billt

If you do try to work it out you'll find that most of those don't actually affect the EPC all that much. Just done a SAP2012 calc on my house, which produces a D 57 as it stands. Increasing the loft insulation to 500mm, adding 100mm PIR to the solid walls and insulating the suspended floors changes the EPC to D 67. Adding 15kW of PV changes it to B 86.

That graph implies that existing housing stock is improving. I doubt that that's the case. EPCs last for 10 years and you only need to get a new one if selling, so the reduction is most likely caused by new builds with better EPCs skewing the results. (The graph also has the journalists/politicians cutting off extremes of the scale, making the improvement look better than it actually is.) This house had an EPC of D 58 in 2010, the fabric hasn't changed and it is extremely difficult to improve it without massive disruption. Does PV still improve the EPC? I've got the best part of 15kW of PV panels (not grid connected or MCS installed); in the previous house that would have moved the EPC from D to A.

My single phase supply is fused at 100A, which equates to 23kW. That's pretty common although the supplier may reduce the rating if there is an issue with the local grid capacity. People generally want a 3 phase supply if they are going to run heavy duty machinery or want to install lots of PV. A new house built with high standards of insulation should not need a large heat pump and shouldn't need a three phase supply, but it depends on what other large continuous loads you are intending to use.

Sounds like something from HHGTG! Yes. We installed a Silestone worktop in our last kitchen, which was nice but not worth the ludicrous cost. The kitchen that came with this house has a laminate worktop that looks just like a quartz worktop until you inspect it fairly closely and it seems to have survived well for a few years.

That's odd as I've stayed in a few hotels and B&Bs where the heating is on 24 hours a day in winter - they don't want their customers complaining about the cold. The heating in this house is on 24 hours a day 365 days a year, as was the house we lived in forthe previous 29 years. The thing is they have these strange things called "controls"; heat is only supplied when it is needed. You like cool bedrooms, set the thermostat to 12C and the heating will only come on in that room when it is really cold. Rooms have a lower setback temperature when not likely to be used, when we're away it goes into frost protect mode, but it's still on.

I've used a few of these https://www.screwfix.com/p/british-general-cfsw07-9-module-7-way-part-populated-main-switch-consumer-unit/3571x. They seem OK to me, but I don't have an exhaustive knowledge of CUs. They do other sizes. If you want completely unpopulated ones select 'unpopulated' on the Screwfix consumer unit page and it gives you 12 options.

We recently installed 2 AEG IKB64311FB hobs. Looked at the wider ones and they're a silly price; it's as cheap to buy 2 off 4 burner hobs as one 6 burner. Very happy with them, but they've only been in for 3 months so can't say anything about reliability, (except that they haven't broken yet, so I doubt that they will in the near future). FYI AEG are part of the Zanussi group. Bought a Zanussi ZITN643K for the flat, which is virtually identical to the AEG (only has boost on the front 2 rings, rather than all of them) but was £235 rather than £319. I think Siemens are an independent company with a wide range of interests outside of domestic appliances, AEG re just a badged brand. There seems to be an awful lot of snobbery about domestic appliances. You can pay eye-watering sums for a appliances that don't work any better than ner bottom of the market ones.

Quite a few people are red/green colour blind which gives rise to an obvious safety issue. Harmonising colours throughout europe was a good idea, unless you're a member of the ERG.

I would speculate that there won't be enough free space around the heat pump. They need some distance from adjacent surfaces, usually 500mm+ from the sides and at least 1m from the cold air outlet. If you reduce these distances the efficiency will be severely compromised.

There's also an awful lot of selection bias; the mass of poorly built TF buidlings from previous centuries have long rotted into the ground. The ones that are left are ones that were considered worth putting the effort into maintaining.

But you still need a socket. We bought a robot cleaner (very good it is too), but it has a charging dock which needs a socket - in the hall as it happens.

Despite being a sceptic against the "heat pumps will solve all our problems" theme, yours is actually a case where I would install an ASHP. But I would design and install it myself, so I'd have a high level of confidence in it working as intended and not being too expensive. It's a problem when you have to rely on costly 'experts' of unknown ability.

Well, if the grid was supplied by zero carbon energy you might have a point, but as most of it comes from pollution emitting sources, that's not a good argument.

Always thinking about it, but electricity is still 5x the price of gas. Where's the heat pump with a seasonal COP of more than 4 for a non passivhaus?

I suspect that it's largely historical. The regions are exactly the same as the old electricity board regions before the insanity of privitisation. They all had different rates; I doubt that there is any justification for different regional rates these days, but it probably won't change.

7 foot is nothing, just a seedling. Ash is like sycamore in that they both seed prolifically and a lot of the seeds germinate. I'd just cut it off at ground level and keep pinching out the shoots which will appear. If you're reasonably persistent it won't recover.

