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.

Sure but the DNO provides you with a plan of what they need and you do that. I was assigned a Project Manager with SSEN so I sent him what I intended to do and then pictures. Leave the trench open at the pole end and seal up the duct. Tell them about your concerns about water ingress into the kiosk because it’s downhill from the pole.

If you’re using it with Hue bulbs you don’t need the relay. Of course if someone switches it off at the switch then the Hue light stops working. I use some Loxone lights within my Loxone system and it works well enough. I have the same problem that if you switch the lighting circuit off in Loxone the Hue lights become unavailable in the Philips app (Home Assistant if you plan on using that) However I never control the Hue lights separately from Loxone. I’ve set the colour temperature I want (or the colour in one case in the TV Room) and configure the Hue lights to remember the last setting after a power loss. It might be challenging to use them where you have multi way lighting circuits though. Where I use one there are two switches to control a single light and you can wire that easily enough although it took me a couple of goes to get it right. You can get around this by installing the Sonoff at the ceiling rose rather than at the switch and they do a couple of types depending on how your wiring has been done.

I use one in the garage. Straightforward enough. My switches are surface mounted so plenty of room to fit it inside the switch although they are pretty small. You can still operate the physical switches plus automate it how you like. I have motion sensor in the garage, and two door sensors it comes in automatically, shuts off after 20 mins or I can tell it to switch off.

Turning the lawn over to a more general purpose mixture ends up being a lot less work in the long run I’ve found. I set the lawnmower to cut the grass but leave the low flowering stuff. I named our new lamb Thistle because of all the thistles on the bank plus he nibbles on them.

The problem is the standard of new build houses is poor largely because of all the self-policing and what’s built doesn’t match what’s designed. You see enough examples of that on here when folk post my builder has done this does it look right. If you want to raise the standard you need to be able to check houses are being built to the highest standard as far as building regs are concerned. You either achieve that with an army of assessors or documentary proof for each house built. However this particular example seems really heavy handed.

You do for SAP 10 assessment and EPC in England since June 2022 and Scotland since February 2023. It was changed because you could just make it up as you said and to bridge the gap between as designed and as built.

They didn’t. I had them all ready to send just in case. We’re in Scotland and the new regs didn’t come into force until 1 Feb 2023 so still SAP 2012. I have geo tagging switched off on my phone. I thought geotagging wasn’t mandatory but you have to show they are unique to the house? eta Just quickly glanced through the SAP10 conventions document and it says in there geo location ‘should’ be enabled. Should and must mean different things. It also has a very detailed list of how to take photos of each build element. I’m glad I missed all of this! I assume the issue is because there are two buildings?

Hence the requirement for these pictures as documentary evidence. The BCO attended our site at the key stages and signed it off.

What a pia. I’m in the final stages of getting the completion certificate. I got the as built SAP EPC a few weeks ago. I have shedloads of pictures of every stage of the build but I don’t think they would meet this high bar. This is going to catch a lot of people out.

Our field was wrecked after the groundswork was completed. I levelled it out bit with a borrowed digger and just left it. It became overgrown but once I started cutting and strimming it I was surprised at how quickly the grass that had been left untouched took hold and spread. It was a grazing field prior to us buying it. It’s not a lawn thankfully so I care a bit less about what makes up the green stuff.