SimonD

I completely agree. Investigate first. For example - when we bought our shell for development, the bungalow built in the 1920s, which we had to live in for a few years was extremely damp - I installed a pretty heavy duty extractor in the bathroom as a first step because there wasn't one in there. We found problems in a few of the rooms that had to be addressed and when we stripped out the old kitchen, we found black mould completely covering the wall behind the cupboards.

Sorry if my post wasn't clear enough. There's the unfortunate tendency in construction of using terms interchangeably in unhelpful ways. By sarking boards I do indeed refer to the 100 or generally 150 x 22mm boards and not the woodfibre sarking boards. If you were to use woodfibre sarking boards your roof buildup would change dramatically and you would dump the pir and instead use woodfibre bats between rafter with woodfibre sarking boards on top, then battens running inline with the rafter fixed through the sarking to the rafters then 150mm sarking boards/plywood, membrane, standing seam. This gives you a cold roof, which is still preferred in traditional standing seam roofing design due to the requirements of very careful detailing if doing a warm roof. If you wanted to go down the warm roof, then have a look at the buildup provided by pro clima, but which uses woodfibre batts between rafters, 150mm sarking, pro-clima metal roof underlay, metal roof. https://proclima.com/products/external-sealing My view is that if you're going down the route of natural materials such as woodfibre or celulose, or even sheepswool, you stick to a buildup with all those materials as a homogeneous system. Likewise, if you want to go down the route of kooltherm/pir, then use a system buildup as specified by the manufacturers. This reduces your risks of cockups, misunderstandings and mistakes during the build, especially when you might have trades that don't know the system. JMHO.

Good point. Given his background, experience and attention to detail, I just assumed @saveasteading would have it all covered off.

The Panasonic M series Aquarea is available in a 9kW 3ph unit. It is very nice indeed and super quite, even if it is physically quite large.

Stop fiddling!!!!! Be PATIENT 😉😊 You are barely into this by a week. This is not enough time for the system to balance itself out. Get the information from the manufacturer technical support you need to input a baseline WC curve correctly. Calculate your heat co-efficient for your house in W/K and use those to calculate your flow temps at the controller inputs. Then leave the system alone. And if you're tempted for reach out and make adjustments, slap yourself on the wrist and go do something else. Yes, of course look at the data to make sure it's running OKish, but let it do it's thing over at least 24 hours or preferably a week - as long as the WC curve is nice and low. Use this period not as a fiddling period, but one of research - gather data to understand how the heat pump is working in context - then you'll understand when it starts to cycle (if at all), what it really modulates down to etc. etc. I know you want to play, but heat pumps, big specific heat capacities, new building and all that do not like this. They want to chill out and relax, take it easy and watch the world go by 😉

Let the battles of SCOP begin, eah. And it's not even pure open loop, but actually has some room influence in the way of TRVs due to large solar gains! Shock horror 😁

At what temperature? These figures are often quoted at 10C so below that may be a lot less. My own heat pump is a 6.5kW unit (at -5) and has a quoted minimum output of 2.4ish. I regularly see a very comfortable 1.2kW output. So best to test it out to see what it can do. You still need to give your unit and house more time.

The electric power only goes to 1 decimal place and is rounded up, for whatever reason, so at 6.8 actual electricity input is 0.276kW. Likewise in this screen grab showing cop of 7.2, actual input is 0.28kW, so the display is a little annoying. I'm wondering whether to get the open energy monitor kit installed before next winter.

Dont't want to blow my own trumpet, but I was a bit dissappointed when mine dropped from SCOP of 6.2 to 6.1. This is for the whole winter so far since October and it's a system on radiators 😉:

It's more of a reminder to myself of how I was once in a self-builder mentality doing the begrudging! Experience is a wonderful teacher! 😁

Yes, indeed, it's not uncommon for markups to be in the order of 20-40% sometimes, but as I've learned now being in the business, the whole transaction costs as a trade sourcing and buying in materials is significant - there's a lot of time involved. As a self-builder, I'd take my time doing materials lists to the nth degree, time I wouldn't have if I'm trying to earn money at the same time. I think the reason for me asking is to primarily to keep control of costs and moreover to not be overcharged. It's all swings and roundabouts, but having a comprehensive materials list to start is essential and a very important part of bargaining down prices. With my build I sent my spreadsheet to the various merchants and the one I chose, put the list on the account for the agreed discounts and each time I needed more materials, we just drew down on that list at the agreed prices as the project progressed. With places like Midsummer, there are always the alternatives like Renewables Centre, City Plumbing etc. or even the other online suppliers - plenty of choice really.

