MikeSharp01

Trying to be my usual efficient self, not always a good idea, I have been working out how much floor boarding I need and laying delivery out against the build sequence and I think I have hit a snag. I need to board out the first floor, largely, to put the ridge beam elements in place so it will be open to the elements until the rafters & sarking are up. Have just tried to find floor boarding I can leave out in all weathers and the best they can do is 'water resistant' just how resistant is that then? I might be able to cover it but there is no way it won't get wet! Is there an alternative I can use, I don't want to OSB it if I can avoid it as that will be wasteful. Any thoughts.

That was one of the design considerations - as in it never needs to furl, one of the designers (inventors) was on R4 Today this morning and he mentioned that it can work in very high winds so keeps on generating even though the more traditional turbines have had to shut down.

Yes and no - the idea looks like it was to accept wind from any direction including up and down so if you put it on the side of a tall building it can operate in the updraft. Their Ptypes are 3D printed which means they can have air passages of all shapes and forms inside.

Can you get underfloor heating (UFH) into the floor as then an Air Source Heat Pump (ASHP) might be a way forward on the electric side and you could use Economy 7 electricity to warm the slab overnight and supplement with PV during the day. Do you think you will let it out throughout the year or just in the holiday seasons?

Now if I recall my chemistry then it (Calcium Carbonate) reacts with loads of stuff which is why having it about might be seen as a problem, and if you use too much limescale cleaner you can get some interesting effects. We did our downstairs wet room at millstone manor 15 years ago with it on the walls as large honed tile and on the floor as rough mosaic and they both still look great I think mainly because cleaning it is so easy, just take the shower head out of its holder and spray the room with it - I also do the WC and the sink at the same time, avoiding the ceiling light fittings of course, and then wipe it off, great.

There might be a wrinkle here if you do do it and, although a vanishingly small possibility, it subsequently turns out to be wrong or misleading, perhaps not providing a strong enough warning about the need to upgrade for instance, then as the seller you might be in line for a fraud charge because you benefited from the sale and this sale relied on information you provided. I suspect this is very unlikely unless something serious goes wrong.

Sadly they don't make it in the thickness I require (15mm). You would think so but the scuttlebutt is that it occasionally has porous sections which would be solved by a coating - which is, I believe, what smartply does - well they talk about a coating doing the vapour control in their propassiv technical data sheet.

Our structural engineer is insisting on me skinning both sides of our lateral walls with OSB for racking strength. It struck me that if I could make the OSB on the inside air tight I would not need to cover it with a membrane. The challenge is making OSB air tight and I wonder if just painting it, either flat before installing it or once installed, with a thick PVA mix, or some such, would do the job. Any thoughts?

IMV meshes are the future as they take the resilience concept underpinning the Internet and make it scalable in micro environments like houses and even cars. They are inherently simpler from a users point of view although rather more demanding in designing for reliability. I wonder if the problem revolves around investment (in previous schema) challenging change.

It works though doesn't it. The weakness, as you have said before, is that it relies a bit too much on you being there to sort it out. What we need is to throw out there an open source home automation protocol (hardware / software / whatever) that we can all develop to and that then forms a community of practice that others can latch (pardon the pun) onto so when those of us who have bespoke systems pass into the land of limitless energy (I assume) where the laws of physics don't apply can be confident that those left behind us won't have to rip it all out and start again as soon a it goes phutt.

Nope - you will mostly only see components EG flooring / furniture / lighting, not finished stuff the ideal home exhibition is better for interior design inspiration I suspect (my Brother and his OH go every year) we are not at that stage yet but might take a trip this year for that exact purpose.

IMO 1 day is more than enough - accept if you do go away after a few hours, bury yourself in your build issues and make a plan to go back the next day and ask all the questions you forgot to ask, then maybe 2 is useful but still a luxury. The OH and I just got there early last year did a morning of looking around separately, had lunch together to compare notes and then went around together looking at each others top picks and asking the questions we had not asked in the morning. Don't forget all the sideshow talks which can consume a lot of time if you are not careful.

but can you?

