Ferdinand

A Dualit one will last 25 years (ours did), and you can get spare parts (such as a set of reflector plates). The other is digital, and will not. It seems you can get it in a colour called Eucalyptus. They haven't fallen for Elephant's Breath, yet.

@Clark Kent Have you considered what is called "skirt insulation" - where you dig a trench round the outside and make it a French Drain * with 300mm (say) of insulation up against the outside of your house to a depth of (say) 600 or 900mm? The mechanism is that the soil temperature at that depth is pretty stable, and the ground under your house heats up over time because the thermal path away is now much longer. Having a warm ground reduces your heat loss downwards. You lose less on the neighbour side because their house extends around your boundary to them, heating up the ground there. Contraindications for this may be eg that there is a high water table, and water movement may steal your heat - which is what the French Drains can be there to divert to keep your patch dry. * French Drains are at their simplest gravel filled trenches with the gravel wrapped up in weed membrane. Easy to do if you need. I put a loose laid path of heavy slabs on top - you get a free hidden route to run pipes and cables.

Not sure that is quite correct -wasn't it Jeremy and that when he installed ufh on top of a 300mm eps raft that 8% of the ufh heat went downwards, not of all his heat lost from the house. Perhaps me putting too much on precise wording.

To add one further comment. Assuming you have a longish term commitment to this site, is there the opportunity to change the facts on the ground to some degree? For example can you plant a native woodland between your barn and viewpoints such as Public Footpaths or the road? Something like native trees surrounded by a temporary shelter belt of fast growing trees to be protection. So then in your scheme in N years time, you can argue that the property will not be very visible to the public. I did a housing estate, which ended up going to appeal. One of our consultants was a "disturbing the view" consultant, who drove round the landscape taking photographs of our site and how much it would disturb the views from other locations. "But what about my view" was one of the repeated objections, which can be shoehorned into "impact on amenity" if they try really hard. We had a "political no" from the Committee voting down the support from the Officer, and at Appeal the Planning Inspector walked onto site including about the distant complaints, asked where they were coming from, stared into the distance and said "I can't see it", and that - in AA Milne style - was that. F

Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh is the new Surbiton. From Good Farmer to Good Life in a decade.

Sorry to hear of your result. I haven't seen this thread previously, but "North Downs AONB" rings a few bells from general news cover. They have been very intransigent in preventing developments of facilities related to the English Wine Industry (see the Kent papers passim.), and seem to me to have quite a chocolate box view of history. Reading their 6 page submission, I note that the first 4 pages are chest-beating to the local council wallahs like King Kong in New York - this is how important we are and all these citations from planning and legal documents you have never heard of shows who writes the law around here. Your scheme does not get a look-in until nearly page 5 out of 6, and the argument is mainly applying general principles to your microscape, rather than detailed consideration of the merits. They do, however, have good points on things like roofing profiles, and perhaps in their implication of your not having addressed specific features of the local vernacular sufficiently. I also note that the AONB staff member / consultant is an MRTPI, who are the Big Daddies of the Planning Arena. My suggestions: 1 - Can you engage with the AONB at design stage? 2 - There may be value in getting a Planning Consultant who knows their procedures / material better than they do, and can win a game of citation-chequers on their home ground; there are always authorities both sides of a question. Look for someone who has got similar circumstances schemes to yours through. It may be less expensive than you expect - I would engage someone to advise from early on as needed on hourly rate (use sparingly and carefully), and then to take a designed scheme through planning on a fixed price with a bonus for success (we paid 3% of scheme value increase), with an option to handle an appeal. You want an MRTPI (ideally FRTPI) with local AONB experience; look at other applications, the local paper, and ask the horiest old git at the oldest local estate agency for a recommendation. (And remember, KD AONB are probably reading this thread.) ATB F

+1 I'll give them some credit for significantly boosting house building 2010 -> 2020 by various means. But now he Hail Mary butt-saving passes all seem to involve burning down everything, including such achievements as they have made. I think they know they are down the plughole, and it is about saving what is left of the South Eastern Tory heartland.

Various people were playing with them, but afaik not really 'normal' until the 1920s/1930s. IME cavity insulators do not like anything under 50mm. Happy to learn new information from others, of course.

