AliG

50A should be plenty. My pool has around half the volume of @billt's and so the filter pump uses about half the power. The main use of power would be the ASHP, even a 5kW ASHP is only 21A. The power use in the pool house is going to be relatively minor, I guess you might want an air heater which might be 3kW. Showing the difference in heating costs for an indoor and outdoor pool. My pool uses around 40kWh a day for heating, call it 1500kWh for the year, we use gas. It is set at 29C all year round. @billt is quoting that it takes (assuming a COP of 4) almost 3000kWh over 10 days to get his pool to 26-27C. On the other hand, I have a dehumidifier as the pool is indoors and that uses around 2500kWh a year. However, 1/4 of that is on cheap overnight electricity. The filter pump uses around 2000kWh with 40% on cheap rate. An outdoor pool also requires a lot more cleaning and chemicals.

This case sounds similar to things that I read. They have the right to pass over it not speak to you, linger, hassle you and so on. Hence why I wondered if they only use it when you are there? If they use it all the time then they are correctly using it as a right of way. If they only use it when you are there then they are using it to hassle you. The quoted case seems to have been a protest which is clearly not using the land as a right of way. The problem you would have is proving that they use it to harass you. That would require filming and noting every incident over a prolonged period of time. Whenever we have had similar issues in the past (a few years ago someone was harassing my wife and daughter at school) we have noted every incident at the time and it has been a massive help when presenting a case to the police or in court. I would keep a diary of any incidents. I would tread carefully before sending them a lawyer’s letter. Are they the kind of people who would be concerned by that or are they the kind of people who would escalate things? My personal view is that you should stay off the patio through winter and try not to interact with them. Perhaps by the spring they will have forgotten that they like to hassle you. If they start up again then, you’ll need to resort to legal means. If they have continued to hassle you the you will have gathered some evidence. If you actually have evidence of harassment I would go to the police not a lawyer, I suspect they’d take the police more seriously.

I really have to emphasise this. It only costs a few pounds to get a copy of their deeds. The right of way in their deeds may be more restrictive and help you out. For example it may say they have a right of way for maintenance or coal deliveries. Or it may not. You NEED to do this. It might not help at all but it is by far the simplest solution if it does help and a lawyer is going to want to check this anyway.

I think they are probably annoyed about you trying to stop them building their conservatory and trying to wind you up. They do have a right of way but they absolutely do not have the right to talk to you as they come through. You could get a lawyer involved and argue that this is harassment but the likelihood is that winds them up more. You would have to film the patio yourselves to prove harassment, which is difficult to prove. Edit: Having thought about it. How often do they come through when you aren’t in the garden? If you filmed it and showed that they only use it when you are there I think that might be decent evidence that they are using it to harass you and not for actual access. However, if they use it all the time then this won’t help. I just wouldn’t go out there as it gives them the chance to wind you up. I know that maybe sounds like victim blaming but if you just forgot about it then your life would be a bit easier. I suspect that if you stopped going outside they would also use it less and maybe forget about it too. It’s almost October 1st. I doubt you’d really want to sit outside for the next 5 or 6 months anyway.

I thought that for a second, but looking at other pics I believe the right of way is past the back of OP’s house then turn right where the photographer is standing. OP is the end of terrace house and attached to the neighbour with the conservatory at the point next to the gate. Thus access to the back of neighbour’s house can only be via OP’s patio A right of way like this is always going to be problematic.

It doesn't, but If you could prove harassment you could get a restraining order, however that is going to require a lot of proof. Hence I reckon the easy option is just to avoid them, annoying as that may be.

I went back and read the thread re next door's conservatory. Have you gone to the Land Registry and got the deeds for next door to see the words of the easement in their deeds? I think this would be very worth the modest cost. On the face of it you are in a horrible situation, it seems like your back patio is the access to their back door so they can and will come through whenever they like. The only possible recourse you have is if they "harass" you as they come through. They can come through but this does not give them a right to linger, talk to you etc. Nor do you have to move assuming that they can get past. However, unless you can prove harassment, then sadly you are stuck. They can come and go as they please. Really I would just avoid using the patio, annoying as that may be.

Very hard to say. In our last house the developers had not put the bracing into the roof and had not actually fixed the roof properly to the frame. They had to strip off all the tiles and fix it.However, this only resulted in strange noises when it was very windy. Otherwise you would not have known. In our current noise the bath makes a single bang a couple of hours after use as it contracts. We have one drain pipe in a ceiling that appears to rub against something and can make a creaking noise when hot water passes through it. Again in our old house the conservatory would make quite a few bang/creak noises as it cooled down in the evening. If it is not windy then I would think it is to do with expansion and contraction as temperatures change. Monitoring when it happens might help. It might well get less bad as the weather cools down and as the house settles.

I think it is probably 0.22 as it looks like they are built using maybe 100mm PIR in both the walls and roof. 100mm PIR with little else would give 0.22 U-value A conservatory does not need a building warrant if separated by outside doors. But moving your kitchen does need a building warrant if it involves moving plumbing and/or the extractor fan.

