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When I mentioned thickness I was thinking of 0.7mm as the standard but you can get thicker. 0.9/1mm IIRC

Not sure about manufacturers but two things I've found in my research: 1. Can get different thicknesses (I'd prefer thicker but it's obviously heavier, harder to handle and more expensive) 2. You can get different coatings on the panels. I think typical panels have 20-25 year coatings but you can find more expensive options offering up to 60 year coatings. Though the longer lasting coatings might have less colour choice. As usual with me, no practical experience just commenting on research I've done for myself.

PassivHaus is a means to an end. The goal being to tread lightly on our planet and minimise carbon emissions. In a way it's a little dated in the sense that to achieve that goal it can (depending on situation) be cheaper (financially and environmentally) to put more solar panels in than do some 'heroic' engineering to achieve a set energy use per/m2. (heroic in some buildings who's architectural concept didn't consider passive standards so now an energy inefficient form has to be forced to be energy efficient - not saying that's your case). Being a sealed box is overengineering, building to a passive standard case study of balancing lots of variables and moving forward with the most efficient way to achieve the goals. Over doing it likely just ends up consuming more carbon in building materials and a lot more money in consulting fees. Once you have a target, there are often multiple ways of achieving it. For example, solutions like Aerobarrier can bring low air tightness scores for much less effort than traditional methods. It needs a good base, but the most difficult part of airtightness is the bit that Aerobarrier does in it's sleep.

In some cases. Definitely easier for a developer, housing association, etc, where the design costs can be spread over multiple properties. Not an uncommon situation. I'd guess the majority of self builders who want to design to passivhaus standards fit in this category (though sounds like your issue with the door is a bit exceptional, either bad advice or just bad timing - needing to meet a specific but also new spec - regs on fire doors have been changed recently and maybe the market hasn't caught up yet).

well it is Buildhub It wouldn't bother passivehaus standards or likely building control (as long as the wall was built to the right standard) but for me a concern would be whether insurance then considered the garage part of the house. I want a garage partly so I can do hobbies in the garage that I wouldn't want to do in the house (and I'm pretty sure insurers wouldn't want that either). So for me, keeping a completely separate building has advantages there, far enough away from the garage that if I screwed up in some way and there was a fire in the garage that it would not affect the house in any way (and thus the insurers would not have to worry about that). Edit: If you just want to park a car in the garage I don't really see an issue assuming planning are happy.

To be clear when I said robot mower I was thinking of a fully automated set and forget thing. For 6 acres they are still expensive but sensible 4 figures not 5. But they are only going to deal with grass and similar so to get started you'd need something heavier and then rely on them to prevent anything coming back. (They go out every day to keep things under control)

Remote controlled things like that exist. Doubt you'd find a fully automated robot though as it sounds too dangerous for unattended use. Jeremy Clarkson hired something similar for brush clearance in Clarksons Farm.

Yeh. I will be interested to hear how the new deepseek flash model does compared to Opus. I've heard good things about using the frontier models to orchestrate lower tier, cheaper agents.

Wow, wasn't expecting you to actually go for it. This is gonna be one hell of an expensive home automation system lol. Cheaper than a sports car though I suppose!

Seems an expensive way of doing it (if you have to pay for an electrician anyway). In a garage I guess there's not much else on the ring (that couldn't be left unplugged if not in active use). Most likely it's the freezer itself or, if you had heavy rain recently, a damaged cable getting wet (at least here we haven't had much rain at all, and in a newish build I'd expect if an area is wet it'd be pretty obvious). So my thought is spend a little time trying to track it down, but maybe instead of paying an electrician to investigate just put that money into a new fridge/freezer.

There are some pretty beefy robot mowers that can keep a large area under control and don't care about the incline (but you'd have to clear it first). Not cheap though.

Mac Studio M5 Ultra is out. Up to 512GB but not sure pricing is available for that yet (they say wait until October). The 256GB model with maxed out CPU/GPU is £10,799. How rich is your blood @Pocster?

I was referring to the requirement to show photos as built and have a full library of such photos for inspection. I may be getting something wrong here but I thought that was now part of the newer building regs. People on here have certainly started threads where they were asked for photos and didn't have exactly the right thing for the BCO. Assuming I'm right, if every junction now needs photos of it showing it was built correctly, then inevitably the cost of doing so vs the passivhaus requirement for similar is going to be smaller and the quality of the standard build will inevitably be higher so the added quality supervision aspect is also not as significant as it used to be. I'm sure passivhaus requirements are stricter, but my point is that once this process is in use by normal builders the add on cost of doing 'just a bit more of what you already do' vs 'doing something entirely new and unfamiliar' is much smaller.

Most new houses will have MHVR anyway. I think it's still strictly optional in current regs but will be mandatory when the next revision comes out If the standard quality windows and doors package for a house is 20k, then getting higher spec windows might add 10k?? If you go for lots of big windows, sliders, etc, you are going to spend a lot more but you are likely buying premium windows anyway and might not need to spend more on top of that premium to meet the passive specs. The newer building regs requirements for documentation of all joints, etc, is not dissimilar to passivhaus requirements so while this premium used to be there I'm not sure it is hugely significant any more and even if Passivhaus is more demanding, the availability of tools (apps, etc) to aid this process likely lowers the cost compared to historical cases. I thought on an average house you'd be looking at less than this. I have in my memory someone saying a passive haus consultant costing about 5k in addition to the architects fees. But not sure the context of that or how current it is. Edit: I think part of my thought process of saying 'PassivHaus costs are not hugely more than standard build for some (more optimal) build profiles' is that the cost of building a 'standard' house has gone up a lot with our Building Regs incorporating a lot of the work that was traditionally only done for PassivHaus designs. (Ventilation, overheating, documentation, higher insulation and air tightness standards, etc).

Might still be worth removing the skirting board. If there is not enough gap it can be made bigger and if too much can be filled with something compliant to reduce movement. It's possible there is a gap at higher layers and not at lower layers or vice versa.