billt

I think you'll find that almost all decisions that people make are primarily emotional, the rational justification comes later. Actually disregarding heating costs isn't that irrational. Historically energy has been cheap in the UK and gas still is. Energy bills are likely to be much lower than the other costs associated with owning a house. Our council tax is over £3,400 (and going up 9% next year) our water rates are £920, energy costs are under £900. Energy would be about £2000 if we still used gas and didn't have PV and a battery. but even £2,000 isn't very high in context.

Yes, I've got 8 Aurora E8 fire rated dimmable LED down lighters in the hall. They're on for several hours a day and been installed for 5 years with no issue. https://www.tlc-direct.co.uk/Products/AUDE8CW.html At one time I would have agreed with Prodave about replaceable lamps, however decent fittings are very reliable these days and even if you have a failure the holes are generally a standard size and replacements are not that expensive.

That's total *******. The entire point of land registration was to simplify the transfer process so that you didn't need to use a solicitor, which you don't - most of the people who do conveyancing are minimally qualified staff and not solicitors. Of course, they will still try to maintain their monopoly by implying that you're not allowed to do it yourself, but that's just an attempt at intimidation. Some of them will try to make life difficult for DIY conveyancers. Yes, the various aggravations make it not worth it now.

I too bought that book (still have it) but I did several DIY conveyances. It's quite a straightforward process, especially if the land is registered, which most are these days. However, i wouldn't bother now as the amount of money you save is small. The great advantage of doing it yourself is that you have a good deal of control over the process, you know what's going on and there's one less conveyancer involved to muddy the chain of responsibility. Conveyancers can still be incompetent, just as some solicitors used to be. One conveyancer involved in the purchase of an unregistered property wouldn't proceed unless the property had been registered, despite it being the purchasers responsibility to make the first registration. (She obviously had no knowledge of the simple procedure involved and was afraid of the trivial amount of work needed.)

Sorry, you specifically said that vented water is unfit to consume because it has rats and other animals drowning in the tank. A system that is properly enclosed is a perfectly safe source of drinking water as it cannot have any wildlife in it. The point is largely moot anyway as stored water is not generally used for potable water. Almost all houses that use stored water feed the kitchen tap directly from the mains supply.

Utter rubbish. An unvented system installed to the water regulations has no route for animals or insects to enter the tanks. Obviously an unmaintained system from the 1960s may have issues.

That's something of an over reaction. BT as a billing company have a very bad reputation and I don't use them, but most people use lines which are handled by Openreach. If you use a decent provider like Andrews and Arnold or Zen, who can chivy Openreach along and sort problems out you shouldn't have an issue with Openreach as they will handle the interaction with the bureaucracy. I've always found the people actually doing the job very good. Had a 3 dongle at our flat for a couple of years which could just about cope with simple browsing or emails but tended to fail if you tried to do anything more demanding. No 5G there and the 4G was flaky. Gave up and reverted to the old Openreach line which is looking a lot more usable. (80Mb FTTC; fibre only available from Virgin who have as bad a reputation for customer service as BT.)

The heatpunk tool seems to be provided by Midsummer Wholesale. AFAIKS there's no relationship with Heat Geek. The Heatpunk tool was very good when I used it. They seem to have introduced a subscription version, I don't know if that has resulted in reduced utility in the free version.

Tut, tut!

Too long, didn't read or similar. (Wants the precis because people don't like lots of words.) No inhibitor in my system so you could call it VDI 2035 if you wanted to be pretentious. I've long been sceptical of the value of chemical additions to a properly sealed system.

Samsung 8kW gen 6, radiators and 120L vented cylinder. The Samsung system controller is left to its own devices. Weather compensation set to 27C flow at 15C outside, 37C flow at -4C outside with a room temperature sensor. Pump runs whenever there's a demand for heat but flow rate is adjusted by the controller to maintain about 5C flow/return differential. Short cycling / short runs aren't an issue and I don't have to agonise over the minutiae of control algorithms.

There are 2 point to point wi-fi links here using TP-Link CPE210s. One's to the front gate about 45M away for 2 IP cameras and ones to a pump house about 30M away.. Once setup they have been completely reliable for the 3 years they've been working.

We've recently bought a Segway Navimow i108. It uses GPS so no boundary wires and it has a camera to help with obstacle detection. So far it's looking good. It can manage our 4 grassy areas totaling 700sq.m. in time. To all intents and purposes it is silent. It uses the internet for rain warnings and it stops mowing if it rains - seems to be working reliably enough at the moment. It should be autonomous; you set up a schedule and it will look after itself and you can check on it remotely if you wish. Setting it up needs a bit of trial and error, for instance if you've set the boundary too near an edge it can deviate a bit and get itself stuck - as it did yesterday while we're away so won't resume mowing until Thursday!. But I think all that needs is a minor adjustment to the boundary. It space under the house wouldn't be suitable as both the mower in its charging dock and the RTK receiver need to have a good view of the sky. (That will be the case with any RTK mower.) It remains to be seen how reliable it is and how long the battery lasts.

And lots of survivorship bias. The ones that have survived are the expensive ones that are attractive enough for someone to spend money on to maintain. (I don't see any reason why a modern stick built house shouldn't last hundreds of years if it is maintained.)

https://diysolarforum.com/threads/house-burned-down.83098/ The chemistry might be relatively safe but they still store a lot of energy and there are other potential ignition sources. I would never install batteries in a loft.