Beelbeebub

Just for completeness here is a graph of oil & gas production (hence the hugher BoE numbers) production from an oil and gas consultancy that errs on the high side of things. As you can see it still shows a big drop even with discoveries and prospects included.

Sadly you are probably right that this argument will keep popping up. Still, feel free to quote that post back at them.

Yeah but they give you 15p all the time even when they could be buying it at 1p wholesale. It also aids predictability. I know that I will get paid 15p for every kwh I export and it will cost me 13.4p for every E7 kwh I import . Given losses the two prices are essentially the same and I can effectively use the grid as an extension of my battery. It makes planning easy. I don't have to worry about onky partially filling my battery to maximise self use. Or what the weather will be. If if fill up 10kwh (£1.50) and the excess solar was 4wkh (60p) it cost the same (90p) as if I fill up 6kwh (90p) and exported nothing.

I have those sensors, they are pretty good for the price. The app can be a bit janky at times but they outperform way more expensive ones and don't come with a ton of bloat and cloud services.

Right, let's put this to bed once and for all. First, the UK produces less than 1% of world oil/gas. That isn't enough to affect the world price. Even if we were to double our production, adding 1% to the world supply isn't going to change the prices. Secondly, and this is the most important bit - our oil & gas fields are nearly exhausted. A quite from the latest consultation on the UK pop and gas industry "The UK’s offshore oil and gas industry launched sixty years ago, when the first licence to explore for oil and gas in the North Sea was issued to British Petroleum (BP). This long history of oil and gas production in the UK means our offshore basin is mature – much more so than other areas of the world. The most accessible oil and gas has already been extracted. Production is naturally declining and has done so for the last 25 years. Our North Sea no longer has the reserves available to meet domestic energy demand." (emphasis mine) Here is graph of the Uk's projected production if we carry on as now (green). Note that it is falling quickly and will have dropped to less than a quarter of today's production (which is only 50%of our consumption as it is) in less than 2 decades. Now look at the yellow and red bits. That represents our production if we drill everything we know about (orange) and everything we are likely to find (red). So even if we go drill crazy we will only change our oil production from 150,000 barrels a day to 200,000 barrels a day down from 700,000 barrels a day now. Like it or not, we are import dependent and it's only going to get worse over time.

I wonder, now we have rent tribunals, if the rent tribunals were to fix a fair rent ignoring the energy performance, then subtract the difference between the EPC running cost and the potential epc running cost if the property made C.

100% it's the scammers and subsidy harvesters. The core idea of encouraging insulation etc by making it cheaper is sound. It is hard to think how to do this without attracting the cowboys - see the recently unearthed external insulation debacle. My problem, as a LL, is how to upgrade old properties (mostly victorian) whilst navigating planning, conservation areas and finance. For example switching to double glazed windows makes a big difference to tenants. But it's expensive about £1k a window (they are big) and one building alone has 125 windows. Now this isn't an issue, we could just start plugging away at it, but if we swap out all the windows in a property for £5-10k (we've down a few) we get 2-3 points on the EPC, barely moves the needle. We've insulated all the roofs to at leat 200mm, most are 300+. But the majority of EPC inspectors won't actually look through the loft hatch - they just put it down as "as built" ie totally unisulated. Obviously wall insulation. That leaves walls and floors. Which are all solid so expensive and with downsides. My latest plan is to try and fit solar as that seems to have alot of points attached to it. I can get 10+ points for £10k of slap and batteries vs 3 points for £10k of windows.

Landlords already have to upgrade at their own expense unless the tenant (not LL) is eligible for certain subsidies. And those subsidies are crap - I think mainly there for subsidy harvesters. We organised one for a tenant. They came back with a package of measures including insulating the loft as it had no insulation. It def had at least 200mm of insulation, 300mm in places as it was up insulated when the roof was redone a few years ago. They also would onky do internal insulation but not pay for any redecoration, just leave the plasterboard finish. They also would only do the whole lot, not just the loft insulation. We had the same thing with windows. I the end we just paid for it ourselves. It would be great to increace the EPC ratings but the %of "poor" rental properties (less than c) is nearly identical to that of the owner occupied sector. Basically it reflects our poor overall housing stock.

