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I’m curious. Why did they drop the price by £10K and did it not ring alarms bells? That’s basically £10K profit they’ve dropped or they bought the project, so how much did they and are they marking up in the first instance?

Usually drawer box boxes come with clips/cam thingies that screw onto the drawer front and connect them reversibly to the box.

I think that you've misinterpreted the cost per kWh. The 9p per kWh seems to be based on the generator running costs; the generator can be run at full load and hence maximum efficiency if charging a battery bank intermittently, with assistance from PV. They are not accounting for the capital cost, which will push the cost per kWhr up nearer 75p. Because I'm stupid and like playing with toys, I have an (in effect) off grid system. It has 14.7kW of panels, 13kW of inverters feeding a Sunny Island 8.0 inverter/charger with about 19kWh worth of LiFEPO4 batteries. It cost about £32,000, including 20% VAT (would be quite a lot cheaper now, as costs have dropped a lot since I started buying bits) and generated about 5,000 kWh over the last 12 months. It should generate a bit more now it is completely commissioned and I've got some extra load in the summer. If you assume a 10 year life, that gives a unit cost of £0.65. If you were lucky and got 20 years out of it the cost drops to £0.33, however that doesn't include fuel for the generator in the 3 months when PV is inadequate.

probably same principle of using breathable membrane in suspended floor insulation application (rather than just chicken wire), to avoid wind washing.

Yes if they want it to perform well, 75mm is woefully poor for a floor with UFH. Many of us find it sad that people are still building like this, and the customer is probably not aware of the poor job they are getting and not been advised that more insulation = lower running costs and a warmer house.

I have a small water heater above my sink in the garage so I don’t have to wash my hands in cold water, never thought about frost protection and it’s not been a problem (so far ?).

Picking up the free storage batteries and controller tomorrow. No ideas what I'm getting! ?

I have just downloaded, for free, Python Machine Learning. Personally I don't think it needs to be too difficult. Really just a simple feedback loop based on basic thermodynamics, which is similar to an RC circuit in electronics in this instance.

We've had an identical pair of freezers stacked next to a tall fridge in our kitchen for over two decades now and apart from the electric costs they've proved to be very handy. When we built the house it was the only way to get a decent capacity out of a vertical format. Being ancient they do require regular defrosting (about once a year) but they get done one at a time, shifting the food between them.

You can often connect to the sewer pipe via a saddle on the top, subject to the pipe size. You do not have to connect via a manhole. So much better than a treatment plant. You should be able to get an asset plan from the water co and it will probably include the pipe material and diameter.

here are some phone numbers for robert schmid, son of founder and the ceo in austria. may as well go to the top https://baumit.co.uk/company/management

we used the stainless straps and nails as used for timber frame. Had to get the long ones and cut them down. Each strap made two. Needed three holes for the motar in the cut bit and one nail hole in the off cut but my time was free and it saved about 500 straps. Knock the nail into the ICF at a downward angle and they hold very well.

Grabfix metal Insulaton fasteners

If there is a fork truck in the building, then block. If an office, then look at timber frame and cellulose insulation as the sound deadening is impressive.

Welcome welcome. Block build here. It was the cheapest but airtightness and detailing very tricky re thermal bridging. These are vital. A developer near us just competed a dozen houses using Kore insulated raft and I think amvic ICF. These guys aren't picking a build method for fun. Airtightness + bridging should be top knotch. Bricks over ICF should work fine althought I'm not 100% sure how you'd tie the facing bricks to the structure.

I know, just I am a bone idle (expletive deleted). One of the reasons I do what I do is that I have a very decent work/life balance. Friday night was a bit fraught with the unexpected power outages and half term, but within 15 minutes of closing (sold out), we were joking about it. Some jobs/companies, when you have a really bad day, have a lingering, negative feeling on for months. I have tried very hard to get rid of that attitude as I know that everyone is doing their best in a fast moving, and changing, environment. And I get paid more than my mate who is a very good thermal engineer in the biogas field. But can I do those jobs remotely when I am sitting in a cafe, or just overlooking the sea? That I would be interested in.

ICF is relatively easy, a bit like big Lego filled with steel re-bar and concrete. Used it in my basement. No need to use brick lips, just use bricks to form the outside skin. The search bar is a very useful tool here, as are the self build blogs.

This is why hospitality locally is really struggling, local cafes and pubs on short hours due to staff shortages. All I can suggest is re-train and get trade skills to access the £200-£300 per day jobs. Lets face it Steamy, with you mathematical skills you could be on good money designing ASHP installations. I regularly see ads for good staff.