Our driveway rises 2m over approximately 18m before flattening off in front of the house. That is about half as steep as yours at 6 degrees. I find it quite steep and slippery and worry about liability when it is wet or there is snow/ice. It only snows two or three times a year here and the first time it snowed just a few millimetres the car slid straight out onto the road before it stopped. Non 4wd cars struggle to get up the driveway if there is any snow on it at all. It may not snow much but with that steep a slope I would just be worried about it being wet. I would be quite concerned about a delivery person or visitor slipping on such a steep drive. How does it affect the accessibility of the main entrance? Is it flat at that point? I would be curious as to what building control had to say. The car issue is easily fixed by buying an automatic or EV which we'll all have eventually.

Thanks guys. In the end we just put the outside tap on the house so we didn’t have to argue about it

The floor will be fine if it is glued. Mine is just glued and laid over normal underlay, not fixed to the floor. I am surprised to see you quote a flow temp of 27C. I tried finding your insulation values in previous posts but couldn't. Basically that would put out so little heat using spreader plates and through two layers of wood that it would only work if you didn't actually need any heating. I find I need to run the flow temp in my house 3-4C higher where the floors are covered in wood than tiles and that is just 15mm engineered flooring on screed. In my previous house where we retrofitted UFH on spreader plates in the kitchen we had to run the flow temp at 60C. Admittedly it was a lot less well insulated.

I have never seen engineered flooring that could not be fitted over UFH. Looking at their website, that underlay seems to be used instead of gluing the floor together. There might be some advantages to this, but standard underlay and gluing would be fine. I have hundreds of square metres of floor installed floating on a basic foam underlay. What kind of flow temperature will you be running? I would be worried that laying 43mm (chipboard+underlay+wood) of floor over the UFH spreader plates seriously limits the transfer of heat.

I decided to purchase an Eddi and Harvi in an effort to maximise the efficiency of my system even if the payback was maybe better on a cheaper timer. Ordered 2/9, delivered 9/9. Took me a couple of hours to get it all installed and set up. Seems to be working but won't connect to WiFi for some reason. It may be because the tank is between it and the nearest router. Install was quite easy as it just required removing the immersion switch and wiring the cables into the Eddi instead. Worst thing about it was tight space and heat in plant room. Harvi very easy to install, it says to install CT clamps "upstream" of Henley blocks. I found this quite unhelpful. It seems to mean between the meter and the blocks, so before them not after them. I am up now at 3am because just before I went to sleep my wife said she hoped it didn't catch fire. So I clearly woke up to check!

The whiny noise sounds like it might be a motor trying to open or close it, but it is jammed. There should be a control box like the one I have shown that operates the window. If you find that you might be able to switch it off or reset it in some way to stop the noise, or is it only connected to the smoke alarm? Even then it should have a power supply somewhere.You might be able to switch it off at your consumer unit. Now as to whether you want to switch off your smoke window, that is another mater, but I suspect it is not working anyway.

There should be a box with up and down arrows to open and close the window. If it is a smoke vent it should be electrically actuated. Maybe using this to move it would fix it. What kind of noise are we talking about?

We are indeed. I think the government should have been more upfront with people that this is what are doing. Boris has tried a little to make this point recently. It looks like Putin has played his last card though. The price has not gone up with the total switch off Russian supplies (see chart below) and, short of an unusually cold winter, it is unlikely to get worse from here. The price of gas is somewhat lower than it was when he first announced switching off supplies for three days two weeks ago. The current price is consistent with a cap of around £5000, so a cost of £2500 per household to cap the price at £2500 equates to £70bn a year, plus the cost to help businesses. Part of the £70bn could be financed from the £18bn of changing renewables contracts and the windfall tax on energy producers. I do feel now that Putin has done his worst that gas will drift down and the cost will become lower. As ever, the government is not really bailing us out, they are simply borrowing money on our behalf. There is economic value in this though, the government has a lower borrowing rate and stabilising the economy and keeping inflation down also saves money. The best thing we can do now is to continue to try and become more efficient and increase the amount of renewables in the system. The less gas we need to buy the better. I must say though that the reality is we cannot quickly add lots of renewable capacity and upgrade out housing stock. As a few of us have discussed, I do wonder if not allowing the price to rise more is not the best long run decision. I would at least like to see £2500 average bills. You need this to encourage efficiency. Alternatively if you gave every household a cheque for £2000(actually £1500, above average users should get less benefit) and then said they could effectively keep it if they reduced their use of energy it might work well. But I suspect political expediency means keeping bills down is the easy option. I remain hopeful the war will not last that long, I suspect the Russians will have serious issues when the temperature begins to drop in Ukraine.