You are wise to ask all this - good call. My thoughts, which also extend a bit beyond your questions. You can get a rough check on date of build by looking at versions of old maps (various online archives eg https://www.oldmapsonline.org/ or https://maps.nls.uk/os/), and seeing when it first appears. Are there any with a data plaque - it was common in that period? Looking at the pics 1890-1910 seems reasonable. At that date cavities are unlikely, but some were using experimental partial 2" cavities if a well built house. I have a 1910 ish house with some cavities, and well built out of *very* hard bricks. Such cavities will be useless for CWI. I'd suggest drawing a carefully measured inside-outside plan, getting thicknesses of walls - which should tell you something about your wall cavity widths vs standard or measured-in-situ brick sizes. You can also learn by looking at the brick pattern - is it headers or stretchers, where and how mixed? Extra skins may well be stretchers. You could do like a CWI contractor, and drill 12mm holes through mortar joints and insert a camera ("borescope"). How does it compare with any other "detached semis" in the area .. eg at the other end of the row? Has it been extended sideways? Roof angles the same? Symmetrical with yours? What is in the planning file? Try a visit to the Council Office to read all of it, or an FOI. What about the BCO file (a bit more difficult to get hold of)? Anything in the Local History Archives at the library? Can you see anything by reaching into the edges of your loft - either with a head torch perhaps with inspection mirror, or a cable-cam plugged into your mobile phone? Can you get down the gap to the next house? If not, you are somewhat buggered by the lack of access. At least it looks too wide to terminate, through trapping, a tumbling tabbycat. Are they all rendered at the back, or just yours? If it is only a few rendered, it is potentially hiding something. I suggest that you decide on drylining-over-insulation (or not) before pouring your hearts into decoration. Aim for as close as you can get to newbuild u-values. What are your floors? If suspended (ie wood) then consider insulating underneath, and perhaps more on top or just on top if solid - it is a big benefit. My way is 100mm or so rockwool and a staple gun through raising about every 3rd or 4th floorboard, addressing underfloor ventilation / dampness along the way to protect joists and a membrane on your floor to block air leaks. If you are air-tightening an old house, then ventilation needs as much attention as insulation as you are preventing it "breathing" in the way envisaged. Wishing you all the best. Ferdinand

Tanks @Marvin - good advice, I believe E or W facing can also succeed and also somewhat higher than 5m (estimating a normal roofline height). ATB.

Can I suggest an alternative? I'd think about an apex swift box, instead. The sizing looks about right for 6 or 10 nesting spaces. Something like this: A bit of due diligence needed, but I think it is preferable. eg These people do them in 42 or 45 roof angles, or can customise. https://peakboxes.co.uk/shop-swift-boxes All the best. Ferdinand

In those circs I would 1 - put one row of tiles along the worktop back, 2 - have the boxes immediately above that, leaving 3 - sockets in plaster, no need to make the plaster good (assuming you use the appropriate double-socket-box cutter) since there are no exposed chasings into plaster, and 4 - no need to cut all those tiles. (Just changed my Avatar from Little Miss Ditzy to Mr Lazy) (Mr Brave is also available, i you need one 🙂) F

What's a fir octopus? I prefer a mimic octopus:

