Introduction

[Lilly_Pines]

Hi everyone!

I've been lurking occasionally, now finally made an account. I've immigrated a few years ago so not overly familiar with how things work around here, mainly looking for information on how to be allowed to self-build the way I want. I'm a bit of a mad engineer with strong and specific aesthetic opinions so anticipating quite a bit of friction with bureaucracy. My ideal would be to combine picturesque, almost fairytale-traditional aesthetics with modern high technology (think vacuum glazing, ultra-efficient lighting and HEPA-filtered MVHR, not smart home gadgets; I work in tech so I don't want any unnecessary computers in my home).

 

I like tall ceilings (3.5m tall, not 2.7m "tall"), biodiversity, Christopher Alexander's books, post and beam framing, and violet-pumped LEDs. I dislike fire retardants, wasting energy, pollen allergies, inadequate natural lighting, lawns, and car dependency.

Edited August 30, 2022 by Lilly_Pines

[SteamyTea]

Welcome

 

All sounds interesting, though difficult.

 

Some on here have a lot of planning experience, while others are good on the technical front.

 

Where have you emigrated from?

 

Good luck with your project.

[Lilly_Pines]

I come from Finland, where the planning is very different: areas get zoned for residential use and the municipal planners specify certain limits (like roof slope and orientation, max ridge height, allowed wall finishes and colours, the part of the plot the house or its outbuildings have to be at, and most importantly the maximum floor area) and then individual builders have a fairly hands-free approach to the details. Unfortunately the planners are very enamored with modernist style and the aesthetic rules tend to reject most of the things I would want (like ornamentation) as "pastiche" and "not reflecting its time" which I in turn consider being stuck in the bad ideas of 100 years ago.

As far as I've understood it, in the UK you instead have to apply for every single building as if it was an exception, and when buying a plot there is very little confidence in whether you will be allowed to build what you want if some bureaucrat wants something else. This then seems like it creates a catch-22 where you need to have a design ready so you can know whether you would be allowed to build it on the plot you're considering, but a truly beautiful design cannot be made without extreme sensitivity to the particular details of the specific site. On the other hand if you get planning in principle or outline permission and buy the plot on that basis you'll sink lots of money and open yourself up to the planners twisting your arm however much they want on the details. Meanwhile Paragraph 79 seems to be designed to let rich people build things that look like post-apocalyptic strip malls half-buried in sand as long as they can pay a sufficiently famous architect to hype them up, while aiming for extraordinary levels of merely ordinary beauty is not exceptional enough to qualify even if the vast majority of onlookers would find it much less of an eyesore.

 

On the technical side I'm expecting some people here to get a bit of a chuckle with some of the things I want to do like building the house around/inside a large greenhouse, ventilating it with something like 2-3 ACH (to maintain air quality even as atmospheric CO2 concentrations rise; to limit CO2 to 100ppm above ambient you need roughly 200 m3/h of fresh air per person), having enough indoor lighting to compete with the sun (to prevent seasonal affective disorder; my current living room has roughly 50,000 lumens of light or the equivalent of 60 regular lightbulbs for under 30 sq.m), or using composting toilets with bidet showers regardless of whether a sewer connection is available (to avoid clogging and aerosol plumes and reduce water and paper consumption while improving comfort and hygiene).

[SteamyTea]

I think Wales has some scope for more off beat designs.

Someone built a 'Hobbit House' there and eventually got planning.

 

You could just build a white cube, then get 4 projectors and put whatever façade you like on it.

Projectors can chuck out quite a lot of light.

 

[Radian]

4 hours ago, Lilly_Pines said:

ultra-efficient lighting

4 hours ago, Lilly_Pines said:

violet-pumped LED

Hi, and welcome. I like the ambition of your project but I'm just curious about what you count as ultra efficient lighting? You go on to express a preference for down-converted phosphor excitation but the Stokes energy shift means it's lossier to convert down from violet than it is from blue. Mind you, I don't know exactly how that's reflected in power consumption. It's certainly better for colour rendition!

