Conor

Anybody recently purchased an Ecodan unit? I had place eyed up for one but they've since gone bust. Google isn't giving me a whole range of options. Specifically looking at the 8.5kw monoblock Open to other options of similar units from other manufactures For self-install. Thanks

line search before you dig will tell you who the local gas operator is, you can then request from them.

How much you can draw down is dependent on the valuation at the time. You can request the valuer out at any time, you can then draw down 80% of the increased value, as long as it's less than 80% of the build budget total. £250 fee I think. We'll get the valuer out once we get to first floor level. Hopefully he'll value works arly £100k so we can get £80k, which will be enough for wondows, doors, first fits erc. When I spoke to him when he valued the site, said there wasn't much of a point getting him out again unless there was substantial progress... E..g in relation to my basement, he saw little market value in a big hole in the ground with a tanked slab... Even though I'd be out of pocket by £50k by that point.

PH plus standard requires a min of 6000kwh annual generation and a max energy demand of 45kwh/m².... So essentially energy positive buildings. https://passivehouseplus.ie/passive-house-plus-standard

Amvic as that's the system that my chosen contractor uses. I spend two years researching different ICF systems... They are all different have their own qualities... But in the end they are all basically the same and it doesn't really matter as long as it's built correctly and meets your spec.

@tanneja thanks very much, good find. Not as blue as I was fearing. I have my house modelled in sweethome 3d. It can do renders in sunlight, I'll see if there is an option to alter the transparency of the glazing.

Blackthorn is very common as hedging in Ireland. It generally won't fruit unless mature and untrimmed and in the right conditions. I'm doing a mix of blackthorn, whitethorn and hawthorn to cover an existing panel fence. There is one along a field near us and for about two weeks in spring it's basically a wall of white flowers.

That's exactly what we are doing. I'm using bat friendly cladding and roofing on a shipping container workshop in the garden. In these situations, the planners are meant to follow the guidence of the relative experts.

Impossible?! Arguably easier to build in ICF then block work. The ICF blocks are easily trimmed to suit on site and window bucks made up as needed. Rebar is placed over openings rather than having to get the correct sized concrete heads / lintels. We've a "floating" corner with 3m glass on one elevation and 2m on the other... And with a sedum roof above. All made possible and easy because we're using ICF. Go for it!

We're going with Velux. Keylight also make 3G roof lights and are a fair bit cheaper. If you have alook at their sizing sheets, you'll find a lot of crossover. What exactly do you mean about "conservation"? We're in a conservation area and planners had no comments regarding our use of standard Velux in our build, even though they wanted timber doors and windows in the rest of the house. We're now dropping at least three of the seven rooflights we have in our plans.... mostly because most are north facing and of limited value, and two were directly over beds and would be a noise issue. Plus, they aren't the best thermally or air tightness wise.

Definitely. We did the PHPP as soon as we'd agreed the design and before we submitted planning. It flagged overheating issues - now mitigated by solar control glass, a bris Soleil and mvhr with summer bypass. I think you'll be ok as you don't seem to have any more glazing than us.

When we knocked though the back of our house to the extension, it turned out that the existing floor of the house had a fall of 30mm or so from one side the the other. The builder refused to last his screed match the existing floor. So solution was to lay the screed to the same height as the highest point of the existing floor and pour sled leveller on the lower parts to match the screed. Worked ok but a year to so later we got some cracked tiles around the transition from screen to self leveller... I think there was some differential movement.

After demolition was completed in March, nothing happened again until late June. If you want a good worker, you have to wait. And that's my friend of 10 year plus, Noel. So I was happy to wait a few months to get him to do the extensive ground works, an experienced plant operator with a team of solid workers at his disposal. As we're building a basement, we knew excavation would be extensive. Once we'd leveled the site, dug out the founds, the drainage and main basement excavation works could start. As you can see, we've ended up with a rather large pile of bricks... A sense of scale, this is 1/2 depth of 1/2 of the main building footprint... the clay was already building up at this point! We knew then we'd have to shift a few loads away as there wouldn't be room on site. All started well... until, well, I got a knock on the office door and was greeted to Noel looking in with a strange, perplexed, half smile reminiscent of a child that's done something wrong and is straining to hide their obvious pride in their achievement. "Conor, I've found a well" "What do you mean, a well?" "A well". A few moments of silence passed. Then he showed me this: Somebody, back in 1920 or so, in their unfathomable wisdom, decided to build their house directly over a 5m deep, sandstone walled well. DONT PANIC!!! A few phone calls and a bit of head scratching later, we found a solution. 5m3 of lean mix concrete was quickly ordered! The well was pretty much at the back inner corner of the house so had to be dealt with. Luckily, the well was dry (apart from a little sludge at the bottom) and not apparently hydraulically linked to anything of importance... so engineer said fill it up! A shame, but a relatively cheap outcome for what could have been a disaster. We kept going, the clay started to be trucked away at a painful £150 a load. I lost count after a week. Another 'sitting at my office chair' moment happened just as we were seeing the end of the dig. What's the smell? Don't tell me Noel's spilled a load of diesel!!! Nope, we'd hit a large patch of soil contaminated with home heating oil. It was flagged as an issue when buying the house, but the survey indicated that it was localised and not at toxic levels. OK. So, it would appear that the oil had seeped down from the oil tank to about 2m deep in to a slight gravel strata and stuck there. The smell was incredible. Another panicked phone call to the oil contamination expert. Came out a few days later and took samples. We carefully stockpiled the contaminated soil to another part of the site on a sheet of polythene. Good job too, came back as hazardous and we would have been in trouble if we'd taken it to landfill. It's still there. And will be there for a long time in the hope that nature will take it's course and clean it.... In the end, we finished after almost three weeks (up from the one week estimate) and trucked out 51 loads of soil (816 tonnes) and imported 225 tonnes of stone. Bonus tho, we now had somewhere to put our "day" caravan and awning and finally have a spot to have a BBQ and beer after work.... and quality time with family. Ended up 50% over budget.... well, at least we're out of the ground now....

