AliG

My £6k of PV will soon be generating almost £1k a year in electricity. That was paying someone to install it! Total no brainier at the moment.

I don’t know but the price of coal has gone up from $70 to $440 a ton in the last 12 months! Where energy sources are fungible they tend to move together in price.

So if the price of gas doubled the price of electricity would go up by 50%. It is worse than that as electricity has more fixed overheads. More like 100% on gas equals 40% on electricity. In the last two years the retail price of gas has gone up around 200% whilst electricity has increased around 80% (using the upcoming price cap). Numbers will vary depending on exactly what people were paying. The cap has “only” doubled as it was above the fixed prices many were paying originally. If the price of gas doubles again then it will have gone up around 500% and the price of electricity would rise about 40% and it would have gone up around 150% So not great for anyone but disproportionately hurting gas users. In many previous discussions re ASHPs people have quoted that electricity was around 5x the price of gas so with a 3-4 COP gas was still cheaper. When the next cap is set we could be in a position where electricity is not much more than twice the price of gas. Hopefully a temporary situation but massively changing the numbers in favour of an ASHP.

Indeed I was oversimplifying it a bit. As you say Russia would get a lower price but still perhaps a higher price than it did before for its gas and oil. However, having checked, they have only been exporting around 2% of gas production to China with plans to expand capacity to bring this to around 6% in 2025. So there simply is not capacity to sell much of their gas in China. They can basically only sell it in Europe at the moment. This would make gas sanctions more attractive, the problem being Europe would run out of gas. It does seem that longer term over the next 30-40 years Russia are planning to shift their main exports from Europe to China as we move to renewables. No less than Elon Musk is also out today saying that we need to increase production. Of course that is easier said than done. Oil companies will be producing as much as possible at current prices. There basically isn’t that much slack in the system. I have said numerous times that the easiest short term thing that can be done is for a Germany to announce they will not turn off the last of their nukes. Indeed they should be looking to turn back in the ones turned off at the end of last year if they are still able to do so. Probably too late. Gas is not as global a market as oil and the price of gas in Europe is multiple times now what it is in the US. There is not enough LNG capacity to get more US gas here and arbitrage the price. It has only been a few days since the war started and the price spiked. If this continues we are in for a 70s style energy crisis. I don’t mean to be alarmist and this could all change in hours if the war can be ended somehow. But if not there will be serious repercussions. Especially for Europe. Most energy intensive businesses will become untenable and consumers will be crushed by utility bills. You’d be talking 3-4K average utility bills. That is just not an affordable number for many people and it will cause a serious retrenchment of consumer spending. You’d expect to see measures put in place to reduce energy consumption, although people would be doing this anyway to save money. The U.K. and Germany have very high gas consumption per capita and would be much worse hit than many other countries. The pain would be felt quite unequally in the U.K. Most people use gas for heating and this will go up a lot more than electricity. ASHPs will start to look very attractive in the short term. People where utility bills already make up a lot of their spending will be disproportionately hammered.

If your supplier goes out of business then fixed deals are cancelled and you move onto the standard variable tariff with a new supplier. I am not aware of any issues at Octopus but I’m sure a lot of people had this happen last year. I believe that the way the system works is that the cap is based on prices over the 6 months prior to each setting of the cap. Thus the suppliers are always catching up with historic costs. With normal price volatility this is not a problem. But if the price increases considerably the energy suppliers have to supply at a massive loss until the cap rises to cover this. There has been talk of the government stepping in to guarantee the loans that are required to do this.

The best thing to do is absolutely not to dot and dab the plasterboard. I have some blockwork walls with dot and dab on them and they are very poor for limiting sound transmission. As @tonyshousesealing air paths is key. No point having double plasterboard etc if there are gaps around the edges between the wall and the ceiling. Dot and dab will make this worse. I would worry that two layers of plasterboard with battens between would actually amplify the sounds and simple double boarding might be better. Even once you have done all this, a lot of sound will come through the door.

