SteamyTea

You are talking about what we would do, not a financially struggling family. Most people only remember negative stories, not the positive ones. Say to someone that spending 500 quid on insulation, and will save them 150 quid a year, then, after a year they find the bill is the same, they will be miffed. They forgot the house is warmer and the energy has gone up. People are strange things.

No, yours is at least twice the size. If I had 300 lt of food in my fridge, most would be thrown away as I cannot eat that much.

No, they won't, but at the moment there is no penalty to change anything. It is a tax/surcharge/penalty based on unearned income. Putting surcharges on has many benefits when it comes to choices, and is only payable when the property is sold. We could just rename Stamp Duty to Energy Duty and apply a formula. We accept that as a cost of buying a house (though may not like it). That is the whole point about price points, if you don't have enough to enter that market, you are totally excluded from it. Like buying a train ticket to London, if you are short on cash, getting to Exeter is of no use at all, so people do not bother at all.

My sofa cushions are polyurethane foam, they are not rigid. The dashboard in many cars are polyurethane and is semi rigid, and integral skin. Water is what makes most PUs foam (blowing agent), melamine is added for fire performance. PUs have been made from plant based polyol for decades, but most is mineral oil based.

Isn't there more than 20% difference in price just by swapping suppliers and manufacturers. It is not whether VAT is charged or not, it is the price point that is important. If it is going to cost £500 to buy the insulation, and you only have £499 in your pocket, it ain't going to happen. One way of forcing thermal improvements would be to put a surcharge on properties when they are sold, say £10/m2 of surface area for every point below 85 on an EPC. So take my small house, external area is ~110 m2. If the EPC is 70 (mid C), then that would be a surcharge, when sold, of £16,500. Seems harsh, but for many homes that is less than a years house inflation increase, and for halve that the building could easily exceed 85 EPC points. If the house uses 5 MWh of power a year, at 50p/kWh, that is 6.6 years worth of energy.

About the same as my small, under the counter, fridge from Currys. Mine cost £110.

The temperature difference effects the efficiency. The greater the difference, the more energy transferred, but it may still only be 3 or 4 K above external calculation. As I said, I have not worked it out, and it will change with wall type.

If it is 19°C outside, why would heat need to be recovered? In layman's, is this something we should consider as a factor or is it minimal and not so noticeable Not sure, never modelled it.

There are evaporation losses from wet walls, these can be quite high, especially at night. The latent heat of vaporisation is 2257 kJ.kg-1.

If the MVHR unit is 80% efficient (optimistic in reality) that means 20% is not recovered. Room by room or whole house probably does not make much difference, but the Building Regs specify flow rates. Just convert from litres per second to kWh per day.

Try 20% of the value.

Is part of the problem that a house leaks air when there is no forced ventilation, then, adding forced ventilation just adds to the losses, even if it reclaims an optimistic 80% of the energy in the expelled air. So let us assume that at 5 ACH and a delta T of 15°C. 1 tonne of air has 15 MJ of energy, that is 4.2 kWh, every hour. Add on another 0.5 ACH for forced ventilation, that is 4.62 kWh every hour. Even if an MVHR system can reclaim 80%, that is 4.284 kWh every hour. Change the natural looses ACH figure to 1, and that becomes 0.84 kWh every hour, add on the 0.084 kWh for the MVHR, then 0.924, call it 1 kWh, or 24 kWh a day. Get the house airtight, more airtight than you can imagine or you are, at current gas rates, throwing away 15 quid a day.

Welcome What is the problem with the utilities?

What did the food taste like?

I thought Durisol where history.

If your combined PV/storage combo costs £20k, and you can export 3 MWh/year at the right time to get say £500/MWh, or £1500/year, it will take 13 years to recover that outlay. But you will be importing in at £300/MWh, and on a £20,000 combo, you will be importing most of your own consumption. Storage and unsustainably high export rates are still really a dream. Much cheaper to use what you can generate, even if you still import at the same time to make up for power shortages.

Yes. They do. Not unusual to be paid to take gas. Happened a while back when a new interconnect opened. It is often cheaper, overall, to give something away than store it. Much depends on the interaction between the accountancy methods and the companies economic modelling.

Still on dialup then.

Did you watch this in your youth?

About the rain in Cornwall. It will stop again next month when the schools reopen.

Divorce. Not that would dare call a wife a chattel.

Welcome. First thing to do is some measurements. Sketch out the house with wall, floor, roof, door and window areas, then try and establish what the construction is of each. That should lead you to know which areas are thermally weak and can be improved. At the same time, take meter readings every day and about the same time. Gas (if you have it), electricity and water (if you are metered). This sill tell you and hell of a lot about what is happening. Internal and external temperature differences are useful, inside could just be a thermometer, external temperature can usually be gleaned from a nearby weather station. Make no assumptions about what is happening, hard data is the only true way forward. Then we can all give out opinions about the best way to do things, such as not fit a wood burning stove, or solar thermal.

All data, if collected properly, is useful. The analysis could easily be confusing to some, but that is down to whoever wants to look at it. £500 seems quite expensive, but probably like most of these devices, it is an IoT, where you want it or not.

No. It is based on the thickness you specify. If the k is 1W.m-1.K-1 changing the m, thickness in metres, or the K, temperature difference, will change the 1W figure.

No, you are thinking about cornholing, oh how I miss using 1970's terminology.