Jeremy Harris

This was the first time I'd used lead-free, because my old roll of 60/40 tin/lead plumbing solder ran out early on. The stuff is horrible to use, really, really horrible. It's non-syntactic, as you say, Nick, so the very slightest movement during cooling causes it to crystallise. Same with cold shock, no more wiping a joint whilst hot with a bit of wet towel to clean the flux etc and make it look better, or you risk the same. TBH, I understand why they've removed lead from solder, but realistically I don't think the people making the rules thought through how very little solder is exposed to water inside a pipe joint and did a proper risk analysis. Given that we still have older houses with solid lead piping, and we know the risk from that is pretty small, unless you live in an area with water with a very low pH, I'm of the view that forcing the use of a type of solder that is many times more likely to cause joint failure is not wise. I'll freely admit that I have never stopped using tin/lead solder for electrical work, because 99% of the bits of kit I've repaired in the past 5 or 6 years have been faults caused by broken solder joints, and it's always the lead-free stuff that's the cause. Luckily I can still buy (imported) 60/40 solder for home use, and that is orders of magnitude more reliable and easy to use than the lead-free stuff.

TBH, I don't know. As we're moving I'm staying out of it! All I know is that the EHO has requested 14 days of continuous monitoring by an approved air quality sampling system, located in a fixed position through the 14 day period, and will only act if the air pollution level recorded exceeds a particular figure (not even sure what that is). This is contrary to the complaint, which is that the smoke emissions interfere with the right of residents to enjoy their homes, and constitutes a nuisance, and should be dealt with by him on that basis.

FWIW, I found that the combination of a 50mm deep service space behind the plasterboard, plus the space allowed behind units, the bath etc, was such that I could easily just sweep the plastic pipe around into a gentle bend to come out perpendicular to the wall by the time it needed to go through something like the back of a cabinet. I then transitioned from plastic to copper using plastic push fit valves, that when in things like the cabinets that house the washbasins, sinks etc are pretty much flush with the back of the cabinet interior, so you don't see the plastic pipe. It did mean having slots in the plasterboard behind units where the plastic pipes came out, but these are hidden from sight and the guys doing the plastering didn't have any problem just cutting slots to allow the pipes to poke out. I'd left the plastic pipes too long, and taped over the ends with red or blue electrical tape, to keep the muck out and show which was hot and cold.

The issue of HETAS regs is a red herring, as it makes no reference at all to the actual emissions from any device, all it does is stipulate an installation method, and show that, under carefully controlled test conditions, a HETAS approved device will conform to some very, very lax regulations. Smoke nuisance is an entirely separate thing, and nothing to do with stove installation, approval or anything else. If the very best stove in the world is located where it causes a nuisance then it's in the wrong place and should not be used, irrespective of the approvals it has. It's no different to anything else in that respect. Say I buy a fully approved portable generator, then run it so it causes a noise or pollution problem - just because the thing's approved doesn't stop it being capable of causing a nuisance if it's run in the wrong place or at the wrong time. Our PC have been trying to get our local EHO to investigate our air quality problems, but frankly the EHO just wants to dodge the issue, rather than properly investigate. I strongly suspect he has a wood burning stove himself, he's that apathetic about addressing the pretty bad pollution problems we have from time to time. Last I heard the PC were looking at whether to buy/hire some air quality monitoring kit, but apparently they've hit a road block with the EHO, in that he will only accept 14 days of continuous monitoring, no more, no less, and it may well be that the monitoring set up could miss a bad pollution event, because whenever there's a bit of wind about the problem literally gets blown away.

Seems prices have risen! I think we paid under £500, for the lot. IIRC it was £485, and that was with our LABC, a full plans submission, with four or five inspections, including the completion inspection and certificate.

