ProDave

+1 to pig muck. The lab I worked at for 10 years was next to a pig farm and on a hot summers day sometimes the smell was vile.

The stove might burn a bit slower and less hot if you shut it's door. All looking very cosy indeed.

I fear that may be the case. Protecting the "schemes" Unfortunately MCS seems to come with a big premium price attached. I have just installed my own 4KW PV for £1500. Granted it was hard to get the kit that cheap but there are lots of people selling a 4KW kit for about £2000. So why does an MCS install come in at 4K or more? There is NOT £2K of install costs. If you can, with batteries, self use most of it, the export payment may end up not worth it. It is likely to only be about 5p per unit exported which considering I have only exported 6.5 units so far means I would not bother even if it were available to me. I am surprised you need as much as llKW to be energy neutral? do you need to address the insulation levels again:? Others have managed energy positive houses with about 6Kw of PV.

I have said before to be viable, solar PV needs to be cheap. It was hard work finding the kit cheap enough but I got mine for £1500. Should be no more than 6 year payback.

Did your on line SAP assessor insist on seeing an official air tightness test certificate, or did he just accept a number with no proof where it came from?

If footings are in, you would expect the vendor to be able to show you the full design and full set of building control drawings, design SAP etc. Make the purchase conditional on all that information being passed to you, AND you having a right to use that and all other drawings that have been produced.

Yes 150mm was the size of the hole needed. In the end I did not cut the holes until I had the vents though.

I suspect that would not hold back sewage under pressure. If that had happened to me, I would be worried it would happen again, and I would be organising an external vent that was lower than the level of the WC rim in the hope next time it would fill the garden instead.

Or if it had not failed so early but failed later when the house was occupied.

The one sentence "This was below the actual costs of the plant" Probably explains why they found it hard to find financial backing.

You don't give the thicknesses of the various layers. so hard to form an opinion. That is very similar to our wall make up. We had the OSB racking layer on the inside like you (lost count of how many people told us we had put the frame up inside out) In our case we had 2 layers of OSB with staggered joints to give sufficient racking strength. I ended up fitting Frametherm 35 earthwool in the 200mm thick frame for cost reasons. We had the 100mm thick Pavatherm on the outside and rendered onto the Pavatherm. We did the same on the roof with the 100mm Pavatherm over the rafters, then a breathable membrane (Protect VP400) counter battens, battens and tiles. U values of all walls and roof about 0.14 Just about to passive house levels, and we expect an EPC A

I was part way through wiring a barn conversion many years ago. One night there was torrential rain, and the mains drainage backed up and sewage poured out over the rim of the downstairs loo and caked the whole ground floor with smelly stuff. There was quite a delay while they lifted all the floors and cleaned it all up. I pitty the owners.

He was refering to @MarkyP post above about a fictitious alternative program.

If we still had AERE we could try one.

It was some form of EPS or similar material with a C shaped steel profile embeded in it to give it strength.

1 1/2 storey

Plastic ones are available in 35mm or 55 mm deep. I have never found that not enough space. If fitting metal boxes I would never fit those silly 16mm deep ones for light switches. There are imho 2 things that can go wrong with plastic back boxes. The mechanism that latches them in the board can be rubbish so as you go to insert the screw the damned thing just pushes away from you. Or the embeded brass nut insert on some makes are just a round knurled fitting and at the merest hint of a tight thread the nut will start spinning in the plastic. You won't have either of these problems with Appleby boxes. Oh and you don't need a box of grommets, which in themselves can be the work of the devil when they pop out just when you think you are finished.

Weil I put it to the panel why would you NOT use a good quality plasterboard box like Appleby?

The interesting thing I found was the plot prices. This show was talking of £100K for the plots, which I think is a reasonable price. But looking today on the Graven Hill website, the very cheapest plot is £180K with many over £300K for what I would consider a decent plot. At £100K I could see them selling well. At £300K I am not so sure (more than my entire plot plus build price)

Okay I may be in the minority here, but do your really, I mean really, want steel back boxes? Have you considered plastic plasterboard boxes? I have only a handful of steel back boxes and for specific reasons. The vast majority I use are plasterboard boxes. PB boxes have a bad reputation, and I am the first to admit, some designs are utterly rubbish. But buy Appleby plasterboard boxes and you won't have any trouble with them. My philisophy: For sockets run cables horizontally around the room at socket height, in the safe zone created by the socket. Leave some slack in each end of the cable but don't cut the box holes, yet. Then when you are ready, you know you can cut holes for the back boxes and fit sockets anywhere along the entire wall. The only caveat being you must fit at least 1 socket somewhere or else you won't have the safe zone for the cable.

Interesting. I wonder if they would consider a consultancy rather than a full time position?

They mentioned Wales, so Tata I would imagine?

David Attenborough highlighted many years ago, just how few people the planet could support it they ALL consumed energy at the rate we do in the West. And that number is a lot less than the current population. Don't get me started on Fast reactors. We (the UK) decided to abandon those along with all our nuclear capability. Now if we want a reactor we have t buy a foreign one. Chernobyl went pop due to unautorised experiments with the safety system disabled. That is not typical operation of a power reactor. Fukushima went pop after being inundated by a tsunami and the cooling system could not cope with the damage and loss of power. I hope lessons have been learned from that. (location, resiliance of safety systems etc)

Hi and welcome. I hope you have a tin hat handy. I am pretty sure all of us respect wildlife and it's right to exist. What I suspect most object to is not being allowed to make decisions for ourselves and take common sense measures to be wildlife friendly, but instead to be treated like idiots / vandals and be forced to pay for someone to write on a bit of paper what is blindingly obvious to most normal people. Thankfully we were not pestered with any of this nonsense in our build. some seem to be over burdened with it.

No sign of any renewables, PV etc. No mention of mvhr etc, in fact no technical details. Shame.