Kelvin

We had the duct split at the joiner for the huge main supply cable. That was a long day. Fortunately it split 2m from the kiosk so it was easy to find as you could hear the cable bang against the other end of the duct. Had to dig down to it by hand to repair then get the cable in. Our ducting route for the cable wasn’t ideal either as it went through two turns plus the down and up from the house to the kiosk. Was a nervy few days for my wife and I trying to get the cable through. In hindsight I ought to have moved the kiosk location to give the ducting a straighter run. I’d still advocate ducting though just be careful with bends and be sure the joins are sound.

Put duct in and park the cable decision until you come to do it. We ended up putting a slightly bigger cable in than necessary to allow us to extend the supply to the bottom of our field from the blower unit housing. In fact put all your cables in ducts. It’s relatively cheap and makes life easier down the line when things inevitably change. Also put more ducts into the house/garage than you actually need. I did n+2 in the house and ended up using both of them. You could argue better planning would have avoided the need but it’s better to have them and not use them than need them and not have them. I also put an extra duct into our electricity kiosk which was fortunate as our EV charger was installed differently from how we originally planned it.

People can be pretty horrible and it’s likely driven by a touch of envy. Your solicitor has given you the right advice. Smile through it and let the process work its way through. Generally there needs to be sound planning reasons for a refusal (planning can be a lottery unfortunately) However if there are several similar extensions on the street then it’s only to your favour. Hopefully planning will be approved and you can crack on. Be mindful that when you get to start building the amount of angst from the neighbours will ratchet up as they will try everything to slow or stop the build. You’ll need to carefully brief all the trades you use about this making sure they comply with any conditions and that they don’t engage in any discussion with them about anything. Builders are often quite good at this as they don’t want to get involved. The main thing is don’t engage with them beyond what you have to do with the process. It’s normal to want to defend every small bit of unjustness but don’t waste your time.

Ours does that with steam too on the mid setting. It’s just less effective with fat droplets.

I don’t find our Neff N70 downdraft hob that effective cooking steak even if the fan is at full pelt. You can see a lot of fat droplets escaping the hob surface. There was a study done that looked at the performance of extraction that was posted on here. I may even have posted it. It’s worth a read. As I recall most domestic extraction is average at best for air quality. If we did a lot of frying I would have likely fitted an overhead extractor to outside. We hardly ever fry so the hob extraction is fine.

It’s fine. However I wouldn’t recommend if you do a lot of steak frying or similar. We don’t do so it’s ok for us.

Our neighbour had some holiday cottages built and the first digger (which was pretty big and your typical house build digger) couldn’t cope. Fortunately the groundswork company had a huge big thing that made lighter work of it.

Is it an actual quote or an estimate? Are they including closing the road, if so is there another way the trenching and cable could be run. I’ve posted my experience a few times. Our original estimate was £26500 this was a desktop estimate. The pole was 2m from our boundary in the neighbour’s field and 15m from where the house was going to be built. However the specific details in the estimate didn’t match the reality on the ground. I let the first estimate lapse and re-submitted with all of the accurate information they’d got wrong. The next estimate was £5500. I then said I’d do all of the labour all they had to do was pull the cable and connect it. The final quote was just over £1000. They did the work and emailed me to say that they didn’t use all the stuff they planned (still no idea what all the extra was) and completed the work in half the time so gave me a £600 refund. Obviously every DNO is different (mine is SSEN) and every situation is different but the moral is to question everything and make sure they have accurate information and are basing their quote on it.

What caught me out, and this is a Scottish building regs thing, is we were very nearly complete internally other than a banister and a glass panel at the top of the stairs (glass panel got smashed by the courier and I wanted the banister as one complete piece of wood turned round the corner so beyond my joinery skills). The lease on our rental was up so had to move. I assumed a formality so applied for a habitation certificate but BCO said no. He came to see the house and said we really needed full sign off including patio to move in and were reluctant to approve habitation certs. In the end he approved it but we had to lash something up for the glass panel (plywood sheet) and the banister. No matter how tidy you are houses mid build are dusty places to be with loads of materials coming in. I wouldn’t have wanted to be living in it while try to build it. And as others have said everything slows down once you’re in. We are in 1 year and 1 week and there’s a long list of small jobs that I’m very slowly working my through. I’d have done them in a few weeks if I had the same urgency as when we were building.

I tiled into the space of the free standing appliances (washing machine and freezer) and just inside the bottom of the cabinets. The kitchen was already in.

