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I did both. ( apart from the save money bit!) I pulled out the plumbers underperforming compression fit attempt after 6 months and redid it all in Hep2O myself with a radial layout. 25mm MDPE to the stopcock. 22mm Hep2O to the control block splitting to 22mm for the UVC and cold manifold. 15mm for all cold feeds except the basin and toilets in 10mm. 22mm manifold rising above the UVC to preheat the hot water via convection. 15mm pipe to the Showers/Baths and Utility 10mm pipe to the basins and kitchen tap. Kitchen tap should be 15mm really but a run of 13m (woops UVC in wrong location!) meant to have quick hot water delivery at the expense of less flow (6l/sec after 8-9 secs) I used 10mm. The plumber had left us with 10l/s after 35-45 secs which was infuriating. I have since done my parents heating and DHW with an oil boiler, solid fuel Rayburn and thermal store.

Hi chaps, finally got this job done: the whole floor's hardboard needed drying out (2 months & resticking down, the lino underside scrubbed of mould & restuck down. And my end of bath gap done (thanks @Onoff did as per your idea/ best I could). Lino Edges all siliconed. New shower door glass trim on, & all areas siliconed. New lease of life! All cos of a daft plunger frozen pipe fiasco. Thanks for the help on this. Too cold yet for a shower but water-tested the pesky low hinge area.. & seems better.

After a little searching I found some research on this very subject. Smokeless coal comes in at 28000MJ/kg or 7.78kWh. At your price of £622/tonne that boils down to 62.2p/7.78kWh or 7.99p/kWh of raw coal. The study measured the stove running at 82.3% efficiency. 7.99p was buying you 82.3% of a kWh delivered into your house or 9.7p/kWh of delivered heat. As the tested stove seems to get it's published figure it seems fair to do the same for gas and oil. A Grant vortex Oil boiler at 92.2% efficiency gives a delivered heat unit cost of 8.6p/kWh. A Worcester Bosch boiler claims 94% efficiency. At your 3.45p/kWh gas price that's a very cheap 3.67p/kWh of delivered gas heat. A Panasonic Heatcharge has a SCOP of 5.9. at the price cap of 31.8p/kWh that ends up at 5.4p/kWh of delivered heat. TLDR. Price of delivered heat. Coal 9.7p/kWh Oil 8.6p/kWh Electric A2A 5.4p/kWh Gas 3.7p/kWh. I'll link to that report. V interesting regarding wood too. burning-wood-consult-bsria-report1.pdf

BTW, it is well worth avoiding these 0 and 1 subnets if you ever want to implement VPN back into your LAN as most coffee shops, etc. use them, and the routing algos can get confused when the guest LAN that you've connected to and the home LAN have the same subnet. Just pick any other yyy in the 192.168.yyy.0/24 subnet such as xxx=44 or 111 or whatever.

For mains dimmed LEDs in use http://www.whitewing.co.uk/acdim.html Specifically designed for LED mains dimming. For constant voltage or constant current fittings (i.e. skipping the mains driver) I use whitewing or D4C from AliExpress. I can dig out more links if you're genuinely interested DMX is just a protocol. I also use it to control relays, SSRs, and even a PWM variable speed extraction fan.

I meant has anyone used or inspected the structures from Quick Garden, as mentioned above.

In Scotland, you have to get a building warrant to build. It's the formal process of building control approving your plans and saying you may start. Equivalent to full plans approval in England and Wales.

Others on here will tell you that to keep the costs low it’s full on Slating first thing joists from mid morning Just myself and my wife

I have the Eon app and it's rubbish. Hugo and Loop are extensions of your Smart Meter display (IHD) which store over a year of data. Hugo is the more mature app, you can have a custom tariff and it's clever how you can have dual fuel on the same chart. A recent update added standing charge and vat, it completely mirrors what I am billed, as you would expect.

