ProDave

The key to a condensation free house is insulation and lots of it. I am willing to bet your old house has very little insulation hence cold wall surfaces where moisture condenses and mould forms. If you build with a decent insulation level then the next thing is make it air tight and coupled with that an MVHR ventilation system That will give you a warm house free from condensation with low heating requirements. Which lends itself to heating by under floor heating at low temperature from a heat pump. There is no doubt a ground source heat pump is slighthy more eficcient than an air source, but when you properly cost it, there are a lot of additional costs and ongoing maintenance costs. Most of us who have looked into it decided the sheer simplicity of an air source heat pump wins hands down. An ASHP will do domestic hot water, I have a 300 litre tank. The key is you store your hot water less hot that you would with a gas boiler. Ours is set to 48 degrees which is plenty hot enough, but the lower temperature points you towards a larger tank. And hot water distribution and careful pipework is the key to quick delivery to the taps. Also some logical thought to the layout so all hot water usage points are close together, and the hot water tank central between them. Lastly solar PV. The FIT has gone, so anything now has to be self financing. That probably means forget paying an installer to fit it. I installed my own earlier this year for a cost of £1500 and we are on target to self use £250 of electricity in the first year giving a payback time of 6 years. Our generation is lower than it should be due to shading from trees, which I am gradually addressing with a thinning / felling program so I hope that will increase over time as I gradually reduce the shading. You need a different mindset for near 100% self usage like use all big appliances one at a time in the middle of the day, and a solar PV dump controller to put surplus power into hot water is a must.

MUST have been built by an electrician.

I don't know why but when I searched earlier for plots I could find none for sale in Argyle & Bute. There are several further up the coast though. We are just north of Inverness, chosen for dryer climate, less midges and more employment opportunities, but we can be on the west coast in just over an hour. It only took us 2 trips up with the touring caravan to find our first plot stopping 2 weeks each time. Have been here 17 years now.

It is indeed funny how the same utility gives such variable service. For us Scottish Water gave the cheapest price for the road crossing and that one road crossing incorporated ducts for electricity and telephone, though it was me that was present on the day and dropped the ducts into the trench as it was being filled, with the agreement of the contractors.

Can you not re lay so the drains go around your study and out to the front alongside the study?

My choice of south wall was simply the north wall faces the road and I didn't want it there. I suspect on a sunny but frosty day there is a marginal improvement from it being on the south wall. Probably less from the air temperature difference, but more from the sun shining on the ASHP just might help to stave off the need for it to defrost as often.

The DNO limit is an annoyance. It was made pretty clear to me that if I went over 3.68KW (16 amps) there would be a network upgrade charge. I never got as far as formally applying to find out how much. The silly part of that is I self use almost all of what I generate and in the first year have only exported 128KWh and most of that will be at mid day when my immersion heater is running at 100% soaking up as much as it can and the export will only be a few hundred watts. They are not open to reason on that, they work on the basis you might export all that you generate and so their network has to cope with it. Anyone installing PV now, with no more Feed In Tariff, must be working on maximising self usage and exporting as little as possible, so you would think the DNO should be open to a reasonable scheme in place to limit export?

Mine is outside also on the south wall, tucked behind the adjoined garage. There is a small (non opening) window in the living room that looks straight out over it. You cannot hear the ASHP inside the house when it is running. I have said before, the nosiest bit of my heating system is the circulating pumps, now a lot less of a bother since I swapped them to Wilo pumps. I would say the heat pump at full tilt makes about as much noise as an oil fired boiler. The difference is the HP is outside and most people are happy to have an oil boiler roaring away in their kitchen or living room. It just might be a bother if you are out in the garden, but when it is warm enough to be relaxing in the garden, the HP won't be doing much, just an occasional bit of hot water heating and you can easily turn that off if it decides to come on mid barbecue.

Things to consider: How much roof space? Do they have to be a particular colour for planning reasons or just because for example you prefer black? How much can you afford Vs payback time? And a very important one, how much will your DNO allow you to fit?

Hi and welcome. There are usually lots of plots to choose from up here, I am not sure if this link will work as it is the results of doing a "map search" https://www.hspc.co.uk/search.asp?searchtype=form If not just start from scratch on their search form. Are you local to the area, or like me when we first moved here, buying a plot from 500 miles away?

