AliG

I just called Octopus now that I have my smart meter about switching to Intelligent Octopus. The person I spoke to wasn't very helpful at all and said that I had to email. She said they increased prices again yesterday, but she couldn't tell me what they were and they have not changed on the website. She said it was because she was working from home, not sure why that means she can't access the prices I thought I would resurrect this thread with news reports about changes to the price cap scheme Wholesale gas and electricity prices have gone crazy again. Luckily the cap carries through most of this winter, but this will really bite next winter. Here are the current gas and electricity futures. If these spikes persisted the price of gas would have to almost double from the current cap to around 7.5p/kWh and the price of electricity would have to rise another 20%+ to around 26p/kWh. I assume they will fall before we get to this point, but that could be wishful thinking.

I agree with @epsilonGreedy The planers don't care about you. They might not care enough about this plan to look at it properly if you don't actually object to it. They are supposed to look at it if you raise questions, but I suspect there is a risk that they simply approve it if you don't object. This could have a negative impact on you. If you object to it, it will be refused. You need to look after yourself and not worry about them. You don't need to be a professional planner to know this is bad for you. You just don't want to feel guilty about it. Your neighbour and their architects are quite happy to ***** you over to get their extension. You have to keep this in mind when feeling guilty about it.

According to the rules if you say nothing they don't look at it and it just gets approved as long as it meets the criteria. This is why the architect wants a "no comment" response. Any kind of question could have the planners looking at it.

It is Scottish Water asking for it. I didn't fill in the name of the plumbers as I don't know who they are yet and they came back and asked for them if we want to self certify the interior plumbing. WB1 Customer Guidance.pdf

Hi, Did other people get asked to give details of their "Watersafe" plumber before getting a water connection. I and my builder had never heard of it and we didn't have to do this for my current house. Seems like yet another piece of waste of time bureaucracy. No doubt a nice earner for the good people at Watersafe. https://www.watersafe.org.uk/news/latest_news/planning_some_plumbi/

If you read the prior approval guidance this is what has happened. https://www.planningportal.co.uk/info/200130/common_projects/17/extensions/2 "If you wish to build an extension of this size, you must apply to the local authority, who will then consult the adjoining neighbours to advise them of your proposals. If your neighbours raise any concerns or objections, the local authority will be required to determine if the proposal’s impact on the amenity of all adjoining properties is acceptable and, based on this, whether it can go ahead." So they consulted you, you had concerns and they decided it was not acceptable. It may be that the reality of the way the scheme works is that if a neighbour is concerned they just reject it. How long is their garden? If as you say it covers most of it then it would probably not be permitted development as it should not cover more than 50% of the total garden area of the house (front and back). It may be that the size of the front garden means that they are within this rule. TBH you give the planning people too much credit. Due to the new rules, if they are OK with it they will approve it and if you are not they won't. Personally from what you have said re the size of it versus the original house I would object. I would not want an extension down one whole side of my garden right up on the boundary. I assume that it is taller than any fence/wall currently there. Did the neighbours on the other side not object?

Thanks @joth I hadn't seen the other thread. This clearly needs building control sign off then. Not just for the insulation, but the electrics, smoke alarms etc. I am guessing @pilgrim that you haven't done that. I know it probably seems like a hassle and it will keep costs down, but it will be worth it in the end to have it properly signed of and they might even notice some things that you haven't thought about.

As you say, you will use around £2 or maybe more on a 0-5C day, but presumably you aren't sleeping in the room or using it every day of the year. So I would guess that the real world heating requirement is maximum 2000kWh and probably less. Say £300-400 a year. A small fast acting fan type heater is probably best for this. The single room ASHP would save around 2/3 of the cost so would pay for itself in around 4 years after installation. It also gives you the option of AC. It would be running at nowhere near full power but it would be good if you could find the noise level at different power levels. The max electricity usage on that unit is 1.12kW, so only 5 amps on 240V. It shouldn't need an upgrade to your wiring. It may need a higher start up current. That unit has no outside unit so all of the noise would be annoying you! This is a quieter and cheaper split unit, but I would guess installation is more expensive. https://www.cooleasy.co.uk/3-5kw-12000btu-inverter-srk35zmp-w.html

Are you refitting an existing roof or building a new one? 100mm rafters would be highly unusual in a new roof. Assuming you are just improving insulation in an existing house then I would put 75mm between the rafters and 50mm across the rafters below this using 62.5mm PIR backed plasterboard. This gives a 0.19 U-value. If it is a new build then you will have to meet the regs as @joth says and there should be some kind of drawing showing what is planned which will have been given to building control. As for the acoustic insulation between rooms that will only help with sound and not heating costs. 100mm is probably unnecessary in walls but it depends how much you want to reduce sound transmission. Sealing the top and bottom of the walls to avoid gaps that sound can travel through will probably be of as much or more benefit than just fitting sound insulation.