When the burner stops firing the temperature steadily drops into the low 50s so it should be condensing

The efficiency includes the benefits of condensing. The return temperature has to be below 55/56 for condensing to happen. Otherwise your boiler is around 8% less efficient. As the return temperature drops from 55 towards 45 the condensing continues to get more efficient. This would apparently be where the 90%+ efficiency would come. If you set your boiler flow much above 65C then it will rarely condense and efficiency will fall considerably. Mine is set at 64C, as I need this to heat my hot water to 55C. This seems to give me a temperature at the taps of around 49C max, so I don't want to set it any lower, it seems to be condensing at this setting. My boiler, a fairly standard Worcester Bosch, only has one temperature, so I have to set a flow that suits DHW and heating.

My guess at 80% efficiency includes any heat lost in the pumps and pipework between the boiler and the tank. I calculated it by heating the tank up and comparing the increase in temperature in the tank with the amount of gas used. If you read this article, however, it appears that the 90%+ quoted efficiency requires the boiler to run at 45C. Whilst I could run it at this temperature for heating, it is impossible to run it this low for hot water. Thus when heating hot water it is likely that most people’s boiler has efficiency in the 80s and I suspect losses around the pipework reduce this further. https://theintergasshop.co.uk/content/187-why-your-new-gas-boiler-isnt-efficient

We have Intelligent Octopus which gives us electricity for 7.5p/kWh during the night. At least 1130-530am and sometimes much longer. I have shifted way over half of our electricity use to this period. Gas is 7.33p/kWh, so if it is running at around 80% efficient to heat hot water, the immersion is cheaper during the night. At the normal price of electricity then the boiler would be considerably cheaper. My daytime rate is 30.83p/kWh This is fixed until February so if there is a further gas price increase in October (not sure what is happening to the cap as of today) then it will be even cheaper to use the immersion.

That’s a fabric house not the fabric of the house!

Missed this thread. We use massive amounts compared to you guys. My base usage of electricity is around 800W. For hot water, you cannot get past the physics. It requires 5.24kWh of energy to heat 100l of water by 50C. So if you use 300l of hot water a day, that is 16kWh, plus efficiency and heat losses, would be probably 20kWh plus of gas. I would assume around 100l/person/day. A lot depends on whether anyones likes to take baths vs showers. I have been running an experiment for around two weeks now to compare how much energy we use by heating the hot water tank with the immersion versus the boiler. It is not easy as i cannot switch everything else off. Basically what I found is that we had hot water on from 5am to 9pm. The boiler came on as and when needed. Doing this we were using around 40kWh of gas a day for hot water. My guess is that we use around 400l a day, which should use closer to 25kWh including the losses in the tank, so efficiency was running at 60-65%. I have tried a couple of things - 1. Just turning on the hot water twice a day. This seems to save around 5-10kWh, efficiency improves to around 80%. My guess is that there are enormous losses over and above the efficiency of the boiler in heating up pipework and letting it cool down multiple times a day. Our hot water has always just been on all day. At 2-3p a kWh, this may well have been wasting 5kWh a day for some time, but as this cost 10p, no one cared. When it costs closer to a pound you start to notice. 2. Running the immersion on Octopus at 7.5p during the night and then running the boiler once during the day for a top up. Doing this seems to use a similar amount of energy to running the boiler twice a day. Sadly it is almost impossible to measure exactly how much energy the immersion uses. Assuming the immersion is 95% efficient it is better to use it than the boiler. Anecdotally, the plant room feels a lot cooler than before. I think the temperature hs dropped by about 2C. I have also turned off our hot water circulation system which maybe used 80l of hot water a day. Heating the tank with the immersion for some reason, hot water comes through much faster than using the boiler. It might be due to where the immersion is or the tank getting hotter as the immersion will keep running until 70C, whereas the boiler themrostat for the boiler is set at 55C. Anyway I am hoping that this is going to save me around 3-4000kWh of gas a year, 20-25% of our use for DHW. As houses have got better insulated DHW has become a larger part of energy use and I suspect this has not been focused on much. I am guessing for many on Buildhub it is actually a larger use of energy than heating.

I am hearing both the present rate and £2500 as caps. TBH I think protecting people from much of the rise creates a moral hazard where people don’t do as much to help themselves. I guess I don’t know at what point there is enough pain that people become more efficient but not so much that people cannot afford their heating. If the money gets borrowed we’ll all be paying it in the longer run, however the costs will fall on taxpayers in general rather than people with high energy usage. I do suspect that prices fall back and it doesn’t actually cost as much as estimated. I also think that Putin has overplayed his hand. So far I am guessing Russian revenues are up due to lower volumes and higher prices. Certainly the Ruble is actually stronger than it was before the war. Cutting off supply means revenues collapse and if we muddle through then his bargaining position is severely weakened.

That's horrible, I'm sure you must be gutted. Sadly I doubt you'll see much back. Their accounts look a bit odd to me, they seemed to invest £1.5m in something unspecified in their 2020 financial year, but not part of their day to day business. They also at various times have loaned a few million to directors which is an enormous amount of money relative to the assets of the company. https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/02771581/filing-history I would not be surprised if one of these things is the problem.