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Hi Tom Doing the strengthening work prior to the Class Q Application could be considered as development under Agricultural PD and therefore start a 10 year count down before Class Q could be used, so be careful and take advice. My personal view is that, as long as it didn't change the external appearance then it would not be considered as Agricultural PD, since internal works are not within the definition of "Development", ie. your Section 55 comment. But, your LPA may see it differently and the Inspectorate of an Appeal may agree with them. There are Appeal decisions in both directions so the situation is ambiguous. It may be worth getting and reading Martin Goodall's book: Practical Guide to Change of Use. I believe it covers the subject with lots of case Law references. It came out too late for me, so I haven't read it, but wish it was around when I went through this minefield. http://planninglawblog.blogspot.de/ Edited to add: I know this is in the guidance, but makes no sense since you will have to reinforce around new "permitted" doors and windows as well as numerous other areas that will be required to meet residential Building Regs.

I think I'm in the minority on this forum for having a 5m set of bi-folds installed in my new build. Aesthetically the 1m width of each of the doors matches the sashes on the rest of the elevation where large sliders would not have done. The U Value of the Solarlux SL97 that I went with is equivalent to other options of glazing, and there's no noticeable impact on airthightness, although I concede no air test has yet been done. As to their use, we only moved in towards the end of the summer and the outside area is yet to be finished, but we did open them up a couple of times and I'm sure we will be doing regularly once the warm weather is back with us.

Is it planned for the steels to remain visible, as in the image on you linked thread? If so, I wouldn't go with galvanised unless you are happy with a very industrial look. The finish is aesthetically inconsistent, especially around touch points when it's in the tank. Even if a fixture was made to support them in non prominent areas, which would push the cost up further, the patterning and thickness of galvanising still varies a great deal. If the steels are to be visible, with the likelihood of damage occurring during handling on site, I'd get a corrosion inhibitor put on at the fabricators, perhaps red oxide or similar, then prepared and painted once installed. Looks like you are using a hollow section so don't forget to get the internal coated with something... wax-oil perhaps. Also, if they are visible, assuming welded (hollow) section rather than seamless will be used, get them to tuck the weld seam on the least visible side.

Very definitely a Google project from its inception. It first broke cover from "Google X" at about that time, but don't think they were handing out (selling) developer kits until around 2014. I was trying to get one back then, but they were only sold in the US. Glad I was forced to wait as the 2nd gen device was a tablet rather than a phone and with a lot more grunt.

It's not that far away. Google's Project Tango is making progress and with a couple of consumer devices now available and a good community of developers creating apps, it's just about possible now, although not without some manual fudging to get the final result. Most of the Apps are for augmented reality gaming, but there are also some 3D Scanning type apps with a goal of creating 3D and 2D plans of the built environment. Similar to this one: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Wosomtech.EasyBuild I got a Project Tango developers tablet around 18 months ago and it's processing of scans into fully volumetric environments has really improved. What I mean by that is starting in one position within a group of rooms, walking round the area and returning to your starting point and the scan being more-or-less back in the correct place.

We've got around a 5.5m internal ridge height on a couple of rooms. One is within a larger open plan area, but the area with the vaulted ceiling is around 7m x 6m and this is a great space, each of the walls around it is broken up by either a double-height window, an internal flip-fold door opening or a full height false wall with recess for the TV etc. The other room is in the centre of the house and is around 6m x 5.5m with roof lights above to let natural light in. When first decorated and with all internal doors shut this did take on the form of a squash court, which I feel was down to having little to break up the plain walls between the top of standard height doors and the vaulted ceilings. We'd already seen this with early rendering I did of the space during the design phase so had planned up/down lighters on the walls just a bit above the top of door height and an over-sized book case on one of the walls, plus a few pieces of appropriate artwork (still) to be hung in the elevated area. Breaking up the big expanse of flat walls was key to making this a very interesting space.

We have something very similar. Hinged glass panel closing to (but not touching) a fixed glass panel. Hung on two of these: with a plastic strip fixed to glass that seals against wall Not touching the floor or side glass We've got a very good local glaziers in Chelmsford (Ace Glass) that do this type of thing. They will make to a drawing, but not sure about shipping.

