SteamyTea

I think a wooden floor/laminate should be treated like a carpet, of the very reason that @Gus Potter says, you may need to remove it. UFH complicates this, but I am sure there are 'underlays' that have high thermal conductivity. A polypropylene ones maybe.

As @Onoff says.

Can you not add in a secondary heat pump, maybe some simple A2A ones. I run my whole house of about £600 of electricity, a year. Have you looked at your half hourly usage date from your smart meter?

Maybe not the best comparison. The garage may well have apprentices that do work on the car, just as an architectural office will have trainees and lower qualified employees working on customers' projects. It is really about management and supervision. Transparency is a different thing.

If you fit LED lighting in a ceiling, you need to make sure they can cool correctly. The light fitting manufactures will show minimum clearances, but they are just that, minimum dimensions.

Continuous usage rating is 10A.

Warm roof and put an MVHR extractor vent in. I think that is what @joe90 did and his loft was very comfortable to be in.

Welcome I like the idea of a restaurant raised up high to get views. There is a place near me that has a great view of a carpark, but non of the sea less than 100 metres away. Have you thought about disable access, we are reviewing all ours at the moment. Judging by the playground in front of the place, what sort of sound proofing you going to need. As for flood prevention, that is a hard one. I think you have to accept that it will get flooded by a storm surge (was 7 metres in Florida a day ago). ICF does seem a solution to this, but then you have to look at what type of foundation system is acceptable for your ground conditions.

That is because we don't have receptors to feel moisture in out fingers, all we feel is temperature and surface texture, then out brains fill in the rest from past experienced. As long as your loft is properly ventilated, I doubt you will have a problem.

Avoid married women from Bristol

Exactly. They say the best way to learn is from YOUR mistakes.

It is to do with energy, 1/2 mass times velocity squared. So the bigger the difference in initial speed, the greater the amount of energy to dissipate. Then there is wind resistance, which works in your favour at higher speeds, the faster you go, the greater the resistance, (air resistance = air density x drag x area / 2) x velocity squared. Then there is aerodynamic forces that affect the vehicle, most cars produce lift at the rear end, this gets worse the faster you go. Then, just for a laugh, there is the braking forces, which changes the axle weigh (remember that weight is mass times acceleration). As you brake hard, more force is put on the front axle, which causes a greater force on the tyres, which then deform, increasing the contact area. Now at normal speeds, this does not make any difference as friction is just the coefficient times the force, but at high speeds, it does as the tyres can quickly change shape (ripple). As a general rule, if your driving goes Pete Tong, in any situation, hit the brakes as hard as possible, it scrubs of speeds, lowering the energy on impact (I went backwards into a tyre wall at over 90 MPH at Thruxton, was airborne and the steering and brakes did (expletive deleted) all, did not stop me trying to use them). I last got caught in 2002, was doing 94 on the A11 near Snetterton. They are usually used to tractors throwing carrots out the back. £270 fine and 5 points. Failed to turn up in court as I was working in the USA, so kept my licence (apparently to be banned you had to appear, or be represented, in court). So in the last 22 years, I have probably driven 700,000 miles. I drive like my Mother, but that is another story. Yesterday I drove 600 miles, got 68 MPG and my average speed was 51 MPH. That is 12 hours of my life I am never getting back.

They seem low readings, but I very much doubt they are in the danger zone. As the building is quite old, there is almost certainly no vapour control layer between the living area and the loft. This will allow higher humidity air to migrate into the colder loft and condense, the formula is simple. T(dew point) = T(air) - 100-RH(air) / 5

Yes, just realised that, was a long day driving yesterday and I think I may go back to bed to sleep it off.

I am actually being a bit dumb this morning, just fit PV, that will take out 20% of the IR on the sunniest days, and nothing on the coldest night.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan–Boltzmann_law

Easy, just look at the number of posts on here from different members. @thefoxesmaltings 136 @Pocster 12.3k @SteamyTea 20.5k If you want to build a house, don't join this site.

It is almost certainly a mismatch between the base resin used with the glass fibre and the top coat. should not be a problem structurally, but then it should not be leaking. The easy way to fix it is to use a polyurethane coating. Something like this. https://www.topseal.co.uk/topseal-pu/

