Kelvin

Ta. Just called them. They are going to send me a sample and do me a quote. They haven’t sold any cladding in the UK yet so one of us might be first 😂

You could do some of that yourself but you’d need access to a digger. I did 21m by hand largely because the digger I had access to broke down. I formed a good relationship with the SSEN project manager for my job and he was very helpful. The instructions on what I needed to do were very clear.

Thanks. Enlightening. I’ll share with my other half. She’s the sustainability lead in her company. When I first met her she was removing stuff from a skip 😂

No electric heaters just wrap up. I wasn’t kidding when I said put a jumper on. If I can survive a winter in this old farmhouse rental with what seems like zero insulation you can survive a broken MVHR in a modern well insulated house 😂

Do you have any direct experience of the product and Gripsure?

They clearly don’t model all the scenarios. Could a war have been predicted maybe not. Could Russia throttling the supply of gas to Europe be predicted in some way then probably yes. Germany is in a significantly worse predicament. My guess is there will be pressure put on Zelensky to reach some negotiated position with Russia in exchange for Russian gas supplies to be increased.

Put a jumper on until it’s fixed. We were in our last place for 7 years. In that time we had a pump fail, two valves fail, and one of the manifold valves fail.

There’s a market for them. The warranty providers don’t care if the lenders don’t accept them. Lenders are also becoming increasingly reluctant to take risks. When we bought our last house there were no issues with needing to take out insurance indemnities. Seven years later when we sold our buyer’s lender wanted indemnities for all sorts of stuff. Our conveyancer said there had been a real shift during COVID. We weren’t going to bother with one but because of this problem we will. We don’t plan on selling as it’s our last house but you never how life goes.

Why is he so convinced the MVHR will fail? There’s more to go wrong with the ASHP and it’s various pumps, valves, and actuators.

Agreed. It’s also ironic that while domestic oil has reduced by about 15% in recent weeks Scotland is one of the most expensive regions. There’s every likelihood that my next oil purchase will cost slightly less than the last one and we don’t use a huge amount of electricity so we can get through the winter without it costing us too much more than last year. I pity the folk that bought our old house. Fully electric with ASHP. Insulation could be better and it’s quite a big house. I never fitted PV despite a huge south facing roof because I knew we would move before any benefit. They are on a variable tariff so I reckon they are looking at about £540 per month. Council tax was high too at £337 per month.

I can’t even get a quote from two suppliers I’ve tried for our build although expecting a quote from a third company on Friday.

It’s not easy. We went round in circles. timber type, coated or uncoated, vertical or horizontal, profile, rainscreen or not etc. You need visit some of the timber yards to have a look in my opinion. I really liked the Abodo cladding Glenalmond sell in the patina coating. You can treat it to start out at different colours but will need redoing to maintain the colour every few years. If you want it to maintain the colour Russwood do Accoya that is painted at the factory. Although if you did that you might as well go down the plastic route as the painted Accoya doesn’t look like wood plus it can and will chip based on their examples. It would be nice as a feature on part of a build but not the whole building. There’s also the thermally treated stuff which can be very dark and the ‘burnt’ cladding is black. Looks stunning on the right building. What we eventually did was: 1. Agree on our max budget 2. Write down what we definitely didn’t want 3. Go visit some timber yards to look at the various options and especially profiles and get samples 4. Decide if we wanted vertical or horizontal cladding as certain profiles only work in one orientation 5. Go look at some timber clad buildings 6. Get quotes for some of the different options you like especially the expensive stuff as that might rule certain things out 7. Take all that info and see if that really narrows it down for you. In our case it made our decision for us. Which is Scottish Larch treated with Sioo:X to accelerate the silvering process as most wood ends up silver anyway unless you keep up with the maintenance. Vertically clad in board on board profile A. Ultimately though this will be driven by budget unless money isn’t a barrier of course. Have you had any quotes yet?

When I started reading the forum I noticed you’d said on other threads. Fortunately that’s exactly what we did right at the peak although any extra we made has been swallowed up and more by the price rises.

In what way?

I contemplated that but it will get knicked so I cba with the hassle of that. More importantly I have one elderly neighbour who has been very amenable and she’s quite ill so I wouldn’t want a noisy generator on-site along with all the other noise the build will generate. What power I’ve needed so far I’ve powered from my leccy car. (V2L)

Octopus have given me £150 of credit due to all the messing about trying to get connected.

Good point. My assumption is that with the outgoing Agile Octopus you also get the agility and smart device integration benefits. I’ve not read the FAQ for a while.

Yep. We’re renting while building. The rental is with Bulb. I have power at the plot with the meter being installed next month. I won’t use much electricity but will be paying two sets of standing charges for a while.

One of the interesting aspects of Octopus Agile is the ability to integrate it with other ‘smart’ devices. This could allow you to set devices up to look ahead at the cheapest rate window for the next day and automatically run the appliance then. It has a lot of potential for the kind of people that are engaged with this sort of stuff. Most aren’t though.

I’ve been told that before but the last two houses we’ve lived in have had single taps still happened. Three members of my wider family are left handed (as am I) and they all do it. Maybe handedness has a part to play in it for some but mostly it comes from a lifetime of not having to think about it. I’ve visited countries where water is more scarce and the people are generally much more mindful about wasting it.

Exactly so. This old farmhouse we are renting might as well have no walls. I gave up trying to heat it last year so just wore more clothes, fingerless gloves and a hat on the very coldest days. Maybe one thing that might come out of all of this is that more people will give greater consideration to how much energy they waste. Years of moaning to the people that live with me about leaving lights on, the TV on when no one is in the room, boiling a full kettle for one cup etc and only now is it starting to sink in. Same with water waste. Drives me nuts when I hear the tap running when they are brushing their teeth. We are a very entitled society generally as we’ve grown to used to always having cheap abundant energy and not having to worry about a lack of water. The UK’s antiquated water systems, the lack of investment in it, and the huge loss to leaks every day is a scandal really. Our self-build won’t be exactly off grid but we will have our own water supply, we’ll deal with our own sewerage and we’ll generate some of our electricity.

I think i can get the backfill for the baskets relatively cheaply as I have a source of free stone not far from the plot. As it happens I am going on a dry stone walling course as one of our boundaries has 100m of wall. Most of which is in reasonable shape but there is some work to do to repair it. I also want to build some dry stone wall features in the garden.

Agreed. Brilliant thread and some great ideas. It’s inspired me not to use a single skip!

I saw you mention them in another thread so have been looking into them. Was originally looking at gabion baskets but they surprisingly dear.

SSEN didn’t charge me anything for the wayleave in that it wasn’t detailed separately on their quote. They needed to know who owned the land but I’d already gone to the Scottish register and got the title for the land so they didn’t need to do that assuming they even needed to do that which I doubt. That cost £45. They wrote to my neighbour to seek her permission to cross her field then drew up the wayleave. My total bill was £1016 for 21m with 4m on the neighbour’s land. I subsequently got a refund of £350 as they didn’t use mains cable so also didn’t need to joint it to the service cable. That included taking a tree down. I did all the trenching groundworks myself including ducting, sand, tape, backfilling, foundation for the kiosk and kiosk installation. All that came to £400 for the materials. Therefore, I’d say your quote is quite dear by comparison. Different DNO of course. Also worth pointing out that I got two previous budget estimates before they did a final quote. The first was £26,000 which I obviously questioned and the second was £5000. What else is included in the quote?