ProDave

I would organise a percolation test. Only then can you calculate the area of land required, and then with that, and the limiting distances to buildings etc, work out just where it can actually fit on the plot. Our previous house required 85 square metres of soakaway.

This should be checked before you bought the plot. You WILL need a drainage field. And depending on the percolation test results it might end up using a lot of land. I do hope you have enough land to accommodate it, or an agreement with a neighbouring land owner for the drainage field to be under their land. It is perfectly possible to get planning permission for a house you cannot actually build or cannot occupy if you cannot get a drainage solution.

That will be down to the amount and decrement delay of the insulation. Our house is all timber, plenty of insulation but of a type with a slow decrement delay. The house only ever heats up or cools down very slowly. That is not because it has lots of "mass", it doesn't, but because the type of insulation.

With a properly air tight house, very little draught enters the house when you open just one window or door.

Perhaps the rogue current your smart switch draws reduces once it's storage capacitor is charged, so it is only an issue when the switch is first connected from new?

Is this your no neutral smart switch?

In many ways your downstairs layout is similar to ours. I suggest you make the living room just a little bigger (shrink the plant room which rarely needs to be large) and then have double doors into the living room directly opposite the double doors into the kitchen / diner. Ours are double glass doors and we like being able to have all the doors open making the whole downstairs feel like one big open space, or closing them when we want it to be snug. Edited to add a picture looking from the kitchen / diner, across the hall and through into the living room

Yes BUT. The replacement plant will be electric. That is a lot of extra green electricity needed if it is not to simply shift the emissions to a power station instead. AND that will only recycle old steel, not make new virgin steel from ore. We probably still need that new virgin steel somewhere in the world, so it is almost certain that new steel will just be made somewhere else, another country getting the jobs and the profit, while being "blamed" for the polution. But not to worry, it helps us meet our target so none of that metters.

The lack of tundish and discharge pipework is serious. Has the installer signed this off as it is non compliant. Get them back to correct this. What on earth is that rats nest of wiring in the bottom, did they do that? It sounds like your mains supply cannot support much flow. You will be lucky to get 2 simultaneous showers from that. Perhaps a mains accumulator would solve that?

I did my own. I bought an old Komatsu 3ton tracked digger. Digging foundations needs a bit of thought as you want to dig them in an order that avoids you tracking back over a finished trench, and working out how you are going to shift the excavated soil and where are you going to store it for re use or muck away. And the depth is not always constant, it is usually once you pass through the top soil into the harder sub soil, which may not be the same depth all over especially on a sloping site. There you want to step the bottom of the trench not make it sloping. Drains are easy it's the working out how to get a downhill fall all the way without it being too shallow or too deep. That is something you need to work out on paper, not in the seat of the digger. Also be sure before you go down this route your builder is happy for you to do this work.

I lie somewhere between your view and that of the climate change fanatics. It makes a lot of sense to move away from excessive oil usage for no other reason that it will run out one day. So moving what we can to wind generated electricity is perfectly logical, And if that gives cleaner air to breath, then that is good as well. I do love my new house for it's low energy usage and lovely internal climate, near constant temperature, constant fresh air, low humidity, no damp or condensation etc. I really would not want to go back to the 1930's house I had that was cold and damp and frightfully hard to heat, or even the 1980's house I had after that, that was still hard to heat but at least it was not damp. Most people seem to worry how are they going to afford to heat their home. Heating is a minority of my energy usage. I do honestly hope EV's will mature and eventually I will drive one, but that may not be until I have ticked off most of my bucket list and am too old and decrepit to be dragging a tin tent behind me around the countryside (some will say that day can't come soon enough)

Well an update. The oven was due another clean. SWMBO works in a cafe and tells me of their oven cleaner (just branded as M3) works like you expect, squirt it on, wait a bit, wipe it off. I have been unable to identify any "M3" oven cleaner so I took a punt on this one on ebay https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/404801471547 It is branded as "K3" (anyone know exactly what these mean) SWMBO says it looks and smells like the M3 stuff they use. Today was the day to try it, and almost effortly I have a clean oven. Just why is it all the stuff on sale to the public in the supermarkets is such ineffective rubbish when proper cleaners are available?

Next doors septic tank outflow. I could draw above that (from the farmers field) but I strongly suspect another house further upstream has a septic tank soakaway that "leaks" into the burn.

WBS definitely and a supply of ready wood in the shed. In our old house we had power off for 3 or 4 days and survived like that Flushing water could come from our burn but that is most definitely not drinking water. How likely is mains supply water failure? We have had plenty of power cuts but never a water cut. We have LPG for cooking. Come to mention it, our touring caravan is designed as an off grid "home" so all you really need is food and drinking water. If we can't get drinking water and fuel for transport then you are into the territory of any number of "end of the world" disaster films. There you want an underground bunker with many many months of stored food water and fuel.

And just to add a twist to this, my daughter is a L driver (test in 8 weeks, unless it gets cancelled again) She needed to learn in a manual car, which of course means ICE. Now it is certain in her lifetime there won't be any ICE cars left (apart from perhaps still some classics) but even so, she did not want to lean in and then be restricted to automatic cars. so we bought a small ICE car for her.

