SimonD

Indeed, it's all relative, isn't it. A little bit of insulation can go a long way, but we mustn't forget that this is a once in a lifetime purchase that also insulates you from the energy market. There's a big difference between passive and active energy saving measures.

I'm afraid the guy must be deluded and it's a shame if the programme could not challenge this. I've noticed it happenng quite a lot in the media where people, some of them claiming to be experts, are making false claims about techologies and unfortunately the interviewers simply don't have the technical understanding to question or challenge it. But yes, also pretty impossible to do with a gas boiler, unless you use the green gas model being proposed by Ecotricity which involve growing and using local grass in otherwise useless farmers fields, then the growth at least sinks some of the carbon.

I believe they looked at the retrofit upgrade measures required to reduce heating demand to below a certain figure, which in effect means the reductions were achieved through retrofit insulation alone, in order to make sure the heatpump would be as efficient as possible once installed. From the papere: "Significant improvements are seen with the addition of SWI, with heating demand and system input power to 1 kW reduced by 50–54% and 60–66% respectively. " "Adopting a higher specification U-value for all measures is shown to reduce energy demand by almost 80%. This highlights possible scope for improvement in current building regulations." Would you care to share your actual data and calculations?

The question is: who told you? There's a lot more research now about the vulnerabilities of thin coat render ewi systems. Norway, for example, now has a specific chart to indicate when exposure to wind driven rain makes it unsuitable for thin coat render and ewi. This is due to premature failures of this system which highlights a weakness of the testing regime. Its recommendation is the include a cavity in the buildup. Likewise, Finland has developed its own testing system because its climate has resulted in significant premature failures due to freeze-thaw cycles not sufficiently tested for in the wider European technical assessments. Like @Radian says about retrofit cavity wall insulation, buyer beware and choose your supplier/installer carefully. It would be interesting to ask K-Rend technical department whether they have any information on suitability for exposed locations.

And I think that is where this debate falls flat. I agree with @PeterW in that unless you consider the whole life-cycle of a product, your calculations about the overall carbon impact of a certain technology are incomplete at best. In addition, you've added 'once insulated' which also supports the assertion that the biggest impact is on reducing energy demand rather than finding a more efficient way to produce heat (and of course you haven't controlled for uninsulated context). As for the wider consideration, just like that ignored with EVs, is the wider environmental impact of large scale deployment of technology. As @SteamyTea alludes to this impact is rarely linear. Considering the installation of one heat pump, it may look simple, but take into considering the additional resources required to build and distribute heatpumps all over the world, just deploying, lets say 1.2 million per year in replacement for gas boilers in the UK, you're look at about 100-120kg per unit extra in steel, about 40kg extra in copper per unit etc. The wider environmental impact of this additional demand, including mining operations and so forth, and you have a significant problem, which will also affect costs where people incorrectly assume they will go down as a result of scaling - with demand on resources likely to increase, they will inevitably go up. Unfortunately, the arguments for/against heatpumps are not simple, nor are they merely at the final user end of the supply chain but it still seems to be a discussion that circles around and around.

I think that's what we all do but @pocster is one of the few to openly admit it! 😁 I always find those bits around soil pipes and other services to need some extra thought for plasterboard fixings. I find one of my most common questions to self is: how the hell am I going to make that work? Lots of spare battens come in handy, or some cls ripped in half. It's interesting that the carpentry/framing books all miss out the difficult bits too. Framing looks very nice...btw

It's just like UFH but in the ceiling. Not a new thing either, just new over here in backward blighty. Been around in continental Europe for some time and big companies like Uponor do similar systems. For a minute I feared we were going to be back on some debate about the electrical infrared heating and their efficiency rather than the wet systems. I made some efforts to source some for my project a few years ago but hit a bit of a wall in getting both information and supply. Some research has suggested that ceiling installed systems are slightly less comfortable than floor ones due to the way our bodies perceive the warmth in our feet etc. However, I really don't like UFH as it makes my feet really uncomfortable and I prefer the warmth from above. Maybe I'm weird.

Any decent diy shop will have them. And if you've got a local timber recycling centre they've usually got a good handful of the things knocking around. You'll be shocked that even a couple of scaffold boards from wickes will set you back £60 now - they were less than £14 each when I last bought some!

As you're in an exposed location, I wouldn't be considering ewi with a thin coat render but ewi with a 50mm cavity and then a carrier board which is rendered.

Here's an example of one of their projects with exposed glulams - https://www.bucklandtimber.co.uk/project/bunavoneader-isle-of-harris-scotland/

It depends on the makeup of the glulam - you can order it in various different species of timber, including oak, many of which are perfectly fine and hardy outdoors. Have a chat with Buckland Timber. Their page on species: https://www.bucklandtimber.co.uk/timber-species/ I received an email recently where they were offering good prices on North American Douglas Fir glulam beams.

