Kelvin

Before we decided on the house plan we are building we went to an architect. The first words out of his mouth were “we can design you an award winning house on this plot”. What I heard was we can design an award winning house for our practice. It put me right off from the start. In the end we are building a very traditional Scottish Longhouse with a lean to porch. It’s simple, straightforward and some will say pretty boring. After all it’s two rectangles joined together. There’s no fancy wow factor staircase, in fact the staircase is hidden. The design maximises the available floorspace so no long corridors with rooms off. We had a fancy galleried staircase in the previous house. It did have that wow factor as the hallway was 30’x17’ and 17’ ceiling and the staircase was up the middle to a west bedroom wing and an east bedroom wing. And as lovely as it was it was a huge amount of wasted space.

I know ridiculous price for a 10’x8’ timber shed. My neighbour has one they put in 8 years ago and I had a look at it and it was in poor shape. All my borehole plant will go in the garage anyway.

It’s not the case that a WISP service will always have a lot of latency. In fact, it could be faster. I’ve used WISP previously and the latency was better than the copper connection. The latency of my Starlink satellite system is nominally mid 30ms and globally the mean is 43ms. That’s not ideal for gaming obviously but it’s pretty good considering the packets are going from my dish to the satellite 340 miles up, down to a ground station and then from there a main internet hub and then back again. You would expect any WISP service to have significantly lower latency. Your suggestion of two services (and making him pay for the ADSL service) is a good one. Albeit more hardware and more electricity usage.

Very good. Highwater quoted me almost £3k for a shed to put all the borehole gubbins in.

How hot does it get inside? I’ll be building an insulated steel garage/workshop. My concern is how hot it will get in the summer.

Having a mast in your back garden wouldn’t necessarily get you a fast mobile connection anyway. The EE mast here is at the bottom of the drive. If I walk down the drive to put the bins out the phone signal drops out. There are a few reasons for this but the primary reason is the way the mast shapes the signal. Go for the WISP service that’s available in your area and do what I suggested to stop the Xbox automatic downloads.

Whichever cabinet you’re connected to supports it. However, you’re not getting it and your existing service is rubbish as you already know.

Cost aside Starlink solves the problem for most. While Starlink don’t support it and it’s against their Ts&Cs it wouldn’t be too hard to share the bandwidth between a few rural houses.

I have this antenna. It’s pretty average imo and wasn’t much better than the TP-Link MR600 built in antenna. @ProDave You are welcome to borrow this antenna to trial should it be a consideration. You might be better located to a mast than I am. Unfortunately I don’t have a spare LTE router you can borrow. Alternatively if you have Amazon Prime order a suitable router and antenna to trial. If it doesn’t work return it at no cost.

If by BT Wi-Fi range extenders you mean like the Wholehome discs then they work fine. They don’t particularly care which router you plug them into. As far as losing BT support goes then that’s a positive reason to move to a different router. I’ve never used the BT supplied router and never had any problems.

It uses little bandwidth when he’s actually playing games on it and you can control when it downloads updates. If he’s downloading a new game then he does that at a convenient time for everyone else in the house. I don’t quite get the problem to be honest as there options to manage it. That said if you had a much faster service and didn’t change any of the settings on the Xbox so everything was as it is now then I doubt you’d notice a degradation of service for the rest of the house. It’s only noticeable just now because you are very bandwidth limited. I wouldn’t mess about with multiple bonded setups. Talk to your neighbours that use the WISP service. If they have have had a positive experience then talk to the supplier. They will have several offerings including a guaranteed minimum speed offering I expect although that’s probably a business plan.

Facebook marketplace and Gumtree are probably your two best options. Obviously self-build sites are good places too. You just need a bit of due diligence when folk contact you about how they are going to remove it. Have you tried any of the static caravan places? If it’s in reasonable condition they might be interested.

