ProDave

Your location might help. What is the local vernacular? What does the local planning policy say? Can you compromise on 1 1/2 storey room in roof design? That's what we have and very happy with it.

Hi and welcome. The good thing (one of many) about Scotland, is generally plots are easier to find than many other parts of the UK. Best of luck searching, you will get a lot of help and advice here, particularly on energy efficient homes.

When you do submit a CGT return, you have to declare "purchase price" Now when we come to the CGT on our former home, now let, that was a self build. My best guess would be to declare the "purchase price" as the cost of the plot plus ALL the costs of building the house. Is there any official guidance on this?

How much work do you want to do? the best thing you could do is strip the roof tiles completely, and turn it into a warm roof by fully insulating between the rafters and then insulating a layer above the rafters before putting the roof back on. That will raise the roof by perhaps 100mm and you would have to be confident of re roofing it the same, or if allowed re roofing in a different way. Do you want that much work?

A friend of mine had EWI added to a standard timber frame bungalow. It was done free of charge by some grant scheme. As far as I could tell it was EPS fitted to the outside and standard (looked like cement based) pebbledash done as a dry dash (stones added dry to wet render) It appeared the EWI went all the way to the ground and blocking all the air bricks that were present. Sadly they got divorced and sold the house not long after so I don't know what issues it may have caused re the probably now bridged DPC and blocked air bricks.

As I have mentioned before, my heating usage is only a small portion of our total usage. I can see my neighbours gas boiler flue from our kitchen window, and at this time of year it seems to be burning near constantly. I am glad I don't have his heating bill.

Yes I could do that with this house. But the counter argument would be I would be running the ASHP when the air temperature is at it's lowest so the COP may be worse and it may need to defrost more often than running in the daytime. A few months ago I was considering switching to Octopus Go to get the very cheap, but short, night time rate and do most of the DHW heating at that time. I hesitated due to my dislike of having to get a smart meter. but at the time it would have given me a very slightly cheaper day rate as well as the cheap night rate. Alas, now with the turmoil in the energy markets, if I switched now, the day rate would now be higher than my 24/7 tariff.

Clearly we are not "most people" then because I keep trying and failing to find anywhere we "waste" energy. The only savings I can see is cook less, wash us or our clothes less. watch less television, don't keep food in a fridge or freezer, sit in the dark at night or sit in a cold house.

They DO get hot, that's because they have a finite non zero "on" resistance so there are losses proportional to the load drawn. The SSR for my solar PV dump is attached to a reasonable size heat sink and gets just pleasantly warm at full load.

Worth also researching early on how you would get service connections. e.g. if the only sewer connection has to pass through part of the garden the neighbour was keeping. If so you would want a wayleave included in the sale to allow that.

That is what we have done but eventually (the sooner the better) the spare house will need to be sold to become part of the retirement pot. That has just deferred (and increased) the CGT bill that will eventually have to be paid.

V2/R =3.61W Might be less as it's an inductive load on ac

I used Findr relay from CPC with a small plug in din rail base. I never measured the coil power consumption, but none seemed to get hot, certainly not 67 degrees hot. and they were less than £10 for relay and base.

It is CGT exempt for all the time they lived in it as their main residence, and the last 9 months of ownership regardless. So they will be liable for CGT for the period it was let, less 9 months. Hmrc take the purchase price and sale price and assume linear growth throughout the ownership, no good saying "but house prices fell that year" If is jointly owned, you will each be liable for half the CGT. and before you pay anything you each have your personal CGT allowance to use up. So if it has only been let a couple of years it might well be the gain is below the joint cgt threshold and there is nothing to pay.

Only one party is building a house. The simplest way would be for that party to buy the bit of garden from the neighbour and then just get on with it. I would suggest a fair price to pay for the bit of garden is half the value of a building plot, and there would be no overage clause or anything. Then the building family own the whole lot and take care of organising the build, CIL etc. Do an outline PP application first and once that is granted, buy the land. If you want to make it formal, make an offer to buy the land subject to PP being granted.