Plants are meant to do this, but when I did an experiment on it, the variation was tiny as the grass grew. There are paints that change colour with temperature. In practice, as radiation is proportional to the cube of the absolute temperature difference, the only times that a meaningful difference happens is during summer, so a reflective coating is all you need, in winter the differences are too small most of the time (maybe 10 days in the UK). City in Sierra Leone covers buildings in mirrors to fight extreme heat People in Freetown, Sierra Leone, are increasingly exposed to extreme heat due to climate change and the urban heat island effect, but covering homes in a reflective film significantly cut indoor temperatures By James Dinneen 3 June 2023 Reflective film installed on the roofs of two buildings in Freetown, Sierra Leone MEER Tens of thousands of people in Freetown, Sierra Leone, live in informal settlements dense with metal and concrete buildings that trap heat and make heatwaves more dangerous. An experiment has shown that covering such buildings with a cheap mirrored film can substantially reduce the temperature inside. Since becoming the chief heat officer of Freetown in Sierra Leone, Eugenia Kargbo has experimented with all kinds of ways to protect the city from heat. When a group of researchers approached her with a plan to cover the city’s buildings in mirrors to cool them off, she thought it was worth a try. “I said, ‘why not?’” The proposal came from a US non-profit called MEER, an acronym for Mirrors for Earth’s Energy Rebalancing. Founder Ye Tao was in search of a place to test the cooling effects of a reflective film the organisation had developed out of recycled PET plastic and aluminium. In theory, a building covered in the film would absorb less of the sun’s radiation and be cooler than one roofed with metal or tar. Tao had heard about Kargbo’s efforts to mitigate heat in Freetown, which have included planting hundreds of thousands of trees across the city and installing shading structures made of reflective plastic in a crowded marketplace. So, he asked her about testing the film. Temperatures in Freetown regularly spike above 40°C (104°F) during the dry season from December to April, and remain hot even at night. The hottest days are projected to become more frequent with climate change. Sign up to our Fix the Planet newsletter Get a dose of climate optimism delivered straight to your inbox every month. Sign up to newsletter The heat is also exacerbated by the urban heat island effect – a phenomenon in which urban areas get hotter than nearby rural areas due to less vegetation, less air flow and more heat-absorbing material on buildings and roads. Kargbo was interested in anything that might provide cooling effects indoors. The city’s buildings are hot and getting hotter. “The heat data shows everywhere in Freetown is getting hotter, but there are also communities that stay hotter throughout the day,” says Kargbo. This was particularly true of the numerous informal settlements built along the coast and the deforested hills around the city. Most buildings in the impoverished settlements are made from uninsulated concrete walls and corrugated zinc roofing that absorb and trap heat. Kargbo says the heat and humidity, along with high levels of air pollution in the settlements, make for a “toxic combination” for residents’ health and well-being. In consultation with residents, Kargbo and other city officials along with Tao and his colleagues decided to test their reflective film in a settlement called Kroo Bay. The settlement is one of Freetown’s largest with more than 10,000 people living in roughly 1 square kilometre. Read more: El Niño climate events cost tropical countries trillions of dollars Jalahan Sesay, a recent graduate from the University of Sierra Leone who surveyed residents as part of the MEER project, says most people in Kroo Bay sleep outside during the hottest time of year, because staying indoors is intolerable. Most buildings lack a ceiling to separate the living space from the roof. “It’s like having a radiator on top of people’s heads,” says Tao. Working with local carpenters, Tao and his team installed mirrored film on the roofs of two residences. To compare its effectiveness against other cooling strategies, they also painted the roof of one residence white and added a new metal roof to another. All four buildings were similarly constructed and had around 180 square metres of roof area. During the day, the interior temperature of the building with the new zinc roof was on average 1 to 2°C cooler than before, and the building with white paint was around 3°C cooler. Inside the two buildings covered in film, it was 6°C cooler, says Tao. The temperature of the roof on the two mirrored buildings was 15°C cooler than without the film, on average. A heat map (left) shows the temperatures of the four roofs (pictured right), with darker areas signifying lower temperatures. While the new metal roof (bottom left) appears coolest, temperature measurements revealed the two roofs covered in reflective film (right) were actually cooler. MEER Sedie Sowa, another MEER intern who surveyed residents in Kroo Bay, says families who live in the mirrored buildings are pleased with it. “They say they sleep comfortably,” he says. David Sailor at Arizona State University says assessing the amount of cooling depends a lot on measurement conditions – cooling effects from reflecting sunlight will be greatest during days with the most solar radiation, for instance. But he says a 6°C reduction is substantial. “There’s a lot of potential there not just to improve comfort, but to save lives.” Tests are ongoing, but Kargbo says she is encouraged by the results, and aims to roof many more buildings in Freetown with reflective film. If an entire neighbourhood or more were to be covered, Tao says the cooling effects could accumulate as air flows across roofs, lowering air temperature across whole areas and not just within individual buildings. Infrared-reflecting paint can cool buildings even when it is black By Layal Liverpool 24 April 2020 A new paint reflects infrared