jack

From memory, Howdens have a sale every October and they're pushed by the people upstairs to turn stock over. Make them a silly offer.

@daiking, I've got a brand new set of grey pipework that came with our Franke sink (plumbers just left it in the bag): It appears to have black versions of those clear tapered washers. Happy to mail the washers to you if they're the right size. What's the outer diameter of the pipework?

What is "policy 22"? Unless you're in the countryside, I can't see why the difference in size is relevant. We went from an 89m2 bungalow to a 290m2 house with attached double garage. We were surrounded by large houses though, and we're on a good size block, so the new house was perfectly appropriate. What're the houses around you like, and is your block big enough to comfortably take a house of the planned size?

Welcome. Sounds like a nice project. We definitely need some pics though!

150mm seems like huge overkill. Are you allowed to bury it before they arrive? If so, just drill the ends they can see! I can't imagine the guys doing the installation will care anyway, as long as they can get the pipe through easily.

Yes, they mention the 6 amp issue somewhere on the website I think. Fair enough, but you aren't trying to run a business off the back of your unit! Also, this unit will have a government subsidy associated with it for many installations. We all know what impact that has on the price of such things.

Brought to you by the people who designed the Immersun - basically the equivalent of an Immersun for EV charging: http://myenergi.uk/product/zappi/ They also do a version of the Immersun that's called something else, which can apparently communicate with the Zappi so you can set priorities.

This assumes no return on the £100 taken as a lump sum.

Perhaps I've been unlucky (and I certainly lack detailed knowledge), but I had trouble with an unmanaged switch when I last tried to use one. Admittedly that was probably 15-20 years ago. On that basis, and for the sake of a few metres of extra cable, I'll take separate outlets on the wall in preference to yet another device to keep plugged in and to go wrong!

I'm sure his boss wants to see happy customers and his employees spending only as much time on each inspection as they need to. Sounds like this guy's fallen short on both counts.

WTAF? Was it the agent that was disinterested and/or Internorm themselves? Were locks specified on the window schedule or other docs?

Yes, the map is by ward, so even within each region there'll be variance. I think we're technically in one ward by way of historical accident. We're at the end of the last road in a suburban area. Until about 50 years ago, our end of the road wasn't made up and was considered part of the adjacent rural area. It's since been made up and adopted, and become part of the suburban area. We're still in the adjacent rural ward though, because they didn't change the boundaries

Sounds like absolute bollocks to me. Unless he's a suitably certified electrician, what qualifications does he have to be inspecting an electrical installation anyway? If it's getting out of hand, I think the only thing you can do is get your knowledge straight (eg, find some official sources of why what he's asking for is out of order), and then have an open conversation with him about it. Explain that you're not a developer, but a self-builder doing the very best job you can to make your house compliant with (and indeed beyond) the minimum required by buildings regs, and that his demands are impacting your ability to keep momentum going onsite. Maybe explore where he gets the idea that he should be inspecting electrical work, for example, or querying the use of approved building materials such as SIPs. I think the danger with piecemeal communications based on particular instances (eg, your text to him about electrical work) is that they don't go to the heart of the problem, and may be interpreted by him as something to be suspicious about. Good luck, however you choose to tackle it. Exactly what happened with us. I was stunned when our (private) inspector took a five minute poke around after first fix (actually, electrics weren't even half finished, from memory) and then said he'd be back once everything was completed.

Re: satellite cable choice, have a read here (same site mentioned above): http://www.satcure.co.uk/tech/cable.htm I bought from them and all was good. For data, I'd say at least two to each TV point, and at least four to your main TV point. Every device (DVR, games console, Now TV, edited to add: Sky, etc) seems to have its own internet connection, and it's always better having these wired if possible. Longer term, you may want HDMI over ethernet, which from memory requires two cables per link. I'd also consider a duct from any central data point to your main TV point to allow for future developments. It's all overkill, I know, but it's so ridiculously cheap and easy to do now that I personally think you'd be crazy not to do it.

It's interesting how localised the numbers are. Sure, it's better in the south and east, on average, than in the north and west, but we've got everything from up by 49% to down by 12% within a few miles of us on the Hampshire/Surrey borders. At least around us, the higher rises seem to be in the "nicer" areas, which presumably have less turnover than the less nice areas. The researchers have not shown data for areas with small numbers of sales, although I don't know what's considered to be a small number of sales.

I believe Dyson has significantly changed its approach to filters over the years. No idea whether the current approach is better or worse than the first generation Dyson you had, but it's definitely different!

It also has a high silica content, I believe, meaning it blunts tools pretty effectively.

We were told to use stainless mails on our larch cladding, or face a high likelihood of staining. The supplier insisted on this even though we weren't buying the fixings from them. Might it make a difference whether local or Siberian larch is used? We had the latter.

Worth a call to the GSHP manufacturer to see whether they have any thoughts? I found Panasonic's tech department very helpful when I had a couple of odd errors during installation.

