 Hello everyone. Thank you very much for coming. I'm now going to hand over to John just making sure I got that right there Just handing over to John who's going to talk to you about his self-made eco house. So hands together for John Hello, so I'm going to have a quick sort of overview really. I'm not going to go into too much detail But I just thought if you want to ask any more questions apart from at the end they'll but you can come and find me round site somewhere so this is a the house I decided to build myself So When we were looking for a house we decided we wanted to actually run with a large garden We had an allotment and we wanted to sort of grow our own vegetables in our own garden And that sort of progressed a little bit as we started looking we decided that we might want to have some animals So It started looking around for places with a bit of an acre and that sort of snowballed a little bit more oh and yeah, we even thought two acres would be nice, but we never thought we would afford that and then The wife being the chief decision decision maker when buying a house We came to this What I thought was an ideal opportunity So took my wife to look at it. We had a six six old six months old son at the time and He needed breastfeeding so she stayed in the car. I had to look around I decided that it's going to be a good one So I went and bought this for that. He's actually seeing it and a little bit of a mess but Bear in mind that this was after a couple of guys who spent a day's work trying to clear this stuff away So you could actually see the house And I mean she was an agreement really because we always knew the To get a couple of acres and a nice house was never going to happen So we were going for a bit of a building plot in some respects So this had a house on it So we were going to be able to rebuild the house there and it was in a development boundary of a village as well So one of the first priorities we ended up having to do Which was an interesting one was we had to build a garage first Which this was actually going to be our second Parity we were going to build this but we discovered we had bats in the house So we had to build them a nice garage first to put the bats into But this became very useful because I could then store lots of lots of house building stuff in it So onto the real subject I suppose We were we're quite sort of ecologically minded so we did a bit of looking into what we could do on the eco-friendly house side of things and So some of the first things When you do searching on this sort of thing is that the the first golden rule really is to insulate and to put lots more insulation on it and if we even more insulation on it if you can Because insulation is really actually quite cheap and it stops you having any sort of heating bills to any extent really later on But after I mean after you've insulated a lot you start finding that about a third to a half of your heat loss then becomes Because at the house leaks air and all the warm air escapes from the house And this is One of the interesting things that builders don't quite understand yet Well, they didn't five years ago when we're building the house that There's a lot of attention to detail and a lot of things I found out about how to make a house airtight so you're not losing all your warm air for no real reason and then we also looked into Low-impacted materials So you'll you'll see a thing called passive house which is trying to make a Low-energy house and running but the problem I have with the passive house is it has no Idea about how much concrete save use and how much of an ecological impact that does on the environment Building the house in the first place so we wanted to do Build that out of wood mostly because that sort of is carbon negative because you're storing wood Cassiota in the walls and Not to have any sort of we sort of try to avoid aluminium as well So that requires a huge amount of energy to actually process the aluminium in the first place I mean one of our other goal goals was if we're going to go through all this effort of building a house We're never going to move again. So we tried to decide one that was going to meet all our future needs to some extent One of those is just making it a little bigger than you really can afford so on the Low-impact side of things Want to remove as much as possible any co2 on the environment and any co2 Use on construction. That's Why we avoided aluminium and such and There was there was also at the time. I don't seem to think it's so much in the Fest these days. There's a single code for sustainable homes That has a load of guidelines and how to go about making a They return a zero carbon house the problem we have with a zero carbon house is To really go to that level you need to generate energy on site somehow and we have we have too many trees Shading our rooms to be able to our roof to be able to do So solar power for electricity, which is what the sort of thing wanted it to do and then when it comes to actually building the house there's all sorts of Materials so it's we went for a timber frame house To do wood for the wooden walls We Used some eco-friendly paint so all the glass work and all the normal emulsion in the house is Low-impact it doesn't contain stuff like titanium dioxide To make stuff white because that's quite a bad thing environment to make and stuff as well in the first place And we we try not to use too much plastic if we could inside the house some of that was unavoidable, but That's how it goes So yeah I mean you can watch all these grand design programs and they give you an impression that builders may know about some of these new Technologies, but if you talk to actual builders very few watch grand designs or no, and they're all quite a bit Left field for them, so it's quite difficult to fire fire builder So I mean the builders we took to I mean grand designs at the time had this idea of CO2 negative concrete But none of the builders knew anything about it So