ProDave

Visibility Splay is the term you need to search your councils planning website for their requirements.

We have discussed this before. In a really well insulated house, however you heat it, the "heat the person not the room" principle won't work long before you have accidentally heated the building.

Except for your bank balance.

Don't forget the genny needs to be water cooled with it's "waste" cooling water heating DHW or the building, aka CHP.

Ours is green, a little unusual which is why we chose it.

Take a bottle of oil with you to the stone merchant. My Italian Granite is definitely impervious to oil and red wine.

They are joints between plasterboard sheets opening up. Nothing to worry about. Sadly this is largely avoidable if only the builders had a bit of care or knowledge. When boarding around a window or door opening, don't run a sheet down the wall in line with the opening, cut a sheet around the opening so the next joint is not in line with it. Very unlikely to get a crack then. but that takes just a little more time and might waste just a little plasterboard and mass market builders don't want to do either of those.

I would move the oil boiler. As space is a premium, consider an outside oil boiler instead.

Your big issue will be electrics. A bathroom cannot have a socket within 3 metres of the bath. It sounds like your room is not big enough for that. This was an issue for me once where a customer put a shower in the corner of a bedroom. It was just, and only just, possible to put a double socket in the opposite corner of the room to the shower, which of course was not where he wanted sockets to be.

I will answer, but bear in mind the way I operate is VERY different to most sole traders for a variety of reasons. For a start I charge by the hour, not by the day. I might work full days from time to time but it is VERY rare for me to work a full week. If you work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week on site, you will in fact be "working" a LOT more than 40 hours in that week. Materials to order and possibly collect, jobs to look at and price up, even the time you spend on the jobs you don't get, so you spend time preparing quotes and estimates, for NO RETURN. and you have to travel to get there so it has cost you money for no return. Then you have to prepare and send your invoices, check payments, do at least some of your accounting yourself (I do all mine) You have to maintain your tools, your vehicle, get it serviced, MOT'd, repaired when it needs it etc. This is all time you spend on the business that you get no income for. I recon as a rough rule for every hour I spend on a customers site working and being paid to work, I spend 2 hours in total on the business. So for a start halve the hourly rate you are getting paid for being on site doing a job to get the hourly rate you get paid for "working" Then there are a whole tranche of costs to deduct, various insurances, vehicle, tools, professional qualifications, membership of professional bodies to name a few. And after all that has gone in the melting pot to work out your profit, the tax man takes his share. So your guy working 5 days a week, 48 weeks a year for his "mega money" will probably be actually working 60 or more hours a week (i.e. a lot longer than a 9-5 employee) and will probably only be "earning" half what you think. Someone prepared to work very long hours like that bloody well deserves to earn "mega money" This is where my business differs to most. I have been self employed for 20 years since leaving "proper employment" and at that point we were mortgage free for the first time and had money invested in buy to let, so self employment for me was something to do, but no need to earn mega money, indeed I don't want to. So I have for the last 20 years been very much a part time worker, earning just enough to pay the bills and have more time to do stuff for me. And as I get closer to retirement, I am working less and less.

If it really is a garage, nicely pointed blockwork and a coat of masonry paint will be cheap, clean and hard wearing. Only if it needs to be something other than a garage would I waste time boarding it with anything.

Nature did that for me.

As replies above, WC in theory should reduce bills a little as the lower temperature the heat pump can operate, the higher will be the COP. but it willmean the heat pump will be running for longer or even 24/7. It would be interesting from one of the people that has implemented it, if anyone has been able to quantify the sort of savings they have observed compared to constant temperature.

More information? like how is the heat delivered? Under floor heating or radiators for example?

In my well insulated house, the ASHP uses about 1/3 of the total electricity used in the house over the whole year, so being kicked onto a higher rate for all the other stuff (most of our use) would be a deal breaker for getting a little cheaper at off peak times.

This always raises a giggle.

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.