G and J

The spec I've got from our window supplier (who will also install) requires a concrete bit behind the single outer brick skin - are you using the compacfoam to structurally support the door frame? If so that sounds a much better plan than a cast concrete bit?

Thought about this a bit more...... our excellent brickie team did look a bit crest fallen at no radio, but did come and have/are doing the business...the solution me thinks...... copious tea and payment on the dot 😉

Don’t believe everything you read Gus. Not as drafty as Alan’s place - see Gus, we aren’t nice, we take the mickey out of everything and everyone !

Understood......we are a timber frame build, close (1m and 1.5m) to neighbors properties and it was the neighbours who put the no radio in the party wall agreements, not that we're complaining.....horses for courses

This sounds daft but is really a case of what "good" looks like. We keep it simple No one comes on site without us being there Everyone gets the hard hat hi vis talk (they don't all do it) We look out for anyone taking a risk (ladder balanced on a block) because we are there with them and only have 1 set of people in at anyone time. If a singleton comes on site we want to know who we ring if there's a problem (health or god forbid accident) We make sure everyone knows our site working hours, that we are no radio/no smoking and that we have neighbours.....simples!

Feels good to finally get out of the ground doesn’t it. Quite a relief in fact.

Maybe not the highest u value windows at min 1.4, but hopefully good enough for us with what we intend to be a highly insulated, airtight house 🤞(and a woodburner, which we hope we'll get to use!) our measure, supply and fit contract for alitherm 400 (they manufacture and employ directly their surveyors and fitters rather than subcontract) is £860 per m2 which include a 0.8 aluminimum front door, an aluminium personal door for the garage and 4m wide sliders. Fitting due mid October, so we'll see how it goes, but so far so good

We’re going for a 10kWh battery. I’m guessing (without doing any numbers so it’s all guy feel) that that’ll be good for several days of the bits I plan to protect. If I did the lot I would expect it to be a day max. before the battery disconnects itself due to low charge. Or is my gut feel an order of magnitude out? We’re having a woodburner for warmth and we’ve a campervan for warming food up if needed. So I’m thinking we would keep things ticking over for three or four days…

I’m going for a split board with a battery that can run in island mode supplying one side of the board. I’ll run lights, internet, WiFi, MVHR and a set of charging sockets off the battery backed side, but I like the idea of a couple of sockets in the utility room that I can plug stuff I didn’t think of protecting into. Fab addition to the plan.

Me too. I don’t live alone but I still think in spirals till I’m certain that my daft ideas are brilliant. Then I interact with others, (J, guys helping us on the build, buildhub, etc.), and that helps me get hone my ideas. Happy days. I’m taking the approach that I’ll do a standard wiring with deep back boxes (thank you @JohnnyB for the noggin idea) and judiciously add wireless relay type bits where needed later. I'll still have some normal dimmers too though.

Don’t do that, or, if you do, put plasters on the wounds, giggle about it as you tell your mates, fix whatever is then wrong and tell us all on here. You might be wasting your time and tilting at windmills, but you might be a small part of the industry moving to low voltage dc over the next few decades. Pioneers either die silently in the wilderness or they bring back new treasures (like tobacco, hmmmm). I initially was spurred in by the notion that dc to ac conversion was inefficient. That was based on my experience of small, relatively cheap inverters for our campervan. When I checked I discovered that big inverters are much, much more efficient than I expected. Moving amps around costs copper. And as the biggest danger from electricity nowadays is not shock it’s fire, and more amps mean more heat, I deduce that low voltage dc is not necessarily safer.

I looked real hard at dc lighting, and I concluded it was do-able. But I also concluded that the volume of bits available to buy for good old fashioned BF&I 240Vac was several orders of magnitude greater than for dc lighting. I also concluded that there was nothing I could think of that I could do with dc lighting that I couldn’t do with mains, for less effort and cost. The killer though for dc is that I want it third party maintainable - when I am in my bathchair in the care home conveniently located just past the bottom of our garden I want J to be able to get an electrician to fix stuff easily. In fairness I want that for me too in my advanced years, as eventually surely I’ll get over trying to do everything myself. But as you say, it’s only you and it’s your pad.

