ProDave

It's a portable home / caravan so building control will not be bothered. But planning will be. how did they get PP for that there?

SIG in Inverness did the best price on insulation for me by far. Otherwise I found the timber merchants in Inverness disappointing, Thoroughly recommend Stone Source in Inverness if looking for stone worktops etc. I am mostly now using the independant merchant Fraser Brothers in Alness but this is probably too far for you.

Yes I learned that in the main house. the only place I have a very faint crack is above the one door opening where I did not cut around it.

Last picture, that is my waste pile leaning against the wall behind the steps. Most of those are very thin strips too thin even for the ingo's. Plus a few small squares that are too small for anything useful. Right throughout, my philosophy has been efficiency to minimise waste. to the point when I need a small piece, I first scout around all the offcuts to find a big enough piece, and often if I can't find an offcut that will work, I would leave that piece out until an offcut turns up later to fill it. If I had ordered that extra sheet, I would probably have 3/4 of it left over plus all those previous offcuts that I would not have used so well pleased to get it done efficiently.

Work continues on the last room in the house, the sun room. Now it has windows time to get it finished inside. So i estimated I needed 10 boards and those were delivered. Of course I should have taken the time to estimate that more accurately. By the time the ceiling and one gable wall was boarded, it was looking clear I needed another board. Not an easy thing to buy a single sheet of plasterboard. So I set about collecting all the offcuts of plasterboard I had left over from other parts of the house, and with some very diligent and careful planning to work out how best to use what I had, I managed to get it all done, and now very very few bits left over at all. Next task, taping and filling then painting.

Don't use nails, so yesterday, use bugle headed plasterboard screws. It is the flatness and soundness of what you are fixing to that gives good results. If your wall is not straight and your screw is forcing the plasterboard to pull in up to the batten then like a big spring it will be trying to pull the board straight again and that is when screw pop.

If health and safety is your concern for iiving in a caravan with a toddler, then you have either bought the wrong caravan, or self building is not for you. There will be MUCH bigger health and safety issues to deal with throughout a build that living in what has been designed as a residential static caravan, very likely originally on a holiday park where a huge percentage of occupants have toddlers.

How "dereleit" is the existing dwelling? I suggest buy it to secure the purchase then plan the way forward, and that should include patch up the existing place just enough to make it habitable while you get the design and planning sorted, and put aside your dislike of static caravans because that really is the most cost effective means of temporary accommodation while building. Also plan the house so it can be built in stages as funds allow, e.g so it can be built as a 1 bedroom bungalow but with attic trusses already in place so later, when funds allow, you can do the upstairs.

I job I was working on, the builder had "solved" the waste disposal problem in a creative fashion. I needed to pull some new cables up an existing stud wall. When i cut the hole for the switch box, I found the "cavity" had been filled by stacking up all the odd offcuts of plasterboard on end. Yes it was a right mare to pull a new cable through that lot.

The stove needs to move to the bottom right corner, tv in bottom left corner, seating along the top wall looking at the stove, view and tv. I suspect you might have been looking for a less radical solution. If you do that, put a new twin wall flue for the stove, and ditch the old chimney and knock out the fireplace to widen the room. I'll get my coat.

I never registered my address oficcially. Everyone knows about it and it is on every address database except the Postcode Address File held by Royal Mail. None of the utilities had any problem with this and the address is now on their own address databases. For the council tax, they preceeded the address with "Caravan" to give it it's own entry on the valuation list.

Yes you are wrong. With mvhr you have controlled ventilation to all rooms, fresh air into living rooms and bedrooms and exhausted air from kitchens and bathrooms. the heat from the exhausted air gets put back into the fresh air entering the building. You don't have ucontrolled non heat recovered exhaust vents from kitchens and wc's. Those all operate as part of the mvhr system. I also don't believe a chimney in a properly installed room sealed stove is a big loss of heat (or an aid to ventilation of the house). We ran the house for 1 year before the stove was fitted and the eating bill did not rise the next winter after fitting the stove suggesting any heat loss is "lost in the noise"

Could it be one or both of the pipes kinks when the flush plate gets put into position thus blocking air flow?

Have you considered appealing on the grounds of non determination of the application?

If the heat output is too great at 11c delta, reduce the flow temperature? In any event the room thermostat will turn it all off when the room gets to the desired temperature.

We have a shower mixer very much like your first link. While we like it, it may not be the best for your mum. The top and bottom levers are the flow to the two different shower heads and are easy to turn. But the middle handle is the temperature setting. It is a completely round "knob" with no lever, so when wet requires a fair bit of grip to turn it. You don't need to turn it very often but with weak hands it will frustrate her when she does. Keep looking to see if you can find one that has a lever for the temperature knob as well. The one in your second link also has the same "fault" that the temperature knob is a slippery round knob with no features to grab, rather than a lever.

That flat has some serious structural issues, be thankful you only rent it not own it so you are not responsible for fixing them. The shed on the side, I suspect it has been built as a lean to, so it's front and back walls are not tied to the main structure, so just "filled in" with foam etc. I doubt very much however if these issues are causing the damp and mould issues that you have. That is probably and sadly just the fact it is a poorly built poorly insulated building and unless you heat the hell out of it and pour a fortune into heating and ventilating it, that is the way it is. A huge amount of the UK housing stock is rubbish like that. Your best bet in the longer term would be to look for a better place to move to. Look at the EPC ratings before choosing to rent, the better it is, the less you will spend on heating and less likely you are to ave damp issues.

^^^ That's the standard "no name" cheap pillar drill like I bought nearly 30 years ago for about £30.

I suspect the issue is the floor make up between the new and the old. The new floor will have been built with proper amounts of insulation. The old floor will probably have less. Did you see what they did to the old room by way of adding insulation under the floor before laying the pipes? The sollution is likely to be to raise the water temperature by adjusting the blending valve on the manifold, and then slowing down the flow rate to the new rooms so they don't heat up too fast wile leaving the flow rate to the old room as high as possible.

I think people are confusing "zones" and "loops" It is normal to make up anytihing other than very small rooms from a number of different loops of pipe. 13 such loops in a large house in not unreasonable. But this does not mean each loop is individually controlled. It is common for each room to have it's own thermostat, and this is what is usually called a "zone" So the thermostat in the living room may control the water flowing to 2 or 3 loops of pipe at once. An alternative strategy is with a modern house being so well insulated is just control each floor as a whole from a single room thermostat.

Yes overly complicated, Why not just have one "green" dial on something like gridwatch, so you just have to look at a web page (no app, no sign up, no registering) to see how green the grid is at that instant?

Our village hall is heated by a GSHP from a borehole and it does not stop working in winter.

At least someone is thinking about ow to usefully use the heat generated by mining BTC rater than just paying to remove the waste heat from a building.

Noise compared to what? I keep saying, My ASHP probably makes about the same noise as the roar of an oil boiler burner, except the ASHP noise is outside so does not bother me. The only time it might bother me is sitting in the garden in the summer, but if it's warm enough to sit outside, it would not be heating the house, just the hot water, and you could go and turn it off and let it heat the water at a different time if that bothered you.

Another that looked at the 2 options. What i found was GSHP the price doubled when you added the collector pipes and fittings and the brine to fill them with. And the brine has a finite life so an ongoing maintenance / replace schedule. And GSHP puts the noisy compressor inside your house vs an ASHP which puts the noisy bit outside. I was doing a DIY install so no RHI and materials as cheap as I could source them so that probably made more difference to the overall cost than a paid for install perhaps? My ASHP carries on working all winter including the one night this year it got down to -17, so stop worrying they won't work in cold weather.