the PF is pretty dreadful from the inductance of the coils, not to mention the fact the things only draw current for one half cycle!

The PF will be well off unity, as these things are near enough an inductive load, one that only draws power each half cycle, as well, because they run at 25 Hz. There was no PF capacitor that I could see when I took ours apart to change the diaphragms, either. A decent power meter should do a good enough job of reading true power, but it may not, as the coils are driven from diodes, so only draw power for half a cycle. The supply meter should easily be able to read true power, though, so reading the meter should give you a fairly accurate estimate of power. The power drawn does vary with load, which is back pressure dependent, so the tank needs to be full of liquid to the normal operating depth to get a proper reading.

I doubt you need to go down more than about 300mm to eliminate the risk of pipes freezing, based on some measurements I did for fun some years ago. I built a weather station, with a wireless link to the house, and had a couple of spare temperature sensor inputs. As the thing was sat on a post hammered into the ground, I decide to fit a sensor about 300mm into soil, just to see how cold it got. This was a few years ago, and the soil at that depth never dropped below about 6 deg C, even when we'd had a spell of very cold weather (well below zero) for a few days. My guess would be that perhaps the top 100mm or so of soil might possibly freeze in prolonged cold weather.

Plus the challenge of trying to compare tenders when all of them quote on a different basis and to differing standards, with varying lists of what's included and excluded. I found comparing quotes a bit of a nightmare, made worse because I had to go around chasing up many for details of their quote. A couple even refused to give me details about things like the airtightness level or the mitigation measures for thermal bridging at the foundation/wall junction. Looking back, it was probably second only to dealing with the utility companies in terms of frustration.

The water regs require that the stopcock be a "serviceable valve", hence the reason for ball valves being non-compliant, whereas a conventional stopcock is compliant because you can take it apart to repair it. Quite why one would ever want to repair a stopcock, rather than just replace it, is beyond me, but the regs seem to have just inherited that definition from the days when changing washers, replacing packing glands etc was normal for domestic-scale stuff. The way some water companies interpret the water regs into their own rules seems to vary a lot. The water regs are as Nick describes, with no requirement for any particular configuration on the consumer side, beyond the incoming stopcock, double check valve etc. Having read through the wording in the water regs, it's not exactly 100% clear, and I think some water companies have taken the view that there needs to be additional double check valves all over the place. All three of the outside taps we fitted had double check valves anyway - they are easy to spot as they have an inter-valve drain plug on the underside and seem to be marked as WRAS approved.

A proper "stop cock" is also a non-return valve, as the piston and washer is "supposed" to be able to float up and down when the handle is fully open, so preventing backflow that could contaminate the main supply. If you take a proper one apart, then you should find that the washer is fitted to a small floating piston than is located in a drilling in the part that rotates and is screwed down. The idea was that with no incoming flow, or under backflow, the little piston would drop down and close off the connection from the possibility of reverse flow. In practice I doubt that these old-design stop cocks ever really worked well as NRVs after a few years, every one I've ever taken apart has had the small piston pretty much jammed in place. Now you're usually required to fit a proper NRV (a double check valve) on the incoming supply after the stop cock for back flow prevention anyway, most probably because it's well known that the standard design of stop cock doesn't work as an NRV very well, as it's a very old design that goes back to the early days of mains water supplies. Given this, I'm not sure why there is still insistence that a conventional stop cock is used as the main isolating valve. My personal view is that a ball valve would be just as reliable (maybe more so) but a ball valve isn't a proper stop cock as far as the water regs are concerned as it's classed as a non-serviceable valve i.e, you can't repair it if it fails (barking mad logic, when you're dealing with a ball valve design that's inherently far more reliable, but rules are rules.............).

I'd just use a ball valve, which is what I've done. Easier to turn on and off and just as reliable. I went a bit OTT and used stainless steel ones to isolate the outside taps, and they seem fine. As an aside, I've found that MDPE for outside taps (we have three, two run of one pipe, one off another) is pretty frost-tolerant. I used it primarily because experience on the farm was that whenever anything froze up solid the MDPE pipe never seemed to come to any harm from it. The same seems true here, I've got a tap fitted to a post with an uninsulated run of MDPE and it's frozen a few times now but seems to just tolerate it without damage.