You’d be very, very welcome @JohnnyB. If you happen to be Woodbridge way during office hours (we have time limits imposed by planning) call in, I’m there almost every day. Thank you for the tour. Really enjoyable evening. I had no idea how late it had got.

+1 to this We bought a 'tired' bungalow with thoughts of adding a first floor. When it came to it the basic structure was just not worth it (this was even more obvious as we progressed). So we have demolished and will end up with a much better built and insulated house. Yes it costs more in the short term, but depending on how the bungalow is constructed and how long you think you want to be there think of it as paying up front fir a more economical (and comfortable) home.

We can all hold our smartphones up with the torch running just like all those aging rockers do at the end of the gig by the even more aging rock band. See, being a wrinkly means I’ve learned a thing or two. Shame that none of it is useful. See you at the cricket club. Do I need to be in ‘whites’?

Hey @Alan Ambrose, as you don’t answer your emails I thought I’d try and catch you on site today as we drove back from a couple of days camping. But you’re obviously having a lazy day. 😉 Very impressed with site presentation, most professional. Makes our site look untidy and done on a shoestring! Oh yeah, that’s because it is.

Did you get this one? https://www.bpsdepot.co.uk/scaffold-towers/diy-scaffold-towers/home-master-diy-scaffold-tower And if so are you pleased with it? I’ve already got a 4’ square one but that won’t work in our side alley as that’s only a meter wide.

So grunge designs is likely to be even cheaper to film than I thought, so that makes them even tighter for not paying their perpetrators.

Or if not then I’d hope they think it looks better than what was there before.

I’d love ours to be on grunge designs if they paid the £20k they should. I think it’s a bloody cheek that they don’t pay to film. I guess there’s enough peeps who are happy to help them make TV cheaply. Perhaps those self builders too financially focussed to do it for free are less likely for their project to go wrong and create the jeopardy/failure storylines that I imagine keep the viewers glued, so a bit of self selection helping our cousin Kevin (with apologies to The Undertones). Our build is way too boring a design anyway, to my eye a lot of their builds stick out like a sore thumb, resembling either an office block or the atrium at my local Asda. Once ours is built I’d prefer peeps to walk by without noticing it, because it kinda looks right in the row. At the best of times I don’t enjoy tripping over people who are in my way, and I imagine film crews wouldn’t take kindly to being dumped on the road every time something I need to focus on is going on. If they gave me a video camera to wear on my head while on site it might work for us, not otherwise. Probably easier to contemplate if it’s your subcontractors that will be inconvenienced rather than one’s self. In reality Each to their own. May your project go well and may you end up happy with the result.

I’m self-unemployed, so I can’t blame work. So I’m a yes unless something goes pear shaped at the build.

Brill, ta.

I do solemnly swear I am a numpty. The evidence I justify this conclusion with is that I’m certain that the information I seek is already in the forums on here, but I’m buggered if I can find it. Sorry. At some unknown time in the future we will have sold our house and will therefore have the funds to carry on with our build. One of the first things will be the ground floor insulation/DPM/UFH/screed. The bit I’m currently trying to understand is the UFH. The plumbing will be Hep2O. The heating will be courtesy of an ASHP, single zone, WC based for both low flow temp (32 degrees maybe) heating and a modicum of cooling above dew point. Our ground floor is about 88m2. Our screed will be circa 100mm. The Wavin UFH stuff is different from the Hep2O stuff so I may as well make an independent decision re which UFH system to use. Gotta be neat and tidy, my OCD demands it so. Gotta work well, and in truth I don’t really know what that means, I’ve only ever installed high temp (gas or oil boiler) rad based heating systems. So which systems should I look at or are they all pretty similar?

"We will definitely try to have some more non-house time through the rest of the build." Good luck with that and if you manage it let us know how....seriously going so well, and as you're a good few weeks ahead of us it's a flagging all the tidings (hopefully joyful) on their way to us.

Don’t think. Experiment, observe, then think. Take a clear tube. Put some water in it. Try and hold it in a ‘U’ shape so that the water level on one side is higher than the other.