Kelvin

Modern houses end up with a bit of wall and ceiling acne. You’ll stop noticing it pretty quickly. Our kitchen ceiling is a bit busy.

Yes definitely call. I’ve found our council to be really flexible with all of this and we are nearly done. They just wanted to know when we thought it would be ready. When we moved up from England to Scotland we had to rent the house for three months before we needed it as our house sale got delayed and we were struggling to find a suitable rental (we have two dogs) We got a bill for the whole council tax amount for the rental. I called them explaining the situation we were we in and they delayed the start of the payment until we moved.

It’s what we have. They are white on a white wall so mostly disappear.

Most of the big suppliers are a bit shit and I reckon still suffer from the malaise of when they were still electricity boards. Octopus don’t have any of that legacy nonsense to deal with so are a bit more fleet of foot and much more responsive to problems. I had some experience of this when the company I worked for TUPE transferred a few hundred engineers from BT. They were mostly good at what they did but their broader attitude was still stuck in past before BT was privatised. Ironically many years later they TUPEd back to BT (well Openreach) and the number of phone calls I got telling me how shit it was and that actually we were a very good employer by comparison so can we come back. I felt a little sorry for them in all honesty.

Fewer units. 😉

Ours is galvanised and coated steel and was all formed on-site as were all the flashings. In fact every part of the roof was made on-site from the coils. It is beautiful but I wouldn’t have it anywhere where it could easily get damaged. It took three guys seven days to do a roof smaller than yours.

Now that I’ve looked at the block drawings I’d walk away. I wouldn’t want any aspect of my house relying on someone else’s land but nor would I want any aspect of someone else’s house relying on my land. Everything to do with our house is in our land. It’s easy to get over invested in a plot of land as you can start to see your finished house etc. It’s what I did on a previous plot but my wife hated it. We found a much better plot that very day. My dad used to tell me that if there’s doubt about something then there’s no doubt. So I’m with Russell, walk away.

I’ve not caught up with this but it seems to me you need a proper survey completed which should be a condition of the sale. You definitely don’t want to be buying the plot on a wing and a prayer. You’re right to be cautious.

When you say dreadful weather was it also very windy? If you run taps and empty loos and sinks and it’s remained dry then it has to be rain. Get a hose on it as suggested.

Great effort, well done. Our first test was 0.88 and we got it down to 0.43. Haven’t done the final test yet.

My question was what is your heat loss. Do you know? -10 is relatively rare, certainly where I am in Perthshire and when it does get that cold it doesn’t stay that cold for long. A better argument for them is for power cuts as we get a few of those. So the worse case scenario is a lengthy power cut on the coldest week of the year. On the overheating ‘myth’. We spoke with two people who had built houses in the last couple of years to a reasonable standard. Both fitted stoves. Both said they never used them as it overheated the room they were in even with the internal doors open. They only used them at Christmas for the ambience. It was this that finally convinced my wife not to fit one.

The important data point is your heat loss when the heating is off. It ought to be negligible over that time period.

The defrost cycle shouldn’t have much impact. These were taken on the same day.

One last attempt. The two previous houses we lived in weren’t that well built certainly not compared to the house were are currently building. Both had ASHPs and both houses sat at 21°C downstairs and about 17/18°C upstairs. The house we are building can get up to 18°C with very little heat input and maintain that quite easily. Now we have the ASHP installed it will maintain any temperature we want I expect which is likely to be about 21°C. In fact I think it might be hard to run the house much lower than this anyway. How do I know this? Well in January we had the ASHP in floor drying mode over about two weeks ahead of the floor tiling. At one point the temperature in the house hit 32°C. We live near Blairgowrie so it can get cold enough. If yours can’t get the house above 17.5°C on the coldest days (if that’s what you’re saying) then that’s either because the house isn’t performing well or the ASHP isn’t (or both) What I am telling you though is that even if we wanted a WBS in this house we would never have been able to use it as it would have overheated the house without opening windows.

I really won’t regret it. This is our third ASHP so it’s not our first rodeo. The previous two houses were nothing like as well built as this one and neither of the ASHP installs were optimal and we never once needed auxiliary heating in those so we won’t here. We’ve had one winter in this house with no heating other than a few small heaters so I have some idea how it will perform. Much warmer overall than the house we rent which does have a wbs and free wood. We use it as little as possible though. We don’t have any heating at all upstairs. The current temp upstairs is 16.1°C. The heating has been off for a week as I’ve been fitting the skirting boards so the sliding door was open all day. The WHO among others state that 18°C is fine with the optimal temp between 18-21.