I see a considerable number of people calling for a ban on Russian oil and gas. This is actually helping Russia as it is pushing prices up. They will be coining it in. A ban would only work if the entire world participated. As long as someone is willing to buy their ol and gas then it simply pushes up the price.This perversely helps Russia and hurts everyone else. The correct strategy to hurt Russia is to swamp the market, pushing the price down, as well as reducing usage as much as possible. Unfortunately Russia produces too much to do this easily or quickly. Russia supplies over 10% of global oil supply, using around half of this itself. This we could just about deal with, Russia produces 22% of global natural gas supply. There is no way we could offset the loss of this in any reasonable timeframe. Russia and Ukraine account for around 13% of global wheat production. I think this is a more relevant figure than the higher percentage of exports which is often quoted. Extraordinarily, Russia and Ukraine account for between 50 and 60% of all global sunflower oil production. My friend keeps arguing, and indeed many other people also, that the government needs to step in and fix the price of gas and electricity.The government do not have some magic wand to fix this. Even if all utilities were nationalised they would still have to buy their gas at the prevailing price. If the current price persisted gas would cost roughly 18-19p/kWh. A crippling price for most people. Almost 10x what it was 2 years ago. My fix that ended in December was just over 2p. There is some argument for a windfall tax on fixed price electricity producers who will make more money because the price of competing gas production has gone up. Of course these people might argue that no-one offered to help them out when the price of gas collapsed during COVID and they were giving away electricity. Still these are definitely exceptional circumstances. I have just switched to Intelligent Octopus which fixes my electricity price for the next year. Gas is the big worry.

When my in-laws built a house in California they were basically given a box they could build inside. After that they could build anything they wanted. Lots of the neighbours complained that their house is three stories. It is on a slope with a garage underneath at the front. Two storeys from the back. Most of the houses in the street including the one next door are single storey with garages underneath. But that fitted inside the height limit so it was fine.

A website I came across in the US discussing McMansions and general good and bad points of house design. Some advice holds for here too and some of it is just fun. https://mcmansionhell.com

Sorry @Zak S but you are going about this in a very odd way. 1. The subsidence has clearly been there for some time, so it is not something that can be claimed on insurance as it is pre existing. 2. The problem was very clearly there when you bid on the property. If you start acting like the cost of fixing it is a problem now, the seller is not going to be impressed. Unless your original offer was subject to fixing it, then they will just put it back up for sale, or sell it to the second bidder. You are wasting money on the surveyor unless it is needed to back out of the deal. You already seem to have a report that says that the ground is too soft to build on without piles. 3. The idea of buying it at the agreed price and then them paying to have it fixed is very strange. It has all kinds of issues. You would be paying too much SDLT, they could end up having to pay inheritance tax on it and the lender is unlikely to be impressed. Over-riding all of this is that you know that the ground has issues. It would be a very bad idea to pay a high price for the house and then refurbish it. You could have more issues down the line. Knocking it down and properly rebuilding it seems like by far the best option, so you should run the numbers based on that. If that means pulling out, then so be it. It is hard to say what state the property market is in, I would have said prices had increased since last summer ex recent issues. The thing I would be more concerned about is that building costs have continued to increase. If most people are looking at this as a development opportunity then that is likely to have the most impact on the value.

So, somehow 60 minutes of protection was specified and when I checked the regs I reckoned it was 30 minutes. The 30 minutes seems to be correct which reduces the cost of the intumescent painting. However, tomorrow I will be asking the question if the insistence on paint and not plasterboard protection was due to the incorrect 60 minute requirement.

I just spoke to the architect and he says they spoke to building control this morning and they are insistent the steel is either directly encased or painted. Putting it behind plasterboard is not acceptable. MBC seem to have agreed to paint it though. Which saves a lot of hassle.

Thanks guys. I will post drawings in a bit, in the US at the moment. Basically a few posts in the walls and beams holding up upper floors. The argument seems to be that putting them behind plasterboard is not enough protection, but I am willing to hear other views. I told the architect I want to speak to BC and see what they say as it is going to cost the best part of 5k plus be a big hassle.

I’m on holiday so struggling to look this up and argue about it. My architect wants us to have all the steel in our timber frame sent away to be sprayed with intumescent paint. I cannot find the regs at the moment but it seems totally over the top in a two storey house. He argues that just putting it behind fire rated board is not enough. It would be a massive pain and expensive to do during frame erection. Scottish regs apply. Any thoughts?

I’m off to Disneyworld tomorrow. Surely it’s basically free if I turn the heating off while I’m away.

