AliG

I’m not very familiar with CIL as we don’t have it in Scotland. To be fair Scottish local authorities, hopeless as they can be, at least don’t seem out to get one over their council tax payers if they can. So we have a lot less in the way of litter wardens etc. ScotRail also does not operate a penalty fine system like the one that now seems to be abused in England. Many government functions seem to have lost any sense that they are working to provide a service for people.

They are well enough funded, they just have no idea how to spend money. Recently I have seen Edinburgh Council budget £60,000 to change a pavement from grass to tarmac. The pavement is roughly 60m x1m so 60sq metres. There is already kerb, they just want to make it a hard surface. I think I paid around £8,000 for something similar when I built my house. Generally tarmac costs around £100 a square metre. I can accept that councils have overheads but this is ridiculous. They have also budgeted £100,000 to redesign a junction. Not for the build work, just the design. The local community council spent less than £2,000 to investigate and provide possible new designs. You could employ someone full time to do every design needed in the town for similar money. They also want to spend £35m to pedestrianise a street in the centre of the town, luckily they don't have any money for this. Then the piece de resistance. £1bn for the new Barlinnie Prison, with space for 1344 prisoners. So £744,000 per prisoner. More than the build cost on a 5 bedroom house. For comparison Premier Inn budgets around £55,000 per room to build a hotel. Clearly a prison should cost more, but not 15x more. Just for a sense check they are currently building two new large prisons in America. Alabama is spending $1.1bn for over 4000 prisoners and $1.2bn for 4200, so less than one third the per person cost of Scotland's new prison. These are small examples which when you add them all together gets you into the position we are in with HS2. People will talk about government overstaffing, but I think the real problem is that they have no idea of how to price things. No one party is to blame as all these things have been ordered up by every party. There just seems no sense check on money being spent.

So you are saying that you both expect there to be excess renewable energy that can be used to make hydrogen and there isn’t enough grid capacity for every home to have an ASHP! Clearly not everyone is installing an ASHP or EV overnight and the grid can quite easily cope with these changes overtime. A considerable amount of research and planning has gone into this. As more renewables are added to the grid then the price of electricity relative to gas will tend to fall. Indeed you can readily buy electricity between midnight and 7am at very close to the price of gas. If you heat your hot water with an ASHP at this time and achieve a large amount of your required space heating it makes running an ASHP now cheaper than gas. This wasn’t the case when I built my house 8 years ago and I have a gas boiler. My parents’ house built 3 years ago does not. In the very long run you are right that excess renewable energy can be used to make hydrogen cheaply. However running things on hydrogen is inherently expensive and clearly things would run directly on electricity - ASHPs and EVs first and then hydrogen would be used for edge cases where electricity is not a good solution.

Assuming you are having an ASHP then I would not bother. Gas work is expensive, you are probably looking at £2000 to get connected and for pipework. A nice saving. ASHP can now becheaper than gas boilers assuming that you run them on cheap overnight electricity. Hydrogen will not be replacing gas for the average house ever, an ASHP is a better solution in the majority of cases.

If you are boiling something say potatoes, turning it down to 8 once boiling keeps them boiling but massively reduces them boiling over

It’s Pyronix equipment. Very happy. No issues

We had one single 600mm deep cupboard in the kitchen. I ended up fitting drawers inside it, drawers are the answer, but they do considerably add to the cost. I feel like there is some kind of kitchen installer conspiracy running on Instagram and Tik Tok trying to persuade people to have ever larger more expensive kitchens full of ever more pointless gadgets. We have a very large house, but not that many kitchen cabinets and it works just fine. Throw away stuff that you don't need. I don't really buy into the pantry idea as it simply encourages people to have way more food in the house than they can use. Two tall larder cupboards would comfortably hold all the packaged food in our house. Even then I have to make sure and cycle stuff so it doesn't expire. High cupboards are a pain, but you can get those pull down shelves. There is not much you can do as you want to fill the height in below the ceiling. Again though, I don't understand when people fit extra even higher up cabinets that require the use of a ladder to access. Surely a massive waste of money. We have a white Siemens induction hob, they don't sell them any more. This is a problem. A Quooker solves the kettle. We don't have an air fryer as it pretty much just replaces an oven with an extra device, although it is cheaper to run. We keep the toaster in a drawer. The blender and food mixer stand out on the worktop. We have to put the Instant Pot in and out of a cupboard. I have thought I might want one of those pantry cupboard where all these items can be on the shelf ready for use.

You’d have to ask the MVHR manufacturer if it could cope. Our pool room is kept at a 60% humidity level, which is quite different to the rest of the house. There is never any condensation in there. I have been in hotel pools where they are covered in condensation and it destroys the fabric of the room. The filtering sounds similar to the system in ours. You put salt in the pool and the oxygen generator creates chlorine/oxygen from the salt as needed. We have less chlorine than tap water.

Gas hobs will be banned soon enough. Induction is the only way.

