ProDave

So they bought the site for £28m and are building 1900 homes on it. That works out at a per plot price of £14,736 Add on the cost of designing the site, laying the infrastructure, services etc building the roads and what would that work out roughly for the cost of each serviced plot? I still think £100K per plot would cover all that and £250K or more per plot would just be profiteering, which was surely not the ethos behind the project?

I just walked in and said I am an electrician, I have a kitchen to fit in a buy to let house and they opened an account. I had to re open the account for the self build because it had timed out due to inactivity and again it was a formality. Perhaps you would be better saying you are a joiner, as that is not a "profession" as such and there is no way to check if you are or are not really a joiner.

Some people are incredably gullible. On one occasion I was visiting my MIL and she complained her computer was slow, would I have a look, I ran Malwarebytes on it, and I think it gave up counting when it had found in excess of 2000 "threats" on the computer. When I asked what has she been doing the reply was "people keep sending me emails saying I have won some money so of course I click on the link" Some people you just can't help.

That old chestnut of "my electric heater is more efficient than yours" is usually utter BS. Resistance electric heating is all 100% efficient, every watt of electricity you put into it converts to 1 watt of heat * I don't know how Trading Standards let advertisers get away with claims like that, but plenty do including F*****r who peddle their range of heaters as a more efficient replacement for old electric heaters, and seem to sell a lot of them on that claim. * not quite true heaters with electronic controls will consume some power for those controls, but chances are most if that will end up as heat anyway as well.

Nationwide free detailed advertising on TV, over 11,000 hits on the website and just ONE confirmed sale. That sums it up, that the plots are over priced. I don't know what the answer to making plots available for self build is, but this is certainly not it. Unfortunately. What price do large developers pay for a plot? Certainly not £250K each. If schemes like this cannot deliver affordable plots then perhaps it is time that planning law changed and demands that say for every 100 houses granted permission to the mass developers, one must be sold at the same plot price for self build? Sadly this seems to be turning into a prime example of "never underestimate how badly something can be run if left to local government"

Good point. A steady stream of people going into the sales office and walking out registering their disgust when they find they can't buy a plot for £100K might drive the point home,

Cheapest 3 bed detached in Bicester according to Right Move is currently £295,000 About the price of a BARE PLOT at Graven Hill now. That makes £100K about right for a plot, and if you are careful, your self build house may cost no more than just going and buying one. A £300K plot needs to be a large plot in a stunning location with stunning views and no neighbours (and no fear of new neighbours) not a small plot on what is going to end up a very big housing estate. I am sorry but I think the project has "gone wrong"

Just a form of electric resistance heating that can be used as UFH. Nothing special. but I would guess probably expensive.

Care to precis what he said?

If doing that, I first transfer a trivial amount, say £10. Only when that has arrived safely will I transfer what I actually want to.

Some companies don't help themselves though. Yesterday I had an email telling me they "may have sent the wrong documents" when I renewed the B&B insurance a few weeks ago, and it wanted me to download the correct set from a link they provided. But the link did not take you to the insurance brokers own website. So I sent an email directly to the broker to question did they actually send this email, and the answer was yes. So why are they hosting the documents on some other website. I saw an interesting theory. This "accept cookies" nonsense we now have on virtually every website has had the unintended consequence of conditioning users to blindly click "yes" to anything that pops up on their screens.

Not really. My "plant room" houses the mvhr and a circulating pump and some controls for the ASHP. These could easily have gone in any convenient cupboard space anywhere in the house.

The programmer that came with the ASHP will do all the timing, but it is a fiendishly complicated thing to program. I wanted instead a simple boiler programmer type interface that anyone can operate without having to pour over a poorly written manual to figure it out. So the programmer we now use has all the usual functions, advance, on / off, 1 or 2 hour boost etc, all easy to understand. Other makes of ASHP (mine is LG) many have a programmer that is easier to understand and operate. It is worth noting that an ASHP will normally do space heating OR DHW heating, never both at the same time. And it has a supply water temperature setting for each mode. Exactly how they schedule heating and hot water depends a bit on the make, buy my LG one does the DHW heating in half hour bursts with a half hour gap before the next half hour burst if needed. There is no explanation in the manual why it is set like this. My best guess is partly to only run it hard for short bursts to minimise risk of icing and defrosting, and partly so as not to stop heating the rooms for too long (though in our well insulated house it could turn the space heating off for several hours before you would even notice). You can change the timings, and you can also select whether heating or hot water has priority.

