Crofter

The difficulties of sealing joints in horizontal cladding must be one of the reasons that more exposed properties tend to use vertical boards. Up here on Skye it is predominantly board-on-board vertical larch, which is what I went with. This is, I think, the best choice for an exposed location. I was in a different price bracket to the OP and sourced locally grown larch which is not of the best quality, but was extremely good value for money (under £10/m2 including overlaps). It is rough sawn finish and there is some sap wood, but I was able to hide the worst of it and use the best boards in the most aesthetically important areas. For fixing, a coil nailer is fantastic. The (stainless) nails are full head, so they look right. You can fit hundreds of nails in a coil, and they're cheaper than stick nails. I did pre-drill and hand-nail if the fixing was within a couple of inches of the end of a board, as otherwise there was a risk of splitting.

I'd be wary of assuming that second fix stuff if easy. Doors, linings, architraves, skirtings, are all quite fiddly and a competent tradesman will do a good job in a fraction of the time that you would do it yourself. I did all mine myself on a 43m2 house (yes, it is really that small) and was surprised how long it took. All of these things are permanently on display as a reminder of your workmanship so you do want to get it right. By contrast, seemingly bigger and more important jobs can actually be easier. Plasterboarding is simple and you can always cover up your mistakes with filler afterwards. Framing up partitions is not difficult. I knocked up the entire kit myself and found it simpler than the second fix jobs. As to saving money, one of the easiest ways is by rigorously chasing the best prices on everything. It's tempting to open an account at a builders' merchant and just buy everything from them as you need it, but you will pay for this convenience. Likewise letting your trades supply everything at list price. If you are organised enough, put together big orders and then phone every possible source and get them to compete with each other's quotes until you can't get it any lower. And don't discount eBay and Amazon- my shower tray, screen, mixer valve, and kitchen tap all came from them. A fraction of the price of the conventional sources and as far as I can tell all perfectly serviceable. If you are really keen to save money, keep an eye open for secondhand or ex-display items as well. My Bosch induction hob was £200 from the Curry's eBay shop, my Bosch oven was £50 off Gumtree and looks brand new.

I managed £800/m2 by doing almost everything myself. The only other people I paid were a digger driver, an electrician, and a plasterer. A bigger build could have come in considerably cheaper due to economies of scale, but I don't think I could have faced that amount of work! Key cost savings came from keeping the design simple (it's a rectangular footprint, no dormers etc), minimal groundworks due to pad foundations, and low cost materials like the steel roof and locally sourced larch cladding. I avoided filling it with gizmos and sourced all the kitchen appliances secondhand. I was relentless in pursuing the best prices on everything, e.g. my shower screen came from eBay at under £200 (a high street retailer quoted £700!) I could have saved a wee bit money in some areas. The woodburner easily added another £1000 in total, and the electrical fittings mostly came from the sparky at full retail price. The windows could have been half the price if I had been willing to compromise and use uPVC. If you haven't already got it, the Housebuilders Bible gives a good starting point for a lowest cost approach.

And the brakes themselves likely last longer because of regenerative braking.

I can't find it just now but Robert Llewllyn (of Red Dwarf and Scrapheap Challenge fame) wrote a very persuasive blog article on this subject a couple of years ago. From memory, the jist of it was that even if you take the most pessimistic view, EVs at least give you the option of being powered by renewable energy. ICE vehicles do not. There is no way that ICE can really win. A hidden part of the energy chain for fossil fuels is that the crude oil takes a lot of energy (and produces a certain amount of pollution) on its way from the oil well to the garage forecourt- extraction, delivery, and refinement are not free. So any study must take account of the total cost of any fossil fuel, not just the emissions from the car itself. Another complication is how much weight we attach to the location of emissions. It may be worse to burn fossil fuels in our cars in populated areas, rather than in power stations in rural areas. But it depends on what effects you are considering- the carbon is the same, but the particulates, NOx and other pollutants will be more harmful in a more populated place.