OK @richo106, my comments and suggestions. 1 - Your De Longhi Pinguino dehumidifier Having read the manual for your device and watched the review at the bottom. The Pinguino is a combined Air Conditioner / Dehumidifier which generally afaics runs both modes to achieve what it decides is an appropriate balance, managed together. It normally gets rid of it's collected water I think via the aircon air outlet. I *think* that means that it cannot run as a pure dehumidifier, which means that you are unlikely to get the same levels of efficiency in terms of energy used per amount of water extracted. HOWEVER, you have it to hand - try it and see if it does the job - a bit of extra power costing a few £10s is nothing if it gets you working again 2-3 days more quickly, or manages a risk. Note that it seems to have a pipe outlet that you should be able to connect to a bucket by putting it on a chair or similar. 2 - Standard Dehumidifiers A classic dehumidifier has no external window-outlet, because the water goes into the drip tray / tank, or to an outlet where you connect a piece of hose pipe or similar. It will be controlled via a switch, timer, perhaps thermostat or humidistat. It may also include a small heater to help boost the air temperature to increase the water in the air, so that it can get more out. Drying out of the air encourages more to evaporate from the walls, which is the process until the plaster is dry. My domestic £149 (a few years ago) 10/ day domestic dehumidifier from B&Q has a 3 litre jug, lots of controls (timer, thermostat, humidistat) but no pipe outlet. Normal process is either to empty the tray/jug umpteen times, or to elevate the dehumidifier and run the pipe into a bucket or soft-bucket or shower tray etc, so you can leave it alone. Big commercial dehumidifiers come with an elevating pump that lets you put the dh on the floor (it may weigh 50kg to 100kg so you have little choice) and run the pipe to eg a sink. 3 - Practicalities Heating the place to 25C makes a hell of a difference, but afaik it is mainly the AIR that you want to heat - so suggest a fan heater is perhaps better than central heating. When you are there opening lots of windows and turning them all off may be more effective. If you can move it (or them) around spread-out places helps. It will work to do one room only with the door closed if you need to work there. For a dehumidifier to be working at high efficiency, the space needs to feel like walking into a swimming pool. (Check the specs on the DH in the manual as to conditions when the magical "X litres per day" 5x more than you are getting was measured - usually 30C / 80% RH.) That will then go off as you dry it out. Often the amount of water to be extracted is underestimated. Each 25kg bag of plaster used requires about 11 litres of water (2.5 gallons), so add up how many you have used and that is roughly how much water has to come out. How many bags of plaster did you use - x10 is how much water you need out in litres (ish). You can dry out particular rooms by setting up polythene curtains in doorways with gaffer tape and DPM. Plus at the end make sure that all the poor circulation nooks and corners are done properly. 4 - My suggestions. a - Do what you are doing to see how well it works. b - Get 2-3 of £10 hygrometer-thermometers to monitor. Your humidity will start at 80-90% and you need it down to about 50-55%. Do this anyway - you will always find these useful, even with drying washing. You will slowly get through them over time, as they don't bounce. https://www.amazon.co.uk/ThermoPro-TP50-Digital-Thermometer-Temperature/dp/B01H1R0K68/ c - To enhance, get a couple of £10 fan thermostat heaters from Screwfix, Toolstation or Argos in addition to your heating. Whack em in and set them to medium-high. Probably do this anyway - always useful to have eg https://www.toolstation.com/upright-fan-heater/p62624 d - If that isn't doing it enough, then look at a commercial dehumidifier or two, which will cost say £300-500 and you can get most of it back at the end, like scaffolding and other bits. I'd say these or similar are OK and decent value (plus the one I mentioned above): Watch availability dates - if it was me I'd snap up the refurbished version of the first one - looks like a steal at £300-380. Sell it on and you should get 80-90% back. Buy, don't hire. https://www.appliancesdirect.co.uk/p/ecd30/electriq-ecd30-dehumidifier https://www.appliancesdirect.co.uk/p/ecd50/electriq-ecd50-dehumidifier My thoughts and all the best. Not a time to pussyfoot too much, but also to act thoughtfully. Ferdinand

Need to think about this. Normal dehumidifier you don't need the hose, but this looks unusual. If in doubt, follow the manual !

There's no harm imo, as long as it has something firm to stand on, perhaps as a quick hit. If there is no source of moisture up there, then drying it out and closing the hatch should keep it that way. But if the loft is not draughty and the hatch is open reducing the humidity in the house should suck it out quickly. I would recommend a couple of the inexpensive £10 min/max thermometer-humidity meters to let you monitor. Like this one: https://www.amazon.co.uk/ThermoPro-TP50-Digital-Thermometer-Temperature/ F

Dehumidifier Tips and Recommendations. 1 - Remember DHs are specced at about 30C, so you need to heat it up as well. Good job we are all building well-insulated airtight houses. 2 - Buying, using and selling is a good plan, as so often. Either new or ebay. I have about 5 DHs, as I am an LL and need industrial ones to dry out houses being restored or if Ts ever flood it (only once). My biggest one weighs 60kg and does 60l/day, but my favourite is a Broughton CR 40, which is portable and compact, and in my experience shifts a lot of water: https://www.broughtoneap.co.uk/products/dehumidifiers/cr40/ (Still available secondhand or refurbished for about £200-400.) 3 - Also, what about using one of the Reversible Heat/Cool/Dehumidifier incorporating a heat pump that we were all talking about? a - Plug it in as a heater to boost the temperature for a half day using the heat pump heater - with the duct through the window in a baffle you create. Mine puts out 3.2kw for 1.3kw input - ish. b - Close window, and switch to dehumidifier mode. I have this one, Airflex 15 - there are others, which is domestic enough to keep to dry washing. £370 new. £300 refurbished. https://www.appliancesdirect.co.uk/p/airflex15/electriq-airflex15 You will also need an insulated ventilation duct.

