Self build..what did you do?

[Ian]

2 minutes ago, NeverEnoughCake said:

Ian

Mid Wales, and if we bought the land and it was straightforward we wouldn't use our solicitor, but like I said..lots of other legal stuff goes with it.

I still think that you would be best coordinating the whole lot through a Planning Consultant. They would liaise with your solicitor and make sure they incorporate anything that is needed for the legal side of the application. Try ringing Berwyn Owen or Jamie Bradshaw at Owen Devenport - they are North Wales based but will cover Mid Wales (I've no connection with them other than I used them for my own application even though I'm an architect)

https://www.owendevenport.co.uk/

[Sue B]

We have a neighbour who works in a solicitors office doing conveyancing but she is very very able and understands planning and planning laws. She knows what is likely to get approved and what they are likely to say no to - and also what they are able to say no to.  She is VERY unusual and probably the only person I know, who works in a solicitors office, that I would trust with a planning application.

[NeverEnoughCake]

Ian

We got prices pretty much nailed down....apart from the foundations!! And as this can seem to vary by many thousands we want clarification of this cost...it could be the difference between building in May 2020 or having to wait, or going ahead with the solar power system or having to wait. We have a set cash budget for the core, shell and roof that we will not deviate from...think I will take Pro Dave's advice and look at getting an engineer.

[Carrerahill]

13 minutes ago, NeverEnoughCake said:

Ian

Mid Wales, and if we bought the land and it was straightforward we wouldn't use our solicitor, but like I said..lots of other legal stuff goes with it.

If you want to use your solicitor to submit the plans for your legal reasons then fine, but don't let PP know they are from a solicitor, my advise would be for you to have plans drawn up, have them signed by yourself, witnesses, your solicitor and their dog so that those plans are now legally "the plans" then you have your architect or engineering consultants etc. submit those plans. This way it just looks like a normal set of drawings from a normal channel - remove the whiff of solicitor from the whole situation. 

Edited April 12, 2019 by Carrerahill

[Carrerahill]

36 minutes ago, NeverEnoughCake said:

So regarding the engineer, would he be able to complete groundworks also or are they purely advisory?

Engineers are the ones in white shirts and ties. He will advise, design, check and specify for you and can provide for BC reasons a design or calcs or report confirming suitability of your chosen site. 

 

 

 

 

[Ian]

14 minutes ago, NeverEnoughCake said:

We got prices pretty much nailed down.

That's great to hear as it's probably the most difficult part of any self-build! I'm impressed.

I understand you don't know about foundations yet but what is the rest of your build cost coming to out of interest?

[Jeremy Harris]

18 minutes ago, NeverEnoughCake said:

Ian

We got prices pretty much nailed down....apart from the foundations!! And as this can seem to vary by many thousands we want clarification of this cost...it could be the difference between building in May 2020 or having to wait, or going ahead with the solar power system or having to wait. We have a set cash budget for the core, shell and roof that we will not deviate from...think I will take Pro Dave's advice and look at getting an engineer.

 

With respect, I don't think you can really get costs pinned down at all until you have got planning consent and costed the implications of any planning conditions that have been imposed.  Depending on the local planning policy, your planners could impose conditions that may have a pretty massive impact on cost.  In our case planning-related conditions probably added around £10k to £15k to the build cost, plus lots of time spent trying to work around some of the conditions that were imposed.

[NeverEnoughCake]

Ian, sue, jsharris

 Ian...costs 46k shell and core (allowing 12k for foundations s?) 33k interior fit out not including furniture..these are costs for materials only and do not include LABOUR. 

 

Sue..as mentioned we feel comfortable with the solicitor. There are many other legal things to take into consideration. We inherited a business between two family members, division of property, change of land usage etc. We are having plans drawn up to our spec by a pro who will forward copies to us and the solicitor, and our solicitor has in fact suggested we also use a planning consultant. She is a rural solicitor well heeled in the trials and tribulations of farming/land/inheritance stuff. It is good to know you have faith in your neighbour?also, regarding the windows, we were invited to the showroom at an appointed time, given coffee, shown examples of doors, frames, colour options. Choose locks, handles and obscured glass design, given time frames, and at no point was a "fag packet" used..just a calculator!?

