Thanks for letting me join. Just about to begin building my new house.

[dnb]

Like most new folk here I am about to start building a new house.

 

I have 1.7 acres of mixed (mainly oak, but without any TPOs!) woodland on the Isle of Wight, with a clearing at one end.

It has planning permission for a 2 storey house with significant easily convertable attic space and a large garage all to my design, with a lot of help and suggestion from my architect & planning consultant.  

 

I have opted for piled foundations for all of the project (trees and heavy clay - no other sensible choice really) and a SIPs panel build for the house (the garage structure is to be built later). I looked at loads of other techniques and SIPs fitted my design the best.

 

The house design is a conservative "New England" style with real wooden cladding, painted light green (blame planning for this). I am aiming for it to be very efficient by using Passivehaus techniques but am not aiming to gain certification.  Each floor is approximately 125m^2, giving 250m^2 of total living space, and a useful attic space of around 80m^2. Some of the attic will contain plant, and the master bedroom has a vaulted ceiling (I had to have some architectural feature!).

 

I will be looking to use renewable energy where possible because the only services to the site are electricity and water. This is the area my first questions will come from. I have some ideas, but no idea if products exist to make them a reality.

 

I have satisfied all the planning conditions (only 11 of them)  to start the project now, and am working on the building regulations submission with my long suffering architect and the SIPs supplier. Hopefully not too much longer to go now before we start drilling holes. The Isle of Wight don't seem to have adopted the CIL, so this is one less thing to worry about.

[Dreadnaught]

Welcome! The site sounds idyllic.

 

Will you take the role as prime contractor yourself?

[ProDave]

Hi and welcome.

 

That looks to be an interesting project, we look forward to it happening.

[dnb]

Yes, I am looking to project manage etc myself as far as I am able. To a large extent it depends on my day job - it has periods of extremes at the whims of the civil service. (best not go in to that)

 

I will get some photos of the site - it really is fantastic. We spent nearly 3 years looking - along with all the pitfalls of getting beaten to it, out bid etc. It came good in the end.

 

 

 

[lizzie]

Sounds lovely.  Looking forward to following progress.

[newhome]

Welcome! Once you've made enough posts (10) you become a regular member and the VAT sub forum opens up to you. Worth reading the guide on there early on so that you understand and maximise the opportunity to pay as little VAT as possible during the build and to ensure that your reclaim is successful. There are some things you have to pay standard rate VAT on but a few ways round some of that (not all) if you organise things correctly. Once you've made enough posts you can view it via this link:
 

 

 

[dnb]

Thanks for the tip. I am always keen to minimise tax.

[Jeremy Harris]

Welcome.

 

We built a passive house, timber clad with larch, that is effectively a "negative energy, negative CO₂" house (it generates more energy than it uses over the course of a year, and has total CO₂ "emissions" of -0.9 tonnes CO₂/year).

 

We're not a million miles away from you, about 10 miles west of Salisbury, and you're welcome to drop in if you're on the mainland at any time.

 

 

[Gone West]

Welcome to the forum, and good luck with your project. I'm not so sure about putting plant in the attic as some friends did that and are now taking their MVHR out and putting it somewhere more accessible.

[SteamyTea]

Welcome

As far as renewables go, look at roof integrated PV and ASHPs.

Make the big decisions first and the rest falls into place.

Purely as an aside, I have no idea what water and sewage costs on the IoW, but if it is similar to Cornwall, you may want to look at a borehole and sewage plant.  May work out cheaper after a few years.

Avoid any type of combustion for energy generation, even though you have lots of wood.

[dnb]

Thanks all. I plan to avoid all forms of combustion. It doesn't seem a good idea in a wooden house! (and there are other reasons too)

I am going down the sewage treatment plant route no matter what - there's no mains drainage for miles.

I have 45m^2 of useful  south facing roof. You'll never guess what's going on it. Shame Tesla aren't going to be ready in time really.

 

The plant in the attic is the thermal store. The MVHR will be in the plant room near the centre of the ground floor - good route for ducts throughout the whole house.

 

JS Harris - I would really love to see what is achievable. There is always something new to learn.

 

I took a couple of site photos while I was clearing up today - there's always grass to mow and nettles to strim!

My back garden - over 100m of woodland - and my "site office" in the corner of the plot.

[Ed Davies]

10 hours ago, dnb said:

I plan to avoid all forms of combustion.

 

Good plan. That's my motto, too.  I consider mains electricity to be (largely) combustion, though, which is probably more extreme than what you have in mind.

[Jeremy Harris]

8 minutes ago, Ed Davies said:

 

Good plan. That's my motto, too.  I consider mains electricity to be (largely) combustion, though, which is probably more extreme than what you have in mind.

 

 

Me too.  At the moment we use the grid as a seasonal storage battery, as we generate more electricity over a year than we use, but generation in winter is pretty poor, so we're reliant on the grid then. 

