SteamyTea

Do you have long showers and full baths. I run my 200 lt DHW at 50°C (ish) and can get 4 showers out of it (or a half filled bath and 2 showers) usually. A couple of things may account for this. I have E7 and usually use the water within a couple of hours of the power going off. I have put a lot more insulation around the cylinder, reducing the losses from about 3 or more kWh/day down to about 1 kWh/day. There has been times in the past when my old lodger would stand under the shower until it goes cold, leaving me with a very luke warm shower at the end of the day, but generally that was the exception, not the norm. Are the modulating? If so, then, assuming the price difference is not ridiculous, go for the larger one. With regards to the efficiency differences of vented or unventilated, I fail to see the difference if everything else is equal i.e. insulation levels, surface areas, pipe lagging and run length. I may be missing something there (not being a plumber), but a small 'hole' to allow for ventilation is not going to account for much. Knowing what the weather is like down in Cornwall (he says sitting in a friends unheated house in North Shropshire), there are so few days when the temperature goes below 5°C in a year, and hardly any when it is below 0°C in a decade, you have to question the cost benefit of installing 'emergency weather heating'. Last year I only used a fan heater (was a mild year), this year was a little bit chillier, a little bit earlier, so the fan heater came out a week or two earlier, but it then warmed up again. I usually 'turn the heating on' when the daily mean temperature falls below 9°C.

I always used a daily diary when running factories, they called me Mr Pad in one place. Proved its worth many times.

Hans never mentioned making men redundant. Being single, I find that I can just lean against it for the desired affect.

Is that like tendenitis If you want to do this early Tuesday evening (set fire to things), I am going to be fairly close to you (well about 50 miles away). We can video it then. Hans Rosling thinks that the washing machine has done more women's health, education and independence that anything else.

Embalm it in 10/40 motor oil, then you can, at your leisure, revive it with WD40. Or for a more permanent disposal, cremation. Fill coffin with gasoline and switch on.

Can you get it via Kodi?

Bet that is a relief. Then the fun begin now.

You could test the idea with a fan heater. Just point it at the MVHR extract in the room and see what happens. I think the main problem is that MVHR is not designed to cope with the higher temperature differences and the greater airflow that a vented tumble dryer produces.

Not for much longer maybe http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-37701427

About what I currently pay on Day Rate and E7

And here is some of the history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horsepower

Interesting report, there seems to be no mention of the silicon finish. Or, again, am I missing something.

Slightly off topic, but as this is a free thinking subject, I am going to ask the question. If the silicon top coat moisture impermeable and the lime/Pavatex isn't, where does the moisture from higher internal humidity go. I may have missed something in the wall build up.

I like the idea and have often wondered why we don't use steel more than we do (along with GRP). A big advantage is that you know, right from the start, the quality of the material. You can't say that about timber. Condensation is juts a matter of calculation really. Thermal bridging is design. Both are probably easily overcome. I did my apprenticeship in toolmaking and smirk to myself when people talk of 'building tolerances'. British Steel knocked these up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BISF_house

Power or energy density?

Looks so good I am surprised that no one had thought of doing it before

Or highlight just the text you want to quote and click on "Quote this"

Yes, so maybe education is the real answer (not what we call education at the moment). Where I lived at the time of the Community Charge, I saw a huge reduction when the tax came in. Nearly everyone benefited. It was a well run council (Aylesbury). Where there seemed to be problems was areas of high population density and high unemployment, coupled with a lower than average age. So large towns and cities became worse off. Then there was also the removal of the 'shire counties' subsidies central government (or in other words, the local taxes where going to go up anyway). The really odd thing about basing local taxation on property wealth is that wealthy people use local services less than poorer people (based in household income). If any group should be protesting, it should be the wealthy.

Too true.

One of the things I find hard to fathom is why councils should be involved in social reform. It is not really their 'job' to make the country a more equitable place (or not), that is for governments to do. The council is there to provide local services in the most cost effective manner.

I seem to remember that it is only after June something or other, that the money we earn starts to become ours, so we pay a total of about half our wages in taxes of all sorts. I did work out a few years back that if all the UKs taxes where put onto income, then the tax rate would be 65%ish. Not too bad really when you consider that everything else would be totally tax free.

The VAT issue is a bit of a red herring in my opinion. What is important is the total size of the investment pot. It is that which will influence the number of places built, it don't matter if VAT is set at 0, 5, 10 or even 20%. The free market is quite adept at reducing costs to meet the amount of money people want to spend. I bet most people on here who have built a house have had to make major savings somewhere. Add all those individual savings together and I am sure that the VAT issue would be negated. The caveat is that people should not be unrealistic in their initial costings.

I think that the problems with the housing market are not as simple as most people (who write about it) think. There are often reports like this that think one simple fix will sort everything out. But the main things is the geo-demographic distribution of the nation. This is why we have empty and derelict properties, as well as overcrowding. As for council taxes, just reintroduce the poll tax. If you are an adult that lives in an area, you contribute for the local services, simple. If you don't like the price of those services, then vote the council off, or move. Basing it on income or wealth is a difficult thing to do, too difficult in reality.

4 things really, the lower storage temperature (50°C rather than 65°C+), limiting the time that it recharges on E7 to a couple of hours before the period ends (mine is strange as it comes on for an hour, off for an hour, then on for 6 hours, then off again at 7AM), using the water as soon as it is hot, rather than wait till it has cooled a bit, so morning bathing for me, and finally, loads of extra insulation. This was the hard bit, but I basically lined the airing cupboard with 100 mm of Celotex, including the door. Then filled in the corners between the cylinder and the boards with Rockwool. No a pretty job, and I was unable to insulate below the cylinder, and there is still a gap at the back where it is hard up against the wall, and where the cable goes to the immersion heater. It would be easy to design right on a new build, harder as a retro fit. This is one advantage of the Sunamp, it is smaller and already well insulated, so replacing an existing cylinder becomes an easier job.

Jeremy's situation was a bit unique. He had a combined cylinder with header tank, in a room on the unexpected warm side of the house (his plant room was off the East side bedroom, it also had the MVHR unit in it). And he was not living in the place at the time, so the cylinder was always hot. So yes, it was causing some additional heat into one room. In hindsight, which is a wonderful thing, he could have designed the system differently i.e. separate cylinder and F & E in a different place, or a pressurised system. All fitted into a dedicated, insulated enclosure. It was his investigations into this problem that showed where the errors lay with the standard test procedure for heat loss of cylinders i.e. a 'days' thermal losses are actually only over a few hours, not 24. The clever thing about the Sunamp is the insulation, but it still has a quoted loss of 0.6 kWh/day (not so different from my losses), the smaller overall size (for similar capacity) and the easy of installation. The price of a single unit is probably not so different to fitting a simple system. Getting two units in i.e. 10 kWh will cost more, but not double, but you will have double the thermal losses i.e. 1.2 kWh/day. But then you can run a shower or two without additional pumps and wiring. The main message, in my mind (which is a strange and convoluted place) is to thermally isolate any heat store from the rest of the house if you think it is going to cause a problem.