Jeremy Harris

Many of the loads in the house will have diversity applied, as they aren't running for long periods of time. An induction hob, for example, will be calculated as being 10 A plus 30% of the maximum rated current, so a hob rated at 6 kW (nominally 26 A) would work out as a load of 10 A + (0.3 * 26 A) = 17.8 A. Diversity is also applied for most circuits in the house, with the exception of electric showers, car charge points, electric water heaters etc, which are rated at 100% with no diversity.

Sounds like a standard single phase 100 A fused connection. An EV charge point will draw a maximum of 32 A, so, unless you have some massive loads planned for the house you should be fine. We're all-electric, with ASHP, etc, and the maximum load I've ever recorded was around 12 -13 kW, and that was with everything running on a cold night and my car on charge.

Depends. Does the existing pipe have an easement/wayleave and does that detail exactly where the pipe runs? If so, it might need to be amended, but nine times out of ten these things just give the right to run the service under/over the land in pretty general terms. Worth checking, though. The chances are that it may be a pipe that was private, but which now will be owned by the water company, most probably as a communication pipe. The law changed a few years ago so that pipes across private land that had been privately owned became the responsibility of the water company, if those pipes were on the water main side of the meter and stop cock.

I suspect it may also be related to fine particles of steel from the polishing brushes getting embedded in the surface. Staining like this seems to occur when the fabricator hasn't been scrupulous at keeping all the stainless polishing stuff separate from other polishing stuff, I think. One option might be to see if the parts could be electropolished, as that should clean the surfaces and remove any minute particles of embedded ferrous stuff.

There's no real maintenance needed for 316 stainless in a non-marine environment, and even in a marine environment all that's normally ever needed is a wash and rub down. One thing that may be causing the staining is if the manufacturer either used a ferrous polishing system, something like steel wool, or a ferrous contaminated non-metallic polishing system. What can happen then is that minute particles of steel/iron get embedded in the polished surface of the stainless and corrode. The fix for that is to re-polish the stainless using clean green Scotchbrite pads to remove the contamination. Looking at the fittings I think they'd need to be removed in order to do a decent job. There are polishing firms around who could do this, but it might be an idea to test one handle first to see if this fixes the problem.

I'd agree, it's not 316. It's probably not 304/A2, either, as although 304 is less corrosion resistant than 316 I'd not expect it to show signs of ferric oxide like that in a non-marine environment. Might be an idea to test it with a magnet, as 316 is non-magnetic, 304/A2 is slightly magnetic and "Chinesium stainless" is almost strongly magnetic. The "Chinesium stainless" seems a curse that we have to live with, as I bought some supposedly "stainless" shed bolts that are now as rusty as an anchor.

No, it's laid to sag slightly.

Yes, the sheets were just nailed to the tops of the rafters. We have counter battens nailed through the sarking, in line with the rafters, then membrane, then the battens for the slates. The idea is to allow a free ventilation path up under the roofing to the ridge vents.

Our sarking is 18mm OSB. The last house we owned when we lived in Scotland used ~9mm birch ply as sarking. Traditionally it used to be planks that were spaced a few mm apart, but it seems that now pretty much anything could be used.

The spreadsheet @ProDave mentions is here: Heat loss calculator - Master.xls It has the U values, areas and airtightness figures for our build, but these can just be overwritten.

Looking at it from the lender's perspective, they will be concerned about the risk if there is an adverse event. They have no guarantee that the work will be completed, and until it is completed the value of their asset has been seriously depreciated by being partially demolished. The fact that you intend the work to be completed in a few months time is neither here nor there; they will be concerned that, right now, they are exposed to a risk that they knew nothing about. Worth noting that they probably have very little knowledge about what you're actually doing, so they may well be working on the worst case assumption.

I initially contacted a handful of architects locally, but wasn't very impressed with any of them, so opted to do the design and drawings myself. The drawing bit wasn't hard, as I've been using AutoCad for years, but the design took loads of iterations to get right, and even now I think a good architect could have improved on it. Having said that, we did save a lot of money by taking the DIY route, although we only had the time available to do this as a result of a 12 month delay in our plot purchase (that's how long it took to sort out a boundary error). That time enabled me to get up to speed on the building regs and go through maybe a dozen or more different designs.

The advantage of dry mix is mainly that it's easier to shovel, it clumps up on the shovel and so you can shift more of it. The annular gap around the suspended tank isn't that easy to get concrete into, either, so being able to shovel the stuff where it's needed is useful. Concrete used for anchoring a tank doesn't need to be particularly strong, as it's only really there to stop the tank floating up whenever it's emptied. As long as it's a good enough mix to cure to one solid lump, and key to the projections that poke out of the lower area of the tank, then that should be good enough.

