Jeremy Harris

Welcome Colin, really, really glad you found our new home!

The heating requirement difference between those two figures could easily be 30% or more, as there is a sharply non-linear impact on heating requirement with decreased U value. By the time you get to a U value of around 0.1 there may well be no heating requirement at all, for example.

That's exactly my conclusion, every time I've had an issue it's been the "unknown unknowns" that have caught me out. Our borehole saga is the classic, well over a year trying to find the cause of the problem based on assumptions that the spec we'd been given (and paid for) was accurate, only to find in the end that the hole had been drilled 17m short and the supposed problem of the bottom of it being full of packed sand that I'd been trying to solve for over a year didn't exist. Added well over a year to our build, that little saga did. I've just spent two hours copying and formatting the 9 page thread from Ebuild into a pdf that's now in part 31 as part of a blog entry: http://forum.buildhub.org.uk/ipb/applications/core/interface/file/attachment.php?id=264

Worth remembering that the "Building Regs" Approved Documents are not the law, they are a suggested way of doing thing that MIGHT comply with the law. They don't exclude other ways of showing compliance, nor are they a proscriptive set of regulations, they are only guidance. The law is far more loosely worded, and doesn't usually have things like dimensions in, it just states the intention.

It seems to be turned off inside Ebuild, as far as I can see. I'm having to manually re-load attachments from my PC to here, takes hours to find them and then load them, it's now slowing down my blog transfer a lot, to around 40 mins per entry.

It's not enforceable. I had this out with my building control officer early on, pointing out that zoned heating was pointless. He agreed. We have a single zone and no problem with compliance.

If you have a brick outer skin then that will allow you to get away with using a low decrement delay insulation, so any closed panel system with a high performance insulation will give you a pretty good figure. There are 190mm SIPs panels available now, I believe, and they are probably pretty good. I doubt you need more than a 25mm ventilated cavity behind the brick skin if using a decent closed panel system. Ideally pick something that's fairly cold bridge free, hence the suggestion of SIPs, as for walls they are better than a single frame timber structure, because they don't have all the cold bridging through the timber frame.

If you're intending to self build and live in the house for long enough for the HMRC to not suspect you're a "serial self-builder" then the self-build VAT process is slightly more beneficial in terms of your overall tax bill. It does mean you don't get to reclaim VAT on materials you have purchased to include in the build until the end, but overall you're not going to have half as much hassle as you would setting up a company, borrowing money, doing the accountancy needed for that company to sell its output to a director at zero rate (not sure how you'd do that) and pay all the fees and company taxes, plus an accountant. The self-build scheme means you can get goods and services that are supplied as a package zero rated, so you don't pay the VAT in the first place. Basically, any VAT registered individual or company you have working on the build (but not surveyors, architects etc) can zero rate materials and labour. I suspect our build might not be untypical. We had around £70k of ground works and services work, including a water borehole, and that was all zero rated, so we didn't pay VAT on it. We had a build package of foundations and frame, and again that was zero rated. We had windows supplied and fitted, so that was zero rated. We had the major landscaping, drive, soakaways etc zero rated. All told, on a build that's cost over £200k (excluding the land) we have a total VAT reclaim on materials we purchased of around £11k.

I was adamant we weren't going to have any lawn at the new house, but SWMBO put her foot down. I agreed, on the one absolute condition, that I would buy her a light and easy to use cordless mower and SHE would mow it. I duly went and got a Makita cordless mower (handy, as it uses the same lithium battery packs as all my tools, so I could buy just a bare unit). Madam approved, it's very light, dead easy to use etc. How often has she cut the grass? About 3 I think, the other dozen or so cuts so far have been me. I've even dropped hints that "the grass could do with being cut" and they fall on deaf ears, so I end up having to do it, again. I HATE cutting grass, and gardening in general. If I'd had a choice the small garden would just have been gravel over weed membrane, perhaps with a few pot plants............. As it needs cutting now, and as it's going to rain later, I suppose I'd better go and cut it AGAIN. PS: The Makita cordless mower is nice and light and ideal for a small bit of fairly well-kept grass. Expensive, even as a bare machine, but when I bought it I thought the price was worth paying if it meant I didn't need to drag the old petrol mower out to cut the grass.

Just ring them, they will take the dimensions from you over the phone, and the spec of the filter material (G4 or whatever, should be written somewhere in the manual or on the filter) and make custom filters for much less than the price of the OEM ones. In our case I measured the Genvex filters, (they are different sizes and filtration specs for inlet and outlet) and asked what the price would be. It was cheaper to buy a few, so I ordered 5 sets of each (10 filters in all) for less than the price of a single set of genuine Genvex ones, including postage. They were made to order so took a couple of weeks to arrive, but look identical to the Genvex units, even down to having exactly the same pattern and colour.

I bought a load of filters for our MVHR from these people: http://www.jasunfiltration.com/ They were custom made to fit and were still around 1/5th the price of the Genvex ones, and look identical. They will also make a custom stainless frame if you give the the dimensions and this can then be filled with the off-the-roll filtration media, which is even cheaper still in the long run.

Welcome, a knock down and rebuild sounds like it makes sense. It seems daunting, but demolition only usually takes around a day, and then you have a clean slate to have the house you want, and you get the benefit of the VAT saving.

Welcome back.

Welcome back it is, I'm sure, as it's not the name of the place that matters, but the people that hang out here. Bit like your local pub changing the sign outside but still having the same regulars.......................

