Alex C

Makita cordless drill, impact driver and reciprocting saw. All used loads during my build and great bits of kit. I have a dewalt track plunge saw which has been one of the best bits of kit I have ever bought. It has had a huge amount of use both on external cladding and second fix internal carpentry. Most trades that came to site seemed to use makita cordless drills.

It is an elica that was very expensive, but as we have an open plan kitchen living space I wanted one that looked good as well as being effective. https://elica.com/GB-en/hoods/meteorite-islandI'm sure it is possible to get ones that functions just as well for less money, although cheaper ones do tend to be more noisy. We have an 800 wide hob and wanted a 1200mm wide hood so that narrowed choices right down. Plenty of people use the ceiling recessed ones above island hobs, but with a high ceiling these are never going to be so effective. The standard for these seems to be the Westin oneshttps://www.westin.co.uk/our-hoods/ceiling-hoods/westin-stratus/.These were specced by all the high end kitchen companies I visited.

We have a recirculating extract over the hob that works really well. We also have an mvhr extract about a meter set back from the recirculating hood extract. The flow rate of the mvhr is many times lower than the extract hood, but over time removes any smells and the extract hood removes grease from the air. We have a 30 year old rental apartment with constant extract above the cooker with no filters. The amount of grease this has collected over time and has stuck in the duct is disgusting and really shows the importance of something to trap the grease and not just rely on the mvhr to extract .

Whatever the manufacturers spec states would be a good starting point. I fitted rainclear aluminium clic system which asked for 750mm centers. You need more brackets than you think as the snow loading can get pretty high.

I had no stages at all from Ecology. I could take whatever money I wanted whenever I wanted it. Made life very easy for the build. I am not sure if they were more flexible than usual as I had a lot of equity in the plot. They are one of the few banks you can just ring up and ask questions and you can deal with the same person every time.

My mortgage company wanted a completion certificate but I suspect it is just luck of the draw if they actually ask for it. As far as the bank is concerned there is still a risk without completion certificate that the house will never pass building regs and be worth less than the valuation.Why cant you just get completion certificate before the garage is completed? This will cause you a vat reclaim issue for the garage though.

Have you taken a look at any builds several years after this type of cladding is installed. The burned finish washes off over time leaving a mixture of black char and grey timber.

I'm with @JSHarris on this one. We have 2.4m high glazing to the south in our living room. In June/July the most the sun comes in to the room is 1m, so overheating is not much of an issue. In the winter the sun penetrates 5m across the room and on to the wall opposite generating far more solar gain. This is not a major drama in our house as it is very open plan and any solar gain dissipates around the house pretty quickly. It would be a problem if the south facing rooms were enclosed with nowhere for the heat to travel to.

Internorm offer proper external blinds and also the integrated external blinds that are behind a pane of glass. There is not a massive differnence in price although the integrated ones have a lower U value as the triple glazing pane is not as wide. I have both on differnent windows and the external ones work better as the slats are much wider and work better when only partially closed. The integrated ones work very well on our smaller bathroom windows

They are internorm although the blinds are very similar to the galhoffer ones. Internorm products are great but I really couldn't recommend the company or the installers. I think the blinds are actually manufactured by another supplier and then just bolted to the windows and colour matched, although when installed they are a really neat design and look an integral part of the window.

We have external metal venetian blinds that disappear into the wall above the window when up so they are totally invisible. They are brilliant at stopping solar gain. I have them so they automatically tilt to track the sun but allow maximum possible view through them.

Fit all plasterboard and trims, plaster everything. Lay your floor tiles and then fit skirting (this will need scribing as there is no such thing as 100% flat floor or level trim). Getting a good shadow gap to skirting is far harder than you might imagine as it is reliant on all walls, door linings etc being absolutely bang on. Crazy idea to have shadow gap to floor and no skirting as this will get knackered the first time you pull the hoover round the house or mop the floor but each to their own. I have been doing these sort of details for years in high end commercial interiors but the standard of workmanship tends to be higher than your average builder is willing or able to do. You shouldnt really be stopping a single skin of plasterboard short of the floor as it should be a continuous fire barrier. Normal practice is to double skin with the second layer stopping short.