Or you could try the iotawatt. http://iotawatt.com/ It's a development of the Open Energy monitor system using an Arduino. Doesn't use the cloud, stores some data locally, includes rudimentary graphing but also allows you to upload to other databases. I upload to a local Emoncms database from 2 of mine and the emoncms.org site from the 3rd. I recommend it, it's cheaper and simpler to set up than the Brultechs and easier then making the open energy monitor system.

Dave Jones undermines his argument by overstating his case; you are doing the same. There are 22 million gas CH systems in the UK, 67,000 heat pumps is niche. A SCOP of 4.2 sounds rather optimistically high - it's only likely to be achievable with very low flow temperatures; IOW not when applied to a retrofit. A quick search finds a list of SCOPs for Vaillant ASHPs which range from 4.58 at 35C to 2.9 at 50C. Even a SCOP of 4.2 isn't enough to make a heat pump cheaper than gas. At the rates that I'm paying the COP would need to be greater than 5.5 to achieve cost parity. I'm not anti heat pumps; I'd very much like to get rid of gas, but it would be economic madness to install one to heat our house. In fact there's an ASHP in the garage at the moment - a 28kW unit with a claimed COP of up to 16! just got to get round to installing it.

A stupid comparison. It is fitting a new, high efficiency boiler, not replacing an old boiler with another old boiler. If you'd read my post you would have seen that the comparison was on the same basis; the cost of a new gas boiler or a new heat pump in an existing system. The actual energy use and the actual energy costs show that the heat pump system would cost significantly more to run. I didn't mention power output at all.

I'm not Dave Jones, but live in a bungalow with terrible thermal properties. We had the gas boiler replaced about a year ago for one of the most efficient that we could find. It cost £2000 including changing a couple of radiators and a few other odds and ends. The boiler is invisible, in a kitchen cupboard. I don't know how much a heat pump installation would cost, but it's likely to be in excess of £10,000, need significant plumbing modifications and add a big, unsightly box outside the house. We've got the space for it, but many modern houses haven't. Gas costs 2.62p/kWhr, so say 2.9p allowing for boiler losses. Electricity costs 16.1p/kWhr. Assuming COP of 3, which would be a pretty good average for a retrofit in a typical house, that's 5.3p per kWhr - twice the running cost of gas. Over the last year we've used about 29,000 kWhr of gas (yes, it's a lot and I'd like to get it down, but that's going to be difficult). That means that a heat pump would cost over £700 p.a. more to run than gas, with current prices. Of course, if the choice is between a new oil system and a heat pump system, the heat pump is a more sensible choice, as long as the system is competently designed. Apart from his exaggeration of the COPs, Roger Bisbee's (?) rant was pretty much spot on. Bear in mind that he's talking about the existing housing stock, not well insulated, well built self-builds.

A PurpleAir air quality sensor.

We to moved from Bulb to Avro when Bulb put their prices up. Can't say there have been any issues. Initially there was confusion about meter readings as they referred to day and night rates as 1 and 2 on their website and it wasn't clear which was which but they respnded promptly by email. They've changed the website to use sensible labels now. Have you tried the website? I dislike apps, especially for this sort of thing so don't use them. Lumo are spectacularly bad and they were only contactable via the app. FWIW our unit rate here (W. Midlands) is16.092p and the standing charge is 21p. In the flat (South coast) with Octopus the unit rate is 17.59p and standing charge is 22.2p.

Yes, if used as intended they are pretty clean for a wood burner. They are designed to burn DRY wood at very high temperatures and store the heat in the masonry. Of course, if you're using your wood burning stove correctly the fire temperature should be high as well which minimises pollution. The trouble is, on the evidence of my nose, people don't have a clue how to burn wood cleanly, even if they use properly dried wood. Masonry stoves are bulky, so they waste space in your house and they are very expensive to construct, unless you build it yourself. They don't even have the excuse of aesthetic attraction as the fire is not visible. We used to live in an isolated rural house with 10 acres of woodland so we used wood for heat. However, we used a gasifying log boiler which ran at high temperatures and produced little pollution - no visible smoke or perceptible smell once it was up to temperature, and no measurable increase in particulates. We've moved to a more suburban area near a canal. Many of the surrounding houses have wood burners, despite also having mains gas central heating and the stink of partially burnt wood is evident most of the time during the heating season. Of course the canal boat residents contribute as well and seem to be very unaware of the pollution that they are creating.

Looks acceptable to me. Tiles aren't a precision product, variations leading to small gaps are inevitable. The overlap pattern is designed to keep the roof waterproof even with gaps between the tiles. If you want a more even result I think you'ld have to strip and relay the whole roof.

Really? Do you have any evidence to support that view? Which particular type of mould is the toxic one and how do you identify it from its colour? As mould is ubiquitous it does seem a stretch to claim that a bit more mould than usual is going to kill a normal healthy adult.