-rick-

Are they defunct? The website they give in the video seems dead. www.sahp.info Whats the website in your earlier screenshot?

No practical experience so hopefully someone with some will be along but fill the gaps with foam? I guess you'd want something with a little give in it to allow for movement.

Have the precast slabs already been grouted? I thought the screed layer was often used as grout to tie everything together on precast? (Depends on how it's specified).

Excellent job (assuming the intention is to provide motivation to get on with the main job asap). Curtain on three sides must make it extra enjoyable to use!

Sounds like this switch is for the immersion. It wont heat up the house but will give you hot water. If the immersion was drawing 3kw when your wife flicked the switch off a small spark inside the switch is not terribly unusual.

Looks good. I do like the idea of concrete in a build, though I'm more hesistant on the idea of kitchen surfaces. Looks a fair bit different from the other concrete worktops I've seen people make. A few questions if you don't mind! Did you colour it? Specifically choose agregate? Did you grind/polish? Do you have issues with staining? Concerns about dirt build up in the texture/keeping it clean?

If they'd done the job properly on the service, the other visits and charges wouldn't have been necessary so make that argument and that you shouldn't be paying for their incompetence. The issues caused significant distress and threatened to/did impact your business (Airbnb) so you could suggest you may be asking them for compensation.

Side point, is a small shower going to work for someone with mobility issues? Accessible bathrooms generally require more space than that (look up the building regs requirements)*. A full width extension would be better if possible. Another option to consider is turning the room into a wetroom with the shower sharing space with everything else. Would be more hassle to look after but much easier for a person with reduced mobility to use. * Building regs (from page 19): https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a7f8a82ed915d74e622b17b/BR_PDF_AD_M1_2015_with_2016_amendments_V3.pdf

I don't tend to think the assemble at home options from fogstar are that worthwhile. For the units we were discussing above, the preassembled version is 25% more and for that you get higher grade battery cells, the work done for you and less chance of assembly errors. I'm sure their factory has occasional issues but the odds of a DIYer making a mistake, eg, not getting the torque right on a bolt and causing overheating issues is much higher IMO.

AFAIK it's electricly simple. You do need an inverter that supports the battery. The tricky bit is configuring the inverter to talk to the battery. That will likely be outside of a non-solar installers wheelhouse. Equally, while simple if an electrician is not used to working on 48V stuff they may not be the right person. The assumes the inverter is already installed. Installation of the inverter is a bit more complex, again something for an electrician used to doing solar related installs.

We do and we have it on the retail side as well to a degree (Agile). There are some customers it's suitable for and some it's not. I'm not suggesting that it be mandatory, there will always be a use case for the provider providing a blended rate incorporating some extra amount for risk. Having said that I don't think we have a particularly good dynamic pricing setup here, where the price paid for every unit is set by the most expensive unit. That means the periods of really low prices are much more limited than they would be if we used an average price rather than max price model, this limits the return for people able to invest to load shift or load shed.

Not sure I agree with this. Yes you need the grid capacity to transport the renewables (you highlighted that problem) but once you have that and you have dynamic pricing then the market likely sorts a lot of this out for you (possibly less efficiently if you did it in a more centralised manner but the the decentralised nature of this has it's own advantages). Offer people/companies nearly free power at some times and expensive power at others and a lot will be motivated to take advantage. There are structually some issues with the way we've done things in this country that means there are more difficulties here than other places but I think the point stands anyway. I don't think we should subsidise new build renewables if we don't have the capacity to use them though. Edit: To clarify, we obviously need sufficient base load capacity for true baseload, but what is true base load will be affected by descisions people make due to dynamic pricing. AFAIK we still have a lot of non-renewable baseload available.

2 ways: 1. Calculate it. P = I x V. They are using the 16 batteries in series so the 314Ah per cell applies to the whole pack. Therefore, P = 314 x 48 = 15072 = 15kwh * 2. They have a very similar model that is assembled for £500 more and also has better batteries so you can directly compare it to that. https://www.fogstar.co.uk/collections/solar-battery-storage/products/fogstar-energy-16kwh-48v-solar-battery * @Dillsue clearly did the maths with 48V as the voltage, but the specs say the nominal voltage per cell is 3.2V so 16x3.2=51.2V. When you plug this into the power formula you get 16072 which is the same as they claim for the other battery above.

I know, hence the wink. No. The bathrooms are fairly stable (internal rooms so keep the heat) but I'd guess it's about 19 in there when I go for a shower at this time of year. It's ok but would prefer warmer. I've recently started running my heating 24hrs with a setpoint of most of the flat at 18 and 22.5 where I use the computer. 18 is cool but ok if I'm moving around. Pretty sure I'd be ok with lower than 22.5 when I'm sedentary if it wasn't for the massive heat suck from my crappy aluminium windows. Before when doing on/off style heating I was still cold with the thermometer at 23.5 because the concrete floor was sucking the heat out of my feet.