I went with HikVision also, have no experience of other brands so can't compare, but price was good, functionality is excellent, and installation is plug-n-play. I would definitely go with IP Camera and NVR, rather than analogue and DVR. Specifically, I went with their NVR DS-7716NI-K4/16P. This one has an integrated 16 port PoE Switch which makes the camera configuration very easy, it's also available with an integrated 8 port PoE Switch instead of the 16, or as a 32 channel NVR instead of 16, although you'd need a standalone PoE switch for the other 16 cameras as the don't do an integrated 32 port PoE Switch. I used mostly bullet cameras outside, but 1 dome under my porch. The bullets I went with were DS-2CD2T55FWD-I8 . They've got long-range IR which are claimed for 80m, but I'd say they're very good for 50m. Before specing the cameras I'd suggest drawing out a plan of the areas you want to cover and make sure you get the right lens size for the field-of-view you need. With regards motion detection, as mentioned above don't expect any system using changing pixels within the image to detect motion to be very robust. You'll get a lot of false positives on external cameras. Luckily the HikVision NVR accepts incoming alarms and you can set up actions on these so you can use a 3rd party PIR to send a signal to the NVR to then send you a notification and some pics of what just happened. We use the same PIRs that switch on the external lights to send alarms to the NVR.

I appreciate Sapele is too dark for what you are after, but I did say I'd get a picture of the porch ceiling. This is also a better representation of the actual colour. The ceiling is done with alternate narrow (94mm) and wide (144mm) boards, bevel edged and butt-jointed. The wall cladding is the same boards but board-on-board. It was the spark's idea to recess the spots into the board, which isn't really noticeable in the pic but is a really nice effect.

We were after a consistent redish-brown to part of our cladding (incl. porch ceiling) and initially thought we'd be going with cedar but were disappointed with the inconsistency of samples where pinks and yellows would be mixed in with the brown we'd expected. In the end we went with Sapele (PAR) and three coats of clear UV resistant Osmo. It's a lovely deep brown, looks like a piece of fine furniture. If there's enough light in the morning when I leave I'll try to get a picture of the porch to post. In the mean time, not the best picture to show the colour, but to give a flavour. Sapele is obviously the lower half, and only one coat of Osmo at this point:

wrt solar gain, I'm thinking of a predictive system rather than reactive. With outside temps dropping to -2 overnight last night it looks like our house dropped its average temp by about 0.8 degrees (down to 20.6) between 22:00 and 07:00 (I block the ASHP from working between these times, not actually sure when the last time heat was put into the buffer, may have been much earlier) At 07:00 it immediately wanted to heat the buffer, but I'd noticed the forecast said that it would be a bright morning, so blocked it from heating. By 10:00 the average house temp was sailing passed 22 degrees and is now (15:00) 23.5. I'm choosing not to dump any heat out as it's forecast a cold night tonight. Had I not manually blocked the heating this morning I'd have wasted a buffer full of warm water. Now, had it actually been over-cast this morning I'd have needed that buffer heating up at 07:00. What would be nice is a control system that was informed by the forecast so that I can stop checking the BBC Weather. In reality I'm using Loxone to control my heating/shading/cooling/ventilation (not yet fully automated). And they do offer a weather service that requires a subscription to be paid. I haven't yet checked if this would provide my controls the info it would need , but I'd prefer to avoid a subscription if I can. A dedicated climate control system would hopefully be more focused on just the climate side, rather that full home automation as Loxone is, and be simpler to set up.

For me, a climate/environment control system for a low energy homes needs to be able to coordinate ventilation and shading along with heating and, if possible, predict timing and amount of solar gain to avoid unnecessary early morning active heating, if within in a couple of hours the sun would have done the same passively. This is all based upon my, to date, 1 week of experience of requiring some low level heating in a low energy home.

Hi Mark, congrats on winning the battle and welcome to the forum. We're just South of Chelmsford. Before you jump into your Building Regs drawings, you may wish to decide on the Frame and foundation supplier as a number of details will come directly from them, lightening the load on what you need to produce yourself. We used a Touchwood Homes frame and Advanced Foundation Technologies slab. TW put us in contact with an Architect they use to help develop some of the non-standard passive house detailing. It was money well spent and as he knew their frame technology well as well as the slab I ended up getting him to pull the Building Regs drawings together and it turned out very cost efficient. Edited to add: The PH Architect, although British, resides in Australia, which made no difference to the support he gave.

