ProDave

Try a different insurer and don't tell them the building is suffering susidence.

So we have a posh oven with pyrolytic cleaning. Except last time we used that function, it slightly melted the internal plastic door lining, so I have lost confidence in that. Time to manually clean it. Now in all my 6 decades, I have never found an "oven cleaner" that easily removes oven residues. Forget what the adverts show you, I have yet to find one where you squirt it on, wait a bit, and wipe it clean in an effortless move to a lovely shiny oven (where is trading standards and trades description law on this?) Many moons ago I was dismantling to repair a cooker hood, covered in cooking grease, and by trial and error using all the chemical products in the house and garage, found white spirit particularly effective at disolving and removing the cooker hood grease. Worth a try on the oven? So yes I tried it, and it did indeed work WAY better than any oven cleaner at removing the baked on grease with not too much effort. Of course I now had an oven smelling of white spirit. Time to use the oven cleaner, that did at least seem effective at removing the last of the white spirit residue. Then time to try it. I ran it at a very low 60 degrees for about half an hour until all smells, of both white spirit and oven cleaner, had dispersed before putting it to full temperature and cooking my dinner. No obvious issues with said dinner and not a trace of white spirit or oven cleaner smell now. Off to get my tin hat as someone is bound to tell me how I narrowly missed killing myself or blowing up the house.

Work on a minimum of 300 litres. The big issue is the ASHP will not heat the water in the tank as hot as a gas boiler would. So in use, the hot water from the tank will be diluted with less cold water, so for the same hot water usage as before, you will need a bigger tank. Look at Telford stainless steel unvented cylinders, they will do any combination of input coils. You will need a high capacity heat pump input coil as well as a separate solar thermal input coil.

This has been coming down the tracks for some time, first for rental properties and now for sale. It has been blatantly obvious to me for years, that a house with a poor EPC should be worth less than a house with a good EPC. But that does not yet appear to be the case. You still hear of people buying an old house with a poor EPC because it has "character" and then complain the first winter at how much it costs to heat, information clearly available in the EPC. It is nearly 10 years since we decided to build our second self build, and it was obvious even then, that the only logical thing to do was aim for as close to passive house as I could, and I ended up with a house with an EPC rating of A94. Our BCO even admitted it was the first A rated house he had seen. That in itself is shocking. But I do feel sorry if people are not even able to sell a house even at a reduced price, unless the work is done first to upgrade it. Preventing sale of assets is for me one step too far for any government in any country. But it will be another nail in the SNP coffin which must nearly be shut by now.

Are you even sure that blockwork you have exposed is a cavity wall? It would not surprise me if on a 1960's house that was not just single block then the hanging tiles? I would not want the render to come right out to the face of the piers, I would want some small step back or are you intending to render over the brick pier as well (thus creating a joint in materials just waiting to crack?

I am thinking is the opening is the original width of the window in the room before the extension and this was the cheap option to just keep the lintel that was there. It is probably possible to widen the opening and replace with a much longer and stronger lintel, but it won't be cheap or simple.

Or do what we did, make Utility and downstairs WC all in one room. I could not find a way to make a WC and utility accessible from the hall without making the hall bigger to accommodate another door and waste space with corridors, or go through one room to get to the other, so I decided on just one room that contains washing machine, tumble dryer, sink, clothes airer and WC. Building control were happy with that, the space of the clothes airer is our potential future downstairs shower allocation and if we did fit a shower we would then partition it to a smaller utility room that you walk through to get to the shower room. But prefer it all open just now.

My 2 pence worth to that: We have our DHW tank in the spare bedroom (one day I will build an airing cupboard around it) It does not give off excessive heat and does not overheat the bedroom at all. No further insulation of tank needed, BUT ensure ALL pipework connecting to the tank is well lagged with good thick well fitted insulation, that is where you will get a lot of heat loss if not done properly. We have a noise issue with the water circulation pump being a bit noisy. It is NOT an issue with where the pump is, but routing of pipes. In our case the pump is in a different room, but mu "mistake" was routing the main flow and return pipes from the ASHP under our bedroom floor. Regardless of where the circulating pump is located, it's gentle hum will be transmitted by the pipes. So keep the pump AND the pipes away from your bedroom. If I could do it again, the pipes would take a slightly longer route under our en-suite bathroom rather than under the bedroom. We set aside a "plant room" (room above the attached garage) but it ended up not really being used for that. The only thing in it is the MVHR unit, some electrical controls for the ASHP and the circulating pump. It turned out MUCH better to site the DHW cylinder in a location central to all points of hot water use, to shorten hot water pipe runs and quicken time for delivery of hot water to the taps. Try and plan a suitable cupboard for that central to all hot water taps. Call it "airing cupboard" on your plans.

