ProDave

Welcome to the forum Steptoe

So normal common law allows you to prune overhanging trees from a neighbour as long as you offer the cuttings back to them. So what if you didn't know they were protected by a TPO, why would you know? they are not your trees and not on your land? If you had a goat, and you parked say a vehicle on your land under the tree, the goat go on the roof and ate all it could reach, would the goat go to prison? All devils advocate of course

We had one round (wife let him make an appointment after a cold call) What he was selling was a "device" that would increase the yield of my existing solar PV system with claims of up to double the yield. He wanted about £3K for this device. There was no technical sales pitch, just "this is what it will do" After he had been swept out of the door I looked it up on their very long website name (part of the Everest group) what they were actually selling was a "voltage optimiser" and all it would do is prevent your inverter tripping out on over voltage at full production. Now I know for a fact mine never does that, so the sum total of what this device would do for me is zero. How are these people allowed to miss sell stuff like this that will only benefit a tiny minority who have such over voltage issues (and there are usually better ways to solve that over voltage issue anyway)

Interesting statement. We have several willow trees on our plot and we are building less than 10 metres from some of them. Contrary to popular belief we are building with just normal strip foundations. The Structural Engieer who made two site visits and witnessed me dig test holes to determine the soil conditions was not the least concerned about the closeness of the willow trees or the fact they might suck the site dry. We just have normal depth strip foundations. Perhaps there is a slight bit of "design" there in that he called for a strong concrete mix for the strip founds and reinforcing mesh in the concrete. Another factor may of course be the trees are right next to the burn so they are not exactly short of a water supply. Our site never dries completely and in winter can be quite wet with a very high water table. Also when digging the foundations we didn't encounter any significant tree roots.

4KW (or actually 16A) is the maximum they have to accept. Any more than that and they can refuse connection if their network cannot handle it.

In Scotland you need an EPC to let a property. There is a limit that it has to be better than, but I don't recall what it is. You also need an EICR for the electrical install, PA testing for all appliances, smoke heat and CO alarms, mains powered and interlinked. There is talk of introducing a legionairs test on the water system. Oh and you have to register as a landlord.

I was just giving the landlords perspective. I think storage heaters are an abysmal form of heating, but you have to admit from a landlords perspective what is not to like? they are relable, need no routine maintenance and rarely go wrong. An oil boiler is fine but needs an annual service. And lets hope your tenant fills the oil tank before it runs out. Mine never did. He always waited until the boiler stopped working. Got the bone dry tank filled. Then called me to come and bleed the air out of the oil line to get it running again. Every year, without fail. If the radiators were there and in god order that might be enough to sway it cost wise in favour of an oil boiler. Another off the peg idea is an electric boiler. Combined with an E10 tariff and a reasonably insulated house you can get most of your direct heating at the cheap rate. I forget the exact times but it's something like 4AM to 7AM so that's your morning warm up at cheap rate. Then 1PM to 4PM so a late afternoon warm up at cheap rate. Then again 8PM to midnight at cheap rate. So for most people, about the only time you might need to use peak rate to heat the boiler might be in the evening if it has cooled down too much after the late afternoon warm up. Electric boilers have the advantage of no regular servicing and pretty reliable. Combine that with a direct unvented water tank and that to gets topped up regularly at the cheap rate so plenty of cheap rate hot water.

How old is it? how well insulated? For simplicity for rental E10 and storage heaters (though I would not have them for my own house) virtually nothing to go wrong and no servicing or safety certificates needed. A tenant won't understand a heat pump. They struggle to understand things like why a bathroom fan operates (and then complain about the mould when they have disabled the fan) I would not personally let a tenant play with real fire in a house I owned.

My policy is via buildstore and it transfers to the remaining period of ordinary insurance upon completion. I would be inclined to renew the self build insurance a bit longer until you get completion. Whatever you do, renew or put a new policy in place before the old one expires. One member had difficulty when he let his self build insurance lapse and they then tried to treat it as a new policy with existing buildings and things got complicated.

And in inside stop valve to turn off the outside tap.

If there's any chance you have to undo it to make alterations I would go compression.

Ah gate valves. Work of the devil. Turn them off too hard and you can strip the thread, result, no matter how many times you wind the handle it does not open. Had to replace more than one that would not open. PITA I would not fit them.

The local earth thing is because you will be using power tools etc and with a PME earth, the earth might no exactly be at local potential. So for the site socket and e.g a static caravan you bang in your own earth rod. There is nothing stopping you connecting the DNO provided earth to the house when it is built.

So you just need to terminate the SWA direct into the CU at the house end. Choose your CU carefully. I fitted a Hager one recently (I used to like Hager) but was disappointed to find it only had square knock outs. I know if you chose a BG CU at the moment they have a good delection of round knock outs that should take the SWA gland directly into the CU. It baffles me that wholesalers don't advertise such important things like which CU has how many of what size and shape knock outs and where.

