ProDave

Have a read of your relevant building regs. For instance Scottish building regs allow no nosing, or the Z shaped profile you are talking about for a private stair.

My concern with moving the kitchen would be will that make a very long run for the hot water to reach the kitchen taps? Where is the new kitchen location in relation to the combi boiler? I am minded of my plumber friends house where he ended up with the hot water tank as far from the kitchen as it was possible, in a house twice the size of mine.

Another thing people tend to do with FIT solar PV is optimise the panel orientation for maximum yield. That is fine if your objective is to maximise payment. But for a non FIT self use scheme, you don't just want a passive peak in the middle of the day that you are unlikely to be able to fully self use. Instead my plan is some panels facing east, to get a much earlier start to useful generations levels and less facing south so the mid day peak will not be as large. Also if I can manage some facing west would be good to extend generation into the evening, but that is harder to arrange here. The total yield would be lower, but my feeling is you would generate more self usable power throughout the day. One option I am looking at is making my east facing bank on a simple flip over mount so they would in effect be on a very basic tracker and those same panels could do the evening burst as well.

Lets work on 4.8 KWh of storage. IF you fill and use that every day / night, you will save about 50p worth of electricity compared to importing. So over a year, you will save about £182.50 Assuming you have managed to buy the kit for £2K the saving will therefore take you just short of 11 years to pay for itself. What do you think the battery capacity will be like in 11 years? I would say ready for new batteries some time very soon. So the true cost of your "free" stored energy is not a whole lot less than the retail cost of importing power. To me, it still does not stack up. I keep on looking at batteries and the cost needs to fall, or true long life batteries like NiFe need to become popular. Concentrate on more self usage in the day and dumping excess to water heating. And keep watching the prices.

Same as me. Warm roof, pavatex, non tenting breathable membrane, vertical counter battens, horizontal battens, box profile roof sheets. Battens then counter battens = 50mm gap anyway.

You may be right. What I wanted to avoid is paying MCS prices for a system then having the FIT denied because of no EPC. It may have in practice been accepted, but nobody was prepared to state in advance that it would be.

My solicitor was very hot on this when we bought our plot. Firstly the paper deeds to the plot showed a hand drawn plan that had no definitive reference. That was resolved by I believe it was a P5 report from the land registry who mapped the hand drawn plan onto the mapping system fitting in with adjacent land. In any event a fuzzy metre or so boundary error would not affect the ability to build the house. He also raised a potential ransom strip issue. Last time our plot was sold the road was a private estate road and it came with a right of access. That is now a public road. Our solicitor raised a valid point that if the public road had been built in a different position to the old private road, then it may be our plot finished before the road started. That was satisfied by comparing old and new maps to confirm the public road is indeed exactly where the private road used to be.

Interesting. I tried and tried near the start to get solar PV installed but hit brick wall after brick wall. I contacted SSE (our supplier then) and they said they would only accept the final EPC that was registered and lodged on the register and of course I won't have that until near completion. I also tried the "unable to lodge an EPC" argument, as nobody would provide an EPC for the static caravan (it would struggle to be good enough even if someone would rate it) so I eventually persuaded a surveyor to type me a letter stating it was EPC exempt, and again SSE would not accept that. Because of all the brick walls I hit I now feel very sore indeed that I have missed any worthwhile FIT which is now why I am striving for an as cheap as possible no FIT system. So forgive me for coming across as somewhat grumpy on the subject. At least I am still collecting the FIT on the old house and will continue to do so until it sells. That has now long passed break even point.

I guess it all depends how well you know your Gas Safe engineer. I have already laid a duct through the foundations that comes up where the kitchen island is. If (and it is still if) we have a gas hob, then my Gas Safe engineer has instructed me to thread the pipe through, lead it round to where the LPG bottles will go, and he will come and connect the ends and issue the certificate.