First a confession, I can get round the back, it's just very difficult as the toilet is in a confined space and i'm an idiot, apologies for the confusion. Since I had no other options I unscrewed the screw on the good side ,which i'd been avoiding doing, and got the lid off that way, but the wing nut fell down the back somewhere and it's lost, is this a comedy? , anyway this could easily be replaced. I wedged something under plate on the bad side as suggested by TennentsLager but the screw won't budge and i'm beginning to damage the head, also it's really difficult to get round the back on that side as it's right next to the wall, so I think i'm going to have to cut the screw off (though i'm not sure how as it's very close to the plate) and buy a new quick release seat. Thanks for all your help

That is 3 core and earth but it would do, just ignore one core.

Top Class. Keep up the good work.

Blower door in action for the first time. I was pleasantly surprised by how airtight the main rooms downstairs were (I sealed the dining room door into the hall, and mounted the blower door into the lounge doorway into the hall). Even on the slowest setting the fan created enough pressure difference to find the major leaks, with the next speed up used for the smaller ones. Now to start sealing the 40ish leaks we identified!

Jo, It was Dunster house. If i was to do one for myself, i would have to treat the whole thing before i considered putting it together. The sliding fixtures for the windows and doors are a whole bunch of fun to get to engage. The windows and the door frame are defo a very weak point, and very lightly made. Just not my thing i'm afraid. If you get One, fit guttering, or the bottom logs will rot out very quickly. If you fit it on either a slab or concrete base, you need to stop the water splash from the roof sides where the water runs off.

£7m! **** me. that's insane.

If you’re not building the house to sell which people are you talking about?

There can be a huge difference in bit quality. It is well worth paying for big brands.

In the end the modulation got back down to my usual reading in the 30s very quickly. I was just panicking (I’m an expert at that). Yes, we’re have a magnaclean fitted. Why would I need to dose more water? I’ve already topped up the pressure by turning two little valves that my plumber told me were for topping up. Weirdly, now that the house and HW have been heated and the boiler is off, it’s showing the actual flow temp as 74C. Not sure why that is.

If you are only drilling a few holes then HSS should have been fine, but at Ø16 you should slow the drill down and take your time. Even a little fairy liquid under the drill may help. If you are drilling a lot of holes then you may want to go with a cobalt steel bit or black oxide bit.

Hi and Welcome I also live in a listed building in North Cornwall over 150 years old. Being listed is both lovely and difficult I get you completely. We are not allowed solar on the roof, no ASHP allowed, and have to keep the windows wooden..... I started with the basics which you have probably already done. All lightbulbs low energy, draft excluder around doors, old fashioned sausage dog type at main doors, rugs and blankets, heavy curtains etc Are you on LPG? I find filling the tank up in August is often cheaper and don't forget you can shop around your not tied to one supplier, unless you have just got a new tank, after the minimum your still free to move. Calor installed a new large underground tank £250 ish we dug the hole and filled back in. We left them after the minimum term and found cheaper supplier who took over the tank. Are you on Economy 7? Make the most of the cheaper hours. Once you have the basics sorted move onto slightly bigger things like insulating pipework, Hot water cylinders extra insulation. Finally save up and get permission if necessary for the other things. We need new windows but at over £1000 per small window supply only its too expensive for now. If you already have ideas you will find lots of help on the forum.

After making most of the windows openable, I get very close to a pass. I've not yet decided on inward or outward opening windows and that presents another route to compliance that I hadn't thought of. Thanks

I think UKPN have a spec somewhere, concrete base etc - ask them. But this kind of thing: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/193232069236 not necessarily that size though. One option is to keep the meter in there for ever.

Listed or not, it 2023 and you need insulation. Borrow a thermal camera and have a walk around and see where the major losses are.

Ah so not fixed wiring. A small round flex will do, probably 0.5mm is okay it all depends on the terminals in the light fittings and what size cable they are comfortable with. It's the downlighters that will be the pinch point. Do they actually have terminals for 2 cables to loop through properly? Many don't and you get just one set of terminals to fit 2 cables in, and a cable clamp really only designed to clamp a single cable.