The mesh won't make any difference to the harmful particulates, as they are incredibly tiny - tiny enough to pass into your bloodstream through your lungs, and beyond. The reason we have health concerns when our ancestors used fire apparently without harm, are many and varied. Firstly, we live a great deal longer, so the effect of exposure to toxins is greater. There are a large number of conditions that are inherited (and I carry genes for one of them) where the condition only manifests itself after prime reproductive age. These evolved because we didn't need to evolve to combat them - few people lived beyond the age of 40 or so, even into the Middle Ages. We are also now living in larger conurbations, at a much greater population density, and we live in smaller family units. Whereas our ancient ancestors may have had one fire for a whole tribe or settlement, we have many thousands of them in towns and cities. Temperature does have a big effect on the type of emissions, but burning hotter isn't always better. It resolves some of the toxic compound problems that cool burning, in the presence of moisture, create (things like creosote, for example) but it can increase the emissions of NOx and smaller particulates. The main issue is that wood stoves have become popular in settlements, and frankly that's where the higher risks are. If you live in open countryside, then at least it's only yourself and your own family that are likely to be exposed, not dozens of people around you. I've mentioned it before, but our village fills with smoke on cold, still, days from just three houses, out of around 400, that persist in burning wood. If those houses were not in the bottom of a valley, very close to many other houses, then their wood burning would largely be just their problem, and frankly I'm of the view that people should have the freedom to do as they wish, as long as it doesn't cause potential harm to others. I view things like smoking, drinking, etc in the same way - as long as people who indulge don't put me at risk then they should be allowed to do as they wish.

The mark up on some stuff is surprisingly high, and not always on the expensive stuff, either. I bought some blocks, pavers and stone for around 2/3rds the best price our very good local BM could supply them for, and this was the same BM who really tried to price-match online stuff, and was generally between 25% and 50% cheaper than the "big name" BMs. With the pavers for the drive, I remember the conversation. I'd found a source online, they were a Marshalls product, so should have been available at every BM in the land, and I range our local BM and asked if he could get me a price. He rang back, apologised, and said that the price I was paying was less than they could buy them for, so would I mind letting him know the name of our supplier!

There are many pollutant sources from burning wood, and to a large extent what you get depends on the temperature of combustion and the moisture content. The first is the toxic gases, which tend to be worse with damp wood, where a host of chemical reactions take place, together with the moisture, to release a wide range of compounds, some of which are carcinogenic, some of which are just toxic and some of which are reasonably harmless. The second pollutant, and in my view the most insidious, as it's not readily observed, are the very fine particulates. These tend to be more significant when burning very dry wood, just because often the particle size will be smaller. In health terms, the visible smoke is a nuisance, and may make you cough a bit, but because of our reaction to smoke we tend to try and avoid it, plus it is mainly pretty large particles (which is why we can see it) and they tend not to penetrate well into closed areas. It's the "invisible smoke" that mainly presents the risk of smaller particulates being spread around, and we now know that these are potentially far more harmful than we first thought - it's why things like diesel vehicles now have particulate traps, and why power stations have something very similar. These very tiny particulates can carry toxins across the lung tissue barrier and into our blood, and from there directly into all our organs, which is the reason there is so much concern about them.

Like Dave, our conical BioPure is set in concrete at the base, which encapsulates moulded-in lugs that act as anchors. The manufacturer offer a ground anchor kit, made up of chains and galvanised angle, but I much preferred the idea of it being held down by their alternative recommended method, the concrete ring around the base. The bottom 1/3rd of our tank is below the water table all the time, and we had to pump the water out of the hole before we put the tank and concrete in.

I knocked up a spreadsheet for doing gravity retaining wall calcs a few years ago, as I did all the design calcs for our big (3m high, 35m long) retaining wall, and looked at several methods, including using gabions. In the end I needed an SE's sign off, so "came to an arrangement" with a very helpful and friendly local SE. There are significant liability issues with any retaining wall over a metre or so high, but up to 1.2m I think you're fine with a DIY design. If you wanted me to run a gabion design through the calcs, then I could probably do it this coming weekend, but I'd need some details of the soil type, the max allowable bearing load of the ground under the wall, whether there is any additional imposed load above from a slope, path, drive etc. Running the calcs is maybe half an hours work after that.

