Thorfun

I think we need to take a leaf out of your book. we're getting about 3 or 4 mice a day at the moment being brought in.

is that a good thing? 😈

just realised my post sounded like I was planning on two of the passive house flaps! but when I mentioned 2 x flaps I was talking normal flaps that cost £30 from the local pet shop. unless you were just making an obscure reference to this of course. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filthy_Rich_%26_Catflap

whoops! sorry. I hadn't got to that part of the forum yet in my research. my apologies! but how to the cat(s) get from the main house to the sun room? I guess they just stand at the doors and shout loudly at you to open them? that's what our cats do whenever they want something

when you go to the url you get this: and clicking on 'Sign up here' takes you to this page which is monitoringpublic.solaredge.com: where if you click 'I'm an owner' gives you the message shown and if you click 'I'm an installer' you follow it through and it asks for SN. so maybe they've changed it since you signed up?

sounds good. please note I was playing devil's advocate not being a argumentative b******d (although I guess by definition they are pretty much the same thing!). I agree with you about the longevity of components but no one knows where technology will take us in 10/15/20/30 years. and because of that we have to make our decisions on the facts we have right now. which is why I will be investigating the SolarWatt panels. 😉

I'm waiting for them to integrate a video camera to check for mice/birds in our cat's mouths and deny/allow entrance accordingly. then I'll be all-in for one!

how are you planning on maintaining air tightness with the cat flap? I see airtight flaps are crazy money (https://www.petwalk.at/shop/doors) available also from @craig @ Ecowin (https://www.ecowin.co.uk/products/petwalk/) (although I have to say they do look pretty darn cool!). I was planning on having one flap on a door into the garage and then another flap on an external door from the garage outside. the other option is to build a deep tunnel through the wall so that there are 2 x flaps through the tunnel, one at the start and one at the end so that only one flap is open at a time.

so those SolarWatt panels do look impressive. but, just to play devils advocate here for a minute, in 15 years when those buying the 'normal' panels are replacing them with more efficient panels as technological improvements have been made over the years are reaping the benefits for the next 15 years when the SolarWatt panels are still producing at 20%-ish efficiency? so is the 30 year warranty false economy?

@Dan F took a look and I need to sign up as an installer and it asks for Serial number of array and stuff! I think I'll just leave it all to Enhabit who I've hired to do the design for me and trust they know what they're doing as I've got plenty of other stuff to concern myself with.

not exactly foundation related but I've been looking in to this as my water mains will go over a culvert and I cannot get the 750mm min depth. I found this stuff (https://groundbreaker.co.uk/products/shalloduct/) which seems to fit the bill. I have someone from Southern Water Regulations team coming to site today to discuss it all. it might be wise to speak to your local water company regulations team to find out what solution they're happy with.

cheers @Dan F. I'll take a look.

yeah. this mostly. who knows what the future holds but it might be that people are more likely to buy with triple glazing than double. maybe not though!

I've got optimisers designed as we have shading from surrounding trees. I think I'll just end up going with what the company designing the solution recommends as they're the professionals and I trust them enough to do the work so I must trust them enough that their design will suit our needs.

that's pretty much exactly what happened with us. like I said, it was our naivety of how these things work that caused the issues and not a fault with the architect. I did apologise to him for my initial comments on his initial sketches. the fault was all with us.