No special requirements for the wall, just an amendment 3 compliant CU No need for an isolator unless you want one. Is the meter going there or is that remote mounted somewhere else?

A friend of mine is looking at a similar hybrid system combining a heat pump and an outside oil boiler.

What does your plumber recommend? Is he saying the cold feed into the house is poor? Blocked pipe coming in (mud in the pipe?)

I would seriously look at extending the ground floor by that 1 metre so it enlarges the living room and solves the shading issue of the living room window and obviously solves the issue for upstairs as well. Yes it's a new strip of foundations for that bit but probably no harder or more expensive than trying to cantilever the upstairs (which would only solve the shading issue for upstairs anyway) I sometimes despair why the original designer stepped it back like that without regard to the shaddow it would cast.

I think the issue of whether to use a passive slab, and what timber frame system to put on it are mostly two separate issues, though of course it is nice if you can get the whole thing as one package from one company. Slab first: Not all sites are suitable for a passive slab. There are cases where a passive slab may actually be easier than any other foundation system, but I don't think so in our case. Our issue was a sloping site and wanting all parts of the site raised from their existing ground level and the finished floor level in some places nearly a metre above finished landscaped ground level. So firstly we would have had to dig out a lot of soil to get trough the vegitation layer, then built it all up again with inert infill and some more. This built up area would have to extend some way beyond the actual passive slab, so either the whole site would need to be raised, which would work out rediculous compared to the neighbours, or there would be a "plinth" all around the house before dropping down to the garden level which would have it's own complications. So in our case it was a lot simpler to use a conventional strip foundation system and use a suspended timber floor downstairs. Not to everyone's liking but there is no reason not to achieve a well insulated air tight house with that. Next the frame. I found it very hard to find a solution. I did approach mbc but there was a hickup and they never did get around to giving us a quote. I looked at Touchwood, to expensive and Beatie Passive, again a lot of up front costs for design and licensing that just did not work for us. I tried some of the local "standard" timber frame companies with a view to taking their standard product and improving the insulation and air tightness details, but as soon as they got a sniff I wanted something better than their standard offering, refused to quote. In the end it was a local eco house builder that sorted it for us. The local firm specialises in modular built buildings and our design did not fit into what they do, so the compromise was they designed it, and it was built by a local firm of builders who did the foundations, then built and erected the frame.

You are trying to over complicate it. The "hot water" output of the time clock is what I normally use to control the boiler heating up the thermal store. So just that switched output and the tank thermostat on the thermal store, probably the middle one. A tank stat has quite a lot of hysteresis (unlike a room stat) so once the TS has heated up and the boiler shut off it will need to drop several degrees before the stat turns on again and calls for heat from the boiler. Yes you could have two stat's and a set / reset arrangement to give a wider hysteresis but you won't do that with all off the shelf parts. The second part is then use the heating output of the programmer, in conjunction with room thermostat(s) and zone valve(s) to turn on the pump to circulate water from the TS to the radiators or UFH. And the third part if you have a stove is an over temperature stat on the tank that turns ON when the tank gets too hot. This should override the heating programmer and rooms stats and force it to dump heat to the radiators or UFH.

Are you worried about excessive heat gain through the roof? If so then the key to combatting that is the amount of insulation and importantly the type of insulation. And that is no different between a flat roof or a pitched roof. Solar gain through too many windows is a different question. MBC should know about fitting enough of the right sort of insulation to ensure you don't have a problem.

Back to LED lights in general. I have always been a fan of flourescent lights, particularly in kitchens as they are not a point source of light so cast very little in the way of shaddows. but I am outvoted as they are "old fashioned", look horrible and "hum" But recently I had cause to fit an "LED" flourescent light. Standard switch start flourescent fitting but with an "LED tube" and an "LED starter" I have to say I was impressed with the quality and colour of the light, the instant start, and total lack of hum. And at 25W it's less than half the power of a standard 58W flourescent tube. Now all i need is someone to make a nice looking fitting to pt them in.

I can't see any problem there. Just cut off the 13A plug supplied and fit a 5A one.

We have stony soil here (admittedly mostly rounded glacial pebbles and boulders) and it is normal just to bury mdpe pipe direct in the ground without even any sand.

Not all earth sheltered houses have big concrete retaining walls. At least one GD house had a "retaining wall" built of stacks of old tyres rammed full of earth. Vary labour intensive, but virtually zero cost in materials. When we came to the Highlands in 2003, we looked at 3 building plots. One was on a very steep hillside and would have needed some probably expensive under building, and any garden you had would be small and terraced. The second one had only a small area of ground at the "higher level" before it dropped steeply down to a lower level. Planning dictated the house be built on the upper level as the lower level (beside a river) was prone to flooding. We were put off that one as it appeared someone had recently tipped a load of soil to try and increase the area of the upper level, which left us thinking again of lots of expensive under building. It was therefore a no brainer when we looked at the third plot which was the largest, the flattest, and the cheapest. One has to wonder how the agents arrived at their pricing for the other more difficult plots.