jack

I've deleted the duplicate post.

Any particular reason to place this upstream of the MVHR unit? I may be missing something, but this way you'd lose some of the "coolth" through heat exchanger inefficiency. That inefficiency could potentially be worsened by moisture in the outgoing air condensing due to the cold incoming air.

Generally yes, but only if humidity is lower outside than in. Where I am, humidity is still high, and is forecast to rise through the night into the high 80s. Thankfully it should drop a fair bit through tomorrow.

I lowered the flow temp on our underfloor cooling from 16 deg to 14 deg a few days ago, in anticipation of the several day heat wave. The surface of the door (polished concrete) slowly fell to a minimum of 18.7 deg a couple of days ago. It's slowly drifted up to 18.9 deg since. In the middle of the afternoon today, I noticed some darker spots on the surface of the concrete. Within three hours of noticing that, entire sections of the floor in the kitchen were slightly damp. We've never seen so much as a whiff of moisture in 7 or 8 years of using underfloor cooling. It's amazing what a two degree flow temperature difference coupled with high humidity (~80 inside at the moment!) can do. I've turned the flow temp back up and will monitor.

You need some ventilation even when everything is closed up. Draughts will do it if have a draughty house. MVHR is a way of providing that ventilation without bringing in full temp air from outside to replace your precious cool air. As noted, MVHR isn't 100% efficient. I tend to keep it turned on as low as possible during weather like this, as that reduces the losses in absolute terms (i.e., you lose double the amount of energy with the same 90% efficiency if you double to airflow).

How so? All MVHR does is try to maintain any temperature difference between inside and outside. If it's cooler inside than out on a hot day, then MVHR will help. Or are you thinking about how MVHR would (or wouldn't!) work in your draughty house?

I'd just tell them it's already there because it's an existing dwelling and ask whether they need more info. If it's listed on one of the broadband checker sites, you could include a screenshot of what's available at your address.

You're lucky you haven't seriously injured yourself. Table saws are one of the most dangerous tools in the shop, even when used for what they're designed for. You can use a table saw for cross cuts, but you need a cross cut sled or similar. Easy enough to knock one up, but even then it really isn't designed for cross cutting long pieces of wood. 100% chop saw territory.

That's no way to refer to the lady.

We used it in a few places but didn't tile directly onto it. One thing I'd suggest thinking about his how porous it is. I don't know what adhesive you plan to use, but I'd guess it would suck a lot of water out of, say, flexible cementitious adhesives. All speculation on my part, so please don't rely on it! Yeah, it's so much more challenging to work with than plasterboard. However, once up, it's dead solid, and you can hang just about anything off it.

Someone mentioned that Ajax are quite expensive, so you could add a line to the prompt above asking for good value options.

https://archive.ph/sYtiH

Thanks, that's much more like it. No way it could have been such a large number.

Not clear from this how they work it out, but it appears the costs include everything: Also, could this insane number possibly be right?: I think the UK is on track to spend something like £1.5b on curtailment this year, which seems a lot. Could Germany really be spending nearly 300 times as much? 😶 And that's down from €554b in 2024.

What standing charges do EU countries have?

Obviously it has its limitations, but this is exactly the sort of question that AI very good at answering. I just put the following prompt into Claude: This was the reply: Try modifying the prompt if you want something different. I just bunged in what I thought were some reasonable assumptions.

If I'd done no research and just listened to 90% of my installers, we'd have ended up with worse outcomes in just about every area of our build. I think it makes good sense to get an understanding of anything technical before taking advice from someone whose job involves maximising profit from you.

FFS, that's ridiculous.

I've hidden the Boffin's Corner one to avoid opening two discussions.

Non sequitur alert.

Yes, but the combination needs to be inventive. Adding, say, a lock to an enclosure isn't ever likely to be inventive given how ubiquitous the principle is.

The international search report says that only claims 9, 10, 29, 31, 34-36 are novel, and concludes that none of those involves an inventive step. From a quick look, I don't even think all of the supposedly novel claims are actually novel. For example, "novel" claim 29 merely defines the step of removing an existing hot water cylinder from a domestic building. That doesn't sound very novel to me.

I've done some digging (well, no-digging) too, but when I'm avoiding work, I tend to do so at my desk. It feels less like I'm shirking than if I went out and did what I actually want to do!

I think even the RHS is slowly starting to come around to the idea that destroying soil structure by repeatedly digging over is counter productive. I've wasted far too many hours watching Charles Dowding talk about no-dig methods on YouTube. He has an incredibly relaxing presentation manner.

@mistake_not @marshian This is the image (I also added it back to the first post):