gc100

For me personally , having solar and a well insulated house/air tight was always about the climate impact, as I can't see any of the cost involved in doing all that work would be paid back financially and wasn't really a consideration.

That would be nice

Not for me at least. My TV room had to have an opening window specified by building control. I've got around it by not putting a door on the room as it joins the kitchen/living area anyhow so would be left open all the time.

I'm planing to move in and see what my consumption is throughout the day over a period before I decide exactly the amount of PV. I've got the ok for 8K system with the DNO but if I'm only using half of that I'll only purchase 4K for example. Pointless finically really at the moment given prices of storage or selling to grid, or I could do 8K and then offset my green footprint which I might well do.

What about building regs ? I’m sure they is a requirement about this for fire escape or purging air

I had to do this as part of my conditions on farm land as well. Most quotes were around 4 to 6k which is insanely expensive for what they actually do. I found a chap in the who did the whole thing for £750 . He had a nice day out jolly where I paid for his petrol and he came with his wife , spent about 8 mins digging 3 small holes on the land then went down to the seafront and had a nice day out. I then got a nice preformated report needed for the LPA

My electrician can supply a 8k. PV system for about £2k, plus a couple of days work (£360). This is trade prices with no markup

This is my plan though I have better reception. I’m still plan to put an extension directional aerial

I still don’t have my windows after delay after delay. Mine are coming from 3 different factories and they all claim the same issue - trouble getting the triple glazed glass. About half has arrived on site and fitted but still waiting for the rest. Covid has definitely messed things up but all the large developers are buying like crazy to avoid the extra costs and delays that will be coming with Brexit in Jan .

no

Yes it did but farm land is cheap compared to the land with building permission . Land is max 10K per acre for farm land around here, building plots up to 300K per acre.. So that only knocks off 10k of the calculation.

This is exactly what happened to me on my dads farm. I warned him that he should gift it to me before I achieved planning, but was insistent (and his accountant) that we would not be liable for CGT. However the long and short of it (I called HMRC and source professional advise), the plot when gifted after planning is achieved significantly increases the CGT due - which IS due. Sorry to be bearer of bad news. I just went through this last year. I would do everything you can to delay getting planning or get it gifted before

I’ve just painted about 200 6m lengths of larch. There are plenty with big cracks/split . It’s wood, so happens all the time as it drys out .

Well done. It took me 3 and a half years to get through my planning. The build is the easy part for me in comparison. Much less stressful, even in the midst of brexit and covid ?

Depends. The one I wanted connecting to was only 25KvA and they had to upgrade it to 100Kva for me to connect to which I had to pay for (well a portion)

Sorry not read the whole of this thread, but I'm surprised about the volt drop statement for 3 phase over 300m. My situation was: My barn conversion is about 750 meters across 2 fields and a wood to nearest transformer (using by another farm). Initial quote was £52,000 from the DNO. There preferred solution was to bring HV line across fields ending with a transformer at my property. I got the phone number of the chap organising the solution in the area (not the initial quote person) and had lots of conversations with him. In the end I got the quote down to about £8K However I had to dig the trench across the fields etc and lay my own cable (which was around £16K just for cable). However the point about voltage drop doesn't add up. My solution in the end was to run a 2 phase (which in theory would have more voltage drop for the same thickness cable). However I ran an incredibly thick cable and doubled up the phases with my meter box (and therefore the DNO responsibility) just by the transformer (which is a large distance from my actual house). A found a commercial electrical company who ran the numbers for the voltage drop (ie a computer program). I'm all connected now with no issues and not much of a voltage drop at all.

In total around £25,000

I have 2 runs at ~25m . I’ve doubled up and have 4 vents with them all for the same large kitchen living area. I didn’t really have any other choice due to the restrictions of my house. Fingers crossed it won’t work the unit too hard.

Sounds like you are ahead of me in terms of actually trying things and time spent on this subject. The electrician(s) where on site today and we need to make a start on the wiring the lights up otherwise my builders will be sitting around to had to make some decisions on the spot in the end. So what I have decided is in the 'lesser' rooms to just wire up daisy chain the lights that are going to be on the same dimmer as you would normally. Wire in for 240v (1.5mm) 3 core. In the kitchen/living area and the master bedroom where I have much more extensive lighting setup, we're wiring up radially to hidden wiring area, and then from there to normal wall dimmer grouped together in what you would normally daisy chain. This way I can use either drivers and low voltage lights, or 240v with individual drivers. I spent a long time looking at all the home automation and all the dimming options, my conclusion is that if you are going outside of the installer driven products , its much much hard to get hold of the devices and lighting (and much more expensive). Going with more consumer orientated solutions the market is in massive flux with established solutions like z-wave/zigbee and lots of new IP orientated solutions. Then there was DMX and DALI. I was set on using DALI as it seems plenty simple enough and nice easy wiring, however in the end I just had so much trouble finding controllers and switches/dimmers, and given the older state of the technology my final conclusion is that I will just upgrade wiring points, drivers and switches with probably zigbee devices in the 2 main rooms to the grouping and scenes that I want with a reasonable control of the dimming for each device. I'll probably go with TRIAC's as well vs 0-10v etc simply again because there are many more devices on the market and I don't need the extra wires. Its not really what I wanted, but it seems without going in the full on installer only setups I don't have much choice. I think most of the technology thats going to be coming on the market will be 98% retrofit solutions, so it should work out fine. As you said it would be good to run cat5/6 and and couple of more lines to each light, switch, etc but I think given most of the products coming to the market in the next 10 years or so will be retrofit orientated, there probably isn't really any point. The way I see it is as so long as I can group the lights how I want, control the switching and dimming then I can do all I need. Given the market is providing solutions for retro-fitting and pretty much all moving to wireless/RF/bluetooth mesh then running physical wires for control/dimming seems a little pointless.

My experience is not very good with them personally, its impossible to get a constant dimming across all lights at the same time, and most flicker. Hence I'm trying to avoid them. Having a single driver that is 0-10v or DALI/other makes for consistent dimming across a set of spots.

So my first fix electrical is just starting and I'm desperately trying to figure out my lighting. I had naively thought that these days all lighting would be low voltage. However looking online it seems 98% of lights are still 240v with integrated drivers in the bulbs themselves . I really thought this was a bad idea mainly due to the quality of the inbuilt drivers vs getting an external dimmable driver unit to power several lights. I had just presumed these days that would be the way forward. Am I missing something? The only thing I can think of is to use the MR16 12v LEDS - is this the only option?

Yes totally understand, as I'm having closed shadow gaps (ie jointed), this was just for the bottom of the cladding.

Wow 4mm is big. Insects would get in with that I would think -very surprising. I personally went with https://www.meshdirect.co.uk/soffit-mesh.html

35mm gaps - bats will like that as well. Personally I’m blocking up all possible entry points with steel insect mesh it’s pretty cheap. Really don’t want mice living in my walls , their urine carries lots of nasty things. Bugs eat wood.

We had planned to have vertical open jointed but after goi g to see a building that’s got the same detail and has been there several years we went against the idea. You will want some form of mesh behind otherwise you’ll get all sort of things moving in behind but it also helps a lot with weathering. I did find a specific mesh for this detail but I can’t remember what it’s called. As we are going with a black barn paint finish we decided to 10mm shadow gap vertical cladding as you still get the look without the trouble.