OK, had my retest today. Improved from 7.9 to 5.55. I could probably have done the work to get below 5 given a bit more time and a lot more enthusiasm. The guy said that it was a surprisingly big improvement. From bad to mediocre! I found quite a few largish holes in places that were out of sight. I presume these were the main areas of improvement. I am not convinced it has actually made any material difference to gas usage. The one thing I did conclusively fix was the WC. It was consistently colder than the rest of the house and the heating ran a lot of the time in there during winter. Now the heating runs less than the adjacent hall.

Luckily we didn’t build in a village with this kind of incomer attitude but the immediate neighbours have all lived in the area for 40+ years, something they felt was relevant enough to put in their objections. It was originally a village on the outskirts of the city. We are fairly certain that the next door neighbours organised objections. They included things such as we might turn the house into a dance school and the local community council objecting to the house with a reason being it was the largest house built in the area since the 1920s. I got really wound up, and particularly wanted to have a go at the community council who also objected to my parents house whilst not objecting to a particularly ugly house built right on the main road into the area. If they are going to work in some statutory capacity they need to have some logic behind their objections but apparently not. I think they have a mate in the street. Anyway since moving in everyone has been absolutely lovely. I think they just didn’t want a house built and once it was happening they accepted it. Nonsense objections are part of the game. We just remained pleasant and civil to everyone and it seems to have worked out. If I am being very honest they are all so old I decided that in the worst case scenario I’d wait them out! They have accused you of doing something underhand so I can see your concerns. I think though if you just act like it hasn’t got to you and pretend nothing happened it’s for the best. I can’t guarantee this strategy will work but I think it’s more likely to work than lawyers letters that will get people wound up.

I had a look at the planning application and comments. The comments are typical gossip/tittle tattle that you see on planning applications. I would just ignore them as they are irrelevant and the planners won't care. We had some preposterous things said about our application and our intentions. I can see why you are upset, but libel issues are pointless to pursue. I am surprised that this is a S73 application. I can see that it doesn't impact neighbours in any material way, but it is quite a substantial change. In particular balconies are extremely contentious from a planning perspective, even though no one actually seems to use them! I would be prepared to be asked for a new full planning application. In our case we had to withdraw and reapply both our house and my parents' house. Each time the second application garnered way more objections as it gives people time to get wound up and get organised. Either way, I don't see any actual planning issues. You aren't overlooking people etc and most complaints seem to be re traffic, access and so on. All planning applications seem to get these and they are generally not relevant. You just have to suffer through what is a very stressful process.

I think the issue is that they are pricing that like a new connection. We just paid £2800 for a single phase connection for my parents. Most of this was the cost of digging an 11m trench. It looks like the 3-phase connection for our house cost £3200, so just a few hundred more (In 2016). I think less digging was required, the builder organised it. I suspect that they will price up 3-phase like you are asking for a new connection and not care that they are already there fixing your current connection. You could get the quote and if it includes the trench etc ask for it to be adjusted as hey have already dug the trench. If there is not capacity to ad it the cost does increase exponentially.

Their service is supposedly good, but they do seem to sometimes have issues getting meters installed. Normally this is an issue as they put people on a more expensive tariff until they get a smart meter installed. Many customers want the Octopus Go tariff. At the moment, however, this is less of an issue as the standard variable tariff is the best tariff that you can get (Octopus Go may be cheaper if you can displace a large amount of demand to during the night)

After the supply is put in you need to contact a supplier who will arrange for a meter install. For a new supply I have found the larger suppliers such as EON or EDF to be better at organising the meter install. I would make sure that they can install a smart meter for three phase, not everyone has been historically, but it should be OK now. At the moment you will just need to sign up to the standard variable tariff as their fixed tariffs are considerably more expensive. You can sign up to an export tariff, but only with a smart meter that measures your export. The payments are outrageously low relative to the current price of electricity 3-5.5p depending on who you sign up with. This is a separate sign up to your electricity supplier. It is much better to try and sue all your PV generation to offset electricity at 21p/kWh. You can get meter prices with Octopus Agile Outgoing, but I see you cannot mix that with Octopus Go (It doesn't mention Intelligent Octopus). Don't sign up to Octopus Agile for incoming electricity, prices are crazy at the moment.

Yes, its just that before I didn't actually know how much I was using and how much I was exporting. It was just a guess. For the gas meter though there are no time of use tariffs, so I don't care as much. I need a smart electricity meter to switch to Intelligent Octopus. By my calculation that will give me a price of around 17p/kWh compared to 21p that I will be on when my fix runs out.

