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.

Jeremy Harris is long gone but he used a Sunamp for water heating.

Why not unless you're in an area that experiences extreme cold? Ours are outside and haven't had a problem with cold yet. I have installed heaters but they haven't been needed yet and the amount of energy that they would use is fairly minimal. Another alternative is just to switch them off during the infrequent cold spells.

Although the heatpumpmonitor data is interesting, I wouldn't attach much significance to the rankings. When you look at the detail differences between the installations you'll find that system design is much more important than the heat pump model., as JohnMo said. There are also a lot of environmental and setup issues that change the rankings. A system in the south in a sheltered location is going to have a better CoP than a system in a colder and more exposed location, all other things being equal. The best performing systems are designed to operate with very low flow temperatures, some of the systems have low room temperatures and low hot water temperatures (or no hot water heating from the heat pump), those will also improve the performance. There are too few systems with too many variables to be able to come to any accurate conclusions. You should also note that although the highest performing systems are dominated by Vaillant Arotherm+ (the most common heat pump in the list), a Samsung Gen 6 model is performing extremely well. The Gallt-y-foel, Gwynedd system has a Cop of 4.7 which is better than most Vaillant systems and not significantly worse than the best performing systems at a CoP of 5.1. You're well into diminishing returns territory here.

I'd guess that it's in a recessed down lighter fitting. If it is they tend to get warm which seriously reduces the life expectancy of LED bulbs.

It was still the case last year when I had to return an inverter. Even worse I had to get an EROI number to get it returned to the UK as we'd left the EU then.

That rather depends on the nature of the building. In my case there were few occasions when only one room would call for heat, so short cycling wasn't particularly an issue. I was merely pointing out the reasons for having "smart" TRVs, not recommending them.

You can change the room temperature from outside the room. You can set an actual temperature, rather than a vague number. You get a reading of the actual room temperature (and humidity). You can link multiple radiators in one room together. When used in a suitable setup system the boiler will fire when any room is demanding heat, not just the room where the thermostat is situated. Of course, if you have a near passivhaus where all the rooms are the same temperature and that temperature doesn't change much it's moot. My Drayton Wiser system is now retired as the Wiser system isn't suited to heat pump control. Reverted to the old fashioned system of setting and balancing emitters to match each rooms heat loss with one temperature sensor in the living room. It works OK but has to run 24/7.

None of my SMA inverters need to connect to the internet. (I wouldn't buy them if they did.)

That rather depends on particular circumstances. Here solar is crap from the beginning of November to the middle of March. Dorset is pretty far south so will have better insolation than most of the country and individual location has a significant effect on energy availability. Over sizing is not really a solution; if there's low insolation levels you won't harvest much energy however large the array. Ours is over 14kW peak and still produces next to nothing in the winter. Yes, panels are cheap but most people have limited space to put them. We've used all the available roofs, and I'm going to ground mount an extra 3+kW, just because I can; it won't make a meaningful addition to the energy produced in winter.

Lynne got caught with this. She lost 2 years of state pension which she could reasonably have expected to receive, so something like £10-12,000 in total. That's a significant amount of money. As far as I can remember she was not told about the change form an official (government) source. We knew it was coming because we took a serious interest in pension planning and saw news reports about it. The main cause for complaint is the lack of information (no doubt that was deliberate) and the relatively short notice given; too short to make serious plans to replace the missing money.