They can pretend if it helps https://electrek.co/2026/01/21/watch-hyundais-ev-sports-car-take-off-with-fake-shifting/

Isn't the point of self building/renovation to create an environment that is a pleasure to live in, not just a place to survive? 😉

@Beelbeebub wasn't saying we should abandon it. He was saying it's a precious resource we should save for things where we don't have an alternative. Many of our uses of fossil fuels can be replaced with other sources of energy. Some things are much more difficult, eg, chemicals and plastics.

Exxon scientists reported on climate change effects in the 70s. There are press reports on the impact on carbon on the climate from the 1920s maybe even earlier. A frog in slowly warming water doesn't notice the difference and gets cooked. Plenty of bad things have been happening. Once in 100 year events now happen much more frequently. Insurance companies are taking hit after hit pushing up insurance costs massively and causing them to refuse to insure many properties without government backstops (more in other countries than here, it's a global phenomenon). Biodiversity is crashing and we've lost vast quantities of species to extinction (though admittedly only some of that is due to climate, but many are directly linked to it). Crop failures, droughts, more hurricanes, heat waves, floods, all have increased. All have been predicted in the 1990s as results of climate change. Some of the tabloid headlines of the past were overcooked, but equally many more recent headlines undersell the risks we face at this point. (potential AMOC collapse as an example) There are lobbyists around for every subject under the sun. The amount of money spend on lobbying by the 'climate skeptic' side outweighs lobbying from green groups by orders of magnitude. In any case, we shouldn't be paying attention to lobbyists, we should be looking at the last 50 years of scientific research, which has consistently backed CO2 emissions as the cause of the warming climate. I'd argue that widespread scientific consensus is more than mere opinion. Is it 100% fact? No, but it's not just an opinion. It's rigorous data backed analysis which has been picked apart by every interested party. It's the closest science can ever come to fact. Such as?

Maybe it's because I'm a bit colour blind (red/green) or maybe it's my screen, but all the options look very similar to me. So unless the differences are much much more obvious to you in person, how noticeable will the differences be to someone walking down the street looking at your property after it's weathered in? I'd guess not many, in which case, maybe don't worry about it and focus on other bigger differences. Having said that, outside the scope of the choices shown: This is what my 2006 flat has and they look awful. How anyone ever thought it was a good idea I don't know. So outside the options presented I above I agree that different colours on frames may not date well. Near black/anthricite has been popular more recently and I'm not so sure that will date in quite the same way but general point I agree with.

Yeh, it seems way too late to be considering changes like that. The amount of extra cost and time that making that sort of change adds (especially if there are other similar changes) will really add up and get your project way off track. That sort of change will likely require new drawings, other calculation changes. Does the extra weight mean bigger foundations, etc? Aside from the impact of making changes at this stage, DIY installation of B&B is an awful lot more (heavy) work than whatever radon membrane work you are thinking of. I'd assume you'd get a concrete crew in to pour the slab. If not then maybe it balances out but I very much doubt it would once you factor in the cost of changing drawings/delay/etc and installing the beams is not a one man job.

75mm of beads will make a huge difference on their own. Do that and plug up any big air leaks and then see where you are.

As the number of bins we need goes up the amount of space available to store them becomes a problem. While you both have the room and are concientious plenty of others either can't be arsed or space is an issue and that leads to bins being left in the street. I'd also guess that plenty of 'disgusted of Tunbridge Wells' type complaints about how unsightly bins are even if they aren't cluttering up the pavement. One of those rules that matters greatly to a small plot in a city but seems a bit overkill on a large plot.

You assume a joined up process. You assume wrongly. Plenty of things get through planning only to find they couldn't move forward because BC require something beyond what is reasonable to achieve on-site within the available money. Edit to add: I looked at a plot for sale with planning a while ago. Positioned on a flood plain, requiring a build over agreement over the flood drainage infrastructure. Planning had conditions attached that basically said, 'you can build this if you can get agreement to do x y z'. Maybe it's possible to get that but it sure looked like an uphill struggle to me.

Financialisation as well. ie, companies (and the government) focusing on maximizing the next set of financial returns rather than long term plans. Been reading a lot of criticism of this recently focussed on our large financial sector dominating the discussions that leads to cutting longer term investments for the short term returns. It's obviously something that happens everywhere but is a particular issue here. If companies aren't doing well then they have a difficult situation but this financial focus means that there isn't the focus of getting out of the hole, just making the best of the current situation. In terms of government we seem to have had repeated attempts to set up long term planning, investment in capabilities (that will only pay off with continued investment/projects) only for those future projects to be cancelled and all the investment ploughed into the capacity being wasted (with other countries going to hire the engineers we expensively trained).

Feels like every time I look the prices are lower and the offerings better. Though I read recently that the Chinese government is stepping in to control the market in China in an effort to stop companies competeing each other into the ground. Same as they did for solar. So thats likely to mean prices stabilise where they are/go up a bit barring significant breakthroughs with batteries (sodium-ion maybe?)