I let ours get very hot indeed and mix it down. Normal temperature is 48 degrees controlled by the ASHP. Immersion thermostat is set as high as it will go which seems to be just over 70 degrees. Even then, some days the tank will max out and some PV go "to waste" How do you normally heat your hot water? If by the immersion heater anyway then it is hard to self use much unless you don't have the immersion heater on at all and only let the Eddi take care of it, but you risk not enough hot water on a cloudy day. I helped a friend set up a second pre heat tank. Once the main tank is as hot as it can get, the diverter then heats the pre heat tank. That seems to work well as a way us using more on sunny days.

This time in Valencia https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-68378968 Similar cladding, similar rapid spread of fire on outside of building, loss of life etc. It appears the Spanish have not had a program of removing such cladding from buildings.

"The government said it also intends to introduce associated permitted development rights. One would allow for a property to be changed from a short-term let to a standard residential dwelling while the second would allow a property to be changed to a short-term let. " So the article says you will need PP to use a property as a short term let, then says to do so will be permitted development. This has to rank near the top of the most pointless waste of space bits of legislation ever?

Interesting. At full tilt our showers will deliver 17 litres per minute. My daughter can easily spend 15 minutes in a shower. If your 3.5 minute shower half filled the bath, then a 15 minute shower would have been 2 bath fulls. Thus the myth that a shower uses less water than a bath is completely dismissed. Even my usual 5 minute shower would be very close to a full bath full.

When we do long journeys there are 2 of us sharing the driving, stops are usually dictated by the need to empty ones bladder. Doing that and refuelling takes minutes. At the moment, people are pretending that an EV is no less convenient than an ICE car. And yes if your usual pattern of use is short journeys it probably is. But it is not there yet for more demanding usage. Perhaps it will get there? Or perhaps those who want us to change to EV's might have to start being a bit more honest and admit at some times things will be a but less convenient, sometimes perhaps even downright awkward with an EV compared to an ICE. We are a multiple car household, and I see the likelyhood that at some point our present small hybrid car will be replaced with an EV and that will do most of the miles, but retaining my big ICE lump for the tasks the EV is not suitable. Particularly with me retiring, that ICE car will probably end up not doing many miles which seems a pretty good compromise to me. I will nearer 2035 take the opportunity to upgrade it so something newer (not new) so it stands a chance of remaining in service longer. But in contrasts to switching to EV's, switching from an old leaky fossil fuel fired house to an almost passive house new build heated with a heat pump gives all the benefits without a single disadvantage that I can think of to the end user and many benefits.

I will add my summary of the whole "green" situation. If / When I buy an EV it will be my vehicle bought at my expense for my benefit. I will not be rushing to use it to support the grid infrastructure that should be paid for by the energy industry. Why would I want to reduce my cars battery life and risk it not being fully charged when I want to use it? I have not yet and am not in a hurry to buy An EV as my vehicle needs are perhaps more complicated than many, I want to move heavy loads, I want to tow things, I occasionally want to go on a long journey > 500 miles. All things EV's struggle with at the moment. If you needs are a "shopping trolley" to do mostly short journeys carrying just people and a small amount of luggage, then the present offering of EV's might meet your needs. But I am still waiting for them to meet mine. Instead I have built my own very energy efficient house heated by an ASHP. Once the generation is sorted out and all green (beyond my control but it is heading in that direction) my house will be "green" I have said before my previous house burned more Kerosene in a year than my car did petrol. So I have already done more to reduce CO2 with the new house, than I would have achieved if I had bought an EV. Cars are the low hanging fruit, because they generally last no more than 20 years so they should be upgraded easier than upgrading old buildings, but it does not mean replacing all ICE cars will do as much for reducing CO2 as making all homes carbon neutral, just that it is easier. When building a new house, the extra cost to do it right, insulate it properly, heat it with an ASHP, make it air tight and fit MVHR is small. This should have been mandatory for new builds 10 years ago. Old houses are the problem that nobody has found a solution for. But because we know that at some point they will need upgrading, I would not personally now buy a house worse than say EPC C unless it was substantially cheaper than a "good" house to reflect the high running costs and upgrade costs that are coming your way.

Hot water for guests is harder than hot water for your own house. You have no control and no idea how many times they will shower and at what time, so you need hot water available all the time. There is a good argument for electric heated showers. Then you are only heating the water they use for showering nothing more nothing less no waste. Then just heat the top half of the megaflow cylinders with the top immersion heater for basin and sink hot water. Solar PV with a diverter to help with that. I am well aware if the don't give a **** attitude of guests having previously run a b&b and found the room thermostst up at 30 degrees and the window wide open.

It won't work. So if not swap them around.

Circuit off both L wires out of the switch R1+R2 test. I bet that you stumped. So with circuit off, connect ONE of the brown wires to earth at the switch, go to the consumer unit and measure resistance from the (isolated) circuit L to E If you get a very low reading, then the brown you have joined to E is the feed. Then go and swap over so the other one is connected to E at the switch (and the first one floating) and see what the resistance L to E is at the consumer unit. Whichever one when connected to E gives the very low ohms reading is the feed.

The title slightly confuses me. Are you interested in self builders? i.e. where you have built a complete house from scratch? Or people that take an old, tired house and "do it up" as in retrofit ? I have done both, one renovation and two self builds, and in all cases I did most myself, just skills I have tried and failed at like plastering that I get others to do. There are some things you cannot do without bits of paper to say you are competent, like a lot of wiring, some plumbing (gas and G3) but plenty you can do.