Sparrowhawk

Yes, keen very amateur birdwatcher and enjoying the coastal waders and occasional marsh harrier down here. Are you? I have found Jeremy's threads invaluable, as well as people's assessments of products e.g. Sunamp when thinking "could that be better than replacing our tank like-for-like. It's also appears to be a less... intimidating forum than some of the others with better natured members and fewer spats and general aggro. We shall see if that holds true 😁 Great advice. I shall try and break down the "WTF do I do next?" into intellible bite-sized questions. Always the hardest part with a mind teeming with ideas and aware of the dependencies that "if I start to do this it'll impact this that and the other bit, which means I then need to do that as well and I think I'll have a nice sit down instead and pretend it's warm". I don't think I know what they sound like! We have a local pair and before we started taming the wilderness that was the garden the female used to bring pigeons and eat them under our bushes. On the second day of this cold spell the male snatched a bird off the bird feeder and I've spotted him hanging around on neighbours' roofs keeping an eye out for more snacks.

Hi everyone, 5+ year reader and finally taken the plunge to join. It's almost 3 years since we bought our house, a 1920's detached house extended twice (late 1990s/early 2000s, the latter extension considerably better quality than the first). I wanted to build a Passivhaus but the impossibility of finding a plot at a sensible price prevented that. We soon discovered this house was cold and draughty and we could see daylight in the eaves storage. Since then I've sealed all the obvious drafts, used a thermal camera to try and find others, had the 3 worst windows replaced with triple glazing (an expensive mistake: I thought it would fix these rooms as the windows weren't airtight but it didn't), but it's still a cold house. Living here during the cold spell that's just ending drove me to join this forum as I'm not sure what to do next. We need a new heating system (25yr old boiler, radiators of same age) which I'm expecting will make the house warmer but won't reduce our gas usage unless I can reduce heat loss. Looking forward to getting stuck in!

Same here. Prime candidate for cavity fill but they rewired by dropping everything via cavities, including an 80A cable to the 2nd fuseboard/electric cooker in the extension on the other side of the house. I have an email from a technical manager at an insulation company saying it's not a problem because the cables inside a wall don't move once it's filled with insulation, so if the sheath becomes brittle it doesn't matter... That's one I've joined this forum to discuss in more detail - once I land on the correct section to post on.