there's lots of little battles and that was one of the ones I sort of for went on really So I mean we decided on timber frame house and there's a Once you've got the timber frame up you've got to insulate it So you've got to fill the timber frame somewhere and some of the ones that I found most interesting is a straw bale but the straw bale is actually a Lot of labor to actually put in And you have to go through a lot of effort of finding a farmer who can build you a really tight straw bale in the first place Because I had a couple of young kid at the time and was working About an hour's drive away. I retried to get a main builder to do most of house for us So that wasn't really gonna work with this must straw bale and the hemcrete as well It's a nice interesting technology, but it's at the time and it still is I think quite quite new Warm sell this one. I hadn't really heard of myself, but my architect Mentioned it and that was actually probably a good choice that we went with warm sell is The term it recycled newspaper, but I think it's when they have a load of printed newspaper that they don't sell So it's still in good condition. They sort of mince that up mix it with a bit of brawl And so it doesn't go moldy or anything and they Get this really sort of fluffy tightly packed stuff That you can't burn because there's no there's no air inside it And the good thing is that it's been on the market for quite a while And so some of the bells as we talked to have actually built a house before using it There's other things After lots of worth looking you can Wooden windows are one of the things to also be chose Initials initial searching will make you think that wooden windows are premium product And you have to pay a lot more than other UPVC window But if you actually look around and find your local timber and your local carpentry or joinery place You can make windows they can actually do it for a similar price to UPVC and You can then use linseed old paint which is a old traditional way to paint your windows Not a 90s way of painting your windows that they rocked So if you if you get to a proper joiner and you linseed all the paint each day They should last it's about 60 years And the advantage of wooded windows is then they're repairable where UPVC tends to get thrown away Also on the structured insulated panels That's another building technique I looked into That's where they sort of have these big panels that I've got plywood or chipboard either side and they've got the UPVR foam Stuck between them But they the foam they stuck between them. It's not really it wasn't really eco-friendly enough for us and the eco paint as I mentioned So when it comes to power in the house there's a few things that I was looking into about how to create energy and how to heat the house in the winter months because Although you can build a passive house even the passive house standards, which tries to have a minimal footprint as on the energy side as possible Requires some space heating to some extent And they tend to have a air ventilation system which has a bit of heating in it But my concern was with kids really was you'd get the kids leaving the doors open and calling the house down too much So on the energy front of things we looked at solar power so that can be your Your normal PV, which is your electric panels that most people are accustomed to they can also get thermal things so you get a Two types of thermal panels which have more to which generally you heat up the water in the in the panel So you have a flat plate one which Is The more traditional one and you have these new one whilst they're not that new anymore that these new ones called evacuated tube ones Which is a bit like a thermos fast. You have this long tube with a heat pipe in it in a vacuum and they was one of the technologies we went to because they work better in The winter and in the spring and autumn times where you get a little bit more energy out of them than the flat panel We couldn't we have trees overshadowing our south facing roof So we couldn't really use a solar side of things, but I come onto that I also looked at wind power when power was it's gets quite expensive when you want a really big wind turbine and probably starts annoying your neighbors and It was also going to go causes huge problems because we have bats so that the bats weren't gonna We're probably going to get permission from that There's also a lot of If you go to a lot of the self-build type shows I'll try and push on to these ideas of ground source heat pump or air source heat pump and the problem I have with those is They're quite expensive and that you're really just using electricity still to heat your house so if you're somewhere Where you don't have mains gas we could have got mains gas we wanted to if they've somebody got mains gas it's probably more environmentally friendly to use mains gas and it is to install your air source heat pump Or you guys the ground source heat pumps are one way you have a big tube into your garden and You take the heat out of your garden with electric Probably like your fridge you're like your how your fridge works and pump that into your room and the air source The problem I have with the air source ones is They're most efficient in the summer when you don't need it and the least efficient when it's really freezing outside And it's cold and the man you actually need the heat Some of the other options we looked into a burning wood and we also Did look into mains gas, but we decided not to connect up yet because that was going to cost us foreground and also Yeah, you could heat your house with them just using your normal mains electricity So the solar panels as I said that there's the PV is not suitable because as I understand it You get you can have your south facing roof full of solar panels But if a tree masks of just a small 10% of one of those panels, that's it You know the efficiency drops right off on your solar panels. You don't really make much electricity I