 

 

Jsharris...now you got me worried...if you don't mind me asking, what planning related conditions did you have?

[Jeremy Harris]

Just now, NeverEnoughCake said:

Jsharris...now you got me worried...if you don't mind me asking, what planning related conditions did you have?

 

Lots.

 

We had a condition requiring samples of all external materials and finishes to be approved by the planning office, with restrictions on what those materials and finishes could be (the originally specified stone finish from the planners would have added around £45k to our build cost, but I won the battle to have it changed).

 

We had a condition requiring control of any run off from the site during building work, to prevent contamination of the stream alongside, which could have cost a lot if we'd had wet weather during the ground works (we were lucky, it remained hot and dry for that stage, and I wrote some deceptive weasel words in my request for discharge so I didn't need to do anything unless we observed a problem).

 

We had a condition requiring the driveway surface to comply with the requirements set by the planning office, with prior approval of materials used by them (again costly, as they insisted on a specific type of permeable block paving).

 

We had the standard condition that we needed to provide SuDS compliant surface water runoff control, which meant building a large underground surge attenuation tank, that soaked away gradually over a period of hours after storm levels of rainfall.

 

We had a minimum finished floor level and parking area level, relative to the 1:100 year flood risk level, imposed by a planning condition from the Environment Agency.  This determined how much spoil we needed to remove from the site (we shifted around 900 tonnes of stuff when levelling the site).

 

We had a condition requiring that we submit a detailed landscaping scheme for approval prior to starting work, and a requirement that we landscaped the area in accordance with that approved scheme.

 

We had the standard condition imposed that restricted all work on the site to being between 08:00 and 18:00, Monday to Friday, and between 08:00 and 13:00 on Saturdays, with no work allowed outside those times, on Sundays, or on Public Holidays (I broke this condition many times, but was lucky, no one reported me).

 

There were a few other conditions, relating to local planning policy, the need to adhere to the approved plans etc, but none were very onerous.

 

[NeverEnoughCake]

Js

Blimey!

Ok..think some of those things will relate to us. With regards to the stone, we have specified the stone, from a local quarry that much of the surrounding buildings and local town are constructed from, will they need to have samples even though it's the go to stone of the area?

 

Landscaping..we have a detailed plan of the site with positions of new woodland, orchard, garden, paddock, fences, stone walling and gravel driveway ( which may move about a bit in the final submission re foundations) All these things will be completed but not immediately, were you given a time scale for completion of landscaping?

 

With regards to the water issues, not quite the same as you, but can you or anyone else help? We are fitting a water harvesting system to the roof to supply toilet, washing machine, animals and garden. We will tap into an existing spring water supply for everything else. We in theory have no need for drains to channel away rainwater, however, should we need to would we be able to run a pipe to remove excess into a lower drainage ditch, which in turn runs down to a ditch in the road and into a storm drain? 

[Jeremy Harris]

As long as the planners are content with your choice of external finishes and the design, then that's fine, but it would be well worth looking at the local planning policy to determine what, if any, conditions might be imposed.  Often it's also well worth looking at a few recent planning approvals in the area (they should all be available online) to see what conditions have been imposed.

 

The landscaping plan had to be approved before we could start, and we were required to stick to it, but frankly no one has been to check, so my guess is that we could have deviated from it, although that could have posed a risk if someone chose to complain about it.  There was nothing saying that the planners had to agree to our choice regarding the landscaping, and it was quite probable that they could have told us to do something different if they wished to.

 

With regard to water, then I'd think hard about how you go about using rainwater.  Modern washing machines run at cool temperatures, so aren't suitable for using untreated stored rainwater, as this will contain significant quantities of faecal bacteria from bird droppings.  It's fine to use stored rainwater to flush toilets, but if you have a spring then why bother to harvest rainwater?  We have a borehole for water, so use that for everything, as it means only having one pump, pressure vessel, filter and disinfection system, etc, and one set of plumbing.  If we'd added rainwater harvesting we'd have had to install two systems, at a significant additional cost, and with zero environmental benefit (rainwater ends up in the aquifer that supplies our borehole, anyway, just as it ends up feeding your spring).

