SteamyTea

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.

Isn't that a good enough reason for this forum to help educate?

No it isn't. I think this is part of the problem. People get put off 'science' at school because it is so badly taught. Most is really easy.

I am with Jeremy on this. Just good basic (as in no harder than 'A' level) engineering is all that is needed to design a thoroughly good thermal envelope. It is very easy to get bogged down in detail at the very start, then go looking for solutions along the way. Often when looking at solutions there is a conflict of opinions. These conflicts usually take the view that you are starting from the wrong place. So rather than be negative, why don't we start an 'official blog' about basic engineering. When I say basic, I mean really simple, the kind of thing that a 12 year old could understand.

The photon is a 'special case' particle. It can be kinetically modelled, which makes it look like it has mass, until it comes to rest, or modelled according to the rules of relativity, which are just odd.

Sounds to me, but not looked at the methodology, that they started with a bunch of data, created a model that fitted, then checked it against the data. Leaving a window open or a hot tap running would 'ruin' the model.

Isn't certification a bit like the government car fuel usage test. What works in the lab does not always translate to the road.

Does this work. Not tried, but it may work off line if you save the page and then open it in a browser. https://steamytea.wixsite.com/radiuscalculator

Or part of an ellipse. Draw it up in CAD

Reminded me that I emailed the production office about I said: Will you make sure that the term 'thermal mass' is not used. There is no such thing in science. There is thermal energy and mass, they are not connected. They said: Thanks for your comment. We will will do our best to ensure correct terminology is used.