LnP

Why so?

I've got a Eufy door bell, an inside camera and an outside camera, all battery powered and connected to a local hub by wifi. I don't have subscription cloud storage. I recognise that the bad guys could take the hub and I will have lost my evidence. But the main problem I have with it is that if I'm away from the house and get an alert, I rarely have good enough mobile phone network connectivity to view the stored event or even the live camera feed. Do the cloud based systems do any better than this? My broadband speed is typically 40 Mbps download and 20 Mbps upload. Btw, the battery life on the outside camera is very poor.

Check if your house insurance includes legal cover. They might support you in taking legal action against your neighbour.

We've done: bespoke supply and fit and hand painted in situ (expensive); German brand supply and fit (medium price;) and good local joiner fitting trade cabinets (cheapest). Getting a good local joiner to install trade cabinets is how we will do our next kitchen. The joiner we used was able to adjust the trade cabinets so it was almost like a bespoke and the whole experience was very agreeable and a good looking kitchen. We know people who have had supply and fit (e.g. Wickes and Wren) where there have been real problems with the fitting and project management. The fitters these companies use are driven by getting the cabinets fitted in the time they've been allocated and paid for. When they hit inevitable snags, for example the design isn't quite right, they just want to get the cabinets in and get away, never mind the quality. Very stressful.

>>Tice argued net-zero policies were to blame for higher energy bills<< >>Reform would recover money paid in subsidies to wind and solar companies<< The cause of high energy bills in the UK isn't subsidies, it's marginal pricing - setting the price of electricity at the marginal highest cost generator, which is natural gas. If the government wants to bring electricity prices down they need to break the link with natural gas.

It's worth looking at Ikea kitchen appliances. We recently installed an Ikea induction hob and are pleased with it. 25% cheaper than a Neff.

I don't have an answer to that just now, but will be meeting with our planning consultant in the next few days to discuss it. I'll reply when I have more information.

Regarding how the obligations in the UU are enforced, when you sign the UU you’re agreeing to a charge being registered on the property. You won’t be able to sell your house until the charge is removed by the LA, either because 3 years have expired, or the LA have agreed to it being removed. The UU says they will look “reasonably” at requests if you need to sell within 3 years. You will anyway have to pay their legal fees to look at it (as well as having to pay their legal costs up front to put the UU in place). They hold all the cards. Regarding the consequences of entering into a UU, you might not be able to get a mortgage on your self build. The charge will make it harder for the lender to sell the property if they have to foreclose. Regarding gaming it and carrying out prior work to lower the baseline score, if they catch wind of that, they can force you to score it on the habitat before you made the changes. LAs are unilaterally closing the door on the self build exemption which is allowed in the regulations - it’s regulatory over reach. I’m wondering if it might be possible to do the BNG assessment yourself. The scoring is done in a spreadsheet and there’s guidance on how to do it. It doesn’t look particularly difficult. Has anybody tried that?

Same thing happened to me, but on a much smaller scale. My neighbour submitted a planning application for an extension to his house which was partly over the boundary onto my side. I approached him and told him he was mistaken about the boundary position. I lodged an objection but it didn't make any difference and he got his planning permission. You don't have to own land to get planning permission on it. What followed was a boundary dispute with my neighbour. He ended up building his extension keeping to the boundary as I saw it and paying my legal expenses for the dispute which lasted 6 years and went to court. I won, but it was a right pain in the proverbial and quite stressful. My advice would be to talk to the applicant about the issues and let him know he's going to have a fight on his hands. You can lodge an objection with the LA but I don't think it will make any difference apart from making your position publicly clear. Btw, my legal action against my neighbour was supported by my house insurance. I'd taken the legal cover option on the policy, best £25 I ever spent.

Not sure about this ... as far as I know, the reason CCGTs are seen as a good fit with renewables is their flexibility to be turned up and down as the generation from wind and solar varies. But as I mentioned elsewhere their efficiency (kWh of gas in to kWh of electricity out) can never beat the laws of physics.

The laws of physics (2nd law of thermodynamics) determine that for every 100 kWh of gas you burnt in your boilers, the best you could ever have got out as electricity would have been about 64 kWh. The other 36 kWh was coming out as waste heat (first law of thermodynamics, energy can neither be created nor destroyed). So, it's good that your plant found a way to use that waste heat. It's the same story for a CCGT power station but unfortunately it's not so easy to make good use of the waste heat. District heating would be one way if there are users nearby. 400 g CO2 per kWh is about right and will never approach the performance of a gas boiler. I'm not an expert on CCGT, so I'm not sure about what benefits you can get by generation at scale. But regardless the scale, the maximum you can get out as electricity is the Carnot efficiency, which is 1-Tc /Th.. Tc is the temperature on the cold side Th is the temperature on the hot side. If say Tc is 300 K (27 oC) and Th is 600 K (327 oC) the maximum efficiency you can get, limited by the laws of physics, is 50%. With a gas boiler you can get close to 100%. Nevertheless as @Beelbeebub pointed out, if you put the electricity into a heat pump, for a given amount of energy going into heating your home, overall you'll get about half the CO2 emissions compared to a gas boiler.

@Beelbeebub is right. If you're asking yourself why a CCGT looks less efficient than a domestic boiler, it's because in a CCGT the heat energy (gas) has to be converted into work energy (electricity). There's a thermodynamic limit to how efficiently that can be done. CCGT is about 50% efficient. In a gas boiler the gas heat energy is being used directly without being converted to a different form and in theory you could design a boiler which could do that with 100% efficiency. Second law of thermodynamics - there are two types of energy, heat and work. Work can be completely converted into heat, but heat cannot be converted completely into work. No matter how hard you try, you'll never design a device whose efficiency for converting heat into work exceeds the theoretical thermodynamic limit (Carnot cycle efficiency). His sums are also right that installing a heat pump will reduce CO2 emissions even if the electricity is coming from a CCGT power station providing the CoP is better than ~2.

The guidance I previously linked to says this (emphasis added): 5.7.4 Mixing of PV DC connectors from different manufacturers should be avoided, and all panel connections should use the connector(s) recommended by the panel manufacturer. System operators should hold spare PV DC connectors compatible with the PV installation for future maintenance, to avoid the potential use of incorrect PV DC connectors. Internationally documented PV fire loss data identifies faults with DC connectors and DC isolators as primary causes of fire. Therefore, it is essential to use the correct PV DC connector, assembled according to the manufacturer’s guidelines, with the correct length and thickness of exposed DC cable, the correct crimping tool for the connector pins, and the correct torquing of the connector cable glands. IEC 62548:2016 and IEC 60364-7-712:2017 explicitly do not allow the connection of DC connectors from different manufacturers. So the concern could be demonstrating that you connectors and extension leads are up to the job.

What are installers currently doing about fire risks for in-roof installations? This guidance from the Fire Protection Association recommends (para 5.1.3): New rooftop PV installations, including panels and fixing systems, shall not lower the fire performance/classification of the roof. In-roof systems should have the correct fire qualification to satisfy the requirements of the Building Regulations. If installation on a combustible or partly-combustible roof is unavoidable, then a fire resistant covering should be applied. Perhaps sheathing the roof under the panels with cement board rather than OSB sarking?

I was assuming that a laurel would be smaller than this, but that could be an incorrect assumption. Apologies for any confusion. If it does meet these criteria, the next question would be whether a laurel is a tree or rather a bush or a shrub. Maybe speak to your LA arboriculturalist.