jack

Talk from Octopus and a couple of other places this week about reducing the cost of electricity to those nearer renewables. Now that'd be an interesting approach...

We installed a lot of solar, so an ASHP lets me use some of that. Batteries will eventually help further. There's mains gas on the road, but the bungalow we knocked down wasn't connected to it. I didn't want to have to install a gas line down quite a long driveway. Didn't want a flue exiting the house. Didn't want to pay standing charges for gas. With a very low energy house, you can run the ASHP very low flow temps, which helps improve COP and make the ASHP more competitive with gas. I wanted to do underfloor cooling.

Welcome! True enough, but heat capacity is not the only factor. The environmental heat source (assuming heating mode) for a GSHP is not the water in the ground loops, but the ground the loops are in. While the water in the ground loops is great at transferring heat from the internal heat exchanger, the transfer between the loops and the ground they're in is by far the limiting factor. I was all for a GSHP until learned it would have been ~5 times the cost for a moderate improvement in COP and a lot more hassle onsite during the build. The energy bill for our all-electric house was £1000 the first year we moved in (8 years ago). Even if a GSHP had halved our energy usage, the payback period on the difference between ASHP and GSHP would have been something like 30 years. Admittedly that would have been significantly reduced with the increases in energy costs over the last couple of years!

For the last couple of years, every time I've finish a box of pozis, I've replaced them with the torx equivalent. They're just so much more pleasant to use.

Likely looking home, well done! Enjoy the rest.

I haven't watched the video, but aggregated data can still be of use even if you don't know the details of individual homes. I wonder whether they do per-house analysis. You can probably learn things by looking at (for example) the variance in temperature across the image of a house. If you have large deviations, for example, there could be cold-bridging.

When you say honed, do you mean a matt finish? We asked for a honed finish on our marble worktops and the supplier talked us out of it. I don't recall their reasoning. When we decided on polished marble worktops, my wife and agreed with each other that we'd be completely relaxed about stains, marks, and etching etc. The worktops are over 8 years old now and still look pretty good despite the extensive visible signs of use. Turning to your question, is it condensation dripping down that's leaving a mark, or water that's made it to the outside of the glass after filling it from the tap? If the latter, could it be limescale? And are you 100% sure it's water and not, e.g., juice or wine? For comparison, we've had zero issues with water marks on ours, and we haven't sealed it since it was first sealed when installed.

We went through a period a few years ago where spammers would join, post a few inoccuous posts, then go back and edit spam into them once they'd disappeared off the front page. It was just about impossible to police. We still get people posting the inoccuous initial posts, but they generally lose interest and stop posting when they realise the editing block is in place. Facebook has its own tools for reducing the impact of spam (on top of actions of the page admins). We don't have anything like that. We have over 40 times as many members as Camelot, but probably a similar number of mods. If anyone wants anything edited, just let a mod know and they'll happily do it for you.

Fixed - let me know if any issues.

Wow, that's amazing. It wasn't that long ago that 6+ months was the norm! I understand that they're now not checking every receipt in every claim, but will instead use sampling. I assume they'll also do a basic check like comparing the size of the house with the size of the claim. Touch wood, but the issue with VAT claims being refused due to HMRC choosing an arbitrary completion date also seems to have faded away. I don't check this form all that often, but I can't remember the last time we had a post on the topic, which is great news.

Quite a few councils have gotten themselves in serious financial trouble by getting involved in housing. The big issue with a lot of the ideas (most of which I like!) in this thread is that they rely on some form of competence in local government.

Came here to say this. Within the limits of our height restrictions, we allocated more height to the downstairs ceilings. We ended up with 2.8 m downstairs and about 2.55 m upstairs. Massive difference in feeling between the two. We also visited friends in their new house recently (a full gut-and-refurb which we hadn't seen before they did the work). It has a large open-plan area downstairs with 2.4 m ceilings. It isn't helped by the massive array of downlights, but the ceiling height is genuinely distracting and makes the whole area feel constrained. Downlights work even worse with low ceilings, because there's less space for the beam to spread. Standing under a downlight at a party isn't that nice given it's not that far from your head!

Whether you go for CAT 6 or 6A, make sure you go for solid copper. Cheaper stuff is likely to be CCA (copper coated aluminium).

Posts now merged.

There've been discussions on here doing this with a scrap electric radiator fan. Mount it to a frame, add a flexible surround (that you can tape to a window or a door), 12 V power supply (ideally variable), and a pressure guage, and you're set.