I used Ecology Building Society and they were great to deal with and easy to draw money down as and when I wanted it.

Accoya is not a very attractive timber and is normally painted or stained with quite an opaque finish. Any paint or stain is always going to need re-applying with 7 years being about the max between coatings. I have had samples of all wood effect claddings going and didn't like any of them but plenty of people don't seem to mind them.

Get on your roof with a bucket and sponge and give those panels a wash. We are very lucky in that there is no shading whatsoever on our roof.

We had just over 18kwh from a 5.5 kw system string inverter yesterday. we are only 5 degrees off due south and panels are at about 40 degrees.

We also use gas for heating hot water during the winter and running heated towel rails as the excess from pv rarely generates enough on winter days. Maybe it would be better to have had a heat pump and be all electric but then these do have efficiency issues with getting water up to temp for DHW. I don't have an answer whether it is ultimately cheaper or more expensive but at the time it seemed a fairly simple solution. We already had gas on site so no connection cost. I think we used under 4000kw hours of gas last year and about 5000kwh electricity. We generated 5000kwh of power with pv.

We had solar thermal on the house I knocked down. I'm afraid i didn't even bother reusing it as it was never that great and the cost of someone taking it down and putting it back again would have bought quite a few extra solar pv panels.

This wouldn't work as you won't get much out of the solar thermal in winter when you need the heat. Why use solar thermal when you could just use pv and divert excess to the thermal store. PV is far more flexible than solar thermal. I have had both in the past and would not bother with solar thermal again. What other heat source have you got going into the store? I hope you weren't just planning on using the log burner

Our house requires pretty much double the heat of JSHarris but is also about double the volume from memory. To keep the air temp at a constant 21.5 takes very little additional heat as most of it comes from cooking, appliances, showering etc but we we do tend to have 3no. 600w towel rails come on for an hour a day through the winter. This keeps the bathrooms nice and warm, dries the towels really quickly and also adds some heat into the building. We also have UFH pipes in the slab (ground floor only) just connected to the smallest gas boiler I could find which modulates down to 3kw. We don't actually need much heat in the slab to heat the house but it is much nicer walking on a 23 degree tiled floor than walking on it at 20 degrees. A small amount of heat input a couple of times a week is enough to just keep the chill off the tiles so we can walk around bare foot comfortably even in the middle of winter. We run the UFH pipes with no added heat input during the day so that any solar gain onto the slab is moved all around the ground floor rather than just making a warm strip next to the full height glazing. A log burner would create far too much of a temperature spike in a passive house, better to have a small heat output for a longer period of time.

You can pretty much heat our house by getting the kids to run around and the dog farting.

We are next to fields and I think they put so many chemicals on them there aren't many flies left. We just seem to have a week a year when tiny storm bugs get everywhere, oh and also the ladybird invasion before Christmas, definately no window opening then.

The windows hardly every need opening. I am just talking about a basic principal of cross ventilation and night purging. The op's architect has incorporated this as well by having an automatically opening roof light. I understand there are other ways to help cool a house, but none quite so simple or fool proof.

I designed my own passive spec house to have at least 2 opening windows on different elevations in each room (but only 1 in my office as it has rooms on both sides) and also with 2 large roof lights at the top of the open plan landing that open automatically at 25 degrees c. This makes purging heat in any room really easy as opening a window in the overheated room moves the heat outside in just a few minutes. There aren't that many times a year that opening a window at night dosen't cool a house down. This is all pretty standard stuff and is something any architect should be looking at doing in a new build.

@jsharris couldn't you just open a window rather than having to run a cooling system? Our living room got pretty warm today as we have quite a bit of south facing glass as well. I generally don't mind this in the winter as the house is open plan the excess heat tends to disapate around the house and not be a problem. The heat absorbed into the slab today will keep the house warm for the next few days with no additional heating requirement at all.