jack

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):

Not visible on my phone, so I think you're right. I'll post it again tomorrow when I'm back at my desk.

That's odd. It's visible to me in both my post and where you quoted it in your reply.

I get all sorts of headaches with dry air - same in winter when we have cold, dry periods. It's all sinus related.

No, that's accurate. Bedrooms are cool but acceptable (to me if not my wife!) in winter. This is the upstairs hall temperature in January and February (lowest is 17.4 °C, highest is 20.3 °C): I'll be tweaking the control loop for next winter to see what sort of impact I can have on the lowest temps, as I now have more info available to let me analyse what's going on. If I were doing this all again, I'd consider tiling upstairs with a wet UFH system. Rugs down in winter for underfoot warmth, along with intermittent mild heating to keep the temp relatively stable. Rugs up in summer, with cooling as needed.

Panasonic are an option. It's been over 10 years since I installed mine, but their technical support department was happy to take my phone calls to troubleshoot our installation, which I doubt all companies would be happy to do. I remember we were getting an intermittent error that we couldn't find the source of. They suggested a slight change to something like flow rate and the problem disappeared. Even as a pleb, you used to be able to get a login to the Panasonic Pro website, which gave access to all their technical docs that aren't publicly available. Again, this info is long out of date, but I did a comparison between the Panasonic 5 kW model I eventually bought, and a Nibe 8 kW model. As you know, the power ratings are somewhat nominal, but I didn't expect the comparison to look like this: One thing I'm not sure about is conditions under which the ratings are determined. For example, periods of low single digit temperatures when it's damp (common in many parts of the UK during winter), defrost cycles can have a significant impact on COP. A couple of other things I'd consider are: What sort of functionality you get without requiring cloud access. Surface area of heat exchanger. If you can find a low power unit with a larger heat exchanger, my guess is that it's likely to require fewer defrosting cycles in cold weather. I'm sure someone (maybe @JohnMo) has mentioned that some ASHPs have some sort of two-stage system that can operate very efficiently at lower power on one stage, then bring the other in when high power is required (e.g., DHW heating). Can't remember whether it's dual compressors or something else. I imagine this sort of tech is more likely to be available in higher power units.