SteamyTea

I wonder by how much, really. My council tax is £1200 a year, that don't pay for much. LA funding info is here, but can't be bothered to unpack it all. https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/local-government-finances-impact-on-communities/#heading-2

Define a micro home? My house is 4m by 8m, on the outside, 48m2 inside. Trust me, that is small.

St. Agnes on the north coast of Cornwall is protesting about the proposed new Co-op. The locals can walk, cycle, drive, take the community mini bus, or the local busses, use a taxi, skateboard, and for some cartwheel there. But the locals claim that it will make their high street unsustainable for local traders. The proposal is for 235 m2 for shop and 115 m2 of storage. so about the same as 3 houses. Now let us look at bit closer at this 'high street'. Takeaway Pizza at the top, then a Spar, news agent, chemist. Opposite is a solicitors and pub, bit further down a bakers, veg shop and estate agent. Opposite again is a zero waste shop, whatever that is. Then an empty shop. On the corner to the carpark, a cafe. Miner's and Mechanics, which does a bit of everything as a community hub, diagonally opposite is some sort of consultancy in the old Barclays Bank house. There was a Chinese takeaway, but that closed down years ago. An Indian restaurant has recently opened, and the Cornwall Cafe is still there. A couple of hairdressers. Then a Costcutter store, but called something else now since taken over, another veg shop, financial services, chip shop, deli, butcher and the art shop. A pub and hotel, the bakery, before dropping down the hill to another pub, a bar, a cafe, surf shop, a Chinese restaurant and some sort of faith healing place. Now I suspect that most of these places only employ no more that 3 people on full time hours equivalent, with most jobs being part time, limited hours on minimum pay. The parish has a population of 7.5k and the village itself has 2.2k (2011 census). Every time I pass though in the evenings I see Sainsbury, Tesco, Waitrose, Ocado and Morrisons delivery vans, with the usual Amazon ones. So after that rambling description of a place I am not too fond of (it is just an isolated small place on the windy north coast, but not actually on the coast). My point is that locals should not be allowed to decide what is allowed in their places of residence. I am sure that the same people that are complaining about a new store, are the same ones that complained about the latest housing development (39 houses and the Co-op would be next to them, and the development before that. So if you want a 'sustainable' community, support all development, especially if you live in a rural area. Not as if St. Agnes is a concrete jungle, it is surrounded by farms (an industrial process).

Really comes down to building the right type of housing, in the right place and at the right price. This is easy to to do with other products i.e. TVs, cars, but because of the higher purchase price of a house, and the fact it will be in a fixed position for decades or more, the risks of getting it wrong are too high. Governments, and especially local government, have to be quite risk adverse by default (they are playing with our money). I have no idea what the perfect solution is, but a bit of extra tax here, and a small subsidy there, is not going to make a difference. Maybe a big tombola with geo coordinates as the prises. £10 per ticket and a daily draw. If you win, you can do what you like with the bit of land.

All the above, but before you start invest in energy reduction. The kWh you don't need is worth a lot more than the kWh you generate costs. As winter is the problem, you need modules to face the lower sun angles (more vertical). This compromises land usage as you cannot have module rows too close together because shading becomes an issue. In the past this was dealt with by modules tracking the sun, but as module prices plumetted, tracking systems fell out of favour because of the high costs. The secondary part is storage. Storing energy in water, especially if efficiency is boosted with a heat pump is the cheapest and easiest, but does require lots of space, mainly for the insulation. Chemical battery storage gets a lot of people very excited, but financially is a disaster and relies on some very dodgy accountancy to make it price parity with grid supplied power. Cut your usage first, it is so much easier and cheaper.

For others that may wonder what a Snubber is, or like me, what it does and how. https://eepower.com/technical-articles/snubber-network-choices-design-and-evaluation/ It is really just a bucket with a hole in it, and a one way valve, that can deal with a variable input and produce a steady, but limited, output, without overflowing.

This is from the Cornwall Council Website. Noise In addition, as air source heat pumps can be noisy. You must comply with the Microgeneration Certification Scheme (MCS) or equivalent in order to be permitted development. https://www.cornwall.gov.uk/planning-and-building-control/planning-advice-and-guidance/air-source-heat-pumps/#:~:text=Noise,order to be permitted development. It is the old 'MCS or equivalent again. I think all we want is an agreed standard and a testing methodology.

Define a child. I am still one.

