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OK, it seems that I was being overoptimistic back then about being "nearly there", but I have now finally completed! Excited & terrified in equal measures...

You seem to think that the wholesale energy market consists solely of a pool in which generators bid in half-hourly (trading period) prices per MWh and all generators are paid at the marginal rate. While this may be a view of the energy market that is easy for Daily Mail readers to grasp the reality is far more complex. You may think that you are the first person to identify the shortcomings in such a market but these issues have been well understood anmd addressed by clever people many many years ago. Let me help you. Alongside the pool is a capacity market and a balancing market. In addition to this sits a set of ancillary (now called system) services, where market participants receive payments for being available, and for being flexible. Whether they are idle or not. Participants (I won't call them generators) get paid whether they are dispatched or not because they provide capacity to secure the network. The capacity market and system services payments for things like ramping margin and reserve provide payments to participants for being available. This is nothing new. When I first worked on industry privatisation back in the 90s availability payments were made to power stations to cover their costs when idle. Daily peaks that requiere small flexible generators to be dispatched for just a few hours of the month in the winter are nothing new. This has always been the case, even long before wind. Just think about it. Peaking plant that comes on rarely are, in my experience on the same site as a much larger power station, relying on the same network connection and administrative functions. Diesel gas turbines can have diesel sat in the tanks without any issue. Its not a big deal to have these units sat idle until required. The Capacity Market and system services pays for this based on their flexibility. What about those other participants that are not even generators. Batteries? DSUs? How do you think batteries are funded when they don't actually bid into the energy market? It certainly would surprise me if the "resulting cost of the output were say twice the normal level" (whatever normal is). While marginal plant is typically higher cost, they are funded by payments that are completely seperate to the pool. The market price is not unduly inflated by their idle time. There are other things that affect the market too, like transmission constraints that would mean the cheapest plant may not be dispatched. And so much more that I do not have time to explain here. The energy market is not perfect. It is fiendishly complex. I actually think a move back towards nationalisation instead of wholesale pool prices would be great but that isnt going to happen any time soon. One thing is certain though. The high cost of electricity at the moment is caused by the high price of gas. It has nothing to do with wind turbines. The increase in wind penetration reduces the reliance on that gas generation. And that is a very good thing.

Absolutely! When in panic mode have something to eat, save the skin though as a real haggis has a flexible sheeps gut. On more a serious note if your are heading out to do an investigation as an SE you have two choices: 1/ You can pitch up on the job and say to the Client.. can't do that, this and oh I can only look at what I can see and I have my chocolate fire guard.. I open stuff up by myself. But when you do that you risk.. falling through a ceiling, busting pipe and cables. On a job that is structuraly unstable you have two choices.. turn round and say to the poor Client.. oh I can't investigate as we need a Contractor who I can pass the can to.. or you can just get stuck in. I'm old sckool and carry insurance to get stuck in. At the end of the day it is hard for folk to sue if you act in the interest of public safety. We are Engineers.. be confident in what you do. An old mentor of mine said.. learn as much as you can, some may sue but if you know what you are doing none / few will win..yes your will have some sleepless nights but your PI will pick up the legal costs of folk chancing their arm. I run about in an old Astra Van on an 05 plate. In the back is.. apart from my tecky and first aid stuff / surveying stuff is.. 1/ Dust sheets, a mop, bucket and cloths. 2/ 30 amp junction boxes 3/ A selection of terminal blocks / 2.5mm and 1.5mm cable and other stuff just to make electrics temporarily safe. 4/ My plumbing tool box.. stop ends.. 15, 22 and 28mm pipe.. all the stuff I need to fix small leaks.. plus a big set of crimps and bungs if I get a big burst a big pipe. here all I want to do is to reduce the flow so things don't flood. 5/ My general tool box.. and boxes of screws and fixings also a few small bits of timber. 6/ At home I keep some Acrow props and a few lengths of 6 x 2 and 4x 2 timber that I can nip back for. If a problem occurs I evaluate, eat some Haggis and all is well. No need for panic.

looking at the wear, I've got to ask a. can you bring the worm down a bit for deeper engagement and b. what kind of grease are you using?

