MikeSharp01

Are you not allowed to put numbers anywhere in your responses? Would numbers not speak more confidently than words and show that the home will generate more energy than it uses (probably - PH+). Keep the car and the electric bikes all charged up and export to the grid when it cannot use all the generation. Might help but I get the feeling this inspector was using other metrics against your application.

Do you think the planners understood passive house plus? I am not sure I do and ours is passive house classic!

Very upsetting it must be. Lovely part of the world, hope you find it in you to keep going.

As I am finding the 'rules' for laying wooden floors are myriad. For the one we are contemplating the drying time for the slc is 1mm/day , the boards must be stored elsewhere or not delivered until after the drying is finished, and installing above 65% RH is not recommended. UFH adds a whole other set of 'rules'. Anyway what has happened is that the oak layer has tightened up (how thick is it?), unlikely in 95% RH, or the plywood base has expanded, more likely but would perhaps lead to twisting as the cross grain layers expand differentially which you don't have. Either way checking back with the suppliers seems like good advice to me.👍

Before it was occupied we were invited to go to the top of the Canary wharf building, a very lonely building in those days. We got to the top in the lift and walked out into the vast open space. There was a video of the build and in it was a test on the window glass, floor to ceiling, and its fixings where they threw the equivalent of of 150Kg person at the window at 10 mph, it just bounced off. I still couldn't go within 1 meter of the edge looking out was fine, looking down was terrifying!

There is quite a lot in the academic press around the Wufi stuff, probably also Ubakus but I have not looked, Wufi has been around sine the 1990s and was IIRC started as an academic exercise- once they knew what they had, something that worked, was useful and that very few people understood in any detail, they went quiet on it a little because they saw the commercial potential and went that way. None the less although it is possible to get to grips with it I suspect that for most people it won't repay the effort either intellectually or financially which is why we paid to have ours done.

Interesting stuff @JohnMo - great posts. Not for us here as we won't have a boiler in our system anywhere although we did fit the trackpipe at the start and are leaving it in in case any future residents want it - not that gas will be available to them by then I hope.

Same with me, built all the roof structure from inside scaffolding then got the roofers to fit the slates as I could not go there. Although on one day I did crawl to the apex and sat there to let the roofer take a picture of me as he said I needed to own it and the worst that could happen was I slid back down onto the scaffolding at gutter level. Actually over the build I have got more confident on ladders and scaffold but once outside support like that I have to get out of there.

I am guessing that they would not have developed the Wufi system if they could have done it with a spreadsheet. This field is littered with no fun hard sums the most difficult of which is calculating value when all you know is the cost 🙄🤣.

Tough one. Have looked at shared ownership opportunities it may be a route they could take and then purchase the other portion in time.

I think this may be the case and it is curious that such a great idea is engineered so poorly. When you look at the guts of it, @TerryE posted some pics when he took his apart , it's clear that it is not just a great concept but simple in practice. A little attention to the design for servicability and control would have made them world beating. As it is everybody is giving it a body swerve.

@JohnMo How cool does the slab get, we are just considering the flooring, my wife has fallen in love with engineered Ash (5mm thick slice of Ash on 15mm plywood) and the manufacturers say that with UFH expansion is a lot less of a a problem than contraction and cooling must lead to contraction.

Interesting project - loads of work for the cable jointers of this world.

We got lucky with our blown cellulose - we DIYed it by 'borrowing' a machine from a member here who purchased a machine on Ebay. This machine is no longer available but they do come up on ebay or there are smaller machines available in the states that would do the job. DIY was not that difficult but made some rookie errors particularly around the stretching of the internal Intello membrane. UK kits are available for purchase / rent EG https://www.markham-sheffield.co.uk/product/turbisol-56-blowing-machine/

Not fixed down by the door though so all the expansion is away from the door, is your floating on a membrane?

Anybody know what has become of Ed? Not seen here for some time and his last blog post is also some time back. Hope all is well.

Couple of observations - not sure they are helpful though. I interpret that as meaning you cannot extend the existing side extension (the 1975 one) you could build off the the second one and, as you say maintain a gap between them but that would mean your kitchen diner having a pair of walls, with a gap, jutting out into it where the diner window is now so it seems a daft thing to do. Given that, there must be some other motivation for the clause and I have no idea what that might be. On another matter you seem to have removed the pillar in the middle of the original kitchen diner - presumably with some structural work, will having to restore the building compromise that? Have other houses in the road done the same thing you have done? Finally do we take it that you still have a right to normal retrospective planning permission or is permitted development your only available route here for other reasons - maybe I missed something.

@Novice14 Welcome to THE forum for people like us.

Probably already been done or in progress although I could not find anything like it in any of the listings. I did find one piece of research that would definitely be in the bibliographic remit of such work: "Chewing it over - public attitudes to alternative proteins and meat reduction." https://bryantresearch.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Chewing-It-Over.pdf supposing that you might want to investigate the psychological / attitudinal approach to the 'snack' as this effects the way one tastes it and how perhaps frame of mind is somewhat a function of more than the time of day. However apropos the thread topic I found an interesting chapter on how heat affects our eating habits - a somewhat profound statement of the bleeding obvious but with nuances that make you think along the lines of: 'So if I keep my house warmer I will eat less and be healthier' , 'I can afford to keep my house warmer because it is very well insulated', 'the air tightness of my house forces the use of MVHR which allows me to control, via filtering and flow, the indoor air quality', 'So if I build a well insulated, airtight house and keep it warm I will be healthier' QED . The question is what price / value do you put on that then and how might it affect the way the house should be built and, should you happen to get your vegan sausage roll home - unlikely because of the current evidence of shards of flaky pastry stuck in the seams of the car seats and your trousers indicating that self control in these matters is somewhat lacking, how it tastes there? (Read the chapter here: https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=MFhTp_wtPDMC&oi=fnd&pg=PT201&dq=The+effects+of+insulation+on+food+awareness&ots=h1YqHjdtdo&sig=O0sjlZumkeQJ-O6-y7m1o3OA9vo&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false)

Yes sorry I was thinking of our setup.

Guide link: https://www.screwfix.com/p/erbauer-diamond-tile-drill-guide/84524

That will do but you will need a guide as well.

That will give you only 17mm void (They are normally 17mm deep), so 42 assuming a 25x50 counter batten as well or you will need to cut slots in the resilient bars to get any cables through them.

You can get away with this while you make sure the screws pull the board down tight and the screw gets covered with skim. The screws will relax a little over time but even then the gaps around the threads won't add up to much on the scale of things.

@Post and beam don't forget that dew point moves about with relative humidity (RH) so any control system will need RH and temperature inputs to calculate the dew point. A simple equation can be found here although , as the author points out, it gets wobbly below 50% RH.