jack

While "fora" is the latin plural of "forum", "forums" is more usual in ordinary English.

Welcome Jim. How windy is it in Essex? (Sorry, it'll make more sense when you read some of Ian's posts.) Good luck with the appeal - let us know how you get on.

I'm sure I saw a tyre place near me advertising nitrogen fill as part of their fitting deal. According to this at least, the advantages in that situation aren't necessarily all they're sold to be.

Our experience is different to Jeremy's, partly because of the differences in our microclimate and situation. We get relatively little solar gain due to trees, plus we don't have his nestled-into-a-hill microclimate, so our house is nowhere near as naturally warm as his. On the flipside, we don't have the summer overheating issues he's had in the past - the house has been fine in summer even without using cooling mode on the ASHP.

@Ed_MK, PM me your email address and I'll send you ours. Also agree with looking on the planning portal for your council - the D&A statement is published with all the other documents. @Ferdinand is right that they're no longer compulsory, but it usually makes sense to submit one, especially if there's anything at all unusual or challenging in what you're trying to do.

Because (and I speculate): The fabric of house with the WBS is already not far off the target temp (21 degrees, say), so all the heat goes into overheating not heating up from cold. How many people do you know who have a 3 kW WBS? I've heard of a 4 kW model, but that's at the lowest setting, and I suspect (but don't know) that you'd probably have to get it up higher to start with. You also have residual heat from a WBS. You don't burn it for an hour then have it fall immediately to ambient. Even a small WBS will probably put at least two or three times its kW rating (in kWh) into the house on a minimum length run (ie, a 3 kW stove would likely burn for at least a couple of hours, then take a least another hour to dump its stored heat, amounting to more like 8-10 kWh of energy). The fabric can only absorb heat at a certain rate. The WBS puts out more than that, and the radiant heat it emits quickly makes nearby surfaces very warm (albeit not to much depth). The result is an unpleasant warmth near the WBS. The situation you're describing in your own house is more like running an air heater in a cold room. The air feels warm quite quickly, but if you turn the heater off it quickly gets cold again because all the surfaces in the room are cold. Give it time.

Oooh, nice!

We?

It's stuff I've largely already said. Happy to summarise if and when it comes to that. And I'm not a naughty boy, I'm the messiah!

Yep. We run our unit at the absolute minimum setting when it's just the family in the house. That's about 60% of the mandated rate, and it's perfectly fine.

Welcome! Some brief comments based on things I've done or read while building our house: Is that Foamglas? If so, isn't it quite an expensive solution? Are there specific limitations in your situation that require the use of something like this? Not the end of the world, although a little extra planning is needed. As you probably know, it needs to be insulated. I believe @Stones has his in the loft. Check out his blog to see what he did. You also want to sure you have easy access for servicing, and especially for cleaning/replacing filters a few times a year. You'll also need to allow for a condensate drain. Our house has Passivhaus levels of insulation and airtightness, and we have no heating upstairs. Bedrooms are fine all year round, but we made a mistake not putting UFH in the bathrooms. It would definitely be more comfortable if we'd put in UFH for the coldest months. I'd certainly consider including some sort of heating for anywhere you'll be wet and naked (oo er). I have a Loxone installation that I did myself (well, electrician did the dangerous stuff, I did the design and programming). If you've having a pro do the installation, cool, but if you're planning on doing anything yourself, feel free to get in contact via PM and I'd be happy to share some bits and pieces I've learned along the way. If you're doing this for watering the garden, great. See what @Bitpipe did with buried containers as one cheap way of proceeding. However, if you plan to use the water inside the house, be aware that it's a very expensive option relative to the returns. Water is cheap (possible too cheap), so it's hard to make any sort of economic case for rainwater recycling. Unless you live in a dry area, there's an argument that there's little or no environmental advantage either - as I understand it, the water companies use less power filtering, treating and pumping water to your house than you'll use doing it locally. Might be worth some research, at least. If you want to continue any of the conversations above, it's best to start new threads in the relevant forums. That way others can find them in the future and learn from the discussions. Again, welcome to BuildHub!

