Jeremy Harris

The insulation grants were, and perhaps still are, a golden opportunity for scammers. We had bonded EPS bead cavity wall insulation installed a few years ago in our old house and I was more interested in getting a decent job done than taking advantage of any grant. All the suppliers, without exception, insisted on the grant paperwork, just because it gave them £300 of extra profit. I ended up using a company that did a pretty good job, not only because I watched them do it, but because a couple of weeks later a chap from their guarantee provider came around and asked if he could do a full quality audit on our installation, which involved drilling a few holes and poking an endoscope in, then neatly filling them in again. Apparently the warranty provide sampled random installations like this, to check that the work had been done properly. Then again, the company I used was pretty big and very well known in the South of England, so they were probably as concerned as the warranty provider about maintaining their reputation. It didn't stop them ripping me off, though! I paid them what I later found out was the full price of the installation, and they got an additional £300 from the grant................

I guess so, in all the council correspondence over the council tax fiasco they used the description in the planning application, which was misleading, as it's the wrong postcode and the wrong road (because our plot used to be the orchard at the bottom of the garden of a house that's on an adjacent lane).

How about this cat taking a ride inside the wing of a Sky Ranger:

I remember reading about this in Passive House magazine and thinking it was a good bit of forward thinking. But then the Irish Government has more need to worry about energy imports that many, with the EU rules gradually closing down the use of peat-burning power stations, I believe. Irish building regs are also tighter than UK building regs, from the little time I've spent looking a them, but that may well have been a reaction to all the crap houses that were being built in the big building boom a few years ago as much as anything else.

I went through this last year. Bear in mind this is experience of "English rules", though, they may well be different in Scotland. Before I could get the Royal Mail to list the address on the PAF database I had to register the address with the local authority street naming team (and yes, there is a fat fee to pay for this..................). They insist that any new address must be created by them and have a policy on what they will or will not allow as a house name (no numbers here, it's a very rural area). They accepted my suggestion for the house name, but they had already warned me that they would refuse a range of names that might be confused with nearby houses (being next to an old Mill, on Mill Lane, means that a fair few houses around here have the word "Mill" in them). Once I had the certificate showing a new postal address, the Royal Mail "should" have automatically updated the PAF, although we were warned this can take up to three months. I kept chasing and eventually had our address listed in around 8 weeks, and could then get the phone line put in. Even now our address doesn't show on a lot of the copies of the PAF that companies and organisations use, as often they will only update their databases once a year. We're still not showing on our electricity suppliers address database (or weren't as of a couple of months ago when they last checked), for example. We've never had a problem with the post, though, as the postman has watched the build from the start so knows exactly who we are, and just uses his initiative, rather than his employers address information. We do still have problems with postal package deliveries, because some of the couriers have yet to update their own copies of the PFA database, and refuse to accept parcels to any address not listed.

This talk of avatars has made me change mine. Not sure the old scrapheap photo looked right, somehow. I reckon one of the mods should crop that shampoo bottle photo and upload it as @daiking 's avatar........................

That would make for an interesting article! I wonder how willing people would be to help? If it was a BBC interviewer knocking on their door, asking them to do a bit on radio they might well respond more positively.

The problem of cowboys ripping people off always seem to arise as soon as there is any sort of government incentive or subsidy, and I've no idea how it could be stopped. The creation of the MCS was partially successful in controlling renewable energy retrofits, but the high premium associated with MCS accreditation added to the cost, making that itself a disincentive. I think the only reliable way to make incentive schemes work is to force the inclusion of performance monitoring. It's pretty cheap to do a thermal imaging survey, as it only takes ten minutes or so, and a "before and after" survey might be a way to show that the work had been done. I've no idea who would drive such a scheme, though. The council are already squeezed and have no cash, so that just leaves a handful of voluntary or charitable associations, who almost certainly aren't well enough organise to push something like this through.

The half life of Americium 241 in an ionisation smoke detector is 432 years, so the life of one of these is only really limited by things like the electronics ageing (drying out capacitors and probably corrosion on battery contacts) than the sensor degrading, as far as I can see. I strongly suspect that the 10 year life limit often quoted is related to the electronics, as 10 years is probably around the point that things like the electrolytic capacitors and battery connections start to fail. Optical smoke detectors are much the same, the life will be limited by the electronics, rather than the sensor (as long as it's kept clean). As for why heat alarms are more expensive, I think it's just because they aren't made in such large quantities. Ionisation and optical smoke detectors have been manufactured in the tens of millions for decades, whereas heat detectors haven't been that common in the high volume domestic market until relatively recently, I suspect, and then only really in new homes where building regs require linked detectors. I bet most people just buy cheap ionisation detectors when they are fitting them to an existing house. I think one of the main problems with smoke alarms is that a lot of people don't test them at all, and those that do probably only use the test button. If more people did a proper smoke test once a year it might help. Having said that, there was an article on the radio last week about children not being woken up by conventional fire alarms, and a suggestion that the tone needs to be a lower frequency and augmented with a voice warning of the fire. Seems a good idea to me, as apparently the children killed by that bastard that set fire to his own home slept through the sound of a working fire alarm.

Good idea. I can borrow a Flir camera easily enough, so could start with that and then just switch to the Seek Thermal.

