What kind of building?

 

 

Michael Gregory – Architect and Illustrator

 

Michael had received our proposal from Alan Clarke but was not able to see us before. It was a most valuable meeting as he had studied our proposal and identified well with our objectives. He was most generous with his advice on all manner of matters.

 

• A hole to examine the foundations should follow the wall down until the edge of the foundation is detected and then should extend outwards and downwards about 12 inches to determine the depth of the foundations.

• Ground source heating buried in the walls appeared to have some merit and should be explored.

• Even though Anglian Windows said that ventilators could not be fitted after installation his opinion was that the steel reinforcing of replacement windows occurs only at the corners so holes could be bored to fit ventilators.

• A surveyor would calculate and report on a structural beam for a sum in the region of £90.

• A surveyor might not be needed for the changes proposed to the roof if prefabricated trusses were used. These are available in the shapes to permit a loft room in addition to the standard truss. The hipped effect can be achieved with successively smaller trusses.

• He would consider reversing the staircase to make the best use of the view at the back of the house to benefit 2 bedrooms rather than a bedroom and bathroom.

• Worcester Bosch should be considered and the cost of a borehole investigated as this would lead to less garden disruption.

• Roof insulation with a polyurethane foam sealer as is marketed by Warmroof has fallen out of fashion because of the strain it puts on the roof tiles. If they are held rigid as the roof flexes in the wind or snow they are liable to crack and replacing them is relatively expensive. We could not take this risk with solar tiles so must reject this option.

• The life of the newer materials has not yet been proved and we should be cautious in using them at critical points. Even replacement windows may deteriorate faster than we expect.

 

As evidence of his work he produced a file of drawings which he had used to gain planning permission together with the full drawings for the builder. These were beautifully hand prepared and quite a work of art in themselves.

It was difficult to gain a clear idea of the cost of his work. He was prepared to undertake the whole job for a percentage, but he did not suggest what percentage. His draft planning application would cost in the region of £500 as long as there were not too many changes. This appeared to take one half day but that was probably the drawing after the principles had been agreed.

He said the work on the large sample project he did had cost £4500 which appears very reasonable. He said he preferred to charge for the time he spends per half day, but did not say what a half day would cost.

I am inclined to think that his advice would be very valuable and will try to retain his services as a second opinion. In order to do this I will send him a cheque for £150 for studying the project attending today and ask if he would be willing to attend some meetings for a similar fee.

It also occurs to me that should these notes be published he would be an excellent illustrator.

I have talked to one or two people about this idea and they seem to think it has merit if David Foale is in agreement.

 

Which first on 27^th April?

I am conscious that we are going on holiday on May 9^th so have only 2 weeks to do what is necessary before a 3 week break. With that in mind I phoned Adam Cusick of Ice Energy to see if a survey costing £500 was the next step to take. He warned me that by ordering a survey I was committing myself to the purchase of a heat pump with a total cost of £5500 after grants. He was required to make sure that I had planned and costed my ground works and understood my plumbing needs before he accepted a cheque for £500.

He said there was no hurry to fit in with my building plans and the surveyor would be more useful after we had a clear idea of the building structure. I respected him for this caution.

At least David Foale has agreed to have a key and start the drawings while we are away so there can be some progress.

 

How good is my insulation?

I do want to apply the most effective insulation to my house as this will save energy and enable me to run my ground source heating at a lower temperature. At the moment I don't know what is the best cavity wall insulation and I don't want to rely on the salesman to tell me! I probably want to know the effectiveness of my walls and floor now and to be able to measure how much better they are after they are insulated.

How could I do this? If I could measure the surface temperature of the outside walls, the inside walls and the objects in the room I should be able to get a good idea of how much that wall was cooling the room. I started looking on the internet for a surface thermometer and read an article saying these had been replaced by Infra Red (IR) thermometers which could very quickly measure the temperature of a surface. Then looking on Ebay I found one for £10.56 including postage. Having a little birthday money I invested.

 

Energy usage

I have just received my first electricity bill at this house. It was much too high, based on an estimated reading, so I decided to take a customer reading. The meter shows a day and a night reading and I was surprised to find that we had used 400 units in the night and 420 units by day. Was there a leakage or some equipment I had been leaving on.

My meter flashes each time it uses a watt hour of electricity ( one thousand flashes to make a unit). As it was evening now was a good time to calculate the night time usage. I counted the seconds between the flashes and found about twenty. This worked out at 180 watts of load so I started turning off some things like computers, TV, VCR, freezer (in case it cut in and upset my measurements) and PIR lighting. I left one 25 watt bulb on so that I would not have to wait too long for the flash!

This time it was 60 seconds between the flashes so a 60 watt load of which 25 was my lamp so only 35 for the microwave and cooker which we do not turn off because we would have to reset the clock.

That sounded about right but really encouraged me to turn off those appliances at the wall each night and during the day when not in use. Oops, did I remember to turn the freezer back on!

 

Progress on the driveway?

