All Activity

I suspect quite soon you’ll be able to buy the latest version for local llm for like £20 or something .

One of the effects of the current mechanism BTW is that conventional generators including renewables get windfall profits every time the gas price spikes. Even with 'the levy'. I dare say they like that. As long as the gas peakers are needed then the marginal price will largely be set by gas. Peaking power plant - Wikipedia >>> New plans include long‑term fixed‑price contracts for renewables, protecting families when gas prices spike The financial markets are very quick to create new futures / forwards / options / swaps / CFDs etc if they think there's any demand - they don't need any government help to do that. All-in-all the current industry players are not unhappy with the current situation.

Hard to find very recent guidance from good sources but I did find this.. https://www.onlineinsulation-sales.com/blog/pir-insulation-complete-guide/ 19 December 2025 PIR Insulation: The Complete Guide for UK Trade Professionals Solid Walls (External Insulation) "PIR boards can form part of external wall insulation (EWI) systems, though phenolic boards are sometimes preferred for EWI due to thinner required thickness. PIR boards fix to the external wall surface, then render or cladding finishes over the insulation."

In the UK, mandatory EV car chargers for new homes are now required under Part S of the Building Regulations since June 2022 I think the rules rules require smart car chargers to be fitted now? I remember that being discussed a while back, but I haven't checked. I was lucky enough to have my Type 1 fitted for free by the government long before I had an EV...

Yes, the concrete floors will help a lot, but I'd be curious to know how the floor temps are when the ASHP is not running? Have you taken any comparative measurements? What we ideally need are specific figures to understand the W/m2 can be gained from a floor during cooling

in 4 years the time gas sets the price will have reduced from 60% to 50% Don't expect to see much reduction in your bills any time soon Britain has already moved from gas setting the price of electricity around 90% of the time in the early 2020s, to around 60% today. Through the government’s clean energy mission, it is estimated gas will set the wholesale price around half of the time by 2030.

We ha da ICF build, but wanted another 100mm EPS on the outside to get to passive house stnadard. The builder used 50mm PIR instead for the lower floor. So I over boarded those sections with another 50mm EPS. Used 100mm EPS on the upper floor that wasn't in the builder's scope. You wont be able to render onto the PIR. Options are to fix cement (render) board, or a thin layer of EPS. You'll need mechanical fixings. No need to take the PIR off.

I hope so

You can get a 7kW charger for £300-£500. Virtually all EVs have a type 2 socket, and that wont change any time soon. Only exception are the 1st generation Leafs, Zoes etc, so no worries about compatibility. Your spark has done all the hard work, dead easy to install the actual unit.

About a third off.

We have a large order to place and are favouring Roca for a lot of it. We are currently awaiting a quote from a smallish specialist supplier. Any guidance on what discount off list to aim for?

I've looked in detail at the standalone sircon units that are very common in Spain. In the diy stores they will have about 20 models. I box outside, pipes through the wall and a raduator/ fan inside. They are optimised for cooling but will also act as heaters, but not very efficiently....better than an electric heater but not much. It seems that the heat pumps are designed that way ie for heating or cooling most efficiently. I suppose the big difference is that in UK we are heating up to 20 when it might be zero outdoors all day, whereas in southern Spain in summer it will be cooling down to 25 when it is 35-40 at mid afternoon, dropping to 20 at night. ISH.... my new SI term to indicate very wild approximations. I wonder what the Spanish and French do in areas where they get very hot summers and also cold winters. Perhaps their units are optimised to heat and to cool.

Called the 'learning curve'. Give it another year, and some high profile bankruptcies, and you will be getting it for free.

I’ll help ! Billions spent on llm / ai etc For a sum under 10k you can have something ‘near’ to that locally ! Thats insane !

The words are in English, but none of it makes any sense.

Don't anyone tell @Roger440 https://www.gov.uk/government/news/decisive-action-to-break-influence-of-gas-on-electricity-prices

Kimi K2.6 Wow ! I want that ! Write a custom iPhone app so I can chat directly to Avalon via tailscale !! Should effectively mean I don’t need a chat gpt + subscription as K2.6 is pretty darn near to chat 5.4 . My own local chat , accessible anywhere in the world would complete access to my entire home . What could possibly go wrong ?

That's the big red flag for me too. I can't find much in the way of useful reference and those references I can find from journals, the process is quite complex. But basically the standard used to calculate cooling is the same standard as is used for calculating UFH output - BS EN 1264. So the calculation goes that essentially the floor output for the same given floor depends on Mean Water - Air Temperature difference - give or take some details. If you're running heating you'll typically have a higher dT for heating than for cooling simply because you need to keep flow temps above dew point and a floor that's tool cold is uncomfortable. This means that the floor heat out (or actually input in this case) is going to be less that with heating. One way to think about this is that a thick slab is highly unlikely to reach parity with air temps during a heat wave, for example and will almost always provide some natural cooling effect due to its mass, so even when running cooler temp fluid through this the temperature difference is going to be even smaller. Then there is the effect of floor coverings and heat transfer. Add to this that heat pumps are designed and developed primarily for heating and you have a system that can do something else - a little bit of cooling, but it's questionable how much it's been developed and tested for this. So there's an optimisation question, then there's a control question because heating controls aren't really designed for cooling control. Etc. etc. Then there is the question as to whether, if you're building a new house anyway, you're better off designing passive cooling measures into the design in the first place. In our house, for example, the top floor is timber frame and it takes about 3 days during a heat wave for the heat to equalise and become uncomfortable when it's over 28C outside. Downstairs we have EWI coupled with brick/brick, brick/stone walls and this area maintains a nice cool temperature throughout heat waves. My sons always comment on this when they come home from school on hot days and how fresh the downstairs feels even after days of heat - this is where all our bedrooms are. We are just installing a smaller split aircon unit centrally upstairs for the living room which gets a lot of heat gain through large windows. There's also another element that's overlooked in effective cooling, which is dehumidification and the role that plays in our experience of heat. Aircon units dehumidify as a natural consequence of condensation. A heat pump using cooling does not, and will not do this especially if it's running safely above dew point - fan coils condensing can of course dehumidify. This is an effect that is important when we experience high humidity heat. So for me the conclusion is that in a well designed and highly efficient house, running cooler water through the UFH will have a positive effect, of course it will, but in terms of designing a whole house system that does efficient optimised heating and cooling through the same system, it is not a simple or easy thing to do. And as we know, how do you find an installer that'll do it and then properly support it? Anyone doing it just has to have a realistic expectation of what they're going to get and the scant public information out there is not massively helpful.

@TedM, In your latest photo, is that shading by the wall of the lower right corner of the furthest panel? This will reduce the performance of the whole string at that time of day. You seem to have around 0.5m of spare frame to the left of the panels, so could they not all move over, or are there other shading issues?

Just make sure all the joints are compression ones. I think those stainless, corrugated, pipes are to allow for expansion and movement. Make the system a drain back one and those problems go away, but gives you other problems.

EV charging can take place via a 3-pin plug if the outlet socket is correctly rated. If you do it through a regular one it can melt them over time. Is this just a regular 3-pin 230V house socket that is marked so that you know it's safe for EV use? Otherwise you don't need a special EV charger for each brand of car. An untethered 6kw wall charger with a type 2 socket on will be fine for all vehicles. There's a few around that still have Type 1 charging (mostly Nissans) but they just use a Type1 to Type2 cable to get around this.

Exactly my thoughts - there is a company doing brick-weave drives locally but I'm not impressed with their prep work - I reckon those drives will soon suffer with tram-lining where cars are repeatedly parked in the same place