Kelvin

It’s better to reduce the extent of the glazing. However we bought the plot for the view and full height windows are nice feature in my opinion. Most of our south elevation is glass so the temperature in those rooms varies a lot more and more quickly. The temperature in the other rooms tends to be a lot more stable and consistent. As always it’s a compromise.

I used Raj Green sandstone wall cladding. Comes in sheets and only 11mm thick so quite neat. Matches the slabs perfectly. I had intended to use cut slabs but they are nominally 22mm +- a bit so too thick.

Good. 😂 As it turns out my insistence on doing it the way I wanted was the right decision too.

You’d think. Except that wasn’t my experience. On window installation day there was a lot of head scratching and disagreement on how to do it. The installation team wanted to do it one way, the joiner I had on-site said he wouldn’t do it that way, the generic construction drawings said something else that didn’t quite reflect our build. In the end we did it the way I decided to do it based on what I’d read on here. I think the only way to achieve consistency of build using generic construction drawings is to also mandate what is built other than size and shape assuming simple shapes. We went kit build for speed and reduced risk and we enjoyed neither benefit as it turned out. But we were probably just a bit unlucky with the choice of kit supplier.

Devil is in the detail though. I was chatting to one of the Heb Owners about this very point. When they started Heb Homes they figured that they could take a cookie cutter approach to reduce the design and engineering costs. In reality though most of their clients wanted to change the designs enough that they were essentially all ending up closer to bespoke. This was especially the case with our house. He said they intended to tighten up on the changes that could be made to their standard designs.

There was an article I read a few weeks ago saying that certain areas of the country had become uneconomical for building companies to build in as a consequence of the slow down in the housing market and increasing inflation. That is where self-building could help if the land was sold off to self-builders who could still be able to build a house of better quality without focusing on making money out of it.

The risk of fire is tiny but I still didn’t want the panels on the house and fire risk was one of the reasons. Our friend’s self-build house had a fire in the roof caused by a cabling fault in the panels. They’d only been in the house a few months. Rebuilt it and then sold. Fortunately I had the option of putting them on the garage or the ground.

Our Vodafone coverage has improved significantly since the Vodafone and Three merger. I can even get a good fast outdoor 5G signal. However my initial testing suggests it’s a bit too unreliable for the other half to use for WFH as some days, despite a good signal, it won’t connect. It did that on 4G too so no change there.

Yes it’s permanently in place in that it’s part of SSEN’s cabling system. The earth rod is there for when the house goes off grid and you lose the DNO earth in case you have a fault in the house. Interestingly there was an urgent notice from Sigenenery to their installers about the correct earthing requirements for the system. Some installers weren’t connecting an earth rod at all and some were but not cabling it correctly in the gateway. There maybe is a multiple fault scenario where neither of these are sufficient but what would need to happen for that?

I had hoped to do similar to you and install it in my kiosk as it’s close to the road where their cable is so that doesn’t fill me with confidence.

Yes we used their earth bonding. I added the earth rod when we installed the batteries and backup gateway. This wasn’t a temporary supply. I asked both SSEN and our electrician about an Earth rod and they both said it wasn’t necessary. The important thing is to think about what you plan on installing eventually and where it’s all going to go and then making sure you plan in suitable ducting and space keeping in mind that different systems require different cable layout and space requirements. I thought I did a decent job of this but got caught out by not fitting a big enough kiosk despite fitting a 3ph kiosk for a single phase supply I hadn’t realised how big the isolator was. Consequently when the Zappi was installed the small CU it needed couldn’t fit in the kiosk so I had to fit another kiosk.

That’s what I did. SSEN connected to my kiosk (which was effectively just in a field at that point) and it was 10 months later before I had the meter installed.

You don’t need an earth rod for car chargers nowadays as they have their own fault protection. However if you plan on batteries and a gateway you will need an earth rod so worth thinking about all that now. In my case I banged the earth rod in beside the garage and the cable runs back to the house where the gateway is. Fortunately I had worked on the principle of n+1 ducts so had a spare duct for cabling. My gateway powers the whole house. I couldn’t see the point of adding another CU for just critical loads. The car charger is wired at the meter side so the inverter doesn’t see it as a load. It is possible to connect high loads (like an ASHP) to a ‘smart’ port on the gateway so that it can be shutdown if you have a power cut and running low on battery storage. If this is stuff that you plan on doing then I’d put in a fully off-grid system and running it like that until the grid is connected then switch over.

I have one and I rarely use it. If you want to see graphs of run time then it can show you that. Once you set your system up then there’s not much to change. I don’t access the heating remotely. It’s also quite dear for what it is. I bought mine second hand on FB marketplace for £35 just because it popped up locally. I wouldn’t have bought one new.

I know. I said a few posts ago I’ve calibrated them. One of the first things I did was calibrate the various sensors so they all measured much the same. I bought the Ruuvi for its humidity sensor as it comes calibrated and you can calibrate it yourself.