A passing Irishman noticed the part completed driveway as he passed and offered to tidy it up for me. He plans to use the grade 1 binding gravel they use on the motorways to overlay my rubble and crush it down with a heavy roller. He offered to do this for £200 and it may be worth the money as I was expecting to pay £100 for the materials and use the car to crush down! I asked for his card and he did not have one. I asked if he was local and he said yes and mentioned a village 4 miles away at Arncott. I may be a fool, but it will have to be renewed when the builders have finished anyway.

 

Update on Solar Costs 27/04/07

I made a call to John Hill to get an update on the prices of solar tiles which he had said could be coming down. He informed me that a new arrangement for grants was expected by the end of May which was expected to limit grants to £2000 per KW peak with a maximum of £5000. Planning will have to be obtained in advance and the grant must be used in 6 months.

He said the current scheme was due to end in December but at the current take up the funds would last 2 years.

He promised to send the latest details on the Solar Century tiles and said that the Anthracite roofing tiles were a very good match for the solar tiles. He said the glass tiles keep clear with the rain and do not need any cleaning to remain effective.

 

 

Ideas from ITV “Grand Designs”

We now watch “Grand Designs” whenever convenient even though the motives and priorities of many of the clients are quite different from ours. Tonight we noticed that a builder was using quite a thin (20mm?) board for insulation under the tiles, which was expensive, but the equivalent of 100mm of sheepswool. The board was called an isocyanate board and I determined to research further. Isocyanates were an ingredient of the foam I had used to try to insulate the hot water tank and I suspect this is the kind of material used on modern hot water tanks too.

 

Second meeting with the architect 09/05/07

This meeting was to get the project moving while we are away on holiday. First David Boale took us to see some of the work he had been involved in locally. There were interesting ideas completed in a cost effective way. Some properties which were quite ugly had been improved and others had been extended in a sympathetic and pleasing way. Materials had been appropriately natural stone, timber and rendered brick.

On returning to his office we were pleased to find he had drafted some floor plans based on our estate agent copies. They were initially quite different from what we had in mind, but as he explained, they appeared to achieve our objectives very well. As a family man himself he could envisage the requirements of a modern family buyer much better than we could.

He had moved the staircase to make better use of the view from the rear of the house by siting 3 bedrooms there while the front of the house was extended within the existing roof line with 3 dormer windows. This dramatically improved the appearance at the front but did not provide as much additional space as my draft. As a result we agreed to try to raise the roof line, even though this might cause planning difficulties, and provide enough headroom for a loft room later. This might be acceptable as the next door roof line is already 1.5 metres higher than ours. A porch was also discussed.

We agreed to go ahead on this broad basis to draw up some plans which might be submitted for a planning opinion.

David asked for more details of the solar I was interested in and I agreed to send him the data.

 

 

Decorating

Some decorating and minor repairs are needed to make the house habitable for this year. We have done the 3^rd bedroom as an office and the guest room and have started the small cloakroom and the kitchen. It's some time since I have done any decorating and I find I am a bit out of practice. I'm making the same mistakes I have made before. For example I use Fine Surface Polyfiller far too much under the mistaken impression that it will give a finer result. In fact iit is a very specialised product for smoothing very fine imperfections in the surface. The problem with using it more widely is that it is very hard and difficult to sandpaper.

 

I have just started using a sanding block again and have been getting some much better results with standard, mix yourself, fillers. They are softer and sand down to leave a very true surface which paints without any imperfections.

 

I often make the mistake of buying paint bargains too. When you put time and effort into preparation and application it is surely worth paying a bit more for a good quality paint that goes on well. I am trying the Dulux Flex range as it claims to cover fine cracks even when the ceiling moves a little. I will let you know if it works.

 

Insulation – do we have enough?

General advice suggests that money spent on insulation is generally better than money spent on technology to achieve a zero carbon house. The problem is that the effectiveness of the insulation of a wall or a roof depend on estimates based on the materials used and the way they are put together. I want to measure the effectiveness of a wall in some way. The materials are measured in watts per degree per cubit metre of material (U value) but the complex structures in roof, floor or walls are difficult to estimate. I thought if I could measure the surface temperature of the inside and the outside of a wall there may be some calculation that could be made to indicate its effectiveness as an insulator.

 

With this in mind I searched the internet for some instrument that would measure the temperature on a surface, fearing it would then be too expensive. I was amazed to learn that surface temperatures are now measured using an infrared laser device and that they cost about £7 on Ebay with £6 postage from Hongkong!

 

My device arrived last week and a good opportunity to try it out came when we had a cold windy night outside in May and used the heating. I made the following readings:-

 

Surfaces	Reading C	Comment
Inside
Radiator	38
Internal Glass Door	18	Catching radiated heat from radiator?
Carpet	15	Cooled from Underfloor
Internal Wall	16	Probable air temperature
External Wall	15	Cooled from outside
Window Inside	12.8	Ordinary double glazing
Outside
Wall	6	Damp and windy conditions
Window	6.8
Away from house	5.0
Water surface	1.0	Interesting! Evaporation effect?

