ProDave

^^^ or just buy wood bits that fit an SDS

The link works for me. But try this one http://www.bimblesolar.com/batteries/nifebatteries That's direct to bimble solar's website rather than one of their ebay listings.

The idea that I am "wedded to" is that you should be able to move from a 5 bedroom house, to a 3 bedroom house just 2 doors up the road, so same area etc, and you should be able to release a bit of equity in the process. It certainly should NOT cost you money to downsize. That is the big issue. It's not as though our new house is anything unique or has any expensive features,. and even doing a lot of the work myself (a lot more than I originally intended) I think I will struggle to achieve that financial goal. I have already formed the opinion, if I had just paid a builder to build a complete house ready to move into, then there is no way I would achieve that.

Sorry to say, I think your builders "messed up" here. Our Rationel doors have basically an aluminium theshold bottom plate. As delivered, there is a wooden piece then fixed to the bottom of the door. Our builders removed the supplied wooden piece and then packed up the door after discussing with us the floor make up and finished floor height. The reason for removing the supplied wooden piece was to allow tiles or floor boards to slide under the aluminium threshold. It sounds like your builders didn't discuss this with you? Did they leave the supplied wooden piece still there, or remove it and sit the aluminium threshold straight on the slab? Could you argue it's "their" mistake, and therefore their solution, including any making good to the render etc if they move the whole door and frame up?

These are about the only ones I can find for sale. http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/12V-bank-Nickel-Iron-NiFe-Battery-400ah-10-x-1-2V-cell-/292003393183?var=&hash=item43fcc22e9f:m:m3iaFCECxzgoMsUm4Ksm4bw That example is 10 400Ah cells so a total of 4.8KWh of storage. (Not sure what that translates to as actual usable storage) for about £2000 They list several packages of different sizes. Shame they are the wrong end of the country to me so no easy way to collect and avoid the high transport costs. The rest of the parts to make a DIY system are much cheaper, I would probably make my own charger, buy a couple of cheap Chinese grid tied inverters from ebay and control it all with an arduino. So given you might get say 3KWh of real usable storage, at a total price to build it of no more than £3000, that's £1000 per KWh of storage for a system that should last a lifetime with no battery replacement costs. Is it viable? Well say I could use all 3KWh every day (unlikely but it makes the maths simple) in a year, I would be able to use 1095KWh of otherwise "wasted" solar PV, lets round that down to 1000KWh per year. Assuming I pay 15p per KWh, that has the potential to save me £150 per year in electricity costs. So that is still going to take 20 years of use, to pay back it's capital costs. So it's marginal to say the least. But at least after it has paid for itself, the batteries would keep on going. What is the typical cost per KWh of storage, for the present commercial packaged offerings?

Have you costed "pence per KWh" at battery renewal time? I.e how much it costs to replace a complete battery stack, compared to how many KWh of (free solar pv) power it has stored and delivered to you? This is my main sticking point that any battery with a life of less than say 10 years ends up as rather expensive "free" electricity. Which is why I am leaning heavily towards NiFe What sort of costs and how many suppliers did you find for NiFe?

I have a "plan B" to get the house finished but the funds for that won't be available for another 14 months. I will use that time to slowly progress the build doing the low budget items with what I have. The reason I am "down" about it, is the plan was to downsize with a reasonable expectation of releasing some capital for retirement. If I had know it was likely to cost me money to downsize I simply would not have bothered. But I am now at a point where I simply have no option but carry on.

If it's like any other forecast remotely linked to brexit, then the reality will be an increase in house sales.......

Before you chuck it, check the brushes. Almost certainly what's wrong and almost certainly replacable.

Thinner tile just for the entrance area, and pretend you always intended to do that?

I am downsizing from a 5 bedroom house (currently trading as a B&B) to a 3 bedroom house. I had hoped to release some equity tied up in property in this process (not an unreasonable expectation) to help retirement plans. If it gets to the point that the housing market really is so dire (because nobody wants to move to the Highlands at the moment?) I might VERY begrudgingly swallow the bitter pill and accept I am not going to release any equity, but I WILL NOT EVER pay to downsize, so I will not ever sell the old house for less than the cost of building the new one. It is all a mess and a huge worry at the moment, and I know who I blame but I am not going to keep on about it and launch into my normal rant.

As I have said we are building close to trees but not THAT close. One of the things stated about trees is they remvce water and dry out the ground. Well that is not a problem we have, our water table is always very high (bottom of the valley with a burn running through the garden), so with or without trees I can't see the ground ever drying the depth our foundations are. In a recent "worlds most amazing houses" was one built amongst trees, with some tree trunks left just inches from the house walls. That was built on screw piles iirc.

AER= ANNUAL Equivalent rate, so they are expecting 8% each year or 40% over the term (not allowing for compounding) Why am I suspicious of this? Icelandic bank anyone?

What I was getting at with TF was at your proposed future floor height, build in a horizontal ring beam of 8 by 2 timber. That can be plasterboarded over for now as it would be flush with the wall. Later on, cut away the plasterboard and fit the floor on joist hangers fitted to this horizontal 8 by 2.

This does not sound to dissimilar to what we are doing. Upstairs is a warm roof with vaulted ceilings. In one (daughters) bedrom it is being kept open as a full height space, then with a mezanine floor above the small bedroom. Our own bedroom has a higher than normal ceiling height of about 2.8 metres so is then closed off to give us some loft space, while the area above the landing and bathroom has a normal 2.4 metre ceiling and a larger loft space you can almost stand up in. So translating this to your scenareo, I think you are meaning a double height space that you can later put a floor in to create an upstairs? Just make sure you build in something substantial to fix joists to when you are ready.

this is very true of our situation. We are downsizing from a 5 bedroom to 3 bedroom house. The new house will no doubt be worth less than the old larger house. But the lack of a buyer for our old house might mean eventually we have to lower the price to sell it. Then we get dangerously close to the situation where the old house sells for less than it has cost us to build the new one. A point I WILL NOT cross. I maintain that in the present market up here, a self builder would be doing very well indeed if they could just sell their newly built house for what it has cost them to build it.

