ProDave

You put Kwikstage up any way you like. So a "kit" sold as doing 1 bay 16ft high will do 2 bays 8ft high as well. I bought all mine from a private seller on ebay just completing his own self build.

Ah you never mentioned the wired devices having issues, only wifi, so we were all looking in the wrong place.

I would love to hear the outcome. How can it be a BT network problem if your wired devices work? WiFi is (an extension to) your local area network and will work (or not) irespective of your broadband connection, e.g I can connect to other devices, share files, print documents all via wifi even if the router is unplugged from and not connected to the BT line.

2 bays of Kwikstage would no that nicely.

Having insulated the visible floor with the expensive stuff to get the minimum floor raise, why not insulate under the cabinets with as much PIR as you can fit in. It doesn't matter if that ends up higher (as long as not higher than the cabinet legs obviously)

I do not understand inward opening. It rains, with a little bit of wind to blow it onto the pane, and water comes in? Why would you want a window that you cannot leave open for fear of it raining?

I am about to start laying the floor make up and then tiling my hall and utility room floors. The rest of the ground floor has a built up floor with biscuit mix UFH between battens and engineered oak floor. The finished level of the tiles has to match this level. I have bought a whole load of slate tiles. In spite of being described as "calibrated" there is quite a difference in thicknesses. So in some places I will have to be laying a tihck bed of adhesive, and others not much at all. So the immediate question is what floor make up to get to the level I want? I have mocked it up with a sheet of 22mm P5 chipbpard then a 12mm sheet of plywood. Taking one of the thicker tiles that only leaves about 3mm for adhesive to get the tile to the finished level, but taking one of the thinner tiles that will easily allow for 6mm of adhesive. Is that about the right thickness to be aiming for or would a thinner floor makeup and thicker adhesive be better? i.e what is the min and max adhesive thickness? Is 12mm ply okay, or would I be better going for say 18mm P5 and thicker ply to get the same overall thickness?

It is not unknown for some designers to "get things wrong" I had a similar issue with my heat pump, with the thermostat input spuriously triggering occasionally and I fitted both a snubber and a pull down resistor to cure the problem. The designer had used a sensitive high impedance input to detect a 240V on / off condition, with no debounce or filtering at all.

I bought some P clips from CPC, and a box of short but fat wood screws that would screw the P clips down to the OSB without the heads bursting through the P clip. Very cheap and worked well.

Very happy with our outward opening top hung windows. Can be left open in rain without problems.

Yes definitely only 2 seals on my Rationel windows. But they do seem to seal very effectively, no obvious leaks in practice or when doing an air tightness test.

Yes they were okay to deal with. But you had to be careful what you said, Mention a small seemingly insignificant change to anything and next day the "letter of variation" to the contract landed on your doormat with the extra cost. I don't know why they went bust but looking back, when I went to see them about the present build, as I already mention they were pushing hard for me to buy a stock house on one of their plots. I suspect they were already in trouble then and trying to sell assets to prevent the crash.

This just highlights why I so much dislike tilt and turn windows that open inwards. The place for a window to open is outwards.

There are two things needed to get a house to be low energy. Insulation, and air tightness. Insulation is relatively easy and even in an older building can be added to some extent. Air tightness is quite easy to get right in a new build, it is mostly a matter of attention to detail, rather than anything particularly expensive. That is very much harder to sort out in an old existing house. Once you get good insulation and good air tightness then you fit an MVHR system (mechanical ventilation with heat recovery) and that ventilates the house while removing most of the (otherwise wasted) heat in the exhaust air and puts that back into warming the fresh air going in. Then you can get very low heating bills. And it needn't add much to the overall cost of a new build. Unfortunately the mass market house builders have not caught up and in general they just build what they can scrape through building regs. It is only a minority of self builders that strive to build something better. Ours meets many of the parameters for it being a passive house but we did not even bother trying to get it certified as such. The low running cost is all that matters to me.

Not if you build them properly. My house in the Highlands , not as well insulated as @JSHarris cost £234 to heat last winter with an air source heat pump.

Plenty of people get mortgages on leasehold houses and flats.

I would treat sourcing the kitchen units, and the stone worktops, as 2 separate items. I very much doubt Wickes will offer the best deal on stone worktops. I am a fan of Howdens, but I would not get the stone worktops from them for the same reason, they just subcontract it and take a cut for doing so.

I can't see what he hopes to achieve. If he has leased the land to you on a 1000 year lease he can't then gift it to anyone else.

We used Roy homes to build the shell of our first self build in 2004. Back then they were happy to build our design on our plot. When planning the present new build, I did go to see Roy Homes again, but they were basically only interested in selling us one of their stock design houses on a plot that they were selling and not at all interested in doing our bespoke build.

I would turn the question around and ask why does he want to lease the land to you rather than gift you the freehold? What does he hope is the advantage to a lease?

I got my visibility requirements reduced by highways simply by pointing out another recent planning application in the same street that was passed with a shorter visibility splay requirement (one that I could comply with)

How is the alarm system integrated to the broadband? is that hard wired or is that sucking all your wifi bandwidth?

If it blows once they will ask all sorts of awkward questions and then replace it. If it blows again they are likely going to ask even more awkward questions and want to see evidence of some changes before they will replace it.

No 1, re boor your router (turn the power off, wait a few seconds and turn it back on) If that does not fix it report it to BT, they will almost certainly as a first attempt send you a new router, which might well be a newer version that what you have. It could be someone else near you has just set up a wifi system and it is clashing with yours, and the re boot may resolve that. Our plain old BT home hub 4 centrally placed in the under stairs cupboard gives a good signal throughout the whole house.

That is a bigger version of the instant gas water heater in our static caravan. It worked reasonably well withing the limitation that ours is a smaller one rated at only 11KW so you don't get a fantastic shower flow, but that one claims to be 32Kw so should be plenty. You trade the expense of a G3 UVC sign off, for the expense of a gas safe sign off, and having a pair of cylinders on an autonatic changeover. You would need to first check with your gas safe man that particular unit is okay for permanent instalation in a building, i.e can you get the appropriate flue parts and does it meet regulations for a habitable building?