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It wouln't shock me if its 2 years. The amount of planned data centre build in the US is mind boggling and they can't build power plants anywhere near as fast. Gas-turbine manufacturing capacity is booked solid for years. Edit: The more dissatisfied the US population are with Trump the better IMO. His project need to very visibly completely fail if democracy is going to survive. Unfortunately, it's going to impact us in a bad way whatever happens.

My completely uniformed first thought on this is this consultant is just a window supplier without offering any guarantees. They can source the windows and then leave the installation up to you (maybe they point you at an installer but aren't going to take any liability for the job the installer does). Are they going to come measure? Take responsibility if the order is wrong?

Everything is relative. Food costs quite a bit more in the US. Houses have been built without energy efficiency in mind so the average consumer uses more electricity than we do. 200A 240V service is the norm in the US (at least for new construction). Because of tarriffs and the immigration crack down (nobody left to tend the farms), food prices are going up like crazy. Electricity prices also going up by 20-30% wlil be felt quite strongly.

I saw some positive language about this a while ago but the bulk of data centres won't get built in Scotland. Tech companies want them near the high bandwidth fibre nodes and where the expertise lives which is mostly around London.

Watched a video on this recently. Solar panels are very expensive there. They have tariffs on panels to protect local manufacturers so they haven't seen the cost reductions the rest of the world has due to China's build out (though they do have domestic manufacture). Permitting is apparently a complete hodge podge depending where you live and it might take many months to get approved to install solar (and that's in areas that are actively encouraging it). The utilities have also been hostile to exporting in many areas.

Sticking with what I said above about making it so it's easily convertable to standard. I've been thinking along the lines of radials and conventional lighting circuits. Plan your lights in groups that you suspect you want to control as one. Put convential mains wiring in for that either wired back to the switch or via a home run to a control panel that could be simply connected to a cable that also runs to the switch (the switch on the wall should have enough mains cables in it to provide full convential control, even if you don't use them). Also run a CAT5/RS485/DMX bus around that you can hook into your dimmers. I want to find dimmers that either go in the switch backbox/form part of the switch or can be accessed via the downlight hole or be in a central locataion. The idea of a service hatch in each room seems really ugly to me. Maybe you could put some art over it but seems best avoided. Having a dimmer located near each four lights with extra wires to those lights, means you could easily replace with standard lights if needed because the wires are already there. If you have a wooden floor above then the plasterboard will likely be forming a fire-resistant layer, which will be limiting to what you can do behind the downlights. Do your own checking on this but I believe these days you need fire rated downlights and having the dimmers there may be a problem unless they can be installed within fire shrouds around the downlights, or you design the ceiling structure to accomodate. Assuming you solve the fire issue but your dimmers are too big for downlight holes then one option is to look at bigger fittings in some places as a way of providing access. Designers tend to advocate for purposeful lighting rather than a boring grid of downlights so consider clustering with fittings like: https://www.lightingstyles.co.uk/brushed-aluminium-twin-technical-spot which both provides a bigger hole for access and more visual interest. I wouldn't plan to run direct from battery. Battery voltage will vary so your lights will be brighter/dimmer depending on how charged the battery is. Battery voltage will also often be above the nominal 24v, shortening the life of the bulbs. You will also likely find a modern high efficiency power supply converting from 240v to 24v is more efficient than your average 24v battery to 24v nominal supply. Solar system batteries want to be 48v minimum for efficiency anyway. Many solar systems use 400v batteries now, though personally I'd want to stick to 48v despite the lower efficiency so make it outside Part P. Electrician will want singles to be in conduit of some form the entire run at least for mains voltages and as above I think it's wise to plan your wiring as if you might convert to standard mains fittings in future.

You have to be a bit mad to self build in the UK and going to this level of effort with lighting is a bit mad. But it's the kind of mad I like! I have been thinking about similar options. Have you actually built and tested a prototype of this custom hardware? The piece of advice I've taken from here and want to follow in anything I do is that if you do something a bit different or unusal, do it in a way that you could rip it all out and replace with something standard without much effort. So for me that means installing mains cabling in all the relevant places that would mean that the low voltage system could be replaced by just changing the fittings (no threading wires or breaking into walls/ceilings). Another focus for me is to ensure that whatever lighting scheme I come up with works together well. If you just build a system for downlights that doesn't also plan to work with task and accent lights and also LED strips then you wont have a cohesive system. A ceiling full of downlights is in the end the bog standard developer option and options with variety and layers of lights is a nicer, more comfortable and more premium option.

Looks like this inverter only has an EPS output for when the grid is down. So needs to be separately wired to circuits that need to be protected by the battery. It's a beefy inverter though so could probably power your whole house from the EPS output in all but the most unusal situations. If you want to do this properly you would ask for some of your house circuits to be moved to a separate consumer unit and have that wired via changeover switch to both the EPS output of the inverter and your normal consumer unit. Big change at this late stage though. Your idea of a few sockets near the inverter is a good one. You will likely need a small consumer unit with an rcbo in it to liimt the current to that circuit, not a big job but maybe one that the installer doesn't want. Oh, and if the shit really hits the fan with Putin, this system is unlikely to really help. But emergency backup would be good for less extreme emergencies. Putin is like all bullies, take as much as he can until he gets real push back then he'll stop. He was talking to Xi about living to 150, someone who has that ambition isn't going to commit suicide.