No, I know that, it has been discussed here before several times - I just want to have as many options as I can for heating / cooling, we have a passive stack system designed in as well an ASHP coolable slab. No south window shading to speak of but will have film and interstitial blinds on the 'rectangular' windows. The one thing I have not found is a passive house qualified Louver system which I would like to put at the bottom of a couple of the north facing walls that can open with the passive stack roof lights and draw the cooler north wall air into the building and pass it out through the roof lights in the cooling season.

Even when you are doing the bulk of it yourselves cost control is very hard / almost impossible. So far we have been hit with (to list the main ones): Asbestos removal. Additional site insurance as we ran out of time. Muck away costs we had not planned for, we had to dig deeper than we expected. Additional type 1 for the sub base going to 150mm from 100mm. Additional Concrete in the slab as we have 150mm thickness not the normal 100mm (Will be good for energy storage but costs a lot) Failed polish on the concrete - so we have to grind it. The £ going south. Some additional labour to help me when I could not do it alone. All of which has eaten well into our contingency, and we are only just out of the ground, so we are now looking at a whole re-budget exercise. It is only us so no 3rd party to blame either. Keep on keeping on, not a lot of choice, and it will be worth it in the end is the way I see it - pragmatism can suppress panic sometimes.

Interest only / over how long?

Why not do it via your MVHR, as is our plan, and put the heating / cooling fan coil unit next to the MVHR unit - I agree this cools everywhere but by working with the MVHR systems distribution boxes you might even be able to control that, by restricting flows to downstairs at night time.

A few of us will know all these part numbers but for the rest: ESP8266 = a micro controller with loads of IO such as embodied on the 'WEMOS' D1 board. SSR = Solid State Relays. DS18B20 (not DD) = Semi intelligent Temperature sensor. SSD = Solid State Disk (give your RPi - Rasberry Pi, some local storage.) Have I got that about right @TerryE

Yep - thanks, found them, looks good but did you also have hold down straps at intervals around the perimeter?

Have you got a link for these?, sound interesting, found this in Oz but not much coming up here. Ah may have found them is it this http://www.timco.co.uk/media/documentation/tds-en.pdf product, if so are there also hold down straps at intervals on the frame as well?

In software or hardware?

Jump on the @TerryE wmos D1 miniPro solution then you can just echo the readings across your wifi or even set up a dedicated network of the little buggers, no wiring required even make a daughter board for the optos - but mind the isolation issue!

Isolation very important so solid state Opto isolators all the way on this one, mechanical relays are all well and good but small high (ish) frequency signals don't make it through very well and shorten the contact life. THIS chip does it as long as you are careful on the board to keep isolation distances, 4K Volts plus isolation if you do, and with a few surrounding components to: a. diode to prevent reverse biased over voltage on the internal LED during the bottom half of the ac cycle, b. a suitable resistor to keep the current across the LED low and c. a capacitor across the output to smooth out the 50% of cycle of the incoming mains (don't suggest doing this on the input side - much safer on the output). The choice of value for the cap will need some thought as it will slow down the off response time by a few, perhaps 10s of, milliseconds.

I think you can do this with a site built design its just about iterating towards a series of local optima and then choosing which one you are going for. In @pdf27's initial post I sense that one dimension is missing, which is part of most mass production design work, and that is the nature of value to the customer in an infinitely customisable product - I agree this is very much taken into account in terms of what the end user wants and would be prepared to pay for. However in self building I feel that we are working towards and infinitely customisable product, as in approaching any number of local optima, the challenge comes in taking the 'cost' as a driver not so much for the design but mostly for the construction optimisation - as @JSHarris points out in respect off kitchen sizes. In a curious way this closes the loop on the production / manufacturing engineering cycle it EG 'now rework the design so we can make it' which is what @pdf27 points out in his modified 3 stage process. - inevitably embodies some aspects of compromise though. If one was looking towards solving the housing crisis as your main objective you would take the manufacturing engineering approach directly and every time. Why can a house be more like a car - which we discussed on the old forum IIRC.

Just out of interest do they offer bulk quantity breaks?