SteamyTea

Are you sure it was this forum, rather than this one. https://www.psychforums.com/off-topic/ I wonder what they do to stop spam and ranting. Join up and let us all know, you could even put a link in. This is their 'venting' thread. https://www.psychforums.com/just-for-fun/topic98319.html Could be fun to join and ask a few questions.

Was that before they told you to sit on the bog, naked?

Change radio station quick.

Spend a few minutes with Google. No one has been talking about an unsupported panel with a vacuum in it. I shall just do a Jackie Weaver.

@scottishjohn I am not sure what you are on about, started off about making vacuum panels in space, then getting a PhD student to try it out on Earth. I pointed out that it has been done, and how it is done, and you seem to be getting defensive about something and going to about thermos flasks and proper vacuums.

That is why it is surrounded by an airtight membrane. I think if you look at most VIPs they are of this design. The ones in a Sunamp are.

My sister was a parish councillor once. They used to 'forget' to tell her than a meeting was happening. Odd that, as I never invited her to anything either.

Been done, how vacuum insulation panels are made. Basically a foaming resin, just that as it foams, there is no gas transfer into the void. Cheaper VIPs use an evacuated open cell foam, surrounded with an airtight membrane. These ones are rubbish.

If you analysis common building materials, you tend to find that the ones that can hold moisture/water tend to have the highest specific heat capacity. This is not surprising as hydrogen, the major constituent of water, has a SHC of 14304 J/(kg.K). What makes things muddled is that there is a unit clash between energy storage and conductivity. They are joules and watts respectively. Joules is just the stored energy, watts are how fast you can release that energy. The difficult bit is that a house has variable power inputs during the day, some are external, some are internal. And to make matters more complicated, some of the internal forces are caused by external forcing. Ideally, you want to reduce the conductivity of a components (why we have legislation that makes us do this, can be treated as a lower bound), but you do not want to store too much energy that overheating is a problem. And to make it even more complicated, as the temperature of the storage mass reached equilibrium with either the internal, or external (and sometimes these are equal) temperatures, no storage or transfer of energy is taking place. Now when you think about it, how often are the conditions right to store enough energy to last a few hours, when there is only a small change between internal and external temperatures (use the kelvin scale). If you really want to store energy for later use, you have to go to an active system i.e. pumped solar thermal to an insulated store, PV to a battery. By doing this, you can then release that stored energy at the correct rate (this is power, and measured in watts). Relying on the walls of a house to do that is only going to work in a very narrow band regardless of what they are made from. So after many years of looking at this, I think that good insulation levels have a greater impact that high mass, as they limit the variable inputs and outputs. Just don't ruin it by putting in windows and doors, live in a cold cave, or a thick polystyrene box, the effects will be the same.

Do you know the exterior wall area, the floor and roof area, windows and door areas, then we can make a stab at the heat loss. 55m2 is just slightly larger than my place and I wish I could add an 80m2 extension. Do you know what level of insulation you are going to get with the new B&B floor? This is important to know with UFH.

Also look at the BTES efficiency. Not any better than growing a tree.

It is interesting when you analysis the data on page 5 of the 2017 report. It would be great if you could just drill a hole, pop a pipe into it, put any excess solar energy into some hot water, pass through the pipes, wait till winter, then pump it out again.

Already spent that, on wine, women and amateur dramatics.

Fair enough, saves me bothering to explain why it can help isolate the problem. As you already know all the answers, can I have tomorrow's winning Lotto numbers.

Are they insured and what does it cover. Make sure you see the certificates.

Still raining, but listening to Woman's Hour. The language they use makes me blush. They were talking about making new rooms in houses for 140 quid.

It is Not what you typed Just being a pedant as I am bored waiting for the rain to stop.

Nor scientific notation. kWh. Or is it a Mac thing.

Dgtvnjjnb gbbbn There are 10 types of people that understand binary. Sexagesimal is more fun.

You need to stick the thermometer/RH meter outside, take some readings and see if it really is the air that is causing the problem. But is your building still trying out in places after years of inadequate heating and ventilation. Keeping the heating permanently on, while ventilating would speed this process up. Just saying.

Not how properly mixed concrete sets. https://www.understanding-cement.com/hydration.html

It is because you can change the shape of a 'volume' without changing the mass, this happens in corners. The shape is important as that affects surface area, and part of the unit of thermal inertial is m2. J.m-2.K-1.s-0.5 it is basically a case of working backwards from volume to mass to establish the lower and upper bounds for the calculations. The other reason is that the majority of the mass contributes little to energy storage, whether positive or negative. If it did, insulation would not work as well as it does.

I can't give personal recommendations other than my cheap Screwfix pump and combined mixer. But I think you need to think about the 3 separate sides of the design. The ASHP The water storage The Mixing system. As you already have the ASHP, you cannot do anything with that. So it is down to storage and mixing. There are basically two types of storage. One where you use the heated water directly (which I suspect is what you already have) and the other where the cold, incoming mains water is heated via a heat exchanger. This heat exchanger may be as simple as a coil in a cylinder that takes cold water in one end, and comes out the other hot, taking the heat from the stored energy in the cylinder. It may be a plate heat exchanger that sits outside the cylinder and has the hot water inside the cylinder pumped though one side of it, while the cold water is forced, via mains pressure, though the other side of it (I doubt you have one of these). The mixing is really just a tap with a valve that can vary the flow rated between the hot and the cold to get the temperature you desire. Some do this automatically, and some, like mine, manually (why it was cheap, but reliable). The main thing to know about mixing hot and cold is that the pressure must be the same on both sides, this is to stop the higher pressure forcing itself up the low pressure side i.e. into the loft storage tank, which would then overflow, and possibly collapse if the water is very hot (not likely with a properly set up heat pump). I like gravity fed, pumped systems as they are very simple to understand, reliable, cheap components and can be self installed, but they are noisy.

Bugger Somewhere on here is a product that can be applied in the wet. Might be what @Onoff uses.

This says it can do it. https://www.resincoat.co.uk/en/roof-paints-coatings/544-resincoat-liquid-rubber-waterproof-coating.html