Ferdinand

Landlords are already pretty much regulated to have their properties C or better within a very few years. I think there is debate about 2028 or 2030. D is required by 2025, and not to have it is an offence. The main problem is with existing older stock in the Owner Occupied sector. The problem there is that the last 3 Governments have been cowards on that question. I'd suggest higher stamp duty, and an extra band or two of Council Tax. Overall the average EPC is now just reaching into C - last time I looked it was 67-68.

I don't have an allotment 🙂 ,so perhaps you have me cross-referenced? I think on the long thread, my contribution was about the Aquatron, which is an spiral separating alternative to a septic tank you put on the end of a normal waste system.

I think that's the only one that needs a comment. Yes - an air gap above. I would install 2-4" less than the depth of the beams, and install it near the bottom.

If using spray foam, you could spray paint it afterwards to make it less obvious.

Some of that may be available free - eg loft insulation. You need to do some digging. Also Jeremy Hunt hinted at more renovation / improvement effort - watch for the detail.

There's also this long thread, but it is mainly about treatment plants. There may be something in it. Again old, but the biological mechanics have been exactly the same since Medieval Long Drops.

One of our members @Tennentslager has a hut at Carbeth, near Glasgow, and used a boxed in dry loo which separates 1s and 2s. Details are here on his blog, quite a long way down the article - but since it is basically a weekend hut there are probably a lot more ideas that would be useful for your shepherd's hut if you read it all. You get the benefit from my interest in bodily functions in the comments. Summary: Dry Toilet And No Smell Whatsoever Apologies for the pic of the loo, warts and all so to speak... This is the 'seperate' plastic toilet from Sweden that has a front funnel and back void. The thinking is to seperate the solid and liquid waste as it is the combination Of both together that causes the smells we don't like. Urine runs to a soak away and the solids and toilet paper (and sawdust which helps the drying process and Erm...helps the appearance should you peer into the pit!)end up in the bucket below. There is a small fan running constantly which you can just see on the floor behind the urine waste tube. The fan is powered from our 12v battery and draws next to no power at around 0.1 amps. This provides an airflow which removes odours and aids the drying process for the solid waste.

Here's the presentation. I think they should have kept VAT free shopping for tourists (or perhaps reduced rate). And the silly buggers have maintained subsidy to the demand side of the housing market for first time buyers, which is completely loopy as it will continue to drive prices up. The commitment to consider energy saving seems forward looking. And Little Miss Dotty is now somewhat marginalised, which has to be beneficial at this time. I quite like this reply:

Yay. Scenario Analysis. Good tool whatever your views. Agree on the arrays of downlights. I have 19 in my kitchen (installed by previous occupier), and another 40+ elsewhere, and they *are* the devil. Though I changed them all (except those that were stuck) to new iKea LEDs in 2013, and I think only a single one has gone pop since. I tend to use this kind of thing as an alternative to drilling 47 holes in a plaster ceiling, or variations thereupon such as a round one with 2-4 stalks: I think that LED panel lights are a decent alternative for eg above your dining table, although a feature metallic fitting may work well there. You also need to consider dimmability, colour temperature (eg cool or war, white), colour tunability if you want it, and point sources such as uplighters and wall lights. You can some fabulous 70s style wall lights that will go with a patterned carpet and tartan golfer trousers to give you a wonderful Terry & June aesthetic 😉. ATB Ferdinand

A couple of further thoughts. You need to have designed your complete install method before you start, including machinery and number of people / skills. The attractiveness of tin cladding underneath the insulation is (in addition to catching fibres and looking nice) that you can order it in custom lengths which will exactly match your pitch length. The downside is that you will then be handling 6-7m x 0.8m hunks of corrugated 5m in the air, so it will be a sod to handle, even with something like a small spider crane or a 5m high board lifter. I can see one scaffold tower plus a powered lift platform being an practical and cost-effective combination for a rapid install. And the "how to attach to steel" still needs to be bottomed-out - I would suggest, once you have a method selected, a full scale trial on one small section of roof which is the left for a month to see if anything goes wrong. I was attracted to things like sheep netting and mesh fence because they come on rolls just like rockwool, so you can install the holding layer with the insulation at one time, and the sections of roof you have already applied will support themselves as you move up (or down) the strip. What about the use of PIR (or maybe sheet insulation of more robustness if necessary?) tacked up by expanding foam with a further "whoops" loop to catch any Great Collapsing Sheet of Celotex disasters as a layer to support and shield the rockwool? Or a similar mechanical solution using say sheets EPS? There are further benefits - it is light to handle, supplies extra insulation, can very possibly be used to cover your steel-rafter cold bridges. If you use alu-faced celotex with the non-printed side facing down that may also help your lighting, and you can seal it with alu tape to give you a 99% moisture seal to the roof. Just thoughts. F

That looks nice.

