ProDave

If you are aiming for air tight, get the ducted air kit, and make sure your chosen stove supports both primaryand secondary from the duct. The stove manufacturer will specify if it needs a full constructional hearth or just a 12mm stone of glass hearth. My best advice is position the stove where it can heat the whole house, e.g in a room that opens to a central hall / stairwell so you can open the door and let the heat to other parts of the house. In a well insulated house, if it's not possible to distribute the heat to other rooms it might well overheat a single room very quickly.

That, in one picture, shows the lack of joined up thinking and cooperation between trades. Someone drilled the hole in the wall and put the pipe there. The boarder boarded the outside wall. The joiner came and put up the stud wall, oh the wall clashes with the pipe. Not my problem, I will put the wall where the pans show, I won't discuss it with anyone. Then the boarder comes back and does the same. If that were my build, I would be livid and getting all the trades together and asking why not one of you raised the issue and thought about doing something about it.

There was a case mentioned where the planning officer visited and standing on the edge of the public footpath, if he could touch it, it was "adjacent" if he could not, it was not adjacent.

There were problems in the past with copper developing pin holes for no reason. Buried in a wall it should be sleeved. Was this just passing through the wall or literally going up or across inside the wall at some depth?

Appeal?

Who designed that? It just looks wrong to me, you are effectively putting a timber cassette down into a trench below ground level, relying entirely on that red board to keep water out, and no way for it to drain if any does get in?

All expenses paid of course. It must be a joy to build with nobody checking what you do. And no need to spend a fortune on heating or insulation. And i don't think we will be discussing air tightness or mvhr on this project either.

Hi and welcome. Nice project but don't expect us to know your local building regulations. So with so much of the main house open / no windows, are they a really honest lot there so no risk of burglary?

go on, you can't keep us all guessing, you have to tell us exactly what instruction he misinterpreted, or we will have to start speculating?

Can you not DIY install as many of us have? It was certainly NOT €5000 of work needed. Or are you forced to have some stupid sign off by some registered scheme like our MCS?

WOW and I thought our £2K council tax was plenty (that is a shock after paying £1K for several years for the static caravan) I coined the phrase "Council Tax Poverty" some time ago, where you are in "Council tax poverty" if you spend more than 10% of your income on council tax. "Fuel poverty" is a well used term, but I am willing to bet most people spend more on their council tax than they do on fuel, we certainly always have done, and unlike fuel, you can't "use less" to reduce your bills. You have to be seriously poor to get any reduction in your council tax bill. And with our house now being band E, we won't even get the £150 off to ease our fuel bills as they must think having such a high banded house, we are rich.

I bought all my UFH kit from ebay, pipe, manifolds, actuators, and a cheap generic UFH controller box.

What is this 100% mark up you talk of? My own 150m2 house used 1400 kWh of electricty heating it in the last 12 months which is 9.3 kWh per square metre, but that is energy into the ASHP so assuming a COP of say 2.5 average that would actually be 23kWh of actual heat per square metre. But we are not passive house. The only way to be sure of your heating usage is to meter that separately. I bought an old school dual rate electricity meter, the sort that has a pilot wire input and would have been used with an external timer. That meters my ASHP usage, one dial meters the usage in heating mode and the other dial meters usage in DHW mode. the pilot wire is driven from one of the signals to the motorised valves.

but they are good at spin.

Can't see your video. Too big? Try a photograph instead?

Re stoves. You WON'T need two. Stoves only work in a well insulated house if you design and treat a single stove as whole house heating. Fit just ONE stove, in the kitchen diner. NOT in a fireplace, but a free standing stove in front of that short bit of wall in the middle of the south wall. Then change the single door to the hall / stairwell to a pair of double doors. When you light the stove open the double doors and the door to the living room and the stove will heat the whole house including upstairs. Shut the kitchen / diner door and the stove will overheat that room. A stove in the smaller living room will definitely overheat it. This is pretty much what we have and the one stove, with all the doors open heats the whole house without overheating one room. Most people will tell you not to fit a stove in a well insulated house because it will overheat the room and you will never light it again, that is because it has not been thought about as whole house heating.

Okay another little twist to this. SWMBO and I had almost resigned ourselves that this was going to happen. SWMBO was less against it than me providing the compensation was a "useful" sum of money. At the moment we have no idea what it might be. I have now spoken to all the neighbours in the street and we are the only ones that have been contacted so far. But the last one I spoke to this morning is our direct neighbour who already has the cable from another wind farm under his garden. Surprisingly he said, without being prompted, for me to give the comany his details and he would be happy to have it under his garden alongside the other one. So now I am torn between just going down that route and suggesting they contact him, or hold out a bit longer to see just what they are going to offer and if not a "useful" amount then suggest they try next door?

It was the tree huger, local materials grown in the surrounding fields, sustainable etc rhetoric that drove this one.

Ouch. I hope that is red? (last few days it is allowed)

The only that I have seen (and wired) put the rectangular bales inside a timber frame. Think of a wide Larsen truss frame built around the bales as they were stacked. Then the inside was lined with OSB and an air tight membrane then a service void and plasterboard, so air tightness was good.

Timber behind the joint (surprising how many omit this) and lots of screws. Why would you expect a balcony to be more likely to cause cracking than any other ceiling with a room above it?

I used Jeremy's spreadsheet and it predicted the heat loss and therefore heating input needed vary accurately, far more so than the SAP report did. Overhheating is not an issue here, the trees grow leaves in the summer and shelter us from much of the sun.

I did my own foundations with my own little ancient 3 ton digger. I pegged out and marked the centreline of each trench on the ground with ground marking spray paint, which was then easy to align with the centre of the bucket when digging. I dug down to what i thought was hard ground and then called BC to inspect and they were happy. The builders came along to take over, they looked at my trenches and said there was no way they were right doing it that way. They then spent a day with their surveying equipment and set up the profiles and at the end of the day said what a good job I had done, there was just one corner that needed squaring off slightly which we did by hand. They brought their own larger digger with a much longer reach for pouring the concrete. The one thing I did different to most sites, is I only stripped the top soil off the actual build area plus a metre or so just to give room to run the digger tracks while trenching. My reason was we only had limited space to store spoil on site, and all of the excavated soil will be used to raise the ground level and make it more flat on our sloping site. So all the soil surrounding the house there was no point removing it just to put it back and some more, so it was all left and just added to from the piles of stored top soil.

Hi and welcome to the forum. That looks a nice site and a nice efficient house design, little wasted space. I don't know what insulation levels you are planning, but many on here build very well insulated houses with good air tightness, aiming for something close to passive house standards, and we find you don't need much heating. Up here in the Highlands (no doubt colder than where you are ) a small 5kW air source heat pump does all our heating and we have no heating upstairs, it is just not needed.

Our kitchen / diner, part of the hall and the living room are all engineered Oak as one continuous run. In the kitchen, we have a washable mat in front of the cooking area. and we learn to be careful, and the oak floor is showing no signs of distress.