ProDave

If you are going to buy scaffold, then buy one of the system scaffolds like Kwikstsge or Cuplock. Whatever is available. They are really a scaffold tower system where you can join as many towers together and build whatever height you are likely to need for a self build. Very simple to erect and change about. For inside use you can build a single tower and put it on wheels just like a scaffold tower and move it about. It is so useful that at the end of the build, I did not sell it all, I kept enough to scaffold one wall of the house. It is just so handy to have when you need it.

When I last had a "proper job" earning enough to pay higher rate tax, the hourly rate if you worked it out was a mere £15 per hour. But that was 20 years ago. I've been a sole trader for 20 years now, and now charge £30 per hour which some will say is high others will say it's low depending where you are . I only ever did a little sub contract work on sites, not for me. I just work direct for my clients far simpler. I don't see why companies not employing sole traders should make a shortage of sole traders for self builders to hire?

I bought probably the same 600W inverter from ebay, mine is grid tied so the shed panel is not a one trick pony it adds to the house power if nothing in the shed is using it. Beware those cheap Chinese inverters are not built very well. Mine failed in less than a year, inspection showed 2 of the transistors forming the H bridge short circuit. I replaced them and it works again. What I noticed was very little heat sink compound on any of the transistors, before the case used to run cool. Now it is re assembled with plenty of heat sink compound the case runs warm when it is working hard showing it is now actually working as a heatsink and 3 years later it is still working.

I sat on the balcony with a cup of tea today, put 2 biscuits down while I got comfy and the wind blew one away. So yes that ICF like that would worry me until tied down to something like stakes in the ground.

No I was lucky, but it would not have been a machine to go contracting in. Fuel filters kept blocking, I bought a job lot and replaced them regularly, probably something nasty in the tank. And I broke the king pin that the boom pivoted on. That could have been messy but it hung on one side until I could get a new pin and drove the old pin out with the new one, so it never all collapsed. the tracks were steel but well work, everything was old and well worn, but it worked and at the end I sold it for exactly what I paid for it.

Where @Jenki is, there are not many days when the wind is low enough for midges to bother you.

There are quite a few of us on here that bought our own digger and used it for most of the build. I did my own foundations up to the concrete then the builders turned up and took over from concrete pour onwards. They started off by saying I would never survey it, mark it out and dig the trenches in the right place on my own, but then admitted I had done a very accurate job, there was just one corner out by about 100mm and that was because I could not get the digger square on for that corner. It took us 10 minutes with a shovel to square off that corner to get it right. I used it for all the site preparation first, services, moving soil around and it's final task before I sold it was the basic landscaping of the garden.

We found you need very little "plant room" space, and it all ended up distributed around the house. A Monoblock Air source Heat Pump, most of the works are outside. You might need some pumps, valves and expansion vessels etc inside somewhere. Hot water tank wants to be positioned central to points of hot water use to minimise delivery time. Ours is in an airing cupboard partitioned off a bedroom. MVHR is best in a warm part of the house, but can be put in a loft id the ducting is properly insulated.

As long as you get a 5 port or 5 terminal meter, it will do that. The 5th terminal is the output that is only energised when it is at the cheap rate. But Smart meters have come along and messed things up. You can aparently get a 5 port smart meter, but not all suppliers seem capable of actually making them do what it says on the tin, and lots of horror stories of the 5th output not turning on and off or the metering times matching the switching times. So if you do switch, ask for Economy 7 or preferably Economy 10 if available and don't mention smart meter and if that comes up in discussion say you don't want one. You will ideally need 2 immersion heaters one to come on whenever the cheap rate is available at the bottom of the tank, and another you can turn on at any time for a boost. If your tank will only take 1, then Horstman do a clever gadget that will let one work from the off peak supply with a manual timed boost.

You don't have to be precise if the size of the PV roof ends up larger just cantilever the end, a bit like I did with my balcony I did the same, poured 2 concrete pads for the balcony legs at foundation time, and only recently uncovered them and completed the job.

What is your monthly energy use now, now that the heating is off? In the absence of any other metering, that will give an indication how much of your usage is heating and how much is other stuff. Even in winter the other stuff uses more than the ASHP. Only when you know WHAT is using all the energy can you look into making it use less.

I guess if there was nothing registering on the normal meter? I once connected an electric boiler to the total heat board for a customer, it certainly seemed to fit the description of a heating appliance. In that situation getting 24/7 cheap rate almost made an electric boiler make sense.

White, has a very horrible habit of turning yellow over time.

