AliG

I reckon I can get consumption down around 4-500kWh a year with this information. £5-60 a year. Not a massive saving, but I suspect everyone could get their consumption down by around 5% if they did this kind of audit. I did invest £9 into a Wi-Fi smart plug that measured consumption. I had already done quite a few things to reduce consumption - Setting lights to switch off automatically. SettingTVs to switch off after a period of zero use. Retiming the heating so that it is more likely to be running everywhere at the same time so the boiler and pumps are not firing up for just one room, this reduced gas consumption also. Switching off devices that are never used and have a few watts of standby consumption. What is interesting is that as fast as things are getting more efficient, the proliferation of smart devices that are always on is eating into some of the consumption saving. Also TVs have a lower consumption per inch, but this has been pretty much offset by the TVs becoming massively larger. A funny example of this is a feature that Tesla recently introduced. A great feature of electric cars is that you can turn he heater on to warm them up before you get in. They have introduced a feature where you can set the car to be warm at the same time every week day or 7 days a week. Of course once you turn this feature on the heater runs every day whether or not you are going anywhere. Probably uses 1kWh every time it runs, the heater uses 6kW. So this might be using a few hundred kWh a year. They have finally moved to an ASHP in the Model Y to reduce this waste. Still a warm car in the morning is worth it. The one I am most pleased with is that the LED strip in the cinema room was running at 80W. I reduced the dimmer to just less than 50W consumption with no visible reduction in the light output. It is the second most used light in the house. I did try on the kitchen lights but they started to dim almost immediately.

Right, I found the original specification for the pool dehumidifier. It states 2850 kWh per year assuming 1 hour of use a day. I suspect I am maybe nearer to 2500. Actually their estimate of the energy consumption for the pool was pretty accurate.

OK, I found one thing. The pool has two big LED lights that create a really nice effect. They work off a wireless remote control, but the transformer is just plugged into a normal socket in the plant room. The transformer uses 20W when the lights aren't on. 51W when they are on. So that's around 175kWh a year. I will switch it off and people can flick the switch before they use the pool. It has had an unexpectedly high amount of use this year with lockdown. My wife likes to compare the house to a cruise ship where you can always sit somewhere else and find something else to do. In this analogy, I may be the cruise ship maintenance people! My daughter says the cost of the projector for her endless watching of The Simpsons is totally worth it, but she might try not to turn on all the kitchen lights every time.

I am watching the F1. So plenty of time to do other things.

OK, I have put various devices into a spreadsheet depending on either tested consumption or the EU energy label. There are more to add such as ovens and microwave. I still think the most surprising one is that a Sky Q box uses more electricity than a fridge/freezer. I already have accounted for around 11kWh here, I would expect the dehumidifier to be another couple and the various heating pumps to be quite a bit. Device Consumption.xlsx

Clearly an insulated raft is more expensive than I expected.

I am going to start putting it into a spreadsheet. I chose to have a pool and expect it to use a lot of electricity. TBH it costs around £1000 a year in electricity and gas whereas 30 years ago it might have cost 3-4x as much. I think they thing is finding the unexpected uses of power. I found one power bar in the games room that is using around 20W with a TV, Wii, DVD player and Sky Q box plugged into it all on standby. The devices are probably used for 1-2 hours a week, so if this was switched off the rest of the time it would save 175kWh a year. Sky Q boxes only go properly on standby between 2.30am and 5.45am. As they are networked they do not power down when on standby, particularly the main box as it provides a signal to all the other boxes. Indeed if you get up before 5.45am, which I do bizarrely often, and switch on a Sky Q mini it breaks the network and you have to reset the main box. Ideally you would find a way to switch things off totally, say between midnight and 6am. The issue is that so many things are networked that it is difficult to know which you can do without something else not working. For example, I suspect the family would not consider it acceptable to have the wifi not working if they woke up at 1am and wanted to use their phone.

