jack

I now know all I need to know about you, thanks.

Open fires are categorically one of the worst things you can do for the environment. They produce more of the worst kinds of particulates than just anything else you can do, as well as being a ridiculously inefficient use of fuel. MVHR isn't the issue. You're planning to poison yourself, your family and your neighbours based on some romantic notion that could be 95% satisfied by a decent woodburning stove (ideally you wouldn't have one of those either, but I appreciate people want to burn stuff). I just can't fathom the logic.

Yes, but he's a highly experienced builder and worked his arse off.

Had exactly this discussion with my older boy last night. The other thing that's worth considering is how easy a job will be to replace over the course of a few decades. It seems unlikely that electricians and plumbers are going anywhere soon, but a lot of desk jobs can - and will - be outsourced (unless they fall within some sort of regulated profession).

100% agree. I've put it to my kids that they'll likely get more job satisfaction and earn more money if they stay away from most desk jobs.

Yup. I have two friends who are trying to move in time to get the benefit of the stamp duty holiday. One would likely have moved around now-ish anyway, but the other has brought forward their decision to move by at least six months, if not more. Unfortunately, I fear you're right. I've long thought the lack of respect for vocational jobs is a serious failure of our national character. Many seem to believe that anyone working in an office is immediately in a "better" job than someone working a trade. Doesn't matter if the office job is a junior admin role or the trade is difficult and highly skilled, the office is still perceived as superior. I've been haranguing my kids for years about the downside of working in an office environment. Whatever they do, I hope it involves more than sitting in front of a computer screen in a beige open-plan wasteland.

This would have been a more convincing attempt at trolling if you'd toned it down a bit.

Did you cross-check the exchange rate?

We were outbid twice by developers for the bungalow that we eventually bought and knocked down. The first time it went off the market for several months then came back, the second it was off for a few weeks. I think the sellers were done with developers by the time they sold it to us. That was in 2012 though, so slightly different market. Eventually, something always does. Good luck!

Oxides of carbon will do that to you!

Works like that on PC too (as I just learned!)

Interesting. The email I received yesterday includes the following sentence: "Based on our latest calculations, you're actually using an average of £135.30 more each month than your monthly payments account for, and currently your account is not at the balance expected for this time of year." We have a lot of PV, and we're electric only, so there's a huge difference between what we use in summer andb winter. I assume a system somewhere has put December's numbers into an algorithm and decided that we're going to get behind at some point. What I'm frustrated by is that the email doesn't include any real information. As I said above, they want to change my direct debit from £82 a month to £140. Based on my annual usage that's utterly ridiculous. There're other reasons I want to leave. Despite several attempts, they still haven't managed to let me access the app for both electricity and PV readings. I'm also slightly wary of just how much a force for good they really are, based on a number of stories that have appeared in Private Eye over the last few years.

That's what annoys me about Good Energy. They ask me for this (optional) reading, and most months I go the effort of giving it. But they don't actually use the information to vary the amount they take. I really have no idea where they get the numbers they quoted in today's email. My current direct debit is £82 a month, which is about right over the course of a year given my expected annual electricity charges. They're now saying they want to bump this to £140(!) a month if I make a £240 balancing payment now, or £157(1) a month for a year to catch up as they put it (or, more accurately, get them as far in permanent credit with my money as suits their preferences). All this with no information or explanation. @ProDave, please PM me your code. I'll use it if I go with Octopus once I've had a look around. Thanks.

I'm happy to do all of those. It's just the monthly direct debit being based on some opaque average that is clearly designed to keep me permanently in arbitrary deep credit that annoys me.

I'm about to move away from Good Energy, who we've been with for a few years. There have been a number of issues leading to this, the latest being how they've handling a request to increase our monthly direct debit. Long story, but basically they emailed me today to say that my direct debit isn't enough to maintain a "credit buffer" over the course of the year. They don't say what my current balance is, what my current direct debit is, what they expect the credit buffer to be, or how they've calculated anything. So this is the final straw and I'm moving to another supplier. What I'd really like to do is just get a bill every month or quarter and then pay it off in full. I don't want to pay some monthly charge based on estimated annual usage. I haven't changed supplier in years - how common is it to have payment terms that let you just pay your bill in full each time it comes out? Thanks.

This situation would put me off buying unless I was desperate. I wouldn't want to share a building with someone willing to: build an extension without the required planning permission worse, put a window right onto my garden in such a way as to prevent me from extending by the same amount.

Bear in mind this is the absolute worst time of year for power consumption. But even if it stayed like this for the entire year, you'd be paying a bit more than £1000 (depending on tariff) for all heating, hot water and electricity - doesn't seem that expensive to me for a decent-sized house.

Welcome Andrew!

I suspect that we're penalised for having mixed construction. Our house is mostly brick slips on cement board, but we have areas of wooden cladding. When you fill in an online form, you have to choose from some fairly rigid construction types, which don't really take into account the fact their may be mixed cladding types. I can't remember what we pay, but I'm sure it's more than if we had brick-and-block construction. Even when I tried speaking to people on the phone or via chat boxes, I got very little help. I remember one person basically told me they couldn't give me any advice on how to select my cladding type from their list of drop-down options (none of which really fit), because figuring out what the terms meant and how they applied to my house was my job and not theirs!

Who did you get your insurance through?

Welcome @DJPASSH Best thing I can suggest is to use the search function with the term durisol - plenty of results from people who've used it. There have been some issues (mainly installation-related), but I don't recall blowouts being a big issue when everything's done properly.

Not quite: I was wondering about whether running it 24 hours a day - i.e., continuously for days or weeks - at a lower temperature would make much difference to the energy usage you're seeing:

Please share if/when you do! I looked into the Modbus side of things early on, but it's a bit beyond my knowledge/experience level.

Lower flow temps should in theory reduce how often you need to defrost - another reason that it can be better to run at a lower flow temperature for longer. Bear in mind how defrosting works: you pump a load of heat into the slab. When you need to defrost, the unit sucks some of that heat back out of the slab to heat up the fins and melt any ice that's built up. This is one contribution to the fall in COP as the outside temperature falls towards zero. I genuinely don't know how different things will be if you just run it 24 hours a day at, say , 28°C versus shortened periods at, say, 35°C. Some form of monitoring would help you see what's going on. I don't know whether you can access it via your controller, but the one that came with my Aquarea lets you see lifetime energy for heating and hot water generation as separate kWh figures. You could record that number in a spreadsheet every morning or evening along with the average or peak temperature, and see whether you can draw any conclusions over time.

You'll get less dripping when it's very cold, because there's a lot less moisture in the air. Very low single figure temperatures with high humidity will give you more condensation than when the temperature is sub-zero.