It's ironic isn't it? They ask for reference to the standards, but don't seem to know them. But the big warning bell that's ringing for me is that they're using an umbrella company. I assume you have a separate contract directly with the umbrella company too? So the actual MCS Design Standard (both current and redeveloped schemes) say this: As you can see, this does not stipulate that you have to have an emitter in each room. It is just assumed by the designer and installer, probably because they have no experience dealing with low or ultra-low energy buildings and therefore don't understand how a passivhaus would perform thermally. I'd recommend you have a good think about using these people as this is not a good start. But also, have a think about your design - at some point you may want additional heat and be able to have cooling, in which case you can use fan coils or UFH to provide this. I saw some very neat fan coils by Panasonic today. Very unobtrusive. I think definitely try to find a good designer and installer who can discuss the options with you. Plenty of help on here should you want help to diy instead.

This could just be the shift settings need adjusting but at the moment, if you've got min set to 28 and max at 32, your curve is definitely too flat. What's the calculated flow temp and min outdoor air temp? And what is your calculated heat loss at this temp? You can simply calculate your heat co-efficient W/K to establish a baseline curve at all relevant temps.

Well, this is just plainly naive, isn't it? What about all the infrastructure and energy required to run all the cloud functionality? I've worked in the tech. sector since the 1990s, mainly on the business side and I have specifically designed my house to not have any smart technology baked in whatsoever - you just can't trust them in any way whatsoever.

No reason as far as I'm aware. I'm fully Nibe trained for both ASHP and GSHP and will soon have completed the NIBE Pro accreditation, so I could be considered slightly biased.

If you do osb sheathing @ 11mm you can use this as your VCL, just tape and seal all the joints. With respect to your buildup sub the metal roof, you need to be a little careful. There are only a small number of standing seam metal roofing manufacturers that explicitly have a buildup that doesn't require a ventilation gap so double check with them that the Tyvek metal underlay system on warm roof is accepted by them (I know it's been designed to allow condensation to drain from below the metal roof and there are approved systems) - and double check with building control. You are also much better of using sarking boards, which are the preferred substrate, second is plywood and 3rd is osb. Pull out resistance of your standing seam clips is greatly reduced in osb where you really need to use screws not nails, which most contractors will use because they won't want to spend the time screwing the clips into the board. So you have to look at this in the round and how the metal roofing contractor designs the clipping for the wind exposure of your house.

What are the property heat losses this scheme has been designed for? What are the proposed outputs of the ufh and what flow temp? What is the zoning plan the designers have suggested (red flag already). What is the plan for 1st floor heating? Are they proposing a circ pump & mixer on manifold or more sensibly electronic mixer if going with other emitters on ff? Lots missing in this design to give a full picture of the system first.

Thanks Gus, I get you now. My reading of this is about taking a wider view of heating design beyond cost cutting via material, initial design input, and doing it in the quickest most convenient way. Instead invest for the long term rather than just look at the engineering redundancy. Yes, whole life cycle makes perfect sense and is ultimately a more sensible approach. And from a design perspective I'd suggest it's more about the principle of understanding the space as a whole rather than what the plans indicate. In this sense it's still important, if not absolutely necessary to vary the design for different areas of the building - e.g. a large living space with acres of glass compared to enclosed individual rooms with small glazing factors, but at the same time look to provide reliable heat distribution throughout the building. Although temperatures will tend to equalise across a well insulated building, there is still very real possibility of localised over-heating if not considered carefully, and therefore the system has to be designed with balance in mind, but not to get distracted by variables occupants can easily change over time. If my understanding is correct, I think we're pretty much on the same page.

I think you've still got a good couple of weeks to go at least until the system balances itself out. I would just go weather compensation, fully in the knowledge you'll be tweaking it for the next couple of months.. The problem I've found with running elevated WC with a thermostat is that they can end up fighting each other, especially if the thermostat has modulating input to the heatpump & flow temps. You then get oscillating compressor frequencies and can even see elevated defrost cycle frequency. Obviously this depends on how the controls are designed and implemented. If you go weather compensation only you're reducing your variables and any diagnostics/analysis of system behaviour becomes a lot easier.

