Alan Ambrose

Taking a quick look, I’m not sure anything much is out of the ordinary. Take the 25th - total consumption was 5.4, HP was 2.5, so rest of house (fridge etc) was 2.9. Our little place uses 4.4 when we’re not here and the heating and hot water is off. So your standby/background number looks good. But the HP was still used for both heating and hot water on the 25th - so presumably it was cold enough that the ‘frost’ setting kicked in and presumably you didn’t turn off the hot water while you were away. Why not btw? I don’t think a high of 21.3 on the 13th is so bad either. Our little place isn’t well insulated and we do a lot of heating with our log fire, but we still had 39.3 max one day. But that was £6.41 so not the end of the world - total for March will be about £90 which I can live with. Your HP app will show CoP?

>>> Wouldn't have the first clue. I don't mean to be antagonistic, and I'm all for the owner / DIYer improving their understanding and learning enough not to be taken advantage of .... and I know that many on here, myself included, know that they'll do a better job of some tasks than a lot of 'professionals'. But ... there is a time when you know you need to get the advice of someone who really knows what they're doing. Now, I also know that it's often difficult to tell a good professional from a bad one and that's a skill in itself. So, this may be the time when you need to get one or more people in to quote and see whether what they've got to say chimes with some of the very good advice you have got here.

Anyone?

North London?

There used to be a Pilkingtons office a mile or so away and I used to source replacement DGUs direct from there. But no longer. Can anyone recommend a best quality source for DGUs and/or also one that will do the more unusual outer panes e.g. solar control? TIA, Alan

Not to mention… Visibility sprays and drainage for bats.

“it shows that modernism was rooted in a faith that society would be better off with new ideas — a design philosophy focused on making people’s lives better.” https://edition.cnn.com/2024/03/25/style/aluminaire-house-albert-frey-history-palm-springs/index.html

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/03/26/style/pompeii-roman-construction-methods-scli-intl-scn/index.html And the super-strong concrete again.

Well IMHO the Americans do tend to do stuff big and well if they do it at all - which is why they have a lot of the West’s tech giants. >>> 'learned to get humans and robots working together’ Possibly marketing BS, but there is a modern trend to make industrial robots at least ‘aware’ of how soft and squishy humans are. Imagine self driving cars that ignored this.

Well the numbers are probably not published anywhere for those products, but they will have similar-ish thermal expansion coefficients as they're all some kind of stone-like powder with a binder. That is, we're not looking at something like glass bonded to steel at one end and stone at the other. So, I think, along with the flex, you're good

If the bar is perfectly flat with no sticky-up bits that will cause 'stress risers' to induce cracking then 6mm should be fine. Toughened gets a huge strength premium over standard. I assume it's not so crazy big that it can't be manoeuvred into the horizontal by hand without overly stressing/flexing it? I would double check the flatness with a long straight edge.

Extract: In a state where housing is expensive to build, to rent, or to buy — and not especially energy efficient — can a big blue robot make a difference? The Boston Globe reports on Reframe Systems, one of the companies "trying robots to make construction more efficient" — in this case, "working alongside humans in an assembly line to build small houses in a factory."[Its cofounders] learned to get robots and humans to work together while at Amazon, which has built more than 750,000 bots in Massachusetts and deployed them to distribution centers around the world. Advising the company are Amy Villeneuve, former chief operating officer of that Amazon division, and Charly Mwangi, a veteran of the carmakers Nissan, Tesla, and Rivian... Standing at one end of Reframe's factory, [cofounder Aaron] Small explained that the company's ambition is to build net-zero houses — houses that produce as much energy as they use — "twice as fast as traditional methods, twice as cheap, and with 10 times lower carbon" emissions. That means using large screws called helical piles to fix the house to the site, instead of a concrete foundation. (Concrete production generates large amounts of carbon dioxide.) The company buys recycled cellulose insulation to fill the walls. Solar panels go on the roof and triple-paned windows in the walls... Reframe's "microfactory" can produce between 30 and 50 homes a year, [cofunder Vikas] Enti said. Eventually, the company aims to set up larger factories around the country, all within an hour's drive of big cities. After a home is trucked to its final destination, "Electrical wires and plumbing are installed in both floors and walls as they're built," according to the article. "Employees toting iPads can refer to digital construction drawings and get step-by-step instructions about tasks from cutting lumber to connecting pipes." One of the co-founders says, "We like to compare it to Lego instructions." See: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/realestate/can-robots-lower-housing-prices-this-andover-startup-thinks-so/ar-BB1iI2ah

