Mana and Building Regulations
We’re closing in on a set of detailed construction drawings. These will no only help us build the house by informing contractors exactly what they need to deliver but they are also needed by our building control inspector to ensure that we are compliant with the full set of building regulations for new builds. Sometimes it seems like they are a detailed set of rules that are a barrier to building a house, although they are there to ensure that houses are built to a climate and environmental standard that helps with sustainability of the building industry. Basically they help control cowboy builders who would otherwise take short cuts.
In our case there are some regulations that don’t make sense at all. By law we are not required to connect to the national electricity grid and we are not required to connect to mains water, two important service industries. However we are required by law to install in-building physical infrastructure so that, in future, copper or fibre-optic cables or wireless devices capable of delivering broadband speeds greater than 30 Mbps can be installed. This means gigabit ready. We would like to have internet so this is not so bad. Finding a company to do this is a bit perplexing however. If we do this through Openreach then they would charge us £2,000, not for the work but as a tax to help fund the network expansion. Here in Herefordshire, the network is well established after the Fastershire initiative of the local government a few years ago. So why would we pay more? The building inspector needs proof that somebody can deliver this before we can start building so we found a company on a national superfast broadband coverage website who will do it for free, which proved enough for our building controller.
The other thing we are required to install is an electric vehicle (EV) charger, even though we don’t have a car! This one makes no sense to us at all because we have to spend money on something that we don’t want and by the time we sell the house the technology will most likely have changed to the point where the charger will be obsolete!
Other strange rules exist that are too complex for the average house building to understand, necessitating contracting experts to evaluate the aspects such as overheating, and thermal performance. It used to be if you wanted a house you built one and spent your money on the materials and labour to do so. Now an increasing proportion goes to people who have to assess the design to ensure it meets the regs. One example is Building Regs Part O which covers overheating. This concerns the matter of how much solar gain the house will have and how much natural or mechanical ventilation there is which can cool it if it gets too hot. Fair enough I say, that makes sense. There is a spreadsheet which takes the glazing sizes and orientations and compares these to the floor areas of the whole house and the largest glazed room and works out if there is a problem. It is good to make sure that the house does not get too hot in summer and that it can be cooled if it does. We ran the calculation and failed because of a lesser known rule which is that for the ground floor bedrooms the windows must be openable to allow night time cooling but must be lockable to prevent robbers and murderers from breaking in. By lockable they specify a. Fixed or lockable louvred shutters. b. Fixed or lockable window grilles or railings. Not really overheating I think, more about security which is no longer a choice for us to make. We have to build a kind of prison!
The last one I want to mention is that to pass the SAP which stands for Standard Assessment Procedure, which measures the energy efficiency and carbon emissions of residential buildings. It’s a specialist task and must be carried out by a qualified person. It concerns amongst other things thermal insulation of walls, windows, floors and ceilings, and thermal bridges, where heat can escape at the junctions and connections where different building elements meet. The service is not too expensive until you use non industry standard materials which in our case means hempcrete. For standard materials like SIPs panels, concrete, bricks etc. there are standard values available for free for the evaluation of the junctions and connections which enable a calculation of the amount of heat that might be lost. With hempcrete these still have to be calculated every time which in our case takes a couple of days work and a large amount of money. I’m not against getting details right but when we’re building a highly insulated modern eco house then the heat losses would be quite satisfactory for our lifestyle without “knowing” absolutely what they are. Hempcrete is highly insulating, humidity controlling and breathable and we don’t want a hermetically sealed house so give us a break!
Anyway, we’re almost there. Our detailed designs are being finalised and will go to the building control inspector who will then hopefully give us the go ahead to start the build this spring (2026).