It sounds very difficult. At least the floor area of the house would give you an estimate of the maximum multiplied by your 0.5m height. Here is a price suggesting ~£50 per cubic m for polybeads - which feels about right. May save for buying more, but will have fitting costs: https://ecclestons.com/product/10-cu-ft-expanded-polystyrene-bead-bags/ At £25 per sqm, that is the same material cost as a posh carpet, or decent tiles or laminate. The way full fill works is it can come in a tanker and is pumped in, usually after you have lined the space with polythene to keep moisture out (!) If you are not able to line, you need to pay a lot of attention to moisture and ground conditions. Also I think to keeping Roland out when he considers visiting; polybeads are probably toasty for rodents in winter. It has also been done with a material called LECA, which is Light Expanded Clay Aggregate - a clay version of an Aero Chocolate Bar, in granules. It is more resilient to moisture. Here are some "LECA insulation fill" prices in bags - looks pricey! https://www.specialistaggregates.com/advanced_search_result.php?search_in_description=1&keywords=Leca Insulation Fill Price&delivery=pallet That LECA is around £130 per sqm at 500mm thick, at which price you might be better off using Aerogel Spacetherm on top in a subfloor. I think you need to map your void - do you have access? If you can see it can you map it with a torch and an estate agent laser measure, a protractor and graph paper? Plan B: Can you do it on top as a raised insulated floor, instead? Plan C might be perimeter 'skirt' insulation in a trench round the house, and letting the ground heat up underneath. I do not know how an underfloor void affects that. Either way, it will need some careful staff work first. HTH Ferdinand

I'd consider moving the garage to the other side of the plot, and put it facing the road - where your site plan says "turning and parking". Or even moving it forward to be level with the house, so that you get all your S-facing back garden back, which is the plot's best feature. What is the status of the electric kit, the wayleave and the wording of the agreement? Can you just give them notice to move it off your land, as is often the case? It all depends on the detail of the agreement - I was able to tell an elec company to remove a medium voltage line (can link to the thread on BH if you like) supplying many thousands of people just by going through the notice process in the agreement. I'll stay off the layout as I think that is going to change majorly and others are all over it, except to say: 1 - Make your stairs a shallow angle 34-35 degrees not 40-42 if you can. Really helps when you become a little more frail. 2 - Provision for handrails, grabrails and things you will need now in your design (panels of ply in the walls to drill them to etc.) 3 - Generous walk in showers. 4 - Everything wheelchair useable. 5 - Provision for a lift. 6 - Plan your garden to need less maintenance as you get older. And I might on that plot think about a bungalow facing towards the back of the plot with some thought about what I want at either side depending on what I like to do in the sun morning and evening. ATB Ferdinand

Mine was expensive enough that I don't want to lose it. Albeit I did not pay +10k for the corresponding, less practical, VW or +20k for the corresponding, less practical, Audi which also comes with a reputation for driven-by-hoons.

I scraped the corner of my car on my front wall. I have left the scratches there in the hope of deterring anyone tempted to steal it by making them do a bit more work before passing it on.

I hope it has sufficiently strong bollards in it, unlike the one outside the Primary School in Wimbledon. Or the kind of rock that features in Rock Cam (personally I'd go for a bigger one). I'm a huge fan of the World Bollard Association, bith for its corporate objective of making BMWs extinct one at a time, and also for the Dogs and Bollards theme.