I thought I might pop this article from 2013 in here. It deals with almost every question that's been discussed on this thread, apart from a significant reduction in energy consumption. But despite the progress, it also highlights how little has changed: (link to article: https://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-02-27/can-we-live-again-in-1964-s-energy-world/) Can we live again in 1964’s energy world? By Andrew Nikiforuk, originally published by The Tyee February 27, 2013 "Everything has to get worse. We are behaving so badly." Vaclav Smil, you should know, talks very fast in staccato bursts and doesn’t own a cell phone. The University of Manitoba professor, perhaps one of Canada’s most precise energy analysts, also doesn’t want to be the servant of a communication machine. "Everyone wants a piece of me," he adds. Authorities from China, Japan, Russia and the United States pester him with speaking invitations and information requests all the time. Even Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates makes demands on him. And that’s because Smil actually knows something about energy in a world that has grown largely energy illiterate, thanks to a now threatened diet of cheap hydrocarbons. For nearly 40 years now, Smil, a Czech émigré and polymath, has studied the world’s energy systems. He grew up in the political darkness of the Soviet Empire and has matured in the moral emptiness of its American counterpart. Although heralded around the world for his insights, he remains largely unknown in Canada. Yet the prolific academic has penned some 30 books and 400 articles on how the world recklessly spends both energy and valuable natural resources. All of Smil’s work is dense, number-filled, literate and chock full of intriguing history. Altogether, his energy writing delivers a sober two-pronged message: North Americans have grown fat and lazy by burning too many fossil fuels. Yet energy transitions are by their very nature protracted, difficult and unpredictable. Wood to coal Although oil shocks and boomtowns can unsettle economies in just years, real energy transitions in large global economies often unfold over decades if not generations, Smil observes. Take one of the world’s first major energy transitions from wood to coal as a source of heat, he says. At first aristocrats considered coal a foul and smoky substitute for wood. But a tree famine in northern Europe and England forced along the hydrocarbon’s adoption by the 17th century. It really took the invention and deployment of the steam engine to transform coal into an empire builder. Even so, coal didn’t provide the world with nearly 90 per cent of its primary energy until 1930 before being partly replaced by oil. So transitions take a long time. "The 19th century was a wood century and the 20th was a coal century." Oil didn’t reach its peak as central energy source until the 1970s and still accounts for one-third of the world’s energy needs. In fact, the global economy remains a full-blown fossil fuel civilization that mines coal, oil and natural gas to satisfy the majority of its energy diet. Even the transition from horse to car took a long time, adds Smil. In 1885, Gottfried Daimler built one of the world’s first combustion engines. "Thirty-three years later the number of horses in the world peaked and then the transition went very fast." But it took 50 years to remove the horse from urban streets and farms. Energized all the time Our overwhelming dependence on fossil fuels creates another problem. In 1850, the average European or North American used energy intermittently. You’d put the fire on in the morning, harness a horse or roll up some sails, says Smil. Energy use was organic and the night skies often fell dark. Today people use energy 24/7 and at fantastic levels. Every home plugs into an ever-increasing number of glowing gadgets, each promising more comfort and entertainment than the last one. "There are no peaks and valleys. It’s not just the quality but the constancy of energy use that has changed," explains Smil every so quickly. Now don’t get Smil wrong. He thinks modern societies consume way too much energy (North Americans consume twice as much as Europeans and yet aren’t twice as smart or happy, he adds sarcastically). Moreover, we lavishly waste much of it on the overproduction of cheap and unnecessary junk. He believes a transition to "non-fossil future is an imperative process of self-preservation" as well as a moral necessity. Harnessing renewable energy flows, is both desirable and inevitable, he adds. But the old-fashioned engineer and historian doesn’t think the transition to cleaner forms of energy will be easy, quick, rational or smooth. That’s a lot of exajoules One of the first obstacles is just the amount of quantifiable fossil-fueled power that must be replaced. Consider, says Smil, that North Americans gobbled up about six exajoules (EJ) of energy in the form of wood, animal power, coal and some oil in 1884. (The Japanese earthquake and tsunami released about two EJ of energy.) Today North Americans happily burn our way through 100 EJ of which only 7 EJ come from renewables, such as hydroelectric dams. In other words, the U.S. would have to find 85 EJ from wind, geothermal or wind or "nearly 30 times the total of fossil fuels the country needed in the mid-188s to complete its shift from biomass to coal to hydrocarbons." That’s a tall order requiring new infrastructure and massive re-engineering. The second issue for Smil is capacity. Renewables such as wind and solar just don’t have the same ability to make concentrated energy as fossil fuels. Capacity is the constancy of energy that an electrical power plant can actually deliver divided by what it could produce if it operated 24/7. No power plants, of course, work that way. Nuclear plants, if they are not leaking or down for repairs, can operate 90 per cent of the time. Coal-fired plants can chug along 65 per cent of the time before they need to be cleaned and repaired. But a solar installation can only pump out juice 20 per cent of the time. A wind farm can muster power 25 to 30 per cent of the time or slightly more if perched offshore. Next comes power density. It’s the rate of flow of energy per unit of land area. A coal mine or oil field can deliver great power density. So, too, can a hydroelectric dam. But not renewables. Fossil fuels, despite their declining quality, still offer power densities two to three times greater by orders of magnitude than wind, biofuels or solar. Smil then offers an uncomfortable calculation. In the early years of the 21st century, the fossil fuel industry (mining, processing and piping) occupied 30,000 square kilometres, or an area about the size of Belgium. The low power densities of renewables, just to replace one-third of the demand for fossil fuels, would require a land base of 12,500,000 km for turbines, solar arrays and transmission lines. That’s a territory the size of the U.S. and India. Renewable challenges To Smil each renewable or alternative to fossil fuels offers a unique challenge. He thinks that solar, of all renewables, offers the greatest potential. It’s the only alternative that currently delivers flows of energy that readily surpass the demand for fossil fuels. But capturing and transporting those flows at the right commercial scale still proves elusive. "We don’t yet have the storage capacity. Solar energy works only when the sun shines." Nuclear, he says, is "as dead as it can be." It promised cheap energy but delivered the world’s least economic source of power as well as persistent waste issues. Only Alberta wants to build nuclear reactors to manufacture more bitumen, a proposal he calls "madness incarnate." Wind will require millions of turbines and massive land disturbance that may be "environmentally undesirable and technically problematic." It’s also an intermittent source of power that requires extensive back-up, usually in the form of coal-fired stations. And in large parts of the world the wind simply does not blow regularly. Biomass or growing modified trees, sugar-rich crops or algae to fuel inefficient vehicles poses another problem altogether. Civilization has already appropriated 40 per cent of all plant growing activity on Earth for food, fibre and feed. This appropriation has already modified, reduced and compromised ecosystems to "a worrisome degree." Devoting more the world’s precious soils to produce something like ethanol, says Smil, is "stupid." Refashioning a ‘supersystem’ The engineer’s bottom line is sobering, if not