jack

Have you looked into the cost of batteries and the associated hardware, and done the sums based on how much energy you can realistically buffer? I'd be really surprised if there's a net financial benefit to a battery system in a low-energy house over, say, a 10 year period. Even with PV, the problem remains: over winter, you don't generate much energy, so your batteries will be underused. Over summer, there's often so much insolation that you don't have a hope of using it all, so your batteries will be full early in the day and you still end up exporting. Shoulder months can be better, but even then it's hard to model day-to-day activities unless you have a good handle on how energy is used (or will be used) in the new house. I don't know whether these very cheap overnight tariffs from, eg, Octopus change the numbers much, but I personally think there are a lot of numbers to be crunched before making decisions like these.

Yes, you need diamond blades. Ordinary grinding discs aren't suitable (might even be dangerous - I don't know). The ones you've posted look fine. Report back how you find them.

If it's a new build, boundary fencing should be zero rated for VAT if it's supply and install.

If the heating isn't on, it's because the house is currently warm enough. If the house is warm enough, then the floors won't be cold! As a point of comparison, we have a 4 bedroom house just shy of 290m2, with passivhaus levels of insulation and airtightness, and MVHR. We have concrete floors throughout the ground floor, except for the TV room. The floor remains a pleasant continuous temperature no matter what the weather is like outside. As for running out of hot water, put in a big enough tank and you never will. If you run a lot of showers, I'd also suggest getting a waste water heat recovery unit. We only have a 250 litre unvented cylinder heated to 50 deg C by a 5kW ASHP, but we very rarely run out of hot water, even with two teenagers in the house. It happened for the first time in months the other day, when all four of us had showers in quick succession and one of the kids was in there singing away for god knows how long before we realised the water was still running!

We lived with two young kids in less than 90m2 for two years. More space would have been nice (especially the tiny kitchen), sure, but living in a place that's three times as big is not three times as good. If I were building again, I'd at minimum tweak down the sizes of a few rooms. The older I get, the truer this seems.

Agreed. I've used both the diamond disc and cup types with a small grinder with great success on concrete (which is much harder than brick). I also shaped some brick slips to go over and around some flashings - the diamond disc went through them like butter. As you say, lots of dust, but a mask and eye protection should be used when doing this sort of thing anyway. @epsilonGreedy, unless there's an access issue, I'd have thought this would be a lot faster and likely leave a cleaner finish than using a multi-tool, although admittedly I've never used a multi-tool for this specific purpose.

Wow, unbelievable it's been that long, but you're right! I'd have guessed that no more than 10 years had passed since those changes. Man I feel old. That said, a reasonable belief as to boundary position remains an option for a claim under even the new law. That seems to be what's happened here (assuming the boundary is actually in the wrong place - it may actually be the title document that's wrong, in which case this is not a situation to which adverse possession applies). See Schedule 6 of the LRA 2002: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2002/9/schedule/6 Para 5(4) is the relevant bit (needs to be read in conjunction with at least paras 1 and 2). I agree that this will all be completely irrelevant as far as the planners are concerned.

So the fence was put in place by the person who owned both plots at the time it was erected? Interesting. I wonder what the law would have to say about that. In some ways, it seems to strengthen your position, since presumably the plot owner had no particular interest in putting the fence in the wrong place. Indeed, I wonder whether the title/boundary was recorded before or after the fence was erected? The ideal would be the latter, because then it just appears to be a simple error in recording an existing boundary defined by the features of the fence and hedge. I'm not a lawyer though - you really will need to speak to one, unfortunately.

It's ridiculous to give a resolution of 1cm (e.g., 2.02m) in the circumstances. It's hard to say more without a full history of both plots. Do you know why the fence/hedge was placed there? Did it replace another in the same place? On the face of it, either the title map isn't right, or it's right and you have a claim to adverse possession (assuming you can show the fence has been there for 12+ years or whatever the adverse possession period is). Either way, all I see is costs for both parties unless your neighbour sees sense.