Indeed, they do. I started looking into this around 10 or more years ago, after we'd been living in our old house (in a small and rural Wiltshire village) for about 5 years or so and had experienced several "smog events", where the valley filled up with a mix of fog and woodsmoke on cold, still days. These "smog events" still happen; we had one a few weeks ago, and there's not a thing you can do to stop the pollution getting into your house. Luckily, neither of us has had any noticeable health effects from this, but the elderly lady over the road was taken to hospital the morning after the last event, and when I saw her the other day she told me that the cause was the smog in the valley. The funny thing is that she was one of those burning wood until around 8 or 9 years ago. She stopped, and had a gas boiler fitted, only because the price of wood here was so high. She's now a bit like a reformed smoker in terms of going around the village telling people of the evils of wood burning. Apparently, the same "smog events" used to occur in the village we're moving to, but the PC and a group of residents got pretty active about stopping them, just by repeatedly pointing out the harm they cause. They got bonfires stopped too, because, apparently, every time someone living low in the valley lit one on a still day a similar thing would happen, and the valley would fill with smoke.

Funny thing about a kitchen costing about 60% of your car. My car cost me £21k, the kitchen cost just under £14k (including all the appliances)............................

In our case the insurers had no change in premium for any rebuild cost under £500k, so I just let them set it at £500k, rather than argue about it. However, what you say makes a hell of a lot of sense, as there's is NO WAY I'm going to do this again! If the worst happens, we'll move into a hotel and let a builder re-build the house.....................

That's a very good point. When we insured our new house, the insurers questioned the rebuild value. I told them that we'd built the house, and knew how much it cost to build, so had set the rebuild value at that cost plus inflation plus demolition cost. They seemed to think the rebuild cost should have been a fair bit higher, and as it didn't change the premium at all, I just let them get on with it........................

ST has cracked it I think. To thirds of your gas bill is delivering hot water, and 40 kWh/ month for heating in this recent cold weather isn't too shabby for the spec of house. Our heating estimate was around 1 kWh/day, with the better insulation level we have, and we're only lower than this because we're in a very sheltered location. Your heating looks to be around 1.25 kWh/day, which, given the cold weather and the poorer wall insulation seems pretty reasonable. For comparison, our 90m2 old house uses around 4 to 8 kWh/day for heating at this time of the year, and around the same as your new house for DHW, provided by a gas combi that is reasonably efficient.

It depends on the true house spec to a large extent, rather than the theoretical spec. You mention very good floor, wall and roof insulation and 3G windows, but what are the true U values? Also, you don't mention ventilation, and this can often be the major cause of heat loss in a reasonably well insulated house. How airtight is your build, what's the air leakage rate and do you have MVHR? As an example, our house would need more than double the heat input if we didn't have MVHR, as the ventilation heat loss is such a large part of the overall loss.

I wrote blog entry a few weeks ago looking at the rough costs of architects, project managers, consultants etc and reckoned that we'd saved around £50k by not using any. Someone pointed out, quite rightly, that I'd sort of double accounted for some of the potential saving, which I accept, but I still think we saved around £40k to £45k as a consequence of my efforts. What's more, unlike the cost savings from my direct labour during the build (I've estimated I worked for around £2/hour on that!) the cost savings by me doing the design, drawings, planning permission, building control, project management etc worked out at closer to £30/hour, more than I get from my pension, and so a very worthwhile saving indeed.