If your UFH is being supplied via a thermal store, this will only have a header tank either built in or an insulated one above it. So your UFH is an open vented system, not a pressurised system. That is pretty much how ours is, and the UFH gauges register 0.2 bar pressure. Your gauges are showing how much pressure the pump is having to develop to pump water around. As the heating demand is switched off the drop is just pressure depleting to show the system head from thermal store header tank. 10m of head is 1 bar pressure on the gauge. If your UFH is taking it's feed from the thermal store, your pumps may need to be turned down. Keep reducing its speed until you see a change on the flow gauges, then take up to next speed.

For me, this is the part of the Net Zero strategy that leaves me with some concern. The 14% FF generation is the higher end of the range, but, as part of the NZ Strategy this is Gas with CCUS. Unabated Gas powered generation is below 1%. My feeling is that CCUS remains, to some extent, snake oil and requires a development in technology that isn't guaranteed. I don't believe the industry is being honest about the level of CCUS that can be achieved today and are making unfounded predictions of capabilities for 2050. The NZ strategy currently, for the lowest cost technology mix to achieve Net Zero, I feel, will likely have shift to a higher reliance on either Nuclear or Hydrogen power generation, which will have higher costs associated than is currently considered.

That sounds about right, asked a few of our tree surgeon customers and they are wanting around £135 per cube.

Well done on the purchase of some mud topped off with grass !!! the hard work and increase in stress levels.....starts now. Nice crimbo present you've brought for yourself. 🥳

Yes, we have the highest prided water and sewage, Indian and Chinese food, electricity.....

Hello, welcome! Can I make a suggestion? You do absolutely nothing for a year - maybe two - while you look at what the house does - and doesn't do. How cold is it in winter .... hot in summer ... drafty is it in westerlies.... how much electricity does it take to keep resonably warm .... how shaded is the roof .... where might you put solar PV.... what does the sparky say about the wiring ... what state is the roof in .... cold roof - warm roof ? In other words gather some data about it. Then you can set priorities. If you're feeling invincible, ask @SteamyTea round for a totally biased opinion on what you might like to do first ( hint : data, data, data)

Congratulations and well done. First big step completed. I was similarly optimistic on timescales. It took 9 months from walking onto the plot to completing then another 9 months to get planning and warrant. We start kit erection in April so a few months shy of two years since we first saw the plot.

Not my experience. We run our tank at 50 degrees and there's no issue at all with the mixers, even as the tank draws down and the hot water temperature drops. They're Crosswater Mike, for reference. Actually, we have a cheap mixer set in the downstairs shower and it's fine too.

And releasable ones at that!

Cable ties. The times these have got me out of the muck !

I keep my tank at 50 C but the output from the tank is mixed down to a lower temperature, about 42 C I think. This is mainly because my OH deplores water that is painfully hot. We have three shower mixers and they all work perfectly well.

Never noticed a problem.

Good idea. I have a 3kw greenhouse fan heater kicking around somewhere. A bit ugly but it will do.

Our el-cheapo mixers work perfectly well down to mid-40s.

Just a quick thought. Got called out to a job a few months back where the structure was unstable. Builder had got some props and so on. The key here was to stop further movement until it could all be examined and understood. The temptation is to make the props tight and whack in bracing tight. This is the wrong thing to do. Nine times out of ten.. put in props and just nip them up. Bracing.. absolute finesse it, just there and no more. If you crank up props and braced hard you can make things worse. A building will do it's best to find alterantive load paths before it falls down. If you start cranking up props hard you can lift the last bits of bearing and that often causes more problems. Most often temporary support is just there to stop things moving more until you can work out the best solution.

Half the ratio and the torque doubles for the same power.

My daily mean, so far this year, is 7.9 kWh/day, 2781 kWh for the year to date. I use around 3 kWh/day for DHW and about 1 kWh a day for the rest. So 4 kWh/day for space heating. House is 50 m2. So total energy works out at 55.6 kWh/m2.Year. Heating is 28.2 kWh/m2.Year. Those number will go up a little for the last few days of the year, but not much. Yesterday I used half the amount I did the same day last week. I have just got in from the Montol and it is 10°C in town. Ansom my bird.