You are correct, BUT you also need a load of control wires. This is where it gets complicated. different heat pumps work in different ways. My first (dud) one just needed a CAN bus pair to connect to an internal control wiring box. But it's (different make) replacement required all pumps, valves, programmers, thermostats, actuators etc connected direct to the heat pump. To simplify pulling loads of separate cables, I just used one bit of 10 core control cable and made my own distribution junction box in the plant room. So unless you know exactly what make of heat pump you might fit, for cabling the best you can do is install a decent sized bit of trunking that is accessible, or at least has a draw string included to pull whatever control cables through when you find out what you actually need. In my case I brought all my cables to the plant room. The controller that came with the HP is in the wall there. But it is a very non intuitive thing and I wanted the "user interface" to be simpler, so I fitted a conventional 3 channel boiler tine clock which is in the utility room so you set heating and hot water times just like any other heating system that everyone is familliar with, and the HP's own programmer is there just for looking at or adjusting parameters, I don't use any of it's timer functions. As @joe90 says an ASHP can heat HW okay, I have mine set to 48 degrees and that has proved okay. The immersion heater heats it further with surplus PV on a sunny day and it will easily reach 60 degrees or more from that.,

I never saw the point in allowing hetrosexual civil partnerships. It can only be from the few who think "it's not fair, they can have it why can't we" playing some spurious discrimination card. Now same sex marriage is allowed I see no point in continuing the civil partnership at all for any gender combination.

@JSHarris quote does not sound so bad. The system I refer to that a friend had installed he paid £11K to have a Mitsubishi Econdan ASHP and pre plumbed cylinder installed. You can buy the HP and cylinder for under £6K so £5K labour to install a nonoblock ASHP and it's pre plumbed HW cylinder. I wonder how much RHI payment he got?

So how is it different to marriage?

I must have done this different to everyone else (not unusual if I am left to work it out for myself) The compriband is there to seal the side of the window frame to the (in my case) wood fibre cladding board. But the compriband is well inboard and then the outside is rendered. The compriband is NOT left on view to be painted, it is some distance in behind the render.

Yes it is a job to know if this was a deliberate taking advantage, or whether the guy really had no understanding and was as stumped as you, but too proud to admit he was stumped so he fed you BS and scarpered. I even have a plumber friend who has little understanding of how UFH works (but this is the same plumber that paid and MCS company a 5 figure sum to install his heat pump, so I suspect anything beyond an oil fired boiler and radiators is outside his comfort zone)

Why when I see that does the phrase "long drop" spring to mind?

For some reason a lot of people just do not understand under floor heating. I have been to several to "make them work" and found basic things like the wrong thermostat connected to the wrong room. It is just a case of being methodical, and it is really simple. If your system was designed professionally, you will have been given a quoted flow rate for each loop. The only reason you might want different flow rates for different loops is to ensure an even heat up time, e.g a kitchen, which tends to have less heated floor area because you don't heat under the units, might want a higher flow rate than a living room where the entire floor area is heated.

There is a lot of nonsense talked about ASHP's by people that don't understand them, or who try to implement them in the wrong way. In a well insulated house they work very well. They work best at low temperatures so are ideally suited to under floor heating, but will work with low temperature radiators. They will work with an unvented cylinder for hot water but are not well suited to a thermal store for instance. I have been using one all winter up here in the Highlands where the temperatures are a lot colder than where you are and the heating demand is higher because of that, and it has worked without issue. Mine is only a 5KW unit which is plenty if your house is well insulated (peak heating demand when -10 outside and +20 inside a little over 2KW) Where people have problems with them is when they try to replace a gas boiler with an ASHP in an old leaky house, and try to run it with the old high temperature radiators. I have a 300 litre unvented hot water tank, and run the UFH directly from the ASHP, though some recommend a small buffer tank for the UFH. You can buy a kit to to do that for under £3K. A lot of these high quotes that some people get are from MCS installers so you can claim the RHI. It is worth looking to see if that is really viable. I bought my kit and installed it myself for a LOT less. I don't get the RHI but overall is worked out cheaper. You need to see the SAP assesment for your new house to see what the worst case heat input is before deciding what size heat pump you need.

At the moment there is no payment at all for new PV instalations. Don't think PV on the roof will heat your house. At the time you need it most, in deepest winter, PV output is very low, it falls off a cliff in November. Assuming this is a new build, and reasonably well insulated, have you considered an air source heat pump? Each 1KW of electricity it uses creates between 3 and 4KW of heat, bringing electric heating costs down to comparable levels to gas. and if you then install solar PV it will help reduce your electricity costs, but it won't eliminate them. An ASHP should be eligible for the RHI payments.

That is roughly what I paid for a (very) bare shell. Total build cost is going to end up in the region of £150K which in my case works out at about £1000 per square metre. But since the shell was finished, the only trades I have employed are a plasterer, and a joiner for the bits I fear I might not make a good enough job of. So there has been a LOT of DIY work to get it down to £1K per square metre.

erm how about Screwfix? Or Toolstation?