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@Mattg4321 Not quoting what you said because I'm not directly replying to your points but this is in response. Firstly, this I find this topic difficult to discuss, both because it is an emotive one with lots of strongly held views which means I want to be careful not to be misunderstood and also it's one where I have more casual knowledge. With some topics I dive into the detail and can feel relatively confident talking about them (I have a reasonable idea of what I know and what I don't). Here I don't. I've had to look up the definition of 'racist' and 'ethnicity' and neither precisely aligns with the common usage of the terms in my experience. Frankly from my perspective the precise definition doesn't matter but it's difficult to have the discussion without that. Looking at the definitions I still don't feel I can talk confidently about what an ethnic group is (the word is often used linked to race but the definitions focus far more on culture). My statement on english ethnicity doesn't necessarily stand up and should be read as a statement that there is no defining genetic/biological grouping for 'English'. Because I can't talk confidently about the topic I can only talk from my personal perspective. From that perspective Rishi Sunak was born in England and has a British passport, therefore he is English (and also British). Someone who says that because he has brown skin he is not English is being racist. I know KK is talking ethnicity and could argue that my definition above is about nationality but that doesn't hold up if you deny someone the ability to call themselves English or claim English nationality because of the colour of their skin which KK is effectively doing by saying Sunak can only be British. In my book, you can say Rishi Sunak is not 'White English' as per that form but you can't say he is not English. This is also quite off-topic and I've gone beyond my comfort level talking about this subject so this will be my last contribution here. It's debatable whether this adds anything of value and I almost didn't post but I didn't want to leave my previous statement without further explanation.

A white person born in england to two white immigrant parents would never be questioned as to whether they were English. They would look and sound like the locals and it just wouldn't come up. Making a distinction (and therefore providing different treatment) about someone due to the colour of their skin meets the definition in my book. There is also no such thing as an 'English' ethnicity. Nationality sure (though we are weird in this country with British being the formal nationality).

I read this as requiring the line be below 20kV and serving a single customer. (But I think this is just the Google summary, not checked the actual law).

The regs say kV - kilovolts, not kVA - kilovoltamps. Totally different things. I can see how this reg applies if they want to extend a 20/33kV line onto a pole near the property and pop a transformer on it. But if the existing line is low voltage already then this doesn't make sense. 23kVA is 230V x 100A, not 33kV x 0.7A Has someone at the DNO got their wires very much crossed? If you are in a garden of existing property it's not like you should need to go to a higher voltage due to distance.

That was my first thought on reading this thread. Didn't want to say anything earlier as my experience is limited (only seen the work done on the building I'm in and I wasn't directly involved in it). However, I agree, this looks awful compared to the work done on the roof of my apartment building.

Many insurance policies include legal cover. Asking them for the legal help might be more valuble than talking about whether they care about the specific repairs. Would only go this far if normal push back on builders doesn't work. Mortgage company would be very interested in things that could affect long term value of the property but as a new build you should in theory already be covered and as long as the leak is fixed then the rest is cosmetic and I doubt they care about that. Not sure I would want to contact mortgage company for something minor like this (so long as the leak is fixed). All in, redoing this bit of plasterboard is not a huge or expensive job so as long as you are persistent with them consuming their time it will be cheaper for them to do the work rather than argue.

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?