Funnily enough, I've been looking at this. So far I've done around a dozen (free) thermographic reports for local people, keen on finding ways to reduce their energy bills. Not hard to do, but it does require the right conditions (cold and dry weather with a heated house) to get the best images from the thermal imaging camera and so produce a useful set of recommendations. The worrying thing was going around a local new build estate. A planning condition imposed meant that these were all supposed to be built to the old Code for Sustainable Homes Level 4. A wander around shows loads of missing wall insulation, cold bridging around doors and windows and a generally poor level of performance. I doubt they even met building regs, let alone CfSH L4, in reality. Thermography offers a pretty foolproof way of demonstrating whether a builder has, in fact, built a house to the claimed thermal loss standard, and I think the more it's used the better informed buyers will be.

The snag is, that inflating the profit will just end up creating disillusionment for budding self-builders. They will get enthused by the idea of saving a couple of hundred thousand pounds from watching this programme, come to a forum like this and then realise that it doesn't work like that for most people, and that unless you're lucky enough to get a cheap (or free) plot you're unlikely to save a worthwhile amount of money at all by self-building. We decided to self-build to get exactly the sort of house we wanted, not to save money. I suspect the same applies to the majority of self-builders, they do it to get what they want, not to make a big profit.

I did the same. One problem I did encounter was that some of electrical components I would have liked to buy (to be able get the VAT back) were only sold to electricians with the appropriate bit of paper. This stopped me doing a couple of things the way I wanted to, as getting our (non-VAT registered) electricians (we used two, one for the external work, one a lot later for the house electrical installation) to buy this stuff would have added 20% to the price of what was already a reasonably pricey item. Similarly, we found that the big name electrical merchants locally were selling stuff (even to those with a "trade account") at really silly prices. We tried to stick to reasonable quality, UK made, stuff, avoided the Chinese made stuff that places like Screwfix sell under their own brand name, but bought on-line instead. There was a massive saving by doing this. I recall giving a list of all the stuff we wanted, right down to cable, clips, Wagos etc, to three local electrical merchants locally. The prices from them all came back at around £4k or more. We ended up buying the same brand name items online for less than £2k. Even our second electrician was surprised at how much cheaper we'd bought stuff than he could on his account with one of the local people. I've no doubt the same applies to plumbing parts, and that if you know what you want you can probably buy on line for a lot less than the local plumbers merchant charges. Finally, some of the builders merchants are just a joke in terms of prices. I signed up with the big names locally at first (Jewsons, Travis Perkins etc) but our smaller, independent, local merchant massively undercut them every time, and would even try and price-match online suppliers. And the local merchant provided a very high level of customer service. It's not an accident that they are the only builder's merchant with a link from our blog - they earned that by consistently giving good service, not something I can say about any of the big names.

I remember writing much the same years ago on the other place. We were plot hunting and I was looking at the massive difference in plot prices in different areas. A bit of quick and dirty analysis showed that when the balance of employment moved away from manufacturing towards the service sector, jobs started to disappear in the North, West and Midlands and increase in London and the South. Some areas experienced mass migrations of the younger population, as they moved away to find work. I remember when I was caving regularly 20 odd miles up the valley from where Nick here lives, in South Wales, about 30 years ago. There were whole villages up there stood empty, with very few young people, as the pits had closed and the young men had mainly moved away. At that time it was all a bit strange, as many of the younger women had stayed behind with their parents. I well remember the fact that young girls outnumbered young men in the pub we used to drink in by about ten to one. Anyway, this migration of jobs is, I believe the root cause of the "housing shortage", I'm not even convinced we have a massive housing shortage, I think we just happen to have houses where there are no jobs, and not enough houses where there are jobs. Successive governments have failed to address this, despite a lot of money being spent to encourage employers to move to places that were formerly manufacturing or mining centres. Some of it is the chicken and egg problem. No employer likes to train people, they would rather be somewhere where there is a pool of people with the skills they need. Before an employer will shift to somewhere with cheaper land prices, grants etc, they will want an assurance that they can recruit staff with the right skills quickly, to get their relocated business up and running as quickly as possible. The flip side if that no one will bother to learn skills if there's no call for them in the area where they live. Government has had a programme of moving public sector jobs out of London and the South East for a couple of decades or more now - my last job involved relocating 1400 people and there is a "forbidden zone" that has been around for a very long time where you are not allowed to create a new Civil Service job, and it's well defined; London, South West as far as the Hampshire/Wiltshire border, North East as far as the Kent border. The result has been the shift of fairly big public sector centres to places like Newcastle (HMRC), Bristol (Defence Procurement) etc. The idea was that the private sector would do the same, with a bit of encouragement, but that just hasn't happened. The private sector looked at the costs the government incurred in relocating all those jobs (when I was doing it the average business cost of relocating a job was about £30k per job) and decided it was unaffordable). I can fully understand their view, and what's more, when the public sector places relocated only around 70% of staff tend to move, which meant there was a pool of people ready to take on private sector jobs in the vacated areas. Somehow there needs to be more done to make areas where land is cheap more attractive to employers. Crack that problem and I think a fair bit of the housing crisis goes away.

