jack

Warmer temps are fine when I'm outside and there's some air movement (either a breeze, or I'm moving around). But 24+ degrees inside and I'm dripping with sweat, and completely unable to concentrate. I've worked in non-airconditioned offices a couple of times, and I definitely didn't adapt. Thankfully my office (I work from home) is downstairs, where we have underfloor cooling and concrete floors. It's heaven during a heatwave.

That seems unusually reasonable for an MVHR installation. Nice!

The formal definition of a recession is two consecutive quarters of contraction. From my perspective, the two most likely outcomes are severe recession (and possibly depression) or massive (possibly hyper-) inflation. I don't see any way we go from the current situation to a situation of stable growth, inflation, and employment. It's like the punchline to that joke about the guy asking for directions from a farmer: "Well I wouldn't start from here".

Most EVs allow you to program their charge times, so you can match that to, eg, the Octopus Go cheap period.

Bit late to the party, but for others who might follow: I believe you did need to use someone certified if you wanted to claim the home charging grant, but the system changed earlier this year, and only flat owners and renters qualify for the subsidy. I don't believe an electrician needs any special certification to install a charger. You do, however, need some special kit if you want to do the required testing. I don't know how common it is for a typical one-person-band electrician to have this kit. The electrician I use just bought the required equipment in the last few weeks, as he now has enough interest from his regular clients to make it worthwhile having.

Service should be zero rated. You can only claim back VAT on goods, or goods and services supplied together. You can't claim back VAT on a service/labour-only invoice. Compare with a plumber: - If labour only (i.e., you supply all fittings), you claim back VAT on fittings upon completion, plumber charges zero VAT on labour - If plumber supplies fittings, VAT is zero for both labour and fittings. No materials are being supplied here. You own the bricks and are having a service performed upon them.

We can hear ours a bit on boost, but not even a whisper when it's on its basic setting. No way I'd be able to tell if it was on or off.

Just as in the title: what's a reasonable day rate for a plumber (sole trader) in the south east for general plumbing work (moving a water softener with decent access to all pipework, that sort of thing). I know it isn't the £1000 one guy quoted me last year just to move the water softener, even if he did explain that he'd need to "include materials to build a shelf".

I'm on Octopus Go and have just been moved onto a 34.86 p/kWh rate for 04:30-00:30, 7.5 p/kWh rate for 00:30-04:30, and about 43.12 p/day standing charge. Only 4 hours on the cheap rate, but at a bit over 20% of the day rate, it takes some beating. We put everything on during that period during winter - washing machine, dishwasher, car. We have a lot of PV, so we focus on using that during the day during summer and on sunny days the rest of the year, but it's nice to know there's a cheap period for when the timing doesn't work out (eg, dishwasher is full after dinner and we don't want to wait until mid-morning the next day to start a cycle).

In our case, we knew we were going for a super king size bed, so based the measurements on that. I assume in most cases people will know what size bed will be going in a space (OP said that there was only room for a double), but yes, they should consider the largest bed that would reasonably be put there.

I doubt you'll have an issue. We had all sorts of copies downloaded from, eg, Screwfix, till receipts with no name, even a couple of invoices in the wrong name (one was in the name of our tiler, the other was in some random name due to an error by the supplier). We explained any oddities in the covering letter and not a single invoice was queried.

Yes, exactly that. I suppose it depends what you want. I don't want my bedside drawer + cupboard right up against the bed, so this works fine for me. We did a worst case measurement on the bed and it worked out fine (just!).

We estimated what size of bed would be going in the space, then put double sockets just outside where the bed would finish. Even where the plug for, eg, an alarm clock or charger sticks out, it's hidden in the space between the bed and the bedside tables. The plugs are nearly invisible, but still quite accessible. Works well for us.

Sure, but my point was that I've never bothered quantifying it. It seems a pretty difficult thing to model accurately, given the almost constantly changing outside air temperature, and that's before you get into second order effects like heat recovery via condensation at the heat exchanger in very cold weather (which itself is at least partly recovering heat absorbed from the environment when the moisture initially vapourised).