200 per day self employed isn’t enough There are very few easy building jobs

With the cost of living going up, I expect most trades like me are now putting our prices up, first time for number of years for me.

Given that most houses heat with gas, so this is mostly not a measure of reduced heating requirements, I would say the 2 big changes since 2005 has been the almost universal replacement of CRT televisions and computer monitors and the not quite so universal replacement of filament lamps with CCFL and now LED. As someone said, that is the low hanging fruit for electricity saving taken care of. That would be our continuing decline in making things? and would there be a significant reduction in electric train travel due to work from home, so fewer trains running? I could be cynical here (what me?) We are constantly told how green electric train travel is, but reduce it during the pandemic and we are STILL burning fossil fuel to power the country. So working that the other way, each new electric train put into service is burning FOSSIL FUEL to power it as there is simply not enough renewable power going spare to power them. The pollution has just moved from the engine to the distant power station.

It doesn’t someone on minimum wage hasn’t trained for four years and done four years of night school On less than minimum wage That's probably why they are on minimum wage

I have, as many of you know, E7 heating. By the very nature of this, there is a switch off set time (7 AM UTC). Because my water and storage heater would come on at 11 PM, then off for an hour, and back on at 1 AM, I put lock out timers on each circuit (my time window has now changed to midnight to 7 AM). This was to stop things heating up, then cooling down, then heating up again. I currently have the E7 time window effectively set as an E4 (3 AM to 7 AM). This gives me plenty of time to heat everything up. I have often thought that a variable time window could be useful, but rather than along the lines that @TerryE uses (signal from MET Office), just looking at the rate of change of the OAT between 8 PM and Midnight could be used to set the start time for the next day's heating window. I have quickly plotted a few years outside air temperature (OAT) binned it by rate of change in the above 4 hour window and correlated it with the mean OAT. Needs a bit more thinking about how to use the slope of the time to set the length of the heating window, but I feel there is a reasonable correlation to be useful. I know from experience that my heating has to come on when the daily mean OAT is below 10°C. There does seem to be a half decent correlation between the night before temperature change and the day ahead mean temprature. Below is a quick chart showing July and February slopes. These are my two extreme months. Needs a bit more thought, and how to integrate it with the building heating curve may become tricky. The aim is simple, the heating turns off at the set time with just the right amount of energy having been delivered, and no more. The objectives are much harder.

@ProDave the Honeywell T4 or T4R both have optimisation algorithms in them and are off the shelf but not that cheap. They are decent units too - an evolution on the older CM range. Also look quite nice !

You can buy a petrol from chainsaw supplier that does not go off. Intend to have some ready to go.

Yes please do yourself a favour and don't use Baumit. I will be posting another post on that thread with a shockingly poor response from them that should put anyone off ever entertaining their product. @Nod If you wanted to waste some time, you could get the Baumit rep to look at your job, then quietly mention my thread and their total lack of interest in even coming to have a look to try and work out what went wrong and then let him know you have ruled out using it on your job because of their lack of interest when things go wrong.

It's like the "optimum start" feature on some older digital roomstats- they learn the rate-of-change of the room/house and re-start from the setback temp in time to have regained temperature at a selected time. The lower the internal temp falls overnight, the earlier the heat comes on. but as @Marvin alludes, how much of a point there is to this in a well-insulated property with an ASHP, is questionable

With a generator the voltage and frequency is not always that stable (not sure how good inverter generators are). I think that would cause the PV inverter to have problems.

In tests I have run here we found the ASHP and controls uses less power left on low over night than turning it off and on. By the time the dawn comes the house is not as cold and so the ASHP seems to have less bad COP work to do. Obviously this is hard to be accurate about because of all the variables, but that is what we do. However, I think this might not work if the building had poor airtightness or poor insulation or no MVHR.

Yes, they are good quality. We looked at a whole raft of window suppliers and ended up with Velfac. The quality is certainly comparable to Internorm and Rationel, for our build they came in at 20% less money. Having said that it was a very painful pricing process, started out at 25k and reduced to 15k. We also have roof lights from RoofMaker that we are very happy with.

Most trades here (NW) are looking £200-300 per day I would get get a price rather than an hourly rate Every job can be priced

They are indeed but the surface needs special cleaning and prepping.

I hope see what you started @ProDave!

Took me over 20 years to realise how to do it properly. And how to manage people, especially my boss.