That's a pretty good idea as way of motivating those looking to buy a house. I think the snag is that the local authorities would try their damnedest to block it, as they'd lose revenue. Our local authority was pretty OTT about trying to get us to pay Council Tax long before the new house was completed; they employ snoopers to drive around in the evenings, "breaking in" to building sites to check on the state of houses. I caught the woman who climbed over the fencing to peer into the windows of our place on CCTV. No PPE, not even decent footwear, and she just climbed over piles of rubble, scaffold boards etc and ignored all the "Keep Out" signs, just to see if the inside of the house looked finished enough for them to start billing us................... If the local authorities got a government grant to cover the loss in revenue it might work well, though.

Given the big hot spots on their walls I reckon they have to keep the heating on 24/7! These houses were only completed last summer, by one of the big-name builders. I've told the BBC lady that it will need a cold night, so we can get a good contrast on the camera, but I think I may just take some images when I know it's going to be cold, so that there's something useful to use (they want to put this stuff up on social media, apparently), just in case they can only do the interview bit on a relatively mild day.

Cheap energy is the real key, as at the moment, kitchen and bathroom bling is far more important to house buyers than energy efficiency. The chap that came around to value our old house (which we're selling) wasn't the slightest bit interested in the EPC I'd done, his view was no one ever asks to see them when they are looking to buy a house, they were just something the government insisted they include in the sales brochure.

Well, just got "off air", and managed to get across some points, but not really enough in the time. However, they now want to do a piece on thermal monitoring, so have asked if I will go around with them, doing some ad hoc thermal imaging surveys whilst they do an interview explaining what's going on. I'm going to try and take the opportunity to visit a big development near me that I know has loads of missing insulation!

Thanks again Declan. I suspect what we see reported in the media is really just the tip of an iceberg. Paul Buckingham (who's day job is as an energy assessor) of the AECB wrote an interesting report ( http://www.aecb.net/publications/publication-author/paul-buckingham/) back in 2013.

Thanks Declan, I knew someone had done it but didn't have the name, so I'll have a look at what he's been doing and see if I can bring it into the conversation without naming names.

Thanks Colin, luckily I have the key points about the Bovis fiasco, although I can't mention names - it's the BBC......................

This is the report I'm being interviewed about in an hours tine see this thread: Be useful if anyone has anything factual I can use in the interview.

There's a new report out by the GBC today (here: http://www.ukgbc.org/sites/default/files/08488 Places for Everyone WEB.pdf ) and the local BBC radio people are interviewing me about it in around an hour's time (I've had to speed-read the thing first thing this morning - not good!). The points I want to make are mainly to do with it being relatively easy to build better homes, if we change the way we look at construction and the methods we use, and tighten up on enforcing building regs, as having spoken to one of the production team this morning there was interest in the poor standard of new home construction. If anyone has any snippets (need to be factual) about recent new builds that are fairly poor in terms of energy efficiency, then it would be a help. I think some of them have already been mentioned in threads here and on Ebuild, and I have rough notes about them, plus some stuff I'd down doing thermal imaging of new builds locally, but any more info would be useful.

I think the main advantages of EPS are that it's usually a fair bit cheaper than PIR and has decades of proven use deep underground, as it's been used for things like basement insulation and boggy ground railway track foundation support for a long time now. PIR should be as durable, but there isn't as much long term usage data as there is with EPS. IIRC, they started using EPS under basement foundations in Germany around 40 years ago, which gives a fair bit of reassurance that it has the long term durability needed. PIR should be similar, as accelerated testing shows it to be OK, it just hasn't been used as much, or for so long, as EPS in this application. For a non-structural floor in a conventional build, like the one shown on that Kore floor insulation link above, then 200mm of EPS70 looks like it should give a reasonable performance, without too much build up in level and I'd guess it'd be a fair bit cheaper than PIR.

Back in the early days of Ebuild it was usually the plasterers who started trouble...............

This Willis heater was the invention of a Belfast plumber, a few decades ago, which is why you'l find them all over Ireland but they are relatively unusual here. The company is still going: http://willis-heating.com/

Worth mentioning that Kore EPS for the floor system we have has a lower lambda than some EPS, the info is on the Kore website here: https://www.kore-system.com/kore-products/floor-insulation/kore-floor/technical PIR has a lambda of around 0.021 W/m.K to 0.022 W/m.K, and Kore under floor EPS has a lambda of between 0.031 W/m.K and 0.036 W/m.K (the 0.031 W/m.K figure being for EPS70, the higher lambda for EPS100). So the ratio between EPS and PIR is not as bad as 2:1, more like 1.6:1 for a structural floor, or around 1.5:1 for a non-structural floor. For example, to get the same sort of U value as we have, for a structural slab, but using PIR instead of EPS 100, would (simplistically, and ignoring perimeter loss) reduce the insulation thickness from 300mm to about 190mm.

Thanks for the kind words, and sorry if the low energy thing gets a bit much at times! I'm afraid I've always taken the view that you get out of life as much as you're prepared to put in, and that helping others, in turn helps them to help more people, so, with a bit of luck, perhaps it helps to make us all a bit more altruistic, making a sort of virtuous circle. This attitude does backfire from time to time, though, as I've had more than one person exploit my belief that learning, and then sharing what you've learned with others, is something they could exploit for personal gain. What really motivates me are the changes I've seen in my lifetime, from a society where learning how to, and then doing things yourself, sharing that learned experience with others, and taking pride in doing that, change into a society where fixing things, or making things yourself, are seen as weird hobbies, with the "normal" thing being to just chuck stuff away that stops working, go and buy something new, or pay someone to do something you could do yourself, without a thought as to how rewarding it would be to use your own resources and then pass on what you've learned to others.

Off the top of my head I think we've had around 7 or 8 prospective clients come to visit us, with our blessing. Similarly, when we were looking around, the builder that built our house let us visit two of their completed builds.