Jeremy Harris

We must have been dreadful sinners during February, as we seem to have generated loads more than we did this time last year. Not sure if it's me or SWMBO that's the sinner though; I shall make some enquiries...

The only new house we've ever bought had turf laid front and back. Not sure if this is normal or not, though.

Might be an idea to plan for some form of active cooling I think. I doubt that winter heating will be a significant problem, but suspect that the impact of reasonably good glazing, which will act a bit like a "one way valve" when it comes to radiated heat, will create some overheating in summer, probably more so than with a relatively less well-insulated conservatory. An air to air heat pump isn't expensive to buy or run, and could deal with both the winter heating and summer cooling requirement. One that costs around £800 or so would probably do the job and cost less, and be more useful, than fitting wet heating.

Skirting radiators might be another option.

Several here are looking at installing battery storage, but the economic justification is pretty slim, unless you're able to to both generate and self-consume a fair bit of energy. The lower your overall electricity usage the harder it is to make the economic case stack up. For example, I looked initially at fitting a Tesla PowerWall 2, but worked out that the repayment on capital was likely to take longer than the usable lifetime of the batteries. There are other, more cost effective options, though, but it's still pretty tight in terms of whether or not a system would recover the capital investment within its lifetime. I'm going to be fitting a battery system before long, as I think I can just about get it to almost cover the initial cost, but part of my motivation is because we have fairly regular power cuts and being able to use the (separate) uninterruptible supply from the battery system during a power cut seems a very useful capability to have.

BS8417:2014 (not the outdated BS8417:2011) only refers to preservative treatment, though, not structural grading (which is what BS5534 is about as far as battens are concerned). Judging from the big knots present the battens in the photo haven't been graded as roofing battens.

The heat output of UFH near the edges will be pretty small, around 50 W/m² is on the high side of a typical UFH output, so you can guesstimate how effective this will be around the edges. If you want heat around the edges (seems like a good idea) then trench heating may be a better bet. It will have a fast response time (much the same as radiators) yet not take up wall space.

I'd reject them, too, as they aren't dyed, so may well not be roofing battens at all. I believe that all roofing battens are required to be dyed a bright colour (around here they used to be blue, but are now pink, no idea why).

Auto bleed vents are OK, but do need to be shut off with the cap when the air has been released. They can, and do, fail, leading to a leak, unless the cap is on tightly. I prefer manual vents, TBH, as I've yet to have one of those fail and cause a leak.

This build seems to have cured my lifelong fear of ladders, no idea why. I used to literally freeze up at about eaves level on a 2 storey house, with a white knuckle death grip on the ladder and legs shaking like mad.

I don't think it's getting in around the windows, it's hard to see how it can given the good job that's been done around them. I suspect that water is tracking in from the edges somewhere, and it just happens to collect on the underside corners of the window apertures, perhaps because there is a very slight fall on the underside along those track lines, with the corners of the window aperture being the lowest points. The weakest points, from your photos, would seem to be around the periphery, perhaps water is actually getting in through the wall, from the other side? @Onoff's suggestion of dye testing is a good one. I've done some dye testing, looking to see where underground streams came out on the surface, back when I used to do a bit of caving, and it's pretty easy to do. You can either use fluorescein, or you can use OBAs (optical brightening agents, used in washing powder to make things look whiter). OBAs can't be seen with the naked eye; we used to use tampons as detectors (they are pure cotton, with no additives, and come with a handy bit of string to tie them to sticks or branches so they can dangle into the stream) together with a UV light (one of the cheap fake banknote lights works well). Fluorescein is harder to use, as it needs to be diluted a great deal, but perhaps easier to get hold of (sadly I threw out a whole box of dye packs when we moved, scrounged from aircraft survival packs). Pity, as I could have sent a couple up to you. One small dinghy dye pack will dye acres of ocean green (and it'll dye your hands and anything else too), so you only need a tiny bit. Applied with a watering can in one area at a time, or perhaps painted on so that it will wash in with the rain, might be the best approach.

Pity decrement delay isn't included in the comparison, as it can have a very significant impact on overall performance. Making a decision based on just U value vs thickness vs price probably won't give an optimal answer for some forms of construction.