The kitchen has 16lights. They are on one circuit of 10 and one of 6. It is just that they use way more than the rated 7w. There is no need to have both circuits on in nearly any circumstance but persuading g the family of this is difficult. I think they are one of the main reasons for unexpectedly high consumption. I do reckon we are running higher during lockdown. The main reasons being more lights on, more use of the projector and more use of laptops. I think I could maybe get 1000kWh off the bill looking at vampire drain etc but that is about as well as I can do. I did look at batteries but I didn’t think they would cover their high cost yet. I am on a fantastically low tariff for power at the moment. I have 5kw of solar. The roof is much bigger but has roof lights that’s get in the way. Due to our high constant power usage I reckon that we use almost all the solar we generate which is good.

Good idea. Of course we won’t be away until next July now! I have tried this in the last for a few hours. I might try again. Gas usage for hot water and the pool is easier to get.

I checked the spec of the kitchen LEDs. They are rated at 7 W but appear to actually use roughly 11W each

I have noticed the exact same thing re the use of soap toothpaste etc. At the amount I use it would last three times longer

It is 70 sq metres. It is a heat pump dryer, it is just used excessively, for example towels apparently need to be washed after every use! So having Googled the pool pump manual, you can actually get an output of how much electricity it is using direct from the pump. As set up at the moment it is using 600W for 15 hours a day. So that is 3500kWH a year. At the lower speed setting the power consumption reduces to 330W, so almost halves. We did try running less per day at one point, but the filtration system didn't like it.I need to check if it has accidentally been moved up a speed as this would be a nice saving. The dehumidifier I am trying to find the spec for.

Good idea. Not sure the pool guy would approve. Might try for an hour or something like that

Tbh I think the pool uses an enormous amount and I can’t do anything about that. The kitchen has two sets of LED spots. My daughter in particular refuses just to put on one set. Together they use 200W. What often happens is someone switches them on in the morning before it is fully bright and then they don’t even notice they are on still in hours later. I just rebooted the smart lighting box when I unplugged it to find its power consumption but I think it records it so I am going to look and see how long these lights are on in the average day. Wouldn’t be surprised if it is 8 hours so that is almost 600kWh a year. They also run the washing machine, tumble dryer and dishwasher pretty much once a day. They all use around 2kWh a time I think. So that is almost another 2000kWh a year. I reckon the dishwasher only needs to be run every 1.5 days when I load it and often find the washing machine run half full. The trouble is convincing the family that I am not just being tight. I reckon I could lose 1000kWh a year from not excessively running these items but they aren’t interested. Of course, as I point out it will also reduce wear and tear and use of detergent etc.

Hi, We probably have the highest electricity use of anyone on Buildhub. I am coming in at around 17000kWh per year, maybe 25% of this is for our Tesla. We generate around 3500kWh from out solar panels, he 17000 is a net number. We have a pool and the pump and dehumidifier use a to of electricity, but I wanted o get an idea if there were other things in the house using an unexpected amount. I bought a WiFi plus that monitors energy usage. They may not be that accurate, but I wanted to get an idea. I will put this into a spreadsheet once I have more data. I was pleasantly surprised to find the usage from our MVHR was very low. We have 3x Dantherm HCV/HCH5. Yesterday, I tested one of these and on the lowest speed setting, which I have them set on 90% of the time, it was only using 14W. My suspicion was that watching TV on our projection screen, which is pretty much standard practice was using a lot of electricity, so I wanted to check. The sound system uses around 100W, which is less than I expected, the projector uses 280W or 350W in HDR mode. The shocking thing is that if the screen is blank and it has gone to sleep it still uses 280W so that you don't need to wait for the bulb to warm up. I reckon that especially during lockdown it is on around 10 hours a day and often people just leave it switched on when they leave the room or don't realise it is on as the screen has gone to sleep. So watching TV is using 380W, which means it is using around 4kWh per day, or 1500kWh a year. So almost £200 a year. The one that surprised me was the Sky Q box which uses 27W whether or not it is on standby, so double what the MVHR uses. It goes into eco mode for 3 hours a night which won't really make much of a dent. So just over 200kWh a year. We have 2 network switches, 9 WiFi access points, a DSL router, a smart light controller and 4x CCTV cameras with a PVR. All these use 114W, so that is 1000kWh per year. I am trying to think which of these devices could be put on a smart plug and turned off at night. The trouble is that someone is bound to want to use something at an odd hour and complain. I need to check various Alexas, Sonos speakers, Sky Q minis etc which are all on 24 hours per day. Having looked up the specs the Alexas only use a few watts, I am suspicious of the Sky boxes but they don't have a hard drive in them like the main box so hopefully will be a lot lower. One thing I have done is programmed all the main lights in the house to switch off at 8.10 am during the school run and 10pm after bed time so that if anyone leaves lights on they don't stay on too long.