with a layer of polymer, which helps keep objects cool Jyotirmoy Mandal A two-layered paint that reflects infrared light while maintaining its colour could help keep buildings and vehicles cool under hot sun. This could help reduce energy used in cooling, such as by air conditioners. This coating was developed by Yuan Yang at Columbia University in New York and his colleagues. It consists of a top layer of commercial paint, which provides the colour, and a bottom layer made of a polymer similar to Teflon, which reflects infrared light. Sunlight contains both visible and infrared light but the infrared accounts for the majority of the solar energy, says Yang. When the sun shines on an object coated with this paint, the top layer absorbs certain wavelengths of light, depending on the paint’s colour, while the bottom layer reflects infrared light, preventing the object from heating up. A similar cooling effect can be achieved using white paint or metal mirrors, but Yang says the advantage of this new paint is that it can be any colour desired. Read more:Earthquake-resistant paint could help brick buildings survive tremors Usually black paint absorbs heat, but painting an object with a black version of this new coating kept it about 16°C cooler than when an object painted with commercial black paint was exposed to the same amount of sunlight. In another test, the new paint coating was found to be able to maintain its colour despite being placed in an oven at 60°C for 30 days. Yang says this paint could help save electricity and reduce carbon dioxide emissions. “Solar reflective and thermally emissive surfaces offer a sustainable way to cool objects under sunlight,” says Mingqing Wang at University College London, who was not involved with the work. This could be useful in tropical locations to help keep buildings cool and reduce electricity consumption from air conditioning, as well as to prevent cars, buses and trains from getting too hot, she says. An intriguing next step would be to try and add more functionality to the coating, for instance to enable the energy from the reflected infrared light to be harvested to generate electricity, says Wang. Science Advances DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aaz5413 Superwhite paint can cool buildings even in hot sunlight By Adam Vaughan 21 October 2020 Some buildings are already painted white to help with cooling Johner RF/Getty Images A new superwhite paint is so reflective that it can cool a surface to below the surrounding air temperature, even under sunlight. It could help reduce the use of energy-intensive air conditioning in hot countries. With global energy use expected to grow 90 per cent by 2050, ways to passively keep cool without using energy will be vital in coming decades. While “cool roofs” painted white are a common sight in hot climates, materials experts think they can do one better. Xiulin Ruan at Purdue University and his colleagues developed a white paint that was so reflective and good at radiating heat that it cooled a surface to 1.7°C below the surrounding noon air temperature during tests in Indiana. Compared with existing, commercial heat-reflective paints that reflect about 80-90 per cent of solar energy, the new one managed 95.5 per cent. Although it sounds counter-intuitive, the surface can be cooled below the surrounding temperature because it emits enough heat through radiative sky cooling, the natural process of a body under the sky – such as a roof – radiating heat out to space. Light-coloured surfaces regularly do this on cloudless nights, but it wasn’t until 2014 that we found a material that managed the feat in daylight, when our cooling needs are greatest. Read more:Infrared-reflecting paint can cool buildings even when it is black Compared with that breakthrough, Ruan says his team’s paint is thinner, cheaper and could be easily scaled up. The acrylic paint is made with calcium carbonate, and partly achieves its qualities by containing particles of many different sizes, which help to scatter different wavelengths in the solar spectrum. Ruan estimates a typical US home of 200 square metres would save about $50 per month on cooling costs, compared with using an existing heat-resistant paint. “This is a very nice result,” says Aaswath Raman at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It demonstrates a paintable solution that employs materials commonly used by the paint industry, and gets reasonably good cooling performance. One potential limitation could be its use of organic solvents, but that could be addressed in the future.” Cell Reports Physical Science DOI: 10.1016/j.xcrp.2020.100221

Have a look here and see what size trays they have. https://www.gseintegration.com/en/solutions/gse-in-roof-system/ Or Midsummer. https://midsummerwholesale.co.uk/

Especially true as the writing is on the wall for combustion technologies, in all sectors, including pub gardens.

No. It is probably just crushing the solid part, or at least making a more uniform matrix. The solid material will still be there, just with less air mixed in with it. This is why on a roll of mineral wool type insulation, it specifies the thickness. Crushing in more material reduces the k-value. You can think of it as a stud, in a stud in a wall, reduce the depth of them and you not only shorten there thermal path, but you also reduce the air thickness, reducing the performance even more.

Just work it out from first principles. The solid material will have a k-value, and that will stay they same, just shorter in length. The air, which is what actually does the majority of the work, will be reduced in mass/volume, and will also be shorter in length. So as long as you know the original densities, you can calculate the volumes, and therefore the length at the correct compaction level. Then recalculate for greater compaction.

No, I think in 20 years my power has been off 3 times, only once for over half an hour. And I live in a very windy place.

I think the problem is disposal of them, rather than the normal usage of existing ones. They cannot be burned easily and they cannot be buried (no point, they don't degrade).