completely politically incorrect. Over the last 100 years the world has spent trillions of dollars building the most extensive energy network ever conceived. Millions of machines now essentially run on 14 trillion watts of coal, oil and natural gas. The quality of these fuels is declining, and keeping the whole show going is getting more and more expensive every day. Refashioning what Smil calls the world’s costliest "supersystem" into something cleaner and sustainable will be a gargantuan task that requires "generations of engineers." "Yet everyone is broke. So how are we going to build hundreds of billions worth of solar and wind farms?" To Smil the only moral response remains a "significant reduction in fossil fuel use." The scientist proposes going back to the future — or the 1960s, to be precise. "In the 1960s people didn’t have three car garages, fly to Las Vegas to gamble or drive SUVs, but they lived comfortably," says Smil. More importantly, they consumed 40 per cent less energy than people today. "We can return to 1964 with no problem. Living in 1964 is not a sacrifice." Nor would getting there impose draconian challenges. Switching to 97 per cent energy efficient furnaces (that means they burn 97 per cent of the gas instead older varieties which send 55 per cent up venting stacks), mandating diesel-fueled vehicles and deploying high speed trains would all be part of the solution. "Bombardier makes rapid trains in this country," declares Smil. "Yet there is not high speed train between Montreal and Toronto. Canada doesn’t have a significant high speed link. It’s incredible!" ‘It will have to collapse’ Smil recognizes that reduced energy use is not yet seen as desirable or politically unacceptable but "replacing entrenched precepts," he adds, is never easy. In the absence of "radical departures" from that status quo, Smil sees but one all-too human reality: "Everything is going to have to get worse." That seems to be the global course at the moment, as oil dependent jurisdictions such as Japan, North America and Europe pretend their "overdrawn accounts, faltering economies and aging populations" don’t exist. Smil, for example, regards China’s rise as an industrial and authoritarian superpower as a copycat of the worst excesses of the U.S. energy experience. To Smil, a long-time opponent of the Three Gorges Dam, the Chinese may well outdo Americans in gratuitous materialism. "China will speed the day of reckoning and India is coming next," he says. He calls the new fossil fuel gobbling economies "riders of the apocalypse." Their energy ascent is physically not possible without an energy descent in the developed world, explains Smil. "There is no shortage of delusionary people," adds Smil. "I’m a stupid, old fashioned 19th century engineer. Things move slowly." In fact, no society has really begun any transition other than that of collective global economic stagnation and accelerating investments in fossil fuels. "Americans are living beyond their means, wasting energy in their houses and cars and amassing energy-intensive throwaway products on credit," he recently wrote in Foreign Policy magazine. Yet no U.S. politician has yet advocated a reduction in fossil fuel energy use by 40 per cent even though avoiding catastrophic climatic change now demands such behavioural changes. "We will never act voluntarily. It will have to collapse. That’s optimistic," he quips. You know, he repeats, "Living in 1964 is not a sacrifice." The conversation ends. Another investigator wants to pump Smil for more straight energy talk. But perhaps his best advice still remains the concluding sentence of a 2011 article in American Scientist: "None of us can foresee the eventual contours of new energy arrangements — but could the world’s richest countries go wrong by striving for moderation of their energy use?" Next Wednesday in Andrew Nikiforuk’s ‘The Big Shift’: What drove our last big shift, from horsepower to steam, and upheavals it caused. MANY DOWNSIDES TO HIGH ENERGY SPENDING Vaclav Smil, one of the world’s greatest energy analysts and thinkers, has long argued that the key to managing energy supplies is to consume less energy, not more. The pursuit of higher energy spending does not make us richer or wiser, says Smil. Nor does high energy consumption improve security, happiness, equality or build stronger democracies, adds Smil. In fact, Smil advocates a return to energy consumption levels prevalent during the 1960s. That means using one-third less energy than currently consumed by the average North American household. "We must break with the current expectation of unrestrained energy use in affluent societies," says Smil. In Smil’s Energy in Nature and Society, the scientist highlighted some uncomfortable truths associated with high energy spending. High energy spending makes civilizations fragile. "Expansion of empires may be seen as perfect examples of the striving for maximized power flows, but societies commanding prodigious energy flows, be it late imperial Rome or the early 21st century United States — are limited by their very reach and complexity. They depend on energy and material imports, are vulnerable to internal malaise, and display social drift and the loss of direction that is incompatible with the resources at their command." High energy spending fosters insecurity. "The Soviet Union nearly doubled post Second World War per capita energy use but with a crippling share channeled into armaments. Enormous energy use could not prevent economic prostration, a fundamental reappraisal of the Soviet strategic posture and Mikhail Gorbachev’s initiation of long overdue changes." High energy spending weakens economic prosperity in agriculture. "Increased energy subsidies may be used with very poor efficiency in irrigation and fertilization, may support unhealthy diets leading to obesity, or may be responsible for severe environmental degradation incompatible with permanent farming (high soil erosion, irrigation-induced salinization, pesticide residues)." High energy spending encourages materialism but not cultural greatness. "It is enough to juxtapose the Greek urban civilization of 450 BCE with today’s Athens or Florence of the late 15th century with Los Angeles of the early 21st century. In both comparisons, there is a difference of one order of magnitude in per capita use of primary energy and an immeasurably large inverse disparity in terms of respective cultural legacies." High energy spending does not bring happiness. "Just the reverse is true: it tends to be accompanied by greater social disintegration, demoralization, and malaise. None of the social dysfunction — the abuse of children and women, violent crime, widespread alcohol and drug use — has ebbed in affluent societies, and many of them have only grown worse." High energy spending diminishes human diversity. "In natural ecosystems the link between useful energy throughputs and species diversity is clear. But it would be misleading to interpret an overwhelming choice of consumer goods and the expanding availability of services as signs of admirable diversity in modern high energy societies. Rather, with rampant (and often crass) materialism, increasing numbers of functionally illiterate and innumerate people and mass media that promote the lowest common denominator of taste, human intellectual diversity may be at an historically unrivalled low point." High energy spending does not lead to greater energy savings or efficiencies. "Efficiency gains in engines or electrical gadgets have not been invested wisely but applied to the overproduction of short-lived disposable junk and into dubious pleasures and thrills promoted by mindless advertising." High energy spending does not improve quality of life. "Higher energy flows actually erode quality of life first for populations that are immediately affected by extraction or conversion of energies, eventually for everyone through worrisome global environmental changes." From: Energy in Nature and Society by Vaclav Smil (MIT Press). Award-winning journalist Andrew Nikiforuk has been writing about the energy industry for two decades and is a contributing editor to The Tyee. Find his previous Tyee articles here. This series was produced by Tyee Solutions Society in collaboration with Tides Canada Initiatives Society (TCI). Funding was provided by Fossil Fuel Development Mitigation Fund of Tides Canada Foundation. All funders sign releases guaranteeing TSS full editorial autonomy. TSS funders and TCI neither influence nor endorse the particular content of TSS’ reporting.