Get good quality LEDs (be picky, look for high CRI). Electricity isn't cheap and you can find LED imitation of pretty much any type of bulb these days. Also, if you have a well insulated house the amount of heat these things will put out may make the room uncomfortable.

I was under the impression that for low risk buildings the Principal Designer role was only about the design phase, not build phase. I quickly googled and this came up which seems to confirm but I may be missing something: https://www.ribaj.com/intelligence/navigating-the-role-of-principal-designer-building-safety-act From that article it suggests that I was wrong to say 2024 above, in which case I'm not sure how I square it with others here saying they didn't need these details on recent projects.

Isn't this to do with the new changes related to building safety where you need the Principle Designer to sign off on the design and the Principal Contractor to sign off that the building has been built to the design? In which case it shouldn't matter that the architect wasn't involved beyond the design stage? As others have said they have recently got sign off without this but it may depend on when construction started? Not sure of the date off hand but vaguely recall late 2024.

If you pair two Victron inverters they share configuration and restritions, but two independent inverters (one behind the other in series), one g98 compliant set to export and one set to not export at all might be an option (but check the technicalities on this) but again if they are running seperately they couldn't share a single battery pack. If you have a heatpump for heating and hotwater, unless you have a really big one 3.6kw should be enough for most of the time, a 10kw heatpump will draw less than 3kw most of the time. Cooking is spikey so when you first turn on an oven or hob it draws a lot, but once things are up to temperature the usage is relatively low. Or maybe others have since used whatever spare they added, or there were multiple limitations and they fixed one enough for the farm but others are still in the way for you.

The multiplus models don't have built in solar MPPTs so the amount of solar connected to them is disconnected from their size. So could easily get a G98 Multiplus with lots of solar. Would be limited to 16A from the solar for house use + export though so guess you'd want big batteries to spread the solar over 24 hours. Most houses will only very rarely draw more than 16A (unless you use an electric shower or electric resistance heating/immersion. Could also look at whether some loads (immersion, maybe lighting) could be run straight off the battery. You could potentially get a second inverter that was set to zero export, but the way Victron works AFAIK you wouldn't be able to share the battery so it would be a bit tricky and I'm not sure about how that works with the DNO approval.

Not answering your question but looks like a good job on the boarding. Did you do it in the end?

@Spinny You highlight many real issues there but I think that just reinforces the point I was trying to make, that you can't take any single paper or single scientist saying something as a fact or true. The process of science relys on lots of work repeating, refining, proposing alternative explanations and only when you get to the point where there is broad consensus amongst the scientists in the field can you call something basically settled. This process removes a lot of the noise you highlight but it takes a long time and is not something a layperson (or even a scientist from another field) can really usefully engage with. Even when something is considered settled, say climate change, just because the fundamental principles are settled the precise details are still discussed. From my limited understanding the scientific debates are now along the lines of if the models have been too conservative and the actual effects of climate change will be worse than previously expected.

Just thinking aloud, listen to others as to wether this is a good idea: Given your DHW use might it be worth getting the second tank and keeping existing? The heat loss from the tanks will be a bit higher but it sounds like you'd use all the water quite quickly anyway. If you were going with the PHE route for the existing tank, then the new tank could be a plain simple tank with no coil, these are much much cheaper. Alternatively, two tanks in parallel, the heating capacity of two coils might eliminate the need for the PHE. Obviously only makes sense if you have the space.

AFAIK FFP3 masks protect the wearer and prevents spread. The other masks provide little protection for the wearer and stop large particles which at the time some speculated would help limit spread to others. Once the science came out that properly analysed how covid spread (a lot of smaller particles that go through/around masks that don't seal to the face) the advice should have changed to have everyone wear the better masks. Our country was quite an outlier on this. The person making decisions on masks in the NHS was a nurse with no training in infectious diseases, at the COVID enquiry she was insisting that masks weren't effective despite all the evidence presented there and elsewhere. I get the distinct impression there was pressure caused by the lack of supplies that lead to hesistation recommending anything better than cloth/low quality surgical style masks. Personally I think this is one of the bigger mistakes made in this country - prioritising managing the situation rather than being very clear on facts. Too often the government focussed on 'the message' rather than communicating what was known, this may have helped short term with getting people to do what they wanted but it sowed massive distrust that continues to this day. The big caveat to all this masks only work if worn properly and at population scale plenty of people don't like wearing them or make half assed efforts. In those cases masks can provide a false sense of security. Without good ventilation indoor spaces are still a problem even with masks (because masks aren't perfect) and it's again one of those areas where England is an outlier. Many other countries, including Scotland, have tightened ventilation requirements for buildings to ensure more fresh air (something that is a good idea even ignoring covid or other infectious diseases).