No idea on 1 and 3, but re: 2, do they really need to have two high-rate people there at all times for all jobs? Seems like overkill to me. I especially think that an UFH specialist is pointless. The UFH circuits are trivially easy to understand and could easily be handled by the GSHP specialist. And what is the UFH specialist doing for the 6 hours it will apparently take to flush the heat exchanger?

We made the silly mistake of buying a Dyson upright around the time we started building the house. I was stunned at how flimsy it was - the whole handle flexed when you twisted it to steer. After only a few weeks' ownership, my wife made the mistake of bringing it over to the new house and vacuuming up some concrete dust off the floor with it. The motor developed a horrible high-pitched squeal that's never gone away. A few months later, the mechanism that redirects air when use the wand jammed so you couldn't use the wand properly. The mechanism that releases the drum for emptying has always been stiff and difficult to operate. I'd never buy one again. It's a shame, because there's some brilliant technology in them. I just don't understand why they need to be so flimsy. We then borrowed a Henry from a family member who hires them out (he runs a plant hire business). According to him, they never, ever break. One of the gusy we had onsite said that he'd been given one by a mate, which he owned and used onsite for 5 years before realising you could get bags for them! The difference is palpable. Unbelievably, the cheap industrial Henry is quieter then the expensive domestic Dyson. The suction probably isn't as good, but frankly you can have too much suction on a deep carpet like we have upstairs (and you can't modulate the Dyson's suction power down). The bags are cheap - 50p each if you buy on Amazon Prime with other stuff. There's no way we'd be able to get through enough bags in the machine's lifetime to make up even half of the Dyson's higher price.

Welcome to Buildhub. This assumes you need high flow temps to keep the house warm in winter. As Jeremy said above, that isn't necessary in a house with this level of insulation and airtightness. We run at 25oC, which is the lowest temp I can get out of our ASHP in heating mode. That does us fine during even the coldest spells in winter (as an experiment, I did try a temperature compensation curve that edged the heat up to around 28oC during really cold weather, but we roasted!). We still haven't switched on our heating yet despite having concrete floors throughout the ground floor of our house. It's starting to get a bit cool, but my wife hasn't started complaining about the cold yet, so it can't be all that bad! I can't see why the RHI would be affected by not having upstairs heating. From memory, you calculate the whole house heat loss and figure out how much energy is needed to heat it. Why would having heating upstairs change your heating requirements? (edited to add: perhaps they're assuming you'll need higher temps downstairs to cope, which brings about a penalty per the RHI - not sure). I also don't understand the comment about sizing the ASHP to cater for heat loss from the ground floor only. Surely you size it for the heat loss of the house, in which case it doesn't matter how it's split between upstairs and downstairs. That said, I'm another with an MBC house. Unfortunately, we installed no heating upstairs. It's usually 1-2 degrees cooler in the bedrooms, which is fine, but I'd firmly recommend some form of low level heating to take the chill off the bathroom floors. UFH heating would be ideal. Electric may be useful to avoid getting too much heat into the structure, but if it's only on for a short period morning and night at low temp, I think a wet UFH system would be fine too. You do need space for it - annoyingly, we had MBC drop the joists an extra 50mm to allow space for UFH build-up in the bathrooms upstairs, then changed our minds and built it back up! It won't be enough to heat the house all year round, but it may be useful to take the edge off the slightly cooler incoming air from the MVHR. It's not really a primary form of heating, but more a way of making things more comfortable by making up for the MVHR losses. As someone said above, think hard now about how you're going to manage potential overheating. We decided not to include external blinds on one large east facing window, and we get a huge amount of solar gain through that in the morning during summer. The external blinds on the western window do a sterling job of keeping the heat out though. Agree with that. An interesting point, though, is that there are several accepted ways of calculating heat loss for the RHI (this is from memory, so don't quote me!) I don't doubt that there are ways to manipulate the calculations to end up with an energy consumption estimate that's far more than the house would actually use. Still not sure it would be enough to make the RHI worthwhile in most cases, unless you can find a tame RHI installer who's willing to certify someone else's work.

Ah, sorry. That was thoughtless of me.

Same(ish) with us: open plan kitchen diner, connected living room, and a completely separate snug. The snug is small - 3.5 x 4, from memory - but it gets used a more than just about anywhere else in the house. It's painted dark matt blue (even the ceiling), and has dark carpet and furniture, to try and keep it feeling, well, snug.

My guess is that you have one opportunity for a frank and free-ranging discussion with this guy. He knows exactly what he's done (just like he knew exactly what he was doing when he lied to you about building a single bungalow when you bought from him). It's touch and go just how much of a spanner will be thrown into the works if you go all out on a formal objection - potentially everything could come crashing down, or the council may think it's too hard to think of these applications en masse and will simply treat each on its face value ignoring the impact each has on the other. I'm not sure exactly what's been built or just has planning at the moment, but overall, do you see a way that he could legitimately develop the entire site while providing the requisite amenity space for all proposed buildings? If not, then he may be VERY upset at you throwing a spanner in his works. If you choose not to speak directly with him, one possibility would be to get someone else - a tame planning consultant perhaps? - to submit an objection without naming you. Whatever you do, I'd suggest that you may want to ask us to hide this thread in the near future!