Conor

12mm clean stone £12/tonne delivered in bulk (16t or 30t lorry) or £10/tonne collected at quarry. We'll be needing about 40 tonnes to backfill our basement. Co. Down, Northern Ireland. Definitely ring round a few local quarries and ask for prices based on 16t delivery.

No idea. All I know is builder is required to provide structural and water ingress warranties as per the contract. 10year defects I think. I was only speaking to the rep as he was on site overseeing the tanking and okayed the design. Also found cheap drain sheets from drainage superstore, but didn't order them as not required and wouldn't be here on time before backfilling.

I know it's a bit like comparing apples and oranges, but we had to do all of the above as well for our 1/2 acre site, and our costs were one third of your quoted numbers above. Have a look yourself for independent self employed people - a day's surveying and drawing should be about £400, ecology survey and report around £600. I would ignore you're architect's advice - only do the surveys that the planners request and deal with it then. Apart from the topo, that will be a definite. You could spend £2k on ecology and tree surveys that might never be needed.

Same here - can't find a 47kg propane refill anywhere- had to switch the caravan to a bottle of patio gas!!! One of the petrol stations I called in to had virtually no bottles of anything. I can get 34kg propane but have to cough up £20 for the deposit on the bottle. The main NI Calor depot is about two miles from me... can't even get in through the gates or get them on the phone!!!

Normally you need two types of tanking to meet the required standards. In my case the concrete core in the ICF and an external tanking membrane. SDG are happy to guarantee it, and I'm happy with it. Does your tanking system wrap right around the building including under the slab? That what ours does - at the critical junction of the ICF to the slab, we've three layers of tanking - the sheets coming up from under the slab, a "fillet" strip along the junction, and finally the wall membrane that laps over the other two. All self adhesive rubber with primer on the concrete. The tanking guy said the best type of tanking system you can possibly get is a proper drainage system under and around the structure so you never need to rely on the primary tanking systems in the first place. That's why I've spent £2k on stones lol Finally, a tanking system is worthless unless somebody is prepared to write a gurantee on a piece of paper and sign it....

Spoke to the tanking company rep - said EPS as a protection for the tanking is satisfactory and will approve the warranty even without the cavity drain layer. Will be a very careful backfilling job!

Koster https://shopwearesdg.com/koster-ksk-sy-15

We will be using "moveable acoustic walls" to separate the stair / hall from the living and kitchen area. They park in to a spot behind a wall, hang on a rail recessed in the ceiling, so you hardly know they are there. In reality, they'll never be closed unless I'm doing a big cook-up or we've a group of friends round and the little one is in bed. We weren't sure this would satisfy BC but they approved the drawings so happy days.

We're backfilling the basement in week or so - 12mm drainage stone against the face. We have the tanking layer stuck to the outer ICF face and an additional 50mm of EPS on top of that. Do I need a traditional drainage nboard against the EPS like you would for a tanking membrane? Or will the EPS be tough enough to be directly backfilled with stone? Tanking guys are recommending it but builder doesn't think it's needed. I'm worried about stones being forced between joins in the EPS panels.

You won't get interest only unless you have the full capital to repay the loan in full. When the build is complete and you have completion certificates, you then apply for a standard residential mortgage as a new customer as you would when buying a house. Obviously you'll go to a broker and shop around. The only difference is that the lenders will require more paperwork and guarantees in place as it's a new build, e.g. 10 year structural or NHBC warranty.

Nope, not a chance the MVHR would cool. Single room aircon unit would be the ticket.

Your resedential mortgage is against your house and must remain habitable. You can't demolish your house. You have to pay off your residential mortgage with either your own cash or a self build mortgage. Caveat is that the self build mortgage provider will only provide you with a mortgage for the value of the plot with the house demolished and planning in place. We did it this way with ecology. Fortunately they valued the cleared site the same as what we had with the residential mortgage, and both products had similar LTVs so we didn't have to cough up too much of our own money. That left us with a healthy pot of money to start the build before we'd need additional draw downs. Sequence was simple, get FPP for a replacement dwelling, apply for ecology mortgage, valuer comes out and values cleared site (even though house still there) with the FPP in mind. You then draw down the self build mortgage and immediately pay off your residential mortgage. Solicitor does all that. Then you are free to demolish your house and start building. Ecology were the ownly lender we found that were willing to do this. Others were looking for much higher LTVs that we couldn't afford as mortgage was quite large. I'm assuming you've not got planning permission yet? In that case I suggest you go on to a one or two year product. This will then give you the time to get a design completed and through planning. when that product ends, you can then pay it off without penalty. We waited three months after getting FPP to switch as it saved us a £3k exit fee. You also need a couple months to get your self build mortgage sorted, as you can't apply until planning is granted.

I was part of that crowd. But once you factor in servicing, standing charges, and the fact that you can get electric from as little as 5p/kWh on flexible tarifs, ASHP has a lower lifetime cost. But the main thing for me is I'm not directly burning stuff and pumping it in to the air. With SSE airtricity here, 80% of the electric over the course of the year comes from renewables. That, paired with my own PV means my carbon emissions are less than a gas boiler.

40mm PIR on to the Amvic block brings it down to 0.16. plasterboard, render etc gives a finished wall of 0.15.

Process is stick on the PIR with expanding foam, then baton out with 50mm batons (screwed through to webs), when first fixes are done, then screw plasterboard on to batons. Same for underside of roof joists in our vaulted parts. For fixing heavy items, we'll have about 175mm of "soft" stuff to get through to the core. But the batons will be able to take almost all mountings that you'd typically have... maybe not the likes of a wall hung toilet tho.