It depends on how much you have to do and how organised you are. With hiring you need to plan your time well to make the best use of it. I’ve hired a 2.5 tonne digger and small dumper truck when moving a lot of soil/gravel etc and will do that again in September to finish off the drive. For the landscaping I just got a guy in with a very large digger. Took him two days to do all the terracing, ground shaping and levelling plus he moved a load of dry stone walling stones around for me into a pile. Didn’t cost very much, he did a better a job than I would have done and it was done quickly. My cousin swears by having a digger but it always seems to be broken. He’s very handy so fixes it himself but he spends as much time fixing it than digging. I think he likes fixing it.

Yes sorry I misread his post.

Sorry no ignore me. I misread your earlier message and thought you’d posted your internal air volume. You need to work that out. Then it’s 1.4 x 200 divided by the volume.

From 1.62 to 0.58 so a great result.

I moved to Scotland. 😂 One lives in St Neots and the other in Wimbledon.

My kids are in their 20s now so will never (unlikely anyway) to live on the house we built. I’d have liked to have done it when they were little. But life wasn’t aligned quite so well then. Regards timing, there’s rarely a right time especially if you consider everything that’s happened over the last 5 years. 4 years ago I quit my job, we sold our house and moved to Scotland all at the same time so I forced the situation to make it as right a time as it was ever going to be. And don’t build a significantly bigger house than you need. If you plan it well a smaller house can feel bigger than it is. The house we built is 210m2 and the previous house we owned was 350m2. We use 100% of the house we built compared to about 50% of the previous house.

We looked at two plots before buying this one. The first plot was in England and we took that quite far before pulling out and our reason was simply a gut feeling that it wasn’t the right plot for us. It was hard to put our finger on why other than it didn’t feel right. We then looked at another plot this time in Scotland. Had an acre of land, planning permission for a modern steading style house and it came with an enormous old mill, cottage, and workshop all as a single large barn. I loved it other half hated it so that was also a no. The same day, and quite by accident, we happened across another plot just going onto the market (they were literally putting the sign up) We stepped over the burn and onto the plot (which was a very sloped field covered in gorse) and we both instantly said this is it. Offer in the same day. My general approach is if there’s some doubt about something then you don’t do it until you can address that.

Utility costs can vary so widely. Our first estimate for an electricity supply was £26,500 and the final cost was £450. You need to include that in your final cost/m2 as otherwise you’re doing a bit of man maths. I did set separate budgets for each element including utilities. Had we not been able to get the electricity supply estimate down from £26500 we might not have gone ahead for example. The second estimate after I challenged it was £5000.

I’m in two minds about having a borehole. Our water is great and tastes better than mains water and, as mentioned by JohnMo, you don’t have anything being added to it. I also test our water every month just to keep an eye on it. Having watched one of our neighbours lose her private water supply (from a well fed from a spring) for 7 months (iron oxide bacteria) and the huge expense at trying to fix it (and it might still not be fixed) it does put you off a bit. However, no borehole no water no house.

Our all in cost was £8000 but that doesn’t include the cost of the borehole drilling and lining etc. The farmer we bought the land from paid for that and it was £18,000. Our hole is 147m deep. Finding water was a condition of the sale. Also keep in mind there’s no guarantee they’ll strike water or at least a plentiful supply. I know of one self-builder near us who left the borehole drilling to near the end of his build (mental). It took several attempts to find a suitable supply and 5 different companies tried. It cost him tens of thousands and took almost 8 months. He assumed you could drill a hole anywhere and find water because there were a few boreholes near him.

If the car can schedule a charge itself just plug it in and set up a schedule. You’ll have to disable smart charging in the Octopus app though I expect. It’s under settings.

Inexpensive? Some of them cost a fortune. The Wallbox Quasar 2 costs over 6000 Euro last time I looked. It supports V2H so it’s more than just a charger as it has to safely island the car from the grid etc I’m unconvinced by V2H as a thing anyway. While batteries are still dear they have reduced in price a fair bit so you can put in a fair amount of battery storage for an almost affordable amount of money without the complication of trying to do that with your car.

It’s not so dissimilar to the document I got and all we had was a field at the time of the quote. You can make a reasonable stab at estimating it as you should have some idea what stuff you’re putting in. They give you some numbers for typical things.

I assumed that’s a mistake as the Pro is the commercial version. We had them in our work car park. The only one that mentions V2G on their website is the Go 2. Octopus only mention two compatible chargers one from Zaptec and the other from Wallbox

This suggests it’s a new charger https://www.zaptec.com/en-uk/info-hub/inside-zaptec/zaptec-go-2