jack

We just don't have the solar gain unfortunately. The one one decent window on the south side is shaded by a large tree most of the morning. Still pretty warm, and very comfortable, with not much energy, which is the main thing.

Concrete can develop fine surface cracks depending on various factors during curing. They don't affect strength, as I understand it. Whether this is what you have I don't know, sorry. Definitely one for the supplier

Bugger, what an inconvenience.

I did the same! As for living in a passivhaus-level house (in terms of insulation and airtightness, although some of our windows need adjusting at the moment), we're still waiting to get our ASHP fixed. As such, our sole source of heating for the entire winter so far has been a single 2kW electric column heater in the kitchen, with a small fan on it blowing the heat around. Mostly I've had it on the medium setting, but turned it on full for the colder weather recently. It isn't on all the time, and I usually have the thermostat set at 4 out of 6. We've been perfectly comfortable (my wife would say it's too cold, but she always thinks it's too cold). At the moment, it's -3 outside. I'm sitting here with a hoodie on, in a room at the other end of the house from the heater, and the temperature is very pleasant. The bedrooms are somewhat cooler, as usual. The bathrooms could do with being 2 or 3 degrees warmer, but they're still warmer than in any house I've ever rented. I am having to wear thick socks, because the unheated slab is very cool (we have polished concrete throughout our ground floor - not the warmest option in this situation!) Incidentally, I just received my electricity bill for the last quarter and it isn't much more than for the same period last year. That really surprised me.

Feel free to post your detailed construction drawings in the relevant subforum and you may get some useful feedback, even just along the lines of particular areas you should be watching the timberframe company.

Check your building inspector doesn't want more. There's some official-ish document around that suggests 10mm if I remember correctly. It's based on the width of a small imperial door and anticipated flow rates - something like that. Edited to add: Knew I should have searched before posting. Here it is: http://www.titon.co.uk/pages/knowledge-support/building-regulations/part-f-ventilation-england-wales.php

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.