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If you are struggling for a plumber locally, maybe it's time to ask here for recommendations for good plumbers who are willing to travel (if you are willing to pay). Get someone good in who can resolve everything in one go. Will likely cost a lot more than you are paying for crap plumbers but if you can avoid the callbacks/issues then still probably a win. Alternatively, DIY?

Sure. I made a general statement, doesn't mean there aren't exceptions. Most people don't have 7p rates at night, bigger batteries in cars is increasingly common now the price of the batteries has plummeted, charging during the day on some tarriffs can be more than 30p/kwh. I admit that £30 is probably high but £20 is very much realistic for a charge from 20% for someone with a 80kwh vehicle.

Not a hard rule to me but should be the default unless either the host has massive solar and the energy is close to free or is sufficiently well off that the cost is inconsequential. I don't really have a problem with a short charge costing almost nothing, that's no different a offering a guest a drink, but if you show up somewhere with a low battery I don't think you should accept a full recharge without paying. With EV chargers being mandated they will be increasingly installed in places where the owner doesn't use them and therfore may not be aware of what a significant charge costs or necessarily be on the right tariff to use them cheaply.

No of course. Definitely support them being there as having a destination charger makes some journeys with an EV much easier. So it should be there for guests or future owners even if the current home owner themselves doesn't currently have an EV.

Ok, sorry, my mental maths was off. Still, different people are on different rates. Some people may pay a lot more during the day for electricity, some people have pretty low incomes (pensioners). So as a general rule I don't think EV owners should expect or accept free charging from their hosts.

Depends on the charger. Basic 16A one sure, £1.80 may bit on the high side for that, but plenty of chargers getting installed are the 7kw type. Someone local popping round for a coffee isn't going to need to charge their car. The people who will need to charge are those who have just travelled 150 miles to visit for at least many hours, quite possibly overnight. Big charges like that do add up.

I think that's a little unfair. Charging an EV could cost £30+ in electricity. That adds up fast if you have regular visitors.

Understandable but EVs will lead to a mindset shift here over time. Charging at home is much more convenient and half the price of charging mid journey. I would expect an EV driver to pay for the electricity they use but assuming you enjoy the company of the person visiting, them paying you for the electricity is a good deal for everyone. They get to spend more time with you, spend less on recharging and spend less time waiting to charge.

@Pocster How desperate are you?

Has been a possibility != every heatpump uses this as the solution. Reversing valves were at one point one of the more expensive components in the system so I'm guessing that in the past some manufacturers cheaped out and used alternative means for defrost.

Purely a guess but I suspect this isn't entirely true. True of anything on the market today, likely not going back a few years. Can imagine some early, non-inverter types having some form of resistance electric defrost.

Locally run good models unlocks so many use cases. Buying a software license for a local install would be excellent (like the good old days lol) but it won't be £20. It would break the sketched out business models of the big AI companies though so not expecting it to happen in a huge hurry. All these free models all rely on big expensive training done by researchers. The models are being given out for free as a taster with the hope it generates income in future. Can't see that continuing for long. Facebook already pulled back on open access, Deepseek, Alibaba also pulling back. AI companies also putting fear of god into governments with how powerful their 'best' models are (Mythos) and talking about how they can't let the public access them. Governments are currently on a drive to force operating systems to verify your age before you can use them, chat apps and cloud storage to scan your messages and files for anything illegal, 3d printers to verify you aren't printing something that's banned before you can print. Free and open access to things is getting harder not easier.

Maybe this is true for UK specific monobloc, but heatpumps were primarly invented for cooling. The vast vast majority of heatpumps deployed worldwide do cooling first, heating second. Including air to water ones. Reversible heatpumps have been available for decades globally though only more recently in a mass market form. Once you have a working and efficient heatpump the engineering required for the reversing valve is almost trival. In any case, I think your above statement is not justifiable for any heatpump that was not designed specifically for the UK market.

Agree, Apple will have to pay and therefore so will Apple's customers. They have been suggesting this so far, but the economics are not yet stacking up. OpenAI just pulled back on it's memory order and has recently changed CFO due to accounting issues. They are struggling to complete funding rounds. A lot of the 'orders' placed so far may not get executed (orders in OpenAI case not actually being orders but rather letters of intent). Datacenters that were supposed to be complete by now are delayed to late 2027 (no datacenter to host the server, no point buying the ram for the server). But even if the AI companies are able and willing to pay (and they have datacentre space), so will a lot of Apples customers. Especially those who are buying big memory Studios. These are literally the same pool of people. AI developers spending investor money. Maybe the big labs aren't buying Studios but the smaller startups trying to come up with unique/differentiated products will. This I disagree with. Apple is big enough that the makers will build whatever Apple wants. Micron can produce x amount of wafers per month. Apple commits to buy 20% of the wafers. Micron asks what patterns do you want on them? I was wrong earlier in the thread when I said the dies on the large mac's are not common. Having read more I believe its more that each package/chip has a taller stack of more standard dies (still not anything like the memory used in by Nvidia for their AI chips but likely the same as used in iPhones). So Apple sells 250 million iPhones a year. Both the iPhone and Mac Studio use LPDDR5. One 512GB Mac Studio is equivalent to 64 iPhones (8GB). If Apple is limited by how many wafers it can get, then availability of product is a purely business decision for them, where can they make the most profit. If they can make more profit selling a Mac Studio than selling 64 iPhones they will sell the Mac Studio. I suspect any limitations on Apples supply will be minimal if they are willing to pay because they are a long term customer. Lead times will always be long for Apple. The packaging of these dies onto ICs and then those ICs onto the CPU package adds many steps. So if Apple misjudges quantities it takes a lot of time to correct.

Self build/custom homes are a different planet to bog standard UK housing, no? It's a situation where the customer cares about the details (to varying degrees but still much more than developers).