jack

Can't help you with the on-tape stuff, but I don't suppose the PWM rate of the driver is adjustable via the Eldoled programming interface?

Admittedly I don't have any heating upstairs, but this is very much not my experience in winter. It's always 2-3 degrees cooler upstairs than down in winter. We're just at the time of year where that changes. In summer it's a lot warmer upstairs, and maybe a central extract upstairs would help when the MVHR is in summer bypass mode.

I'm very late to this but we have an insulated concrete raft: up to 300 mm EPS, ~100 mm concrete slab, then ~70 mm polished concrete screed (no insulation between structural slab and screed). I work from home and almost never wear shoes inside, so I spend a lot of time walking around on it in socks. Yes, it feels hard underfoot, but to be honest I don't notice it. As for temperatures, I had dinner at a friend's place mid-winter many years ago. It was a refurb with building regs insulation levels throughout. Top level was engineered oak flooring. I don't know what flow temperature they were using, but I found it extremely uncomfortable underfoot. My feet were sweating and I found it extremely distracting. TBF, my wife didn't notice the temperature. Our floor temp slowly wobbles around 19.5-21.5 degrees during winter, based on a 25-28 degree (weather conpensation dependent) flow temp. It doesn't feel warm underfoot, but it's perfectly comfortable to walk around in socks.

1. I was responding to you about EVs in general, not Teslas, since that's what you were referring to: 2. Assuming the 1% number mentioned by Tesla is reasonable for other manufacturers, my battery should lose up to 0.38 kWh per 24 hours. That's less than 2 miles, which is exactly in line with my comment: 3. The numbers given by Tesla in the link you provided suggest a 3 kWh/day standing consumption is far too high. Assuming a 54 kWh battery (which is what Jeremy's would have been, I think), 1% is 0.54 kWh, which is about a sixth of 3 kWh. In summary, parasitic losses are a thing, but are nothing like the thing you implied.

I've never measured it, but 3 kWh would be over 12 miles at our usual consumption rate and it definitely doesn't lose anything like that when it's sat in the driveway.

I did say "at worst". I'm basing that part of my comment on experiences several BuildHub members have shared over the years.

The main issue with committees is that a lot of people sitting on them are at best ignorant of planning law, and at worst know the law but intentionally subvert it to suit their personal agendas. They needn't be a bad thing, it's more that the introduce unpredictability.

My recollection is that the neighbour consultation date is nominal, and that they still have to take into account any (relevant!) objections received in time for consideration before a decision is made. Of possible interest is the question of bringing the application into committee. Our rules say an application is brought into committee if it receives a certain number (5, I think) objections. It may be that the consultation deadline is a factor in whether the number of objections triggers a committee review. Makes sense that would be the case.

Fears were rising a few months ago about the elevated sea temperatures this year's anticipated El Niño might bring. Interesting/worrying how extreme it's looking already.

There's an old book about designing homes called "A Pattern Language". A lot of it tends to the esoteric and it can be a bit new-age airy-fairy at times, but there're also some useful (and often research-based) observations. One of those is that balconies less than a certain depth (about 6", from memory) will rarely if ever be used. Edited to add: I found this: One more link: https://archive.curbed.com/2019/7/11/20686495/pattern-language-christopher-alexander

100% this. Stop wasting time and emotional energy negotiating with people who aren't negotiating in good faith. Tell them politely but firmly what you're going to do, provide copies of the documents supporting your right to do it, and then crack on.

We have balconies at the back of our house - a full width one outside our bedroom and another outside one of the kids' bedrooms. When I say they are never used, I mean no-one has ever once set foot on them for any reason other than to sweep them. They introduced significant cold bridges we didn't notice until it was too late, and they absorbed a lot of money for something that isn't ever used. There are cases where brise soleil make sense. We really ought to have one above our south-facing slider, for example, as that would cut a huge proportion of the solar gain we get through the summer months. I think for south facing windows, they can do a good job of cutting a lot of the direct sunlight through the middle of summer days. We actually have some of the windows on the south side set back in the the cladding by ~400 mm, and that's actually enought to cut out nearly all of the sun in the middle of the day in summer (the windows are only about 500 mm high, to be fair). But for other windows, especially east and west facing, I think external blinds work a lot better. We have them on west-facing windows and it's quite extraordinary how well they work to keep heat out. No cantilevered brise soleil could have achieved the level of heat-exclusion achieved by the external blinds. You can also have the blinds stay down only when needed - so we don't lower the east-facing blinds at the rear of the house at all in winter. In summer, they come down when it gets dark, feather slightly open at 7 in the morning (so you get light and can see out, but no direct sun), then retract completely in the afternoon.

Get into GPT. Apparently this is exactly the sort of problem it's ideal for solving.

I hope he's right, but I doubt he is: https://skepticalscience.com/flaws_of_ludecke_and_weiss.html

Ignore the fact that the Willis heater is external - the two situations are almost exactly the same (albeit there might be slightly more stratification in the Willis heater example due to how/where it introduces the heated water to the tank - an internal immersion is more likely to cause some turbulence/mixing). In both cases, buoyancy causes hot water to rise and displace cold water downwards, and also in both cases, the distance that the cold water will be pushed down is limited by the vertical position of the heater.

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.