ProDave

You don't want your house mvhr linked into the garage.

@joth have you sourced your fan coil units yet? if so which ones and from where?

Our issue I am sure is our very high mains water pressure so running any cold tap or the cistern filling is noisy. At the new house every cold tap apart from the kitchen comes from the pressure reduced feed and everything is very much quieter in operation.

Okay I feel I am getting slightly further. Reply from the Fakro rep: Those are "list trade prices ex VAT" So it confirms my suspicion £125 for the extra pane of glass is probably not worth it for the marginal energy saving with such a small window? But I still feel I am being hoodwinked. I can get the "standard" Fakro with it's automatic air vent for £201, so it seems so wrong to pay £380, not far off twice as much, just to not have a vent. So the search continues....... Part of me says just buy the standard one with it's silly built in vent and empty a can of squirty foam into it to block the vent.

Yep I would just personally drill say an 8mm hole in the bottom of the joist hanger and insert a wood screw through that into the wood to fix the top plate.

So you had TWO surveys? An air leakage test (blower door) and some looking around with a thermal imaging camera? What was the air test result? and can you post any of the thermal imaging pictures? Why did you have the survey? You must have either been concerned about damp, cold, or high heating bills?

Wow, £3,400 per square metre for the ceiling alone. That puts the £/square metre budget of most self build houses into perspective.

I would just drill a clearance hole in the bottom of the joist hanger and screw through that into the joist. No doubt someone will now tell me why that will cause everything to become structurally unsound?

The NO1 noise you have to consider is the noise of the lavatory cistern re filling after you have flushed it. In out previous house we built back to back en-suite rooms without regard to that fact, and it created an issue that when the next door bedroom used their loo at night, the WC backed onto our bedroom wall so we heard the noise of the water flow to re fill the cistern after use. Keep the WC cistern away from any wall directly adjoining your bedroom and you will avoid that issue. Our en-suite design takes this into account. Re "smells" We must just have more control of our functions than some others because we never normally have need to do "that" function in the middle of a night, only ever a visit for a pee. So as long as the flush and refill is inaudible in the bedroom, there is no problem.

My main concern with oil is the volatility of the price, it might seem reasonably priced now, but a few years ago it was not, and no doubt again in the future it will spike up. It sounds like your house it well insulated so it should not need much heat input. What does your SAP calculations give as the maximum heat input demand to the house?

I last saw our council tax valuation officer in January. He agreed then the house was not ready for valuation and said he would be back again in the summer. I have not seen him since. We are still paying band A for the caravan, even though he knows we are now living in the house. Obviously Highland council are not putting as much pressure on to get houses valued and paying full council tax.

Just back from a weekend away in the over crowded SE. There has been some heavy rain here over the weekend as the burn is well up this morning and the outside temperature is just 7 degrees this morning. The house being empty for 3 days with little incidental heat input and it has cooled down slightly. The washing machine and TD will be busy this morning so that should start to redress the heat input. No need for heating yet.

All I will add to this is I agree a Sky HD box is a very poorly designed wasteful device. They never really shut off, even when in "standby" all that has done is shut off the AV output and turned on the standby light. Everything eles is just about running normally. for that reason mine is connected to a mains timer, it only switches on at 5PM and goes off again at midnight. In the rare occasions I want to watch or record stuff outside those time I override the timer. A daily re boot also reduces the chance of the flakey software in the box from crashing while I am trying to record or watch anything, The cyliner being talked about here is an exhaust air heat pump. It uses "waste" heat from the house to heat the hot water. As others have already said, just vent the AV cabinet to the house to keep it cool. I would be seriously questioning the power consumption. It does not need to be that high. We have 2 large screen tv's each with a surround sound 5.1 sound system, and neither of those get particularly hot. the sound systems are in the rooms with the tv's, not away in a dedicated rack. A small hdmi splitter to route hdmi from the sky box to more than one tv uses very little power and does not get hot. We have a sound system also in the cupboard and there really is no noticable heat from that. The only thing in "the cupboard" that generates any significant heat is the aforementioned sky hd box and that is reduced by the use of a timer as already described.

Raspbery Pi is a cheap little computer board. A HAT is an add on board (think of it sitting on top like a hat) that adds extra functions, in this cause an audio amplifier to drive some speakers And iPeng is some software to make it do what you want to. This is just a variation on what I have, except I use my vintage hifi as the amplifier and use the Pi Music Box software. Instead of an amplifier HAT, I have a DAC (digital to audio converter) HAT that makes it produce a low level audio output suitable for my hifi amplifier. Buy the package that @Onoff linked to and you should be good to go. It will be a bit of a learning curve, but an interesting one.

As they mandate a red duct, is the cable they supply red also? or the standard black cable?

What do you want it to achieve? My sound system is a 1980's hifi system, one of the first to be made with IR remote control. That allows me to lock it away in a cupboard where you rarely need to actually touch it. And the source for most music is a Raspbery Pi Music box, that can play radio stations over the internet, play music stored on it's memory card or a whole host of streaming services. The music box is controlled via a web interface accessible on any phone or computer in the house.

Try putting a bit of blue duct into your new build, and then see the reaction of the DNO when invited to feed a power cable through it. Agreed some DNO's use red for LV cables, red is supposed to be used for HV (but I have seen SSE up here putting HV in black)

Yes please but I won't be able to contact him until next week.

So the latest thinking is we like Fakro because the handle is at the bottom. We don't like Fakro because they don't do the cheap no vent one in anything other than UPVC and we want white painted wood. We don't like Fakro because the vented ones keep talking about this automatic vent that you can't shut off and you seem to have to pay a fortune to get any other with no vent.

Link? I could not find it.

Oh yes it will, BLACK for electrical cables. don't use any other colour, especially not blue for electrical cables.

And most are first time buyers and might not have heard about the "issues"

I would not panic about an ordinary vent, you can shut those. It was the Fakro making the statement I quoted above about having automatic vents that you cannot shut that I do not like the sound of. And they don't seem to clearly state which windows have that automatic vent and which have a manual vent. That sort of ambiguity puts me off choosing Fakro. I will contact them and see how much they want for a window with guaranteed no vent. SWMBO does not want UPVC, she wants white finished wood. If she has accepted UPVC then I would be ordering that cheap, no vent, UPVC Fakro I linked to earlier.

Yes no doubt that is a VERY nice window. But oh the price. See my calculations in post #1. https://www.roofingsuperstore.co.uk/product/fttu-u805-thermo-white-centre-pivot-window-78cm-x-98cm.html

So looking at this cheap one https://www.sterlingbuild.co.uk/product/rooflite-core-aax-b510-white-paint-centre-pivot-roof-window The attraction is no trickle vent. Of course it's an unknown male and poor U value. WHY don't the good makes do one without a trickle vent?