ProDave

Downlights in a conventional house have bugged me for years. Not only were they a terribly energy hungry form of lighting (not so bad now with LED lamps) but they put a bloody great hole in the air tight and insulation layers when used upstairs in 99% of houses. I used to hate them, and lost count of how many times I have removed a perfectly good 58W flourescent and replaced it with 300W or often more of halogen downlights. Likewise switches and sockets. In most of the housing stock I work in, on a windy day when you remove a switch or a socket, a cold howling gale comes out of the hole. In a well insulated house that has had some attention to air tightness in it's construction, and a warm vaulted roof, you will have NONE of those problems. A good test of an air tight home is on a windy day, open one door or one window, and you won't feel a draught and it won't blow shut (or further open) Insulating your entire roof space including the eaves spaces would use less insulation (less surface area than insulating down the ashlar walls and across the ceiling) so cost less, and would be much easier to detail correctly, and you would not have to take any special measures to seal cables, pipes, ducts etc that pass through the eaves space. In your case if you stick to your plan, you are going to have a particular problem with any switches or sockets on your ashlar walls. So much of the improvements we can make to buildings is not just about extra insulation, it's about attention to details to prevent massive air leaks. One such being create an air tight structure, then a service void within that before the plasterboard, so all cables and pipes have a free run without penetrating the building structure or it's air tight layer.

I don't see how vaulted ceiling is "bad" fr the environment. Yes is increases the heated volume. BUT it is a LOT easier to get the detail right and maintain continuous air tightness and avoid services penetrating the insulation layer. So I suspect in practice a house with a warm roof vaulted ceiling will be a lot more eficcient than a cold roof loft with lots of leaks in the insulation layer. Ours is room in roof, which is pretty much the standard for housing in the countryside up here, so part of it is habitable space anyway. It just made so much more sense to enclose the whole lot, loft storage space as well, inside the insulated envelope.

This is why it's good to discuss this before you are at the point of no return. You have a room in your roof, so most of it will already be insulated at rafter level. So insulate the entire roof at rafter level. It makes it easier to detail, to join the roof insulation to the wall insulation, and gives you 2 warm eaves spaces for storage or services.

This thread reminds me of a loo in student digs that was so small it had knee holes cut in the door.

In Scotland you must have an accessible downstairs toilet and demonstrate you have space to install an accessible downstairs shower in the future. Oh how relaxed things are down south. As noted if you can't comply with the accesability requirements, don't fit it yet, just make a cupboard that happens to have a capped off drain fitting......

I wired a new house this year where he started out with trickle vents in the windows and mechanical extraction ventilation., but he saw the light and converted part way through the build for mvhr. My mvhr unit cost just over £500 and all the ducting and vents from BPC was about £1K so you should comfortably get a system for under £2K Have you got a SAP assesment of your build yet and any idea of your heating costs? Mine I expect to cost less than £250 per year to heat it, and there are several on here with even better houses with lower costs. It really is worth putting in the detail now to get it right, ignore it now and it's a major job to improve it later.

If only I didn't have a wife who won't accept anything second hand........

That unit does look very much like the one my plumber friend had, particularly the control panel unit looks the same. I wonder if the default settings make far too much use of the heater, hence your and my friend initially having high energy consumption. Why do they refer to the heater as an electric heat battery? it is anything but a battery.

I will be interested to hear the answer to this. Does the ASHP have any power monitoring i.e. to measure how many KWh it has used? I don't think mine does so I plan to install a KWh meter for it so I have a measure of heating power independent of other electriciy usage. My plumber friend initially complained of high heating bills. He got he heat pump installer back to check things over and they said it was "some wrong settings" on the mvhr. I don't know any more details.

As I have said our community council looked at such a system. It would have covered about 100 homes some spread quite far apart. Some of the target homes were like us, almost at the edge of wired broadband availability, and many others who can't get any wired broadband. But nobody tendered for the work. To me that suggests they know some other form of upgrade is in the pipeline. There was a planning app for an EE 4G mast that would I am sure cover most of the target houses. When that becomes live I will look at what 4G packages are available for data. I have recently just given up using the landline for telephone calls (incoming calls only now) BT's call charges are simply too high and keep going up. Instead I now pay £6 per month for all the mobile calls I need. It is beginning to look line a wired landline is becoming redundant.

