jack

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 There's still tens of tubes of it sitting in my garage, now out of date, because despite supplying replacement adhesive they didn't pick the wrong adhesive up.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!

As alluded to above, unless you have mm measurements all over your planning documents, a few tens of mm aren't even going to be measurable. I've heard from more than one source that planners allow 100mm tolerances.

We booked flights to France with Ryan Air a few years ago and were offered a cheap hire-car booking for the time we were away as part of the booking process. It was a really good deal, so I booked it. When I went to pick up the car, I was told that I'd need to pay the deposit, and that they'd take the cost of a full tank of fuel out of the deposit when I returned the car. Querying this, I was told that the agreement I'd "signed" on the way through the booking had confirmed that I would have to pay for a full tank of fuel upon arrival. I couldn't believe this was true, so went and did some research when I got where we were going. Sure enough, I'd been told the truth by the agent. The tank of fuel condition was buried somewhere down in a 40 page terms and conditions document, which was only accessible at the actual time you were making the booking. I was absolutely seething, because we weren't going to need to drive more then 30-40 miles while we were there, so I'd effectively be paying for a full tank of fuel that I'd only be using a small proportion of. I will avoid Ryanair unless I literally have no choice. Hire car companies are all shocking, so I haven't bothered crossing this one off the list.

We bought from Love Your Home in Peper Harrow. Decent quality for the price and they offer extensive customisation options. Natuzzi is lovely but expensive.

... and it's your money.

Ah yes, I believe you've talked about this guy before. Never met a door to door salesman he didn't like!

Building a house is easy. It's like riding a bike. Except the bike is on fire and you're on fire and everything is on fire and you're in hell.

Have they done a full and proper annual generation prediction comparing the two systems? If not, where has the 25% come from? My guess is that it's just sale BS, and that if pushed they won't put anything in writing. The main reason to consider microinverters or power optimisers (Solar Edge is the latter I think) is if you have a lot of shading. If he doesn't, then I can't imagine that it makes any sense to change. He'd have to look at the maths, but the payback period will be woeful, especially on a relatively small system like his.

Agreed. You can cut down on expensive materials, use second hand or seconds materials from ebay, use cheap imaginative finishes etc, but fundamentally, someone needs to do the actual work, and there's a floor for hourly/day rates for trades.

It looks like there was a problem with the quote in your previous post. I've just fixed it. Looks like you have the hang of it now

Welcome! I hope you do too, although I think the general feeling is that self-build is more or less a series of reinforcement learning episodes punctuated by brief periods where things appear (deceptively) to be going right.

Great, thanks. That all accords with my understanding but I wanted some reassurance before going back to the ASHP guy and asking him not to charge VAT for his services.

But an electrician can zero rate his/her services even if there's no supply at all. I think installation of zero rateable goods is zero rated, but design (or more particularly, design without supply) is not. I also understand that you can't claim back wrongly charged VAT on services. The VAT refund is only on products. To clarify, it isn't supply and fit. The electrician and I did the physical installation. He did the electrical connections and the plumber plumbed most of it in. What's being done here is finalisation of some installation details (temporary connections outside being made permanent, for example), filling of the UFH loops with glycol (supplied by me) and testing/commissioning in accordance with the manufacturer's standards. The only supply is some ancillary bits and pieces (a valve for a filling loop and some copper tubing).

I think I know the answer to this, but thought I'd check. We're going to have our ASHP installation finalised and commissioned by a professional. I've just received a quote, which includes VAT. I can't see why this would be any different to the installation and commissioning of, eg, windows or electric circuits as part of a new build. In that case, VAT shouldn't be payable. Does that sound right? Thanks

I think this is just what we'd call "cement board", which is wood fibres in a cementitious binder. The stuff we left outside developed a similar patina over several months.

I'd consider buying a piece of cement board and experimenting with distressing it, including spraying/splashing parts of it with water, tinted washes, chemicals (particularly acids), or whatever. Try sealing the result with matt/gloss lacquers to see how that changes things. We had a couple of big offcuts lying around outside for several months and they developed an interesting patina!

Exactly the same from the guy who did our decorating. The colours can be matched by many other paints. The "chalkiness" obviously isn't there, but apparently it's a nightmare, because the moment you touch, scuff, or wash it, you get a patch that looks different from the rest.

Interesting list. We have a lot of the same equipment (even down to the railway sleepers!), so I'll be following replies with interest!

Welcome!

As a comparison, we went away for three weeks over Christmas. We've had some problems with our ASHP (hopefully to be fixed in a couple of weeks) and had been using a single column heater to keep the house warm. I didn't want to leave this on, so turned it and the immersion heaters on the UVC off for the whole three weeks. The only incidental gains were the losses from the fridge and freezer motors, and whatever solar gains there were over that period (some very cold temps and gale force winds I believe). Everything else was switched off at the power point. We returned to a very chilly house on Saturday evening the weekend before last. I didn't check the temp at the time, but I guess it was around 13 deg C based on the temperature the next day. Bear in mind we'd had cold temps and gale force winds during much of the period we were away. I switched everything back on and turned the column heater (2kW) on full with a small fan on it to distribute the heat. The house temp initially rose by around 1.5 degrees a day. Things were pretty unpleasant for a few days (not just because of my grumbling family!), but by around Thursday we were in the very high teens and I switched down to medium power. We're sitting at around 20 C now, with 1kW input from the column heater. As I've said before, we don't have great solar gain, so I was surprised to see the house sitting well into the teens after three weeks away with no incidental energy being supplied.