No, this was quite recent. I assume he missed it because the flammable cladding is only to an overhanging portion of the first floor. If you only look at the ground level floorplan, it appears compliant.

We have flammable cladding much less than the required distance from our neighbour's boundary. Completely overlooked the the BCO until his final inspection! He basically said "Oops, I seem to have overlooked that. Oh well, it looks pretty close to the required distance".

Adverse possession is for where land that is owned by one party has come into the potential possession of another party by way of long-term occupation. Your case sounds more like there's a question over where the boundary lies, exactly. The land registry documents are not definitive. If there's been a fence in place for 20-odd years without anyone noticing, then unless the land registry makes it clear that the fence is in the wrong place, there's a decent argument that the boundary is in the right place, and the land is yours (not theirs, and you having a right to claim by way of adverse possession). That said, there are traps for the unwary here. Do not under any circumstances discuss this issue with your neighbour before talking to a suitably experienced solicitor. One trick your neighbour might try is to offer to sell it to you at a low price. You accept, then he/she withdraws, but by that time you've effectively confirmed that you believe he owns the land.

I should probably use a thermostat, but I just run it open circuit at 16 deg C, and switch it into cooling mode manually when needed. Usually only bother if we have a run of hot weather predicted, as it takes a while for the house to get hot. If you plan to use a thermostat, bear in mind that when cooling you'll need to have it trigger when the temperature goes above a setpoint, whereas for heating it's the other way around. I don't know whether some thermostats have N/O and N/C outputs so you could have one pair connected for heating and the other for cooling, and then just change the mode at the ASHP on a seasonal basis. Alternatively, use a separate cooling thermostat. What's their basis for saying this? I only have a 5kW unit (which has even lower cooling capacity) but I wouldn't be without it during hot periods in summer. It's extremely pleasant walking around on cool floors when it's really hot outside. People who come into our house for the first time at times like this are always stunned at how pleasant it is. It's a very different feeling to cooling via air conditioning.

Actually, that rings a loud bell.

We average around 7 MWh per annum, which is somewhat less you might expect for the same array mounted to a south facing roof at a higher angle, but still pretty good given the angles some of the panels are at. Our panels are on a flat roof and we wanted them out of sight. The panels are therefore all mounted at relatively shallow angles - mostly south-facing, but there's a line of panels with alternating east-west orientation that's actually tilted slightly to the north (as well as being angled east and west). These typically generate about 80% of the energy of the south-facing panels. Interesting that your array produced more in January than December - ours was the other way around this year. We had a particularly poor January this year at 135 kWh - the previous three Januaries were 164, 184 and 161 kWh. Edited to add: so yes, my previous comment was somewhat pessimistic about how much energy you might expect from the average 4 kW installation, but the general principle of there not being very much energy available in winter compared to heating needs still applies.

I use an ASHP to heat and cool our downstairs floors. They're polished concrete, so it's really effective (it's like walking into a cave in the middle of summer - on a really hot day the kids come inside and lie down on it to cool down quickly!) The one carpeted room downstairs doesn't get heated or cooled anywhere near as well as the bare floors, so I think you're right to be concerned about UFH upstairs if you're having carpets. If I were doing this again, I think I'd go for tiled floors in bedrooms, and put down large rugs in the colder months. You'd then just need to heat enough to keep the chill off in winter, but you'd have the full effect of UFC for summer. The alternative would be an air conditioner for summer. Depends on what your insulation levels are like, and what temperature you like your bedrooms, but we're happy with no heating in the bedrooms.

I'd argue that you should essentially ignore PV as part of your heating assessment, as insolation is at lowest exactly when you need the most heating in the middle of winter. As an example, I have 8.5 kW of PV. It managed 144 kWh in December, and 135 kWh in January. In January, there were many days when I got less than 5 kWh. For resistance based heating, that amounts to covering the energy required to operate a small fan heater for about 2 hours. With a 4 kW system, you're looking at less than half that output - so a small fan heater for an hour. Sure, during sunny days it makes more, and if your insulation is current building regs level, you'll need heating during the shoulder months, and PV will help. I just wouldn't be making PV a significant focus of my heating plans.