Decisions made by SunAmp have gone down in my estimation knowing the heating company they have now teamed up with.

Our plot was overgrown from 30 years of neglect. Some large trees (mostly Willow) and lots and lots of small trees / saplings. I didn't have the chance to do anything to the trees before initial planning as I didn't own the land then. So all I could do was indicate on my outline planning application where the house would go and which trees would go and which would remain. Plans were passed and no TPO's. I have stuck to my work and the remaining trees are still there, though I have a very slow ongoing thinning plan to slowly harvest firewood as we need it and reduce some that are grown in very dense clumps. If you actually want to put the house on top of where an 80ft tree once was, do not under estimate the work in felling it, then getting all the roots out, and then building on it with the impact it will have on foundation design. I hat a 3 ton digger and that struggles to get the roots of some fairly small trees out of the ground. you will want something a lot bigger.

And just to add, solvent weld cement comes out of the tin (with it's built in applicator in the lid) quite thick. You paste it onto both halves and there is no doubt the two will weld together. Once you have mated the 2 parts, do up the clamp quickly then leave it alone. You don't want it to be moving as it sets, which takes a few minutes.

Where I used to live there was a cottage by the river that flooded regularly. It had been "adapted" with a quarry tile floor, quarry tile skirting and the walls "plastered" with sand / cement not plaster. All electrics high up. When a flood was due, the kitchen kick boards were removed, and all furniture lifted up on bricks. when the water went down they just mopped it out, put the furniture back and carried on. They continued living in the house even in a flood, the just wore wellies downstairs.

A LOT more information needed. So you have a megaflow UFH system and a Worcester boiler. What is this "Danfoss control unit"? Is that a standard boiler programmer where you set the on and off times of the central heating or something more complicated like a programmable thermostat? What other controls are there, there will probably be some motorised valves. What type of boiler system or combi (i.e is there a hot water tank)? From what little I know so far my first guess is you might have a faulty motorised valve, quite likely if those are Danfoss as well as they have a regular habit of the microswitches failing that would then "call for heat" from the boiler even when the heating is off, and because the water has nowhere to go it just gets hotter and hotter until the boiler shuts down.

Can I ask one thing. When making an extension, that HAS to match up with an existing floor level for a knock through, it is normal practice to drill a hole through the wall a known distance above the floor it has to match to, then measure down that distance on the wall outside and clearly mark that floor level. You then build everything with reference to that floor level mark so when you knock through it all lines up. Has that been done? If not ask them HOW they are going to guarantee the floor levels line up when they knock through. If they have not done that then the floor levels could be anywhere.

If it's like my Landy slave, you ignore the leaks (what's another fluid drip from a landrover) and top up the reservoir regularly. Back to contingency. I can understand that concept if you have to borrow money so you work out how much you need and add a contingency and that is what you try and borrow. But ours was in theory being funded by assets, so we have what we have and are not borrowing. So the build will cost what it costs with just the desire to not to waste money and achieve value. So we set out without an accurate budget and no concept of contingency and that is how it is still. Remember the old saying, cheap, good and fast, you can only have two. We have opted for cheap and good and now in the 5th year.

Yes band A for the caravan, and they don't seem in a hurry to value the house.

Living on site will incur council tax for the static caravan. I am currently paying £98 per month.

The McAlpine pan connector arrived today. In spite of what I hoped, the end that goes into the pipe was not removable, and it was too long to use as it is. I must have ordered the wrong one? Those "fins" are moulded directly into the pipe. Not to be deterred I got creative. I shortened it (losing the fins) and instead used the sealing set from the old failed pan connector: We got there in the end.

My Orangery is not yet finished, it will probably be the last bit of the build to get completed. But the frame was designed and built by the same builders that built the house frame so it was erected at the same time. The windows will almost certainly be the same Rationel Aura plus aluminium clad windows fitted to the rest of the house. What little "wall" there is on the orangery will be clad in timber. Work in progress:

Rather than a "conservatorry" I would choose what is now generally referred to as an "orangery" which means it has a proper insulated solid roof.

Can you not crowbar it back on without letting off any more tension?

Didn't you replace the tracks not long ago?

Do you have to have bi folds? With this issue and their know air tightness issues, why not consider a pair or even 3 lift and slide doors? I know you can't open it all, but it might solve the issue?