Further Project details

The stone walls are dry lined: timber studwork with insulation between and inside and a sealed vapour barrier.   Where both sides of the wall are internal they have been left fair-faced and repointed in lime.

Each of the original trusses are connected by new purpose-designed steel collars at a lower level than the wall plate, to enable the upper area to become an open, unobstructed mezzanine, and form the steels supporting the mezzanine floor.  The timber upper and lower collars were then cut out.  The one original truss can be seen in the double-height space.

The heating in the main barn is by a multi-fuel Rayburn, using our managed woodland for logs.  A central thermal store takes water from the solar panels on the roof and from the Rayburn.  We have a 16-panel, ground-mounted PV array to a 3-day-usage battery bank as our only supply of electricity, the Planning Authority refusing consent for  wind turbine.

The store’s immersion heater is linked to an electronic gismo that picks up a signal (increased Hertz) from the inverter/controller when the batteries are full and dumps all the excess electricity to it without needing any control wiring.  Thus we maximise the tariff: there is an off-grid feed-in tariff – slightly lower than for on-grid.

All black and grey waste water goes to a septic tank and the over flow water goes through a series of sand filters and settling tanks to a pond.  The water comes from a borehole we drilled 120m deep and this is filtered and UV treated since we are on highly fissured limestone, prone to contamination in deluge conditions.

The track was built by us for a fraction of the local contractors price by using a geo-grid on a geo-textile, with the local quarry stone vibro-compacted into the cells.  We needed no other civils and the overall thickness was 200mm.  450m of track cost us £11,000 to lay rather than £35,000.