Assuming you have enough space for the P5(18mm) and floorboards (25mm) I would propose something like this. Notch out the wall plate as shown for ventilation. (Disclaimer------ I don't "think" the house will fall down!!) or drill a couple of 25mm holes. Follow ecological building systems approach with the two membranes keeping the drafts at bay. Both from an windtightness approach( thermal bypass) and airtightness. Return the membrane to the internal walls. Lay 25mm battens on top of the existing joists in lieu of the thickness of the floor boards ( you could even rip down some floor boards to do this). This will give you a insulative value of about 0.3W/m2K using a high performing mineral wool batt like If you want to substitute the mineral wool for the more painful and less robust process of PIR then the U value could drop to 0.25W/m2K.

I've got an MCS registered installation but not even bothered to apply to any utility company for SEG payments. So far, if I did, I'd have been paid a grand total of £1.45 @ 5p/kWh. Hardly worth the cost of the phone call.

It’s only a bungalow, cable end front and back, all internal walls are stud work. The 4 inch timbers on top of the dwarf walls are in good condition, as are the bricks and mortar, they also have an old dpm which looks fine. It had some woodworm on the end of some joists, which I’ve cut out and just about to replace.

I had to look up the definition of TOG and google offered up this which I thought was quite handy:

Neither am I. In nearly 4 years, I have exported a total of 334kWh which is just the times the inverter generates more than the house uses, even with dumoing to the immersion heater. The point is the DNO are only interested in how much could be exported, not how much will be exported. They take no notice of you actively trying not to export. I will delve into this more after April when it becomes clear how the new system works in practice.

Best not show a picture of a vintage test meter then. Wait until after April. If your test comes out worse than 0.18 ohm, then they will likely say you need a network upgrade. If you applied for that today, there would be a cost. But it looks like after April you may not have to pay for network upgrades. See this thread: I will be watching for how people find this situation after April, I would like more PV myself but don't want to pay for a network upgrade that I don't think I actually need as I have no intention of exporting anything.

Reality check lucky to get it done at £5k m2 you are going to need top end trades for the shell and finish, IF you have contacts to source them they will be big ££ I think your in fantasy land thinking you can get a bond house built cheaper than a bog stand box we all build on here.

Also take a look at the period house forum and the Haynes manual

None whatsoever and if you’re selling at this level of house folk often replace the kitchen anyway.

respectfully, if you're building YOUR house for YOU to live in, what the hell has the value or brand of kitchen appliances got to do with it?

I've mentioned before that we've done something a little different. We've gone without underlay altogether and got the carpet fitters to stick a carpet direct to the floor. They use hessian backing for this kind of application. The carpet itself has a TOG rating of 2 so that's it. The effect is that you get a nice warm floor, softer than laminate or tile (and sound deadening) but without a spongey feeling. Suits us fine.

+1 to the above. Some carpet salesmen haven't a clue. I once asked for the TOG value of a carpet sample and the man went away to check and came back with some ridiculous number like 10 or 11 written on a post it note. Think that's more like a duvet. Others told me all their carpet was suitable for UFH - meaning it wouldn't be damaged by it, not that it would let the heat through. Ideally keep the total TOG to below 2,5 and ideally 2.0. Ask to see the makers specification which sometimes states the TOG. Beware: Some carpets are made in two versions. Foam or Hessian backed. Some shops have terms in their small print on the order form that allows them to choose which version they supply. You don't want to order hessian backed based on its low TOG and find that foam backed is delivered. I recommend trying out samples of the underlay and carpet together in bare feet as some very low TOG combinations can feel a bit hard.

I have done some research. Basically underlay has tog of about 3.0, but the special stuff is 0.7, so much more heat comes through. Avoid foam-backed carpet, or wool. Carpetrght have their own name for this special underlay and sell it at £13/m2. it is called Duralay elsewhere and the cheapest I have found is £9/m2. Delivery to the Highlands is stupid extra money as often. (£70 for the last 50 miles from the notional barrier to transport). I think free with Amazon, much as I'd rather not use them.

