ProDave

I remember the 18 months we spent in the static, which happened to include the winter with the "beast from the east". It proved it was possible, just, to survive in that in a winter storm but boy it needed a lot of heat. We lit the stove in November and it hardly went out until March and it was a challenge keeping up with firewood to feed it. Now I read of people in "ordinary" houses with high heating bills and sit smug in our comfortable house with low bills. It is definitely worth it. It is widely assumed by most that your largest household bill is energy. It is most certainly NOT in our case, it is council tax, and sadly that is one I cannot reduce by making any changes. I have said before, if you applied the same criteria to council tax as you do heating bills, then we are in "council tax poverty"

Well we keep being told that automation etc will make us all more productive and increase leisure time. I have been fed that mantra since school and I am still waiting for that to be the case. But it should be possible. Time for those that kept on telling us that to prove it. It won't be my problem, and not my daughter's either so I won't worry about it.

What sort of property needs two 24kW boilers? That's 48kW of heat? This is clearly not your average house. Clearly cost (running cost) is not an issue to the owners so just slap in your electric boiler. Unless you find they already have three 10kW electric showers and the electric supply is also already overloaded.

You surely did not ask for a new gas connection with a new meter and a new set of bills just to heat a garage conversion? Just connect it to the house gas supply. The extra load is not going to bring the grid down. Or just the flow and return from the existing heating system, unless there is a huge distance from house to garage.

I have always held the view an electric boiler is a solution looking for something to solve. If you are going to heat the house with electric resistance heating, just fit individual panel heaters, controlable room by room. An electric boiler just adds complications and cost to achieve the same aim (if you are lucky) of heating the house by direct electric resistance heating.

I think "starting" for planning is separate to "starting" for building control.

Are they trying to justify that on the basis the development has already started thus changes to BR's since they started do not apply? It will be interesting to see the legal ruling.

Making such alterations to a CU is usually frowned upon. If you are going to do it the usual way (that the manufacturers do it) is one cable daisy chaining from one to the next so no more than 2 in one terminal. Manufacturers tend to use fine cored cables for that, not the normal "meter tails"

I have a "conventional" UFH setup. a normal UFH manifold with a temperature blending valve and circulating pump. There are only 5 pipe loops on 2 zones downstairs. I have yet to find an issue with this setup. Beware that many heat pumps require quite a high flow rate and their own internal pump on it's own may not be able to achieve that (mine could not) so I would not be in a rush to ditch the manifold circulation pump. Arguably with the ASHP setting the flow temperature for heating you might say the temperature blending valve could be omitted but what about when the ASHP switches from DHW to heating and that slug of 55 degree water in the system would get sent round your UFH loops. All my loops are on 200mm pipe spacing and cover up to 8 square metres, so your 15 loops for 150 square metres sounds reasonable. I would be looking for no more than a 6kW ASHP for your heating load.

When I was doing our build I looked into the law on this as there are 11KV overhead lines across the road from us. You will often find a statement "no building within 10 metres of overhead power lines" When I looked into it, it turns out the 10 metres is the point where you need to start taking notice, serious notice of the lines and the actual restrictions only start at 6 metres from the lines. We also had more than one delivery refused to use a HIAB as they deemed it too close to the lines, others just took more care knowing they would be slewing away from the lines. Nobody is going to install insulation on a live 11KV line (like they to on a live 240V line) so even if some insulation was available it would be a shutdown of that section of line

The only thing that struck me was the boot room is a very long way from an entrance door, but no obvious place to relocate it.

That has been a chip on my shoulder for some time. In the "old" days people were happy to use blue (a phase colour) as neutral so why so against black now? Of course my gripe is why is only brown / black / grey available? * particularly when talking of 3 core and earth flat cable, Name me one case where you will actually use 3 core & earth as a 3 phase cable? Brown / Blue / grey would seem a better choice. * Yes I know we are talking about SWA here, where 3 phase e.g to feed a motor is a real possiblility, and where you CAN buy 3 core in brown / blue / green-yellow

With an UVC in the middle, think where you are going to route the D2 discharge pipe. That is to vent possibly boiling hot water being vented in the event of a fault. There are strict rules on how it can be laid. It either has to vent out of the building or under some circumstances into a drain pipe stack. That will almost certainly need something building in for it at foundation time.

Depends where you are and your climate (you price in € as the only clue to your location) Under floor heating from an Air Source Heat Pump will be the cheapest "electric" heating. Roughly 1/3 the cost of direct electric heating. And it can heat your hot water as well.

Very happy with our Rationel 3G aluminium clad. They were the cheapest quote of the quality window suppliers we approached so easy decision. But pricing does seem a lottery and others have reported them as expensive. I looked at 2 houses with Nordan windows and I was not impressed with either.

A lot of work? Why not just replace them all with nice new straight joists?

I wish I could un read that and purge the image from my imagination.

Ditto. Apart from the main big jobs it was bought for, it was a damned handy thing to have, often just used for a short period. You would not hire a machine just to have sitting there to be used every now and then, so without your own machine you would either do without, or wait until you have enough jobs to hire one.

Well ventilation running 24/7 WILL suck heat out of the house. That is the whole point of mvhr, that most of the otherwise lost heat, is recovered.

It is sad that the Sun Amps have ended up this way. Right from the start I liked the concept, but not the price. I also did not like the idea it was pretty much direct electric heating, i.e. no way to heat from an ASHP. Then as time rolled on and some people had problems it became apparent the engineering had some "room for improvement"

I did have one of these Chinese boosters in the last house before wifi calling and whatsapp. It made a bit of a difference but not startling. Can I start by asking what network you both use? I ask because even if your phones will support it, not all networks support wifi calling on all phones. This became a big issue for me just over a year ago when the network I was on (O2) changed something and we lost out signal at home. That was only solved by switching to a different network (EE) that did support wifi calling on my phone, and then later with some network changes we now also get a good native signal from them at home. There have been a lot of changes going on with all networks lately with the switch off of 3G and 2G and some re allocation of what signal bands are used for what service. This may have made things better for some and worse for others.

Having now lived several years in a near passive house with it's low heating bills and constant comfortable internal temperature, my view of old houses like this has changed considerably. To properly upgrade it will cost a LOT of money. You either upgrade it, or pour lots of money into it every year in heating. I firmly believe that the market value of old inefficient properties like this should be much lower than a well performing house, to reflect either the high heating bills or the work needed to upgrade it. I am not saying don't buy it, but buy it with your eyes open, and I hope you are not the one owning it when the market finally wakes up and people realise poor performing houses really are worth less.

What I got from this is the planners say they have to build so many "affordable" homes, which they can only do by subsidising those from the profit made on market value homes? Then the additional costs due to delays, interest and that retaining wall means even selling the market value homes, they could not afford to subsidise the "affordable" homes. And unless they can do that they can't sell the market value homes. Is that somewhere close to what happened? I have never been comfortable with the concept that private developers must subsidise "affordable" homes from the profits made on normal homes.

It's the "system" built up around the BUS grant that forces a cartel to charge as they please. Perhaps the journalists would do better if they looked at an installation in detail, costed the equipment supplied, noted how many people and how long it took then ask "so how can you be charging £4K for 2 man days work"? (for example)

Think again, at least 100mm PIR