I had the loan of a (Hitachi) gas nailer, it was good but they don't like the cold. You end up swapping gas cartridges frequently, and keeping one in an inside pocket to warm up. I've since bought a cheap 2nd hand deWalt air nailer. I also have a very cheap (Clarke) coil nailer. They both run off a little 12l compressor, and the total cost of the two guns and compressor was less than £200. Nails are cheap as chips, they're totally reliable, no batteries or gas to worry about. You have to lug around the air hose but I didn't find it all that much bother. The big advantages of the coil nailer are that you can get more nails in a coil, they have full heads rather than clipped heads (looks much nicer for cladding), and you can set it for semi-auto firing so you keep the trigger pressed and just bump the nose onto the wood to fire. I used it for all my sheathing/sarking work where you're firing a 50mm nail every 150mm along the edge of a board, and the semi-auto mode was lightning fast. Just don't bump it against your leg with your finger still on the trigger!

Well it was only inhabited for a few stays over winter (Christmas, New Year, and a couple of weekends in February) so I can't really make a fair comment. The only form of background heating that was left on was that the water tank- which is within the heated envelope- got a boost overnight for either half an hour or a whole hour during the coldest spells of weather. This was enough to elevate the temperature to a few degrees above ambient- I think the coldest I ever saw was around 7degC. Thanks to the MVHR there has been not even a hint of dampness, though. Our own house would never have tolerated getting that cold! When it came to heating the place back up in advance of people arriving, I would put the stove on the morning, or if I was out at work would plug in the electric oil filled radiator. Either one of these was enough to get the house back up to around 20degC by the time people checked in. I'm afraid I haven't been terrible scientific about measuring the energy input. It's a reasonably efficient building, considerably in excess of BRegs minimum, but quite a long way from passive standard. The exposed underfloor, and the small overall size (which gives a high surface area to volume ratio) count against it. It's also quite hard to justify overly thick walls in a small house, as they eat up a lot of your footprint. My walls are about 330mm total thickness and I wouldn't have wanted to go any thicker.

With the 2019 season now here, I've spent the last couple of weekends doing a bit of tarting up around the outside of the wee house. Little things that you don't think really matter, but the end result looks far more 'finished'. I was never very sure how to complete the gable ends of the house- whether to box them in or not- but eventually decided to kill two birds with one stone and use the space for a log store. I think it looks pretty good, and it's tempting to do the same on every side of the house, although those elevations do see a lot more wind and rain. My current obsession with processing my log pile is all down to a fantastic book I was given: 'Norwegian Wood- chopping, stacking, and drying wood the Scandinavian way'. Highly recommended, and an absorbing read even if you never intend to ever light a fire. The other bit of work has been to create a gravel path around the side of the house, and so properly edge the gravel area underneath the house. The only downside of all this work is that it makes the lumpy lawn look even worse than it did before

Sounds good. Wish I'd had one when I did my place! Are there limitations on what type of paint you can put in it? e.g. waterbased only?

We've got a Firestick for home, and a Roku stick in the wee cottage. I haven't used the Roku all that much myself, but it seems slicker and less glitchy than the (now 3 year old) Firestick. With both devices, you download various different 'apps' to access content. They are really just Android powered devices and if you are used to using a smartphone then it will seem fairly logical. So you can download the BBC iPlayer app and access all BBC content that way, and of course ITV, C4 etc have their own apps. On the Roku there is a Youtube app, whilst on the Firestick you have to go via the web browser app since Amazon and Google had a falling out.

I wish I had got one of those board lifters. I had a vaulted ceiling to do, and my initial plan was to balance the board on my head and walk up the stepladder with it. You can get about two steps up before the board snaps. Maybe a thicker board would have worked better, but it would have been heavier too... In the end I built a contraption using spare lengths of timber and some hinges. I propped this up against the wall, laid the board on it with the white side inwards, and then swung the whole thing up on the hinges, bringing in a prop to hold it in position. In hindsight a hundred odd quid for a board lifter would have been a much better idea, but, you know, budget and all that...

Timber beading, stuck on with gap-filling adhesive, and then painted over?

Another point raised by the OP is sourcing of locally produce/manufactured goods. I'd be interested to put some figures behind this, but IMHO it's a bit of a red herring. Global transport is really quite efficient- you can ship a whole container from China to the UK for a few thousand pounds, which puts an upper bound on how much energy it must take. So sourcing more energy efficient windows that have to be transported some distance is, IMHO, very likely to work out as beneficial over the lifespan of the building.