Here is my version of a pallet shed

IF smart meters were implemented properly, then your supplier would have not only half hourly readings of your usage, but also readings of your export. The admin would be tiny to credit your bill with everything you exported at an agreed rate, say half of your import rate. There would be no need to "set anything up" or insist you register with some smart export scheme and produce MCS paperwork to do so. It is silly schemes like that that bury the issue under a ton of paperwork. And when it comes to paying the energy wholesalers, your "usage" would be your import less your export, and that much is what your supplier would pay the wholesaler for. It staggers me how we seem to manage to make something so simple, into such a complicated problem.

I think it relies on the hot feed to the manifold being driven by a circulating pump of it's own, so the hot water arrives under slight pressure and the return is relatively under slight vacuum. The position of the manifold circulating pump means it is pulling water into the bottom of the pump so it will be a blend of fresh hot and recirculated cold going through the manifold pump. Assuming it was working but has stopped, I would suspect either the manifold pump, or the main circulating pump has failed with my bet being the manifold pump has failed. If it's not on it's full speed setting already, try increasing it?

Even if gas doubles from it's already high price, it will still be cheaper than electricity. Electric boilers only make sense if you can run them on an off peak tariff.

He does that because he wants to use the flue gas analyser to set up the burner and he wants to ensure the boiler keeps on burning and does not shut off, so turning the t'stat up will give it a longer burn and time to do his adjustments. It does not mean it should be left that high and really he should set it back where it was before he came to do the service.

Well I went for ground mount to at least get away from some of the shading by the trees. It had to be raised off the ground so see over the bank behind us. I chose an east / west split to try and get longer meaningful generation rather than peak generation (easier to self use). Then when the mounting frame was up and the panels were on, it was a no brainer to enclose the sides and make the "Swiss chalet solar shed"

It is the output temperature you want to turn down, not the boiler power.

You are paying for the privilege of someone sourcing all the bits and selling you a kit. I put together s similar system by seeking out the very cheapest components individually for about £1500. Not much over £2000 would be my target. There are some astonishing claims of how much you might save on that website as well. Even your estimate of £800 per year savings is optomistic. My system is a little poorer due to a lot of shading and being a lot further north but I am self using in the region of £300 worth in a year. I think you would be doing well if you saved £600 in a year. As you have a paddock, could you not build a shelter for the horses with a nice south facing roof and mount the panels on there? I believe the horse shelter would be permitted development.

So this is the overheat thermostat tripping, not the burner lockout that is usually referred to as lockout. Assuming this over heat thermostat therefore is on the return pipe, and the problem only happens when nothing in the system is actually taking any heat out, so the return temp is pretty much the same as the flow temp, then I would suggest the boiler flow temp is too high. Since you can't adjust the over heat thermostat trip temperature I would reduce the flow temperature from the boiler so that the flow temperature is comfortably lower that the over heat trip temperature.

The elephant in the room is for anything over 4kWp (actually 3.68kW limited by the inverter) you need prior permission from your DNO before you connect it, and there may be a fee to even apply, and there may be network upgrade costs to pay before you are allowed to connect that much. This is why 4kWp is such a common size, it is the largest you can connect by right, without having to seek prior approval and you only notify the DNO after is has been connected. If you have 3 phase, you can connect 4kWp per phase so up to 12kWp may be possible without prior approval. Don't for one moment think PV will do all your needs. It won't. In the summer it will generate loads more than you can use very often, in the winter when you need most energy it will not produce enough. We have a typical 4kWp system and manage to use almost all we generate and that is saving us about £300 per year, about 1/4 of our total electricity usage. Even if we had 4 times as much PV it would not do all our needs as in summer it would generate way more thay we could ever use or store, and in winter it would still be only generatig a tiny fraction of our needs.