I think you might be better off measuring up the gear and then ordering a replacement spur gear with pin holes from a bearing supplier or other industrial supplier. That way you'll most likely get the right diameter and maybe a better quality gear. You'll need to know the module: http://www.metrication.com/engineering/gears.html

Looks proper, I do like a bit of unistrut

48 degrees, found by experiment as the hottest task you normally have to perform is kitchen washing up and with no cold added, I can just, and only just put my hands in the water without it being painful. I see no need for any hotter than that, but if such a need arrises, there is the boiling water tap.

For balance, consider my marginally insulated, air-leaks-like-a-sieve 90's monstrosity = 70kWh/m2 pa. for space heating and 30kWh/m2 pa. DHW 🤦‍♂️

I have resisted posting because this is not a typical developer new house, but my self build, built to largely passive house principles but no attempt to have it analysed let alone certified as a passive house. 150 square metres 1.4 air tightness ASHP under floor heating downstairs only triple glazed and MVHR Last 12 months heating the ASHP consumed 1200kWh so that's 8 kWh of electricity per square metre or about 24kWh of heat delivered. In addition the ASHP has consumed 1000kWh heating the DHW (metered separately to heating usage) And this in the east Highlands where the last week of cold weather that brought the UK almost to a halt, is just a normal weeks weather here in the winter.

@tuftythesquirrelYour "plant room" looks amazing! You'll have to give guided tours, it's a work of art!

A couple speedfit 15mm and 22mm push fit blanks

Nope - your glycol will be an inhibited glycol mix so not 100% glycol.

Assuming the chain is what pulls the door up, using it on the small sprocket the door will lift slower. So being forced to use the large sprocket (because the small one is no longer there) would lift the door further for each rotation, thus to my simple mind the torque on the shaft would be more and therefore forces on the teeth would be more. So I would say the small sprocket is what you want. Will you be around in 25 years to replace it again?

thanks jilly, that makes sense. I'll create separate posts for each question, not all at once.

Very important this. People will only hide things if they think there's a b*llocking coming and in fairness nearly everyone is very diligent. " Do your best and if there's any holes let me know and I'll sort them out". We had none in the end AFAIK apart from when I put my foot through it from the attic.

But may diverge enough to be worth changing the design. Eg if bricks go up but timber comes down. My experience is that it takes many months for trades to accept that rates are dropping. They will sit at home through pride, until sent out to take what is going.

So roughly 75% on the night rate, that is actually pretty good. 7 kWh a day is pretty good as well. So say you use 2 kWh during the day. That is about £1 to £1.30 a day. A battery system would have to be around 5 kWh to give it a decent longevity, and be able to reliably power a decent size inverter, around 6 kW so it could cope with kettle, oven and a cooking ring (hopefully you have an induction hob as they are just better all round). Now I would think you would be looking at around £8,000 to have something like that installed, and it should last 10 years, so £800/year, plus the running costs i.e. the night rate electricity. If your night rate is around 15p/kWh, and you can get 80% efficiency on the charge/discharge cycle, that is 54p/day, £200/year. Not looking good. But you will save on the high daytime rate, that is between £365 and £475 a year, a real saving of between £165 and £275. Not looking good at all as it cost approximately £800 a year, a you are in the red somewhere between £525 and £635. You could probably save more by showering for 1 minute less each day, or 1 inch (25.4mm) less bathwater.

Glad to see some people have found the statement useful. Something I didn't explain in my original post but which may be apparent anyway, is that once I had a good idea of my preferred design I asked myself: 'If I was the planner assessing this, and if I was being as harsh as I could reasonably be, what would be the specific grounds on which I could refuse it?' The statement is partly an exercise in anticipating those possible grounds of refusal and addressing them in advance. That is easier for me as a planner than for many others, but it's not rocket science. Look at the adopted policies and supplementary guidance on the council website, and read the planning officers report for a few applications in your area to get a feel for how those policies are applied. You'll find that you get the gist pretty quickly, even if you've never looked at a planning policy before. Its not impossible to discuss and debate your plans once they are submitted (though it is increasingly rare to get the chance), but really the idea is to make the most substantive and comprehensive case upfront. It is for the applicant to support their proposal, not for the council to tease out everything that is good about your idea. Ultimately of course, if you've designed something that obviously doesn't meet the policies then it doesn't matter how thoroughly you state your case. Equally, if you've got a design which plainly meets every criteria then you shouldn't need to sell it to the planning office. Most plans sit somewhere in the middle of those two extremes, where there is inevitably a degree of subjectivity, so put the work in to show the extent of compliance with planning policies as part and parcel of your application. You do of course get the odd stroppy or difficult planner, but not half as often as you get a stroppy or difficult applicant! However frustrated you might get, remember that there is a significant difference between making an argument and having one.