believe now there are it little inverters so you can power so you can take the harvest of power from one panel at a time But at the time I was looking into that that was a new technology that wasn't quite released And so the flat panels are said that sort of traditional bit like a black radiator where the whole thing is just got water in it and So that that is affected more by the cold weather than the evacuated tubes and Yes, so the path is on the actual heating is that the passive house will You still need hot water people still expect what water to be there available every day of the year so even even a passive house you need to heat your water somehow and For us and especially living into it we find the space heating between November and February is when We start thinking about whether we need to heat our house a bit or not Outside those months. It's just we don't care. We just don't think about whether we've got enough heat or water to some extent I mean have a couple of kids now So they they run a near at the house and don't close the doors and stuff So if we went for the whole path is house problem, I think if we didn't have actually some proper heating behind it We may struggle So on our So in the end I went with a I think all the start thermal store So I am thermal store is sort of best sort out as a large hot water tank But in reverse so instead of using the water in the tank the water in the tank is what you heat up and The actual coil in the tank is what you put your cold water mains into and the out out the top It comes out as hot water and the mains pressure So that's good for your showers and stuff. You don't need any of the Shower pumps or anything like that. We just shower and I am mains water pressure. So we find that the During the spring, summer and autumn we get enough hot water Really quite well We just find that when we have cloudy days, we just Plan our showers or bars. They were onto the sunny days really Now to heat our house during the winter we have a wood burning stove Which is actually a German model and I spent Days I think on the internet trying to find the best one and I think I found it So this one's got am I think called a water jacket that's not just on the back of it It covers all the sides and the top as well So that's that's good because we've done a very well insulated house and we find that The one kilowatt it puts into the room and then it so it's a 10 kilowatt and boiler So it's wood staves your normal sort of small staves are about five kilowatts So this one's twice the size of a sort of a small one and the one kilowatt it puts into the room Really does we quite quite a large kitchen diner and that's it still can get that quite warm If we're not careful and and all the other nine kilowatt goes into that big thermal store that we can run the end of Underfloor heating off But we That's done a store has a couple of immersion heaters in it as well Just in case we need to use it and we're too lazy at some points. Not that we really come to that yet laptop's not working So the performance of a house This was one of the big unknowns I was having when I was trying to design the builder house But you can get all these you value calculations all these sap calculations, but you still don't know what that means in reality so we've got a better than What the The sub scouts we were actually when the energy rated B on the subscouts because we don't have any actual Electric generation they care about But we find that when it's freezing in the in the middle of winter and we have the house at 20 degrees See any drops a couple of seas at degree see overnight and that's without having any of our end of floor heating on it or anything And that the cell effect tubes do do a good job of providing a hot water during the March to October We have a slight worry occasionally in the summer when we've got a few hot days and the The cell of pumps pumping away and the tanks that she was 110 degrees and the tanks getting to 95 and stuff But hasn't seemed to cause any problems yet. There's when you get the solar your thermal store at that high It seems to drop lose quite a lot overnight anyway But even the winter the If we put the under floor heating on and really cool down the thermal store If you get a nice sunny day in the winter, we still get a bit of energy out of it, which is useful One of the things that was on my real big wishlist To get the builders in store was at the rainwater halving steam system, but they were going to charge me 10 grand for it Which seems like a lot for just a tank of plastic tank in the ground so about a Year after I built it a couple of years after we moved in I think I Did it myself so that I got them to put the sort so phrase all to the same place I then spent about a thousand pounds on hiring a digger to dig a trench One of the things we needed we wanted water into our field anyway, so I put so I dug a big trench Upper upper hip Slate we're honest a bit of a side of the way Hill I bought 12 IBCs which are these big Thousand liter containers that the ship Liquors around the world so I buried one of those into the ground covered in concrete put pump with it next to it And then pump that up to the field with the And the trench has got everything I can ever think of And that feeds back to the house and that flushes our toilet and does our washing machine So that's sort of when I've actually got that up and running that sort of took two-thirds off our water bill So some of the other tech I was just as I'm a geek I was busy It's in the early stages trying to get on towards the end of the project ended up being I just want to get the house Finished so I put one wire temperature sensors in all the floors and stuff and in the walls a bit as a Maybe I'll dole to make the house and the heating system, but in reality that's probably overkill because We find that one when we pretend the on-the-floor heating system a couple of hours later They could tanks caught too cold anyway into work anymore without