These programmes are all fiction to some extent (and I do have a little bit of "inside knowledge" - look at the avatar I use here). They are primarily entertainment, and entertainment in a competitive area of programming at the moment. There has been a steady growth in programmes like this ever since GD, and they are all fighting for a share of the viewing figures to justify the making of another series - it's how production companies work (and again, I've seen this from the way RDF operate, to quote just one production company). Exaggerating house values has been normal for decades in many areas. Down here I don't think houses ever actually sell for the Estate Agents asking price, but all people will remember is that asking price. Few bother to check afterwards and find out what a house actually sold for, so there is a myth that houses here are worth more than they are. I think this may change in future, as with sites like Zoopla etc showing the actual selling price for nearby properties (they interrogate the Land Registry sales data I think) buyers can now check on the reality of the price an Estate Agent is asking. In the meantime, I think you have to take the supposed profit that Charlie Luxton ALWAYS makes a point of stressing as being exaggerated BS, intended as a bit of puff, and a hook to keep people watching the series. After all, would the programme be popular if it showed reality, with self-builders just about breaking even?

FWIW, my experience with the VoA was that the people you talk to on the phone don't seem to be 100% conversant with the law, but are quite reasonable in terms of accepting a logical and sound argument as to why a particular point should be relevant. My particular experience was with the way they calculate external area as a means of determining value, and in particular the way that they accepted my point that a passive house would often have much thicker than normal walls, and so the (rather odd) way though go about determining value from external gross floor area would be flawed in our case, because the usable room area inside the house (which is really what plays a part in determining area) would be less that that which their "standard formula" gives. They accepted this without question - I just sent them copies of the detailed drawings, annotated with room floor areas, as evidence. I'm reasonably sure that this, together with the absence of normal central heating (and no heating at all on the first floor) contributed to our house getting put into Band E, when I fully expected it to be in Band G! The two houses further up the hill, behind us, are smaller in net internal floor area, were both built around 15 years ago and are both in Band G. I rather think I was pretty lucky. The VoA put in their letter to me that I could appeal against the banding, and included a description as to how to do this, but to be honest I felt that to do so would be wholly unreasonable, in the circumstances....................... One tip for others. Apparently you are far more likely to get a reasonable Council Tax valuation if you make the application for a change to the register directly to the VoA, rather than hang on and wait for your local authority to do so. You get the opportunity when you make your own request to suggest the band you think your house should be in and you can submit your own evidence to support this with the application. If your LA does it, they will almost certainly try to push for a higher band, I think.

The only thing I'd watch, in your case, Dave, is whether the case law that defines what is a rateable hereditament applies in Scotland. A check on the original rating act, as amended by a series of acts later, would be needed to see if it only applied to England and Wales, or whether it also applied to Scotland.

The case law is clear, if there is no electricity or potable water supply it is not a rateable hereditament and therefore Council Tax cannot be charged. Well worth pursuing this with the council, quoting the relevant case law from earlier in this thread and providing evidence that the electricity supply and water supply have been removed.