jack

Ha. I remember being in that phase. You'll be absorbing information for weeks. It's extraordinary how much there is to know! Even now, I only realise how much I've managed to learn when a friend doing an extension asks me a simple question and I suddenly realise I've been talking for 15 minutes without a break. In the end I usually just direct them to the site...

Welcome. Sounds like a nice plot! One thing: if you're going for MVHR (a good thing - I'd never go back to living without it), you need to be thinking now about airtightness. Little details addressed at this stage will pay large dividends on how easy it will be to reach a reasonable airtightness level. For example, if you're going brick and block, look into parge coating (search "parge" on the forum). Consider how airtightness will be handled at interfaces between different building elements, such as around windows, and where walls meet roof. Lots of info around the forum, but if you have any specific questions, fire them off in the relevant forum and someone will hopefully be able to help.

Welcome! Sounds intriguing from what little we know (yet ) Is there any specific element in all this for which you think some creative input might still be useful? If so, post away in the relevant forum. There are some awfully smart and creative people on this forum. Hopefully someone might spark some ideas that haven't come to you yet.

For a moment I read that as saying they did coffee and cake delivery to local train stations!

Do you ever wear any bloody clothes mate?

Welcome to Buildhub! Don't worry about asking rookie questions; we've all been (and some, like me, remain) there. You can be sure that someone, somewhere already has the same question, or will be pleased in the future to find a great forum thread answering yours. People do love pics, so if you have any you feel it's appropriate to share at this point in the purchase, feel free to do so. Again, welcome.

The spec for all ASHPs will include noise parameters. Worth checking before buying, especially if your neighbor's the one who has to hear it!

I don't think I'd want to either have the ASHP high enough to be near the MVHR outlet, nor the MVHR outlet low enough to be near a ground-based ASHP. Depending on the indoor and outdoor temperature (and your MVHR's efficiency), the MVHR outlet might only be a degree or two higher than ambient. As Jeremy says, the volume of air involved is low, too, relative to what the ASHP pushes when it's outputting a lot of heat. Re noise, our ASHP is almost silent when in heating mode. I don't know about DHW mode, as I'm never awake when it's operating like that!

A forum member/angel?

Sorry, I disagree. Everyone's jumped on two bricks and £40k muckaway, but he talked about groundworks, muckaway, altered ridge heights and changes to ceiling heights in the initial post, and a "5 figure" saving for 1-2 bricks. My point is that I think that rather than submitting any more arguments trying to prove him wrong, it'd be interesting to have @Fredd explain the figures. I absolutely agree that the proposed savings seem very high, and certainly that Fredd's initial post could have included more actual information.

Rather than speculating about what Fredd's talking about, why not leave him to come back and answer the questions?

The hoses they supply are laughable to say the least. The "full bore 22mm" flexis supplied had internal diameters of around half that from memory.

I'm curious about what you're hoping to achieve with this approach. I can't see anything positive that could come from asking this question. As I mentioned elsewhere, you're inhabiting a different world of costs to most self-builders, and seem intent on comparing a built-down-to-a-cost developer house to a self-builder's they'll-take-me-out-of-here-in-a-coffin house. But most people building their own houses are already paying a lot more than a developer for something of the same size. The extra cost of more insulation and better airtightness doesn't need to add all that much to this total cost. Over the 10 to 30+ year timeline a lot of selfbuilders have in mind, the extra cost is no big deal unless you're seriously up against a budget. Extra comfort and lower bills for a decade or two (or three) - why wouldn't you if you can afford it? Makes more sense than a £50k kitchen to my mind, but lots of people go for those. A properly power floated finish, done by an experienced professional, can be pretty good. Some here are within 5mm across a decent sized-slab (mostly done by the same company). We had ours laser-measured and everything is within 7-8mm across a ~140m2 footprint. I don't doubt that a liquid screed could be flatter if done properly.

Also, costs aside, my heavily insulated and airtight house is a very pleasant place to be in winter. Fresh air from the MVHR, and a nice even warmth throughout, with no cold spots, drafts, or intrusive radiators. Building this way did cost more, but last year my electric bill for the entire 12 months was around £900 - and we have no gas, so that covers heating, hot water, lighting, cooking, and everything else. It certainly cost me more to build this way, but I expect to be here 20+ years, so it all works out in the end. And given how long I plan to be here, I'm happy that we spent a bit more on decent windows etc, as it makes it a much more pleasant place to be.

You can set a lot of those values via the regular interface, but there may be other settings hidden behind a service interface. Panasonic had to talk me through setting the internal pump speed, because it was set too low for our situation and changing it isn't in the installation guide or instruction guide that came with it. I also understand that there's a setting for having the internal pump come on for a few mins each day to stop it seizing during periods of non-use. I suspect it sitting still doing nothing for over six months last summer encouraged the pump failure that our ASHP experienced.

