Bramco

We can too. We've had them in our homes since we lived in Holland in the 80's. We've had Howdens and IKEA in rental properties and IKEA are much better. It might be a small point but with IKEA you have oodles of holes in the sides of the cabinets to set your shelf height - with Howdens (at least in the past) you get a choice of 2 or 3 positions, so lots of potentially wasted space and then there's the 'utilities space' at the back of the Howdens and other base cabinets I've seen, maybe great for the installer but an absolute waste of space. IKEA are very well thought out. For the new house we've already speced IKEA cabinets - the work surfaces we'll get from somewhere else though. We'll also get IKEA appliances. Our own kitchen is on it's 2nd set of doors and as @SimonD said when anyone comes round they are always wowed by it (it's not that wow really), it just still looks pretty new. Simon

Thanks I'll take a look. Simon

Here's a graph of a sunny day. I should say that our thermal store in now 10 years old and is a DPS store - they were notorious for not being lagged well - it does make for a great drying room though!! The zig zags are the boiler kicking in. So at 7:30 or so because the tank temp has dropped low enough, then there's another one, when one of us took a shower. The big drop in the afternoon is both of us taking showers - it's a rain shower, so uses a lot. From 9am the rising red, grey and orange lines are due to the solar PV divert and the blue line due to the solar thermal going into the bottom of the tank. The PV divert goes into the middle, so only heats the top half. Graphs are all from the open energy monitor software emoncms which is excellent for this. If you look to the left you'll see it with the heating on the previous evening - the boiler only fires when temperatures drop enough. There's actually two setpoints on the tank controls, so the backup boiler is set to fire at a higher setpoint when the heating is on, i.e. the tank is a bit warmer - this prevents the flow to the rads dropping too much (we have both rads in the old part of the house and UFH in the extension. Hope that is of use. Simon

We have a thermal store and heat exchanger in our current house on which we have a number of sensors. There is always a gradient on the tank (210l), so v hot at the top, getting gradually cooler as you go down the tank. As you draw off hot water, the hot water is extracted from the top through the heat exchanger and returned lower down. If the temperature at the middle drops enough, then the backup boiler kicks - we have solar thermal and PV divert to harvest as much solar energy as we can. I'm guessing that an ashp or gshp wouldn't be able to kick in with the same amount of energy as the gas boiler does, so wouldn't maybe be able to give you several showers and a bath. Having said that I can't see how a how water tank would be any different from our thermal store. The hot water generated by the heat pump surely enters the tank at the top as cooler water is drawn off at the bottom to be heated up. So the tank won't be all hot, there will be a gradient, so as hot water is drawn off at a shower or tap it will eventually get cooler as again the heat pump won't be able to keep up. So it would seem that each solution will behave in a similar manner and depending on sizing might be behave exactly the same as each other. The reason we went for the thermal store in our current house was to make use of solar thermal and diverted PV and to have mains pressure potable hot water through the heat exchanger without having to worry about legionnaires. For the new house we'll have to decide whether we go the same way again or go for a hot water tank and make sure it goes through a hot cycle for the legionnaire treatment. It would be interesting to know the relative sizes of a thermal store and standard cylinder to get the same behaviour, i.e. amount of hot water before it begins to run cooler. Assuming I'm right about the heat pump not being able to keep up. Simon

We would but I read here -> https://www.edie.net/news/11/Government-planning-to-replace-RHI-with-Clean-Heat-Grant/ that in the budget it was extended to 2022. If not, then we'll have and ASHP in a field!!! EDIT: Here's the official notice -> https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/future-support-for-low-carbon-heat PHEW!! Simon

@Dan F @Oldsteel I'm assuming you have both completed the build by now, or are nearly there. Any chance you could let us know how you decided to manage your projects and any insights on how they went? We're about to start ours, structuring it an a similar way to @Dan Fs, groundworks, foundations and timber frame from MBC, metal roofing and cladding and the MVHR and ashp as packages and then a builder to do the internals. Trying to keep things as simple as possible. Simon

And we're at J24 - Batman country if you know the area. Simon

We were intending to do that as well on the first floor. So only UFH in the slab on the ground floor.

This is something that has got me thinking. Assuming we have our bathrooms warmer than the rest of the house and also have heated towel rails in the bathrooms, won't the returned warmth that an MVHR recovers as the air flows from the living spaces through the bathrooms to the outside keep the living spaces warm. So you can imagine that the heated towel rails are actually doing the heating which if these are electric are at a COP of 1.... Is this an issue? And if so how do you prevent it happening. Simon

Hi there, wish I'd found this forum earlier!! Not that we're in need but there's loads of great experience here which could have kept informed and entertained as we ground through the planning process. We finally got permission a week or so ago after 3 years - I'm sure there are plenty of members whose trials and tribulations were worse than ours but I'm sure it's a pain for almost everyone. Our build is in the Green Belt and is obviously infill, therefore not inappropriate - the officer that dealt with our pre-app decided that the plot, was too wide at 32m. She then went on to give permission to another application in another village stating that their frontage of 100m was fine for infill. Beggars belief.... Anyway, we won the appeal with ease and then had the haggle of getting our design through (oh and another officer on the reserved matters decided the outline permission red line wasn't correct, so we had to put in a full application). So here we are 3 years down the line, when we should have been living in our German kit house for 2 years, being unable to afford the Germans because of the exchange rate, watching materials prices shooting up due to Covid and Brexit, as well as possibly a housing market slump in a years time when we want to sell our existing house....... The upside is that we'll be much more involved in the build which should be interesting... Our permission is for a 3/4 bed timber frame house to passivish standards but not certified - although we may need to be when it's done. Metal roofing and cladding with some wood and render, ashp, mvhr, solar at the top of the field, triple glazed windows etc. Simon & Jane PS We're just south of Nottingham which seems to be a bit of a desert as far as self builds go...

Hi Bozza, That's not going to work.......... I probably don't need to say any more....... Thanks for the info though. Simon

Hi, We've just been granted planning permission - the 'granted' bit makes it all sound a bit medieval - which it is - took us 3 years and an appeal..... That aside, we now need to make sure the finance is in place. We can cover all but about £100k and have been looking at how to find this part. We own our current house outright and it's worth about £450k, so naturally we would look to a mortgage on this rather than a self build mortgage as the rates are much better. So the question is how do you convince a bank or building society to loan you that kind of money on a new mortgage on the current house? Speaking to brokers some time ago, as soon as we mentioned financing a self build, there was much sucking of teeth and quotes for bridging loans at extortionate rates. I noticed someone on a post a couple of years ago saying they had said they wanted to buy a 2nd home. We have rental properties, so I guess we could say it was for a deposit on a new rental property. Is there any experience of raising money on your own home and if so how did you do it? And which bank/building society did you use? Thanks in advance for any help. Simon