Interesting to see there's been a bit of a change to the narrative about this, especially in the last few months, but I've been surprised to hear a number of people suggest that people can turn down their dhw cylinders to 'just above 50.' I've even seen a vid from Heat Geek and a couple of others on youtube making this suggestion. Now, I know that over 50 kills the bacteria over a few hours but always seen the plus 60 recommendation from the like of HSE etc. What's the consensus here, if there even is one? Would you be happy to keep your dhw at just above 50 without a regular 60+ cycle?

Glad to hear your order of priority and the most important point to consider and I won't worry about the size of your penis 😉 (I'm going to regret saying that aren't I?)

Plumbing convention seems to suggest that pipework is laid in straight lines, either perpendicular or parallel to joists for example, even when installed under floor joists. I'm installing my pipework at the moment and due to having service voids under my ceiling joists, I'm going to run them all diagonally across the house because it'll save me loads of pipe and fittings - basically all fanning out from a central ch manifold I've made. I'm also going to put nail plates on the battens directly below the pipes to avoid accidental nail and screw holes when fixing the ceilings Will I be forever cursed? Am I missing something about the sacred parallel and square approach?

Rolls Royce will be putting those on the market soon..with some good oomph at about 400MW

Only ever had one 2-stroke. The others were v twin, v4, straight 4, straight triple and a few big single cylinder 4-stroke thumpers - it's the single thumpers that were the worst out of all the lot but most fun to ride and tune, except for how much they went pop!

It would be so handy if it was standard practise to install some test tee in strategic places for connection into the system with a guage, wouldn't it. More common I think on commercial installations. No, I can't. My ears are still ringing from the years of trying to do that on racing motorbikes.... manometer was always better

My friends said the previous plumbers had tried this but it seems to be the biggest question and I'm less inclined to believe it has been done. However given how well set the flow and return temps are, somebody who knows what they're doing has had their hands on the system. My biggest worry about the circulator is that a rough calc of the pressure drop across this problem loop comes to almost 1.5m head. There's another loop of similar length that feeds 2 rads which my estimate comes to about 1.1-1.2m head. Taking into consideration pressure loss through the boiler, there's not going to be a lot left for the rest of the system. the DAB circulator manages less than 6m at 0.5m3/h which is about where it needs to be flow wise I reckon. It's the opposite end of the house, but not as far away as the upstairs rads which work fine. I've open the problem rads up fully and unscrewed the trv mechanism so there's absolutely no pressure on the pins. Haven't restricted the others on the same loop yet as only found that out yesterday when crawling under the floor - before it was assumed they were connected to an entirely different loop. Not that I know of. Some of the newer pumps will display useful data, either energy consumption which can be correlated with the pump chart, or pressure and flow rates. Grundfos pumps allow connection to mobile app for balancing too.

We have a black Schock Cristadur sink which is granite based - very happy with it so far. We're in a hard water area and have to say no problems with limescale, yes it's visible but just wipes away. Not overly expensive either. https://www.schock.de/gbr_en/world-of-materials/cristadur

It had crossed my mind but set it aside due to finding a space to fit the additional pump and then running the control wires across to the other side of the house for the boiler - there are parts of the undercroft I can't get at due to sleeper walls so couldn't just run it all under the floor.

Friends of mine live in what was originally a bungalow but has been extended several times over the years. Each time the heating system has been added to. Ever since they've lived there, they've had problems with two rads in the annex never heating up. They've had several plumbers round to sort things costing them money and never resolving the problem. I kind of quite enjoy these problems so said I'd go over and have a look and also crawled into the undercroft to look at the pipework there. - there's about 15 rads on the system and the two problematic rads are at one side and end of the house. - the rest of the house gets nice and warm quickly - 30kW heat only boiler running sealed ch system - circulator is a DAB Evosta 40-70/130 on proportional differential pressure setting 6 - pipework under the floor in the undercroft is a terrible mess - the two problematic rads are on a 15mm loop, that looks like it includes another two rads, probably giving a total flow and return pipe length of 24 meters for those rads When I started up the boiler, I put it into service mode max and even with the whole system cold, it would cycle rapidly. When I put the system as normal it would run fine and eventually, after about an hour finally reached 70C flow and 50C return - at all times during heat up it ran at 20C differential temp. I fiddled with both lock shield and trvs and the two rads eventually got hot but this was after probably 1.5 hours of running the heating on full pelt. Clearly there is a flow problem here. My thinking. I think there's too much pressure drop along this leg of the system and some of the other pipework has long legs of 15mm suggesting the total head on the system is pretty high. So questions: - do we chuck in a more powerful circulator pump. The curve on the DAB is pretty rubbish in terms of drop in head even at normal ch circulation flow rates. So we could go for a better domestic pump, like from Grundfos or Wilo that could deal with decent head up to 7.5m, or alternatively chuck in a light commercial pump for up to 9m head? - do we get under the undercroft and modify the pipework. There's a section of accessible pipework in the undercroft feeding two rads that do get hot. As it's so accessible my thought was this could be upsized to 22mm and we could then tee in the troublesome rads to this loop on 22mm pipe? (there are some dead legs here already suggesting that's how the old system worked before some building work was done and radiators were moved) - they've said plummers have been round a tried to balance the system, but is it worth us trying this first? Budget's limited so hesitant to just chucking in an expensive circulating pump without having a good sense of whether it might work, but is that the most sensible solution? I'd appreciate any suggestions here.