This thread shows a real deficiency in English building regulations system, that it is possible to build a house that does not meet the standards, but not find out it has failed to meet the standards until it is finished. The Scottish system is much better. You have to have a design SAP done before you can get a building warrant. And then you know if you build the house to what the agreed plans say, it WILL pass the as built SAP, no nasty surprises.

That almost sums up "the problem" Anyone would think there was a government policy in place to make it hard to install a heat pump, either by impossible red tape, or just make it plain too expensive.

Fit 4kW PV on roof. Least intrusive addition and it should get you "over the line" Not only that, it will reduce your electricity bills for the foreseeable future. DON'T go anywhere near an MCS supplier for the PV. You just need a roofer to fit the brackets and an electrician to fit the panels and connect it. I fitted my own for under £2K in parts cost. It is a great shame you did not ask the forum at design stage, we could have given lots of suggestions for how to build a good house. Sadly it looks as though you will have ended up with something akin to a mass produced developer house, the very minimum insulation and air tightness they can get away with and slap on just enough solar PV to scrape through. such a house will have higher ongoing heating costs but the developer does not care because 99% of buyers don't care or don't know. If you are self building you have a chance at the start to do it properly and get something better.

If it's the same Titan chainsaw I have that came from Screweys (brilliant saw by the way) it came with an Oregon bar and chain, and they sell the replacement so I will just buy it from there. But my original chain (with a quick sharpen every now and then) is lasting way better than the previous chainsaw I had. The key to chain sharpening is little and often. Don't wait until it won't cut and smokes before even thinking about sharpening it. If it won't cut 25mm to 50mm hedge trunks then boy it's "done"

In a well insulated air tight house, you simply won't get that level of temperature change in such a short time. If you have heated the bedroom to 19C to get up, even with no heating in the depths of winter, don't expect it to drop more than a degree or 2 in 24 hours, so no way will you get down to 12C over night.

It would be interesting how much. I bought a good used static caravan for £4000 delivered, you can get even cheaper if you are not bothered if it is a bit tatty. No further bills regardless how long you live in it (council tax etc of course)

That sounds an expensive option? Most buy a used static caravan and then sell it at the end of the build (a few keep them after that) With an old static caravan that you own it is relatively easy to alter them to add things like washing machines, or set up another shed for laundry etc.

^^ Was he Australian?

Can you post a clearer picture showing the context and what are you concerned about? I am not understanding what I see there, some roofing,some pallets and some unidentifiable material?

What's the other side of the wall? Easier and less intrusive to cut a hole in the plasterboard to see and patch up afterwards. Any sockets on the other side of the wall, if so easy to spring a socket box out for a look.

Have you considered a knock down and rebuild? If only 3 of the original walls remain and not much else it would be better in so many ways, 0% VAT, start with a clean sheet on the design, if you are not having the garage and accommodating all parking in front, you could make the house wider and probably get the upstairs accommodation without raising the eaves height. Regardless of what you do, your drawings need to be clearer. you have a numpty of a planning officer that can't tell his left from his right, but either way, both neighbours have at least one roof window looking at your site. So your layout drawings should show both neighbours and the positions of their existing roof lights. Then adjust your layout so at worse it is a bathroom roof light with opaque glass facing your southern neighbours roof light and all bedroom roof lights do not overlook that existing roof light. Show it clearly on the drawings so there is no room for misunderstandings. e.g. none of us can tell for sure what roof light is actually looking straight into No 23 from those drawings.

Is this a knock down and rebuild, or an extension / renovation?

I used 25mm PVC conduit with swept bends. The ends are accessible under the island and under the consumer unit. I installed 10mm twin and earth. Way over kill for a couple of sockets but it can be used in future should we decide to change for an induction hob. If I really needed to I could pull something else through thanks to the swept bends.

Several people here including me took the "leap of faith" and only installed heating downstairs. And it is true, in a well insulated house with good air tightnes and MVHR, you don't need any heating upstairs. That will certainly cut down your install costs.

And most immersion heaters also have a safety cut out, usually in the form of a tiny almost invisible little red button that will pop out if it gets too hot, if that has tripped push it back in and it should go click.

Perhaps some pictures to put this into context, particularly if they also show these line posts?

It might be the immersion has failed, or take the cover off that box, there is a circuit breaker inside as well as the contactor. See if that has tripped?