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🤣 Definitely over thinking this one. That's well within fitting tolerance. Whoever fits it on the day will get it approx there and if you are measuring the the millimetre after it's installed you are going to be disappointed. If it looks good, it is good and you won't be able to see 1.5mm by eye. You need a bit of wiggle room as everything moves with temperature and at different rates. 2mm each end will be sealed with a sealant. Obviously, it's an area when you can give clear instructions/supervision. "I want a minimally visible sealant bead". 2mm is going to be required to fit the slab. Understandable, but think in this case your expectations are a little high and could maybe get you in trouble. Focus on the visual result and not the millimetre. Increased precision increases cost exponentially (or more).

Yes Not going to touch the sides. Adaption in climate terms, means changing the crops we grow. Living with a lower population world (there will be less arable land in temperate zones so it will be difficult to grow as much food as we do now) Obviously air conditioning/more insulation/more heating for people depending on where you live. Adaption also means living with higher sea levels of at least a metre or two maybe more. That means at minimum building a new much bigger tidal barrier in London (and similar examples all over the world), possibly abandoning various existing urban areas due to no cost-effective protections available.

All these related threads being tagged 'Spinny's Kitchen' or similar might be good.

I think this is debatable. While an 80-page thread called 'Spinny's Kitchen Saga' might be quite a read, separate threads are more searchable and this forum needs people coming here after searching for answers.

And even then I'd still want to position the hob so that the worktop has plenty of meat front and back. If it's a fairly standard size one then that means in the middle. Don't want some teenager/contractor/other putting their weight in the wrong place only for it to go snap. (Yes, when installed the underframe is supposed to be able to fully support it but if you narrow one edge to a thin strip murphy will intervene).

Just a shame that it's the vastly more costly option. By multiple orders of magnitude.

Nope! Water and gas go off before I leave the place if it will be unoccupied for any length of time. Though if you have a bad water leak then even an hour of flow will likely do a lot of damage so something automatic is a good idea (which I'd like to implement but haven't).

I know what I've said above is a bit off topic from your question @flanagaj but I think it's relevant. If you've already satisfied yourself that the second SE is right and the first is wrong then why are you questioning the seconds proposal? If you have not satisfied yourself about who is correct then I feel you need to resolve that first. Clarifying this, it's likely you need bracing anyway. So the OSB is required in any case. But my point is that maybe the first SE specified heavier OSB than normal or other details about that to deal with the situation that has been missed by the second. If you look at their calculations are they basing them on the same wind load or have they started from a different base? If so, why?

You have two differing opinions, both by people who are professionally registered and insured (I assume that you have verified their credentials and insurance). My first thought is that the second opinion is working on incomplete information/different assumptions. For example, the first SE specified OSB bracing and the second is specifying windposts. Is the second fully aware of the OSB bracing? Are they planning to require both the windposts and the OSB or is the OSB redundant in their scheme? Fundamentally, you should be able to go to the second SE and say 'I have a design from a registered and properly insured professional (who are standing behind the design) that you are calling inadequate, please explain precisely why you think that? Also if you think the design is inadequate will you be raising this with professional bodies for investigation?' That might be seen as a bit confrontational and I'm sure you could soften that somewhat, but they need to be able to explain to you in detail why they are right and the previous SE is wrong. Another way to potentially resolve this is to either engage a third SE to explain this to you or potentially query the discrepancy with the professional body ("I'm being given conflicting information from two registered professionals - how do I resolve this?"). Having said all this, my feeling in this case is that you have a design from the first SE who has heard the criticism from the second SE and still stands behind their design (ie, they have confirmed they have not made a mistake and are happy for you to proceed with their design as-is). As long as the BCO is happy to proceed with the design I would continue on that path. Edit to add: I wouldn't tell the BCO about the conflicting advice. Just review the first plan with the BCO to confirm they are happy.

Expanding on this. What is your heatpump make/model? Most modern (<10years) heatpumps can be set to cool, though some may require 'enabling' with a dongle, code, or similar. Seems like it would be well worth exploring this before spending money on any new system. You might have to make some adjustments to your existing system but shouldn't be that big to at least get ufh cooling (which is not the same as full A/C but does make things a lot more comfortable in hot weather).

Change one thing at a time but another thing you could try is to disable the legionaire cycle (I don't know the heatpump but I imagine it might be possible it has tried to use the immersion for that, detected some fault and got into a loop where it keeps retrying).

Then the UK is an exceptionally bad example to look to, other countries are a much better guide in those situations. Which most other countries think is stark raving mad. Even the countries with difficult systems generally have a much easier time than we do for nationally significant projects. This is an example of an area where if we were setting a good example we would have changed this system earlier (there have been recent changes), which would have fairly significantly lowered the cost of some of our decarbonisation efforts, which in turn would have enabled us to do more, faster, or resulted in less impact on our industrial base. We still have so much low hanging fruit that we don't address because the costs of doing so are ridiculous (compared to contemporaries). No, but you can compare costs between countries. Other countries generally do big projects at a significantly lower cost than we do.

On it's face it's impressive but still I think there are fair criticisms that we choose an expensive way of doing it. In mitigation you can say we started relatively early and it's inevitable mistakes were made. However, I think there are likely better examples out there even just confined to generation (and that's taking a holistic view of the last 30 years). If you limit yourself to just examples from the last 10 years or so (ie, during the time when technologies matured) there are many countries that have done a very significantly better job than us at taking advantage of the more recent developments (second/third mover advantage). If your goal is to help more countries achieve big reductions, then learning from these second/third movers should be the goal. Using the UK as a guide to less optimal solutions.

Agree, but that's not what I was responding to. We have been somewhat talking past each other. I responded to you saying the UK is a good example of decarbonisation and that by extracting more oil/gas we are risking that. My response is that while we have achieved a significant reduction in our emissions, a significant proportion of that is because we decided (intentionally or indirectly by actions) to just stop doing a lot of high carbon things. We aren't a good example of transitioning existing industry to low carbon, industries in this country are shutting down because they can't operate in our business environment*. Other countries have done a much better job of that. Talking about Burberry and Mulberry is a distraction. They are relatively small components of our economy that are not generally replicable. * Mainly it's electricity/gas prices (which we could have addressed in a different way) but it's also a general complication of rules over the last few decades (and Brexit) that adds friction. When other countries have adopted holistic carbon reduction schemes that encourage and support companies through the transition with active government support (and in doing so have achieved some great results) and we don't, we really can't claim to be a good example.

'In immersion mode' which it only sometimes switches to. So my reading is that the system works fine for a while then something happens and it stops working as normal and needs resetting and then it works again. @MorganP can hopefully confirm.