Bramco

Havre you looked at aluminium - not as long lasting but probably cheaper £130 per sq m sounds astronomical. We spoke to a local standing seam co and aluminium is as versatile as zinc apparently - again you'd have to be careful about making sure you don't get bi-metalic corrosion. Simon

That's the conclusion we came to too. We're on an acre plot so would have had the room and initially GSHP was the plan until we looked at things and for the reasons above it's just not worth the investment. Simon

A decent sized contract - I'd quote for it but then....

We also had a quote direct from Velfac last year. I wonder if it depends on how many windows you need? Simon

On a more serious note... Search the Web for similar applications and appeals. We had to do this for our infill appeal in the green belt. Your search should turn up some agents or solicitors who have handled cases like this. Give them a call - they'll be helpful - they'd like your business!! If you can find someone out there that seems to have won a similar case and you think they are ok, then work out with them how they would go about winning an appeal for you. And be patient - planning an appeals are marathons not sprints. Simon

Indeed. Equestrian is agriculture in Europe but then .... And that's not a Brexit comment it's gastronomical... Simon

Useful guidance - thanks. Just out of interest, if you are cooling in the summer, then I assume you have a bypass round the buffer tank and blender? Or are you not cooling the slab in the summer? Simon

The part of planning that validate applications have little or no time or on the ground local knowledge unless they happen to live round the corner and even then... I'm sure they take a site location plan as gospel unless someone local complains. So the onus is on you or neighbours to point this out. Probably called democracy but .... Local councillors can be really helpful with this kind of thing, except maybe they're thick as thieves with the perpetrator - it is the time of backhanders. As @PeterW said the council solicitors are on the hook if it's wrong. So an anonymous email/letter should work. From experience don't bother calling the case officer.... Simon

We had heat loss calculations done for both 0.7 and 1.2 and the difference in terms of heating required was actually quite small. Walls will be 1.4 and roof and insulated slab 1. You have to weigh up the additional cost of going to 0.7 against the expense in terms of lekky for the ASHP with 1.2. When you work it out, it's not a lot - for us it would be £100 a year but a LOT more to do the windows at 0.7. Having said that we may well go the extra mile to get an A rating - daft?!!!.... Simon

Agree wholeheartedly - we installed solar thermal when PV was too expensive - it's great in the summer for hot water but you need a few panels for it to be effective. In the winter it doesn't really do a lot, so no use for hot water, which in your question would mean an immersion heater if you didn't use the ASHP. If you use the ASHP for hot water as well as UFH then it should be up to a third cheaper than an immersion heater due to the COP of the ASHP. MVHR will simply mean you don't lose a lot of heat through the air changes you need for air quality. When PV came down in price we installed some PV - sadly we didn't remove the solar thermal and replace it with PV - wish we had!! PV is much more versatile as you can divert any excess through an immersion heater into your hot water tank - and when that's had enough it will supplement the power needed for any other electrical devices and if they aren't using anything into a battery for later consumption, or your EV. And hopefully in a couple of years more vehicle manufacturers will get 'enlightened' and allow V2H or V2G - in which case you won't need a house battery as you'll have one on 4 wheels parked up outside. (Only the Leaf does this currently). Batteries are great for some of the new electricity tariffs like Octopus agile - if you can avoid the peak times, rates are cheap and last summer they were paying you to fill up your EV or battery storage overnight - yes a few p per kW to take electricity off their hands!! Kerching!! Simon PS We're also about to start a new build - ASHP (UFH and DHW), MVHR and a 4kW PV array (and when the SAAB convertible dies an EV...) PPS I saw a table comparing prices of batteries on Naked Solar (was put on to this by a Mesh Energy presentation) Tesla come out as one of the cheapest in their comparison which wasn't what I expected -> https://nakedsolar.co.uk/storage/ scroll down a bit to see the comparison table.

They do and I think the IOTCricket is based on either the original or the ESP32. But of course you need the software to handle the sleep, awaken and manage the wifi to send the data. The IOTCricket seems to have solved this, although it's worth reading Pete Scargill's blog. For us the ESPs were in a place where power wasn't an issue, so they ran continuously without using the sleep functionality - it's a lot easier if you can do this. Tsk tsk - and you've had many months of Covid idling when you could have ....... ? Simon

That's a route I've been down as well. Feeding the data to an emoncms system running on a pi. These though wouldn't be battery powered and you'd need some software. Another option are the sonof devices (we have some of the switches and a temperature switch in the shed to turn on the heating when it gets too cold). Sonof devices can also relatively easily be reprogrammed with the Tasmota IOT software which is much more versatile and doesn't use a Chinese cloud server. If you need a battery powered device instead of the esp 01, there's a UK company thingsonedge.com with a new device called iotcricket. Not tried one yet but Pete Scargill has -> https://tech.scargill.net/the-iotcricket-from-thingsonedge-com/

I've had a lot of pleasure from installing an energy monitor. Another great aspect of these designs is that you can monitor temperatures as well as the electricity flow, so we have our thermal store all wired up. For the new house we're planning to do a DIY thermostat monitoring the temperature of the slab as well as the room temperatures. The guys that developed things are also doing a lot of great work on the open ESVE, so software to manage when to charge your EV using data on the Octopus Agile and Go tariffs. PM me if you are interested in what we have done in the current house. Simon