 

The next stage in my plan to reduce grid consumption is to fit a battery storage system.  It won't be a Tesla, because of the lack of control that Tesla have over when their product charges and discharges (it's impossible to override the Tesla algorithm).  I want to be able to charge the battery only from excess PV generation and off-peak electricity, with the aim of reducing our peak rate electricity consumption to near zero.  I believe that doing this will probably have a disproportionately large impact on our grid electricity CO₂ footprint, as the big and dirty power stations seem to get most use during peak rate periods.

[SteamyTea]

IoW has an OCGT 140MW unit at Cowes, the Gateway to the World.

 

[dnb]

I do intend to put in a battery bank in the fullness of time. And it will operate using my algorithms if nobody has properly solved the problem I am tryingg to solve... Unfortunately I have to watch the budget at the moment.

[Ferdinand]

40 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

IoW has an OCGT 140MW unit at Cowes, the Gateway to the World.

 

 

Is that not one of those places south of Watford, somewhere?

 

 

[SteamyTea]

2 hours ago, Ferdinand said:

Is that not one of those places south of Watford, somewhere?

IoW is Up North to me as is Plymouth, Exeter and Bude.

[LA3222]

Hi @dnb, you seem to be carrying out a project very similar to my own!  I am going down the SIP route, approx 280m2 over two floors and am also just now going through the building regs process so I will keep an eye out for your posts.

 

Good luck with the build.

[recoveringbuilder]

21 hours ago, dnb said:

Thanks all. I plan to avoid all forms of combustion. It doesn't seem a good idea in a wooden house! (and there are other reasons too)

I am going down the sewage treatment plant route no matter what - there's no mains drainage for miles.

I have 45m^2 of useful  south facing roof. You'll never guess what's going on it. Shame Tesla aren't going to be ready in time really.

 

The plant in the attic is the thermal store. The MVHR will be in the plant room near the centre of the ground floor - good route for ducts throughout the whole house.

 

JS Harris - I would really love to see what is achievable. There is always something new to learn.

 

I took a couple of site photos while I was clearing up today - there's always grass to mow and nettles to strim!

My back garden - over 100m of woodland - and my "site office" in the corner of the plot.

This so looks like our ‘site office ‘ which just happened to be home for 7 months, the awning was the office part until a big wind got up last September and took it out!

[TerryE]

I am another self-builder with an electric only passive-class non-certified house.  A couple of things to consider:

• Your loft space:  if you are considering making this living space then at a minimum do all of the structural and at least 1st fit work during initial construction.  Also make sure that you have any roof lights, etc. in the initial build so that commissioning it doesn't  change the external look of the house and therefore fall foul of further planning approval.  Our estate agent for our old house had a look at our new plans and he was the one that suggested that we include our loft space as living space from day 1 -- far cheaper to do than doing a conversion later on.  A decision that we have never regretted.
• We haven't got a thermal store.  We use a SunAmp system (lots of discussion on the pros and cons here on the forum), but the big pluses are that it this is thermal energy dense and also has incredibly low heat losses, so our entire 'plant room' is a cupboard off our ground floor toilet.  We use our ground floor slab as our thermal store for space heating.  Do the math: that amount of concrete has more than an order more specific heat capacity than any conventional TS.  Again we've had various threads on this.
• ASHP vs GSHP.  Again research all of the threads on this.  I realise that you might be tempted to go the GSHP route given your acreage, but the consensus here seems to be that ASHP is better in terms of through-life costing.

 

[dnb]

Thanks all! Lots of good information.

 

The awning is currently serving as the garden shed because the on site garage is full of broken car. Just what I need - another job to do.

 

I am not considering the attic space as bedrooms for the moment, but want to have this as an option in case of any elderly parent care requirement. (Not for them - they get part of down stairs) My architect was very good at helping me to get some nice large half-round windows in the gable ends in the attic to make it all possible. It will be built to all the regs with living space in mind, even though we don't plan to (can't afford to) fit it out fully.

 

I have looked at the SunAmp system and am not yet convinced. I will have a piled foundation with ring beam and beam-and-block floor (probably using some insulating blocks), so relatively little concrete in the grand scheme to store anything - my maths indicates I have more of a cooling problem than a heating problem.  I think at the moment it is solar thermal with PV and a battery bank eventually (again depending on cost-benefit analysis) for water heating and taking up the house base load for electricity.

 

I am going for an ASHP - see the thread on integrating the MVHR with air conditioning. GSHPs do work, but are expensive to the point of not paying back in my lifetime in the house and will upset the council over disturbing the trees (even though there are no TPOs).

[Ed Davies]

12 hours ago, dnb said:

I do intend to put in a battery bank in the fullness of time. And it will operate using my algorithms if nobody has properly solved the problem I am tryingg to solve...

 

That'd be interesting to discuss sometime.

[Clockers]

Looks amazing, congratulations and best of luck ?