SteamyTea

With the Phillips Hue system, isn't all the controls built into the bulb. So normal wall switches and wiring, just a remote to loose down the back of the sofa.

£1.7bn https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-64186210 The previous years were zero Still (expletive deleted) all in reality, but it does pay to keep my mother in the care home.

But that is because we are not adding in all the costs. Do you ever factor in the ~£10bn a year the UK oil companies get each year. That is about £300 per year per tax payer.

Sketch it up. You can always insulate pipes.

Must have been about a decade ago that the Future Home Standard was dropped. A stroke can go both ways.

There are a couple of ways to think about insulation. It stops thermal transmittance by physically stopping warm material moving to colder material. This is often called convection. This is why windows are not very good, you want light to pass though but not thermal energy. The key to that part is the size of voids in the material, the smaller the voids (bubbles) the less movement is possible, but you get a greater ratio of solid material that may, or may not, have a higher thermal conductivity and a different heat capacity. The other way to think about it is at the sub atomic level. When a material is heated, the electrons become 'loose' and can eventually instantaneously jump up to the next electron orbital shell. If there is a space there for the electron, then there is no change in temperature, if there isn't a space, then, because of the exclusion law, the electron has to loose energy so that it can drop back down to the original orbit. When an electron does this, it instantaneously changes to a photon, then back to an electron, at the lower energy level. The excess energy that it had is released as radiation, which flies off following the sum of all possible paths until it interacts with the next electron, and the process starts all over again. So apart from physically stopping 'hot' material moving, all thermal conductance is actually a radiative forcing. This is why, in isolation, reflective materials can act as insulators, except the photoelectric affect allows some energy though the material and re-radiate somewhere else. In the case of 'normal' insulation, the key points are the void to material ratio, and their heat capacities (air is 1 J.gm-1.K-1, Polyurethane is 1.6 J.gm-1.K-1 and Phenolic 1.5 J.gm-1.K-1) and conductivities (Air is ,0.022 W.m-1.K-1 Polyurethane is 1.6 W.m-1.K-1, Polyurethane is 2.9 W.m-1.K-1, Phenolic is 1.45 W.m-1.K-1). The above numbers would imply that just an air gap is pretty good, but the problem with that is that air can move because of thermal expansion, which causes density changes, which causes movement. The above is not the whole story, and there is a lot more to it that I have tried to explain (if it was simple to explain, we would all know it). Have you got an infrared thermometer to see what the temperature difference is across the door. You may find it is not as great as you think. I have just looked at my temperature differences, it is 13.4°C outside and 18°C inside. That part of the door is 44mm of pine. The larger recessed panel is at 12.5°C outside and 15.7°C inside and is 20mm thick. The glass is at 10.7°C outside and 13.6°C inside, overall the double glazed unit is 24mm thick. If I have got my arithmetic right (very likely it is wrong), that works out at: At the current temperature differences (12 K) Thicker timber Losses 4.9 W.m-2.K-1. Thinner Panel Losses 15.6 W.m-2.K-1. Glazing Losses 14.4 W.m-2.K-1. Working out the areas, thicker frame is 0.625m2, Thinner Panel 0.335m2 and the Glazing 0.62m2. Work that lot out and it comes to 17.2 W That makes my door have an overall U-Value of 1.44 W.m-2.K-1. If the temperature stays about the same all day, that is 0.035 kWh/day. 10p/day at current electricity rates, so about £10/year extra on my bill. Not brilliant in todays terms, but it is 37 years old.

Forget Aerogel, it is not the product for here. Space Shuttle tiles and nuclear reactors maybe, in the domestic setting, no.

I was going to google 'tufting', but thought better of it.

And boys going though puberty. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1087772/Boy-12-collapsed-died-using-Lynx-deodorant.html

Probably at first, but then realised that renting small rooms to the Windrush generation was more profitable. Beacontree estate at Dagenham was a development of 26,000 homes. Dudley Moire lived there.

Quite progressive. But then Scotland had a big problem with landowners, usually English ones. This is post Victorian.

