jack

Pretty clear from the background digging @AliG did that they knew a lot more than they were letting on.

I was very happy with our architect. He was excellent on both the design front and the planning process (we replaced a 90 m2 bungalow with an ultramodern, flat-roofed house of 290 m2 in a very conservative area, and it sailed through planning with his assistance). I don't think he was particularly knowledgeable about PassivHaus principles when we engaged him, but we used MBC Timberframe as a builder, which short-circuited a lot of the potential issues around, e.g., airtightness detailing and cold bridges. I know he's used them a few times since so I guess he's happy with what they offer. He's based in Farnham, Surrey. I don't know what sort of budget he targets now (it's been over 8 years since we engaged him), but his speciality is ultra-modern family homes. Drop me a PM if you'd like his details.

If it had been your wall, sure, but it isn't your wall, it's theirs. Unless their deeds require them to maintain a wall on that boundary at their expense, you can't make them repair it if it's damaged. If it does fall down, all you can do is sue them for the cost of any damage (likely minimal if it doesn't hit anything) and clearing the land (not much given they can just pick the bricks up themselves).

Just seeing how much disruption and time has been involved in refitting gas mains around my town over the last decade, I don't imagine residential installations will ever happen in the UK.

I believe there's a common forward spinning reserve market that operates across several countries in the region, but yes, Danish generators are more likely to be bidding in this market with wind turbines. Low grade "waste" heat from power generation is used in some northern countries to heat water for district heating systems. I don't know how much that improves the overall effective conversion efficiency.

I've worked with a turbine manufacturer on and off for a few years and am pretty sure wind turbines are already providing spinning reserve in some Scandinavian countries.

How is that any worse than you arguing that using the grid to charge a car doesn't reduce fossil fuel consumption?

Gas is inherently a less carbon intensive (CO2/energy out) fuel than petrol/diesel, plus CCGT power plants make their use even more efficient. On top of that, most of the time, a significant proportion of the power provided by the grid comes from wind and solar etc. How does using grid electricity to charge a car mean you not "cutting use of fossil fuel"? Yes, but it will simultaneously reduce the amount of petrol or diesel burned by considerably more than that extra gas, for the reasons above. I feel like I'm missing something in the argument you're making?

Someone who is required to recuse themselves from any decision involving them?

This makes my blood boil, but well done you for sticking it out. There ought to be an independent complaints body with the power to remove the right of councillors to be on a planning committee if they're shown not to follow the rules.

I looked into adding an insulating "skirt" hanging down from the insulation under our slab, and heating underneath that as a sort of thermal store. Far too much excavation required to make it feasible. I did wonder about whether you could calculate the rate of heat movement and bury pipes at a depth sufficient to provide a ~6 month time offset. Add heat during the summer months, and have the heat "pulse" arrive at the slab during winter. Again though, expensive to do, experimental to say the least, probably huge round-trip losses, plus at best all you're doing is stopping/reducing heat loss through the floor.

I considered this before we built our house as well. 10 mins of research to conclude there was no way it could make economic sense!

I'm not sure whether you're interested in DIYing a solution, but it's probably still worth reading through what Jeremy Harris did with his borehole (he had hydrogen sulphide in the water, among other things). He explains a lot of what's going on and the different things he tried to solve various problems. He turned it into a PDF here: There have been other posts about this too - Google (note: may be less effective with other search engines) the following text: "hydrogen sulphide" buildhub

Merry Christmas all, and happy building for next year.

Welcome Steven, good to have you aboard. It's best to keep questions to a single sub-forum, so I've hidden one of the cross-posts you did on the topic you're asking about and removed it from the introduction above. For others, here's a link to your question:

Not my experience. We run our tank at 50 degrees and there's no issue at all with the mixers, even as the tank draws down and the hot water temperature drops. They're Crosswater Mike, for reference. Actually, we have a cheap mixer set in the downstairs shower and it's fine too.

I meant think about installing both heat and smoke alarms, specifically in the plant room. I'm not sure whether either is compulsory, but it's a small price to pay for a bit of extra safety.