Have you tried Airflow direct... for the Adroit unit. Airflow will do the system design in house (free), which is very comprehensive, and then provide you with the BoM to hawk around their distributors to get the best price. I found that BPC don't get such good terms with Airflow so their pricing wasn't keen. Travis Perkins ended up getting me the best price. They had no idea what they were selling me, just quoted on the Part Numbers from the BoM provided by Airflow. Airflow provide you a target price which you should be able to achieve better than through a distributor. That price provided was also "negotiable". When I hadn't placed an order within a few weeks of getting the system design I was chased up by their sales team who promptly re-quoted when I suggested I might go with a different brand of unit. When I sent that re-quote through to TP they came back with an offer that was a few hundred pound less that the target price.

I was originally going with Colorcoat as the original quotes of £40/m2 Installed was the most cost effective Standing Seam roof I could find. However in the year it took to get from the costing stage to having a roof ready to clad, Tata/Colourcoat seemed to get themselves in a mess and prices went North of £65/m2 installed. I went back a re-quoted all the different options and Aluminium then came in the most cost effective at a little under £55/m2. I wasn't happy with going over budget on the roof, but using a more ductile material (Aluminium, Zinc or copper) does allow hand dressing of all joints, such as roof-light flashings etc. so you avoid having to introduce another material to seal around penetrations.

Assuming doors aren't rebated then I allowed 3 x 3mm gaps for a pair. So, 3 + 533 + 3 + 533 + 3

I'd have them South facing, with external (automated) blinds. Embrace the Solar Gain and use it when you need it.

Magic Man or Plastic Surgeon, similar service from each.

I would not pay anything "upfront". No issue with fortnightly invoices with a swift payment, but paying money upfront will not work in your favour.

Thanks @chrisb that's a great help. As you say I need to stick with analogue lines for now due to bandwidth but we may get Superfast in a couple of years so want the option to move to VoIP. You've given me the acronyms I needed to get better results on my searches. May look to a IP PBX solution so that it works out the box, I've got a few other home projects to straighten out and could do with something that "just works".

Mine is a solid sole plate. The Engineer for the insulated raft did show an I joist on its side for the sole plate, so I assume it can be done, but that's not how the TF supplier did it. While the thermal bridging would be further reduced with an I Joist sole plate, it would not give much flexibility with bolting positions to fix the sole plate. I believe most I Joists have a 47mm deep flange so your going to want the bolts right in the middle. Your Slab would then need to be spot on, assuming your having and EPS upstand coming up underneath the soleplate. A solid sole plate gives a little more flexibility.

Hi @chrisb For me: 1. copper line, broadband provided by TalkTalk - 6.5Mb/s download (rural) 2. 2 lines in, 1 domestic, 1 business. Voicemail for each line. Office phone to ring for business calls, all lines ring for domestic calls. Others can "pickup" business calls if I'm not "in the office". Internal calls between extensions. 3. VOIP Service added in future. More handsets as children age. 4. Mixture of wired and wireless handsets 5. yes 6. Hmmm... as long as I perceive it to be good value, then what ever it takes... within reason. I guess I'm expecting to get the PBX for sub £250 and handsets sub £150 each. I'm open to buying used kit from Auction etc. 7. yes, all IT and Automation is in a "Node 0" area, either racked or DIN rail mounted. Edited to add - PoE kit would be preferred...

My plan was to run IP phones, but I've a gap in my knowledge that's stopped me from ordering the hardware I need. On the server/exchange side, I want to connect the IP phones to my "standard" BT line, and perhaps add a VOIP Service in the future. The PBX servers I've looked at don't explicitly say they can handle a standard BT line and route the IP phones through it, but I assume they can. Can anyone confirm that's the case, and if possible recommend a suitable brand for a cost effective domestic set-up. ie. max 2 lines in and say 6 extensions. Thanks.

Couldn't agree more. I was able to 3D scan the existing steel frame of the original cow-shed we converted, and CTD then built the timber structure around it, resolving the issues in CAD rather than on site. They seem to enjoy the challenge of designing non-standard structures. In defensive of the TF companies I'll give my "take" the markup of the TF companies: The TF company in question is offering a package of which the frame design and production are a couple of parts. That package offers the self-builder the opportunity to de-risk substantial components of their build, including what I believe is +25 years experience of erecting more-or-less the same frame technology and developing a propriety erection process that delivers an air tightness substantially better than PassivHaus requirements. Taking this into account I believe the "mark-up" includes a whole lot more than just profit. Whether or not that seems to be good value will depend on whether a self-builder is capable of erecting the frame themselves or if they need to contract that portion out.

Sounds like a similar service to what Cullen Timber Design offer. Definitely worth sharing your experiences of who you are working with as I'm sure it could benefit others. The route I took got me involved with CTD and their service was excellent.