Kelvin

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?

Yes it needs to be tarmac at the entrance. The transport consultation report describes both the junction type and the access construction.

That was exactly my concern with the first block plan the architect did. The groundswork guy I’m speaking to made the same point with the same suggestion.

That looks terrific. Our cutting won’t be anywhere near as deep. The retaining wall will be about 1m high and 21m long

I have the same problem. In the end we changed the approach and will enter the plot lower down and drive across the slope rather than down it. The height difference from the road to lowest point of the drive (and house) is over 2m so it meant building up the site bringing a lot of material in. I said this was a non-starter as it nearly brought us to sell the plot. We’ll be using gravel.

U+004B

For those of you that have completed your self-build what would you do differently if you did another one? Particularly in terms of running the house after. I saw a few posts, for example, talking about some of you having overheating problems. We’ve not started ours yet but hopefully soon.

Indeed. If the unit symbol is named after a person it’s capitalised.

Anyone looked into these: https://flowerturbines.com/locations/europe/ I’ve contacted them twice but they aren’t very forthcoming with information beyond what’s on their website.

Do you know why it’s taking so long? Is there something unusual about the application? Which council is it? You can raise a complaint about the delay.

No it was free. I'm in Scotland so things might be different elsewhere. The process was simple enough. Fill an a variation form and send this and the updated drawings to planning. My changes didn't change anything to do with the design of the house or garage, it was changing the access point to the site, the driveway, and the site elevation.

I contacted them earlier and got a very nice email back apologising for the delay. Everything is now updated and they’ve added the various consultation notifications which are all positive. More importantly I don’t need to make an education contribution!

In a similar situation. Updated drawings submitted on the 24 June (there’s a variation form you need to fill in) Planning have acknowledged the updated drawings and said they will update the portal shortly but they still haven’t updated the planning portal. Decision is due on the 24/8. I’m not sure if I ought to be concerned or not. On the one hand they have acknowledged that they’ve received the updated drawings so therefore I assume that the various people in planning will work off those. On the other the last thing I want is planning to approve the wrong drawings. We’ve chased once already and they got a little shirty with me.

It depends on the dish. The original large round dish was much more power hungry than the current square dish. It moves the dish when setting up initially and I assume it uses beam forming thereafter. The dish hasn't adjusted itself since the initial setup. It is rated for 180W which it might use to melt any snowfall in the winter. It is excellent. I've had it installed for 3 months and it's been down for two days in that time when they had a widespread outage. Latency is around 45ms, average download/upload is 150Mbps/15Mbps but I've seen as high as 260Mbps/25Mbps. We use it a lot for zoom/Teams meetings and it's fine. The only very occasional issue is that we might get the odd pause in the video stream for a few a seconds or so. You can see these pauses in the app. Over the course of a day it's a few seconds at worst which is fine for just about everything we do as you don't notice it. I still have it mounted on the temporary stand in the middle of the lawn. I have all the kit to bolt it to the house but it's a rental while we build so will leave on the lawn. It is very sensitive to being blocked though so needs to be clear of trees etc.

This is a good exercise to go through. Switch everything off during the day that doesn’t need to be on for a few days and then monitor your usage. It is surprising how much energy is consumed by the house just sitting in ‘standby’. I have a Starlink system as it’s the only way we can get fast internet. The Starlink router powers the dish and it’s surprising just how much power it uses. A standard router is probably using about £17 of electricity PA and I reckon my Starlink router is consuming about £90.

Not if you simply export the excess PV given you’re not using everything you generate at the moment.

Your total electricity consumption is 12,000kWh not just the ASHP. And it’s high compared to my experience and compared to some others posting on this thread. You’ve lived there since 2014 do you still have access to your statements so that you can see exactly what you’ve used each year since you’ve lived there?

Regardless your annual electricity consumption is very high which looks like it’s mostly winter usage if your current usage is typical.

To give you some idea about your usage. My previous house was a 300sqm newly converted old barn. It was all electric no PV and had an ASHP. It could have been better insulated and it certainly could have been more airtight. In the last year I lived there we used 12191kWh that was two people wfh and two kids. Electricity was 13p kWh.

Well Bozza is using significantly less electricity than you in a slightly bigger house…

Oil fired boiler and a wood stove (we get free wood) We rent a 50 year old farmhouse (we are building a house nearby) It has an EPC rating of E!

I used 423kW last month but we have an EV so about 150kW of that was charging the car. We also have electric showers and have had a lot of folk visiting and staying over so I’d say our usage has been a little higher for July.