Going back to the original question... The OP mentioned the embodied energy of solar panels. I can't find it right now but we had quite an enlightening discussion on that point recently on BuildHub. I think it was @Ed Davies who pointed out that you can do a very simple bit of arithmetic involving the cost of energy in China vs the wholesale cost of solar panels, which proves that they are very much energy positive over their lifespan. I.e. if they used more energy to make, they would have to be sold at a much higher cost. On a different note, one subject that I think does not get enough attention is that standards like PassivHaus, or EPC ratings, etc, are always about energy cost per unit area or volume. Not about usage per person, or per dwelling. So we are incentivised to build bigger houses which use less energy per square metre- not to reduce our actual total energy usage. We don't sell cars like this, do we? "The new Range Rover uses less energy per tonne than a Fiat 500, making it the eco friendly choice!" No, we look at absolute energy consumption, because that's what actually matters.

OK I might have mis-remembered a wee bit there. I think what I actually did was to seal the bottom, but the way the window frame was shaped you ended up with a gap that would allow any condensation to drain out. Can't really explain it without a photo, and it's all hidden behind cladding now!

I used Siga Wigluv tape for sealing around the frames. Expensive, but not somewhere that you really want to scrimp. I was advised (can't remember by who) to only seal the sides and top, though- this leaves a pathway for water to escape if any moisture condenses inside the wall. It sounds a bit counterintuitive, but the way the rest of the detailing worked, it wasn't going to cause any problems as the alu sill forms the actual weathertight layer across the bottom of the window.

Up here in the north of Scotland we have a slightly unusual tariff called Total Heating Total Control. It is a two rate, two meter tariff, but unlike E7 you can have 24/7 access to the cheap rate. Sounds too good to be true? Well the catch is that you are only allowed to use the cheaper meter for heating appliances, and your home must have a certain proportion of storage heating. The electricity company will energise the storage heaters at times of their choosing, based on weather forecasts. The advantage is that you can run other things like panel heaters, immersion heaters, and electric showers at whatever time of day you like, and get the cheap rate. It used to be a not bad deal. But a letter arrived yesterday saying that the price for both rates is going up. So even the cheap rate is now going to be uncompetitive- over 15p a unit! The higher rate is well over 20p a unit. Ouch. So I think it's time to ditch this tariff for good. I can get a flat rate tariff at 14p/unit on a single meter, or I can get a normal E7 tariff. Question is- when I make the switch, will I need to consider the hardware and meter side of things at all? The whole house is wired for THTC, with two separate circuits running from two CUs and two meters. And if I need to change any of this, who pays for it?? Hoping @ProDave might be able to offer some advice on this one...

Another happy Armeg Beaver customer here. I've got the one, a 12mm, but it has done a ridiculous amount of work for me. The ring beam that my house sits on is made of two layers of 75mm douglas fir, sistered up, and held together with literally hundreds of 150mm bolts. The Armeg in my impact driver drilled every one of those holes, no sweat, and continues to be my best and sharpest drill bit. In fact I think I may have just talked myself into getting a full set of them...

You need the 5mm offset on the architrave as somewhere for the hinges to sit. They cold be flush on the side that the door opens away from, though. I went through all of this and decided it would be better in every way to just go for MDF and paint it. Quicker, easier, cheaper, but obviously if SWMBO wants the all wood look then not an option...

That's interesting. It's common knowledge that houses in Scotland use sarking. Perhaps this is not a hard and fast rule, just common practice. It sounds like it may be possible to comply with regs if you can demonstrate that the roof is strong enough without sarking. I think the onus will be on the designer/developer to prove it, though.

How much moisture is actually within a structure that has an impermeable polythene vapour barrier on the inside, and a breather membrane and rainscreen on the outside?

What effect does thickness have on vapour permeability? I used OSB3, but only 9mm.

I guess I am hearing the full 45dB. I bought is quite cheap as an incomplete unit on eBay- no controller. It's simply powered off the bathroom light via a 12v transformer driving the two fans inside (they are just computer PSU fans, 4w each).

I've just installed a Kair single room MVHR for my bathroom. It seems to work fairly well- the incoming air is definitely warmer than ambient outside temperature- but it's pretty noisy, essentially the same as a normal bathroom extractor fan. Uses 8w, but I don't know how much air it shifts off hand.

Going rate for a good, used, IBC is around £40 here. As others have said, I don't really see what they add compared to simply filling the hole with rocks.