 

Drainage depends on how forcefully the planners decide to impose SuDS (SuDS is a national requirement, supposedly).  In general they may impose a standard condition requiring the control of surface water run off, or they may not.  Have a look at local policy and recent planning applications in your area to get a feel for what they may choose to impose.

[Ferdinand]

@NeverEnoughCake

 

I think your big thing over the next couple of weeks is getting to grips with the planning system and what it will require of you. It may be about to hit you like a steamroller if you are not already familiar with things.

 

Can I suggest that you read several of the blogs here and elsewhere of projects with similar aspects (and I mean every word of the blog). That will I think be really helpful.

 

Can I suggest for offsite blogs:

 

Jeremy’s blog here http://www.mayfly.eu/ . Read it end to end.

 

Dip into Life at the end of the Road, which is off grid https://lifeattheendoftheroad.wordpress.com/

 

For onsite, pick a few and read the earlier posts about planning stuff.

 

Other people may have good suggestions; I am now out for the day.

 

F

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited April 12, 2019 by Ferdinand

[NeverEnoughCake]

Js

Rainwater needed because we will be sharing original farm water supply with other party. They are a family who will use more. We will of course fit filtering and cleaning processes before we use it, even though it won't be for drinking. We would use rainwater for everything, but legally you can't use it for showering and drinking. We don't do much in the way of cold washing in the machine....hot wash because my partner has a manual job, and we live on a farm. Bird faecal matter is the least of our faecal matter worries!!?

[Jeremy Harris]

1 hour ago, NeverEnoughCake said:

Js

Rainwater needed because we will be sharing original farm water supply with other party. They are a family who will use more. We will of course fit filtering and cleaning processes before we use it, even though it won't be for drinking. We would use rainwater for everything, but legally you can't use it for showering and drinking. We don't do much in the way of cold washing in the machine....hot wash because my partner has a manual job, and we live on a farm. Bird faecal matter is the least of our faecal matter worries!!?

 

 

The snag is that hot washing (it needs to be over 60°C) uses a lot more energy.  The best solution would seem to be to just fit a single tank fed from the spring and use that.  The tank will act as a big buffer, so can fill up overnight when there's no water demand.  Alternatively, you could do the necessary filtering and disinfection (you'll need to install a UV light disinfection system anyway) on the spring supply, then pump it into an accumulator to give you a treated store of pressurised clean water.

 

I have a relative whose water supply comes from a slow spring, little more than a trickle, and they have an underground storage tank, with an overflow (much the same as a rainwater tank) with a small pump set that pulls from that and runs the water through a 5µ filter and UV disinfection unit to supply the house as required.  That works well, as the spring doesn't have anywhere near enough flow to meet their instantaneous demand, but is more than enough to keep their tank topped up.  Their tank can supply their water needs for several days, so they can cope with short periods when the flow from the spring is really low.  The overflow from the tank runs to a large pond at the end of their garden, and the overflow from that runs down to a nearby stream.  The pond is also their rainwater run off attenuation system, that stops surface water from running off quickly beyond their boundary (which is now a SuDS requirement).

[NeverEnoughCake]

Js

I see your point

Firstly, we will be self sufficient for energy via solar, battery and back up generator, so we will be using our own power for the washing machine, which will of course be used when the solar is at it's most productive time of the day.

Secondly, with regards to the water, we need more of it, not just another way of storing it. The original spring is actually a powerful flow, but during very dry periods it turns muddy and barely runs out of the tap. It has only ever served the main farm and will now have to stretch to two properties. If the stream running through the property dries up, which happens usually every summer at some point, then the spring also becomes the main source of water for the animals as well. So as you can see, it's very important that we gain additional water.

