Heating - a change of mind

After agreeing that we were going to go with solar heating we have changed our minds .... why??, because solar heating is proving to be expensive and not as green and energy efficient as you might think !!.

Basically, despite your solar system heating your water you will still require an electric heating system that heats your water in a storage tank during night time and low light hours. This will require an increase in your electric mains power from 12 to 34Kw. Using the building and room dimensions we calculated our energy, (electric) usage would come to nearly 20,000Kc, (over £660 per month) !!!. I am so glad I held the initial site meeting now as it was our appointed buildings engineer who ensures all works are carried out in accordance with the authorised plans that raised the issue. Without asking he went away and did some of his own calculations and advised us against it. Turns out he was looking to do the same to his own property until he found out about about geothermal heating and ground pumps and has had the system fitted to his property. We went to visit and its very impressive. Ive attached some pics of the system as you can see. We have since had a survey completed and are looking to go this way. Despite the outlay being a little more that the solar system we are looking at a considerable overall cost reduction with a limitless source of heating ....

We have now engaged an engineering company to do the geothermal, (ground source) installations and they recently arrived on site and started installing all the pipework ...

Window problems

(above computer animated image)

Prior to submitting your final plans to the local planning office its a good idea to make contact with them to tell them your intentions. We have done this via our 'girl in krumlov' and have explained to them our intentions and exactly what we want to do. Up to now they have been very helpful as far as explaining what we need to do and which things we need to be compliant with. Turns out we are in a conservation area so need to be sympathetic to our surroundings. We showed our window plans to the office and explained how many we intended to fit in order to provide a sufficient amount of light in the new bedrooms. They were given the ok so based on this we obtained quotes and agreed a company to do the fittings for us. Unfortunately it turns out that the person who initially agreed our plans has since left the Krumlov planning office and their replacement informed us that we had to reduce the amount of windows we intended on installing. This was based on the fact that despite the fact you would see no structural changes to the roof from the street you could see them on the inside of the courtyard from the main road as you pass the village, (from about 1/2 K away, on a good day if your really paying attention !!!, we think some politics going on). Potentially there could be major isues with this ... no windows no light in our new rooms. We were then told we could have them visible from the street instead ??!!. If we had known this before we would have done it this way so had to revise our plans at additional cost. Our architect has been great about all our changes, (he is also a member of the historical society) so did this for a minimal cost. We have had the plans re-submitted along with all the rest of our building permissions and finally recieved the final papers and approval a couple of weeks ago. We have done all we have been asked to do, (again with Czech help) so all should be fine. Prior to final approval we were told that we could start some of the work so long as it didn't effect any of the structure so the builder started work waterproofing and lining the roof as no weatherproof membrane had been previously fitted. Building works have since commenced with a fervour .... including some feets of extraordinary engineering .. ( the beam was huge!!!! ..400kgs) ... I think I'll entitle that one 'Health and Safety' ... but thats another post.

Exchange rates - important

Money is always going to be a big deal when buying / renovating abroad ....

When we bought the house in 2007 the exchange rate was 41.5 Ck to the Pound, we recently bought Ck's for as low as 27.50 .... our last transfer which was a pretty large amount we managed to get 30.45. Hopefully the market will pick up again but with the interntional monetary crisis the market is slow although there have been some improvements. With exchange rates so bad it can't be helping the tourist industry which Krumlov so relies upon.

You will need to consider how you are going to get your money from the UK in CZ. We did this using either one of 2 ways, ...
1) hand carrying sterling and exchanging it once we got over which means you need to shop around to get the best deal .... locally the best appears to be Petra Tour s.r.o no. 4 Karla street in Cesky Budejovice which is about a 1/2 hour drive from Krumlov but you can also go to Pilzen or Prague but that involves a fair trip from Krumlov.
or
2) using an International Money transfer company ... you really need to shop around with these to get the best rates and when you have all the rates you need to palm them off against each other to see if you can get an even better deal. You can try the following ...
http://www.hifx.co.uk/, http://www.moneycorp.com/ or http://www.currenciesdirect.com/uk/ .... these seem to be the best. One thing to be sure of is that you have a Czech bank account and also be aware your bank may charge you for transfering to them from the UK !!?? sounds daft but most seem to do so, up to 1000Ck+. When you do your deal with the exchange company make sure that they will cover any of those costs. Basically follow the process as described at http://moneysavingexpert.com ..... good luck.