I'd rephrase this as "should not, but definitely don't rely on it". Rather than re-hash a discussion that's been had in detail elsewhere on BuildHub, I'd point people here (I think you may need to have made a certain number of posts to access this sub-forum): It was a large number of claimants over many years. Originally, HMRC said on the claim form that if there was any question over the completion date, the date on the completion certificate could be relied upon. They removed that language from the form perhaps 10 years ago. Over time, they tightened up their approach until the reached the point they were interpreting the word "completion" or "complete" (can't remember which) in the relevant act to mean that any activity that could be mapped to that word started the three month clock. This was despite the claim form itself plainly stating that the clock started when the completion certificate issued, unless the claimant chose to use different evidence of completion. The trigger they most commonly used was being placed on the valuation register, presumably because that's easily verifiable information and is prima facie evidence that the house was complete enough to be habitable. But there's at least one example (it's somewhere on the forum) of them finding a Google streetview image and concluding that the house looked finished several months before the claim was submitted. ^^^ Now we're talking ^^^ I put my claim in 5 years after we were put on the council tax valuation register (which was around the time we moved in). I have absolutely no idea why our claim was allowed without so much as a murmur when others were still being rejected at that time, even for people who'd moved in only a few months before making a claim. One factor appears to be whether there are are receipts for significant amounts dated shortly before the claim is made. HMRC has lost a number of cases at the appeals tribunal over the last few years. Unfortunately, since the tribunal is administrative rather than judicial, every decision stands by itself and cannot be used as precedent for future cases. They should tend towards a consistent outcome over time, but for the time being there's always a risk of a particular tribunal going against you. That happened to one claimant shortly after a couple of the cases that were most damning of HMRC's behaviour. @bob the builder 2, I don't think there's a simple answer to your question, but hopefully the answers so far will help you identify the likely risks.

From memory, it happened while they were filming, and you hear it in the background.

There's no need for a one-to-one correspondence between the falling outside temp and the flow temperature compensation. My flow temperature only increases by about 0.3 degrees per degree of (falling) outside temp change. You need to figure out what the appropriate gradient is for your house, which may need some experimentation. Maybe it's just how you've written this down, but this table isn't right. When it's -4 outside, you want 45 degree flow temp, and when it's 16 outside, you want 25 degree flow temp (ignoring, for the moment, my comment above about there not being a need for a one-to-one correspondence between the falling outside temps and the rising flow temps).

Welcome to BuildHub. Do you know the make and model of your MVHR unit?

But you disparaged people for panicking about the high usage they could see during cold snaps. I don't disagree with anything else you say. ASHPs are absolutely being missold, designed badly, installed shoddily, and commissioned poorly. More government funding is just going to bring in more cowboys, unfortunately.

I genuinely can't understand your relentless hostility towards smart meters. Literally all they do is tell people how much energy they're using. I've personally got a lot out of having one over the last few weeks. If someone seeing their usage is enough to panic them then surely it's better they know now than when the bill arrives? You know that there are people who are virtually unable to turn on their heating because bills are so high? It isn't because it's colder than usual, it's because our housing stock is shit, inflation generally is out of control, and we're paying 2+ times what we were paying for energy only a year or two ago. My unit rate went up by a factor of 2.5 when I came off my last deal.

Ha! 6 of the last 8 posts on the forum are ASHP questions. This long period of freezing weather is certainly testing a lot of installations. Mine's fine in terms of keeping the house warm and the DHW up to temp. With no heating upstairs, I get complaints if the floor temp is much below 21 degrees (concrete floors don't help), so possibly we're running things a little warmer than you. We do seem to be using an awful lot of electricity at the moment, but even with good insulation and airtightness, we live in an almost 300 m2 house, and this has been the coldest week I've seen in my 14 years living the area. We should certainly expect to be paying more than usual. If anything, this cold weather is showing me that I hadn't quite optimised the ASHP settings, so I'm just taking it as a learning experience.

@Orion331, I've closed this one off in favour of your other post, which got a reply first. Ideally, we don't want the same question being answered across different threads, as it can make them hard to follow.