ProDave

I will just add my thoughts to this. Most of out house has triple glazed Rationel windows. I faced this 2G / 3G question when looking for roof windows for our en-suite. To be frank I found the market offerings disappointing. But anyway, at a time when we were short on funds I compared the heat loss of a small 2G roof window with a 3G version, and concluded the heat saving of 3G in this small window was tiny, so i bought 2G. That was a bad decision. This is the ONLY window in the house that gets any condensation. Only a small amount around the edges, but I wish I had paid a little more for the 3G version which would hopefully have prevented that. There is more to choosing than pure heat loss vs "payback" time.

My LG ASHP does not have a condensate drain either. Any condensate just drips out of the bottom onto the paving slabs and runs off into the surrounding ground. This usually only happens when it defrosts.

So they are putting up £150m for a scheme that hopes to build 30,000 self build homes. That's £5K per self build home. That level of "subsidy" is going to do somewhere between nothing and not very much at all to help self builders. As noted the problem is finding a building plot. Solve THAT problem and more self build houses will follow. How about on all big housing developments insist a percentage of plots are sold as serviced self build plots at the SAME average cost as it has cost the developers?

It does not need to be so complicated. Locate the studs in the 2 side walls. Attach 4 by 2 (100 bu 50mm) timber horizontally fixed securely to each stud. Fit 4 by 2 joists spanning side to side attached to the bearers on the wall with joist hangers. Fix the joists at 400mm centres and floor with 18mm chipboard. Make sure the front edge of this new floor is at least 2 metres above the stairs to preserve required headroom. Fix further timbers and studding to form the front of this new cupboard. Access to this cupboard can either be by cutting a hatch through to one of the bedrooms, or by having a door on the front and accessed from the stairs with a ladder. Clad the structure in plasterboard. It may look better to form a sloping ceiling under the cupboard matching the slope angle of the stairs. That might form a handy void to route ducting etc.

I never see the point is taking a break as such. I drink my flask and eat my sandwiches on the go. Most trades will go and sit in their van for half an hour and read the paper or play on their phone. I would just rather get the job done and go home. £22 per hour is cheap for a plumber. So you are getting about 7 hours of actual work for £176 that's about £25 per hour. Still a good rate for a plumber. Is he any good, that is a more important question.

All I am saying is you don't get those PD rights until the dwelling is completed. So before then you can't just site a caravan under PD rights.

The difference between an occupied and empty house? About 14kWh generation here, almost all self used. What size is your PV?

A few points. You don't get permitted development rights until the house is complete, so that does not help you putting a caravan in your garden. When i applied for planning I put the static caravan on. It came back with the default clause "the static caravan is to be removed upon occupation of the house." (that might not be the exact wording) I wanted to keep my static caravan for other uses. I pointed out to the planners that on the day of completion, I could remove the caravan, and then immediately replace it with an identical caravan in an identical position and it would be permitted development. They then changed the wording to "habitational use of the static caravan shall cease upon occupation of the house" So my caravan can stay but not as a residence.

Send it to me I will make good use of it. Save you the problem of storing it. Or put it in one of the Capri's. Or are they already full as "storage units"?

I remember a case on here where someone put up a 2M fence just off the highway. There was a path, then a grass verge then the fence. A planning inspector visited, stood on the public foortpah and reached out as far as he could. He could not touch the fence. Therefore he deemed it not to be "adjacent" to the highway and took no action.

DHW is heated by the Air Source Heat Pump in a Telford 300L ctlinder with the high capacity heat pump input coil. Topped up using the immersion heater to use up surplus solar PV

That slider was £3079. Roughly double what I could have got a local cheap double glazed slider for. But the rest of the house has Rationel and it would be a crime to fit cheap UPVC to the sun room. I am sure prices have gone up a lot since we bought the rest of the windows nearly 5 years ago.