£410 per square metre for 0.14 U-Value. Rises to around £515 for a twin wall frame, I have taken out the roof insulation cost to make them comparable. Our frame does have quite a bit of steel in it which will be boosting the cost by quite a bit. Maybe as much as 20% would be my guess. I had a quote from Scotframe that was around 15% cheaper once adjusted to be like for like, but I think it is worth it to have one company responsible for the whole shell build.

Thanks, that is about the same as mine as I calculated it on the external footprint. Hopefully we can get an idea of what other people are quoting.

Hi, I am just awaiting our ground survey and the plan is to go with an insulated raft assuming there isn't something stopping this. I have a quote from MBC for a frame and a raft. The frame cost is a little high as I expected, but not crazy. The raft price seems very high. I have not seen anyone actually quote how much an insulated raft foundation is costing them. We like the idea of MBC doing the whole shell, but I am just curious as to what would be considered a reasonable price. The quote is almost £250 per square metre of footprint. We would still have to do the groundworks on top of that. So people who have paid for or had quotes for an insulated raft, what kind of cost are you seeing?

We have a Pyronix system, as we have had in our last couple of houses too. All wireless now, so straightforward to install. Not issues with battery life, or false alarms. It was installed by a local alarm company, but I don't see why you couldn't do a self install. What we like is that they now have an app that you register the system with and you can set and unset the system as well as check its status via the app.They do charge £36 a year for the subscription. The one issue we have is that maybe once every few months there seems to be a problem with they system for a few hours and you cannot set it remotely. You can still set it via the the panel. You can use their app with CCTV also, but we have a separate app for that at the moment.

Would the sills be in a spot where people would likely put something on them? If they are just painted in mat emulsion and people start to put vases and tea cups there it will stain. If not then I don't see why not plasterboard, we have some plasterboard alcoves which are basically the same idea.

Will do once it comes through and I am happy with it

I assume that the SE is OK with a raft attached to your house which has a different kind of foundation? I guess this may need a couple of holes and maybe one extra one where the summer house goes. A summer house is likely to be a light wooden structure and probably doesn't need a soil survey at all, but if they are already on site, an extra hole won't cost much. Did the surveyors recommend 8 holes or the SE? The standard is 3-4 holes for a new house.

I just had a soil survey done in Edinburgh. I had a guy recommended on here at just over £1000, but he wasn't available. I basically went on Google and sent the same email to five companies. Two came in at over £4000, two at around £2500 and one said they didn't do it, but recommended me a company who did it for just over £1000. I am still waiting to see the report before I recommend them to anyone. The high quotes often had absurd padding in them, such as £350 for a utilities report, even though it is on garden ground and I have a map of what is under it, or hundreds for H&S assessments etc. I would just send out asking for quotes, they all came back in a couple of days. I only needed 3 holes, so you might be nearer to £2000 or more if they need to know what is under the site before they drill. I paid over £4k for one arranged via an SE four years ago, when I looked back at it, around £1000 was because they weren't local and charged me for travel and subsistence, so I only checked local people this time. Edit - Just had another look at your original post. Why would you need 8 holes for an extension, that is crazy. I doubt most people have anything for an extension, they probably just dig down and match the existing foundations.

Demolition work on the garage on site started today. Presumably I should really do a blog rather than a series of posts this time.

I think we are at crossed purposes here. The polyurethane I am talking about is in the interior partition walls. They don't need to be insulated. They used OSB SIPS inside the building for speed.