joe90

“At least on the brightside I can do away with the vents above the bedroom doors, bathroom extractor fan, the outside vents in the bedrooms as well as the cooker hood outdoor extraction!” You need 10mm gap under doors for air movement with MVHR, I have a recirculating cooker hood and installed a relative humidistat in the extract manifold (again I made this myself!) which switches the MVHR onto boost mode if excess humidity is detected (bath, shower, cooking) some have a manual button to press to kick in the boost. Using the small diameter flexible pipe is sooo much easier to instal than large rigid pipes (you can always double up the pipe if you want more air movement).

The ASHP runs the heating fir about 3 months of the year max and only coming on fir a few hours a day, it keeps the floor at about 22’ which stops the house feeling cold, for a blast of heat in winter i light the woodburner. The ASHP runs for about an hour a day to top up the DHW cylinder. If and when I get PV, I will time the ASHP to start at 11 am to use any excess sunshine (if). If during the winter this timing is not enough I will over ride it.

I am the forums Luddite, I don’t do tech and had a similar approach to your plans. You only buy insulation once so buy a lot. I also have a woodburner, yes controversial but like @ProDave I burn my own wood and frankly it’s only used a couple of months a year. I also have MVHR but mainly so I did not have to have trickle vents wasting warm air and creating draughts. I bought mine on EBay cheap. Installed it myself and never got round to balancing it and the house is very comfortable. Yes orientation is key IMO, my house faces South and with a large conservatory this heats my house for the majority of the year. I do have an ASHP again from Ebay with UFH all installed myself. The only thing I did not do is install PV but with current price hikes this is now on the cards on my workshop roof (again facing south). Keep asking questions, lots of practical knowledge here 👍

If I had my time again I would have liked to study being an SE, as a practical type of chap I can usually work out what will stand up and what will break but would like to understand the science behind it. 👍

As I like dealing with wood rather than concrete etc and I found @Gus Potters post above fascinating (even if I don’t understand the numbers 🤷‍♂️) however But the cladding will be pushing against the edge of the OSB due to rotational forces and fixed to the 50 x50 so It won’t bend (well it might bend outwards if negative air pressure is great 🤔). But realistically anyone is going to nail at 150mm centres and may even glue as well so I think the Larsen truss is a great way of building a wall that will allow a lot of insulation (maybe I might do another build 🤔) (maybe not). also if the 50x50 is a bit bent (as a lot is) it can be straightened to meet the straight edge of the OSB prior to nailing.

+1 pushed well in to support the door sill.

You will love it, I almost did not want to sell my JCB after the build, my best “toy” ever 👍

Wow, looks really good, well done.(I had a brilliant builder so they are out there, but rare!)

Yup , not impressed, but I made him do it again (several times) till he got it right.

Yup, exactly what I did, I only paid to put it on CAD because I can’t!!! The Architect that I got to do it (worked previously with my builder) got loads wrong, could not even follow what I gave him.

With Ebay so many items are now sold by companies, not joe public and that makes a difference (IMO).

Oh dear, perhaps dementia is setting in 😱 mind it was a long time ago!!, yes they are good.

Ha, I saw that but don’t think it was me, yes it is a good idea, but who?

I bought mine on EBay fir £850, brand new still on a pallet, yes it was worth a punt and has proved very worthwhile.

Bolt some timber to it to hang the hinges on, it’s only temporary! If you used “pin hinges” you could lift it off to give more room! 🤔

I am finished (thank goodness) but I have to say I really enjoyed the journey, being retired helped a lot I am sure as did having a brilliant builder. Our only problem was with planners who I took to the Secretary of State and appealed and won hands down 👍, never met such a bunch of time wasters !!!!. I am all electric (with bottled gas Cus er indoors wanted a gas hob 🤷‍♂️.)

@DevonKim whereabouts in Devon are you?, I am up near Bude.

As an example my builder put the shell up and did not charge VAT on his labour or materials, however I did all the other work, bought the materials and claimed this back at the end ( and I used Andrew above to do my reclaim and he got back more than I thought so covered his modest fee 👍https://www.vat431.co.uk)

🤣, I did do paper drawings ( ‘O’ level engineering drawing when at school decades ago) but gave them to an architect to put on CAD and submit to the council (and he got so much wrong I had to keep correcting him).

Great, so my big American type fridge freezer is green? 🤔

I have decided to let my conservatory go “uh natural” whatever I put on it disappears quite quickly.

I decided against full RWH fir the build but plan to capture rainwater from the workshop to supplement garden watering using gravity no pumps, simples.

I like using counterbattens or drape the membrane so any moisture under the slates can run down the roof and escape , battens touching membrane can lead to rot/crap building up.

Inside, wherever the plasterboard joins with the window, my windows are wooden, hard wood but wood still moves a little fill the small gap between stop bead and window with flexible mastic. Even our Jeremy had problems with plaster cracking here and wished he had heard of this before.

There are different opinions on what makes are good and which are not, I prefer hep2o (as recommended by our in house magic plumber).