Check the nails that are holding the slates in. If there are iron and have rusted, the roof (slates) will need redone at some point with copper nails Definitely find out the reason for the damaged/missing/slipped slates before proceeding.

Your building shape, size and floor plan are eerily similar to ours... But I think ours is a bit smaller going by the number of rooms you have. We're also building to passive standard. All very nice, here's a contrast with ours for a different perspective. We've just moved our kitchen from the same location as yours to the "outshoot" / lounge. Reason for this is better connectivity with the garden as we have a covered veranda area (pizza oven, BBQ, all that fun stuff) just off the bifolds, along with a kids play area. The space where the kitchen was will now be a dining / play area. Where you have your "reading room" we have essentially a the same... will have a folding partition door between it and dining/kitchen. Few informal sofas and 4.5m wide bifolds to the garden balcony (rear of house is 1.5-2.5m above garden) Also south facing. We are going for an upstairs laundry... Basically sacraficing a bath in the family bathroom for a washing machine and drier. We don't have the garage/ balcony as such yet as shown on the plans, as we've a full basement below the ground floor for utility, storage and guest suite. (Old layout attached- stairs to basement now under main stairs, ground floor guest room now a TV room, and kitchen moved to outshoot, and walk in pantry gone as we've a cold room/cellar in the basement)

If you have a digger on site, do it now, it'll cost you nothing. Get the area you are thinking of using roughy excavated down to the subsoil level, backfill with rubble or subbase or any other type of stone. It will mean you can use the area in the mean time and will be a doddle to dig out in a years time to do your founds.

You've a lot of big windows and bifolds on the ground floor. I can't tell where north is. Has overheating been modelled? You'll need to spec very high spec triple glazed units if you don't want over heating in the summer and big heat losses in the winter. Our 3G bifolds are coming in at just under £10k for 5m span for top spec. In such a large house, insulation and airtightness will be critical in keeping running costs down. Has your architect discussed this with you? What levels of insulation are you aiming for? As for layout... It's all a bit ordinary tbh.. but I've a irrational distaste of square, hipped roof houses! You've limited scope with that form and they all end up the same. Is that a planning restriction or choice? I'd be expecting a large walk in wardrobe/dressing room for the master, and the 8m long living room is too big unless you plan to separate it with furniture like a tall bookcase.. You'd be looking to have at least 3m high ceilings in there or it'll feel like a cave. I don't think the kitchen is optimised. You'll want to see a kitchen designer sooner rather than later. Never found architects any good at kitchen layouts. I'd have a separate walk in larder/pantry rather than a single utility, and have the functional areas and island much closer together. You've space for a decent sized island with informal dining table attached (opposite of a breakfast bar). Function of utility and pantry are very different and you've got the floor are to easily have both. Boot room? Always good to have the mucky stuff come off in the same place in the house so mess of shoes, coats etc can be contained. A must in our design brief.

When I built my 2.4m x 3.6m block brewshed, I laid 300mm trench, filled with concrete and couple layers of block on flat to bring up to floor level. Laid 100mm of eps inside on a dpm, and poured 75mm of concrete to floor level. Then built walls up with block on edge. Simple timber flat roof with GRP. You could probably get away with shallower founds but you'll still need 100mm EPS and 75-100mm concrete for a half decent floor. Electric cable (extended a ring from an external socket using armoured cable) and water pipe came up through a 40mm duct in the slab. Waste pipe out the side to a simple soakawway. If I were doing it again, I'd build it out of timber stud and clad it! Would have made it a lot faster build and walls would be easy to take electrics through and to insulate. Reason for block was to satisfy the planning guidence of "mostly non combustible material" when building an outbuilding within 2m of a boundary.

That's that I thought. As most of our ground floor is basically open plan, we were hoping for herringbone engineered timber throughout. Might just tile the kitchen area behind the island so rest of the floor is continuous.

Any body have engineered timber in a kitchen? How does it cope with spills, dropped pans, knives etc. After having solid oak in a previous kitchen, I swore I'd always have tiles as it was basically destroyed.

We have our beam set inside from the wall (ICF) centre and the doors will hang on triangular brackets welded on the side of the beam. The beam is then packed with EPS same as the ICF and rendered.

Anybody? Or any other similar glazing units with solar control coatings?

fitting PV is more about reducing demand on the network and reducing the carbon footprint of your lifestyle.... e.g. timing your heat pump, car charging, washing machine etc to make use of PV electric to reduce usage from the carbon intense network. it depends if that is important to you or not. As above, payback is usually in the 10-15 year bracket. I'm going for a 6pkW system split over three roofs with a 4kw inverter. It's coming in a shade under £5k. Excludes wiring and commissioning.

You have to make sure your site is not easily accessible... I think in reality that requires a 2m wall/fence/thorn hedge! As above, security fence panels are only about £20 each new, and are easy to buy/sell second hand. If you don't take sufficient security measures, you insurance may be invalidated.

Commented on your other post but didn't realise it was that kind of compactor. Sell it and hire a proper vibrating plate compactor. Much better job and easier to use. It will only take a couple hours so you should only need to hire one for a day or weekend... So I doubt it will cost you more than £40 or £50.