I bought this shoveI. It has been excellent for £21. The serrated edge is very good at cutting through things. Have spent three hours so far digging and pulling. The best thing to do seems to be to dig along just past where you think the chicken wire is buried, then you can pull it up like a roll of turf. The problem is places where roots have grown through it, sometimes up to 2cm thick and in one place where someone wrapped it around a large tree and the tree has grown into it, I just had to cut it there. They also just dumped unused chicken wire on the ground to grow into the undergrowth. Idiots. As you pull the chicken wire back you occasionally have to stop and run the shovel under it to break up roots. It has been back breaking work, I have had to put my not inconsiderable weight behind pulling it out. A woman stopped and cautioned me that her dad did in his back doing something similar. My recommendation would be that you should use chicken wire sparingly. I have also been able to perform an archeological study on the eating habits of builders and school children. They appear to really like McCoy's crisps.

It all depends on how good a swimmer you are. It works perfectly for me, a professional swimmer might prefer a swim spa. This totally misses the point. I can think of hundreds of jobs around the house that are easy and yet no one wants to do them thus they are better automated if possible. Because the underground temperature is higher and steadier than the outside temperature, the insulation of the room is more important than the insulation of the pool. The underground temperature is usually considered to be a constant of around 8 degrees so the temperature difference between the pool room and its exterior will be higher than the difference between the pool and underground. Clearly though more insulation is better. I was shocked how little insulation pools came with as standard. There are evaporation losses as well. Yes but it looks like the pool has a cover as does mine. Otherwise I would strongly recommend one as evaporation losses are very high. Heating my pool/pool room uses around 15-20000kWh of gas a year. Hard to say exactly as I have never turned everything else off except the pool. The room is 10x7x2.7m plus another 2.5x5x2.7m for the plant and changing room. Plus 9x3.7x1.35 for the pool, so the pool itself is only around 15% of the heated volume, hence I would focus more on the insulation of the whole space. The cost that people tend to miss is the dehumidifier and pump. They use around 4500kWh of electricity a year. I have timings set to maximise use of PV and night-time rates, but basically they cost as much to run as the heating. Including chemicals you are probably talking about £2-2500 in running costs a year. It was a lot less before utility prices increased. The real cost is the cost of the pool and a very large room to house it. That’s probably about 400k at today’s prices.

I couldn’t find a better picture. The area you can see there with the pipework is underneath the pool room. I think it was just backfilled with gravel after the pipe work went in. The pool sits under where the blue tarpaulin sits. You can see the pool sitting up at the top right waiting to be lifted in. I think they used french drains around the outside and then they painted the walls with some kind of paint on tanking membrane. It wasn’t a big job at all. The pool itself had 50mm of EPS insulation all the way round. We laid another 100mm of insulation on the concrete base then sat the pool on top of that. I’d be asking if the pool needs any manual maintenance like checking pH levels which would be a pain. I have the guy come service ours every 8 or 9 months and really he just delivers extra chemicals that the system uses automatically. I just chuck a cleaning robot into the pool every few weeks. Our pool is a bit larger and our air handling may be overkill but 6 years in the pool room still looks like new. I went to a local pool to see how much space I needed to do lengths and we ended up just over 9m. I’d consider a very slightly longer pool and no swim spa which would make things a lot simpler. Our pool is I think 9.2x3.7x1.35. It should maybe have been 1.4 deep.

Our pool is effectively in a small basement as described. The thing they are missing is it had to be tanked to stop water coming in and it has to be insulated. Otherwise you will lose heat to the ground. The pool costs the same to heat as a space that size would cost heated to 28C. It actually costs more to run the filter and dehumidifier. I have a Niveko pool which is made of polyurethane resin. It looks and feels a lot nicer than fibreglass but is a bit more expensive. Have they not mentioned air handling and dehumidifying in the costs. That was another 20k for mine. It heats the pool and extracts heat and moisture from the air. Also the filtration equipment looks quite minimal. I have a sand based filter, pump, centrifuge, uv disinfecting and automated pH regulation. There is literally nothing to do, the pool looks after itself.

This would be the easiest but seems a bit much for some chicken wire There is about 30m of the stuff. It was there when we bought the house we knocked down, so I am guessing it has been in at least 15 years and shows absolutely no sign of rusting. I suspect the fencers just dig through it, I just thought this was a good opportunity to get rid of it. The problem is the amount of stuff that has grown through it, it is tougher than the wire. I think I might give the hoe a chance and see if I can scrape the stuff off the top of it so it lifts up. A sharp spade might also work, I don't have one to give it a try.

It looks like the part is here, just need to find it without the rest of the stuff https://www.ventilationland.co.uk/en_GB/p/vent-axia-siphon-sentinel-kinetic-advance-o32-mm/18784/?gad_source=1&gbraid=0AAAAAB0qKPDPgcA_zQB1T1U2Ii7QMSNZM&gclid=CjwKCAiA0rW6BhAcEiwAQH28Iher6XY6Qox2OJWqL879n9bCwv20DkFKsMKbmeQHzBscJaDZu_07qhoC4QEQAvD_BwE