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rh2205

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  1. Internal blinds would have to be fitted on the wall above the window recess otherwise will catch head on them when walking through the door so hardly an attractive position as the metal bracket/roll up dimension is lower than the current opening ( they usually run at about 7cm our frames are 3cm). If we don’t want cords due to width of door & needing approx 4 separate blinds we also have to pay out for electric ones at a cost of £900.
  2. We have two issues due to oversight when we designed our house. The most pressing one because we have a child who is starting to protest is that the dining table area gets very sunny in the morning, we have 6metre wide patio doors. The sun at the height of summer passes over by about 1pm so it could be worse. It would probably ruin it to put curtains up & top mounted recessed electric blinds would drop 4cm below the very thin outer window frame profiles & we have an extremely tall person in the house which would then catch their head on it when walking through the doors. On the outside we have some very pristine white external wall insulation & we are scared to mount anything externally plus I am not going to lie we really don’t want to be spending more than a few hundred pounds on the solution in an ideal world. Second issue is our house gets very hot… if I could go back we would of designed external blinds at the outset to combat this issue plus improve sleep quality as quite frankly this countries idea of ‘black out blinds’ are utterly useless. Do we just live with all our shortcomings for the next 20 years? Because it was a major refurb but not a full rebuild we have big windows with no consideration for overheating! I don’t see that we can easily retrofit external blinds now for various reasons without totally ruining all the external facade which to be honest worked out as somehow the best finish on the entire house (sorry we clearly put our money & thoughts in the totally wrong places being inexperienced & in a rush). Upstairs the window recess externally is only an about 50mm & we have all this lovely vertical concrete cladding to contend with for fitting anything upper floor. I did see you can buy some pretty cheap external tarps that could be hooked up on the hottest days but that would still require some fixings into the insulation & all the faff that comes with putting it up only saving grace is we have a very tall person who doesn’t need a ladder. But there is also the day to day morning sun issue. Any & all ideas on a budget now welcome because I don’t like the idea of potentially spending £1000’s on stuff as in my mind all the expensive solutions literally ruin the appearance of the entire house either inside or out for the times in the day you are not using it! It’s £550 for instance just for one of those internal blackout blinds with ugly outer frame to fully blackout 1 window upstairs for instance, and there’s 2 windows in the master bedroom…
  3. We have grey EPS beads in our 1960s cavity, no problems so far 18 months in, though we stuck 100mm EWI on the outside too so I’m guessing damp will be unlikely from such a set up. Do wish we’d gone for triple glazing though as the obvious issue is our new aluclad windows are on the crap side of performance & we seem to have a lot of them!
  4. We had a vat exemption on an empty bungalow & added a 2nd floor. Did a full refurb only saved external walls & concrete slab altered every other external opening. Came in at £1250sqm inc. 5% VAT. All looked after by a builder, we did the painting & laid a couple of basic floors/tiling, builder added EWI so it doesn’t feel drafty downstairs though there is a slight temperature differential by about 1C probably from that uninsulated slab! It seems pretty efficient & our energy use has been a fraction of the amount estimated on our EPC using an ASHP. But yes it has it faults & we would have underfloor heating if we’d started from scratch but there are scenarios where it does work out better & I’m happy we saved 150k as the faults are not worth that much to me (plus unless you lived on the street most people who visit think it’s rebuilt). The rebuild rate was about £2500sqm when we did ours and is currently at £3500sqm. We had some crazy quotes so be careful with the figures the architect tells you unless you can do much yourself! Also round here it takes about 2 years of planning to have all the permissions to start a new build and quite a bit of expense with all the conditions they add, so the type of planning authority might also be a factor - this might sound like an exaggeration that I don’t have experience of but I also work in this authority so it’s not second hand info, it was a big deciding factor for us.
  5. Yes rockwool fitted, we came every day! There was a bit of an argument over plasterboard thickness so we agreed to 12.5mm instead of 15mm specified, maybe if we’d of looked into it we might of ditched the osb for thicker plasterboard, but I don’t know what really would of worked best, it’s definitely feels more hollow than our crappy 1980s masonry bovis home, but it’s also bigger & we don’t own much stuff so probably doesn’t help with how noise travels.
  6. No it wasn’t architect spec’d it just because of being able to affix things easily, we also have external osb & EWI on the outer frame so there’s a lot of osb & I presume the outside osb will act as the bracing. Of course no one realised or questioned this until the work was started & we just went along with it..
  7. We have our TF upstairs bungalow to house extension lined with osb (architect spec’d it & builder never spotted it until he read the drawings), yes you can hang things but it’s still like a hollow echo chamber & doesn’t seem to have any sound bearing properties & I’m not convinced it’s given the perception of being more solid. But it was no extra charge so I’m not complaining.
  8. I mean an induction hob is not more efficient if I need to buy loads of new pans think of the waste & the extra cost! I just think they are annoying, supported by relatives who quickly got rid of their induction ones once they’d broken (one a chef and was convinced they were slower to cook on than standard ceramic).
  9. We use a microwave often for reheating foods slightly more batch cooking than average, we have a 5 ring electric ceramic hob because don’t like induction ones, we use a kettle to boil water for the hob. We have two microwaves, two dishwashers & two freezers (1 oven & grill too)! We haven’t used the tumble dryer this summer, we have a robot mower working all day for 5/7days as big garden (though less so in last 3 weeks as too dry). We have 1 smallish TV but various other pocket sized devices & laptops etc. Probably a bit basic on the tech front no mvhr or other fancy things, don’t use our extractors much. We don’t use candlelight but probably sleep a lot when our toddler sleeps, only 1 caffeine drinker in house!! We have white noise playing 15hrs a day & stereo on for about 8hrs a day. Our DHW is actually somewhere between 1.3-1.5kWh a day I’ve never checked but can see our overall usage since March falls into this reading, we are not trying to reduce our energy use as such thus have many chargers still on at the switch & don’t put devices to sleep enough, don’t do terrible stuff like leave tv on all day! We went pretty low spec on all our appliances. My husband uses two laptops all day I use one. We don’t vacuum much 😂. To be honest I put this all down to avoiding an induction hob.
  10. Last 52 days we have averaged 5.15kWh. All electric house with ASHP. 2 adults one child. Both adults work from home including having clients visit. Wish we had solar panels but I’m not sure we’d pay them back at this usage, maybe we will get an electric car & hot tub and reconsider…
  11. We ordered off plan for a retrofit/extension & did the osb fix in a similar fashion. I think our builder maybe gave himself some wiggle room as he did the measurements for our own supply of windows direct from manufacturer so even more risky as we had no come back to anyone as it wasn’t even the builder fitting them but another approved contractor. It was the best way from the time saving side so we were ok with it & nothing went particularly badly.
  12. This is the same stuff many councils used or still do to spray all their weeds in parks & public places. I’ve never heard about dying dogs albeit some councils are only phasing out in recent years because of biodiversity issues not because of rare breed dogs.
  13. @saveasteadingactually the blackout blinds we have are white on the side facing the outside.. the house still gets very warm when the suns out!
  14. @Thorfunwe are east anglia. Though it sounds like retrofit isn’t straightforward & shutters would look ridiculous against our vertical cedral cladding so maybe this is an idea rather than reality.
  15. Can anyone recommend some external blind companies to approach on here? We have a heat problem but also the daylight impacts on my sleep even with “blackout blinds” so I think this would win on multiple fronts.
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