 

[twice round the block]

You should have brought a ship load of timber with you as your country (Finland) is exporting it all. The profit would have payed for a development over here. 

 

Apparently there's a shortage  for the home market according to my neighbour who has just returned from her summer house by the lake, which she is trying to get planning on, to extend.

[Lilly_Pines]

1 hour ago, Radian said:

Hi, and welcome. I like the ambition of your project but I'm just curious about what you count as ultra efficient lighting? You go on to express a preference for down-converted phosphor excitation but the Stokes energy shift means it's lossier to convert down from violet than it is from blue. Mind you, I don't know exactly how that's reflected in power consumption. It's certainly better for colour rendition!

 

I've seen quoted efficiencies (ignoring driver) of around 110 lm/W (e.g. Nichia Optisolis) which seems good enough for dimmer lighting (morning and evening) and in full daylight mode I'd be combining them with more efficient but spectrally suboptimal high-CRI blue-pumped LEDs (I've seen 165 lm/W on greenhouse lights, possibly better nowadays) to reduce the cost in both purchase price and electricity consumption. With sufficient windows (every single house I've been in I've wanted to punch a bunch of additional holes in) the full power should only be needed on cloudy days which also helps, and with mid-pane U-values of 0.5 (LandVac) the windows themselves shouldn't be too much of an issue, especially when considering solar gains on sunny days and "waste" heat output from the lights on cloudy days.

 

Ideally the slight underfloor and wall heating required for radiant comfort in the bathroom could be produced by something like a compost pile for garden waste and no other heating would be needed, so I'd only need a heat pump for DHW (with the ability to optimise for efficiency at high temperatures) and all other efforts would go into preventing the house from overheating with appropriate shading, using ground source non-heatpump pre-conditioning for the ventilation air before the MVHR, etc.

[Lilly_Pines]

3 hours ago, SteamyTea said:

I think Wales has some scope for more off beat designs.

Someone built a 'Hobbit House' there and eventually got planning.

Does Wales have leeway in ways other than One Planet development? I've looked into that but am not particularly enthusiastic about the requirement to generate income off the land when my comparative advantage lies elsewhere.

[SteamyTea]

1 hour ago, Lilly_Pines said:

Does Wales have leeway in ways other than One Planet development? I've looked into that but am not particularly enthusiastic about the requirement to generate income off the land when my comparative advantage lies elsewhere.

No idea, I live geographically close to Wales but by road it is a minimum of 260 miles.

[Radian]

110lm/W would be acceptable to me although I'm kind of limited to 3000K anyway otherwise I seem to get migraines 😬 Not seen much discussion about vacuum glazing. My initial thoughts are 'how long does it hold a vacuum'. Is it a mature enough product to answer that question yet?

[Lilly_Pines]

13 hours ago, Radian said:

110lm/W would be acceptable to me although I'm kind of limited to 3000K anyway otherwise I seem to get migraines 😬 Not seen much discussion about vacuum glazing. My initial thoughts are 'how long does it hold a vacuum'. Is it a mature enough product to answer that question yet?

All the information I've seen suggests it holds a vacuum much better than regular double/triple glazing holds its gas in, with warranties of 15 years being routine. Combine that with the better aesthetics of slim panes and minimal to no double reflection, better sound insulation, and better thermal performance than reasonable multiple glazing options, it seems like a no-brainer if you can afford the initial outlay.

[markc]

For vacuum to work it needs to be a true vacuum and that would mean very thick glass or small panes or atmospheric pressure would defect both panes until they touched. Gas filled is much easier as the gas can be at atmospheric pressure so no stress on the glass

[Mr Punter]

2 hours ago, markc said:

For vacuum to work it needs to be a true vacuum and that would mean very thick glass or small panes or atmospheric pressure would defect both panes until they touched. Gas filled is much easier as the gas can be at atmospheric pressure so no stress on the glass

 

I think the panes have lots of barely visible spacers to keep them apart.