For us Bulb has a slight edge over all the others for E7, at 15.729p/kWh day rate, 8.148p/kWh off-peak rate and 20.44p/day standing charge. Octopus Go offers a much cheaper off-peak rate but needs a smart meter plus only has a 4 hour off peak rate, which isn't really long enough for us, a it can take 5 to 6 hours to charge the slab up with heat overnight in cold weather. Not sure if/when Bulb will be putting up their prices, though. If they do then Economy Seven Energy look to be the next best, at 17.903p/kWh day rate, 8.76p/kWh off-peak rate and 20.11p/day standing charge.

Exactly our issue, something I first noticed the Spring after the house went up. The house is fine in midsummer; it's always Autumn and Spring that cause the problems. Our cooling system came on for four days last week, each time it was at no cost (generation exceeded consumption by a lot), but I'd rather the heat didn't get in in the first place.

I'm pretty sure there is a commercial glazing unit that's like this, as we fitted them to the new lab/office building as part of the last job I managed. I remember it because the construction crew fitted roughly half the glass panes the wrong way around, and the next morning when the sun came out it was very obvious from outside which panes were not reflecting and which were, as the colour looked very different (they blamed Eastern European workers who hadn't read the labels on the glass - not fair IMHO, as the chap overseeing the job should have checked). Cost SRM a fair bit, as there were a hundred or so glazing units, around 2.5m x 1.5m, that had to be changed.

Speaking purely from personal experience, I really, really wish I'd designed our house so that the plant room was downstairs. Having heavy kit on the first floor is a PITA, that was rammed home further last year, when I swapped our old Sunamp PV (~70kg) for a new Sunamp UniQ 9 eHW (~160kg)...

I was sent on a course like that, on Dartmoor, with the raft having to cross the Dart to rescue a "casualty". In our case all the teams worked in parallel against the clock (and each other) to build the standard "four oil drums, two planks and a length of rope" raft. By pure luck, that summer I'd been part of a raft race team (the annual one organised by Truro Rugby Club back then). As a part of training for that race we'd worked out a very quick way to lay out the rope in a zig zag, place the drums and planks over the rope, then lace the whole lot together through the open ends of the loops, pulling the resultant lashing tight at the same time. Seeing that our challenge was pretty much identical, I quietly briefed our nominated team leader and he agreed that we'd use the same method. Not only did it work very well, but getting our raft into the water about 10 minutes ahead of everyone else caused a load of panic. One team tried to prematurely launch their raft only for it to fall apart as soon as it got in the water. One of their team members opted to remove his shirt and trousers and wade in in his underpants to rescue the debris, only to then discover that his Y fronts went see-through when wet. Everyone else said we'd cheated...

Makes a big difference having the right lat.!

If not claiming FiT then there's no need for MCS, and being in non-Part P land means nothing other than a DNO notification (down here even a non-MCS/FiT installation would mean getting it done by a Part P chap).

You can check lat. and long. using this tool: https://www.latlong.net/ Very roughly I'd expect you to be somewhere around 51.3°N, 1.3°E (lat. and long. respectively).

I think the key bit is that the doors are shaded by midday. I've found that most of the solar gain through our overhead shaded front glazing is from around 11:00 to about 15:00. From the data above I'd say that it looks very much as if you don't really need the brise soleil.

Yes, they aren't attached at the top or bottom, only at the sides. We opted for the Duette double layer ones mainly because they have better thermal properties than single layer blinds and because the cords are completely hidden from view. The cost of the blinds on the door and window isn't broken out separately on the invoice, I'm afraid, so I've no idea how much they were. I do know that the Duette motorised blinds we have at the top of the gable were the most expensive ones, by far, though. I've recently asked them to quote for two more blinds to fit to our French windows, so as soon as I get a price for those I can let you know.

Because these are a double layer, with a sort of honeycomb section when viewed from the edge (which isn't visible on ours when fitted) they seem to stay very even when closed. They can be opened from the top or bottom, so part of the window can be covered with an open bit at top and bottom if needed.

They are a lot easier to clean than venetian blinds, as they are a seamless length of cloth when closed, with no holes or cords showing, so it's easy to just run a vacuum cleaner over them with a soft brush nozzle. However, we've not had them long enough to see how they cope with dead insects etc, although this house tends to be pretty insect-free, as it's too well sealed for bugs to get in, it seems.

Certainly, they came from Conservatory Blinds Ltd and the model is the Duette Thermal conservatory blind: https://www.conservatoryblinds.co.uk/conservatory-blinds/duette-thermal-blinds/ Ours are in parchment, with parchment support bars.