ProDave

It means the PSTN, Public Switched Telephone Network is being turned off. In simple terms no more hard wired analogue telephone service. No normal phone plugged into a socket on the wall to give you a hard wired telephony signal. This is the telephone equivalent of analogue switch off, already suffered by televisions and mobile phones. So if you want a "landline" aka hard wired home telephone, it will be a VOIP phone, Voice Over Internet Protocol, so it will only work with a broadband internet service, and in the event of a power cut unlike a hard wired analogue phone, will be very very unlikely to work. I believe the switch off plans have been put on hold due to lots of complaints about things like alarms that call for help, old people that just need a phone that works without needing internet, loss of functionality in a power cut so the vunerable cannot call for help etc etc.

This forum is full of people like me that had a unforeseen situation meaning we were short of expected funds. We all found a way to resolve it. Flexibility is the key. Our solution was lay off the trades and do it all myself, thus began a 5 year "build as you earn" completion of our self build. You don't need flooring for completion sign off, bare chipboard is fine, fit the proper flooring later. Likewise curtains etc not needed. You will need a functioning kitchen that could be second hand or the very cheapest flat pack units that you can upgrade later. You don't need much in the way of garden completed, usually just a parking space and a hard path from there to the front door, usually with a ramp for wheelchair access. We chose to do our VAT reclaim a little before the house was actually finished just to get the injection of capital for the last few items and to pay off some 0% borrowing that would have been due soon.

We must agree to disagree. I found detailing a warm roof to be air tight and well insulated without cold bridging far easier than the previous house I built with a cold roof. Both room in roof, that is the situation we are discussing.

Making it a warm roof makes no difference to the look of the finished roof, so completely irellevant to conservation areas.

No. It would have changed the roof construction but some of the insulation would have been above the rafters and some in between so no reason to be any thicker overall, just different. there is almost a case (again if not too late) to detail the insulation above the raised ties from above, before the tiles go on. At least take the PIR between the rafters ALL the way to the ridge, (leaving the ventilation gap) and then fit the rest of the insulation from below.

How far into the build are you? or just at design stage? I may start sounding like a stuck record but the difficulty in insulating, ventilating and making air tight this exact situation is why I am completely sold on the idea of make ANY room in roof situation with a WARM roof, that means insulation above rafters and possibly in between as well. It is SO much easier. But it has to be planned for at design stage.

I seem to recall the guidance for even a wired cable is up the wall to a junction box then in through the wall. I ignored that and ran the cable they supplied through conduit up through the slab and up into the house where I wanted it, and the engineer that came to connect it did not complain at all.

Some do but ours made it pretty clear there would be a charge for 1W above 3.68kW Wait until after April when the rules change, after then, it should be unusual for domestic installs to be charged a network upgrade fee. The cynic lurking in me suspects things they previously wanted to charge you to upgrade, they might decide don't actually need upgraded if they can no longer charge you.

They never questioned it with me. If they had been a stick in the mud I would have fitted the very very cheapest electric panel heater I could find.

I thought they hadn't started yet.

Hi and welcome. What do you mean "mid century modern"? I hope you don't mean this, that was featured on C4's Ugly to Lovely https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/132031949#/?channel=RES_BUY

If you are out in the sticks your supply impedance might be a bit high if you are not close to the nearest transformer.

I have exactly this with my LG ASHP but only on start up, not at full running. It will be the variable speed drive in the inverter putting a varying load on the supply and hence dipping the voltage rapidly. It is precicely this that worries DNO's as they don't want your ASHP flickering next doors lights. It would be interresting to hear from the electrician the loop Ze of the supply and Zs of the ASHP circuit. In our case it is only the lights in the utility room affected so we ignore it. A different make of LED lamp elsewhere is not affected, so first instance I would buy a few of different makes of LED lamp, and when you find one not affected, buy a job lot of them.

It is worth corresponding with your planners. In my case condition 1 of the planning permission said the access onto the highway must be formed prior to any other building work on site. When I started on that I wrote to them to notifiy that I had started and they replied confirming that the development had started. If I had wanted to I could have left the site indefinitely before continuing as they had confirmed the development had started by forming the access onto the road.

Yes we had to make a compromise having a run or counter top across the whole room with a back to wall WC and cistern and that was the lowest we could get. you get used to a slightly higher than usual basin.

If the prevailing wind is NW the smoke from your neighbour will seldom trouble you unless they are very close. How close are they?

I just went and measured ours. The counter top is 790mm above the floor. That was the lowest we could get it, constrained by the concealed WC cistern further along the same counter set as low as it possibly could be. This puts the rim of the basin at 950mm about the same height as any other ordinary e.g pedestal basin. Your 850mm for the counter top may be a little high unless your counter top basin is not as tall as ours?

It was over 20 years ago when i was in the last year or 2 of a "proper office job" where we had a pretty normal setup, with individual desktop computers with the software needed installed on them, and an office network for data storage, backups and handling the email servers and wed service. Then one day it was announced "we are going to outsource all out IT to a cloud based service" so all programs, and all data would be served from and stored on an outsourced data centre somewhere. I remember at the time thinking "what a bloody stupid idea, what idiot decided that was good?" Thankfully I left shortly afterwards and have been self employed since in charge of my own destiny and free to make my own good or stupid decisions.

To balance in favour of the low tech UVC, with direct heating you can have multiple immersion heaters at different levels and heat the top part of the cylinder first then switch to the next heating element down the tank.

So do you actually want a painted steel I beam as a "lintel"?

Drying rack with mvhr works well. Upstairs laundry, you trade taking baskets of clothes up and down, for having to get a washing machine up the stairs. Not I job I would wish to do or regard myself as strong enough to do without doing some serious harm to the stairs. It's good to get some exercise taking the washing up and down from time to time. A laundry chute would deal with the "down"

Do not mix UFH and radiators, it just complicates things with different warm up times so you really need different controls so radiators and UFH turn on and off at different times, which seems to fry the brains of most "heating engineers" used to all on and off at the same time. If you are really building to close to passive house insulation and air tightness you probably won't need upstairs heating. I followed the well trodden path on here of not really trusting that, so I put electric points for a panel heater in each bedroom. Like most that have done this, those heater points have never been used and we have no heating in the bedrooms, and this is in the east Highlands, probably the coldest place in the UK in winter. I can never understand why some people get quoted high prices for UFH. I did all mine myself and the materials are not expensive, and it is not even difficult, just time consuming. If you want to fit it yourself there will be plenty of help here, and there is no reason wy UFH upstairs should be much different than downstairs, though you might need to make some decisions very early on in the design of the building.

So get your architect to make an offer to you to buy the plot "subject to planning permission" Architect then applies for full planning and once granted the sale completes. No more cost to him as he has to do the plans anyway, and if he is quick he gets the reserved matters application in before the PIP runs out. Then he can do the dig a trench to "start" if he wants to lock in the planning for some future build date. Almost exactly what we did with our plot.

What makes you think in X years planning would be refused? Planning was granted for 2 houses when it was a bare field. Now one house is built why do you think it less likely the second would be approved again? So wait until you are ready. If it was refused then you have good grounds for appeal. Digging a trench and pouring concrete does not constitute "starting" as you have no approved plans to build from (reserved matters) and I bet there is a "development not to start until approved matters are agreed" clause.

And I thought working out the pattern to tile our floor with 2 different size rectangle tiles and 2 different size square tiles was complicated.