SteamyTea

I would think it is all down to the air movement around them. If there is virtually no movement, then even will a low condensation risk, there is still the possibility that rotting of some sort could take place. Though it may just be a method to add value to a tried and tested product.

Ian Have you considered a holiday. Maybe a week in the sun, or God forbid, Canada, may help.

That is really down to just collecting data. But I think that simply extending the extremes of a model would be good enough.

I would think that a temporal statistical model would do that. Just run the above model though the different temperature and humidity conditions for an area, then weight those results to local weather data.

Sell your current place, cash is king in this world.

Why not DIY SIPs. Basically just a couple of sheets of OSB, a sheet of Celeotex or similar, some posts in the right place and a pot of glue. Knock them up in a garage, tow to site, nail together and then clad in tin.

Just been brought to my notice over at the other place that there is a Part R of the building regs about communication cabling. https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/517789/BR__PDF_AD__R__2016.pdf

Is the comparison between space probes and mobiles really relevant. They are designed to do different things, in different ways and in different places. I still have a working scientific calculator from 1979.

Do you have a couple of temperature and RH sensors rigged up to a logger. Then you can see what is really happening

Bogged down in the English planning system

Once the plasterboard is 'up to temp', say 19°C for an internal air temperature of 21°C, it then starts to fully transmit energy. So you can think of it as a change from absorbing energy from the internal air to just allowing the energy in the internal air to escape to the outside (which is your insulation/frame/render and finally the great outdoors) only being hindered by the R-Value (or U-Value). I suspect what other have said about moisture is correct. A kg of water takes 4.2 kJ to heat up 1K. But to evaporate 1 kg of water takes 2,260 kJ, 538 times more energy. This is also affected by the relative humidity, I think the higher the ambient RH, the more energy is needed (why things don't dry well in the tropics) Now I have no idea how many kgs of water is in your plasterboard, but for every kg, you need 0.63 kWh extra.

Seems to me that you are better off with E7. Are new heat pumps going to have to change to R774/CO2 ones in the not too distant future.

For those that missed it, Costing the Earth is available here. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0938p7z And the podcast is here http://open.live.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/5/redir/version/2.0/mediaset/audio-nondrm-download/proto/http/vpid/p05frp5j.mp3

We used to make decorative moulds for concrete formwork. I was quite surprised just how ridge they were made. Large RSJs and very large timbers.

Why they are called Laws. I suppose it is the difference between Physicists/Mathematicians and all the other sciences. I was speaking to a neuroscientists the other day who was saying that the verify their research at the 5% confidence level i.e. 1 in 20 results may be wrong due to chance. I asked if they would get in a car with a drive that was that confident. But all this is moving away from the problem of actually building low energy usage homes and just becomes very polarised.

Sadly not, but, apart from a few accounts offices and building suppliers, dot matrix printers have gone. Interesting that the quietest office in a company is the accounts office until the last week of the month. Then it is the noisiest and most panic stricken.

People like Jeremy and myself. We both like the idea of low energy usage housing, but fail to see and credibility in the hoop jumping that is PH. As soon as you take things like air quality and noise into account you are generally into the area of qualitative opinion. I hate the noise of barking dogs, crying babies, wailing women and dot matrix printers. At least one of them seems to have disappeared from our lives. As the old saying goes, from Lord Kelvin: "To measure is to know". Which just about brings me back to my first point:

I was referring to the number that @craigcould not actually quote. As anyone that has does both quantitative and qualitative research will tell you, qualitative data is unreliable and often misleading. I was referring to the certification process. This is not unique to just PH stuff. It is rife in many industries. Take electrical engineering. A highly qualified 'Dr.' should not do some wiring in their own home and self certify it without the same Part P certificate that I have. Though may well be capable of getting a job writing the national standards. Same with driving. My friend from the USA could drive as a visitor in the UK, but not now she is a resident.

Bet there are a few here that want to 'chop the bollocks off' a builder. As for mock court cases, I seem to remember a story about Baden-Powell (of boyscout fame) having a mock trial in Africa, to show how the English legal system worked. They got some village elder to act as the defendant. Held the trial and found him guilty (no surprise there). Then the executed him. No idea if it is true or not, but makes me look at the boyscout movement in a different light.

I am with EDF and when I get a bill I read my meter, update the readings on their webpage and then pay the updated amount. I don't have a problem with it. Did you do the same before moving suppliers? Or did you call them?

So did I, and the fence is crap.

Except you can, for want of a better term' self verify the overall performance when you have finished i.e. your energy usage over unit time. I seem to remember that PH standards are very hard to reach for small houses. So take my neighbours, they have a 50 m2 house, that is an end of terrace. The largest wall get virtually no sunlight as shaded by another building. So the kWh.m-2.year-1 usage is relatively high compared to mine which is just a terrace. Any standard that penalises small places is not a good standard as they generally use less energy overall.

If that is the case (the actual numbers are not that important), it is what pisses people off about certification, especially if they are being charged for it. Why a few of us fail to see the value in PH certification.

As in they default to an artificially low (or high energy use) value?

This I don't understand. Are you penalised against the (worthless) PH standard or actually penalised against real energy usage (which I doubt). Could you clarify please.