G and J

Yes, they put in a planning app and a Certificate of Lawfulness app in for exactly the same building before they'd even moved in Would be if they hadn't chosen to have it clad like a park home with brilliant white uvpc windows ......we are in farmland and of course they don't want to see it from their house, so they've put it right on our boundary It's on screw foundations and the materials/construction would suggest won't have structural integrity if lifted. Are we p......d, oh boy yes. Are we lucky enough to be planning our build...thank goodness...yes. Do we just have to get over it and hope it does less damage to our spring house sale 🤞 than the application did when we tried to sell earlier this year. There, I feel better already.

Our investigations were that having more than 50% cladding on a timber frame house limited options. (We haven't pursued as we were researching for the eventuality we needed to sell in the future to someone who was going to take a mortgage or we decided to take a lifetime mortgage (yes we are getting to that age!), neither of which are what we are planning but never say never). Is it possible to tweak your design? In the end we've reduced the cladding and gone block skin for the ground floor.

Our new next door neighbour put in for planning permission for a building to house one set of aging parents in their garden. That was refused flat, it was completely outwith anything likely to pass. They simultaneously put in a certificate of lawfulness to formally recognise that the same building was legally a caravan or moveable building. It arrived today. It’s a panelised, single storey, flat roofed timber framed building on screw foundations. It’s as moveable or temporary as any other modern estate house. So I’m left scratching my head as to how this can get through building control. I think it’s getting on towards 100m2 internally with two bedrooms. It’s well within a metre of our boundary yet appears to be principally made of combustible material. It’s on medium elasticity clay built over where they cut down a mature tree a couple of weeks ago. When we built they made us go down 3m in the same circumstances for strip foundations. Their screw foundations are about 1.5m into the ground. I would be very surprised if they had applied for building regs, so I presume they are either ignoring the rules or they are under a building notice (which in fairness I don’t understand). My belief is that they do have to comply with current building regs. Can I quietly check if they are under a building notice? If under a building notice do they get inspected? And if so is it automatically the responsibility of the local authority? Until today I assumed they would be craning in a ‘static’ beloved of many seaside caravan parks, that could abd would be craned out again when no longer needed. But this is a 140mm studwork based timber framed bungalow avoiding all the planning requirements, and maybe, all the building regs too. What best to do to understand how legal this thing is?

I believe the calculation of the gain will be simply sale price minus costs. i.e. costs means the total of all purchases and fees and contracts. I also believe that your own time and effort will be costed at zero. The fact that you built a house equivalent to some notional value if purchased as is is irrelevant. Sorry. The good news is you are only taxed when you’ve made a profit and it’s only a percentage of that profit. Other countries are worse, I’m told.

Return temp is effectively, I presume, a weighted average of all rooms served by the UFH. So if you have a fire in one room do the others then suffer a temperature drop?

So if the woodburner or solar gain is heating the room the return temp will be high enough to stop the ASHP pumping? If so will the return from overheated rooms effectively redistribute heat a little to colder rooms?

I’d like a few lights to be automated so they can come on and go off at set times. If those lights could also be wall switch controlled I’d be pleased. Our current hive system is like an app controlled old fashioned wireless thermostat for the oil boiler heating and hot water, but we won’t need such function with an ASHP plus solar and suitable tariff. Maybe app based target constant temp setting at the very most. But we’ll need timing and boost control for the bathroom UFH electric mats. I guess the bedroom fancoil will need a stat in the room for cooling, maybe for heating on rare occasions. Hmmm, maybe there’s more to control than I realise…..

When I googled home assistant the first thing I saw was a Raspberry Pi so I freaked and took another tablet. On my second look I’ve found a home assistant green which looks like it’s a hive home hub equivalent. Is it?

Well I’ll go back to the bottom of the class then lol So, while I’m in learning mode, one of those two with a plastic T and chrome thumb taps must be the cold feed. I’d have expected a service valve or something to isolate the boiler but maybe there’s one inside the boiler. What’s the other one with the plastic T then? Hot water out or heating flow or return?

Can you post a diagram of your foundation/beam and block detail?

Our Worcester Bosch combi had a filling loop built in, operated by a plastic key thingy that lived clipped into a snap on panel. I can’t see on that pipework where a filling loop would connect.

It’s kinda rude to call someone’s gender fluid child ‘it’. I’ve got used to thinking of they and them as ok in the singular. Took a while though.

Let’s not be too binary folks. Life is more fluid nowadays. It’s taken me ages to get used to but I’m getting better at using ‘them’ and ‘they’.

So, depressurise your system, if it’s in a static I presume it’s not two storey, then undo that top bolt. I think there will be a rubber ring thingy (technical term) in there.

I don’t think that’s a valve. I think it is a T junction. they’re used to put an electric element in as well as the water flow from the boiler.

Oh, where’s your sense of adventure. And in the plus side, maybe food poisoning increases one’s biome diversity. 😉

That’s an interesting thought. The smell of burning flesh throughout the house will alert everyone to the fact that the food is over-ready. Lovely. 😕

I’ll let you know if and when I get the grant, for my ASHP that cools too! (Perhaps sometime next summer).

Any badly implemented building method can lead to horrendous issues, including masonry inside and out. I believed (as you appear to) that timber frame was the anti-christ when we built our current house. Been round the block more since then and we’re soon to be building timber frame with part masonry skin, having changed my view completely. Most important thing is that you are happy with how you are doing it.

I’ll be wiring to make adding a battery later easy, but I can’t for the life of me build a case for it right now. There appears to be no eco benefit and there won’t be a financial one for us. But prices will come down….

We’ve not had our as designed SAP done yet but we’ve designed out lots of PIR on the basis that it gives a more echoey house and is bad for the planet (and our carbon score). So we are going for loads of soft fluffy stuff in the loft that will take me no time at all to deploy (c.f. many miserable hours trimming PIR to fit between trusses) and a raised walkway so as not to compress the fluff. I’m hoping it will mean the rooms are quieter and feel nicer. Certainly PIR is not the most popular stuff in here with everyone.

I think you may benefit from a bigger slab to benefit from more thermal mass. (To the pedants, I know that there is scientifically no such thing but it is a useful concept in such debates. So there.). Now I appreciate that someone with letters after their name has decreed stuff but you are the client, so actually, what you want tops their sometimes odd preferences. And remember sometimes the guys doing the drawing are driven more by how quickly they can get onto the next job than they are by your long term happiness. I’m looking at slightly lowering our bnb and increasing our screed to 100mm (75mm in drawings) and maybe upping the insulation from the 150mm PIR as drawn. Might use an insulated bnb to help that.

It’s a personal thing I guess but I’ve read on here many times that electric mat UFH in bathrooms gives warm wet toes even when the rest of the house doesn’t need heating. Zoning ASHP based UFH appears to be bad news. My history is boiler and wet rads with zines which works well in my wind tunnel house. So it took me a while to get my head round heated slab, slow reaction time, different control methodology entirely. Talking of which…..

Good for peeps named Noah perhaps….

Welcome JoeM. I personally am very wary of bottom up cost builds. If I’m costing up a small project then I’ve got half a chance of remembering to include most of the elements - hopefully all the big ones. But building a house has a big shopping list. So….. many peeps rely on area based budgetary estimates then factor in extra bad things like piled foundations or party wall agreements or an expensive kitchen habit or whatever. The per m2 figure you use is the next question, and they range from just under £1k/m2 (do everything oneself) to maybe £4K/m2 (appoint an architect and accept the keys when it’s ready). Keep reading, part of the power of this forum is that by sitting watching the posts flow by you learn all kinds of things you didn’t know you didn’t know….