Welcome Ferdinand, nice to see you've found us all. We put a heck of a lot of effort into trying to set this up to be a long-lasting and secure forum, and there is a brief history of how it came about here: It is currently run by a properly formed association of members, 14 people in all, with a committee of five. We have a formal constitution, records of key discussions and decisions (hosting, software, domain choice, etc) and elected officers in accordance with the normal rules for an association of members. The Forum Foundation Group is the formal title of that association and it only had the aim of collecting funds, setting up the new forum and then three months from that date will form a new permanent management body to run the forum, on the principle that it is a non-profit making (but clearly not non-income generating) community operated enterprise. The Forum Foundation Group will transfer management responsibility to the new managing entity and then will be dissolved, with any excess funds passing to the new management entity. You may have noticed that the forum is running on a fairly high-end commercial software package and is hosted with significant capacity to spare. The aim was to ensure that it was established with a robust foundation that wouldn't need changing in the short to medium term if traffic levels were to grow (and I have a feeling that they might!). The correct title of this forum is "BuildHub.org.uk", to distinguish it from the dormant website that refers to itself as "The Buildhub". The advice we have is that this is adequate protection, and was the mechanism used by another very-well known open source site and product to distinguish itself from another with an almost identical name.

Welcome! Glad you managed to find us OK, we were a bit worried last week that we'd put all this effort into creating this forum and then no one would join!

Welcome back, it's really great to see so many friendly names from Ebuild finding us.

Welcome, glad you got the nozzle OK, I had no way of contacting you or even getting your details, as the PM system was shut down when Ebuild went down, but luckily it seems that many people from ebuild are managing to find this place we've set up as a replacement.

Yes, with the PIR triggered units. My neighbour bought a battery powered unit (I think it came from somewhere like Toolstation) about 18 months ago. It looks like a PIR triggered outside light, with an LED floodlight, but has a small camera and DVR internally. Unlike the motion sensing on the DVR (which is what I'm using at the moment), the camera is only powered on when the PIR detects motion. If it happens to be dark the LED floodlight turns on as well as the camera and DVR. It records in blocks of around 30 seconds to 1 minute, I think, and the quality was pretty good. IIRC it was quite expensive when he bought it (I gave him a hand fitting it to the front of his garage) but there are cheaper ones around now, I'm sure. There is a problem with the recording being held inside the unit, so scrotes that realise they've been videoed could nick the thing, but it wouldn't be too hard to hide a unit somewhere. I have a spare car dash board DVR, the one that was fitted to the Prius that got written off a couple of years ago, and have thought of fitting that into a waterproof case, with a battery, solar panel and a PIR switch. The car dash cams all have a tiny current draw from the car supply all the time, (minute, a few uA) and automatically start recording when the ignition power lead goes live. It would be easy to just wire a PIR switch to turn 12V on to what would normally be the ignition wire, which would trigger recording for as long as the PIR was triggered. I have a 12V PIR module here that draws just 5uA when idle, and has a 12V relay that switches on when the unit triggers. It would make it easy to adapt a car dash cam in this way, with a standby power that is so low that a small rechargeable 12V battery and solar panel would run the thing reliably for a few years, I think.

I've looked at doing it, but the power demand for "always on" cameras is just far too high. I just have a single hi-res outdoor camera, modified to take a small 50mW 5.8HGz video transmitter, and the current drawn at 12V is around 90mA or so. That might not sound much, but if I were to make it solar powered I'd need at least a 20 to 25W solar panel to power it reliably, plus a battery capable of delivering a usable capacity of at least 1.5 to 2 Ah at 12 V, which realistically means using a battery of around 5 to 6 Ah minimum to allow for a reasonably long life. The best solution for very low power is to use the PIR triggered cameras with built in DVR's, that record to an SD card only when motion is detected. Making one of those solar power should be pretty straightforward.

I wish we'd tried to barter on price for windows, in the light of some of the prices people have been quoted recently. Internorm quoted us a ludicrous price, somewhere North of £23k including cills and fitting, against around £8.5k for very similar windows from Munster. I've since heard that people have had far better prices from Internorm that we were quoted, so perhaps, now there's a bit more competition in the market they are all realising that they have to be more realistic about pricing.

They buy in bulk from Kore, and if our experience is anything to go by they seem to over-order from time to time. We had a big stack of left-over 100mm sheets sat on site for a couple of weeks, until I suggested insulating our garage with them.

EPS is specific in that it refers to Expanded PolyStyrene foam, but it comes in a wide range of densities and compressive strength ratings. The number after "EPS" gives the compressive strength for 10% compression (too much "give" for a foundation) in N/mm², so EPS70 (the very light packaging type foam) is 70N/mm² at 10% compression, whilst the strongest stuff around is probably EPS300, at 300N/mm². Some types have additives mixed in before the foam is steam blown, like graphite, which can improve the thermal properties and change the colour (this is often what makes some foam look grey, or have grey speckles in it). It's all the same stuff though, in the sense of being the same type of plastic beads foamed in the same way with steam, that both creates the foam and bonds the beads together into a solid block.

Here cuts happen several times a year and most are only an hour or two and not really an issue. We have had much longer duration cuts though, two years ago we lost power for two days in winter. Not a problem for our current house, as I have a small inverter that will run the gas combi boiler (the inverter connects to the car, so I just run the car whenever we want to boiler to run), so we have hot water and some heating, and we have a gas cooker and an open gas coal-effect fire, so the only real loss is lights, and I have a collection of home-made LEDs that are connected to LiPo battery packs and work well. MVHR isn't an issue if the power goes off, you can always crack a window open to get some ventilation. The main problem with the new house is that all the cooking is electric, so we'll probably have to get a small camping stove. The other problem for longer power cuts is the water pump, we can go for a day or so without the pump running, but we'd have no hot water (the Sunamp needs power and the PV stops working when there's a power cut) and we'd need at least a 2kW generator to run the water pump for maybe ten to twenty minutes or so a day.

We'd spotted you looking a bit lost on another place, seemingly searching in vain for a Welsh plumber................. Welcome back!