[pulhamdown]

The other side of the coin is that we had virtually no conditions set by the planners.  Other than that no trees can be cut down during the build.  Of course, any trees in the way were felled before applying for PP?  

[jack]

4 minutes ago, NeverEnoughCake said:

so we will be using our own power for the washing machine, which will of course be used when the solar is at it's most productive time of the day.

 

Just as a point of comparison, we have 8.5kW of PV and there are often days in a row in winter where we generate sod-all power. Generator backup will help your electricity needs, but it's an expensive and inefficient way of heating water.

 

Could you add oil or bottled gas to supplement your water heating needs when the sun doesn't shine?

[NeverEnoughCake]

Hello Jack

We will In deed be installing a gas boiler. We are living in a caravan at the moment, and we have managed with the tiny LPG boiler for showering, and all hot water needs, and we have decided to install one in the house. Worcester/Bosch do a little one that is more powerful than the one we are currently using and we think it will be fine. So its LPG GAS cooker and hot water, solar power, and woodburner for heat. That's alot of power you have! We are low users..about 2000kwh a year! Going with 7 x 365 LG neon mono panels, Victron easisolar48/3000/70-50-230v-c/w integral mppt charge controller, BYD -B-PLUSL 2.56 kWh 48v lithium battery...any thoughts?

[jack]

3 minutes ago, NeverEnoughCake said:

Going with 7 x 365 LG neon mono panels, Victron easisolar48/3000/70-50-230v-c/w integral mppt charge controller, BYD -B-PLUSL 2.56 kWh 48v lithium battery...any thoughts?

 

My only thought is that I don't have sufficient knowledge about any of this to give you advice - sorry! ?

[NeverEnoughCake]

Pulham down

Thanks for that....we are kind of looking at one hurdle at a time...we want costs first...if we can't afford to do it the way we want why bother applying for planning permission. Planning problems will be overcome when they arise....but PMA..we won't have any!!!! If we do then we'll deal with it.

[Jeremy Harris]

We have 6.25 kWp of installed PV, and I'm looking at installing battery storage.  We're also "off grid" for water and sewage, but have grid electricity that we use as a big battery, in effect.  Over the course of a year the PV generates a bit more than double the amount of energy we use (the house is all-electric, no bottled gas, oil, or other toxic fuel burning stuff).  However, from around October to about March every year we don't generate anywhere near enough electricity from the PV to cover the house consumption, even though the house consumption is very low (it's a passive house, so needs very little heating).  It wouldn't matter how big a battery system I installed, we could never hope to meet more than maybe 10% to 20% of our winter energy needs from the PV generation, so would need some other means of keeping the battery charged for around 4 or 5 months of the year.  If we had a generator, then it would need to deliver around 15 kWh to 25 kWh per day, during the PV "dead season", so would be costly to run.  Unfortunately, we can't install wind generation, but if we could I think we could possibly reduce the winter deficit. 

 

Paul Camelli (his blog has been mentioned in this thread before, it's well worth a read: https://lifeattheendoftheroad.wordpress.com/ ) has managed (after many years of off-grid experience and development) to create a system that doesn't need a generator now, with the combination of some PV generation, a fair bit of wind generation, and, perhaps most importantly, a small amount of always-on micro hydro generation.  His micro hydro system only delivers a couple of hundred Watts, but that apparently really makes a big difference in terms of keeping his battery topped up, and has meant that he rarely, if ever, needs to fire up the generator.

 

At the moment we use the grid as a seasonal battery to meet the winter requirement, by putting far more into the grid in summer than we use in winter.  That's not ideal, but my next step is to install a battery system so that when we need to use grid power we can do so at the best time, overnight, when grid demand is low.  I doubt the battery system will be cost-effective, in terms of being cheaper than buying electricity from the grid, as the capital cost alone would pay the electricity bill for many years to come.  It will, however, reduce the net CO₂ we use, and even though we're already CO₂ negative, reducing our environmental impact further has to be a good thing to try and do (and is why I drive an electric car, charged for more than half the year with PV generated energy).