Seems from Google that I should have been asked if I wanted 30 minute or 1 day readings. I have contacted my supplier to see if they can fix it. One thing I can see from the smart meter is that in the 6 weeks since it was installed I have only exported 11kWh vs around 200kWh generated. So during the winter I am using almost 100% of PV generation.

OK, they turned up and installed the gas meter. As I guessed might happen the gas meter cannot communicate with the electricity meter. They are about 10m apart with two cavity walls containing foil faced PIR in between. The guy said that he would install the higher powered gas meter but it didn't help. I guess I don't really need smart functions on a gas meter and the smart functionality is now working on the electricity meter. My providers website seems to be updating the electricity reading every day now, but I cannot see the history or 30 minute readings anywhere, I think they do not offer that function, but I can download an app that maybe does, so I will try that.

It may be that the gap outside is deliberate to ventilate the roof space. Is there a room above or is it a loft? On the other hand, why does the ceiling not go all the way to the wall? Was there just a gap left up into the roof? Is there some kind of stepped ceiling? Assuming that is a roof space, you need to put a piece of plasterboard in across the gap. Then you have to go up into the roof space and put insulation above the plasterboard. It doesn’t matter if cold air gets in above the insulation from outside. What you have done with foam there will do nothing to stop a draught. You need to fill all the gaps. Tape is the best way to do this, expanding spray foam is OK but still likely to leave gaps.

For my house I don’t really see that there was much benefit over using standard blocks considering the extra time that they seemed to take to lay the Porotherm. However, I have cavity walls. If you use this kind of single skin product you may get a much faster build. I would ask them to compare to blockwork and price it up using both. Then if it is more expensive I’d want to know what the benefits are. Porotherm sell it as air tight but this is all in the detailing and nothing re-ally inherent about the blocks. They can be as leaky or airtight as any other blockwork depending how they are installed. Rendering them on the outside was no problem at all. I would think they would want to dot and dab them on the inside. I don’t think they are great for chasing stuff into as the tend to crumble when cut.

If the walls are wet plastered and the floor is screed then I don’t see where air is going to come from at the wall floor junction. It would have to be coming through any small area of unplastered wall which would be negligible.

It would be unusual to put wall in before the floor, although it would probably be better for air tightness. Someone may comment who has done that. A couple of things I would recommend- 1. Put 25mm of PIR around the edges of the screed. We specified this in our build and the builders then used a roll of thin foam instead. The screed was down before I knew about it. You need insulation around the edge of the screed to stop a cold bridge between the screed and the block walls. 2. Are you planning to wet plaster the block walls or dry line them with plasterboard? If wet plastered then this will create airtightness and you won't have much to worry about. If dot and dab plasterboard then the best thing is to actually try and make sure the walls are airtight behind it and not use the plasterboard to create airtightness. I would recommend doing an air blower test before plastering the walls and sealing everything up then whilst it is still easy to get access.

OK, a very messy morning - I made up the mix and was really struggling to get it into the holes. The problem is that I am working through a small opening and cannot get the right angle on the brush. I was using a small broom and at full stretch between the head and the mix on it, it was very difficult to control. So I tried a small roller and a small brush taped to the end of a pole. These worked much better and I could work the mix into the vertical joints. But I suspected that the main issue was the space between the first floor slab and the outside wall. In the end the only way to fill this was foam. I attached an 8mm pipe to the can and attached the pipe to a brush handle. I had tried this before but was running into problems at maximum reach. I ran out of hands to both keep myself steady and squeeze the trigger. Plus due to leaning from a set of steps at a steep angle the step would start to slide out from under me. This time I enlisted my wife. She held the can and squeezed the trigger as well as standing against the steps so they did not move. This worked much better allowing me two hands to direct the foam and hold myself steady. It feels a lot less breezy in there now. I am also taking this opportunity to put a wifi extender in there to get a better signal out on the terrace. When you close triple glazed doors that pretty much kills the signal and sometimes I want to sit outside and stream stuff. Just waiting for the foam to dry to scrape some of the droppings off and tidy up.

Not sure what the issue is but I got somewhere by using the escalating complaint method - Officer, team leader, head of planning etc. I wouldn't worry about NIMBY objections, most of them are farcical and ignored. The COVID excuse is preposterous. Planning is the kind of job that should be unaffected. I worked from home sitting in the dining room for over a year and got more work done. Planning officers couldn't make site visits so should have more time. TBF I do have a friend who is a planning officer and he sounds very overworked, there has been a big increase in application numbers. However, this brings in more fees so funding should not be an issue. Lack of qualified staff might be though. Now we have a BC application that is taking months and months. Architect recently got an email saying that the officer had been on long term sick and was back. This also happened with planning when our house was applied for. The thing is, no one tells you that they are off sick, they just let you think you are being ignored and cases do not seem to be reallocated.

It's a fake chimney. There is a twin wall flue that goes out through the wall. That's the top of it in the bottom picture.