The Once you have glycol in sufficient concentration, it won't freeze unless you live somewhere crazy cold. We used some special sort of propylene glycol that was less viscous than the standard stuff, but still non-toxic. Can't find it online now unfortunately, but maybe it's what you're already looking at. I wouldn't personally leave an ASHP unused for months at a time. Some of them allow you to do some sort of brief turn-on every day to keep things moving. I'm pretty sure ours (Panasonic Aquarea from 2015) has a setting along those lines.

Not quite. I believe the ones designed for cooling have a condensate try and drain. I believe the ones that are okay for cooling will be fine for heating, but not necessarily the other way around. If you're talking about heating/cooling capacity, I think it's probably the other way around (ie, you need more heating capacity than cooling capacity, in general). Personally, I'd be concerned about dry air if this is to be your sole method of heating the house.

We used it (along with lots of other sites) for ideas for our build 5 or 6 years ago, but the site was annoying and clunky, and there's no way I'd click through to buy stuff through it.

No idea. We had about 300-350 invoices/receipts, I think. I suspect they take a quick glance at every invoice, but I can't imagine they have the time to check them all in detail. I wouldn't be surprised if they use some sort of sampling, whether per claim and/or across several claims. Maybe they check every 5th or 10th invoice/receipt in every case, and check every 5th or 10th claim in great detail, possibly based on a few flags? I tried very hard to make ours look as professional and detail oriented as possible - in my head, I thought they might be less likely to challenge things if it was clear that effort had been made to be compliant. No, I believe all we had was a text or maybe an email confirming receipt. Nothing else before all documents were returned with a decision.

That's great news!

Very much the case, unfortunately. The classic issue arises at the interface between one trade and another: so the brickies will blame the guys that did the foundations, the window installers will blame the brickies, the plasterers will blame the chippies who built the frame. I don't know how you manage this, other than making sure each trade coming onsite knows what quality of work is expected upfront, and checking that quality as each stage finishes and before you make final payment, so you can get issues sorted before the next trade turns up and starts complaining. More than one BuildHub member has suggested taking recommendations from people whose work you're happy with. The other way around would actually make more sense: have people recommend the trade before them, because they know who'll do a good job that'll make their life easy! Shame houses aren't built in that direction...

Well that was an unexpected surprise. We just had a signed-for delivery arrive. I wasn't expecting anything, and then had a slight panic attack when I saw it was from HMRC. Big bundle of docs, so assumed they were just returning the invoices, but turns out it came with a letter confirming they'll be paying in full within 20 days! A few notes: We moved in around Christmas 2015. It's taken us far longer than I'd ever thought possible to get things signed off, and I was convinced we'd be going to appeal as a result. We were upfront about the delay (i.e., we put in the correct moving-in date on the form), but did not give any explanations or excuses. The application was filed at the end of October (about 2.5 months after issuance of the completion certificate), so it's taken almost 4 months to get the decision. We had some oddities - a few invoices in the name of trades, an invoice in the name of someone completely random (something bought at a trade counter - our guess is that they made a mistake and used the last customer's account?), some cash receipts for cheaper items (each under £100, I believe), and one weird invoice for bathroom stuff that combined the amount owing and deposit paid in a difficult-to-fathom way. We put a brief explanation on each point in the covering letter. All invoices were accepted, which surprised me a bit. We did have some decent expenses in the months leading up to the completion date, which may have helped paint a picture of the work being ongoing. There were, however, periods of a year or more where nothing happened, so certainly there's nothing to suggest that the work was continuous. In any event, the money is nice, but not having the stress of a potential appeal and tribunal hearing is even better! I do hope this is indicative of a change in practice at HMRC. I genuinely feel for the people who lost significant money as a result of HMRC's behaviour.

I think that diagram is just one he's found elsewhere, rather than being related to his plans.