ProDave

Can nobody do maths here? 1,500,000 houses over 5 years = 300,000 per year = THE EXISTING TARGET (that has not been met for many yers)

Hinge the door the other side otherwise the open door blocks the bedroom doorway.

I count 154 "points" I used to estimate on the basis of 1 hour per point. So 154 hours. I am out of touch with labour rates "down south" but a few years ago I would be quoting just under £5K for the labour for that. I would guarantee southern rates will be a lot higher than that, £7K for labour would not surprise me in the least. Materials will add up, they could easily be another £7K depending what you want.

We have 8 houses sharing a 100KVA transformer which is where they derived the 12KVA that they offered me with no upgrade charges. They don't seem to apply diversity. What surprised me was when installed it was the same size cable as they would use for a 21KVA supply and they fitted a 100A fuse. You could ask what fuse they would fit in the supply head if you accepted a "3KVA" supply? I think the smallest would be 40A which would amount to 9KVA But with that many houses on one 100KVA transformer it does sound like it is time they upgraded it, and it still looks like they are trying to get you to foot part of the bill for that.

That would work if done as a full wet room. You would want to avoid too much water splashing on your door and into the WC area. For that in our wet room (shower in corner) I use two of the cheap over bath shower screens. Hung on the wall so the bottom is 100mm above the floor and the top is about eye level for me. The don't stop all the water splashing but most of it, a little will splash over the top and there will be some bounce at the bottom, but generally it keeps the non shower parts of the wet room dry. when not in use they fold almost flat against the wall.

Up here, if you go above 5 properties on a private road, that triggers a requirement for you to upgrade the road to highways standards and the council to adopt it. Check if that applies where you are. And one of the plots we considered buying had a clause in the planning, no building on the first 3 metres from the road, to allow for a compulsory purchase to widen the single track road.

Don't laugh but when I had to do a similar thing, I cut out cardboard shapes to scale of bath, shower wc, basin etc and their respective activity spaces and played a game of tetris with them to find a layout that would fit.

Your present system probably has a cold water tank in the loft, often a very flimsy plastic thing, did you worry about that?

My take was install all the cables you think you will need, but only connect the ones you actually have a use for. Like you I installed 3 to each tv point but I can never see all 3 being used. Partly my reason for installing several was in the event of some cable type superseding hdmi, I can probably use 2 network cables and a clever adapter to replicate the next standard in AV cabling. I think what I am saying is you won't need a 48 port switch.

If those sustainability guidelines were applied here, none of the plots in our road would have got planning permission.

Post the exact model number, I would be surprised if it can't do cooling. It might need an internal switch changing to enable that function. Cooling to radiators will work, just keep an eye on cooling water temperature so you don't get condensation on the radiators. ASHP cooling on a sunny day is free if you have solar PV as well.

The clue is in the name "evaporative". It "cools" by evaporating water. So it puts water vapour into the air. What else do you think will happen to the humidity in the room? Many will say this sort of "cooler" is snake oil. The only way to cool the room, is to remove heat from it. Something your ASHP is likely capable of doing?

And the corresponding downstairs layout see we can see what any upstairs walls can transfer load to.

And where in those views does your SE think a steel is needed?

I am surprised BC passed it without trickle ventilators or mvhr.

I am very surprised that if you have all the "normal" holes in a building as listed above for individual extraction and trickle vents that he achieved an air test of less than 3. Surely it would be easy to open a couple of windows a crack just to get a worse air test than make permanent unwanted holes.

MVHR is NOT all about air tightness of a house, at least not just about how air tight you can make the fabric of the building. If i take the example of my last house, my first self build. I don't believe the basic fabric was leaky. But because it did NOT have mvhr, instead it had: Kitchen cooker hood exhausting through a 100mm hole. Utility room extract fan, venting through a 100mm hole. 4 bathrooms, each with it's own extract fan, exiting through a 100mm hole. A stove that drew it's combustion air from the room, and for that it had an air inlet vent built into the hearth do admit outside air into the room directly behind the stove. and because it was not room sealed, the stove flue effectively was vented to the room. We also had a standard letterbox in the front door, a cat flap, and every window had a trickle ventilator which even when "shut" I doubt were particularly air tight. That is what a "standard" house has as a collection of big holes to let air in and out uncontrolled. Fit mvhr and we have NONE of those. So regardless of what air tightness test you get, simply eliminating those collection of huge holes to be replaced by one inlet and one outlet and an mvhr system is bound to be a big improvement. Of course because everything was thought about this time, the WBS is room sealed drawing all it's combustion air directly from outside.

5kW will be plenty. Almost certainly way more than you need for heating and cooling the building and adequate for heating a 300L water tank. I and many others have that size of ASHP for heating a whole house.

To save others pondering whether to open an unknown 28MB file, here is a shrunk version. Us, last weekend:

Doing really well to be under £1K per square metre.

We got all ours mail order from Boston Seeds.

This is a real thing. My BIL suffers from it. He went for a walk up a hill near the sea, fine on the way up, turned around to look out to sea. The land sloping gently downwards to the sea gave him an attack. He had to crawl down the hill on all fours. It must run in the family. I took his 2 children on a hill walk in Wales, we got to a narrow ridge between 2 peaks, the stuff that for me is the highlight of the walk. The daughter freaked out and we had to find a different way down to avoid it. I guess if this is a problem for you, don't design your house with a galleried landing with glass balustrades? design it with stairs enclosed both sides by a wall and opening to an enclosed landing.

I would just heat and bend the connecting bit of pipe for that. Alternative off the ball idea. 50mm SW coupler. 50mm to 32mm reducer Note the reducer is offset. SW one in one way up, the other in the other way up. That gives you a straight coupling with about 30mm offset.

Show the specific problem you are trying to solve with full dimensions.

You need to take some bricks off and excavate in an archaeological fashion to determine at what level the ground has sunk. It could be the aco drain is leaking and the top layer of sand has washed away, or it could be something deep down that has collapsed like previously made up ground, a collapsed drain, a leaking water pipe or just about anything else.