You don't need hardcore, sand blinding and then concrete. All you need is a sufficient cover of inert material so a good spread of hardcore or a lean mix of concrete cover - 50mm concrete should be sufficient. Then just make sure you've got a min 150mm distance between the bottom of your joists and finished level of oversite.

Well, it's Friday night and this thread caught my eye. How many books have you actually got? I haven't sat down and done any math on this one as my main thought was that my dad has a lot of books, a lot of them. My sister also has a lot of books currently on bookshelves on a floor that's been around for nearly 100 years now. There's never been a problem with floors coping with the load from the bookshelves, even in the last place where my dad had them in a loft converted into a library. In my current house, the SE didn't design the floor according to minimum BR load requirements, but to a higher standard to reduce deflection, which in theory is going to mean the capacity to deal with a greater load. I'll report back when I get my library out of storage and onto the bookshelves ☺️ If my very rusty engineering brain remembers correctly, this is only one way of calculating your loading which is in effect the resultant force of the load. However, this is a simplified approach. For a uniformly distributed load you may need to think as if it's pressure against the surface which would calculate the pressure over an area - think for example snow load. In this instance you'd be looking at load per unit area, or in more simply terms load per unit length. This way you get a better idea of the distribution of the load which is more accurate because in your case, you wouldn't in reality see the resultant force on one joist with less or nothing on the others. But also, because the floor structure ties the floor together your loading will be distributed across a wider area of the floor than just the joists below the bookshelf - try walking across a load of joists without noggings, then add the noggings, and then add your osb/chipboard floor and in each case there will be a very obvious difference in the floor's behaviour and how it feels underfoot. Like @markc has also clearly experimented, I've driven and used a mini digger on a floor with only 4inch joists. But maybe I've had too much beer....

Hmmm, I think the layout is pretty poor. Is this designer actually a proper designer or someone who sits next to you at a diy store and plonks units into place on an app? Ditch the breakfast bar as I think you'll find it cramped. no way you want someone sitting there while you use the kitchen. But more to the point, the designer doesn't seem to have thought about how a kitchen works. There's very little usable worksurface next to the hob for prep etc. It'll be full when a kettle is there and there's some washing up on the side. You've got acres of worktop the other side of the oven which means you'll probably do all the food prep for cooking there and have to work round the oven - if you cook at all you'll hate this with a vengeance, even more if you use food processors etc.. The fridge is at the other end of the kitchen from this prep area too. The fridge opens out across what looks like a doorway and the other doorway opens virtually straight into the breakfast bar. Similarly it looks like the dishwasher opens out in the way of good access to and from the fridge and it would get in the way of the walkway to and from the door when open. I also think there are multiple issues with the high oven next to the window and the wall cupboards around the extractor that are next to the other window. I think this will create some weird light in the kitchen and maybe darken it. Tall oven cupboard in the middle of it all will make the space seem much smaller too. So for some constructive input, I'd suggest you play around with the layout by moving the sink and dishwasher (assuming it can be opened without getting in the way of the doorway) right across to the other side of the kitchen beneath the large indicated window. Then move the tall oven cupboard across next to the tall fridge. This way you'll have created yourself a load of space and a much better sense of space with good light. Also consider if you can live without the wall cabinets that are currently on the wall above the hob and just have a simple extractor. The other consideration is whether you could live with a simple one sided galley kitchen. Remove the tall oven cabinet and instead have the oven below the hob. Then you could turn the fridge 90 degrees around so that it opens towards the galley kitchen without getting in the way of the doorway. Sink and dishwasher again sit under the large window. I have worked in commercial kitchens, love cooking and so I spend a lot of time in my kitchen. Following the image you've shown, I would lean towards the galley kitchen. Clean, simple, functional, leaves space in the kitchen and it's cheaper. However, if you've just bought your first place, don't rush out to renovate the kitchen. Live with what you have for at least 6 months to get an idea of how the space works and how you use it - you'll be so much better and knowing what you want then.

There is definitely positive movement, yet as the late Hans Rosling, the famed Swedish physician and statistician always used to say - you've got to look beyond the numbers. If you do this, the graph you show isn't as rosy as it might seem. In 2021 solid biomass acounted for over 1/3 of all 'renewable' energy, 70% of which is used for electricity generation. This process is highly inefficient (probably dirtier than coal) and in 2018 required us to import just under 8 million tons mainly from the US and Canada. Now according to the bean counters, this is classed as a renewable source. According to more up to date research and knowledge, it isn't. In fact it's now causing an increase in carbon emissions but this part of it has been off shored, like much of our other emissions. It also masks that we've done the easy bit in phasing out coal, for example. They've picked all the low hanging fruit. Now comes the harder work to continue the downward trajectory. This will be both more challenging and expensive.