Are you not having an internal battened service void for cables? if not, why not?

Did your SE not notice the tree? I ask, because we are building close to Willow Trees, which everyone will tell you are the worst. Our SE came to the site twice, and I dug 3 test pits for him down to about 2 metres deep, so he could assess the ground conditions. The only things he seemed to stipulate were that we dug down to the predominant sandy clay sub soil, and he specified a strong C35 concrete mix for the foundations and a heavy duty reinforcing mesh in the foundations. By the time I had stripped the organic top soil off the whole house site, and then dug the strip foundations, we were down to between 1.5 and 2 metres deep, but really the trenches from the stripped level were not that deep at all. building control just came and looked and said go ahead with the pour, because all they needed to know about the site, including the trees, was on the drawings. I have to say, I was surprised how few tree roots we encountered, and those we did find were tiny, but then the willow trees grow on the banks of a burn so let me guess where they might get most of their water from?

Was a structural engineer involved in the design? Was it full plans approval? was the tree shown on the BC drawings? P.S imho nothing wrong with a suspended timber floor, that was my choice.

I am not a fan of electric boilers. I just do not "see the point" If you are going to heat by direct electricity then a panel heater is far far simpler. the only "reason" for an electric boiler is radiators look better than panel heaters and you can call it "central heating" in all other respects individual panel heaters will do the job just as well. if you really must go direct electric (rather than storage, with it's own set of "issues" I would only consider it on an Economy 10 tariff If you look at the cheap rate times for E10 you get a few hours in the morning, morning warm up taken care of at cheap rate. A few cheap hours in the early afternoon, the "come home from work" warm up at cheap rate. It then just leaves the early evening at peak rate, when having a really well insulated house would help minimise what you have to use at that time.

I shall watch this topic very carefully as it's close to my heart. I strongly suspect by the time I have an EPC and the cash to buy solar PV panels, the FIT will no longer exist (it's already at a rate hardly worth paying the "MCS premium" for) In that case I am now thinking of DIY installed non FIT solar PV so that means ensuring near 100% self usage. So battery storage seems pretty essential. Two things bug me about packaged systems, firstly the battery life, and secondly, the details of how it operates. I am strongly minded to build a DIY system so I can program the algorithm about when and how it decides to charge and discharge the batteries, and have the ability to tweak that to suit our needs. But also, I really want to use some "fit and forget" batteries which keeps pointing towards NiFe (WWII submarine battery technology) but to buy them new they are expensive, something i am hoping will change.

Hi and welcome (back) Glad you managed to find our new home. Hopefully this one will last as the way it is set up is as a collective, so not at the whim of one person to close it if he has had enough. Start a post and tell us more about where you got to, with pictures, we like pictures. I sympathies 100% about selling your old house. we have been on the market 2 years now. Still plodding along slowly with a small pot of money, trying to concentrate on all the jobs that cost little but take a long time.

Safe zones are 150mm in from a corner and 150mm down from the ceiling, then horizontally or vertically from each accessory. If you stick to BC switch and socket heights, then I like to leave a gap in the battens at 450mm and 1150mm from floor level. That gives you the option to run cables horizontally from sockets and (less likely) horizontally from a light switch, without having to bother drilling holes in the battens. No you can't run cables along at skirting board height (though plenty do, but where do the nails holding the skirting board go?. Oops.) Just run cables round the room from socket to socket, then up to the ceiling void where you can't continue that route for whatever reason.

Never tried different thicknesses. Personally I think it's best to stick to one so you just buy a big pile of it and don't worry about running out of one size. Are you saying yo want ply directly behind the plasterboard to "fix" things to? Your electrican will hate you for that. I would not do that personally but I do see the point in putting something behind the PB just where you are expecting to hang something heavy, e.g flat screen tv (but I have never yet failed to fix one just by finding the studs to screw into) P.S re earthwool vs pumped in insulation. I was originally going to have the pumped in stuff, but that was a job that needed doing by A.N.Other. I then looked a bit deeper. Earthwool was half the price of the pumped in stuff, and was a DIY job, and gives virtually the same U value overall . Having done it now (well 90% of it, still working on it) I love the fact I am able to fill then board each section and it's all done. No need to get someone in to pump in the stuff which due to a few peculiarities in my build would have been a logistical nightmare to get it all done in one go.

My 2 pence worth in no particular order. On the inside you NEED a service void (please tell me you were not planning to run cables in the insulation through the JJI's) So inside out: Plasterboard 25mm by 50mm battens vertically following each JJI this gives a service void inside the sealed envelope for cables etc. Use thicker battens where you want to run pipes. Vapour control / air tightness membrane so the whole of the building is sealed on the inside OSB (cheaper than ply usually) only needs to be say 9mm JJI joists filled with insulation. Knauf Earthwool Frametherm 35 is a lot nicer to work with. 9mm OSB again it does not need to be thick, it's not for racking strength (your steel frame provided that) just to hold the insulation in. Breathable membrane Counter battens You usually need vertical and horizontal battens to give free air flow. battens cladding Arguably you could forget the inner OSB layer. A house near me that I am wiring shortly has JJI joists filled with Frametherm batts, then just the air tightness membrane (helping to) hold the batts in, battens then plasterboard, but I think personally a solid layer to keep the insulation in place is a better solution.