Good riddance to the THTC tariff. It was a good idea in it's time, the chief advantage being the "total control" circuits being metered 24/7 at the cheap rate. But it became a very expensive tariff and with only SSE offering it there was no competition and you could not switch supplier. To convert, all you need is a simple Economy 7 or economy 10 supply with a 5 port meter, the 5th port being the SWITCHED off peak output. Economy 10 if you can get it is the best match to the old off peak times of THTC. The only thing you will need an electrician to do is then connect the total control circuits to the normal permanent supply. You will miss out on the 24/7 cheap rate which could have powered panel heaters or showers. Did you actually take advantage of that, or were you just using ordinary storage heaters?

And don't throw away the spare bit. Put another plug and socket on it and you have another extension lead.

It can be read via the IR port, that red flashing light is one of 2 IR sensors / receivers and the right gadget can read all the data. The rED thing was initially there to detect people trying to reverse the meter in the hope it would run backwards.

Is the Juliette balcony permanent, or just to get sign off? Will there be a real balcony later?

Yes exactly the same as my generation meter. Note the writing on it to avoid misunderstanding with any meter reader. Note also my import meter is displaying rED that means Reverse energy Detected (the small amount of export) It alternates between that and the import reading. Nobody has raised this as an issue yet.

How are you going to fetch the diesel? I bought a plastic 20L Jerry can for collecting fuel when I had a digger, those were the days I could buy red from a local supplier.

Not everyone has a railway in their garden. So tell more (in a new thread)

I first question WHY in needs to be perfectly level? That is not such a stupid question as it sounds. The holes obviously want to end up on the outside exactly right to line up with the holes in the Juliet balcony. But to ask for the holes to be perfectly level implies the fixings on the inside will be visible, so they too also need to be in just the right place. If so not only do the holes need to be perfectly level, but also perfectly perpendicular to the wall. If the internal fixings are not visible when finished then only nearly level and perpendicular are required. Also what are you drilling through? I assume ICF walls, so the start of the drill will be soft material, it is when you hit the concrete core that the drill is likely to be thrown off course?

@Thorfun You did better than me. What a lousy bloated, confusing horrible website, I never actually managed to find a price anywhere. At a low capacity of 1.5kWh then even if you could store that much from your PV and use it every day you would save about 50p per say, so if it really costs £1700 then it would take 3400 days tp pay for itself, that's a shade over 10 years. Then there is not enough details to even know if it would simply store any surplus that would be exported. No sign of current clamps or anything similar to measure your import / export just talk of connecting it to a phone app and putting you in control. I would keep on looking for something better with some idea it will actually do what you want, how it will work etc.

If it is any consolation, I was disappointed my air test came in at 1.4, though the tester was having kittens saying it was the best one he had yet tested. The building still performs very well, heating usage is exactly in line with what the heat loss calculation says it should be. There are no noticeable draughts and it fits my basic test that on a windy day you can open 1 window or 1 door with no perceivable draught entering or leaving that one open door or window. (previous house with all the plethora of individual extract fans, window trickle vents, cat flat, letter box etc, if you did that there would be a draught blow through and likely an internal door blow open or shut) So although it would have been a "fail" that does not mean it is a bad building and was a waste of time trying or it is going to waste a lot of energy. The flaw in your argument is if you knock down and rebuild you would just employ a specialist to do it all properly. I only know of one timber frame company that will erect a complete frame and guarantee a particular air tightness figure. And that is for the bare shell. You then have to guarantee that all your following trades, plumbers, electricians, even joiners, do not drill holes in your air tightness layer and destroy your good air test. It is a sad reflection on the UK building trade that most tradesmen in the industry don't have a clue about air tightness and think you are being silly when you talk about things like that. You really are best seeing to the detail yourself, you have done a large part of the house already, just carry on. With a rebuild I bet you would either still be doing the detail yourself, or complaining that it has been done wrong and having that same argument.

Picture zoomed further out to give context and one from inside showing lintels above the door and window? Are the lintels where the wall steps out? The house wall steps out, how is that supported or is that external wall insulation fitted that makes it step out? What are you hoping to achieve? It looks fine to me as it is as a useful outside / work / storage space. What to you need or want to get into it that requires a larger door opening?

In the 4 1/2 years, the total export (i.e. wasted) is standing at 334kWh (I have fitted my own export meter) Export happens when generation exceeds what the immersion heater can consume and nothing else in the house is using power. For a lot of the year I also dump to a small convection heater that is turned on when that situation arrises, but in the summer that is disconnected (though I could out of spite just move it to the garage) More export happens on the occasions when the immersion heater thermostat has cut out when the tank reaches maximum capacity. If I was able to get paid for the export at the silly low 5p per kWh that would only have earned £16.70 If I had a smart meter and signed up to one of the more lucrative export payment deals, that might have earned perhaps £50 in export. But any export payment would require it to have been an MCS install. Clearly the extra of an MCS install vs DIY would NEVER repay itself in export payments. If I add more PV that will be with battery storage, that is another topic for the future, I have to build the car port first where it will likely be mounted.