jack

Apologies, I've hidden my response, since it's clearly way off topic.

The problem is that most 12 year olds just don't have the life experience to be able to predict outcomes. Mine certainly doesn't!

Just to be clear @Coops85, you don't connect the PV panels to just the ASHP and/or Sunamp. PV is connected to the household supply, and anything that is drawing electrical energy within the house will use power from the PV if it's available. You can do things like program your ASHP to only turn on during daylight hours, which will tend to ensure that it's powered by PV if available. But bear in mind that in the middle of winter there are days where you'll generate virtually no PV, sometimes for days on end. In that case, you can't avoid using mains electricity. The aim of the game at the moment is future proofing. Battery storage is still too expensive to be mainstream, but that's changing all the time. Include heavy cabling from the consumer unit to an area where you can one day install batteries (garage, attached shed or workshop perhaps). Also run heavy cables from your consumer unit to anywhere you might one day want to charge a car. As Nick says, the requirement for three phase is puzzling. How much PV has the council stipulated? If you don't know this yet, you can use Jeremy's heat loss spreadsheet to work out an estimate. Come back with that info and people will be able to give more specific advice.

I have a 12 year old - sorry, but the potential benefits are swamped by the risks imo. It may be that the risk of accident isn't that high, but the outcome of such an accident is likely to be very poor.

Electrician had some free time today so has kindly offered to come over. He's just arrived and will be extending the ring in the pantry to include the fridge socket. Looks like a straightforward job, thankfully, helped by having space to run conduit behind the units.

A friend used to hot-wire model aeroplane wings, as you said. Easy enough to build your own with nichrome wire, a frame and a variable current power supply. It would take a while to get it all together, which would allow you to put off actually doing the work.

I suspect could manage this with some help from the usual suspects on BH, but I just don't have the time this week.

I spent a lot of time thinking and worrying about this (initially to the amusement, subsequently to the boredom, and eventually to the horror, of my wife and the architect). My excuse is that I once slipped on some very steep Victorian stairs with narrow treads while carrying a [edited to correct baby's age: just realised I told this story on the thread Ferdinand linked above] six three month old baby. Baby was fine, but I nearly broke my elbow protecting him. One place to look is the commercial regs. They require wider treads and a shallower angle than residential. From memory, the statistics say that even small increases in run above the residential minimum can significantly reduce the risk of accidents. Also bear in mind that angle isn't everything - fewer, higher steps with a longer run can give the same angle, but more space for your foot (but also a higher vertical per step, which may be more challenging as you get older). I used to carry a tape measure around with me when we were planning the house, and measured everything from the size of rooms I liked, to windows, to stair sizes. We eventually decided on a run that was similar to the stairs between the floors where I was working at the time, with a slightly higher rise due to constraints within the house design. This is what we ended up with: Note that the treads are open, so the effective size of each tread is more than 264mm, because your toes can go underneath the overhanging tread. I find this size very comfortable. It's definitely a noticeable improvement over the basic building regs approach. I'd have preferred a lower rise. We could, for example, have added one more step and reduced the rise to ~172, but the extra step would have brought the stairs too close to the door for my liking (although now that we've lived here, I don't think it would actually have made much difference). The only thing that concerns me about these stairs is that it's a long way down if you trip at the top. Given my time again, I'd have reconfigured the house to put the stairs with a 180 deg turn and mid-level landing. Oh, and the stairs are nearly the maximum width you can go without needing handrails on both sides. The max is 1000mm, and ours at 980mm feels very generous.

Welcome to Buildhub! One minor suggestion would be to drop those questions into the relevant sub-forums. Some people only browse the sub-forums they're interested in, and mightn't pick up your questions in an intro thread. Also, it helps others find answers in the future. I will say that rainwater harvesting (beyond basic harvesting for the garden) rarely makes economic sense. I was all for it, but even the most ardent greenies we spoke to in the sustainable building world thought it was a waste of money.

Thanks Jeremy. I do have an adjacent location where I could put a switch, although running cabling there might be a bit of a faff. Probably safest to get the electrician in and see what he says. Unfortunately, the fitter is onsite with the stuff first thing this morning and I won't have time to get my electrician onsite. Things should still be accessible enough to get the wiring where it needs to be though (I hope!)

We finally have our pantry furniture arriving tomorrow. Carcasses will be installed tomorrow, then we choose and install worktops, then the fitter comes back and finishes off some cupboards and woodwork that sits on the worktops. I was just admiring my wife's handiwork after she cleared out the space this afternoon, when I realised that we haven't actually had a socket or wiring installed for the bar fridge that'll be part of this! There are a few options, but before I go too far down any particular road, what's the legal position on sockets for built-in appliances? Is it necessary for them to be remotely switchable? And if not, I assume it's desirable for both safety and practicality? Can two fridges share a remote switch? Our main fridge switch isn't actually that far from where the bar fridge is going, so it's conceivable I could wire both through that, or possibly have two switches at that location but supplied from the same cable. Thoughts? Thanks

Only "reasonably"? I think you're selling them short!