[epsilonGreedy]

1 hour ago, NeverEnoughCake said:

Going with 7 x 365 LG neon mono panels, Victron easisolar48/3000/70-50-230v-c/w integral mppt charge controller, BYD -B-PLUSL 2.56 kWh 48v lithium battery...any thoughts?

 

 

Nice to see Victron equipment getting recognition in UK self building. Long seen as The Brand for marine leisure installations.

[NeverEnoughCake]

We have tussled with this issue for a long time.

We would have, in all fairness, connected to the grid for electricity, but we were quoted £7000.00 and we had to dig our own trench! This was money we would never have got back, and we would then be paying them for electricity for the rest of our lives. For about the same cost we can install our solar kit, and never pay another electric bill. At the moment it is still fairly new technology that is advancing all the time, so we take a chance that in the future when things need replacing the prices will have come down a fair bit and they will generate more power. We can adapt things as and when new things develop. Our ideal would probably have been a hydro system, but with no stream actually running past the property it's not an option. Domestic wind turbines aren't suitable because we either have a slight breeze, or its blowing a gale and they would just switch off. 

We accept that power will be an issue over winter, but so long as the fridge keeps running that's ok. Cosy nights by candlelight with a good book and the woodburner going will see us through. We chose a mixture of wood, solar and gas so that we had options should anything fail. We originally thought of roof mounting the panels, but changed our mind. Most people want a south facing property, but ours will face east because that's where the view is. So we thought about a ground array, but not for long cos they look awful. We have settled on a car port roof, which will face south, and will work for any future electric cars we get, but unless they start making 4x4 pick ups I don't think it will be any time soon.!!

 

Thank you all for your advice, I'm off now to find a builder to scribble some prices for foundations on a fag packet?

Will be back with update or request for more info.

[Ferdinand]

Make sure that it is a fag packet with one of those coronary warnings, to make sure you are ready for the number he Is about to give you 

 

?

[Jeremy Harris]

As long as you realise that 2.55 kWp of PV will only meet a tiny part of your energy needs, and that you will be relying on the generator for a great deal of the time, then that's fine.  With only that small amount of PV, you can pretty much forget about getting any useful generation at all for maybe four or five months in winter. 

 

It's worth putting your PV array into PVGIS (http://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvg_tools/en/tools.html ) and seeing what the output will be (PVGIS seems to be pretty accurate, as far as I can tell).  I don't know where you are, but a quick run assuming that you're somewhere near Newtown (picked at random as being near the middle of Wales!) and your PV array faces south, with optimised elevation and azimuth, this is how much electricity you would generate:

 

PVGIS-5_GridConnectedPV_52.513_-3.311_CM_crystSi_2.55kWp_14_37 (opt)deg_2 (opt)deg.pdf

 

(ignore the fact that the file is titled grid connected, it doesn't mean anything useful in this context).

 

Looking at this data, you would get around 4.5 kWh/day in October, around 2.7 kWh/day in November, around 2 kWh/day in December, around 2.3 kWh/day in January, and around 4.1 kWh/day in February.  That's not a lot of energy at all.  Our energy consumption is pretty low, given that our house is a passive house, designed to use very little energy and be less than zero CO₂, but in winter we use around 15 kWh to 25 kWh per day, maybe ten times as much as your PV system will generate.  A standard block and brick house built to just the (pretty dire) building regs minimum requirements could easily use double this, or more.

 

If you're relying on power from the PV system then you're pretty much going to have to forget about using most electrical appliances for around 5 months of the year, as for lots of days in winter you're going to struggle to have enough generation to run the lights, let alone anything else.  As an example, our background load (just the power that stuff in the house uses 24/7) is around 200 W, which is higher than I'd like, but is a consequence of having a sewage treatment plant (the necessary aeration system uses power), a borehole for water (the pump and disinfection unit use power) and things that are on a lot of the time, like the internet router, the circulation pump for the heating system and low power LED lights (all the lights in the house are low power LEDs).  Our base load of ~200 W couldn't be met by the power generated from your very small PV system between the end of September and the beginning of March, let alone anything else, like a washing machine, TV, PC or whatever.