Welcome to Buildhub If your builder had engaged and paid the PM, then those services could have been zero-rated. The difficulty then, though, would be that your contract wouldn't have been with the PM. Even if the PM were ostensibly working on your behalf, you'd only have had recourse to the builder if the PM's performance fell short.

So you're literally "pissed off" about an optional certification process? One that you admit you're ignorant about: I also think you're still conflating the standard itself with certification. Most (all?) of your criticism seems to be about the standard itself rather than certification. If you want to discuss shortcomings of the standard in the context of certification (bearing in mind the thread is about the latter), then the argument goes something along the lines of "The PH Standard sets a number of requirements that will add cost and perhaps complexity to a building's design and the building process. If you don't plan to certify, you may avoid some of this cost and complexity by focusing on a core subset of the PH Standard requirements, such as airtightness, insulation and heat recovery."

Exactly. So who exactly are you saying is "pissed off" about the certification process? This isn't like SAP, where people have every right to be frustrated about a compulsory box-checking exercise that they need to pay for when they sell their house. This is a voluntary option, that a proportion of people who build to (or towards) the standard choose to pay for. I've already said twice now why certification might make sense to some in certain situations. I personally didn't see it as being good value in mine. I'm not even slightly annoyed about that. The certification process isn't the problem. Some elements of the standard itself could certainly do with some tweaking. And that has to do with PH certification how?

I think an important point is repeatedly being missed. The PH standard is not just about a handful of measurements that you need to meet (eg, airtightness, primary energy usage, etc). It is also a quality and comfort standard. Gaining PH certification involves a lot more than just making sure two or three numbers are right, because as you say, if that was all it was you could just measure airtightness when you move in and energy usage over a year, say, and that would be the end of it. The PH standard involves a significant amount more than that. It requires an independent third party to verify that the building meets all of the requirements of the PH standard, both as designed and as built. They include things like the noise of MVHR units, thermal bridge assessment, and loads of other things. Yes, an individual with the time, capability and interest in working through all of the requirements for the standard could design and build a house that met it, then not get it certified (several on here have done that to varying degrees). But if it isn't certified, a subsequent buyer (for example) has no way of knowing that the standard has been met. Energy bills just say how much energy has been used. They don't deal with all the other stuff, like thermal bridging for example. I get that you don't think certification is worth anything, and in certain circumstances (eg, where a self-builder builds or closely project-manages their build), I agree it may be of limited use. But if you, for example, contract a turnkey building company to build you a Passivhaus standard house, the only way to be sure they've actually built you one (assuming you're not actually onsite supervising them every moment) is to get it certified. Given that it appears people regularly spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on such properties, an extra few thousand to make sure you're getting what you pay for doesn't seem too crazy to me. It's the opposite of what you suggest - they do this because the numbers are very important! As @craig said, if the numbers are independently verified, that's fine. Do you think that using manufacturers' data should just be relied upon with no oversight? Why would anyone be "pissed off" about certification? No one forces you to get certification, so I can't understand why people get so cranky about it. You can use the PHPP to design your house, pay close attention to how it's built, and you'll likely get all the benefits of living in a PH. If you figure out the PHPP yourself, the cost of doing this is literally the cost of the PHPP package (a couple of hundred quid, I think) and your time. I think that's a pretty good deal myself. Yes, this is rightly one of the major criticisms of the PH standard. It should definitely be modified to take occupancy into account and house size. The other major criticism is that it offers no flexibility around climate. It's easy to meet the standard somewhere like northern Europe where there are long periods of sun in winter. It's a lot harder somewhere like Seattle, where it's relatively overcast throughout winter, so solar gain is hard to come by. The US PH people split off from the main PH lot a few years back, based at least partly on this issue. I have some sympathy with their objections, and again this is an area where the PH Institute has been overly rigid imo.