We originally tried to go down something like this route (currently a bungalow, wanted to put a new floor on top of part of the house and insulate properly), and eventually abandoned it purely for cost reasons: Downstairs is already in need of major refurbishment, so we would essentially be keeping the existing walls and foundations. Unfortunately the cost of EWI to a good standard is not far off that of building new walls from scratch, and to sort the layout we even had to get rid of most of the internal walls. Keeping anything above the foundations means that the whole build attracts VAT at 20%. For us this would have been significantly more than the value of what we could have kept. Very few of the package companies would quote because of the risk to them that the walls would be slightly mismatched to the plans when we got the roof off. The only one that would quote still said it would be cheaper to knock down. If we wanted to go for EnerPHit we would need to dig out the slabbed parts of the ground floor by hand, and possibly dig out under the suspended floor area too before insulating and re-laying. We would also have been left with a very annoying step (the existing rear extension was built on top of the earth excavated from the original foundations, as far as we can work out), and around half of the losses would have been through the floor. Existing layout isn't great, and we'd be locking that in. In particular, to leave by car we have to reverse out into a fairly busy road, albeit one with a 30mph limit. I've since found out that one thing I knew was a bit of a risk hit some people over the road very badly - they were planning to do much the same as us, albeit probably to a slightly lower insulation standard. However, when they got the floorboards up to start work they found the place had essentially no foundations and it got condemned as unsafe so they were forced to demolish and rebuild after already starting work on refurbishing. Our house is from the same era and on the same ground (gault clay) so we would have been at severe risk of the same thing happening. Looking at what you're thinking of, it looks a lot like our initial thinking - "we need to fix items X, Y, Z, that's it, it'll be much cheaper than knocking down and starting again". The problem is that those items didn't form a clearly defined section of the existing structure, they were scattered all over the place. That then had knock-on consequences, which snowballed. Essentially if you can get what you want with extending the existing loft conversion (e.g. hip to gable conversion for another room) then it's likely to be viable. If not you're probably worse off than knocking down and starting again.

got a wavy knife blade for the jigsaw, like a knife through butter and no dust.

Erm...just cut half way through then turn it over?

PIR is left exposed in cavity walls while they are built. I'd just buy a large cheap tarp off ebay. Stick some blocks on it. I'd be more worried about it being stolen .

And you are still not getting it Now you are just trolling.

And you are still not getting it 😞

You have a very different household to me. At times our 300L tank is barely enough. Our showers can run in excess of 10L per minute so you are expecting a woman with long hair to shower, wash, rinse and condition their hair in 8 minutes. You have not met my wife and daughter. Double that time and water consumption and my 300L tank barely does 2 lady showers, certainly not if it has done 1 much shorter man shower first. Tell them to turn it down to a trickle and they don't see why they have to put up with sub standard. And nearly 2 hours to re heat it "sorry dear you have to wait 2 hours if you want a shower as well" lands you in the dog house. Oh and most ASHP's (probably all) stop heating the house when they heat the hot water. Ours likes to only do DHW in half hour chunks. You can fiddle with parameters to make it do DHW for longer before reverting to space heating.

Ah yes, because madcap ideas will save me come the Apocalypse! I can only hope the zombie hordes are delayed by tripping over all the unfinished projects.

Think my bathroom was 70mm out on two opposing walls.

Welcome John. A couple of pointers: - add the term "Buildhub" to a Google search to find info on the forum - if you have a question, drop it in the relevant sub-forum for the quickest reply. As to what not to do, just use your common sense and I'm sure you'll be fine. Plenty of the regulars have no common sense at all and they get by.