Kelvin

IP65 is IP65

IP65 is suitable for outdoor use. Patio lights are often rated at IP65. Rain falls and is driven at relatively low pressures compared to powered jets.

That’s a poor design both for efficiency and layout. Google some timber frame companies and have a look at their designs for ideas. The simplest most efficient to build are squares/rectangles either 1.5 or two storey.

You are indeed and it doesn’t need to be as much as £1000. (£100) You really ought to buy everything on a credit card this way to give yourself extra protection.

If I knew a year ago what I know now I may well have gone MBC.

It's going to raise it by only 5mm. How so?

Agree on point 1 above. We had this exact problem in the previous house. Very annoying. Tried to design it out in the self-build but the best we’ve managed is this. I originally had two front doors, one into the utility room and one into the lobby. The plan was to ‘hide’ the door into the utility room somehow. Ditched that idea so have arranged the front door and util door so that shoes and jackets are kept in here. Our kids have grown up moved out now so no more piles of stuff inside the front door.

It takes practice for sure. One advantage of a self-build is you have plenty of walls to practice on. 😂 Mine is also a Wagner and highly recommended. I bought mine second hand.

Same with many appliances with electronics. What I can tell you is that two kitchen places we’ve been speaking with have dumped Siemens and Neff and moved to AEG because they can’t get reliable lead times or any lead times for either. We are going to go with AEG. I’ve already bought the hob which is Neff but only because the kitchen place happened to have one a customer cancelled due to the 9 delay in it turning up. You could place an order and wait and fit something cheap and cheerful until they turn up.

Any thoughts?

I was going to ask a similar question. The air tight barrier generally goes on the warm side of the wall. However I’m also thinking doing as you’re doing. Our timber kit build up is a full filled 302mm CPS space stud, 9mm OSB, air tightness barrier, 25mm service void, 12.5mm plasterboard. I was thinking of filling the service void too.

Thought I’d update this. After a lot of back and forth and goal post changing about why the kit company won’t install a 4m 3G slider, unless I take all the risk of it going wrong, we have reached a solution. The max weight of slider that they’ll install as one component is 350kg. Anything heavier and the IGU has to be installed separately which the kit company won’t do. Therefore, we’ve agreed to fit a 3.6m 3G slider (347kg) and change the coupling window from a 1m tilt and turn to a set of 1.4m French doors.

Really nice. They must be pleased. Front door similar to the one I’ve just ordered.

Our build requires a soakaway for the treatment plant and separate rainwater attenuation. We did some percolation tests last year so have identified the ideal location for the soakaway taking into account the burn at the bottom of the field, the neighbour’s borehole and our borehole. We had a design report completed for planning which states it needs to be at least 18.6m2 in size made up of two 9.5m trenches 1m wide entry via a distribution chamber. The warrant has come back and design has been changed to 3x8m trenches. I’ve yet to get an explanation for this change from the architect. The plot is on sloping land which flattens out as it approaches the burn which will accommodate the soakaway. One of the groundswork companies I spoke with said that, in his experience, he prefers installing single trenches rather than multiple trenches with a distribution chamber especially on sloping land. His view is that often what happens is the liquid ends up biased towards one trench causing early failure. I’d have thought multi-trench soakaways to be a common solution as not every site will have the space for 19m+ long soakaways. However his comment has raised a concern. Any views on this? The drainage design I had done stated that there was no legal requirement stopping me running directly into the burn so didn’t suggest we do anything but that. The warrant says we must install a rainwater soakaway though which is fine. I was already working on the principle that I don’t want rainwater leaving the plot any faster than it did before we built the house. Plus there is a flooding risk downstream of us so I don’t want to be adding to that. The architect got the SE to do a drainage soakaway design which is a single 14mx1m trench with all rainwater running into it. Would it not be better to have multiple routes for the rainwater to run into? Even if it was a minimum of just separating the garage from the house.

They are supposed to be good for sure. We had five Fakro windows in the last place and had problems with four of them. One of the the blinds failed. Easy to replace unless you have some special size that they no longer supplied so we had to get a third party replacement. It never matched the blind in the other window in the room so I eventually replaced that too. Then the handle snapped off another one. The other two were very stiff to close. I managed to fix one of them but the other one had failed so once I eventually managed to get it closed we never opened it again 😂

That’s good. Any obvious holes to fill in?

Yes they are a lot dearer at around £300 per window. We have six; two twin top hung windows, a single over the stairs which is centre-pivot, and a fixed rooflight on the flat roof over the entrance hallway. An extra £1200 or so against the total build cost isn’t budget busting but it’s the £1000 here and there that can add up to be budget busting.

Good to know. They have a passiv certified window too and it’s not entirely obvious if it has the opening mounted vent or not. Did you go for centre pivot over top hung for any particular reason? Ours will be triple glazed, top hung, and 94x160 so will be quite heavy.

We had Farko in the previous house and the other half said she’d rather have no windows than those. We did have a lot of trouble with them.

Nothing seems straightforward. Moved onto speccing the rooflights. Specced no trickle vents. Doubles lead time and adds a huge amount to the cost. They told me that they have a case study showing air tightness isn’t impacted when the trickle vents are closed. I’ve asked for a copy of it. Sticks in my throat to pay significantly more for them not to fit trickle vents. Does anyone have any experience of this? What did you do?

http://www.zehnderamerica.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/ComfoAir-Q-Installer-Manual.pdf Not convinced it’ll be possible to do. It’s also very slightly bigger according to the dimensions in this manual.

The limiting factor will be the frame the covers are attached to which is unlikely to be simply bolted together. You need the maintenance manual for it or some pictures with the covers off.

The flight from FF is going to have to consider every possible option including this. It wasn’t possible until we had reusable rockets with big payloads which we now have. Whether it make’s commercial sense vs terrestrial PV solutions is to be determined. Everything based in space is hard and costly and that isn’t going to change much.

Businesses everywhere behave like this. Supply and demand. It’s not great but you pay when demand is high and benefit when demand is low. I am rather hoping we’ll benefit as our build starts at the beginning of April.

It’s above the front door in our case. But it depends what’s beneath it I guess