Welcome to BuildHub.

We asked a couple of alu-clad window suppliers whether using standard sizes would reduce cost, and both said there are no standard sizes. Even trying to keep multiple windows the same size makes no difference, as all windows are bespoke, and the minor gains potentially made by having a few windows the same size are completely swamped by the cost of materials and labour.

Welcome Claire. You picked a good time in the process to find Buildhub!

Ooh, cool. Never seen one of those in the wild before.

We're drowning in birch polypores around here. Shame they aren't edible (and I don't sharpen my own razors, so no use for that application either). Do a little research first. The vast majority of mushrooms you run into won't be edible. The River Cottage mushroom book is a good resource. Take a look at this website too: https://www.mushroomdiary.co.uk/getting-started-in-mushroom-hunting/ Honey fungus would be my best guess too. Not many other fungi fruit this gregariously!

The top left one is pretty good, although you only typically get one drawing of each. It covers plants, mushrooms, seaweed, shellfish, fruits and nuts. I can't find my River Cottage mushroom book, but from memory it's particularly good because it focuses on the safe collection of edibles, whereas the others above are more general references. I do a bit of foraging for mushrooms, but stick religiously to those that can be safely identified. We had a penny bun (cep) in our garden this year for the first time, along with several large slippery jacks that have appeared out of the new garden beds (haven't eaten these yet - mixed reviews on whether they're worth the effort): I collect black trumpets from a forestry area near me - amazingly tasty dried. They haven't come up yet this year, presumably due to the lack of rain: I've also managed the odd parasol from a nearby cow field (this is a young one - cap hasn't opened yet):

Already checked by mods and unlikely to be what you're thinking, although I can see what it looks like!

Welcome to Buildhub Tim. I can't help you with this question but hopefully there'll be someone who has some info they can share. Roughly what part of the country are you building in, and what's your project?

Wowsers, that's an impressive flush. ?

I think there are lots of reasons behind budget overruns. Sometimes, people add up all the things they think about, but then forget about all the little addons. For example, you budget for tiles, but then don't realise that adhesive and trims are a significant extra cost. They also forget the cost of things like an architect, pre-commencement conditions, landscaping and access. Our driveway is 45m long and we were surprised to learn just how expensive even the cheapest methods of making a driveway that long were. Another reason is the "upgrade as you go" model. That's where you budget everything out, then when you get to the bathroom you realise that by paying only 20% more for tiles, you can get something you really like, and hey, it's just for the bathroom, so doesn't add much to the budget overall. Then you do it for the wooden floors downstairs, then you splurge on an above budget kitchen. Do this enough times and a serious cost overrun will creep up on you. In my opinion, you can't go far wrong by working to a budget per m2. It depends on where you live, what spec you're after and how much you plan to do yourself, but if your figures are coming in much below, say £1500 per sqm, I think you'd want to have a good basis for such a low figure (several on here have managed that figure and a lot lower). Others will have better ideas of reasonable ranges than I do. It drives me barmy when I watch Grand Designs and someone suggests that they're going to build a large, bespoke, well-specced house for less than £1000/m2. Add extra frustration points if they're doing it via a main contractor and paying the architect to oversee things. One I particularly remember was the couple where the guy had had a stroke (I think - serious unexpected health problem, anyway), and they decided to build a huge house on the Isle of Wight. Their budget was £500k - my missus and I nearly spit out tea out! We said a minimum of a million, and I think they were at £1.2m or £1.3m by the end.

That said, I think you're right to underline this @lizzie. That's a LOT of glass. @Adam2, what direction is this heavily glazed elevation facing? Anything other than north and I don't think it can be overemphasised how important solar gain control will be. Be aware that while internal blinds will help, they're hugely less effective than stopping the sunlight before it reaches the windows. We have external blinds on some windows and they do a great job of cutting solar gain down to almost nothing. In the one room (east facing main bedroom) where we should have had external blinds but chose not to install them to save money, blockout fabric curtains still leak an awful lot of heat in the mornings.

Exactly this.

If eye-to-screen distance is the primary concern, you could always attach a cheap monitor arm to the desktop. You can then push it further way when using it (assuming it isn't against a wall), and swing it back in when you need the space behind it. My desktop is 65cm deep, and I have my monitor perched as close to the edge as I (safely) can. I find that perfectly fine.