jack

Yup. All covered by the "etc"

Have you ever looked into eating fermented foods such as kefir, sauerkraut, etc? Supposed to be good for people who've been through antibiotics and have yeast infections.

You can't criticise the scale of the man's vision(s).

And that's assuming nothing goes wrong! Our ASHP blew a control board before Christmas. Cheapest I can find a replacement board: £170 It's highly recommended that you change the pump at the same time, because it's the most likely reason for the failure, and isn't easily tested. Cheapest I can find a replacement pump: £380 Then there's the cost of troubleshooting the problem and doing the repair. I haven't had this priced separately, but I can't see anyone with the relevant qualifications doing it for less than a couple of hundred quid. Let's call it £750 in total. The ASHP itself only cost £1700! By way of background, I've had an authorised Panasonic engineer check our setup and installation and he confirmed that everything seems fine. The only potential issues are that we hadn't been running glycol (now fixed) and it was spending several months completely idle over summer due to our Immersun covering all hot water over that period. There's a setting that turns the pump on for a couple of mins a day whether or not heating or cooling is needed, to keep things moving - that might help longer term. The installation was only 2.5 years old. Installations done by an authorised Panasonic engineer come with a 5 (sometimes 7, if you get them during a promotion) year warranty, so possibly worth paying the extra up front. But back to your point @TerryE, yes, an immersion-only system is looking very appealing to me at the moment!

Interesting, thanks. I remember hearing about this a while ago but didn't realise it had launched. Shame it's Leaf (+ that commercial vehicle) only - that's too big and expensive for what I want/need from an electric car right now.

As an example, here's the daily generation for January this year on my 8.5kW system: There were 14 days that generated less than 4.8kWh, and that's ignoring charge/discharge inefficiencies, SoC limitations, and the fact that at least some of what was generated will have been consumed and therefore not available for storage. I just checked, and December was worse, with 19 days that generated less than 4.8kWh. Remember, this is an 8.5kW system. A 4kW system would have generated less than half what's shown above. In fact, a 4kW system at my location (Hampshire/Surrey borders) would only have managed 5 days above 4.8kWh in January, and only 1 (and only barely!) day in December.

I think these calculations need thinking about. Our winter generation is at times virtually zero for days on end (edited to add: we have an 8.5kW system]. I'm also less sure that there will be a lot of days where you can recharge several times. Unless I'm missing something, the only way that can happen is for you to charge up, then use some of what's been charged, in time for there to be further charging. However, the chances are that if you'd just consumed the PV-generated energy as you went, you'd get the same benefit. It's hard to really model how you'd do without a year or two of good generation and consumption data, maybe on an hour to hour basis.

As Dave says, for us the numbers don't quite add up yet. From memory, we use around £900 of electricity per year (we have no gas, so that's heating, hot water, cooking - everything). We do have a nasty habit of using the dishwasher and washing machine overnight, so I'm sure we could reduce that, but I need to do some more analysis of what we produce compared to when and how we use it to figure out the price point that would make storage financially viable. For the moment, and for our family circumstances, I think an electric car is a more useful way of absorbing excess production. I reckon we can save well over £1000 a year in fuel and other costs by replacing our small car with an electric car. This does ignore capital costs - there's no doubt we'll need to pay more to get something we'd want to hang onto for a few years. I'd love it if someone would cobble together a system that let you use a proportion of your car's storage to provide time-shifted power to the house in the evenings. I know there are long-term smart grid ideas that take this concept further, but as a country we can't even manage a roll-out of basic smart meters, so I'm not holding my breath for smart grid functionality arriving in the next decade.

Yeah, just messing. It's very easy and fun, really.

At the start, yes!

That opinion may change as the build goes on!

It isn't just developers. I suspect that the small family firm I engaged to do the plasterboarding at my house cut corners when fitting ceiling insulation. It's an attitude - they either have it or they don't. If you find someone with the right attitude, stick to them like glue, and cheerfully pay them a bit more than the alternative if necessary.