Make sure it's cleaned recycled stone. Ours turned up unwashed and is pretty unpleasant. Unfortunately I wasn't here, and it had been accepted, laid and whacked (fnarr fnarr) before I got home.

Interesting. Looking at his website, he's done some very interesting stuff!

That's him. He's an architect, as I recall.

The guy who built it gave a talk at Ecobuild a few years ago (possibly the same one where I met Thomas Froehlich). I was really surprised to hear that he was able to get PH certification after the fact. I think he was somewhat lucky, both that he'd documented everything so well, and that it was built in such a way that it met the formal requirements. I absolutely love the arch, especially from the inside, but was originally less sure about its interaction with the box. It's definitely grown on me since. I do think certification has a value, which is that an independent person has reviewed both what was designed and what was built, and concluded that both elements meet all the requirements of the PH standard. That may be of less value for those of us who are project managing or even building it ourselves, because we have a better chance of catching shortcuts by others (or ourselves!) For someone using a main contractor, I believe there's definitely value in this independent oversight. It's not that you must buy them, it's just that for certain elements it may be easier to meet the standard if you do, especially if other restrictions (eg, orientation, shading) make meeting the standard more onerous. I do think it's ridiculous that an MVHR's SAP rating has to be knocked down by 15% - it isn't as though it just a manufacturer's number plucked out of the air (assuming I'm right that SAP ratings involve independent testing - please correct me if I'm wrong). Never apologise for having a crappy day. Being able to let off some steam is just one of the great things about Buildhub.

I'll see if I can find the quotes we got. Pretty sure the whole deal was more than double that.

Who said anything about not educating? Like everyone on here, I try to help out as best I can. Many of my friends and family come to me to ask about building since they know how hands-on we were (at least in a project management sense). The problem, as Daiking says, is that if people can't be arsed to understand (or in the case of many builders, meet) the basic requirements, how are they going to have a hope of understanding non-standard or unusual approaches? I do agree that the quality of teaching is generally pretty poor. I don't think that's the fault of teachers. It's the fault of a society that increasingly doesn't value knowledge, curiosity or creativity. Coupled with low rates of pay and appalling conditions for a lot of teachers, you end up with a largely disengaged group of people trying to teach another disengaged group of people. I'm trying really hard to engender a sense of curiosity and a love of learning for learning's sake in my kids, but it's bloody difficult.

Another good outcome. Well done for sticking to your guns.

Great outcome Ian. Nice it came through so fast. I find it a bit surprising they claimed on their insurance. Was it really worth it for that amount of money?

Getting back to the original poster's question for a moment, what point in the build are you at @graeme m? Unless you're still at the planning stages, it's likely to be difficult, if it's possible at all, to certify your house as meeting the PH standard. Was that for the second part of the certification process (ie, confirming that the PHPP as completed by the PH consultant meets all the requirements, and submitting to the PH Institute), or for everything? I can only assume it's the former, based on some of the quotes we were getting for the different stages.

A large part of the problem is where we're starting from in terms of what the general population and builders know and want (edited:) are willing to pay for. Since starting our project, several friends have undertaken significant building works. None have actually built houses, but one took a bungalow back to bare walls and added another storey, and two completed roof-off renovations including extensive extensions. All involved all-new windows and doors, and replacement insulation. I talked to all of them about insulation and airtightness, and all shrugged and said that their architect/builder was doing the "building regs" stuff. I encouraged them to go for better windows, but they weren't "in the budget". I encouraged one to at least add extra insulation to their loft bedroom, given that they were unsatisfied with how hot their current loft was during summer. Nope. Not willing to spend the money, don't have the ridge height, and in any event they're installing an air conditioner! Builders are even worse. We've all seen how disinterested many of them are in even following the rules they're supposed to follow. Most won't offer better standards even if they've capable of achieving them, because the buyers of their services value those standards at approximately zero. So all this talk of technical capability within the industry is theoretical unless and until it's backed up by law and oversight, imo. Until then, people will do what they've always done.