Crofter

I'd presume that in 50yrs time our oil and gas would be worth more than it is now. Nice little nest egg to be sitting on whilst everybody else burns their reserves.

My air to air system doesn't look like that. There's a normal outdoor unit like any other ASHP. Then under the floor there's the indoor unit, completely out of sight. Insulated 200mm ducts go from this too each room (smaller rooms split down to 150mm). The warm air comes out of wall grilles. One in the kitchen plinth, the others are just above skirting level. Each grille has adjustable vanes and a damper to restrict the flow. I've throttled down the kitchen one a little but otherwise haven't touched these. The house is 93m², the ASHP is 10kw, which I thought might be slightly oversized but it's what the installer suggested. In use, we tend to set it to anywhere between 18-20⁰C. The thermostat is in the hallway in the middle of the house. You can close doors on individual rooms if you want them hotter. So usually we leave bedroom doors open and that keeps those rooms comfortably cool, while closing the living room door lets the temperature go up to a degree or two more in the. We could adjust the dampers to achieve the same thing but opening and closing doors is easier! We do light the woodburner in the evenings so when I say we're spending £1-£2 a day, it's not quite the whole story. I reckon we maybe save £1 a day lighting the stove. Which does make me question the wisdom of spending so much time and effort chopping logs 😂 Edit to add: total installed cost was about £4200 including every little jubilee clip and clamp. Most of that was the supply and fit of the indoor and outdoor units. I ran all the ducting myself. A simple but time consuming job that the installer wasn't interested in taking on himself. I likely saved a lot of money by doing that myself. And just to reiterate, zero grant funding towards any of this.

What's wrong with your house? I've been pretty amazed by my heat pump. House is a very badly insulated 1970s bungalow, on an exposed hillside in the north of Scotland. It used to have storage heaters that were costing hundreds a month to run. I installed an air to air system and now I rarely spend more than £2 a day. Average daily usage this winter has been around 4-6kwh. It cost £4k to install so the payback times is likely to be easily under 5yrs, for a system that is better to live with in every conceivable way. Next step will be to spend about £600 installing PV and a diverter, and that should slash my DHW costs over the summer. I'm estimating a payback time of 2-3yrs on that.

So why isn't the industry making this case? The figures were seen in this thread area from the industry, and are likely on the optimistic side.

I'll bow to your superior knowledge on this, I was just going from what I could find as a lay person when googling the question. Numbers vary a bit but I'm getting estimates from 450-670m barrels between Rosebank and Cambo. So that's less than a decade at the consumption figure you've given above.

Analysis without numbers is merely opinion. The West of Shetland oil and gas won't keep the lights on for very long. Less than a decade if we extract everything. And some of this is likely to be uneconomic due to conditions.

1kwh is tiny, I'd imagine it would be much better value to fit larger batteries than that.

I never knew that. It does make sense though. A 4" SVP can adequately vent a pretty large building. I have a 2" SVP on my little place, so that I could hide it behind the cladding. It works perfectly. I can only do this because I didn't have to comply with building regs.

Wow. I knew it was expensive but I didn't realise it was quite that much!! Not sure about current prices but the guttering on the little house I built was under £200 all in. Been up about eight years and still looks brand new. So I think that after 50yrs I'll be coming out ahead on cost. I just wondered if I was missing something.

I've always wondered, what's the advantage of metal guttering? It's a huge price premium over plastic which, in my experience, works perfectly well. Is it mostly an aesthetic thing?

Would this be a good point to trot out this perennially relevant cartoon?

This is a little misleading, because China of course are manufacturing the whole world's goods. And there is more manufacturing being done in general.

I used to think that battery storage couldn't possibly play a meaningful part in supporting the grid. I'm starting to change my mind. I'm not saying it's necessarily the best way forward, but with LFP tumbling in price (no Co in these) and Sodium entering the market, the price for battery storage is far lower than anybody predicted even a few years ago. Add to that the proliferation of EVs, with lots of battery packs ready to go on to static storage once the vehicles have rotted away. And of course V2G should be part of the solution. By my back of envelope calculations, an average EV should be able to run a house for about two days straight. That might not get us through every period of calm, dim weather, but it will go a very very long way. We'll probably still need some gas generation to plug the gaps, but I genuinely think it will be possible to get to 10% or less fossil fuel dependency on the grid.

In a few years time I think we'll have stopped worrying about EV range. It makes far more sense to transmit energy down power lines than to drive it around in a battery. Better charging infrastructure will allow smaller batteries, lighter cars, more miles per kWh.

I hope I'm understanding you correctly, but are you saying that you're worried that a layer of ply underneath the kingspan would rot? I'd have thought it would stay pretty dry, it't got an entire hut on top of it. If it helps at all, the little place I little place I built has a floor build up of (from bottom to top): 9mm OSB, 300mm glass wool, 22mm moisture resistant chipboard (glued and screwed), bamboo flooring bonded down. This is completely exposed underneath as the building sits on piers. I'm in NW Scotland and we get our fair share of driving rain here. The underneath of the building remains perfectly dry. It's been up nearly ten years now and it looks the same as it did on day one. Glass wool is obviously going to be a bit more permeable than PIR, but I imagine you'll be fine. And OSB could be slightly more permeable than ply. Maybe.