This one has a U-Value of 1.3 .m-2.K-1 https://www.amazon.co.uk/VidaXL-Anthracite-Front-Door-Anti-Burglar/dp/B0CQWR99ZP Or for a tenth of the price, the padded cell look.

Yes. Twice I have emptied mine, causing an airlock. Very rare that the flow will be over 10 litres/min, and if it can refill at that rate, not so much of a problem. Like all things, it has to be sized right.

So basically you have a flat panel door, can you stick a sheet of insulation on it without making it look silly? May need some hinge/frame/trim modification to help the looks. Are they brothel creepers.

Life is easy then. Vented cylinder with an F&E tank, dual shower pump on the delivery side pumping to both taps. Cheap and easy to install, no need for a plumber to inspect and sign it off. Some will tell you that vented cylinders loose more heat, but no one has yet shown me how this happens. They also tell me that an unvented cylinder delivers more hot water, but again, I have never seen an explanation.

I have had a look at the Octopus tariff page for my postcode. Gives me 19 different options. Only Intelligent Octopus Go October 2022 v1 is really cheaper than I have now, and that has a short night rate window by 2 hours. Octopus Go February 2023 v1 is 2p/kWh more expensive at night, and a shorter window. I think Octopus has lost the plot of tariffs (said that before).

Can loose a lot of space though. My house is 3.7m wide, 7.5m long. Adding 0.15m to each wall of insulation would reduce the floor area from 27.75m2 to 24.48m2, 12% smaller. And there was (expletive deleted) all to start with. Then, where the stairs are, the width would go from 2.8m down to 2.5m. External wall insulation is the only viable option, but as I am in a World Heritage area, not allowed to do it. As the aim is to reduce carbon emission, changing our energy production is the only option. My loss of ~3m3, if replaced with 150 Wp of PV, would generate about 0.15 MWh of energy each year as an off set. That is about a sixth of my annual energy usage. The PV does not have to be on my property, it can be tacked onto another system somewhere. Thinking about it, for every linear metre of 0.15m thick insulation, that is 45Wp, or 45 kWh/year of generation potential. Going to be cheaper to electrify and install PV. So how much PV would you get instead of insulating houses. Take a small house 6m by 8m, that has a foot print of 48m2, the linear metres is 28m. That would give us, at 0.15m insulation thickness area of 4.2m2. Or about 800 Wp, which would generate close to 0.8 MWh/ year.

Basically, reflecting thermal energy is not going to be very good, so that only leaves you with the option to add some sort of sheet insulation material. Or maybe fused silicone (aerogel). If you have the option to add thickness to the door, even 20mm of phenolic is going to help. Post up a picture and see what the creative minds can come up with. When I was a kid back in the 1960s, we lived in Holland, many of the houses/flats has rugs on the wall. This was a response to the Hongerwinter 20 years before. If I see rugs on walls now I see it as an act of defiance rather than poverty. Never seen an Amsterdam one, but passed by a lot of Den Haag ones. There was a brothel at the end of our street. When my parents needed a babysitter, that is where the girls came from.

Where is the pump in this system. Usually pumps are used with vented systems to increase flow rates. Having said that, there are mains pressure showers that have pumps built in.

I have had 2 Victorian houses, both had damp issues and neither had been thermally renovated.

Were they built for sale or rental by a large, local employer?

@Adrian Walker @HughF It is ready for downloading. I had forgotten all about it. https://oceanofpdf.com/authors/john-krigger/pdf-residential-energy-cost-savings-and-comfort-for-existing-buildings-download/

Then that is £350/year. If you got an Ecocent type water heater, then you may get that £150/year (if you run it at night). Not much difference if you change to a fixed rate tariff.

Generally yes. There may be the odd day when the temperature is silly low and the units are defrosting more than usually, but they would be very rare days. Well I do. For this year, until December, my mean E7 power is 0.872 kW and the day usage is 0.077 kW. That will look a bit better come tomorrow as I did not turn the storage heaters on until this month.

Every £1000 spent on a battery could buy 6.6 MWh of E7 (@ tomorrows EDF rate of 15p/kWh).