... not used it yet, but it looks promising: https://drajmarsh.bitbucket.io/daylight-box.html

>>> What am I missing 🤯 A bit of graph paper, a ruler and a biro maybe?

I'm seeing "Material - Stone/Stone Resin"? I would just fit it, that's what the flex is for in Sikaflex. Sure, you could do some 3D heat flow calcs, some differential expansion calcs, and check the expansion allowances for the mastic etc ... but ... my guess is that the temperature would equalise fairy well / the differential expansion would be minimal for 'stone' vs. your (screeded?) floor / the mastic would absorb that expansion. Does anyone actually do any calcs or tests for any mastic joint unless you're, say, an EWI system designer or industrial plant designer?

Ah, the old 'pass the buck' thing. Of course the warranty supplier wouldn't want to take any risk (they are an insurance business after all) and would prefer you spend your money to cover their arse. The modern way...

>>> I think I would find yourself a solicitor familiar with the CIL exemption and run this past them pronto. +1 I think the CIL people just try it on sometimes. Mine sent a wacky 'CIL liability' notice to me, the guy that originally owned the land, and almost certainly the guy in between. This is for a design that will never be built by me and cannot be built by the previous landowners .... because they don't own the land now, duh I'm sure the LPA's 'Total CIL Liability Collectable' is a very impressive number. Garbage, of course, but there you go - the CIL people are doing a great job

@Temp - nice find.

>>> Well I got this back in October 2023 for a simple LDC appeal which started in November 2022 Oh FFS, LDCs are lumped in with enforcement which is running at an average of 51 weeks + validation? @kandgmitchell - did you get to 'validation' yet - it would be useful to have a time-from-file-to-validation data point for that flavour. I have one for householders, which is 4 weeks file -> validation.

>>> To test this principle before embarking on detailed investigation.. what if you fill the hole you have dug from a bowser to bring the standing water up by say 200mm and then see how long it takes to revert back to the standing water level you see at the moment? Very clever, I'll do this next time I'm at the plot. Will run the duck pond idea past the wife

Other ideas: something to do with your PV wrt RCD type being upset with residual DC? Your PV is also sitting on the left hand RCD? The RCDs are all type AC which are a bit iffy for PV (they may not trip properly). The PV should really have a type B. Or ... possible something has got at the cable between the outside breaker and the CU? I might be inclined to replace the outside RCD for the house with a switched fuse as others have said. It's worth eliminating the other possibilities though as just masking a fault isn't always the best idea. I can't see where the shed supply comes from or where the house RCD <-> CU cable is? The bit of T&E from the outside house RCD looks a bit manky.

Yeah, Reolink doorbell seems good and no subscription. I've had a bunch of Reolink devices in two locations since 2019 and they're good. Have not looked for a while but you couldn't buy an additional ringer when they first came out. Apparently, KERUI M525 chimes will work though.

Wow congrats. And a pond big enough for ducks.

Wow that shouldn’t happen unless there’s a serious short/overload. This is the main switch in the CU or do you have a breaker upstream of that?

Ah those times are for ‘minor developments’ i.e. full planning for small numbers of houses (including only one). Let me see if I can find the numbers for ‘householders’ i.e. changes to an existing dwelling and LDCs. (All the numbers are averages, of course, and have quite a bit of variation.)