Thedreamer

We paid for 'building water' on our connection charge, lasted about five years. Water is collected with your council tax here, so no council tax, no water bill.

No not at all. I am not from these parts but family crofts are very important to those that live on them. Often they can reassemble small islands of land within a sea of bog and heather. Even in the time I have been here a lot more have been split in size or gradually sold for house sites. You then get the small holders and hobby farmers that you refer to.

Crofting is the way of life here for many generations. Most crofts have about the same level of beasts. Presently only larger crofts with good access to hill grazing can run a croft on a full time basis.

There are big supply and demand problems with BWMB. I think they have to much. We have around 35 sheep and in a good year usually about £20. We may consider using fleeces as mulch or composting if we reach point where we have to pay to have it taken away.

Well done @ProDave I picked up on a google search your blog on e-build and that was what led me to joining e-build and then when that ended I discovered that everybody had moved here. You now need to transfer your earlier entries over to your website to complete the story. I hope you and your family have a wee drink to celebrate.

Not mine, but during a colleague's build they plaster boarded in a cat. It was eventually freed. ?

I feel fuel poverty could be an issue in my local area. There will be a number of stone cottages that are starring at many turbines but paying some of the highest rates of electricity in the UK. I would like to see a policy of a single unit of electricity costing the same for all households in the UK. It's radical but fair. The nice clean renewable energy for towns and cities impacts rural communities.

My understanding is limited on heat pumps and the UK grid. Does the expected increase in heat pumps result in the need for much more electricity to be generated, how will this occur, whilst already trying to increase the percentage from renewables at the moment?

It would be useful to post an extract of your section plan. Here is mine. You This is the first step to correct the problem.

What do you plans show? You should have a section plan which shows the breakdown of layers/materials in the roof, wall, floor etc. We have a small metal room roof on our lean to and it has a breather membrane underneath to catch the condensation,

Royal mail super fingers crossed delivery. I work in an office and was able to make copies of invoices.

This may be of interest to those who follow DIY VAT decisions. https://www.accountingweb.co.uk/community/blogs/leshoward/multiple-diy-claims

I had a look at my EPC report after reading the above posts and it mentioned we were 79. This report is said that we would have used 3,124 Kwh of electricity for space heating, but I only had the one electric heater on for maybe five or six hours over the course of the year. Just noticed that it states this document should be fixed to the dwelling, who does that?

The redevelopment of the buildings is horrible. Particularly the earlier one. That's the trouble with property it's all about greed. The planning system penalising those people who view their house as their home and compared to those who view their home as a house. If I had a magic wand I would reform principal residence relief to taper for CGT purposes.

Had a quick look over this again. The system has worked well, only used the heat pump and no expensive use of the backup immersion heater. A few comments were made on the post regarding the amount of air needed to come into the house, even trickle vents howling with the air movement. This has not been issue and we don't notice the temperature in the house decreasing when the system is running. It runs for about six hours a day to heat the water for two adults and two children. I've said a few times before I don't see why such large external heat pumps are required in a well insulated self build. With no underfloor heating, heat being extracted from the house into joule aero and trickle vents, we never had the temperature drop below 18c since we moved in. Usually around 20c to 21c.

Thanks. Not quite ready to start planting yet and it might be into the summer next year before we have produce.

Tatties are definitely on the list.

It's been over a year since we finished our home and I thought it would be good time to reflect. We have not had any major snagging issues with the house. The only product which required some additional work was the LVT flooring, we found thermal expansion was causing some warping. This has since been resolved with the addition of two expansion joints. In my last blog post I discussed how we were heating the house with just a wood stove during colder times of the year. In the first year I had to build up our wood stocks quite quickly, but going into the second year I decided to focus on collecting sticks. I'm still burning home grown split logs but I find that collecting a bundle of sticks to be a great way to maximise the amount of firewood. By the end of the summer I had collected quite a large pile. Nearly all of these sticks are either dead wood, wind blown trees or from trees needing to be cut down for other reasons. In these times of uncertain electricity and gas prices, it's very satisfying to be able to collect and store fuel to heat my family. For our hot water, our exhaust air source heat pump has been very efficient and with no need for electricity to heat our house our usage has been 10-11kWh a day. During the course of the self build I collected a huge amount of stones from the ground. I used the smaller ones to extend the parking area. The larger ones I sorted and then had a go at dry stone walling to line the ditch. In the spring I stumbled across videos on YouTube by Charles Dowding discussing his no dig approach to gardening and I decided that it would be great to grow more vegetables. My take away from his videos was that having access to large amounts of compost was critical to making this a success. I started to hot compost from lawn clippings, hay and a variety of woody materials. I recycled the last of the pallets from the self build to make this four bay system By the end of the summer I had a huge pile of homegrown compost. This is now ready to grow some vegetables in the Spring, any suggestions?

Our stove which is just under 5kw and has a dedicated air feed under our suspended timber floor. This prevents uncontrolled cold air coming into the room and this approach can only be a good thing for ventilating the joists. Our house has a good level of airtightness/insulation.

If you collect the water in the pipe, where will it go? Does the grass in the second photo form part of your ground?

Say if my timber frame house lasts 100 years, what difference does it make to me or even my kids? For us it was no brainer as the right skills are around here to stick build and save a fortune. My mortgage is very low for my age and will be paid off by my middle forties. Is it better for the environment to have a timber frame with a limited lifetime of 100 years +?

When I've worked with modern lightweight blocks they crumble quite easily. How long has this building method been around? To me a traditional building would be dense concrete block and covered in brick or a cement render, most 'traditional' build don't use this approach. On average it's much easier to get a better result in terms of airtightness and insulation in a timber frame. It's can be done by your average self builder with little experience and when compared to block and brick, unless you are doing the blockwork you are going to need to monitor and have trust in your builder. In my local area (Hebrides) nobody builds block and block anymore it would be seen as odd to do so. We get some of the wildest weather in the UK and never heard of any house having issues. We were able to arrange for our joiners to stick build a timber frame at a relatively low cost. No doubting that a oak frame is going to be stronger than modern timber but it worthless taking into account that modern wood is treated and incorporates modern fixings. Your roof structure will most likely be timber frame so you need to trust the material.

Presumably you were able to examine the broken bit? Not asbestos?

Sorry, but I don't know the weight, as I own no scales. The wood is very well seasoned and light, the home grown alder especially. It's no more than a garden trug basket at the very coldest points of the year. A bright cold frosty day will provide sufficient solar gains to keep the house nice and warm without the need for the stove.

If it helps our three bedroom on Skye is using between 10-11 kWh a day for electricity. I have no heating system, apart from a electric oil heater that gets wheeled out on special cold frosty occasions for a morning boost. The rest of heating is provided by a centrally placed wood burning stove which usually runs from Octoberish to March for a a few hours in evenings. Might be worth sharing a bit more information on your electricity connection? There are ways I got mine down a lot with SSE. Also bear in mind that members come from all over the UK and beyond so do consider advice in the context of your location.