Crofter

It's well known that to minimise cost/m², building over two stories can work well. You sacrifice some space to fit in the stairs, but your expensive roof and foundations are now serving twice the floor area. Is there a rough rule of thumb for how large a house has to be before these savings kick in?

I don't think I'd bother with a wood burner next time. I'm also not convinced that the extra cost of aluclad timber windows was really worth it. They look pretty nice but they've not been trouble free. The uPVC I fitted to the other house have been much easier to work and live with, and a third of the cost.

Sorry to hear about your health problems. Are you able to live in a place after deep cleaning, and/or with sufficient medication? It sounds a nightmare. If it's really not possible to mitigate the effects, you'd think it should be treated with the same priority that disabilities are. Just to play devil's advocate, some people rely on their pets for their mental health, and it's pretty heartbreaking to hear about vulnerable people having to give up an animal which might be the only thing they can trust. Happens when homeless people are housed.

Is it possible to avoid having a joint there at all?

Oh and if it's of interest, I've chosen an underfloor ducted system. Just installing the final duct just now. I have three rooms hooked up already and I'm really impressed with the response time. Running costs look like they should be good. There is a certain level of noise but you only notice it if there's zero other background noise.

I'm just finishing off the DIY bits of an A2A installation. It was supplied and partially installed by a guy based in Lockerbie, he was really helpful and easy to deal with. He might be a good point of contact for you. Message me and I'll put you in touch (and no I'm not on commission etc).

This looks pretty solid... https://toughleads.co.uk/products/hard-wired-heavy-duty-wi-fi-control-switch-230-415v-16a-32a-options?srsltid=AfmBOorigu5GXrsM5hGImuOvIcbLVWK8kMHPFg3tDIg5VklB48iLiRQY

Well that would be one way of the oil industry working towards carbon neutral.

That's a great little house. Interesting that you chose steel for the frame. I did something similar but built mine on Douglas Fir beams, 150x300, with engineered timber joists to make a sort of ladder chassis.

Just returning to this subject... can anybody recommend a decent WiFi MCB? There is a lot of cheap stuff out there and I don't want to burn my house down... The 20A Sonoff switch mentioned above is certainly tempting, because it's about £25 and includes a temperature probe and data logging. But from the teardown video it maybe looks a bit flimsy for a high current application like an immersion.

What's going on with Japan?

Looking for a recommendation for a cheap, simple thermometer so that I can check the temperature of my house when I'm not there. The ones I'm looking up seem to want to link with Alexa etc, I just want a basic standalone unit. I don't specifically need any kind of history or data logging function, but I guess it would be nice. Bonus points for one that doesn't need to run off batteries, and/or it has a probe that I can tape on to the outlet of my UVC...

It's not a case of being told to throttle back, it's planning ahead for what happens when there is no wind and no sun at the same time as peak demand.

Because the generation assumes all renewables are going at full capacity. If you remove renewables, the remaining generation capacity is about the same as peak demand. Exactly what you'd expect.

A septic tank also needs a soakaway- it's a pretty large project. You'll need a building warrant for that. You'll have to do percolation tests first to determine the ground conditions, which then sets the size for the soakaway. I'm not sure that the tank/soakaway needs planning, but you do need planning to live permanently in the static caravan. For a ten month period, I don't think I would bother. Can you connect to the sewerage system at the house? Possibly with a macerator pump? Alternatively, a chemical loo would probably be a reasonable temporary solution.

We used Modern uPVC Windows for supply only, can't really fault them.

Once you go over 4.8m span you're in a different world of cost and difficulty. Stay within standard timber lengths wherever possible.

160m² is enormous! Sounds like a lot of effort for a temporary building. The materials to build something that size, even if you cut a few corners, are going to add up to many tens of thousands. You could use engineered timber joists for that span. According to the JJI span tables you could use 450mm deep joists at 300mm centres. So that's nearly 70 joists. Which will be a fair chunk of money. Admittedly that's to support a habitable floor rather than a roof, it's possible that you'd get away with a bit less given the lighter loading of a roof. The other options would be trusses, and you lose the flat roof, or mid span supports. I'm not familiar with the planning and building regs situation in Ireland. I'm up in the Highlands of Scotland and there's absolutely no way you could get away with building something that size, and then living in it, without attracting attention. Especially if you're doing a self build straight afterwards on the same site. Over here we have a planning exemption for agricultural buildings. Could you erect a big agricultural shed, and get permission for one or two static caravans to live in beside it? The shed could provide useful extra space. If you tried to move too much stuff in there you might be breaking a few rules but I think you'd be on much stronger ground than your plan of building a huge temporary building with no permission. And you'd end up with a massive shed afterwards. I've yet to meet anybody who thought their shed was too large.

I thought about that when we built the cottage. We'd have had to charge VAT on our holiday lets which would have ended up costing much more than the reclaim would have saved.

That's kind of what I thought, but I wasn't sure. The house we built a few years ago wasn't intended as our own home so no VAT reclaim. I'd looked in to a way around that at the time but I couldn't remember the details.

If you build a home for your own use, and intend to move in to it and reclaim the VAT, so you have to sell your previous house, or can you retain it and rent it out?

I've been given a barrel of tar. Probably about 20kg in there. It's still liquid and like treacle in consistency (haven't tasted it yet). My driveway was laid with road planings which have mostly bound together really nicely, but I have a bit of a pothole starting to form in one spot. I'm thinking about scooping up some of the dried out/excess tar planings and mixing them with this tar, then filling in the nascent pothole. How do I handle this stuff? Do I need to heat it up first? Will it naturally go hard over time after application? Could I help it along with a cupful of diesel?

Those sheets are a million times better than what I recently used to build a lean to wood shed. I slapped some denzo tape over the old nail holes, works surprisingly well. Wouldn't dream of spending money on paint though 😂

Welcome aboard, from sunny Costa del Skye...

I'm going to be using my oscillating multi tool a fair bit, and the prices for blades are a bit eye watering. Anybody got a heads up on an economical source for these things? I'd rather do a bulk buy of half decent cheap ones than get a few premium blades, because you never know when you're going to hit a nail... If it helps, I'll be mostly cutting plasterboard and softwood framing.