This is a tough one unfortunately as these APs use 'Passive PoE' - which basically means the manufacturer has made up their own standard rather than using the proper 802.3af/at standards (which is what your switch is providing) You could try something like this (At your own risk!) - https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/204193562706

I think you need passive POE rather than active POE? A Passive PoE switch is, as you might think, very similar to an active PoE switch, with one notable exception. In PoE, the switch and the remote equipment actually communicate and negotiate the proper voltage and the pins to use for the transfer of electrical power. In passive PoE, no negotiation takes place between the two devices and power is simply drawn from the switch. PoE can supply devices up to 100m away, whereas Passive PoE is limited to 30m.

Even though the WHO said there is no safe level. The other, more important thing is, none of us know what your local particulate levels are. Basing health decisions on how one likes to think they are, and what they really are, is a recipe for disaster. They can do isotope testing to establish where they come from, but that is expensive. You are right, they do not now if one chemical base is worse than another, which leads onto this There are two affects, one from the physical size, which can pass though cell walls, and then the chemical reactions, which are amplified by the surface area. This is a well written article. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191113-the-toxic-killers-in-our-air-too-small-to-see One of the problems with medical research is people, we are all a little bit different. Some things are near enough certain i.e. 100m fall onto a concrete slab will be fatal. Other things less so i.e. exposure to the influenza virus, fatal for a few, unnoticed by a few, the 70% in the middle will have symptoms that range from a slight sniffle and a mild headache to quite sever illness that requires hospitalisation and technical medical intervention. One of the problems with associating one cause to one illness in one person is very difficult and is usually what a Coroner has to do in mysterious deaths. Luckily we have epidemiologists that are trained to spot true patterns in data and work out the most likely cause, even if the mechanism isn't fully understood. We can thank Florence Nightingale for this, she was very good at presenting data showing that more solders died of infection than injury, even though the cause of the infection was not fully understood, and at the time, antibiotics were unavailable. We are probably at this stage with particulates, but luckily we have much better data and analytical techniques these days, so getting the scientific truth is generally quicker. Google Scholar is pretty good for finding research, I just did a simple search for PM2.5 between 1980 and 1990, 644 results. 1990 to 2000, 8430 results 2000 to 2010, 32,300 results 2010 to 2020 150,000 results 2020 to 2023, 91,400 results Seems there is quite a lot of interests. (there will be some double counting and irrelevant papers, but there is a lot of scientific research happening in the field.

Time for a reality check people!!! Get a thermometer and put it in the bath when you think, "ooh, that's just right", eg just before you pass out and then turn the hot tap back off.. Please post that temp here and lets see who ACTUALLY needs these ridiculous DHW temps.

He's an idiot. That cycle should be performed early hours of the morning, ideally in line with an EV car charging ( cheap rate ) tariff, and scheduled as to purposefully avoid scalding someone.

Eden project are at ~5km, bless 'em: https://www.edengeothermal.com/the-project/drilling-and-operations/ That's "proper geothermal" though, a ground-source heat pump can do alright with a ~50-200M vertical well, depending on where you are and whether you go open or closed loop. https://www.bgs.ac.uk/geology-projects/geothermal-energy/ has a brief overview of different technologies and a couple of shiny maps.

Been there, wondered that. Not found anything particularly useful. You could just poke your neighbours addresses into gov.uk's find energy certificate website and see what improvements come up for their properties - and see how different houses are assessed.

Going up is deffo better value per sqm. Smaller roof & foundations. Also a bigger garden if your plot is smaller. Can’t give you a % difference though. Someone might here though. obvious disadvantage is if the house is for when your older though.

Hi All I'm not sure if this is common knowledge or has been posted before. The National Library of Scotland has available for online viewing historic maps covering all of Britain. Just type in your place name or postcode etc and it will zoom into the area and show you the available old OS plans for the area. These are also available for sale in print. If you have a look be prepared to lose a couple of hours looking at every place you have ever lived as it is quite compelling. https://maps.nls.uk/geo/find/#zoom=5&lat=56.0000&lon=-4.0000&layers=102&b=1&point=0,0

Did you see the bit that it was a bunch of Manchurian academics that names it after the slang term for clothing.

Less fatal

Ha, I shouldn't post last thing at night or first thing in the morning!