I think a lot of conspiracy theories especially around Covid and climate change come from people forgetting/not knowing how science works. Science gets to answers by investigation, analysis, testing, etc. It's a process not a single result. Scientists make mistakes, there are misunderstandings, different people do the same testing and get different results. It takes time and multiple people working on the same things to get to settled conclusions where the inconsistencies are resolved and understood. In the past scientific results generally only made the news in a substantial way once near the end of the process not as a blow by blow during the process. Most of the climate change research happened away from the news and things were mostly settled in the late 90's early 2000's. However, there are always outlier papers contesting one point or other (its just part of the process) and those whose interests are against decarbonisation try to hold them up as proof that they are right. You have to be an expert in the field to really understand the points raised and why these outliers are indeed outliers (and even sometimes deliberately misleading) so the general public can't easily tell. COVID really highlighted the workings of science in a way that made conspiracies very easy to start. Scientists were publishing research as fast as possible. As is usual, some of that research had errors or inconsistencies but because of the urgency there wasn't time for the scientific process to resolve those issues before the information was brought to the public. When the public and governments were presented with this inconsistent information it's easy to see how a 'choose your own adverture' type experience happened for lots of people, especially when people in power weren't following their own rules. An example is masking against COVID. @marshian claims that masks have been proved not to work dispite the earlier claims they did work. That's not really accurate. There have been many hundreds of papers published looking at masking. Some show it works, some show it doesn't. Again, you have to be an expert in the field to understand these results and come to an overall conclusion. I'm not an expert in the field so all I can do if I want to make an informed decision about whether to wear a mask is listen to people who are. The conclusion I found from doing that is that good FFP3 masks worn properly do massively reduce your risk of catching airborne illnesses (covid included). A bit of cloth over your face is much much less effective and possibly counter productive (how often were people cleaning those?). Surgical masks are also not great for airborne viruses but better than cloth ones.

None of the AI companies are making money, their users are spending far more in compute resources than they make in subscriptions and as the models get more complex the cost goes up (there are limits to power/data centre availability and compute demand is going up faster than Moores Law scaling). Once you get the real bill for your use you might suddenly find your laziness lessens

And those that are financially and politically motivated (though political motivation is often driven by financial interests as well) I'd prefer this government to what we had before or Reform but they really don't seem up to the challenge we face in basically any field. I wasn't expecting anything miraculous but I'm geniuinely shocked at how back they are and the country seems to agree (ratings not far off the Liz Truss budget atm). Zero chance that would fly in the past and likely still today (though less so). When's the last time they put up fuel duty? Not entirely sure about this. We get solutions to problems designed around constraints in our system. We have so many layers of crap that we keep building on rather than fixing the underlying problem. No doubt the current system is incredibly inefficient and the money could likely be better spent but I do think the uptake is likely higher than if they hadn't done anything and fixing the underlying problem is something that would take years, though we should be laying the framework for that now.

There are ways you could do this, but it sounds like this isn't your only issue. First useful thing I found when I searched, there will be easier ways: https://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/3946145 Can you infer the building from the sequence they were taken in? I would expect if you go through the pictures numbering and labelling things it might be possible to show the route you walked the building and thus where the photos are. This seems like the bigger deal than the geotagging. How thoroughly have you checked? Maybe something is visible in the background of another photo or maybe a walk around video (if you took them). How would it affect your SAP score if this was assumed to be the default value? (I thought it was possible to move forward on that basis but I might be misunderstanding). That all said, the easier option is to find someone willing to work with what you have without a fuss if thats possible.

@Canski is the location data in the photos simply not accurate enough to figure out which site the photo was taken in or is the person just not willing to look at it? If the former, can you say with certainty based on something else where the photos were taken?

Well that sent me down a rabbit hole. I think what I've said above about licences likely only applies if you have on-site generation and even then maybe it's only bigger scale - really not finding much info. Looks like it's perfectly fine to do sub-metering to tenants so long as you don't profit - charges need to pass through. That does of course mean any sale would have to be a leasehold sale for it to continue after sale. This does sound like the easiest way to sell, though if you were looking to sell you could also price up the cost of a connection to the grid at that point.

So long as you own both properties and aren't metering the use of energy/recharging I doubt there is an issue in the short term assuming you can get past building control (not sure about that aspect). Doubt you'd be able to sell the property seperately though. If the property is close to your existing then I suspect the cost of electrical connection will be much lower than the previous connection as the DNO should be able to reuse a chunk of the work they charged you for last time. If it's far away then trenching from your existing house to the new would also be expensive. Having said all that, I'm out of my depth here, replied earlier because I am aware of the restrictions on resale of energy, etc, not sure about anything beyond that.

I'm sure there was a previous thread with a similar issue but I can't find it right now. What I did find is this one: Which includes the attached PDF that suggests geolocation embedded in the image is ok. It does suggest that the file name of each photo includes which plot though. Something you could handle with some tedious work if needed. Technical_Bulletin_A_Guide_to_Photographic_Evidence_for_New_Homes (1).pdf