Kelvin

You’d be as well getting ChatGPT to draw you something as what you’ve done is very poor. Take @ETC up on the offer.

That is a big hole.

Laphroaig, in fact the bottle I was bought when we bought the land. I said I’d open it when it was signed off.

We got our final building regs sign off approval today so that’s us technically finished. Yay. Feeling quite relieved. It’s taken just over 4 years from when we first set foot on the land till now. What a ride. 😂 Thanks all. Buildhub has been awesome.

Yes but it was part of a £12k install including PV panels, gateway, inverter and two other 8kWh batteries.

That’s expensive for a 5.2kW battery. It cost us £2400 for an extra Sigenergy 8 kW battery. Which battery is it?

I applied for the final building sign off yesterday so we’re done as per the building warrant. Consequently I’ve given the question of would I do it again a bit of thought. Despite all the issues and stress I’ve changed my mind and would do it again. We love our house and it’s just about perfect for us. There’s one design flaw with it that we always knew was there (no muddy boot room) but other than that the house is working as we hoped and better in some ways. I would do it very differently next time though. We thought the approach we took would reduce the risk and stress but it was the complete opposite. My other half wouldn’t let me though so this is it until an kark it.

I was disappointed with our plastering too. Fortunately there are only two areas where we have this problem although it did change our lighting design a bit as wall lighting will also highlight it. I did as described above. Sand m, easy fill, sand repeat until it was flat and then several coats of paint.

Agreed. I read all the pros and cons and decided to add it for the same reasons as you.

@Lincolnshire Ian I’m still away. Back tonight so will let you know tomorrow.

I’ll message you separately when I get home tomorrow and let you know exactly what I have.

I might have some I could sell you at a fair price. Let me know exactly what you need and I’ll have a look at what I have.

Agreed the more complicated it is the more likely things will stop working and anyone not familiar with everything will soon be a bit lost. It does take a little bit of time to figure Home Assistant out but it’s fairly user friendly nowadays and the interface is greatly improved. Its flexibility and openness also makes it slightly harder to use for sure. Our system is setup such that the folk I live with never need to use an app to do anything. I kinda think a home automation system fails if you are relying on apps to do stuff. It should either be genuinely automated reacting to whatever is going on in the house, operated via a switch without screwing anything else up or voice activated. My other half won’t have any of these apps on her phone anyway. There’s a central iPad just in case she needs to for some reason but never has. I do exactly as you are doing with our battery system but it is automated within the Sigenergy app.

Yes the building warrant is what allows you to start building and is what you are more familiar with in terms of building control. In terms of timescales it’s at least 8 weeks for planning and then circa 12 weeks for the building warrant with a gap between them to prepare the building warrant drawings although you can start some of the drawings before you have planning approval with the obvious risks. In my case it took 12 weeks for planning approval, 8 weeks to get the warrant drawings (the structural engineering drawings took weeks to get) and then 8 weeks to get the warrant approval. I’ve founding dealing with our local council BCO to be a positive experience. He’s very pragmatic, genuinely wants to see you get the house built, easy to get a hold of, and quick to respond. If you’re using an architect they’ll typically do all this for you. The councils also use the Scotland eDevelopment platform make the various applications and upload the required documents.

The advantage of using Home Assistant is you can mostly ditch all the proprietary apps and expose all the sensors. How you do it varies from platform to platform. For example with Zehnder there’s a Home Assistant integration that uses the Zehnder Comfoconnect LAN C box to integrate it with Home Assistant. Once it’s in HA you have the ability to automate it how you like. I’ve added our Sigenergy PV/battery system to Home Assistant via the MODBUS in the inverter. This gives me complete control over the system independently from their cloud based app which means I can still see what’s going on if their cloud service goes offline.