jack

I believe Dyson has significantly changed its approach to filters over the years. No idea whether the current approach is better or worse than the first generation Dyson you had, but it's definitely different!

It also has a high silica content, I believe, meaning it blunts tools pretty effectively.

We were told to use stainless mails on our larch cladding, or face a high likelihood of staining. The supplier insisted on this even though we weren't buying the fixings from them. Might it make a difference whether local or Siberian larch is used? We had the latter.

Worth a call to the GSHP manufacturer to see whether they have any thoughts? I found Panasonic's tech department very helpful when I had a couple of odd errors during installation.

No idea on 1 and 3, but re: 2, do they really need to have two high-rate people there at all times for all jobs? Seems like overkill to me. I especially think that an UFH specialist is pointless. The UFH circuits are trivially easy to understand and could easily be handled by the GSHP specialist. And what is the UFH specialist doing for the 6 hours it will apparently take to flush the heat exchanger?

We made the silly mistake of buying a Dyson upright around the time we started building the house. I was stunned at how flimsy it was - the whole handle flexed when you twisted it to steer. After only a few weeks' ownership, my wife made the mistake of bringing it over to the new house and vacuuming up some concrete dust off the floor with it. The motor developed a horrible high-pitched squeal that's never gone away. A few months later, the mechanism that redirects air when use the wand jammed so you couldn't use the wand properly. The mechanism that releases the drum for emptying has always been stiff and difficult to operate. I'd never buy one again. It's a shame, because there's some brilliant technology in them. I just don't understand why they need to be so flimsy. We then borrowed a Henry from a family member who hires them out (he runs a plant hire business). According to him, they never, ever break. One of the gusy we had onsite said that he'd been given one by a mate, which he owned and used onsite for 5 years before realising you could get bags for them! The difference is palpable. Unbelievably, the cheap industrial Henry is quieter then the expensive domestic Dyson. The suction probably isn't as good, but frankly you can have too much suction on a deep carpet like we have upstairs (and you can't modulate the Dyson's suction power down). The bags are cheap - 50p each if you buy on Amazon Prime with other stuff. There's no way we'd be able to get through enough bags in the machine's lifetime to make up even half of the Dyson's higher price.

Welcome to Buildhub. This assumes you need high flow temps to keep the house warm in winter. As Jeremy said above, that isn't necessary in a house with this level of insulation and airtightness. We run at 25oC, which is the lowest temp I can get out of our ASHP in heating mode. That does us fine during even the coldest spells in winter (as an experiment, I did try a temperature compensation curve that edged the heat up to around 28oC during really cold weather, but we roasted!). We still haven't switched on our heating yet despite having concrete floors throughout the ground floor of our house. It's starting to get a bit cool, but my wife hasn't started complaining about the cold yet, so it can't be all that bad! I can't see why the RHI would be affected by not having upstairs heating. From memory, you calculate the whole house heat loss and figure out how much energy is needed to heat it. Why would having heating upstairs change your heating requirements? (edited to add: perhaps they're assuming you'll need higher temps downstairs to cope, which brings about a penalty per the RHI - not sure). I also don't understand the comment about sizing the ASHP to cater for heat loss from the ground floor only. Surely you size it for the heat loss of the house, in which case it doesn't matter how it's split between upstairs and downstairs. That said, I'm another with an MBC house. Unfortunately, we installed no heating upstairs. It's usually 1-2 degrees cooler in the bedrooms, which is fine, but I'd firmly recommend some form of low level heating to take the chill off the bathroom floors. UFH heating would be ideal. Electric may be useful to avoid getting too much heat into the structure, but if it's only on for a short period morning and night at low temp, I think a wet UFH system would be fine too. You do need space for it - annoyingly, we had MBC drop the joists an extra 50mm to allow space for UFH build-up in the bathrooms upstairs, then changed our minds and built it back up! It won't be enough to heat the house all year round, but it may be useful to take the edge off the slightly cooler incoming air from the MVHR. It's not really a primary form of heating, but more a way of making things more comfortable by making up for the MVHR losses. As someone said above, think hard now about how you're going to manage potential overheating. We decided not to include external blinds on one large east facing window, and we get a huge amount of solar gain through that in the morning during summer. The external blinds on the western window do a sterling job of keeping the heat out though. Agree with that. An interesting point, though, is that there are several accepted ways of calculating heat loss for the RHI (this is from memory, so don't quote me!) I don't doubt that there are ways to manipulate the calculations to end up with an energy consumption estimate that's far more than the house would actually use. Still not sure it would be enough to make the RHI worthwhile in most cases, unless you can find a tame RHI installer who's willing to certify someone else's work.

