ProDave

The reason I am very cynical about Project management is one previous roll I had, as well as designing the bloody machine I had to keep updating the project plan. Of course things kept changing, the spec kept changing, estimates of timescale kept changing. I was ending up spending more time keep adjusting the project plan than doing any design. Had it not been for the fact I needed to maintain employment and an income, I would have told the managers "just forget this project plan and just let me get on and design and build it, you will get your machine a lot quicker that way"

I am a bit cynical about "project planning" (historical from experiences at work) Anything you do will at best be inaccurate as you are at the whims of different trades and suppliers and their estimates will at best be approximate and at worse a complete guess. Then throw in weather, availability of trades, changes you may make and the whole thing gets very approximate. I think what I am saying is anything you want can simply be done with a pencil and paper?

I hope you are going to say you paid the deposit with a credit card.

How about the small fold up spider cranes?

Need more technical information than that. I suspect those 2 cores "sensor output" are a relay contact so could be configured as a switched L output going back down the third core, but would need to be a LOT more certain of their actual function. The cable cores issue. If you have the common 3 core with a brown, a black and a grey core you can use that with appropriate sleeving of the cores. But if you have the less common 3 core SWA with brown, blue and green/yellow cores then you really should not be using the green/yellow for anything other than earth.

Our panels arrived on a 3 axle 3 ton trailer in several loads, delivered that way from the builders workshop to our site, and offloaded directly from that into position with the digger plus boom extension. Such a trailer would be able to get into a smaller space than a more normal artic flatbed all in one go delivery.

We have a mezanine from the largest bedroom. Barely standing height for even me, a short person, and shown on the BR drawings as a storage platform, i.e. no fixed means of accessing it. No special precautions asked for. (ladder and handrails might appear later, after completion)

Exactly what our builders used to lift all the panels including upstairs and the big long ridge beam.

The shared walk through wardrobe is the bit giving me concern. That is so quirky I think it would put a lot of people off. A compromise might just be cupboards either sides of the access to those bedrooms but loose the door onto the landing, going through 2 doors (one shared) to get to the bedrooms is so odd.

Surely the double plasterboard ceiling and walls is the fire barrier? Between our garage and the (plant) room above it the fire barrier is just the double plasterboard ceiling.

I did the same thing but using an old large office fan and a large sheet or cardboard to cover a whole door opening and lots of tape to seal it. As alredy noted, set the fan to extract and you should easily find all the draughts coming in. But you have answered your own question. You have open fan vents, an open cooker hood vent, an open chimney and probably an air inlet vent for the stove. And I bet you have a letterbox in the door and possibly a cat flap? Our last house had a total of 9 such openings, plus trickle ventilators on all the windows, and the result was it was draughty, not because of any particular failings in the construction, but all the ventilation and other openings. Our new house has none of these. All ventilated by the mvhr system that has just 1 inlet and 1 outlet, the stove is room sealed to the flue and the ducted air intake no letterbox and no cat flap, and is so much better sealed and completely free of any draughts detectable. You might well find some minor leaks in the building that you can seal up but my suspicion most of the problems will be the ventilation fan openings and there is not much you can do about that. A good "seat of the pants" test, it with a sell sealed house, like our new one, on a windy day you can open 1 door or 1 window and you won't get a draught and the door or window will not blow shut or further open. Our previous house, if you did that, wind entering or leaving one of the many ventilation holes would blow that door or window open or shut. The flaps on those fans seem to serve just to irritate you and rattle in the wind and have very little practical effect at sealing the openings.

Do they provide a wiring diagram? You only need 2c SWA if you use the armour as earth, so you can then probably use the spare core as an alarm signal. What colours are the 3 cores in your SWA?

The USP of no electricity is lost there. My Conder was under £2K The £2650 saved will pay for the electricity it uses for the rest of my life.

The smaller towable machines are popular with contractors for obvious reasons, but for a self builder who wants a machine at one location, not so. you pay for transport once when you buy it. And when you are finished you sell it and the buyer pays for transport to take it away. A 3t machine looks small on the back of an 11t beaver tail,.

Did you try the faster pump speed? Have you actually been present to see what actually happens at the instant it throws up the error? I had a most peculiar intermittent fault on mine that I only solved because I just happened to be in the plant room when I heard it start up spuriously (when it should have been off) and then trip out.

The biggest issue does seem to be the low level of floor insulation. Obviously your ridge height is fixed and thus by definition your finished ground floor level. So surely all this means is lowering the foundations and ground floor structure, to create room to add more insulation and end up at the same finished floor level. The details need to be agreed, drawing updated and foundations built accordingly so I still suggest you put the brakes on the project until that is all sorted out.

I thought I was being critical, but if you are expecting near passive house performance, then you need to call a halt immediately and have a very serious discussion with your architect. Either he does not understand what a passive house is, or he is seriously misleading you.

But that still leaves the wiring between insulation layers, it just saves you having to cut channels for it. So the insulation and derating factors still apply.

A few observations. I see no mention of a service void. How are you going to run cables around the outside walls to switches and sockets without either burying the cables in insulation (will need derating / much larger cables) or compromising the air tightness or insulation of the building? Ideally you want a completely sealed and insulated building, inside which you create a 25mm deep battened service void before applying ordinary plasterboard. I am going to see a client next week to try and thrash out a plan of how exactly he expects me to wire the extension he is building and hopefully convince him to incorporate a service void. You have a rendered finish on a render board. That adds nothing to the insulation. Consider using as we have a wood fibre external cladding board and render onto that, this adds more insulation to the building. Kingspan type insulation while a good insulator has a poor decrement delay which means the building will cool down quicker. Other types of insulation have a longer decrement delay so the building stays warm longer when the heating goes off. But you will need more thickness so probably again too late to change that. But it may be too late in the day to make changes like that?

So if fitting single phase in the house and fitting solar pv, make sure the solar pv is connected to the same phase as the house loads.

OR think about switching to Economy 10 that has it's off peak 10 hours in 3 chunks including an early afternoon burst, so the storage heaters don't have to store the heat for very long. There is no alteration by the householder needed for that, just getting the supplier to change tariff that may involve them changing the meter.

I would imagine plasterboard is another big contributor. Then all the "things" like mvhr, ASHP etc then the kitchen units and appliances. You are getting int cfsh level 6 territory. A Cousin used to work as a builder and he did one cfsh level 6 house, he said it was a paperwork nightmare, every journey including to and from work had to be logged, even how many times they went to the toilet.......

Our Conder Air blower treatment plant has a mushroom vent on it's lid, mainly as that is the air intake for the blower pump. Otherwise it is vented at the far end of the stack via the stink pipe above the roof of the house, and at the discharge pipe into the burn. There is never any smell in the house (there would not be with any system unless you have a leak in the drain pipes) But even outside standing right next to the treatment plant, or right by the discharge pipe into the burn, there has never been any smell whatsoever. The discharge into the burn is a clear oudodourless liquid. These things really do seem to work very well indeed.

110mm drain in under the foundations, coming up against the outside wall under the sink, Reducer to 40mm and up to sink waste trap with washing machine point. Probably won't even need an air admittance valve (ours does not) Get a plumber to do it, not a builder.

We used the Powermid XL remote control extenders. Linked here from the first one I found on ebay, but I bought them from CPC where you can buy the transmitters and receivers separately of you want to control from multiple rooms https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Marmitek-PowerMid-XL-infrared-extender-set/263746787472?epid=1405455327&hash=item3d68889890:g:JL4AAOSwUwlbG2OM:rk:4:pf:0