I suspect that even with fairly cheap kitchen, windows, etc, the average self-builder will struggle to get near this. You have the benefit of good contacts and, I assume, work with people who know what you want and how you work, so it's all very efficient. Makes a world of difference compared to trying to find trades as a self-builder. At the least, I'm sure most trades build in a "self-builder" margin when pricing jobs. On average, you also get prices on materials that the average self-builder will struggle to get anywhere near. Add in the better spec that a lot of self-builders try for and it adds up quickly.

Welcome to the forum @Fredd. Always good to have someone stir the pot as long as they do so respectfully.

I think we paid just south of £4k (cash) for double story all around, for 16 weeks, with one adjustment. All the other quotes we had were at least several hundred, and in a couple of cases 50%, more. The big thing to watch out for is extra weeks. Some charge nothing, some charge 10%. We got stuffed a bit on this, as we ran over our initial estimate by a few months for various reasons. In the end the guy possibly felt a bit guilty for how much he'd made off us and said we could just keep it for nothing for the last few weeks. I suspected he was happy to just leave it there rather than take it down and store it. Sure enough, when it came time to remove it, it came down on three separate days over nearly a month, presumably as and when he needed it for other jobs. I think in the end we tool the last bit down ourselves and told him he needed to pick it up or we'd leave it by the road. Scaffolders are an interesting breed. Most of the other trades we had onsite weren't complimentary.

I can't see what else you can do. You've offered, they haven't taken you up. As you say, expecting hand-delivered notes for every delivery is nonsense, so don't play the game.

From memory, my wife found someone who had some sort of brick milling machine that was set up to do hundreds or thousands of these a day. I got the impression he was just sitting at the edge of an industrial estate with this thing stuck in a corner, reading the paper while the machine got on with it. Could be wrong!

Our experience with these was absolute hell. The first guys we had do them were brickies who were recommended by the brick slips suppliers (can't remember who it was off the top of my head, but not the company you link above). An absolute shower of gobshites. With no exaggeration, a 10 year old child could have done 10 times as good a job as the halfwits we had onsite. They ended up being the only supplier we kicked offsite. I think they were glad to go. We got a tiler to do it in the end, and he did a job that could best be described as workmanlike (he's the same guy that stuffed up our bathrooms, in case you followed that saga). We had a brickie do the pointing and that seemed to take approximately forever. The bricks supplied by the system manufacturer were dire. The cheap ones that we wanted to paint were different thicknesses. Some were bowed. We have a section of engineering brick slips. These were supplied as tiles (ie, not cut bricks) and show odd manufacturing marks in oblique light. The corner slips supplied were completely different in colour and texture to the main face slips, but the guy installing them didn't (somehow) notice, so they were all up and the adhesive set before the problem was noted. They look ridiculous, frankly, and I plan to replace them once everything else is done. The adhesive used is really good, but that means that it's a real pain getting them off! The third lot of adhesive the supplier sent to us was completely different to the first two. It was far runnier, and basically unusable in the application. There's still tens of tubes of it sitting in my garage, now out of date, because despite supplying replacement adhesive they didn't pick the wrong adhesive up. Unsurprisingly, we refused to pay for the wrong stuff, despite them attempting to get money from us for over a year after they wrongly supplied it. Basically, if I were to do this again I'd: - use a different system (we used the one with moulded plastic guides on a cement-board backing) - insist on cut bricks, not brick look-alike tiles, unless I was able to inspect samples and ensure they would look like bricks when installed. - carefully check every delivery to ensure that the slips are of high quality - same size, colour, thickness and texture - get a decent tiler to do it, or at least someone who has a decent eye for this sort of thing. I'm convinced it's actually a really easy job to do well, but as usual with British trades, we just couldn't get anyone to slow down and do a decent job, even on a day rate. - offer a day rate - we found that people had little idea about how to price the work.

This may be in Ireland (based on the OP's location), where there have been regulation changes that require someone to be responsible for the whole build. Not sure of the details, but Brendan (MBC) was telling me about it last year. Architects are one possibility for responsible person.

We bought a bungalow on a decent block of land on the Surrey-Hampshire border, surrounded mostly by much larger houses. We did this in 2012, just as things were starting to pick up. I reckon we're probably 10-20% ahead of what we spent, but that's solely because of the rise in property values since we bought and rebuilt. Looking around now, I'd say you'd have little chance as a typical self build doing any better than breaking even with the same approach unless you could do a lot of the work yourself.

Great work Russell!