For a comparison, these are how my usage has worked out recently. Factors are: - It is Gas for heating, nearly all hot water (one electric shower), and cooking. - The A2A heat pump as described. CoP about 2->2.5, so puts out 2.5->3kw for 1>1.5kW of input. - I have a new air-fryer cooker which I have been using quite extensively -> transfer from some wok cookery on the gas, but also from the Electric Oven. - I have a solar array put in in 2016 which reduced my annual electricity consumption by something like 30-35% like for like (finger in the air estimate). If I go for more electrical heating that will work the other way. - Living on my own in a largish 4 bed house (200 sqm approx). Usage numbers. - During the summer I was using about 4-5kWh of imported electricity per day. Figure from smart meter. - When I got the air fryer in, and started dabbling with the ASHP in heating mode during Oct, that went up to around 7-8kWh per day. - During the current cols snap that has jumped to around 10kWh per day. I hope to keep it at that level as a max. - Gas use during the summer was cooking / water, so very little. - Since early Nov I have been running a bathroom radiator a couple of hours AM and PM. Put usage up to about 1-1.5 cubic m per day (which I make ~15 kWh). - My downstairs heating controller was replaced in mid-Nov, and I have that on driving the UFH over the downstairs to provide some baseload heating. That has put usage to about 4 cubic m per day, which I make around 44 kwh. - For an early morning boost I have occasionally been using the wok ring for 15 minutes whilst cooking breakfast, which is not quite optimal efficiency or C02 wise, but a good instant boost. - Bills for 4 Nov -> 3 Dec were £60 gas and £70 elec. I think I need to get to grips with the the new GFCH controller to use gas more efficiently by setting up daily timings rather than default, judging by the weekly gas usage where 45% of the last 4 weeks was in the last week, or it could run away with me like last year. - TBF, my current regime is a little hair-shirty, back to the old "warm certain rooms" method (baths + kitchen-diner), and the rest running .. er .. 'cool' ! House is OK-good, rather than near-passive. Graphs Reflections - Last year I was caught out a little by the amount of gas I used for heating, which having done a retrospective audit of bills recently was more than I thought it was. But I was incapacitated by illness. - This year my stretch goal is to keep bills below £100 per month except for Nov / Dec / Jan / Feb (say £800-£1000 total for 12 months), and to break even when solar exports and FIT are added in. That is a bit of a stretch goal TBH, especially on the heating side. - Further improvement will depend on the supply side and a switch to electric heating, so likely more solar / solar export and a house battery. Not much scope for improving fabric performance since it was all done just before we bought it around 2008 - except perhaps draughts and drylining as I need to redecorate certain areas. A detailed heat model analysis may help.

It's notable to me how much difference each progressive step makes, since I developed it slowly due to my serious illness. I'd suggest making a point of doing all three: 1 - Insulated duct *not* uninsulated duct (leaving it uninsulated creates a duct-surface-area-inside-the-room radiator working against your heating or cooling goal). My 3m one cost about £35. 2 - As good a baffle in the window opening as you can make. The one that came with my unit was suitable for windows with an obtangular opening (eg sashes), but sized for an uninsulated pipe. I started with cardboard and eventually made one from plywood. The gap around the edge is less of a hit than might be expected - at an average 3mm gap around a 150mm pipe with 25mm insulation it would be leaking area/inlet area = (2*PI*100mm*3mm)/(PI*75mm*75mm) as a fraction, which I make 0.05. Not zero, but fairly marginal. (That calc ignores edge leakage around the baffle and temperature variability effects between where the baffle is located and where the end of the pipe is located.) For cutting the leakage I would use a bit of rockwool or material round the pipe, and probably sticky foam strip around the window frame. 3 - Sort out your water drainage outlet - I use a watering can and a piece of beer-making-type hose with the end cut at an angle to concentrate any flow, which was easier to manage/cut tidily than hose pipe. HTH F

I've been doing internal master taps on tenanted houses for a number of years. I find Ts usually like that an an external double socket, especially if they like gardening. Ts who like gardening are worth their weight in tomatoes. In one memorable case I have no idea where the pipe goes when it vanishes underground, it is so old. That was my own cottage which my gran and grandad owned from 1926. So when it froze originally we had to dig a hole around it to give space for the plumber to work. On that one it has a stop tap at the base of the outside pipe, and a normal two-headed tap at the end (one for hose plus one for buckets - T uses it a lot). My call would be leave external tap open, and cloe the inside master tap, for the freezing period. And insulate a box with some rockwool just for a bit of extra resilience if it is away from the house or an outbuilding. F