jack

I disagree. Your current immersion is unable to heat more than the top of the tank because of its position. Putting a Willis heater low down would allow much more of the tank to be heated. Exactly. You were complaining about the complexity of a destratification pump. This is a potential solution. I don't actually know whether a Willis heater addresses all of your problems, but I can't see why you wouldn't at least look into it further. They're pretty cheap and there isn't much plumbing involved.

Look into Willis heaters. They take cold water from low down, heat it, and return it to the top of the tank. Do you have access to any sort of connector lower down in the tank? You might even get away with breaking into the cold feed where it comes into the tank. Then you just need a return connection at the top of the tank. I don't know whether there's such a thing as an adaptor that would allow you to blank off the immersion heater boss and provide a connector you can connect to the hot water output of the Willis heater.

Welcome. I haven't heard of Cortizo (which I think is the right spelling). Who recommended them to you?

The issue is that the American man's house could potentially be his heavily, even lethally, defended castle, so perhaps they're less concerned about pseudonymity.

What's a fad? Time of use tariffs?

With some of the time-of-use tariffs starting to be offered, I think we're approaching a time when batteries could make financial sense for some people. However, whether it makes sense in the long term assumes that the current electricity rates will apply for at least several years. That's hard to predict with any certainty. It's also hard to model. I'm coming to the end of my Octopus Go contract. The Go rates I'm being offered for a new term are terrible. There's another option with lower peak and off-peak rates (compared to the new Go rates), and also a longer cheap period, but I'm also thinking about whether Agile might make sense. It's extremely difficult to model though. Even if I can model our current usage, I assume that will need to change to get the best out of any variable time-of-use tariff.

It's a combination of ignorance and laziness imo. We had this with our plumber, who had never worked on a low energy house before. He started by proposing a 16 kW unit for our 289 m2 MBC twinwall construction house, then countered with a 12 kW unit when we told him how much energy would be needed. He was genuinely concerned about how much the internal temperature of the house would drop if it took 2+ hours to heat the DHW tank. Nothing we could say would convince him otherwise. In the end we went with a 5 kW Panasonic Aquarea and it's been perfectly fine. That said, if I were doing it again, I'd potentially consider a higher capacity unit. With time of use tariffs becoming increasingly common, the potential to push some or perhaps even all of your heating and DHW into the cheap times is appealing. It's harder to do this with a smaller ASHP. For example, we've been on the Octopus GO tariff for a couple of years. We only get four hours at the cheap rate. It can take up to two hours to reheat the DHW tank, leaving only two hours to pump heat into the slab. A more powerful ASHP would help reduce the time spent heating the DHW leaving more time for slab heating. Alternatively, or in addition, I'd also consider adding a buffer tank for the UFH so that can be heated during the cheap time to act as a reservoir for the UFH for the rest of the day. It's possibly less of an issue if you're considering batteries. They allow more flexible interaction with time of use tariffs.

I can't help much beyond agreeing with your 3.3 L/s calculation. Can you give some examples of the numbers you're trying to meet?

There really isn't a definitive answer unfortunately. HMRC is completely inconsistent: they treat similar situations differently, they tell you one thing on the form but do something else when they look at the facts. It's just a complete mess. Be aware that HMRC will potentially use anything you tell them (e.g., moving in date on the form) along with any available public information (VOA register, even Google streetview in one case!) to show that the house was complete according to some arbitrary standard more than three months before you put in your claim. Personally, given what's at risk I'd be conservative and go with the VOA date. Can you buy the materials in advance so you can reclaim? Even if you put it on a credit card, the additional VAT will more than pay for a bit of interest if needed.

Some of the bedroom outlets in our place have floor vents. It worked well for us because the ducts were going through the floor anyway.

Yes for the airflow settings. I'm not sure what other non-standard values you might have had in other settings. The only one that immediately occurs to me is the temperatures at which summer bypass kicks in and out, which might have been changed from the default.

I don't have an account, sorry. My unit doesn't have this functionality.

One of my kids is in central London every day this week for rehearsals and performances. Even with the congestion charge (which I never got around to registering our electric car for so we could get an exemption), public transport would be way more than double the price of us going up there in the car twice a day to drop him off and pick him up. Even off peak on a Sunday it costs well over £50 for us as a family to go up and back on the train, less than an hour each way. There're very few things I'm in favour of outright banning, but this is one of them. It'll never happen.

We've just ticked over 50k miles in just short of three years in ours. Occasional charging drama, mainly when we do a long trip that we aren't familiar with, but 99% very comfortable motoring at much lower running cost than an ICE car.

Buy a new one of the same sort. Put the old one in the new packet and return for a refund.

Yeah, I need to run some numbers. I've been on a smart meter for over a year so hopefully between that and the generation tracking on the solar system I can figure out what's going on.

I had an email from Good Energy (who still handle my FiT payments) yesterday mentioning such a change to how they paid out. I was a bit surprised by that, but assumed it was just them and not the system generally. Will have to have a think about this. I wasn't planning on changing tariffs, but there may be a financially better way of arranging our power usage.

No, I composted it well before using it (shredding massively helps with the composting process). Even if you don't compost, you can just let it dry out properly during a long period of dry weather. It's tough, but it's still a plant, and it won't stand drying out completely for long without soil around it.

I've got the older version of this: Not the fastest thing in the world, but if you have a lot of long thin (up to about 4.5 cm, I think) twiggy offcuts, this is very quiet and does a great job. With a bit of care, I managed to process a massive pile of brambles a couple of years ago.

The school my son went to had a strict "no coats or jackets inside" policy. Teachers would stand at the door from the outside making children take their coats off before they entered, even though the halls weren't that much warmer than outside. Even during Covid when it was cold and they had the windows open, a couple of miserable fvckers still refused to allow coats or even an additional jumper inside. Of course, the teachers doing this were were standing at the front of the class in a puffy coat over a thick jumper. In one class when the weather was particularly cold there was nearly a riot - some of the kids were shivering and a couple had blue lips. It took a surprising amount of parental backlash to get the school to relent even temporarily.

Funny you say that. Research is being done into using mycelium (the substrate that supports mushrooms) for all sorts of things, including insulation panels.

Jeremy hasn't been around for years, unfortunately.

To add: I've found the case, and this is what HMRC's current guidance is: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/revenue-and-customs-brief-8-2022-single-diy-claim-first-tier-tribunal-andrew-ellis-and-jane-bromley/revenue-and-customs-brief-8-2022-single-diy-claim-first-tier-tribunal-andrew-ellis-and-jane-bromley In summary, it sounds like it was a lot more complex than just submitting a second claim. Still possibly worth a read of the original case if there's a lot of money involved.

Couldn't agree more with this. It's difficult to access the surfaces of the fans on our unit. Partly that's due to where/how we've installed it, but easily removable components would make me far more likely to stay on top of keeping the unit clean. I've noticed our making a bit more noise over the last few months (7.5 years after installation) and suspect I might have a bearing on the way out. I'm not looking forward to that job!

There is some evidence (including a Tribunal case) to suggest that a second claim ought to be accepted. Look back through this thread - pretty sure it's mentioned, maybe in one of my posts summarising a list of Tribunal cases? Perhaps worth a shot given there's no fee for submitting the form.