There's no argument at all as far as I'm concerned, triple glazing is significantly better than double on many measures. Insulation, sound exclusion, solar gain reduction. There are a lot of basic window manufacturers that only make double glazing profiles and others who just don't want to work with heavy 3g units. Of you have any significant south facing glazing, you pretty much NEED triple glazing to prevent over heating. Also, there's not much of a coat difference, I don't see the point in saving a few hundred or thousand of pounds when your ploughing so much more money in to the fabric of the house. Re install... I won't be doing any electrics but I've a fair bit of plumbing experience (I'm an engineer in the water industry, so it's naturally familiar to me, just pipes are a lot smaller!). I monoblock ASHP only has two water connections and one electric connection plus controls. I'll like have everything bolted and sat in place then I'll get the spark to do the reat and plumber to do the hot water cylinder.

No need to duct. Use 100-200mm of quarry dust around the pipes if stony ground. If the ground is stone free, no need for dust either. Quick calculation suggest you'll only need 8tonnes of dust. I recently got 13t delivered for £120.

It has a 1500w socket on it. You plug your sander/table saw etc in to it and the vacuum only activates when you use your tool. Saves having the vacuum running the whole time.

2. You'll want to be going through to the concrete for anything like kitchen cabinets, TV, heavy shelving etc. The plastic webs in poly off are evenly spaced and easy to find. 3. If you know EXACTLY where you're services will be going through, then yes, stick a bit of ducting in pre pour. I did this for electric and water, but not for my MVHR or ASHP pipes as they are not confirmed yet. Otherwise, you'll be core drilling after the pour, but in exactly the right spot. 4. Your foundation system will depend on your ground conditions and the engineer's preferred design. We did a concrete raft and ICF started directly on this. Same can be done for trench founds, speeds things up and reduces cold bridging. 5. our builder needed a full week for our 100m2 footprint. 6. Rebar and concrete mix will be determined by your engineer. Our build needed 2 verticle rows of 10mm bar every 200mm in the basement, and 1 row of 10mm bar every 400mm for the rest of the building. 10mm lateral bars every 1200mm. Each openings requirements will depend on the spans and imposed loadings. E.g we have a floating corner that needs 32mm bar! 8. We're adding an additional 50mm insulation to our standard Amvic blocks to get to u0.15 for passive House standards. It's far easier and cheaper to add PIR insulation to the inside of the walls rather than EPS to the outside. Can be done DIY over a weekend. Whereas external requires scaffolding, thicker sheets of EPS and lots and lots of big screws. You just need to factor in this loss of space in your design. 9. Using ICF for internal walls eats up a huge amount of space (e.g. 280mm Vs 100mm) compared to single block or stud walls. And costs a lot more. Bit it is faster and DIY able. One thing I would add, if you are doing this DIY, advise you to try and visit a build where it is happening. Also, you'll need to get your own structural warranty organised of not using a contractor. Factor in another £3k for that.

MVHRs sole job is to maintain air quality, whilst recovering some heat from the exhaust air. There's no need to have MVHR and heating "talk" to each other. Yes, there are some MVHRs out there that have integrated heat pumps and can heat domestic hot water and heat/cool incoming air. But as others have said, unless you are building a passive House with minimal heat load, these will struggle to distribute heat. I think the max realistic heat you can distribute through air is about 2kw. The peak heat load for my house is 2.5kw, so I can't reliable heat my house this way. Plus, you have to have higher air flow rates which often equals more noise. And when I did the sums, the likes of the Nilan compact P with ASHP was coming out nearly double the cost of a separate ASHP and MVHR. If you go for a standard MVHR like a vent axia sentinal or a Zehnder Q series, and a separate monoblock ASHP, you should be able to do 90% of the install of both systems yourself. This is what I'm doing in my ICF passive House. My current estimate is about £12k for self install of both systems including DHW tank, ufh, but excluding commissioning. Ashps can get hot water tonl 50c + ... Tho most here seem happy with 45c. Be aware there are lots of companies and people jumping on the MVHR bandwagon with limited expertise and will say anything to make a sale. It's like the double glazing boom of the 90s. What ever way you go, your number one priority should be maximising insulation and air tightness. You can then spend a lot less on heating. I recommend you look up the passive House standards of you want a very low energy home.

Go for low E triple glazing. Not much more than standard double but you'll hugely reduce over heating and keep better temps in winter.

Note on our engineers drawings: "3. WHERE STEELWORK IS EXTERNAL OR WITHIN ICF WALL IT SHOULD BE EITHER GALVANISED OR DOUBLE COATED WITH BITUMINOUS PAINT"

Anybody used these guys before? They install Kastrup and Lacuna which we are both considering. Any feedback appreciated as they seem to be a small firm so been difficult to get an feel for them. Cheers.

I'm looking at the zehnder units as well. They have a range of control options. e.g they have wireless controllers and integration with smart home sysyems. You'll need a control panel somewhere for the unit. I'm having mine in the kitchen so I can boost it that way. Will be relying on humidity settings for bathroom boosting. This is a good list of the control options. https://www.zehnder.co.uk/download/29632/118736/en_uk-72928.pdf

My mate did our ground works for £45 /hour for him in a 16tonne machine. He charges £35/hr for his 5tonne. The house clearance and ground works, stoning and muck away and drainage came in at £15k. I demolished the house myself.