Problems with an old house episode one

Of course ..... buying an old house is going to mean that you are going to find things that need fixing ... unfortunately when they have been covered up for years and left unchecked you don't tend to find these things until you happen upon them. Luckily we have some experience with these things so along with our builder we have been doing some uncovering .. (its helps when you know the right places to look).
Roof and ceiling timbers are a major issue so one of the first things we have done is got a roofer in to inspect and repair some of the slipped and rotten / damaged timbers .... once that was done we got our builder to treat all of the exposed roof timbers with an insecticide to kill any beetle / worm infestations. Unfortunately after further inspection, to see if the chemical treatments had worked we came upon further issues, mainly within the areas where the house had been renovated over the last 20yrs or so. It would appear that the oldest parts of the house, mainly the ceiling timbers have remained unaffected but the newer parts where the ceilings have been modified show signs of dry rota and woodworm infestation so we decided to get an independent surveyor in to have a further look who along with the builder highlighted further areas for concern. So after much brick moving and disposing of timbers all areas that require to be addressed have been identified now all that is required is fixing / replacing and treating them so that any infestation is effectively irradicated. Irradicated being the operative word. Did you know that know that there is no 100% guarantee that chemical treatment will work, (have done quite a bit of research on this) as the chemicals cannot penetrate deep enough into the wood, especially the thickness of some of the timbers we have. The Beetles will literally come up for 'air', have a sniff and if they don't like what they smell they just wait and go back to hibernation. Apparently they can 'live' in the timbers for years. Your modern, thinner roof timbers can be treated effectively by chemicals. So ... what to do, as far as I knew this WAS the only way to treat timbers ... there is however a more modern and effective way to do this using microwaves. Apparently it can be done on floor boards and has been used on antique furniture for a few years so makes sense that it should work on roof timbers. This typically involves heating timbers to between 50-54 degC and has proven to kill larvae at all stages of development. We got in touch with a company called Impreg who are in Budejovice, see http://www.impreg.cz/ and had them treat our roof and ceiling timbers. Once the renovation work begins timbers etc. will get covered so we would rather have the piece of mind that the roof and ceiling is solid enough and bug / rot free to prevent even worse problems in the future.

Blowing up the house (our recent visit)

Hello all,

get ready for a load of posts, there is a fair amount to bring you up to date with, here is the first .....

Things have progressed since our last post and we are getting even closer to being full time in CZ. It is now just the tying up of those loose ends that are stopping us and of course getting all the planning permissions in place to start the renovations at the CZ house.
The planning side of things has taken up a fair amount of time, especially with the drawing up of plans and deciding how we are going to fit a completely new central heating system that will cover the whole of the living areas, (and not cost the earth in doing so) as well as windows to bring enough light into the rooms as well as the layout and position of the rooms etc. We have even had several complete changes of plans which includes issues with windows as well as changing from a solar heating system to a geothermal one. I'll tell more on this in further posts.
First of all we had a trip back to the house recently and had an exciting trip ....., after taking our friend H's advice I bit the bullet and had winter tyres fitted .... despite the fact this is likely to be a legal requirement throughout Europe very soon you just need to get this done. It makes a huge difference to your driving ... so we avoided the problems we encountered the last time we were over !!. It was the being at the house that was the fun bit ..... SNOW ... did it ever, in bucket loads and kept doing so during the whole stay ... great powder for skiing though !!!. The temp was a balmy -10deg C during the day and we had -20 at night. On our first night yours truly thought that it would be a really good idea to get the boiler started so after turning on the water supply and re-filling the system I started a fire .... in the boiler of course but it was a good one and it was happily roaring away but with freezing cold radiators and a pressure gauge creeping into the red zone rather rapidly with some pretty good clanging and banging of pipes !!!. Note to self and warning too others ... despite the central heating being drained down you will not get rid of all the water in the system. Yes you will prevent the pipes from bursting in your absence but you need to refill and heat your system slowly. I started the boiler using wood which provided the heat but as it couldn't circulate far beyond the boiler I managed to melt the pressure and temp gauges off of the front of it. Its a good job that the system is simple enough that you simply shut it all in to starve it of oxygen and then drain the water down so the pressure is reduced within minutes. Didn't save the gauges though !!. Unfortunately my neighbour did not have so much luck and thank god nobody was hurt .... her back boiler to an open fire in the lounge did blow .... took out all the windows to the front of the house and lifted the roof off!!!!. Turns out she never had a pressure relief valve fitted, not even a pressure gauge and it was just a matter of time and a hard freeze.
So as I said more to follow .... cau T