S2D2

Yes, this is correct.

I've had a walnut worktop in about six years, nothing but Danish oil and it looks like new unless you look extremely closely for all the small dints that come with wood. Takes a lot of time when new, it must have drunk about two dozen coats over the first few months. Now it's an hour every six months to take everything off and do a quick coat. Don't skip the reminder or you're setting yourself up for a week long job like others have said. Keep on top of standing water too, quick wipe with a tea towel is all it doesn't have to be bone dry.

I found the Bluetooth pairing to be broken/unreliable, so log onto the local WiFi it creates instead and configure it there. Then in the app just scan wifi for new devices and it'll add no problem.

From what I've heard £200-300 isn't uncommon for an official Vaillant service. Octopus have a service plan for their installs at £108 a year which is more palatable and more than offsets any efficiency differences between the units.

The point of the BUS grant is to incentivise switching to an ASHP, required for gas boiler users because if installing an ASHP costs more than just putting in another combi, the vast majority will just put in another combi. Somewhat unfortunately for resistance electric users, they already have a very strong incentive to switch to an ASHP as they could already achieve payback within a short time period. Thus, the government can leave the market to do its thing and no intervention (funding) is required. I may be in the minority but the BUS grant did exactly what it was intended to for me. 11 year old end of life boiler and the BUS grant brought the price of an ASHP below that of a new combi, so in it goes and off goes the gas connection. Big tick in the decarbonisation box for that BUS funding.

You need to check individual models for this, for the Daikin units Octopus install there are two ranges which determine what the minimum modulation is: 4-8kW and 9-14kW. There's a thead on another forum where someone got Octopus to rip out the 9kW they installed and replace it with an 8kW unit, performance increased hugely due to the minimum modulation being vastly lower on the 4-8kW units.

Go is compatible with Outgoing as of about a month ago, just for info.

Like a smell you notice a change in temperature more, e.g. cold kitchen in the morning or radiant heat as you walk past a hot radiator. With little variance you forget the heating is on, it's just comfortable all the time so is ignored by your brain.

Ah okay, they must have put that value in as they applied for the grant. Good to know!

A good option if you have the skills. I don't, so for the time to learn and then do it, £2k seems a fair labour price. I do remember from the BUS form I had to sign that the quote has to be above £7.5k. So that puts a lower limit on costs, essentially making it a "your labour vs theirs" comparison.

PV + small Battery + fixed export + EV here, I'm with Cosy as I also export a hefty chunk of generation.

At a very high level: https://octopus.energy/press/project-mercury/

It may help to think that the BUS budget is a tiny fraction of the windfall tax on oil and gas companies? Provided it can get the cost down to the same as a combi swap buy-in will accelerate. Of course plenty of companies make up a number they think people will pay, that's why I've been shopping around for the last year. I reckon it would cost me £6k to DIY. I had a quote just to supply + replace radiators at £4k. Finally got a quote with the BUS grant for the whole lot for £2.2k, but that frankly just involved a heavy dose of lucky timing.

-20% but still, sounds like my quote a year ago. Keep rolling the dice on the random number generators...

I didn't get as far as getting them out for survey but sent my local heat geek elite the spec and the ballpark cost was £7k after the grant. Instead I made use of some Octopus promotional discounts and locked in a price of £2k. When I got a quote from Octopus a year ago it was £5.5k. Heat geek website has told me anywhere between £4k and £12k(!) after grant over time, it's essentially a random number generator. Worth checking Octopus with their current 20% off before the end of the month, comes out similar to what I ended up signing up to. Like you I wanted the perfect system but it would never make back that £5k.