As I suspected, an untidy bit of "click bait" advertising. It's worked, though, as we've all been giving this company the oxygen of publicity, which is all they wanted.

Articles like this are really just click bait for the advertisers who have links embedded in them, I'm sure. Write a bit of meaningless twaddle in five minutes, give the article a title that will get the curious to click on it, then carefully insert a link to the sponsor. With luck the article may do as this one has done and get picked up and spread around on social media...

It may be that the DNOs are getting increasingly concerned about unregulated microgeneration and the impact this has on the local LV distribution network, so want to try to restrict it. I doubt we'll ever know what has really driven the change, because it will be buried in layers of subtle lobbying, but it does seem that the rapid growth of domestic PV is beginning to cause the DNOs some problems. Here we often get periods on sunny days when the LV network sits solidly at the upper limit, 253 VAC, causing PV inverters to hard limit, for example. How typical that is I don't know, but it wouldn't surprise me if there are fairly large swathes of the distribution network that are starting to behave like this.

Good point about the Tesla PW2, as it's now looking a bit pricey when compared to the competition, although even with the lower prices of some of the competing systems it's still a bit marginal in terms of the cost benefit. If electricity prices rise, as I believe they will once we have widespread "smart" metering, then battery storage may start too look better, but right now it's very marginal, and highly dependent on the nature of the specific circumstances as to whether it makes sense economically.

If starting again today then I still think that we could get the cost to be neutral, as well as the environmental impact. Adding battery storage now will be more costly than if we'd added it as a part of the build, I think, but even so a modest investment seems likely to reduce our energy import cost, and make better use of our excess export. Our initial objective is to remove our peak rate grid import, which will both reduce our bill and give an environmental benefit, as it's better to only use off peak electricity, if possible. I believe that we may be able to be effectively off-grid for around 8 months of the year, with a bit of careful optimisation.

As you know, we're pretty familiar with the GSHP systems that Anthony has installed. I'd have to say that they are far from being optimal, and he has made expensive changes to them as a consequence of feedback from guests. We didn't complain about the loud noise from the GSHP, but I gather that other guests had, as Anthony spent a lot of money relocating the heat pumps from inside the cabins to outside, which did make a modest reduction in the noise level. It still wasn't quiet, though, nowhere near as quiet as our ASHP. The area there is pretty quiet, though, which makes any noise more noticeable.

Agreed, but the bottom line is that we generate a great deal more than we use over the course of a year, so no matter what, we are still a net energy contributor, rather than a net demand. As it happens, we will soon have a battery storage system, so more of our excess generation will be used, reducing our demand on the grid still further.

Not sure that's true, as the plan is to pay for export at the mean wholesale price, I believe. Certainly that was being discussed a couple of months ago, though as usual it seems that our government is way behind the curve. We had a system in place like this for microgeneration before the FiT was introduced, so that microgenerators could be paid for their contribution to the grid at a fair price. The fair price was around the mean daytime wholesale price, which today would be around 4.5p/kWh, which is what we get paid for export.

Not a problem, as I believe that the "fair use" criteria applies ( @jack can possibly say yay or nay, as it's his field of expertise, I think). I may be wrong, but I think that it's acceptable to quote from copyright material in order to illustrate a point, as long as you are not profiting from doing so. It may well be more subtle than this, but I've allowed quotes from papers and publications that I've written, on that basis. I have to say that it's rare for people to actually ask before using copyright material though. One case I remember well was a student from Lancaster University that submitted a paper that I'd written as part of his course work. What he didn't realise was that his supervisor was a friend of mine, who recognised his plagiarism straight away, and who 'phoned me, asking me to write to his student, just to put the wind up him. I still have the student's abject apology, although I'm not sure that this got him off the hook.

The combination of FiT and export generation to the grid (we export around 50% of all the energy we generate, now) gives an income of around £1000 p.a. Unfortunately, we missed the really high FiT payments, so we get less per kWh than the retail price, but it's still useful.

Joints in areas that are not accessible are absolutely fine, as long as they are not things like screw terminals. Crimps, soldered and heat sleeved, or Wagos in a box, are all classified as being compliant with 526.3:

Not too hard to get energy bills down to zero. We're running at around minus £500 a year for all bills except Council Tax and insurance. Annual house running cost, including Council Tax, insurance, water, sewage treatment, electricity, window cleaning and garden maintenance comes to about £1,600, most of that being Council Tax (Council Tax is current about £2100 here). That includes most of the "fuel" for my car, too.