They do seem a bit fairer up here. When we moved into the static caravan and contacted them, the valuation officer made reference to his file containing photographs of the 'van, and the 17 times he had visited our site. A less scrupulous council might have decided that the 'van was perfectly habitable and started to charge council tax on it long before we moved in.

Does that not mean it can't be valued until building control have deemed it "finished" by way of a completion certificate, or at least a certificate of temporary habitation?

This is why I have been starting the internal fit out upstairs first, so that when (not if) the nosey valuation officer comes for a look through the windows, he will see a less finished house.

... and it will only run at low temperature <30 degrees Some say do it. Some say run.

We looked at Howdens for our vanity units, that was until SWMBO found something completely different in one of the sheds. What I did learn, was 90% of "bathroom vanity" units are in fact just kitchen wall cupboards stood on the floor.

Of all the stove shops we visited this was the only one selling an ex display model and they only had this particular one on sale. It just happened to be that SWMBO liked it.. With this stove there is no "adaptor" to fit. The combustion air is already lead to an 80mm diameter spigot. You can choose to do nothing and it will draw air from the room, or you can connect semi flexible aluminium duct to pipe the air in from outside. Had we bought the Springdale as I had been expecting, with that you would buy a plenum box to fix onto the bottom for ducted air input.

I used Pex Al Pex 16 by 2 for the UFH in my last house and didn't have a problem. It's a 2 person job unwinding a big coil like that, but generally Pex Al Pex bends and stays bent. So it wasn't a question of is this the right pipe, but rather would you trust a product from Germany that's half the price of anything I can find in the UK, has all the correct approvals, but no sign of a manufacturers name that I can see in any of the photographs.

I am sourcing all my UFH components individually this time rather than buying a kit. And first off, I need the pipe. This one from Germany is coming in at typically half the price I can find anything in the UK https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/PEX-AL-PEX-Underfloor-heating-pipe-pipe-16mm-x-2mm-300m-rolls-WRAS-approved/263265218704?hash=item3d4bd47090:g:NbYAAOSwZZlZ5FZI The same stuff appears to be on sale by several different German sellers for almost identical prices. Would you feel safe using it?

My concern is from OUR local supplier it would be vastly inferior glass units.

That's looking great. I am sure that will be much more of a feature than my stairbox stairs.

Wait for the plasterer. Then decide and lay the floor. Fit the stove and a kitchen, then move in. Then finish the other 90%

Well we have a stove now. Not what I expected, I was convinced we were going to buy the Springdale and yesterdays tour of all the stove shops was just to prove it was the only option. Not so. SWMBO did not like the Springdale, it was "too traditional" She did like the look of the firebox, which is basically a Springdale wrapped in a more squared off box. But the trouble with that model is although they do a version on a base, it is a solid base with no log storage. However we did find this: It's a Mendip Sroves Churchill Log store version. At a shade over 4Kw it's a larger stove than the Springdale but it does have the room sealed air intake at the bottom already built in as an 80mm diameter hose entry without having to buy a separate plenum box. Unusually for the ducted air intake stoves it will also burn smokeless coal. It's list price was £1067 and I would normally have rejected that on price, but this one was being offered as an ex display at a discount that made it not so much more than I was expecting to pay for the Springdale. It will be some time before I actually install it.

The usual weakness on many dishes is the LNB arm. Not helped by the design of some is a U shaped hollow tube specially designed to fill with water and rot from the inside. I have 3 "guy wires" on mine,

Don't expect a cheap sky dish to last more than about 5 years on the coast. Even here on the East, the coastal ones rot away in no time. being inland a bit it seems okay here and I am still using the same one I took down from someone's chimney 15 years ago.

You have to be at the foot of a steep hill or behind trees to not be able to receive satellite tv. A rough rule of thumbs is you need to be able to see the sun between about 10AM and 11AM on the spring equinox. If you can't you won't get satellite tv.

A lot of tv's have a "Hotel mode" that disables all the setup menu's. Well worth investigating and enabling that if it has that function.