sgt_woulds

Tough Buttercup - a couple for starters 🙂 For Humans: How Different Sound Levels Can Affect You - Noise Project - not section on dB ranges and effects - 40-50 dB range is where most problems start - the same range as most ASHP Noise Pollution Isn’t Just Annoying — It’s Bad for Your Health (brainfacts.org) Noise and mental health: evidence, mechanisms, and consequences | Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology (nature.com) The Effect of Noise Exposure on Cognitive Performance and Brain Activity Patterns - PMC (nih.gov) Crosstalk between Oxidative Stress and Inflammation Caused by Noise and Air Pollution—Implications for Neurodegenerative Diseases (mdpi.com) For Wildlife: Evidence of the impact of noise pollution on biodiversity: a systematic map | Environmental Evidence | Full Text (biomedcentral.com) Frontiers | How chronic anthropogenic noise can affect wildlife communities (frontiersin.org) Songbirds affected by human noise pollution | Interviews | Naked Scientists (thenakedscientists.com) Anthropogenic noise affects insect and arachnid behavior, thus changing interactions within and between species - ScienceDirect

" In the vast majority of cases the noise is no more than (and frequently a lot less than, any of these things we are all very much used to and accept. " Change that to: 'things we are forced to listen to and aren't given a choice about'... There is a very real difference between noise that is natural and that living creatures have evolved with, and continuous artificial noises. It creates low-level stress which raises blood pressure and increases inflammation leading to long-term medical conditions. Road noise is truly awful - I really looking forward to the mass adoption of EV's as this will reduce considerably - although a large proportion of the noise we hear at a distance is tyre roar and air displacement. If cars had only been invented last week people would be up in arms about the stink and hubbub - sound barriers would be imposed on every road. We should learn from our mistakes with future technologies, not add to the problem. The real solution, (until ASHP noise attenuation is improved) is building / upgrading to good standards and using MVHR with heating - keeping any associated noise inside the building envelope.

No fear of change. ASHP is a great technology that needs to be refined to remove the annoyance to others. I fully agree that it needs to be rolled out as quickly as possible - but not in it's current form. Electric cars are great, noise is reduced to tyre friction and a low hum. Then some people say they need to make more noise as people cannot hear them coming so the noise pollution is built back into them! I'm glad you want to save the planet - I do too. But I don't want to hear you do it...

Also, the comment about the boiler on the landing - agreed it's a bad choice. But at least it is their noise and they are keeping it to themselves. Fitting mechanical plant that creates noise that others can hear is just as antisocial as playing music on your phone in a public space.

The quiet ones aren't quiet. I don't want to sit on my garden bench and listen to a fridge running on the other side of my fence. It's only a quiet whooshing, but it is noticeable at all times when it is running. Or should I say, when it switches off you suddenly realise how noisy it was. This kind of low-level background noise is proven to increase stress in both animals and wildlife. The majority of heat pumps (GS & AS) that I've come across over the years are not as quiet as my neighbours. Also, as they age they get noisier and generally people won't repair things until they fail or are legally obliged to. The world is noisy enough. Make them quiet enough that I can't hear them when I'm sat on them and introduce a legal noise testing regime, then, and only then will they be acceptable.

Scaffold Canopy is expensive. Scaffolders will need to ballast / secure and provide certification and calculations, (and insurance) to cover the additional risk of building a giant wing on your house. Requires far more bodies, or fewer people but more days to complete. External sheeting is also essentially a consumable as it gets bashed to buggery in all the '100 year storms' we have these days. You are paying extra upfront for convenience and speed for the rest of the works. I doubt you'll find it much cheaper from a reputable scaffold company. There are still some monkey scaff companies around if you want it cheap - you pays your money and takes your own risks.

Why can't you in-roof with the panels you've got?

Geocell is an arse to compact. You will need the heaviest whacker you can get to achieve anything like the compaction rates that Mike Wye suggest when they work out how much product you need. Expect to have a lot left over. You won't find an electric whacker up to the job - at least I didn't - so unfortunately you will have to put up with petrol fume headaches and the one you'll get just from the noise... Plan for more labour than you expect. Geocell does not shovel easily because it binds together - moving it around before whacking is exhausting even for a very small area. If it's just for a living room I'd be less concerned than for a garage; use an electric whacker - but reduce the amount of geocell purchased by at least a quarter.

