Gone West

I have an external wall in the kitchen which is around 650mm thick and is of sandstone/rubble construction. I am trying to work out if adding a thin layer of insulated plasterboard, say 25mm PIR, will improve comfort levels. Alternatively if I just plaster skim the wall, will the comfort level be better because of the thermal mass effect.

IIRC our house was only 120m2 for PHPP. I think unless the fabric of the building is significantly better than PH maximum levels, ie overall values U=0.1, the combi 185LS would struggle to keep the house warm. That is unless the interior is around 20C, but we did keep ours at 23C. That Plumbavent site is a good find, I'd have rather dealt with a UK company than Danish.

I fitted a Genvex Combi 185LS back in 2017 and IIRC paid around £5000 buying it direct from Denmark. At the time it was around £8000 from Total Home Environment. The reason for buying it was that it's a compact unit offering MVHR, DHW and warm air heating and it worked well in our PH. The only downside was it had an enamelled steel DHW tank with an anode.

No best time, but I've found it easier in the summer after a long dry spell, when a lot of it falls off of it's own accord, and the rest can be brushed off.

The EASHP in the Genvex 185LS I had, was rated at 585W. I don't know how it worked to heat the water, as it just switched between heating the water in the tank to heating the air in the MVHR ducts. Ground Sun produced a small ASHP a while back called GS200.

I used one of the test kits from Amazon around six years ago. Everything needed was included in the kit and the results were back in a few days. Mine came back as positive Chrysotile.

I've recently fitted some slotted concrete fence posts, I cut a couple and they had four lengths of rebar, one near each corner.

I designed and built my PH in East Kent, with walls, roof and floor 0.1 W/m2K, triple glazing and airtightness 0.47ACH. We heated the whole house to 23C with just electric towel rails in the three bathrooms, supplimented with warm air from the MVHR with built in EASHP. It would have been massive overkill to have installed any sort of conventional CH. I think a wood burning stove would produce too much localised heat in that sort of house.

Yeah we managed to transfer it and we get just over £2k a year in total 😀. There were no details other than the installation invoice when we moved in. There is an SMA Sunny Beam display but the total output bears no relation to the generation meter which has gone round the clock at least once or been replaced. The Sunny Beam is reading 45,420.6kWh currently and the generation meter is reading 3486.7kWh and when we moved in, it read 92845.2kWh, so there is a mismatch somewhere. I was hoping there might be a record kept by OFGEM, or someone, of historical annual output for every producer so I could look back over the last twelve years to compare yearly outputs.

I've bought a house which has a 4kW PV array installed in 2012 under the MCS. Is there a way of finding out the annual production going back to 2012?

Do you mean with a 1 + 1 gang back box? https://www.screwfix.com/p/appleby-1-1-gang-galvanised-steel-knockout-box-35mm/48234

Very true! Storm Eunice slid our neighbours shed about 500mm off the concrete slab it was sitting on. I've got 22 expanding bolts holding my shed onto the slab.

Pretty quick. Once you've lived through a winter and you realise it's not going to blow down, there are probably plenty of things, other than the house to think about.

This might help. Pipe sizes and dimensions chart.pdf

I used to think ASHPs would be noisy when our neighbours had one fitted 1.5m from our fence. It was a Nibe and I couldn't hear it when standing next to the fence, except it produced a whooshing sound once in a while, that lasted about a minute. They certainly used it and we lived there for over three years and we were right out in the sticks. We must have been lucky with the various factors influencing the sound.

Thanks for the heads up. We got one and it really is a great improvement.

Wasn't there a tidal generator operating in Strangford Lough for around ten years. Don't think it's there any longer, don't know why.

We are going to have an open vented thermal store, heated with an oil boiler, solar thermal and PV, for similar reasons as you. I was looking at the Newark Aquinox TS with PHE which is very efficient. I can't see it on their website now though. Aquinox HWM.pdf

We built in the garden of the bungalow we were living in. I just put a T connector in the existing pipework to the bungalow and ran a supply to the new house. When I demolished the bungalow I kept that water pipe and used it as a garden supply. I never told the local water company that we were even doing a new build.

Why isn't a full plans only, submission required, with the developer taking the hit if they start without BC approval. If this was the case, with proper BC inspections, you would know who was at fault.

Isoquick had LABC approval and certificate, which made it straightforward when we used it. It was in 2010 so it may no longer apply.

When I gave my 3 minutes worth at committee, I pointed out all their errors, as politely as I could. I had, a few days before the Committee Meeting, hand delivered a package of supporting documents to each of the Committee Members. I won unanimously much to the intense annoyance of the Head of Planning.

A quick explanation :- https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/uk-bans-popular-garden-plant-gunnera-after-study-finds-it-an-invasive-species/ar-AA1lbVM2?ocid=mailsignout&cvid=4038674bd46b4070ae440db7f59a4350&ei=39 The details :- https://journals.rbge.org.uk/rbgesib/article/view/1998/1917

IIRC the farm was owned by the Church Commission when we bought the cottage. Something to do with a Canterbury College. They originally built a terrace of three solid walled cottages and then later (1901) two pairs of semis with cavity walls.

That's interesting, as back in the 90s we lived in a 1901 built semi-detached farm workers cottage with a 2" cavity in the main part of the house. There was a solid 9" walled single storey extension at the rear.