Are these games he already has and they are being updated? If so then you can manage this. Within settings untick the box that says keep games and apps automatically updated. He’ll be notified there’s an update pending and you tell him to do the updates over night. In terms of faster options. Your WISP option (Wireless Internet Service Provider) is a good option and your best available at an affordable price. I’d upgrade to this anyway. We have a similarly crap BT service so tried all the options. WISP is available in our area but trying to get the company that does it to ever come out was impossible so canned that. One of their excuses was a sheep ate through a cable 😂 I also tried LTE via EE. This improved things but video calls were a bit hit and miss. I used an external antenna which made some difference. Ironically the EE mast is at the end of the long drive but we sit down in a gully so the signal isn’t the best. Finally we went for Starlink. It solved our problem. It’s a great service but it’s expensive. £589 for the equipment and £89 per month. For that you get no data cap and and speeds of 150Mbps download and 20Mbps upload. I’ve seen as high as 260Mbps download. Starlink’s latency is typically in the mid 30s but sometimes worse than this. Not ideal for online gaming but still useable.

Battery powered heated jacket and a fire pit for the ambience. I’m going to build something like as a wind break at the bottom of our plot

There’s nothing stopping a prospective owner asking for this information during the enquiry process.

Oh I definitely keep a blog even if it’s for yourself. You make so many decisions along the way that you’ll both forget you made it and then when you remember you’ll forget why. Take 100s of pictures and video too. Well that’s my plan anyway. 😂

Well done. I’ve been through the mill with this too. Some days I get a bit down about even starting this. We could have bought a wee cottage with a little bit of land and invested the rest. We’ve been at it a year almost to the day from putting an offer in on the land until now a few weeks away from a full planning decision ( we have PIP) Even just trying to get people to quote has been a trial. Everything takes much longer than I was expecting. Naively I thought we’d be started by now. The constant news cycle of everything going up in price takes us from having a comfortable budget to it might actually be a bit tight. Not at all where I wanted us to be. However, it just means compromising on certain things. I was willing to spend a big sum on wholehome automation but have removed that from the list. The garage was going to be a mini version of the house now it will be a steel building etc However, that’s some days. Other days I feel excited about it all and want to get going. We are committed to do it now both emotionally and financially so what will be will be.

Agree on the fewer bathrooms comment. We had 5 in the previous house and plan two in this one. One upstairs in the ‘master suite’ and one shower room downstairs between the two downstairs bedrooms.

All very useful input. I can echo the insect screen comment. It was a nightmare at our previous house. We visited our old neighbours a few weeks ago. They couldn’t use their kitchen because of the number of flies in the house.

Your manifold and control are also the same as my old one. Was it supplied by Freedom Pumps by any chance? The original warranty certificate will probably say so. The difference with ours was we had a blending valve and a temp/pressure gauge. That said our blending valve failed so I had to replace. When I did I added the ability to the pump as they also fail. Three of our neighbours had them fail. Not cheap to pay someone to replace it either.

My kitchen folk have just told me that Siemens are about to increase their prices by 11.8%

Your system is identical to what I had in our old house. Your electricity usage is about 20% more in a house that’s 40m2 smaller. Our downstairs floor area was 175m2. Ours was a barn conversion. The insulation was better than average but not as good as it could have been. Our UFH manifolds (we had two) had a combined temperature and pressure gauge and a mixing valve. I messed about with flow temps and settled on 30C for most of the time and upped it during very cold periods. I also heated every room despite not using every room. The house was generally warm enough most of the time. We had two teenagers in the house at the time who were never out their showers. They are both paying their own bills now so are having fewer showers for less time each shower 😂

Sample will be here by Saturday.

Yes more than happy to see more tips.

I just read their brochure. I assume the Moso bamboo is different from the stuff your chippie is talking about. According to the Moso brochure the bamboo planks are produced using a thermal modification process and then compressed with a binding glue into planks. They claim a durability class 1 and state it’s harder than most hardwoods. The Gripsure company use it for their decking but have only become a cladding agent in the last few weeks. Edinburgh zoo uses their decking in some of the animal enclosures so I’ve unwittingly walked on it.