There was one YTer who sat in on the latest Octopus "webinar" and apparently the question was put to the octopus CEO. The answer was it [getting rid of the 15p export] wasn't something they were looking at or had plans to look at. Of course he could be lying or they might start looking at it tomorrow. But there isn't much we can do about it. The 15p rate seems to be too good to be true and it will probably have to go - or at least go if you have an extra cheap rate well below the 15p eg EV tariff. To be fair, banning the ev tariff lot isn't a terrible thing. There were people exploiting it a bit (one YT guy has a couple of tesla batteries to exploit the rate difference). The best thing is not to build your financial case on high export rates but on self consumption. Treat the high export as a nice bonus.

Oh, I've moved house since then! 😁 The system I put in 14 years ago is trucking along just fine We swapped houses with my parents as they were struggling in their house and ours was designed for "elderly living". Their house was built on the late 90's when UFH was over new (to the UK). It's not the (now common) PEX/PB pipe akin to speedfit. It was a small bore rubber (actually thermoplastic elasomer - think edge of an aerobie or soft touch handles) pipe system. With a clever counter flow design to minimise the temperature variation over the length of the run, which allowed it to be laid "up and down" rather than in spirals. Turns out that isn't an issue anyway. Unfortunately the rubber started failing after about 5 years due to a catastrophic screw up over material compatibility (turns out it degraded when in contact with warm water with dissolved copper ions in it). At that point the company went bust so the "50 year guarentee" was useless. So my parents fiddled the system on at low pressure and temperature for the next 25 years. Interestingly it kept the house warm at a flow temp of below 40C. If it was still operational it would be great for a HP,! Unfortunately my dad's dementia meant he tried to fill the Ch system and forgot how to turn the filler off so it over pressured and burst loads of thr (now brittle) pipes. So it now leaks like a sieve and is mostly decommissioned. Ironically the only but that is still operational is the zones embedded in the slab as the concrete provided the structure to resist the pressure.

When I installed mine, I filked each loop via a hose and checked the water flowed out nicely as a way of checking for restrictions. The I pressure tested the system. I was also careful laying down the loops not to kink the pipe. One loop did get kinked and was lifted out and repaid with a fresh coil (the kinked coil was reused for a shorter loop where the knik was cut away) - took about 30 minutes extra. Given most of the loops require the flow valves winding in to restrict them anyway, even if there was a mild restriction as long as you can get the flow required by upping the pump settings and winding the restrictions down on the other loops it isn't a major practical issues (though a bad one from an installation quality perspective)

Isn't there a DC specific SWA cable now (the regular SWA not being compliant for DC)?

Pretty much every single UFH install checklist has a flow test (in that you fill the pipes with water so obviously you pick up any glow issues then) and a pressure/leak test - usually 24h. If any leaks or damage are detected the whole loop is replaced - it's never advised to joint the pipes. As Rick said, a bad install wil have problems, but that is true of any aspect of any building. I remember seeing a YT vid where an extension had some settlement and when the builder dug down the foundations had been filled with rubble including empty paint tins and bottles with just a skim of concrete over the top.

As someone who is slowly retrofitting radiators and fan coils to replace a failed UFH install (not for any of the reasons Gus cites though) - whilst adding a radiator is the simplest and cheapest option, it is not always simple or cheap and I have the advantage of preexisting distribution pipes to individual room manifolds. I'd also say that the floor finishes argument is not an issue in new builds because the low heat loss makes the target flow temps low to start with and you don't need to jack them up much to compensate for any furniture reducing output. We had our "bare" floor areas cut at least in half by rubber playmates, foam sofas and beanbag on the floor, rugs etc. And still the flow temp was 30C or less and the surface temp was onky a degree or so above target air temp. In fact the issue we had was as it was a concrete finish the slab temp to hold 22C was often no more than 23C, which feels a bit cool on bare feet (hence the rugs). It was only on the coldest of days (like -10c) that tge floor temp ever got to about 25C and didn't feel cold on bare feet. Of course, retro fitting may require much higher floor temps to cope with higher losses

We've been getting sun pretty much all week, but my problem not is my damn house is getting in the way! The sun is so low it doesn't rise above the ridge of the house. I get a brief 2h of direct sun, but fortunately generate 4kw over that time so can top up my battery nicely. At some point I'll lose the direct sun but that was a trade off I was willing to make.