If your yardstick is number of trees planted then I’ve planted more so therefore I am allowed to lecture you? I rather suspect not. There’s a long list of stuff we could compare if you like beyond how many trees we’ve planted. We have ‘banned’ plastic containers from our house which is almost impossible really. We try and use refill places as much as possible for example. But it’s cut down the amount of plastic we use significantly probably by about 75%. I no longer shower every day. I wear clothes for longer between washes. We don’t use a tumble dryer etc The point is that everyone can justify how they live. It’s the collective impact of that across millions of people around the World. 18°C is a perfectly healthy temperature for the majority of people. Sure if you want it warmer then fine but it won’t impact the health of the vast majority of people. A wbs is likely to be worse for your health. But my point was that three small electric heaters got our house up to 18°C before the ASHP was installed. Therefore I’m quite confident, now it is installed, we won’t be sitting freezing on the odd day it’s cold because it can’t cope wishing we hadn’t deleted the wbs from the plans.

About 100 trees I would say. If I count the ones I helped plant on farm my rental is at then it’s several hundred. Not sure what the point of comparing dick sizes does for the argument. Not burning the wood would be better. Not burning the wood and planting trees better still. Our house isn’t a passive house. It’s close enough. A wbs would make it over heat even on the very coldest of days. We live in Scotland so it can get cold and during the coldest part of this winter we heated it with a few electric heaters before the ASHP was installed . It was fine. It takes very little effort for it to sit at 18°C. Once it’s up to temperature it takes quite some time for the temperature to drop much so I’m pretty confident I can ride the very occasional -10° This is why they need to be banned for new builds.

You shouldn’t need a log burner in a house built with high levels of insulation and air tightness. There are folk on here with very little on the way of heating at all. Opportunity missed there. But this attitude is why, ultimately, humanity is screwed. At an individual level the odd person burning stuff isn’t so bad. Scaled up to millions then it starts to matter. It’s why the oceans are full of plastic, the countryside full of rubbish. I’m being hypocritical of course as we built a house and the cost to the environment isn’t zero. Buying an existing house might have been more sustainable. Over its lifetime our house should net out but that depends of a number of things. You can scale this up to countries too. Why bother doing anything in the UK as we are too small to make a difference. Etc.

Yep. I disregarded all the built in bulb types and any downlights that are plastered in as nice as they are.

I’ll probably do the same. I’ll fill it first and see how that works.

The wall isn’t straight.

It’s averages. All the other bulbs might last longer than 20,000 hours.

Yep. So it seems. I contemplated concealing the stringer into the wall originally. In case no one notices how I got the skirting to match the stringer height is I ripped 25mm off it. 😂 Compare it to the skirting on the right. My wife told me to only look at that side when I go upstairs 😂

After the stairs were installed it left an awkward detail at the top of the stairs where the stringer joins the skirting board. Further complicated by the fact my skirting boards are higher than the top of the stringer and theres a gap between the stringer and the wall. Consequently running the skirting board up to the back of the stringer meant the skirting was higher than stringer. I figured that this must be a common feature to detail. A quick look at Heb Homes website and sure enough several examples of the problem. See picture. I can’t quite believe they left it like that as that would annoy the hell out of me every time I walked up the stairs. The second picture shows what I’ve done to address this but can you see how I’ve done it because I can’t decide if it annoys me or not. Any other ideas?

Completely agree. There’s is an element of trust here that the builder will comply with the agreement you’ve made. A solicitor’s letter will show intent so worth doing for a few hundred quid not worth it if it’s going to cost more than that. The big question to ask yourself is what’s your feeling that the building company are stand up people that will follow through. As I’ve already said get it done right at the start. If you leave it they’ll prioritise the building works over you. Our previous house was a barn conversion and one of 8. We were first in so the building company was on-site for several months finishing the other houses. We had a long defects list. We made a point of getting to know the site foreman and got on well with him. Consequently we got 90% of the defects resolved just by dealing with him but crucially while they were all still there. The actual process was to go through the office and get every defect signed off which generally was a painful process.