 

 

Related Conclusions and Questions

1. The surface thermometer is not accurate enough for any but broad conclusions

2. Bear in mind the walls are cavities not filled and the floor is parquet carpeted.

3. An 11 degree difference between inside and outside is the minimum for any conclusions.

4. A ceiling measurement should be taken to complete the picture for each room

5. The floor (carpet) and the external walls cool the room to an equal extent per sq metre.

6. The inside window temperature of 12.8 differs from the room by 3.2 degrees indicating over 3 times the heat losses compared with the walls per square metre.

7. If the windows are conducting heat at 3 times the rate of the walls this should make the outside of the windows much warmer than the walls but they are only 0.8 degrees warmer.

8. Does the amazingly low temperature of the water surface make sense? Can it be repeated? What does it mean for wet roofs and walls?

9. The method could be used to identify gaps in the insulation in the walls and floor but will not indicate U values at all accurately.

 

Insulation Materials

I don’t know much about the relative merits of insulation materials. After my experience with the Warmroof salesman and being bewildered by the options I did an internet search and came up with the material Polyisocyanurate. A visit to the local builders merchant and I had a product booklet to study but he would not give me any idea of price until he knew what quantities and thickness I needed.

 

 

Flat Roof

Half the flat roof has looked cracked since we moved in but now we have had some heavy rain it is starting to leak in two places. I had bought some sticky black stuff expecting an emergency like this so in a break in the rain I tried to seal the worst places. A had some success but as I walked on the roof the water oozed up from below so it was clear there would soon be more leaks. Rather than do work on it I planned a tarpaulin to cover it for the time being. This gave me another reason for having a chat with our preferred builder.

 

Keeping the Builder up to date

I feel in general that if you consider others they will consider you. This rather runs across the conventional approach of designing a building and then putting the work out to tender. I wanted to find out a convenient slot in our favoured builders programme and then aim for it. He popped in and we talked a bit about the relative cost of pitched dormer windows which concerned me.

He explained that he had had a large job deferred until next year so it would be advantageous for him if we could start to work in August or soon after. We agreed to aim for this.

We mentioned our problem with the flat roof and he agreed to pop a tarpaulin over this next week.

 

Our Holiday

Then we left for 3 weeks holiday in Lanzarote. You may condemn us for our use of air travel at a time like this. Yes I do believe that air travel will need to be rationed as part of a scheme to reduce carbon emissions by 90%. However I don’t believe that my failure to fly would accelerate that legislation. I would like to be able to lead on every front but this is too much for any private individual of modest means. My priorities include visiting my grandchildren in Lanzarote but I am changing my habits to visit for longer at a time and less often.

If I can show that an ordinary house can be made carbon neutral and more attractive then I will have contributed significantly to the future for my grandchildren.

 

Back Home again 09/06/07

Weather has been good so we have given the garden a blitz. We removed the overgrown forsythia which divided the front garden in two, removed the gate behind it, and cut back the neighbour’s overhanging beach branches with his permission. I have a little bag of logs to give him! Now we can get the feel of the front of the house.

 

I continued my study of insulation and conductivity. I learned at school that most materials like metals that conduct electricity also conduct heat well. I thus assumed that ceramics and concrete that did not conduct electricity would be similar in not conducting heat. I needed some better information and found it on the website of a wood stove manufacturer.

 

Common K and R Values Chart

Material	K value	R Value	| inches-K value .84	| inches-R value of 1
per inch
Micore 300*	0.43	2.33	0.5	0.43
Wonderboard (cement board)*	1.92	0.52	2.3	1.92
Common Brick	5	0.20	6.0	5
Cement Mortar	5	0.20	6.0	5
Ceramic Tile	12.5	0.08	14.9	12.5
Marble	11	0.09	13.1	11
Air Space (ventilated)	0.7	1.43	0.8	0.7
sand and gravel	1.7	0.59	2.0	1.7
Drywall (gypsum)	1	1.00	1.2	1
Rockwool or Fiberglass Batts*	0.3	3.33	0.4	0.3

 

 

This gives me a lot of food for thought in planning under floor heating. Ideally we need highly conductive materials like marble and ceramics on top of the heating pipes as thin as possible and the best insulation possible below the pipes. Carpeting and wooden floors will make the heating system less efficient and energy will be wasted.

 

 

 

 

The first Plans

 

Meeting with the Architect 14/06/07

 

David Foale presented his plans for the project. With his approval I invited Michael Gregory to the meeting and it worked very well. One plan was presented along lines we had previously discussed which involved enlarging the present roof forward and placing three dormer windows at the front. The plans below were presented as providing better usable space upstairs without raising the roof line. Both architects claimed this was important if the plans were to be approved easily and quickly. They also replicated the 33 degree pitch of the existing roofs in the extension gable which the planning officer would prefer.

 

 

 

 

These were plans in pencil on A4 paper and it can be seen where some alternatives were discussed.

 

I was surprised initially by the total change in appearance David had achieved. I was expecting something much more traditional and the low pitch and triangular appearance of the front took a little getting used to. However the low pitch flat extension roof to the South West would present the solar tiles to the sun very well. If needed there would be an area of South Easterly roof as well. A porch had been added which echoed the roof pitch and could enable a part-carport in front of the garage. If our neighbour approved this style of roof could be repeated over her garage to good effect.