Thedreamer

I had to move a single pallet of dense concrete blocks over about 200 meters uphill and it was hard work with a wheel barrow. If I had lots of materials to shift I would use a wagon trolley over a barrow.

Sounds as if you are going to go a broker to go to a broker. Lots of fees with Buildstore. Our mortgage was going to be with the Newcastle Building Society, I was shocked by the fees. I would look at building societies. Might be useful to state where in the UK you are. In Scotland our choice were limited to a few lenders. And welcome to the forum.

It's easy tv and I like the quirky music they pick. I wouldn't however make financial decisions based on the show, just as I wouldn't open an antiques shop after watching bargain hunt. I heard somebody did a sponsorship marathon watch of the show, yesterday on radio 2. They said after 24 hours the colours and music started to have strange affects on them.

Are your neighbours not prepared to allow you to a dig a trench?

Good result ?

I only made a handful of taxi journeys with the electric heater and kept my eye on the meter. My electricity bill all in was £67 in January and that was with the children being at home during lock down. Not against heat pump for water heating. My exhaust system is currently extracting the moist bath heat into the system for tomorrow.

Our heater moves a matter of meters. In the first year we have been in the house it was on a handful of times. I do agree that the general public is not ready for a no heating situation. The surveyor who valued the property at the end said that to be the case. I'm not sure how it affected the value as we were £40k above what they said it would be at the start. I heat my water with a joule aero heat pump. This can be set-up to work as an exhaust heat pump or extract colder air from the outside. The bulk of my house heating in the winter evening is provided by our wood burner with rare quick heat provided by an electric oil radiator. What do you class as carbon neutral? You could build a massive house and get a good energy rating but in reality this does not take into account the environmental impact from the construction or how many people actually live in the house in the end. That's great. I have a fair amount of south facing glazing as well, which provides the bulk of the heating. I agree with this.

Interesting responses to my post earlier. Would you rather have no heating system, then have a house that drops down to say 19 degrees when you have a cold overcast day? For us if it's exceptionally cold I wheel out an electric heater and then it's away as needed. Takes a matter of seconds. When you consider the capital and running cost it's very cheap way of providing that exceptional on demand heating needed in a modern self build house. I hear what you are saying, if you are building a large property then perhaps a external air source heat pump has a place. But if we are wanting to get serious about climate change then we should consider whether we need to build such large properties. That is true for any heating system though. This is such a misunderstood point that it has become binary. Yes, that is correct. But if you have inefficient system you have high running costs, but replacing with another system you may have higher potential running costs and the capital cost of installing the system. Often people misunderstand how air source heat pumps work and their benefits. They may also have place in fairly new built social housing schemes. In my local area this is typically where you see them installed. Again is it necessary to have a really warm house? That's your personal preference, which is none of my business, but generally can we live with slightly lower temperatures during the odd occasion of the year? To me this is the bottom line, why pay for a system that operates at full capacity for only 7% of the year in heating the home? Is it really worth the capital cost to the customer and tax payer. As mentioned earlier much better to invest in insulation and airtightness and keep heating to exceptional times of the year.

If we had installed an external heat pump it would have been a big expensive mistake, for us. I just don't get why they are needed in a recent self build for space heating and if installed in a earlier built properties then they will struggle to fight against lack of insulation and airtightness issues. For the installation costs I would rather invest in more insulation and airtightness. For hot water a small heat pump makes sense. There might be some times, say a cold morning in winter when a little instant heat is required but from reviewing the capital costs, installing a external heat pump seems to be an expensive way of providing this. Add servicing and potential for problems into the equation then it looks costly to me. Servicing and installation should be considered from the point of view of the majority of the UK population who have no knowledge in this area and perhaps don't want to. For existing older builds I would keep using gas or oil. For self builds, insulate to a standard that you don't need space heating. If anybody has some data I would be interested to know over the course of year, for a correctly sized heat pump for a new self build, how much of the capacity of a larger heat pump is actually being utilised for a space heating over the course of a year?

Looks good. I have been impressive by how our rotten rock driveway has done, no pot holes over the five years. If I was self building and looking to acquire a croft, checking for rotten rock would be on my checklist with utilities.

How much land do you have? Access to a small hill? We had just over 100 meters of driveway to construct and faced a similar problem. We quarried rock from a borrow pit close to the house site and this formed our driveway. Saved a lot of money. For us it was having the right geology at the right place, as the rest of our site is clay.

Have you asked for non material variation? Do you an have email address for the actual planner that approved the application? Even submitted a fresh application it would probably be a lot quicker to pass through than 8 months.

We set it at 50. Over the last year I have tinkered with the settings to achieve the best set-up for us. One approach I have found is when the tank has heavy use for an occasional bath. I leave the hot water in the bath, the moist warm air disappears up the the duct and is recovered into the system. Generally these exhaust air source heat pumps don't have the best reputation as they have been used for heating in poorer insulated houses. I have also heard of cylinders made of poorer materials failing but Joule seem to have a good reputation for making cylinders. I wouldn't use our system for heating. But I have found if you self build properly you don't need much in the way of heating. I am always surprised with the number of self builders that use larger external heat pumps. Currently it's 19.5 in the house and 5 outside and I have not had any heating for three or four days.

I would also add that utility connections, particularly an electricity connection can increase above inflation.

Nothing wrong in planning ahead. I put in outline planning when I was 22 and moved in last year when I was 33. I wanted a goal of being sub £500 for all costs connected to living in the self build. Our site has great views, but required a bit work to make it a useable house site. I spent most of 11-12 years trying to achieve this in the most cost effective manner. I did not want any uncertainty when we were ready to roll with the build.

I hope everybody is doing well. The house is looking great. Your be keeping yourself busy after the house build with the woodlands. I also got one of those repayments for a SSE connection. For us we did not even get a letter explaining why we received the repayment, just credit slip. It was a great Christmas treat.

I have a joule aero. Works really for us (family of four). Never used the backup dual immersion heat, just rely on the heat pump. It was cheap to install and cheap to run. Why it works well for us? Our house is a self build completed last year. Good insulation and airtightness. The cylinder is a better quality than others cylinders Noise is not an issue, we have the cylinder in our utility room inside a cupboard. You barely hear it in the kitchen

I would go with the @IanR suggestion. Your house is looking great!

If your growing your own, you will most likely be in a rural environment, where very little pollution is going to be felt by your neighbours. Installing a wood burner in a urban area makes no sense. I checked our own home grown and they are 5-7% on the moisture meter.

Plenty around here that have septic tank that have never been emptied. Sometimes the use of fence post in a concrete tank to ease things along. Would a treatment tank essentially become a septic tank if the air blower stopped working?

It shames that they cannot design a tank that just deals with the sludge. It would not work in an urban environment but I could deal with the occasional sludge if it came out like compost.

Thanks for the comments. We have a large poly tunnel on the croft, but interested on the DIY fish farm/water pipe option.

Good to know, on the local facebook pages there often seems to be lengthy delays for Scottish water, often people seem to need to group together for a different wagon to come out. We are pretty careful with what goes in, but I was hopeful of three year empty cycle.

Good evening, Anybody on here got a Polycrub?

I am sorry to hear that they are not going to do the right thing. Just thinking outside the box, are the big issues with the render system the bits closest to the ground? What about stripping off the lower part and having a split between the render and timber cladding? Perhaps a little bit of tidying up around the windows etc?