The point with the basement, is you use the U values of the walls floor and roof, but to calculate heat loss you don't use outside temperature, you use ground temperature which will be pretty stable all year round, especially at the floor depth.

What is a "garden basement"? You talk of 1000mm of soil? Are you building a basement, then filling it with soil to have a garden down there? or have I had too much single malt tonight?

I suspect the "are able to access" clause will translate to "if you are prepared to pay the high connection fee" Time will tell.

The existing network is decrepit. When we had our new connection it took them about 2 weeks to actually get a connection from our house to the exchange. they were grubbing around to try and find a spare working pair on each of the several legs of cable between us and the exchange. Speaking to one of the engineers doing it, I got a pretty good idea of the route it took, and from our village it goes down to completely the wrong end of the town, then runs the length of the town to get to the exchange.

Not related to the breakfast bar. That standpipe in the washing machine or dishwasher space will almost certainly mean the appliance will not go back far enough and will stick out and look awkward. Change that for a washing machine sink trap.

What is the wording of the "timber window" requirement? Rationel do timber windows, indeed all their windows are timber. You can get them as painted timber finish, or aluminium clad timber. Unless your timber window requirement says they must be stained or varnished timber (i.,e timber coloured) I can't see why you can't use rationel. Unfortunately they stopped doing timber coloured windows some time ago. I am sure some f the other quality window suppliers like Nordan do timber coloured.

The way it was stated on the news is you can "demand" it. That is not quite the same as them responding to the demand? The Scottish Government did a similar thing to make high speed broadband "available" to all homes by about 2021 (I forget the exact date) My guess is remote properties who currently can only get BB by satellite will be "offered" it but at an astronomical price. The community Council here tried to get a faster rural broadband network installed, but that has stalled because none of the suppliers approached bothered to tender for the job.

Those barns need saving, if only as a bloody good covered work / storage space (it rains a bit in Wales) Possible future potential for a conversion?

I have been phoning around for some prices. For an impey 1200 by 900 tray with tile waste and 5 square metrre tanking kit: Plumbbase £645 William Wilson £560 Plumbstore £453 All including VAT. Still waiting for a price from TP. Jewson and plenty of others can't get them. No reply from the 2 on ebay that I have tried.

Hi and welcome to the forum. I am not sure if your "cottage" is the building on the left or the right? or do you own the whole lot? Looks like an interesting project.

What do you need to move in? For me personally if it was warm, had a working (not necessarilly finished) kitchen and a working bathroom, I would be in. Even if that meant climbing a ladder to go to bed. We thought about moving in just to sleep but with no kitchen or bathroom operational yet, we would still be using the 'van for those so decided it would be more trouble than it was worth. Some time next year when we can get a bathroom and some form of kitchen we will move in, a long time before it is finished.

When we built the last house we paid for the nhbc Solo for Self Build. That has now passed it's 10 years so arguably was as waste of money. This time round we have not bothered, we did get some quotes and the costs had more than doubled.

From my perspective, usually the "electrical design" was done by the architect in so far as every switch, light and socket is shown and oven and hob positions etc. The reality is I rarely follow that. I spend an hour or so walking round with the client, and a big black marker pen, discussing where to put switches, sockets lights etc. Invariably since the plans were drawn, a door or 2 has reversed it's swing, the kitchen layout has changed and the architect never got the sockets where they were wanted in the first place. If you are going to "pre design" this sort f thing, then you must pre design EVERYTHING that includes the kitchen in detail and all bathrooms in detail, and then not deviate from that detail design. I can see the merit in pre design if you are giving a builder a turn key package to build you a house ready to move into. But most self builders are more hands on and involved and like to tweak things as they go along.

In my case the bathroom UFH IS within the joist space. OSB support "trays" held in place by bearers screwed to the underside of the top member of the posi joists. Whern the floor deck goes down it touches the spreader plates. I put a few dabs of sticks like on each as I laid the floor to stop "creaking plates" The fiddly bit is threading the UFH pipe through the web where it needs o cross a joist. Ok on a small room with a short run but it would be a rel challenge doing this on a large room with a long length of pipe. Now back to my question: cheapest place to but impey trays and tanking kis?

Pushes the price of the tray up not to mention the price of the drain. It would work for one of them, but since the drain usually runs along the long side, I would have to cut a big notch in a posi joist which of course is a no.