One approach would be a pinned post at the start of at least major sub-forums (eg, foundations, windows), with a summary of what people have done, and links to relevant posts. As @recoveringacademic says though, this would be a massive undertaking. Another option, which I've mentioned in the past, is to set up a self-build wiki. Again, summaries of what people have learned, with links (onsite and offsite) to relevant content. Again, a massive undertaking.

I think it's fair to say that some architects will save you money, but that isn't the universal experience of people who've used them. I say that as someone who used, and was very happy with, a local architect for our self-build (well, after we fired the first one who, it turns out, had no idea about planning considerations and wasn't actually able to design houses!)

Jesus, what a clusterfark of an organisation. How hard can it be?

Ah, I forgot, thanks for the reminder. Still, all the more reason to try and get solar gain under control. Also, these threads will likely be read by others in the future who don't have these limitations, so hopefully these thoughts will be of use to someone, some day!

None taken!

And why do you think that is? That said, there are plenty of people doing brick and/or block, as well as ICF. We have suspended floors (wood and concrete) and insulated slabs. We don't have a lot of SIPs, but there are good (in some cases historic) reasons for that as set out in the relevant sub-forum. There are good reasons why such a large proportion of people on this forum have used MVHR, including air quality and reduced energy consumption.

Interesting idea, but won't all these sensors and (active) grills be costly too? You'll also lose heat recovery, which over several years will more than pay for any difference between MVHR and DCT. MVHR needn't be expensive. Several of us have installed most or all of the components on our own. Another thing: if no-one's installed one yet, it's probably worth thinking about whether building control will be happy with you being the first!

See red writing on bedroom 2.

Our MBC house didn't get above 23.5 deg C upstairs, and 22 deg C downstairs, during the recent mini heatwave, and that was without opening windows overnight. It's definitely about limiting solar gain imo - even internal blinds are far from an ideal way of blocking the sun. While purging alone works well during short periods of heat, if you get a solid week of high temps with relatively warm nights, the average temperature of the house will likely still slowly rise to uncomfortable levels over several days, even if you're conscientious about purging and using summer bypass. If you can figure out where the worst gain is (often east or west of south rather than south itself, due to sun angles), it may be worth looking into some sort of external screening on those windows. Trees, brise soleil, external blinds, screens with fixed or movable angled slats - anything to reduce the amount of sunlight actually entering the house. We have external blinds on some windows and they work very well. Without solar gain working against you, it's much easier to keep the temperature down over a long period just by purging overnight. One thing I wish we'd considered is insect screens on at least the bedroom windows, which would have allowed overnight purging without letting mosquitoes in. At least one security door with screens downstairs would also have been useful to encourage stack ventilation. As I say to my wife far too often, "next house".

I seem to recall that Crittal are eye-wateringly expensive. We looked into getting some two interior doors done by them and from memory it was going to be thousands.

This is what we did with our MBC slab. Foundation window detail.tif Not shown is an EPDM layer on top of the ply. The reason for the reinforced self-levelling layer is that the initial recess is formed pretty roughly with bits of wood or EPS before the concrete is poured. The slider must sit on a perfectly smooth and level surface, and obviously you need to have it sitting at exactly the right height, especially if you have a level threshold. I was told by the window installers that the final layer needed to be ply. It worked well, with one exception: due to a miscommunication with the window installer, we ended up with the wrong grade of plywood. He said "shuttering ply", which he seemed to think was good quality voidless stuff with a smooth faced (melamine?) veneer. Shuttering ply is actually the cheapest, crappiest, voidiest ply you can buy. In our case, the centre of our 5m door has sunk by a few mm as the ply has settled, meaning that the door sticks about a third of the way open if you raise it to its full height (it's a lift slider). It opens fine if you only lift if halfway. If I were doing this again, I'd go for marine or other high-quality hardwood ply, or possibly even just spend some time getting the reinforced (it must be reinforced!) self-levelling compound to the right level and put the door straight onto an epdm layer on top of that.

I love paying a surcharge for worse service, especially when you're only told about it after you've agreed to spend a load of cash with someone.

But bees are nice