Ah, sorry. That was thoughtless of me.

Same(ish) with us: open plan kitchen diner, connected living room, and a completely separate snug. The snug is small - 3.5 x 4, from memory - but it gets used a more than just about anywhere else in the house. It's painted dark matt blue (even the ceiling), and has dark carpet and furniture, to try and keep it feeling, well, snug.

My guess is that you have one opportunity for a frank and free-ranging discussion with this guy. He knows exactly what he's done (just like he knew exactly what he was doing when he lied to you about building a single bungalow when you bought from him). It's touch and go just how much of a spanner will be thrown into the works if you go all out on a formal objection - potentially everything could come crashing down, or the council may think it's too hard to think of these applications en masse and will simply treat each on its face value ignoring the impact each has on the other. I'm not sure exactly what's been built or just has planning at the moment, but overall, do you see a way that he could legitimately develop the entire site while providing the requisite amenity space for all proposed buildings? If not, then he may be VERY upset at you throwing a spanner in his works. If you choose not to speak directly with him, one possibility would be to get someone else - a tame planning consultant perhaps? - to submit an objection without naming you. Whatever you do, I'd suggest that you may want to ask us to hide this thread in the near future!

What are the main differences?

Since bedrooms 3 and 4 are only 2.3 metres wide (and some of that width is presumably not full height), I suspect he's playing the "ask for more and negotiate back to less" approach to planning. Also, the western one seems very big for the area of land allocated to it. Do you know whether the 50% curtilage rule applies in this situation? It might just squeak by even if it does apply, but worth checking. I don't know the rules about leaving a property in a forward gear - does that apply here, given that effectively they're building new houses and defining new plots?

That's the interesting thing about just about everything he does. He doesn't just speculate in a science fiction sort of way, but looks ahead and takes bold, concrete steps.

On topic (ish): https://imgur.com/gallery/MDMLh

I met Juraj (George, I believe he goes by) several years ago when looking at using the architectural practice he worked at. Really nice guy who appears to know his stuff.

I think he was talking about lithium sulphur batteries in particular. I agreed completely. I don't use the car anywhere near as often as my wife. When I do get into it, there's a decent chance it's going to be low on fuel, because getting petrol involves an out-of-the way drive which she hates doing. I'm assured that when we get an electric car, she'll plug it in every time she gets out of it. Certainly that behaviour will be reinforced the first few times she realises that an "empty" electric car is going nowhere for a while, because it can't be driven on fumes to the petrol station on the way to wherever she actually wants to go! This is how it will eventually be for all but the rich. Self-driving cars will also be involved in far fewer traffic jams, because they will self-route as a group to avoid them. Tailbacks at merge points will also be reduced, because self-driving cars will optimise their spacing before and afterwards to maximise throughput. There's so much work going on in this space that it's unreal. Self-driving cars are the next mobile-phone-type paradigm shift for society, imo.

I remember reading that. I'm not sure if it's how the book starts, but I do remember something about aliens being able to understand everything about human behaviour other than why they insist on surrounding themselves in metal boxes before going anywhere. Oh, and that very unexpected death in the middle...

No, just a very powerful stream.

It's been done several ways: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_transmission#Microwave_power_transmission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WREL_(technology) Even using ultrasound: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBeam

One of the problems with cars is that they tend to concentrate their pollution in cities. Even if efficiency were the same, it would still make sense to consider remote production (enabled by electric cars) in order to make cities safer to live in.

Our younger one is part racehorse, I'm sure.

Great news Lizzie, sounds like a satisfactory outcome on a crappy situation. That said, it's unacceptable to be shouted at in this situation. I know I'm a bit soft, but I'm not sure I could personally work with someone who'd reacted like this to reasonable feedback on unreasonable workmanship. Also, where is your project manager in all of this? Really, having it out with a tradesperson over shoddy workmanship shouldn't be your job! Anyway, well done for standing your ground. I'm pleased he apparently knows how to skim!

Our kids virtually never remember to flush the toilet or wash their hands on their own, despite many, many years of pestering.

I'm sure that's part of it, especially with the Genvex where you have only a single UK supplier of a relatively unique product. However, the higher prices often seem to exist even where there's more than one supplier of the product, and the product itself is competing with other comparable products. It does seem worse with products (like MVHR) that are still considered somewhat niche in the UK.

Quick update - I had a closer look at this tonight and note that the lid actually just clears the actuator and rests on the tiles immediately above.