Yes we have a 5kW ASHP roughly twice what the worst case heating load is. It runs without issue. The WBS is really an indulgence. Partly because fire wood is so easy to get and free here. It is used on those dull wet grey days when even with the house at it's usual 20 degrees you "feel cold" so it is nice to stoke it up for a few hours with free fuel and raise the whole house to 25 degrees and feel snug and warm. It's also a backup form of heat should there be a power cut or something break down. And useful to warm the house quickly if you have come home from holiday to a cold house (about the only time I would actually find a use for remote internet access to the heating controls so you could turn it on a day or 2 before your return)

Must it be aluminium? Would aluminium clad timber be okay? Just fitted this Rationel aluminium clad timber slider. Just under 3M wide and 2.1M tall triple glazed. Very pleased with it. All I would say is Rationel don't do triple sets, so if you must have 3 panes they probably won't do what you want.

Only a small example. My sun room, the last bit of the house that we are just finishing now. Maybe not the clean look some want as there is a stack of beams between the 2 panes to support the roof ridge beam.

Look up Woofers. They provide labour for free in return for board and lodgings. I doubt any will be builders, but I know someone that built most of his house with his own labour and some Woofers. Your approximate location would help? Mainland or remote island?

So that is probably a clay or cast iron pipe in the ground. The old WC would have been the type where the outlet went straight down into the pipe in the floor. That flexi pipe and the cement is a bodge. If that pipe and hopper in the last picture is the basin waste and is going into the foul drain then you can convert that to an external stack but you will need to dig up a bit of the patio around the open gulley to do that.

ASHP and WBS as secondary heat here. The ASHP is noisy thing is a myth. I would say the ASHP is no more noisy than the burner of an oil boiler, but the big difference is all that noise from the ASHP is outside. Why is it people complain about a small noise from something outside but are happy to put something equally noisy (oil burner) inside their house? Obviously putting the ASHP on your patio might not be the best plan, and nor would putting it on the boundary so as to annoy a neighbour. Rockwool has a longer decrement delay, which basically means the time taken for heat to pass through a wall is longer. The foam type tends to have a shorter decrement delay. You want the delay to be more than 12 hours so as the day warms up, the heat never has chance to get through to the inside before it is cooling down again. For ease of handling I recommend the Knauff Earthwool type, far less nasty to handle that the old yellow glass wool type of stuff. Re your steading? Have any surveys been done? While a steading conversion can work out well, I do know of one where they needed to lower the floor by 30cm to give room for 2 storeys, but then they started digging they found there were no foundations at all under the walls. it ended up with a re submitted planning application and a knock down and rebuild new, just using the old stone for cladding.

Without entering the property, how do you know it is dry rot that caused the collapsed floor, not wet rot? What is with the corner with the Quoins? Why do they stop above the ground? It looks like some have been removed and replaced by bricks? The brickwork referred to above between the two windows looks to have been replaced. Why?

I am not familliar with this system. Any pictures of the hardware as you have it set up?

Yes 100 Amps per phase is about 23kVA so 3 phase will give a maximum of 69kVA What rate are you expecting to charge your car? and only one EV or more?

This sounds like a golden opportunity to renovate the bungalow while doing the extension. Start by under floor insulation (I bet it has absolutely none at the moment) and UFH in the original part, probably a closer pipe spacing for the UFH in the original part. Carry on with the oil burner for now, I suspect in the next 5-10 years there are going to be serious grants to insulate and replace old fossil fuel boilers, there has to be with yesterdays CO2 reduction plans.

I would go for 21kVA and see if they flinch or try and negotiate.

I would keep the thermal store, needed when using the wood burner, but I would not heat it with the GSHP, I would only heat the UVC from the GSHP. Use all 2 port valves (I hate 3 port valves, and choose carefully, some can be normally open, some can be normally closed.

I have my hot water on a timer so it does not come on until 11AM, by which time the PV should be generating well, and then it is set to 48 degrees. This still leaves plenty of room to heat it hotter by surplus PV in the afternoon.