I did some reading about it. Dogmatic morons if you ask me. You have to make compromises in life all the time. The right plan would surely have been only to turn off the nuclear after it had been replaced by renewables. Not just turn it off abruptly and up your use of fossil fuels.

It’s the regular TF 0.14 U-value. Won’t be quite passive but close to it. Can’t imagine a flow temp much above 30C. When I looked at the solar gain calf’s the heating would theoretically hardly ever need to be turned on. Still not heard back on their solution. We can’t be the only people with expansion joints and UFH in the slab. Online I saw pics of formers. Wouldn’t really impact the floor finish as it is basically at doorways except the bedroom door. I might ask if they are really necessary.

A fair thing for a generator to think about and to avoid ToU is that if lots of people had batteries then they could buy their electricity at lower prices during the night and they would lose higher priced sales during the day. This will not be an issue for the foreseeable future. Of course if so many people had batteries that they could shift capacity like that to different times of the day then need for peak generating capacity would fall which would reduce costs in the long term. Normally long term costs of commodities are driven by marginal costs of new capacity additions. This would be in the £40/kWh range we are used to historically. At the moment gas provides the marginal supply and gas prices have exploded hence electricity prices have exploded. This is a good argument for a windfall tax on nuclear and wind generators who will be coining it in with no increase in costs. I have done the same sums everyone else has. I need prices above 20p/kWh to justify a Powerwall. So easily justifiable at today's prices but willl they continue. I have been using a return to a price in the 17p range in the long run to do sums. TBH this is just a finger in the air number. Maybe looking at US numbers, less impacted by Russian shenanigans would give a better idea of long term pricing. The current UK gas price future is in the 6-7p/kWh range. The current USA price is closer to 1p/kWh! This is up around 50% in the last year. This suggests that short term issues - Russia, closure of German nuclear capacity have driven European prices to unsustainable levels. Eventually the gas price will return to normal and the price of electric will return to 15p/kWh or less. The cost to charter an LNG ship has gone up massively. People are now ordering ships to move LNG from the US to Japan, China and Europe and arbitrage the crazy price difference. Then that really confuses me is Germany. If they simply came out and said they won't close their remaining nuclear plants at the end of the year that would help considerably. They have backed themselves into a corner. The thing that still makes me laugh is the constant blaming all of this on "green" policies. Maybe if you include German switching off nuclear. But "green" generation would be much less prone to outside influence than fossil fuels. There was plan to build PV in Africa and a cable to Europe. Seems crazy to once again put ourselves at the behest of foreign countries. What if someone attacked the cables! If you do this you would need to distribute the risk.

It costs almost nothing to run a wind turbine during the night (maybe some extra maintenance) so instead of turning them off anything you can sell is almost 100% profit margin. High fixed cost assets thrive on keeping utilisation as close to 100% as possible.

Maybe it is just the shape of the slab. Blue dashes are the expansion joints.

Why do you think ToU tariffs will disappear? The price of electricity varies considerably across the day and nightime demand is always likely to be considerably less than daytime demand. If anything the current Go rates 30p/7.5p have an even bigger ratio between day and night rates than when prices were lower.

That's a very reasonable electrician. I was thinking they would charge £50-60 per panel like it was a switch connection, plus extra for the meter, connection to the CU, isolator switches etc.

We just received drawings from MBC showing that they will cut expansion joints in the passive raft foundation. This then had me asking the question what happens to the UFH pipes when they cross the expansion joints? Waiting to hear back from the foundation engineer, but it doesn't seem like it would be an unusual issue, so has anyone come across this before?

Out of curiosity, this then needs installed. I can see an electrician looking at it and saying £1000 plus the work to install the panels on the roof maybe being the same again, so is it much cheaper than going to someone who would do supply and fit? Maybe I am too high on the costs?

I found a ruling re late submission of forms. If you look at point 9 here, it seems to suggest that filing the wrong form and then being allowed to refile the correct form outside the 6 week limit is possible. http://www.landmarkchambers.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Croke-v-SSCLG-judgment-1-February-2019.pdf However, there is nothing stopping you making the argument that the 6 week limit was missed. A reasonable argument would be that they were too tight to consult a lawyer and fill in the correct form. But I think the judge probably knows of this previous riling so will allow the filing to proceed. He will still not have considered anything about the case other than this.