That's what I said: I think you're better off simply using weather compensation for UFH and not trying to mess with flow rates at the UFH manifold as that just adds another unecessary variable and will impact Delta P across the system, so just get rid of your actuators.

I often wonder about this and how this actually works. Of course we're seeing some of this all play out with Mandelson and his 'consulting' firm - all the senior ex politicians seem to be at it. However, I often think that a lot of these patterns are merely self-servicing rather than part of a larger 'vested interested' group. I also think that most politicians have nowadays been so sucked into the neoliberal way of thinking, that a lot of them aren't even aware of how this makes them think and act and encumbers them, and therefore they're not even aware of the real world effects in politics, economics and society. Awful as it may sound, I also wonder whether many of them have the critical acumen to really and properly question this and look at viable alternatives. As such, they just jump on the gravy train to get what they want and cash in on what can be quite an unpleasant and difficult public career in politics. I mean, if you look at the extremely narrow educational backdrop of pretty much all our leaders whether politics and business, it's really no wonder. And even if they do see what is going in, they're still so caught up in the ideology that they can't fathom a creative exit. Which I suppose goes back to my suggestion that it really is all down to how we think. Yup, all rather cynical, but every time in my life I've tried to go in a different direction with my stuff in business, I've found I hit a brick wall with the inherent status quo, and so I eventually end up back where I started merely navigating the existing playing field as best I can, learning how to jump through the hoops, whether I like it or not. Thank you!

