Building a Passivhaus in Sussex

[Robert Clark]

Hi Guys

 

The story so far....

Have wanted to build and live in an eco house for years. So was quick to try and snap up a 2.5 acre local building plot when it came on the market in the summer. The plot already had planning permission, so we thought we were good to go!

 

We agreed to pay the asking price and the legal wheels were set in motion.

 

After a number of months of tooing and frowing we were told that the vendor still hadn’t got access rights agreed by the owners of the access road. 

 

The next blow was when the vendor told us that he’d received a higher offer (than our asking price offer) and that we needed to pay an extra £10k or risk loosing the plot.

 

Finally a few days later we heard from our solicitor that the vendor had pulled out of the sale, 4 months after accepting our offer, giving no reason for his decision.

 

So undeterred we went back to the drawing board and decided to demolish our existing house and re build on our 1 acre plot.

 

We’ve appointed a local Passivhaus architect and are now awaiting their initial concepts.

 

We've got a pre application meeting booked with the planning department on 5th Feb, so now feel that we’re finally making some progress.

 

The BIG question in my mind now is which is the most cost effective route for getting the build done?

 

Architect and Main contractor?

Project manager and sub contractors?

Just a Main Contractor?

 

Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated.

 

Thanks!

 

Robert 

 

[Mr Punter]

Hello Robert and welcome.

 

What a pain with the other plot!

 

Are you planning on doing any of the work yourself or do you want to hand the whole job over?  Do you have a build type in mind (timber frame, brick and block, ICF)?  Often the architect will have worked with a couple of contractors so this may be a good place to start.

 

Passivhaus involves more than just gaining planning consent and a standard building regs application, so your architect will play a vital role.  Make sure you have a good relationship and understanding of what both parties expect of each other.  Have you seen examples of their work and talked to other clients?  Also, do they tend to get repeat business?

 

Demolish and replace is very expensive, so be very clear on exactly what you want and make sure that is what is delivered.

 

I am a small scale developer in Sussex and will be happy to give you any pointers where appropriate.

[Robert Clark]

38 minutes ago, Mr Punter said:

Hello Robert and welcome.

 

What a pain with the other plot!

 

Are you planning on doing any of the work yourself or do you want to hand the whole job over?  Do you have a build type in mind (timber frame, brick and block, ICF)?  Often the architect will have worked with a couple of contractors so this may be a good place to start.

 

Passivhaus involves more than just gaining planning consent and a standard building regs application, so your architect will play a vital role.  Make sure you have a good relationship and understanding of what both parties expect of each other.  Have you seen examples of their work and talked to other clients?  Also, do they tend to get repeat business?

 

Demolish and replace is very expensive, so be very clear on exactly what you want and make sure that is what is delivered.

 

I am a small scale developer in Sussex and will be happy to give you any pointers where appropriate.

 

Thanks for your reply.

 

Min we’re nig planning to do any work ourselves.

 

We’re thinking about timer frame (maybe MBC or Touchwood) , thought the external finish hasn’t been decided yet. The architect has worked with MBC and is also familiar with PH15, though we’re not tied to using them.

 

The architect is a Certified European Passivhaus Designer and a Jury Member of the International Passivhaus Awards. So I’m hoping for a positive outcome, though only time will tell.

 

Will post some of his designs when we get them.

Edited December 12, 2018 by Robert Clark
Missing sentences

[TerryE]

A lot of the members here have got houses built to an equivalent energy performance to Passivhaus, but without formal certification.  For example my house has an MBC twinwall and passive slab, Internorm windows / doors and Fakro roof lights, etc.  My attitude to Passivhaus itself is that it is a "designer label" in that whilst I agree with the underlying energy saving principles and have built my house to them, I think that the actual scheme itself and certification is overly bureaucratic and by itself add no value.

 

IMO, the most important thing is for you and your architect to understand your true underlying goals and to design a house that you will truly enjoy living in.  Don't allow yourself to be lulled into a design that looks good on paper, but a year after you move in you keep thinking to yourself: I wish that we had done that differently.  For example, many architects seem to love "acres of glass" which results in a loss of privacy for the occupants: if you don't own the overlooking sight-lines, then you can't control overlooking.  Also large windows can a greenhouse effect that can be expensive and difficult to mitigate, especially if such measures are an afterthought. 

 

The energy design of a house is important, but a very common mistake is to fail to understand that achieving the cooling goals can be far more challenging than the heating ones.  Put simply, with current technologies correctly applied it is fairly straightforward to build a house that is cheap to heat in the winter season.  It can prove a lot more difficult keeping the house cool enough in the other three seasons. 6m² of glass can generate over 3 kW of incident heat on a sunny autumn day and +3 kW will turn an average room in a zero-energy house into an oven in hours.

 

Many of the members here are willing to host visits, and this can be a very effective mechanism for you and your partner to get a good gut reaction as to what would work well for you and what wouldn't.    In our case, Jan and I have lived in our new house for a year now, and we can truly say that if we could redo this again, the things that we would consider doing differently are very minor.

[MikeSharp01]

Hi - and welcome to THE forum for self builders. We are building a passive standard house in East Kent and I suspect we now lean rather more with @TerryE than we did when we set out in terms of certification. Our architects are not PH certified bit I decided we could deal with that as we wanted quite an avant guard design from their stable and the PHPP software is not complex to drive after a 1 day course I felt I could probably tackle the main work, avoid the key pitfalls and get it verified by a PH designer.

[joe90]

I built to “passive hous” principles but not interested in certificates. Mine is brick and block, traditional cottage, and I had a main contractor (who was brilliant). I am a retired “builder but did mainly kitchens , bathrooms and loft conversions. I was very hands on with my build and did all the carpentry, plumbing, tiling etc but not electrics as it needed signing off but I laboured fir the spark to save money. Having been on this forum has been a gold mine of information . I was lucky with my contractor, (some here were not) a local chap with a very good track record. Our build is all my own design and there is very little that I would change if I did it again. I think the main difference between “other” built houses and self build on here is the attention to detail which makes all the difference. Airtightness is a major thing with passive hous and very worthwhile getting right as it can be near impossible to correct it afterwards. 

[the_r_sole]

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Edited September 26, 2019 by the_r_sole

[ProDave]

With a whole acre is there no chance of keeping the original house and dividing the garden to hive off a plot for yourself?  It would be a lot more cost effective than knock down and rebuild.

[Gone West]

3 hours ago, Robert Clark said:

 

We’re thinking about timer frame (maybe MBC or Touchwood) , thought the external finish hasn’t been decided yet. The architect has worked with MBC and is also familiar with PH15, though we’re not tied to using them.

Hi Robert, welcome to the forum. Friends of ours had a low energy Touchwood house built several years ago and are very happy with it. We designed and built our own house to PH standards using the PHPP.  As others have said make sure you have the internal layout as you want it, as you will have to live with it.

[Robert Clark]

2 hours ago, ProDave said:

With a whole acre is there no chance of keeping the original house and dividing the garden to hive off a plot for yourself?  It would be a lot more cost effective than knock down and rebuild.

 

Thanks for your reply

 

We did consider splitting the plot a few years ago but were advised that we’d never get permission as we live in a SSE area.

 

Even if we did get permission, the existing house is in the best part of the plot, so we’re now committed to keeping the plot as a whole and having our choice of the best orientation and views.