It fails catastrophically (most composites do, why Kevlar used to be mixed in with carbon fibre) when buckled past the yield point. There is very little elasticity with normal GRP compared to the tensile strength. I think timber has other engineering characteristics, mainly the grain, with very different properties across and along it. This, as has been noted, can cause problems at joints.

You have to do some real studying as well.

I think we are at cross purposes. I thought you meant using harvested water to replace mains supplied water. Buffering rainwater is probably a giid thing, though there will be some places with high water tables that may get localised issues if natural gullies are removed.

Based on 95% of potable water usage. Then some formula for that incorporates the surface and highways. While it may be a bit hard to find out if one individual is gaming the system, other than through unexpected reduced usage, if a few people on a main sewer did it, then I suspect it would trip a warning. Flow rates in sewers are measured as they need to manage unexpected discharged to the sea/rivers. When a neighbour put a bag of cement down the drain, SW Water sorted the problem very quickly, they did the same when the manhole cover collapsed on my local waste pipe (serves 6 houses). As much as I dislike paying over 8 quid a cubic metre for water, it is really very cheap considering the quality delivered, and what is involved in cleaning it up. There are not many things that can be delivered at £2/tonne to your door, and that are good enough to drink, and who would take away 950 kg of my wee and poo for £6/tonne and dispose of it safely.

the waste quantity will be measured as your water purchase quantity Yes, but not legal, and certainly immoral to not pay for waste.

I fell out with my PhD supervisor for that reason.

https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/EU-Hits-Record-74-Zero-Emission-Power-Generation.html

I have just replied to this on another post. Take it you are the same person.

Welcome Tam Sustainability, the migrating metaphor, it can mean whatever you want it to mean. Personally, my take on the use of timber (in all forms) needs to be from new development, on old industrial wasteland (we have a lot of that here. Cutting down old stock and replanting is carbon dioxide equivalent release positive (generally released more CO2) and causes other environmental problems. Production needs to be in countries that have the lowest CO2 emissions (lots of renewable energy) and must be done at the largest scale that is practical. Midern mass production is generally the lowest environmentally damaging, old infrastructure and work practices are generally the worse. There are some crops, like bamboo, that can be in effect coppiced, and make a hard wearing product, so I would tend towards them. Retail price has very little to do with quality, more to do with marking and PR (I could employ a recent graduate at £25k or £70k per year to do the same job, the product would be the same). One problem with end of life usage is that timber burns, and that is how most will be disposed off, hopefully in a waste to energy plant (have a large one if those in Cornwall). Trouble is, regardless of how recently, or distantly, the tree was grown, and how long it took to grow, burning it release CO2, and that is a bad thing for a CO2 saturated atmosphere. But there is no system, that I know off, that will take used flooring and reprocessed it into a useful product that will sequester the embodied energy and carbon for a century. Transport cost do not bother me in the slightest, they are such a small fraction of the whole they are not worth considering. Transport is getting much 'cleaner' by the year. I recently had the latest round robin email from Craig Jones about ICE, I really need to look at the database again and see what has changed, it is usually surprising what has low processing emissions, and what does not. So to answer your question, I can't really. My preference would be floorboards, or chipboard, and carpet. I do like a bit of parquet though. One area I have never looked into is the processing of timber composites (I worked with plastic composited). I suspect they use very little 'chemicals' in reality and most, if properly controlled, do not pose a large scale environmental problem.

Down here, if you have a borehole, but use mains sewage, you pay. Now I could collect rainwater and not tell SW Water I was doing that, and hope they assume the house is empty, but in all fairness to SW Water, there is unique topology and geodemographics in Cornwall that makes dealing with waste very expensive. Here is a screenshot of what my charges are Water a couple of quid, waste over 6 quid.

Wish mine were, most expensive in the country. Mainly the sewage charge, so RWH loo flushing still needs to be charged for. How else can the beaches be used for sewage dumps.

I wonder how much the pH changes over different parts of the UK. Be a good Citizen Science project.

Not as if existing roofs never leak. In fact, traditional roofs (UK) are pretty easily damaged, and because they are made from multiple components, hard to repair.

Why not get it sheathed in GRP (in a workshop). Then install and get the joints GRPed in situ. Is SIPs considered vapour impermeable?

Would need a lot more thought and detail, but something along this idea.

Welcome. I break software, jigsaw blades and fingernails. We like pictures of projects on here.