the fire being on So we have to put the wood burning fire on to actually hit the house and the other problem is The That because the house is so real insulated it doesn't really need that fine control So that's probably a pipe dream that will never get finished But I also put um cat cat 5 networking everywhere So every PowerPoint in the house has got a cat 5 plug song in next to it because I could I've got a Econome is a An open source energy monitoring that as I'm sort of setting up now to control all this stuff So there's a lot of things that I learned and this is just a few of them one of the things that I In hindsight, I maybe could have done would be to put windows in the house claim it was a house get a mortgage I then use that mortgage money to build the house Because yeah without a house there mortgage. You can't get mortgage you can get a self-build mortgage, but they're Are you too expensive and be very quite restricted? I had other problems like the one tonne load of hot water tank went into the attic and I Didn't think it really looked strong enough And the but I had no meeting minutes from with the builders that they said it was strong enough Then the builders sort of went bankrupt on me And then so I went to the timber frame company said did you make the roof strong enough to hold the water tank? And they go no we weren't told about that so I'm glad that I I did keep an eye on anything But I just worried that what would have happened if I wasn't really on the ball, but um You live and learn I mean you can watch what grand designs and there's all sorts of went weird of wonderful building stuff on grand designs But if you go and talk to your normal to builders most of them haven't heard of any of them which is Interesting One of the things I had one of the things I ended up doing was the plot. I bought was at auction which is um On the day that you're there at the auction you have to pay over 10% of the deposit which is a huge amount of money to Check out for And then yeah, that's when you exchange contracts. So you have to be ready. I Don't have yeah bidding on auction is good exercise for your heart. I wouldn't recommend it Say one of the best I think things I did do That saves me a load of time was to hire a proper professional spray-painting machine The house we built is a four bedroom house with the attic space we actually use So I made the pitch a bit bigger and she's got a huge actually that we haven't actually Done much with because we can't afford it, but I'm So that four bedroom house with a huge attic. I managed to paint with three colors of this three coats of paint I'm painting walls different colors to some extent in a weekend And that yeah Because you just mask off the windows you've put in don't care about everything else really and just go to town with a spray-painting machine You can you can get a sort of rectangular piece of aluminium on a poke on the stick So you can spray paint your white your white ceiling and you can hold it in the corner and Gains play your walls so you get two of you one holding the stick and the other one spray-painting Yeah, and as I say eight rooms or so in a weekend three coats and My last bit is if you are building an airtight house is you do need a Mv HR system, which is a mechanical ventilation heat recovery system One of the problems with We when we first moved in we weren't quite finished So we're all sleeping in the living room and we have serious concentration problems for the first week until I actually got my arson together and did the got the Mv HR is commissioned and then the condensation has disappeared It wasn't an issue anymore and it also Removes the need to have trickle vents on the windows Which is another way you lose heat and it stops you needing any extractor fans on your bathrooms or your kitchen or anything like that It's just and it's got heat exchanger on it So it what it does it takes and fresh air in from the outside and passes that through the heat exchange with all the air It's sucking out from the or and moisture rooms here your Kitchens in your bathrooms. It sucks a warm air out of your kitchens and bathrooms passes through the heat exchanger and uses that heat to heat warm up the hair coming in and The SAPs calculation stuff that says how energy efficient your house is don't seem to like it for some reason because if uses a small amount of electricity pulse constantly constantly, but it removes the need to have any ventilation otherwise and it's it's one you can control So, um, I believe there's time for questions if anybody has any or you can always email me and Come and find me later. And there's also a one of the good things is there in in Bath I was living in Bristol at the time in Bath. There's a self-build the group setup where it's just later for the People have finding challenges building their own houses and it's I found really good I think we have time for a question if it's answered quickly maybe two I saw the gentleman here at the back first. I'm gonna hand you the mic Cool. Thanks for your talk What about internet provision given that you seem to have picked a random piece of land somewhere outside of a village So it may look like a random piece of land It's actually in a village. It's got about 300 houses and we were actually part of the development boundaries So the house sort of formed the corner So that the house is like on the bit of land closest to the village and the house was actually and When we moved in Yeah, I was getting about Two and a half meg download speed But now with the Somerset and Devon broadband initiative they've actually come put fibre to the cabinet in the village So I've now got 70 meg Which I'm quite amazed with because I was the sort that was never going to happen Okay, and it's now four o'clock. So if you have any more questions for John Just have them at the side of the stage or outside. You'll be around all weekend, right? Yeah, fantastic. Cool. Let's put our hands together for John Thank you very much