That's not quite right as the lower U-values will need to be justified - Building Regs don't care about room size unless it impacts part M. I work for a company that makes woodfibre insulation for IWI. It is important to note that we do not generally recommend achieving high U-values with IWI due to the condensation risk to the structure. There is, generally, a sweet spot between 40-100mm of woodfibre that balances the energy savings, cost, and condensation risk. Part L of the Building Regulations for England offers flexibility when retrofitting existing walls, roofs and floors; for walls, an improved U-value of 0.30 W/(m2·K) is the target but a ‘threshold’ level of up to 0.70 W/(m2·K) is sufficient, as long as the approach can achieve a payback not exceeding 15 years and is ‘technically and functionally feasible’. It is worth discussing with your local authority / BCO. For an older building, most BCOs are now sympathetic to the argument that breathability is more important than the insulation value. It helps to approach them with evidence and we always recommend a WUFI study for any IWI to prove that the build-up won't cause moisture issues long-term; this is very useful when arguing the case for lower insulation levels. If the change of use is for a domestic home you will probably need to mitigate this performance drop elsewhere, (by e.g. upgrading roof thermal performance). P.S. Insulated plasterboard is the work of the Devil - rarely installed properly and causes more long-term problems than it solves.

You have plenty of room on the board, so something like this can be fitted easily: FuseBox 45A Single Phase Energy Meter - KWH1M45 – BigOnElectricals.co.uk Meter shouldn't cost more than £20 and a sparky can fit in minutes so won't cost an arm and a leg overall, (but your company should cover the install cost too). I have something similar - I record the Kwh readings at the end of each month to work out my refund.

One of the excuses given for all the floaters in our rivers is that the sewage system cannot handle excess water when it rains. If RWS is mandated, it will be interesting to see what excuses they think of next to excuse their crappy behaviour...

I used to install solar panels. Back in the year 2000 we were one of only 3 installation companies in the country and our customers were an eclectic mix of uber greenies, (uber rich too - the average install cost for a 3kwp system was over £20k!) so we got to visit some very 'interesting' people. I don't have any pictures from the time as I lost my old hard drive a while ago, but I have seen similar things done commercially now. I knew at least 7 people with systems like this, and visited many times over the years - we used to have great chats about what worked and what didn't. Everyone who started with a small system like this eventually got a larger rainwater storage butt in addition, but their Heath Robinson creations kept working well. (One lovely lady ended up with 40-odd interlinked water butts extending from her front drive to her back garden and another had dozens of fire extinguishers welded together and hung in a ring around his eaves - he was a metal artist and it looked a lot better than it sounds!) The more ordinary systems looked very much like this: Gravity Fed Rainwater Harvesting System For Flushing Toilets and other – Freeflush Water Management Ltd.

You only need about 500mm head to feed a toilet cistern (with any flow restrictors removed) so a smaller tank can fit just below the eaves without issue. A 100 litre tank would provide about 20 flushes on a low-flush toilet. My preference would be to have this tank internally for maintenance, although I have been to customers' houses where this has been done externally as DIY and it works well, if a bit ugly. I agree a large underground tank is best, but not practical for all. Either option would be easy to design-in with a new build if stipulated, and better than introducing points of failure into roofs that are already designed to be as quick and cheap to build as possible with unskilled labour. Impossible to fix the mass builder quality issues, but we can fiddle around the edges to get minor environmental improvements perhaps. Given the number of hosepipe bans in the last few years - and weather predictions for the next 50 years - it is madness that this is not already mandated.

Then it wouldn't work in a house either?

'It wouldn’t work in a bungalow though' Why? The tank would be above the toilet so can work with gravity feed the same as a 2 storey house. A bungalow would probably have a larger surface area to gather the water per occupant than a house too. P.s. which company is this? how do they deal with filtration and maintenance when tucked in a hard-to-reach area?