WisteriaMews

Are you running the tank purely from solar / grid electricity, or do you have it connected to an ASHP. We have planning for a passive house and I was thinking of a Sunamp, but have been put off by all the stories and the price, so am now thinking of an OSO running from solar / off peak grid electricity.

All of the quotes were from planning drawings. That's one of the reasons I expect the quotes to go up when they get to building regs and the lintels required over openings etc ... Per @TerryE you need to be aware of cladding costs. We're looking at a mix of metal standing seam and charred timber and it is looking like it will cost not much less than the timber frame installed.

I received some quotes before Christmas from 3 frame suppliers, including MBC, and the average was £800 per m2. The advice I got is that these were initial quotes and when you got into the detail of adding the necessary structural elements (e.g. the odd steel) it would nudge up a bit.

I'm not quite at the stage yet to plan the cables on my self build, but puncturing the airtight membrane is something I've half started to think about. Do you have any tips on how to avoid them? As I said I've not given it serious thought, but mains electric, connection from the solar panels and TV aerial needs to come in. Power for the outside sockets, lights, security cameras and alarm need to go back out. It's adding up to a worrying list.

Attached are two more images showing the inside of the bike store and the steel above the door.

We have a bike store just to the left of our front door behind the wooden doors in the photo. It is recessed into the house with a bedroom above. The floor joists of the bedroom form the roof the the bike store and are well insulated with Kingspan between and below the joists. However, the interior walls of the bike store which are cold, effectively become the inside walls of one corner of the bedroom as they rise up through the building. They create a cold corner in the bedroom as there is no thermal break in the wall. Hopefully that makes sense as a description of the issue. I was thinking of cladding the inside of the bike store with insulated plasterboard to try and improve the situation. I appreciate insulated plasterboard doesn't have the best performance, but I'm limited on space if I still want to fit bikes in the store (which I do). I could omit the plasterboard and use that thickness to add more insulation, but I think leaving raw insulation would get damaged. I'm also not sure it is advised to leave exposed Kingspan? We are also likely to sell in the next year (to fund the next self build) so want to do something that is DIY and not too expensive. I had three questions I was hoping the forum could help with: 1. Does this sound worthwhile doing? 2. I'll add another photo below. There is a gas pipe, two meter boxes and a couple of other things which mean I won't be able to cover all of the bike store, probably around 80/90%. Would that still be worthwhile? 3. There is also a big steel over the door. Should I try to cover that or leave it exposed due to the condensation risk? Thank you!

Thanks for the suggestions. We're still in planning so it will be a while before I have any concrete updates, but will post back when I do

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Thanks. Their website only mentions slate & tile roofs. As you suggest a call if probably to see if their system can work with metals roofs.

Good to know GSE integrated panels can be made to work with standing seam. None of the technical details I've found so far mention metals roofs but I'll take another look.

Do you have any details of the integrated system you used that you could share?

Thank you. We've looked at these (effectively) stick on panels and ruled them out due to a combination of low efficiency, short warranty, price and difficulty in replacing if needed. We'd like to go for standard size panels which are integrated into the roof but it doesn't seem very common!

We're hoping to soon submit for planning on a new Passive House in a conservation area. We suspect we'll have an easier ride through planning if we show integrated/ flush solar panels on the roof. Integrated panels on tile roofs are pretty common (we have them on our current roof) but we can only find one example (attached image) of integrated panels on a metal standing seam roof which is what we are going for. Has anyone integrated panels on a standing seam roof? I'm hoping for an indication of whether it is doable/ isn't cost prohibitive before stating we can do it in planning.

No experience of approaching Nationwide directly, but we remortgaged with them via a broker to release equity to buy our plot. The broker said he fully disclosed the reason and Nationwide were fine. This was ~12 months ago.

Thanks. If you paid that 10 years ago I suspect our quote is reasonable. I managed to speak to someone in a neighbouring borough who had one done last year (?) and they paid about the same as our quote. I thought a desktop study should be a lot less but it appears not!