ProDave

I am intrigued why an under stair cupboard needs a fire door?

Rubbish It seems common here on individual builds to have nothing. The tree or hedge on the plot has to suffice. If you need anything more than a pee, go and find a public loo.

Why are you building it narrower than the base it is standing on?

If you have turned the Toby off and you still have water coming out, it is probably just emptying the pipes or draining down a tank. It is not like electricity where it all stops dead when you turn it off. The white handle at the bottom right in your picture is the stop valve and it looks to be in the off position.

That's a stopcock / boundary box / Toby Choose which is the usual term for your area

That could have gone badly wrong. I have heard of tradesmen who have not been paid, going round and starting to remove whatever it was they had just installed and the police were called and they got charged with criminal damage. My non payer is clever, they paid half the bill so they can say the materials have been paid for, just not the labour.

Yep sh!t happens when you are a tradesman. I have a non payer at the moment but thankfully a small amount. Small claims court or debt collector.

That depends what you are hoping for. I was disappointed with 1.4, I was hoping for less than 1, but in practical terms our house is very low energy.

Hi and welcome. Changing the light bulbs will do nothing to reduce your heating bill and just shows what a stupid system the EPC is. What you really need to know, is how much heat energy needs to be put into the building on the coldest winter day to maintain it's temperature. From that you work out the size of ASHP required and whether it is even practical or not. A whole years oil consumption would allow you to make a reasonable assumption.

The world is in desparate need of a competent assasin.

Photos of the roof from above? It is likely the roof is leaking somewhere, water is running down under the tiles on the felt, but the felt is not correctly dressed to lead the water into the gutter so it is soaking the inside of the sofit.

I am no expert, but i would be telling the builder to halt work until the SE has been to site so see the steels and either say they are okay, or tell the builder what remedial work needs doing. Simply tell them they do not appear to be in accordance with the plans so you want it checked.

I would want to strip some of the grey render off to understand firstly why it is so thick? It is normally just 2 coats of sand / cement render and thinner than the roughcast coat. and secondly to understand the logic of what they were trying to achieve with that gap?

Try it and see, you need the flue a certain length to create a draw. that's why you often see a very long guyed flue from a single storey building.

I saw this discussed somewhere else and a figure of 50W per square metre when it is raining. Solar panels will give more than that, and I am sure the sun shines more than it rains, even in Scotland.

We had to provide the air test result as well as the as built SAP

Our building warrant went in with a random make of stove, and what we fitted was quite different. At completion they just needed the manual for the stove to confirm the required "distances to combustible materials" and confirm it was HEATAS approved.

Just strap the flue to the side of the shed with stand off brackets. It will need to remain 50mm away from the overhanging eaves but you can get adjustable stand off brackets. 1M above the ridge is usually all that's needed. That's all I have on the static caravan.

No it's the rather sarcastic name for the cheapest, smallest new house on a housing estate built by a developer. A rather small, poorly built, poorly insulated house on a small plot with a tiny garden on an estate that is far too tightly packed in. I hated it, but at least it was a first step.

I solved that. I bought a second hand old school dual rate electricity meter. The power feed to the ASHP passes through this meter, and the pilot wire (that switches the meter from day to night rate) is switched by the feed to the hot water motorised valve. So one dial on the meter measures it's usage in heating mode, and the other dial measures it's usage in DHW mode. Adding cooling mode to that would be tricky.......

Yep. You need it to plug in the emergency kettle when the boiling tap fails. Good planning.

Thanks for that. The front is north and the rear south. So the living rooms get the sun (and the sun room) Yes no reason why you could not build it without the sun room and garage. We only fitted one stove, in the kitchen / diner and in a different location to shown, about mid way along the west wall next to the door. The single 5kW stove will heat the whole house if you keep both the double doors to the stairwell open. If you shut the kitchen / diner doors then it will overheat just that one room. You really do have to think of it as whole house heating and keep the doors open. I would make the main bathroom slightly deeper than it was but by the time I realises I wanted to do that, the bedroom doors were in place and that would have been a big job to move them (trivial if noticed before that load bearing wall was built). Changes we did make, omit the airing cupboard from the east bedroom, that made the en-suite bigger. The HW tank is now in the small bedroom that puts it much more central to the points of use. We have not yet built the pantry. One thing that is not to everyones taste is the combined utility and WC. It works well for us though. The upstairs roof is built as a cut roof from big ridge beams and a "gable end" extends out at the front centre above the bathroom, and two gable ends extend out the rear one above each bedroom. These mean almost all of the upstairs has standing headroom even though it is room in roof. We built it for about £150K so just under £1000 per square metre, but it took 6 years and a LOT of DIY work to get it that low. You would not do that now with the increased cost of materials so I don't really have a clue what it would cost to build now. I doubt it's much more expensive than any other house design. Elevation plan attached. BW013 - Elevations.pdf

None of those stock designs are floating my boat. I offer up my house plans. My design, detailed professionally for the building warrant, and only a few minor as built changes from the plans. I think it makes a nice simple house very efficient use of space and it works well for us. 992830669_BW005-GFPlan.pdf BW007 - FF Plan.pdf

Mine is a bit different, render onto wood fibre external insulation, and I believe at the time Baumit was the only system approved for that. If (as looks very likely) it fails again then I am into unknown territory of what to replace it with or what alternative way to finish / clad my walls.

Probably a tick box to get the DNO to accept it and nobody cares or will test if it actually works.