This just comes from the fact that nobody, whether they like it or not knows what's achievable. And therefore trying to find consensus is just nonsense. But like I've said earlier in this thread - or was it one of the almost identical ones here that crop up on a fairly regular basis - the problem is not actually one of technology or engineering. Octopus, for example, have just got on and done what they've done and I'd argue that in doing so they've dragged the rest of their market with them. Similarly, I was listening to a conversation with a global solar entrepreneur talking about large scale solar installations in various regions and about how he was just getting on with it because the price was getting better as were the returns and social rewards. If you scratch beneath the surface of what is hindering progress, it's enough to make you shiver. One of these essential layers is that of government and the civil service. Both of which we know really don't work. One reason is because parliament is not actual sovereign, but the country is run by a small cabal that are the government. If you're not in the government you have little chance if any to have a say and influence the direction of policy. Another is that we really do have a lot of people in the machines of government who are totally incompetent. They typically come froma very narrow education path and don't have much, if any domain knowledge about the things they're supposed make decisions about and create pocily for. As really good book about this, worth a listen as an audiobook or a good read is Ian Dunt's book How Westminster Works..and Why I doesn't - here is a yourube video with him; On top of this, you then have what I consider to be poorly and narrowly educated leaders in the related businesses, including in the spere of the engineering and technology side. I was involved in leadership development and aligned education and it always struch me that much of what was learned and then being implemented was stuff straight out of academics' heads with little if any real world validation, and because of the problem of group think most leaders are taught exactly the same stuff and there is no variety. On top of this 10,15,20 years ago, leadership development had its eye on Silicon Valley as the bastion of exemplar leadership......enough said. And this doesn't even begin to touch the social aspects at large reagrding what you have rightly highlight as general ignorance about new technologies etc. The fundamental problem is how we think and it's going to take a while to shift that. The only way to shift that is through companies like Octopus pushing the market in a better direction and others doing the same. When I was building my house (well, I still am actually), I realised how much of my previous life and career was stuck in what I call concept and proposition. Lots of thinking, lots of writing reports and other documents and lots of giving guidance etc. but mostly it didn't achieve a whole lot. Now I'm doing heat pumps, which is my little contribution to making a change step by little step.

Ah, so this must be the truth then. Have a look at this. He explains the dysfunctional market very well, but if you want the TLDR, just go straight to 4:26. The whole video is worth a watch IMHO, plus he deals specifically with the economic ineptitude of the, "this bit only adds so much to costs" and how from a financial perspective this leads to excessive costs.

I was listening to Greg Jackson (CEO of Octopus for those who don't know the name) talking about the infrastructure upgrade decisions being made. He mentioned that due to these costs, we're highly unlikely to see any reduction is prices for the foreseeable on this basis alone.