SteamyTea

I had my cylinder set at 50°C, but have recently lowered it to reduce losses. It needs to be as low as possible, but still needs to deliver enough hot water. In a way, only you can answer that. If you feel it is too hot, turn it down. I don't have a thermostatically controlled shower, it is just a basic valve that blends the hot and cold, worked well for the last 15 years.

I don't think it is actual 'extra' trade. Just clarifying the taxation position for when our government takes us out of the existing trade deal. There are benefits in having this deal, but they are not very great. We would need 20 or so similar sized deals to get back on an even keel. Trouble is that all but 5 (or more) of those deals will be with countries that have smaller economies than ours. I have not bothered to look at the details, but a news report said that over 90% of items traded with Japan will be tariff free. This says very little as it does not mention value.

Is that right. I think we do around £280bn worth of trade with the EU, and this deal, which is just a re-jigger version of what we already have, is worth around £16bn. To put that into perspective, it is about double the economy (GVA) of Cornwall, or about the same as the GVA of Buckinghamshire.

Fit a portable airconditioning unit, that can supply some heat (the power that the units draws from the mains) and reduce the humidity (greater the difference the faster the drying), both will help drying. And make sure it is a well insulated area, with well controlled ventilation, no point it affecting the rest of the building.

Or just move the existing one to a higher value area.

Does that mean you can drive a Range Rover, or have a bonfire every month.

Been arguing that very point for years, but it falls on deaf ears. Price up a generator and the associated running costs, that then gives you a base price to work to when it comes to pricing batteries.

About 3 years worth of basic fees at Eaton College (other Public schools are available, the one I went to is about half the cost).

Welcome. Like any project, make the big decisions first, the rest is just detail. A "box" like @joe90 has is a good start as has a low surface area to volume/footprint ratio. There is also some walk on glazing for sale near you, you could do all of us a favour by designing that into your built.

That will be runc then

Yes. When I had a lodger, and once I had trained her to take a shower that was only a few minutes, my usage was not much higher. One thing about putting extra people in a house is that fixed loads do not increase, so there is only a marginal increase in usage. I use a basic vented, 200 lt cylinder with E7 heating. I had to buy a new cylinder a couple of years back, cost £220, or £7/year, as it lasted 28 years. I don't know how much it would cost to fit in a new build, I suspect it is about the cheapest installation one can do. I have added extra insulation to the cupboard it is fitted to, just some sheets of PU and voids stuffed with mineral wool. This over halved the losses. I also run it at a relatively low 45°C or so (not checked the actual temperature, but have turned it down from the 50°C I used for years). If I have guests, I can easily turn the temp up, or use the upper element, so never had a problem of lack of hot water (since I trained my old lodger). If I am costing out a system, I always compare it to what I have, as I know the costs of what I use as I have been monitoring for a decade.

I use about 4.5 kWh/day for everything. That £2500 would buy me around 23 years of DHW. This is the dilemma I have, energy is just too cheap for me to change anything.

I think the scaling does not optimise too well. Generally, when it comes to any energy production, bigger is better.

There is nothing wrong in directly heating air, it is just the practicalities of it. To heat a litre of air, by 1 °C, takes 1.2 J. So if you have a total airflow of 10 litres/second, and you need to raise it by 10 °C, you need a power of 120 W. Trouble is, you may need a lot more air and that gets noisy.

Right, may be worth modelling to see what could be achieved with my place.

Without looking at the details at all, those limits tend to favour larger houses. 6000 kWh / 45 kWh/m2 = 133m2 Or about 2.7 times the size of my house. And it is kWh, not kwh.

and, like my house, your walls are not a yard thick. I think the problem with SB is that people think that straw is a waste product (we used to burn it in the field) and should be cheap. That, and it is natural, well I don't think there is much natural about a cultivated crop that has been intensively farmed and processed (I don't have a problem with industrial agriculture). It does have a lower embodied energy and CO2 but as it is not the major mass in a building, the benefits are probably not that great.

My house uses less, I suspect yours does to.

Straw Bails have an RSI of around 0.26 m.K/W, aged rigid PU is around 1.1 m.K/W So about 4 times the thermal losses. A quick look on eBay and they range in price between £3 and £19. As these are feed quality, I suspect that building quality is at the upper end. OSB3 is around £20 for 18mm. Lime Render is about £8 for 25 kg, Portland Cement is around half that. I suspect that the foundations have to be the same, all depends on what the local BC and SE says. I seem to remember that the cost of SB was discussed over at the other place and it was decided that it was not cheap.

Yes you can, you can also put PV on it and earn living .

Is Straw Bail construction any cheaper than block, really? Not as if straw is valueless, and it needs processing. May be easier to just cost out some components. So stairs, build a bungalow. Bathroom, just fit shower. Kitchen, small and basic. Windows and Doors, find the cheapest and make the hole to suit. Trickle vents. Heating, storage heaters. Plumbing, E7 and vented (as you can fit that yourself). Electrical, basic, two double sockets per room, pendant lights, one per room. SIPS, stick built or bought in timber frame, integrated roof PV as probably same cost as tiles. Basic cladding/render. Probably make a 50m2 house like mine for £40k. Or just spend that contingency on the kitchen and bathroom, more CAT7 and HA than you can understand, and convince yourself you have a better building as it is flashy.

If this is just a costing exerciser, then I would think it is quite easy to 'build a house' for £100,000. Probably 2/3rds of the world do it for a lot less.

Does it have all the 'services' i.e. water, power, road access, environmental surveys, structural 'stuff' etc etc? There are some on here that have probably spent close to that before they start digging.

Actually, I think that is a pretty good way to model it. Certainly a lot easier than working out the forcings as the sun moves around the house during the day. If the rain stops, and the sun comes out, I may get my IR thermometer out and see what sort of temperatures the walls get to.

Only the wall area that is exposed to the sun at any one time. May not have made that clear, in fact I didn't at all.