I've lived in a house with MVHR for over 6 years, and my answers are: Yes, it's worth the expense. Yes, it's more equipment to maintain and potentially go wrong. Yes, I'd do it again. Knowing what I know now, there's no way would I ever choose to build a house and not include it. It probably costs a couple of hundred quid a year in energy use and filters, but the improved air quality is more than worth it even if I don't make up that amount in reclaimed heat (I've never done the calculations to estimate what energy savings I might make).

Welcome Simon. Take a look at the VAT subforum: https://forum.buildhub.org.uk/forum/103-self-build-vat-community-infrastructure-levy-cil-s106-tax/ Lots of stuff in there, although your situation doesn't sound like it's as straightforward as the newbuild, zero-VAT option.

I occasionally watch woodworking videos on Youtube. Watching Americans doing mental arithmetic using combinations of quarters, 8ths, 16ths, and 32nds is physically painful. I mean, it's clever that they can do it at all, but if I'm working on something, I want to focus on the work, not the maths.

Welcome to BuildHub. It's worth using the forum search function on the terms above (or using google and adding the term "site:buildhub.org.uk" - e.g., google "isotex site:buildhub.org.uk") I'm sure there have been discussions of all these systems at one time or another.

This was a ridiculous idea when first presented many years ago, and it remains a ridiculous idea now. I reckon five or maybe even ten times the cost of the equivalent power using standard panels.

I run mine at 25 °C (the lowest I can turn it down to) and it's perfectly fine in all but the coldest weather. I have compensation set to increase the flow temp once the outside temperature drops below about 7 °C, increasing until the flow temperature reaches 28 °C at 2 °C external temperature (all values from memory). I don't think you should set your flow temperature based on averages of other houses. They don't have your climate, insulation, or airtightness. I'd start off by reducing it in a big step - to low 30s, say - then see how it works out in a cold spell. If it's on too often or the house isn't warm enough, raise it by a couple of degrees and try again. Play around with weather compensation if you have it. That's how I came to the settings I now use.

1. Yes. 2. Possibly feasible, but from my point of view is mostly a set of drawbacks. I actually had a leak in our UFH shortly after we moved in. It appears that an electrician who was asked to do something at the last minute before the polished concrete floor was laid accidentally drove a screw into an UFH pipe. I dug out the concrete around it and fitted in a loop of UFH pipe using joints. It's been over 6 years since then and no problems. That said, this leak was relatively easy to find, because it was right near a recess for a socket (which is why the electrician was involved). If you had a leak buried in concrete you'd have more of an issue finding it, but the real question would be what would cause such a leak? There are no joins if you do it properly. There's very little thermal stress given you're running low temperatures. I can't really see what would be likely to cause a failure.

A few years back I went to a friend's house who'd just finished a full-on gut and renovate. They'd put in UFH on the ground floor, and basic building regs insulation with little attention to airtightness. I found their house to be uncomfortably warm, at least partly due to the blood in my feet boiling from being in contact with the hot floor. If you have decent insulation, you only need to run your UFH at a relatively low temperature. In my case, I've turned down our ASHP to the lowest temperature it can do (25 deg C), and that works just fine in all but the very coldest weather. The polished concrete floors are extremely comfortable in winter, and pleasantly cool during those periods of summer when the ASHP is run in cooling mode. As someone else said, the stuffiness could also be a lack of ventilation. MVHR will help with that.

*better than

Yes, but my house was 98% complete when we moved in!

Half-hour minimum. Often, if I have a project to do over the weekend, I spend Saturday looking for all the tools and materials. It's usually dinnertime by the time I've found everything I need, so I finish up for the day. Sunday morning I go to start again, then realise I'm missing something essential. Quick trip to Screwfix or Toolstation (me not being able to start a job without such a trip has genuinely become a standing joke in our house), back home, half an hour finding all my gear again, then if I have any time left, I make a start. Rinse and repeat. Now you know why it took nearly 5 years from moving in until sign-off.