You need to install a system that will tell you. Take a look at the open energy monitor site -> https://openenergymonitor.org/ They sell a simple system based on a Rasberry pi which will monitor your overall usage and your PV generation - there are tools included to allow you to create your own dashboard. There's also instructions on how to build a PV diverter to divert any excess into an immersion heater. These will only divert when there is excess PV over and above your consumption, so automatically will stop diverting if say you turn on the dishwasher and you aren't generating enough to run it (there are commercial units that do this as well). There are also some apps for android and apple so that you can see what's happening and on the community there's lots of additional info and ideas - for example with a fairly simple bit of code you could light an LED when you are generating enough to run a big appliance - of course you could just look out of the window ?. Also follow the advice about running big appliances round midday and only one at a time - you'll get the best self consumption that way. Simon

Ours is only there in the current house because solar PV and solar thermal as the only energy source wouldn't cover the needs of an old fairly draughty house in terms of heating in the winter. For the house we're building which will be very well insulated with MVHR we'll only need an ASHP for both heating and DHW. We'll still use a PV divert into the DHW tank I think, so as not to waste the generated energy. Simon

But the calculators work through how many showers, loos etc you have and there is nowhere to put in how many people there are...... I can only use one loo obvs but our new house will have 3 en-suites and according to the calculators we'll be massively over the 110l per person. Simon

Agreed - not that you're going mad of course - but the calculators take no account of the number of people. We have to do the 110l/per person limit but if you add up all the toilets, showers, a bath, washing machine etc in the calculator then it comes out as way above 110l. Where on earth does the per person bit get factored in? Simon

We can too. We've had them in our homes since we lived in Holland in the 80's. We've had Howdens and IKEA in rental properties and IKEA are much better. It might be a small point but with IKEA you have oodles of holes in the sides of the cabinets to set your shelf height - with Howdens (at least in the past) you get a choice of 2 or 3 positions, so lots of potentially wasted space and then there's the 'utilities space' at the back of the Howdens and other base cabinets I've seen, maybe great for the installer but an absolute waste of space. IKEA are very well thought out. For the new house we've already speced IKEA cabinets - the work surfaces we'll get from somewhere else though. We'll also get IKEA appliances. Our own kitchen is on it's 2nd set of doors and as @SimonD said when anyone comes round they are always wowed by it (it's not that wow really), it just still looks pretty new. Simon

Thanks I'll take a look. Simon

Here's a graph of a sunny day. I should say that our thermal store in now 10 years old and is a DPS store - they were notorious for not being lagged well - it does make for a great drying room though!! The zig zags are the boiler kicking in. So at 7:30 or so because the tank temp has dropped low enough, then there's another one, when one of us took a shower. The big drop in the afternoon is both of us taking showers - it's a rain shower, so uses a lot. From 9am the rising red, grey and orange lines are due to the solar PV divert and the blue line due to the solar thermal going into the bottom of the tank. The PV divert goes into the middle, so only heats the top half. Graphs are all from the open energy monitor software emoncms which is excellent for this. If you look to the left you'll see it with the heating on the previous evening - the boiler only fires when temperatures drop enough. There's actually two setpoints on the tank controls, so the backup boiler is set to fire at a higher setpoint when the heating is on, i.e. the tank is a bit warmer - this prevents the flow to the rads dropping too much (we have both rads in the old part of the house and UFH in the extension. Hope that is of use. Simon

We have a thermal store and heat exchanger in our current house on which we have a number of sensors. There is always a gradient on the tank (210l), so v hot at the top, getting gradually cooler as you go down the tank. As you draw off hot water, the hot water is extracted from the top through the heat exchanger and returned lower down. If the temperature at the middle drops enough, then the backup boiler kicks - we have solar thermal and PV divert to harvest as much solar energy as we can. I'm guessing that an ashp or gshp wouldn't be able to kick in with the same amount of energy as the gas boiler does, so wouldn't maybe be able to give you several showers and a bath. Having said that I can't see how a how water tank would be any different from our thermal store. The hot water generated by the heat pump surely enters the tank at the top as cooler water is drawn off at the bottom to be heated up. So the tank won't be all hot, there will be a gradient, so as hot water is drawn off at a shower or tap it will eventually get cooler as again the heat pump won't be able to keep up. So it would seem that each solution will behave in a similar manner and depending on sizing might be behave exactly the same as each other. The reason we went for the thermal store in our current house was to make use of solar thermal and diverted PV and to have mains pressure potable hot water through the heat exchanger without having to worry about legionnaires. For the new house we'll have to decide whether we go the same way again or go for a hot water tank and make sure it goes through a hot cycle for the legionnaire treatment. It would be interesting to know the relative sizes of a thermal store and standard cylinder to get the same behaviour, i.e. amount of hot water before it begins to run cooler. Assuming I'm right about the heat pump not being able to keep up. Simon

We would but I read here -> https://www.edie.net/news/11/Government-planning-to-replace-RHI-with-Clean-Heat-Grant/ that in the budget it was extended to 2022. If not, then we'll have and ASHP in a field!!! EDIT: Here's the official notice -> https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/future-support-for-low-carbon-heat PHEW!! Simon

@Dan F @Oldsteel I'm assuming you have both completed the build by now, or are nearly there. Any chance you could let us know how you decided to manage your projects and any insights on how they went? We're about to start ours, structuring it an a similar way to @Dan Fs, groundworks, foundations and timber frame from MBC, metal roofing and cladding and the MVHR and ashp as packages and then a builder to do the internals. Trying to keep things as simple as possible. Simon

And we're at J24 - Batman country if you know the area. Simon

We were intending to do that as well on the first floor. So only UFH in the slab on the ground floor.