MikeSharp01

Yes - as many as you can to run the services that don't need TLC - Electric, Water, Comms, even gas if you are up for using tracpipe, leave the roof space for the hot water etc so A: You don't need loads of holes through your joists thus making them weaker, B: you can insulate them carefully so as to keep the heat where you want it.

Mine takes about .9T and is only 800mm wide.

Jet washer - Steer clear of abrasives as you can take anodizing off, assuming it has any, if you are not careful. If not anodized then you can be harsher.

Good question, I just wandered round here and looked at our windows, double glazed and fitted in 1993 (close to 30 years), there are over 40 individual units and none of them are blown. I would have thought that modern manufacturing would get to 30 years MTBF for triple glazed without a problem although I cannot see any guarantees that go out that far.

Welcome to THE forum for self builders.

Great piece of work but the overall benefit may hinge on more than the pay back time for you personally. The house will be around for perhaps 100 years at which point it will have paid back more that 10 times over on a planetary scale rather than just for your pocket - assuming the windows don't get replaced (our daughter has just replaced several rotten sashes that where installed in 1887). If you have children, they will see the benefit in an improved environment and future generations more so. Maybe there is additional gain here to help justify.

It must be the regs then allow people to NOT have have homes that impact the planet less. We almost had something like we needed in the 2016 regs that HMG deleted prior to them coming into force. On the plus (ish) side there is a new PART L coming and I found a good review of this and the associated new SAP scheme HERE which shows how much tougher it will be for the big house builders and the self builder.

Didn't he use Eltron in line water heaters to boost the temp on demand he found that they would add the few degrees he wanted to the tank output.

Yes we have only been going 4 and I feel like an old stager, still 18 months to go at current pace.

Welcome to THE forum for self builders (old or new), hope you find it useful to be here.

Ok, I have them on the way. Many thanks. Mike

What machine are these for, angle grinder or a tile cutting machine? Also what is the lube if not water. I tries cutting with water but the muck gets in the crackles! (Not acceptable to customer - our daughter!)

Anybody got any good ideas for cutting crackle glaze tiles without edge damage. Can't get better than attached with wet wheel. Left is cut and diamond polished bevel right is as cut with slight diamond bevel. Left shows too much base to be acceptable while right is too damaged without diamond polishing. Any thoughts?

Not true in my experience - we have a couple of children, both in their twenties, who were regular frequenters of pubs that are set up right before this pandemic - and we used to drop by and see them there. I dimly recall, as it feels such a long time ago but is only slightly over a year, when they dragged us round several central London pubs for lunch, afternoon drinks then evening. The pubs were, to be fair, all of a type - staffed mainly by hipsters, but good beer and well kept wines.

If it already has pedestrian access then there is no one you can lobby because it is an established right of way. Even if the road is private, is it?, access rights are very challenging to overturn and in your case, as you have lots of properties that need pedestrian access, you could not restrict it.

Is not pavement parking being banned / changed - HMG put out a consultation at the end of last year, you can find it HERE, closed, but it shows that HMG want's to ensure that pavements are available for pedestrians. It won't be long, 15-20 years before we don't have cars each we just call a 'self drive' and it will navigate to you and whisk you off to your destination. (By then the AI's around you will have worked out that you are thinking of going down the shops and the 'self drive' will be waiting just round the corner for the actual call 'Alexa call a self drive'

Maybe @Bruno lives even further north than you do - summers in such places must be very hard to imply a COP like that!

Is it remotely possible that the strainer has corroded away?

Not sure I can cut it as neatly, XPS will cut on the hot wire, given the volume the U factor is not an issue.

No PVC nearby - mostly it will be clamped between / under wood to provide thermal breaks. I have used gorilla glue on XPS in the past, works OK.

We have a few places where we need to get some cold bridges around windows dealt with and it looks to me like STYROFOAM™ will do it. It is XPS has a compressive strength of around 30T / m2, a good U value at 0.033, is very workable, and is not expensive if brought as sheets. Any opinions / thoughts / experience anyone?

Small minded approach really - they will get blown out of the water by stuff you can get in Lidl as the whole thing becomes bolt on and Alexa takes control. Why would you bother with a dimmer block when you can shout at the bulb and tell it how bright you want it, what colour temperature you want, how long you want it on .....

Don't forget that the Architect may also be needed to tackle the Building Control Drawing aspects - which will be extra. They have a standard pattern of phases so you should be able to work out with them how it all works. If you are building a traditional style house then you may find you don't need an architect but once to go a bit out of the ordinary I think it is worth it. We looked at several architects, boiling it down to a shortlist of three and then we interviewed each after first giving them the broad spec, somewhat like the one you set out above but including budget and with a mood board - several pages of things we liked in terms of aesthetics etc. This worked for us, we chose one in the end and it worked out well I think. Three meetings is not too bad, you can do a lot in those meetings provided you give them a good idea of your desires before you start. Total architects bill up to BC was around £13K (2016), ours is only 156m2 so a bit smaller than yours. They often (maybe always not sure) try to link the fee to the build cost so we worked with them to engineer that as because we are doing a lot ourselves the build cost was projected to be quite low on an m2 basis (about £1250).

You don't use the @ in creating PM address just type rob99, or whatever name, and all will be well I think.

I think @A_L means that the new wall value if using PIR will be but if there are any changes to the geometry it could be different. I just tried it on PHPP and got 0.229 for the Frametherm and 0.157 for the PIR so that agrees with @A_Ls figures. PS Also do not forget the hydrothermal (moisture migration) changes going from Frametherm to PIR will make and those figures are the U value for just the insulation not the whole wall buildup so the wall value will be less, assuming the whole wall is not just PIR .