TLC Direct can be good, especially if you are near a store. https://www.tlc-direct.co.uk/

100-150mm gap should be fine. 8mm glass may be surprisingly cheap - remember how inexpensive large shower screens can be. Try a little local glazing man if you have one. Whatever you use, check the safety requirements. Might plastic get too dusty? We had secondary glazing (for draughts in a listed building with original Georgian sash windows) which was just sized and edge polished sheets of toughened glass, which we fixed up with mirror hinges for the winter then took down again. We just used a circuit of foam to block the draughts and cushion.

Yes - it would help. You need 2 things - a wide air gap and a good seal around the edge. It will not cut other noise routes, however.

It's all discussed in the pinned discount thread. Have a dig here. For Wickes it should stack with the Trade Discount. Quite often via employer card discount schemes - I get one with my health cash plan scheme. The mechanism is that you have a reusable cash card, load it up on the website at a discount to cash value you are loading, then use it to pay at Wickes or where-ever. They come as a perk with all sorts of employee schemes, memberships and similar. And many just don't know the value.

There's an optimist at the Estate Agent. That per sqm price on the theoretical house is 50% more than the local ones that are finished. What happened?

Always remember that at Wickes -10% is always possible as they hand out trade accounts like confetti. And that they participate in discount card schemes for a further -10%, which takes it to roughly their staff discount level (last time I checked, which is not very recent). Plus good discounts for eg NHS staff or Blue Light card. Presumably all that is within margin. F

Having explained the history of the whole thing above, also to get my thinking in order - to address the direct questions. Basically if you store it it then it depends on whether you use it yourself later from your storage, or export it later from your storage (aiui at a 20-25% round trip efficiency loss). The storage just does a time shift, you get to use your solar electricity later and import less, or export it if you have that level of control and potentially get export payments. If you don't export it when generated or later (if you time shift it using your battery), then of course you won't be paid the Export payments - as you have not exported anything. Although you may still get "deemed" export payments, as discussed above. But on an Agile Tariff you could get paid more or less for your exports depending on how you time the export. Plus - and this is the one you have wrong I think - only a small fraction of that 56p is Export Payments (Contract 2 as I referred to it). Your FIT payments (Contract 1) are not dependent on exporting electricity.

That's not quite right. Let me explain my understanding, also to clarify in my own head - I'm have moved my tariff to Octopus Export Agile. This is how it operates: Under the FIT scheme you have TWO contracts: Contract 1 with your FIT provider that will pay you for everything you generate. This is basically a subsidy to help you pay for the cost of your solar equipment to get the ball rolling for the country, which reduced over time as the cost of kit fell. This was 60p per generated unit at the start for installs from 2009 (?) or so, and fell to about 11-12p by 2015 for contracts started then, and was then significantly reduced as it was deemed to have basically done it's job. It was usage based to make sure that people would install solar arrays to actually produce energy. I did mine in late 2015, and paid around £1k per kWp to get the solar installed. You may have paid 4x that, which is why you get the big FIT payments. Contract 2 would also be with your FIT provider (afaik) and would pay you a minimal amount for lecky you actually export to the grid. If you have an export meter, that would be on the amount you export. If no export meter, they "deem" half to be export and pay you on that basis. This is why there is an incentive to use 'divert devices' which prevent export and divert it all to a local load, such as electric ufh, a hot water tank or a Sunamp. The "deeming" process means that you get paid for an assumed half, and get all the electricity as well. Back then some people thought this a bit ethically dodgy, but everyone is now cheerfully cynical. The Smart Export Guarantee (SEG) is a minimum guaranteed payment per unit of export, which I think is aligned with the base payments under Contract 2. The Octopus Outgoing tariffs replace the Contract 2 with a new contract with Octopus (other companies do similar but are less innovative aiui), where they pay you either a fixed amount (normal version) which is higher than the (SEG) which was 7.5p per unit and has recently jumped to 15p per unit, or they pay you an amount ('Agile' tariffs) based on the futures market price for tomorrow's electricity minus admin expenses and I think a small margin. Outgoing tariffs require an Export Meter, which is part of the gubbins in a SMETS 2 Smartmeter, which is why they require that. The currently innovative bit aiui is that Octopus let you keep your existing normal import tariff (ie import = your normal supply) which avoids the risk of being shafted by the market at times of high demand when they used to make you have an Agile import tariff as well. That makes it nearly a one way bet, upwards. They also seem to let you timeshift your house battery output if you have a house battery and a means of controlling it. The current capital cost per kWh of charge stored over the lifecycle do not make this a cost-effective single reason to get a house battery even at current prices. You need more justification, such as if it reduces your lecky bills enough to cover the difference. That is one reason I say keep it simple. On the battery aspects, obviously if you stick lecky into your battery you can't export the same lecky. That's one of the things you get to use your skill and judgement on, within the controls that you have over your battery and your current export limits and what it is you have chosen to maximise. Whilst it is I think technically possible to feed the current export price into an automatic controller which will switch your setup between export and import by the minute, you'll have to programme (or use simulated data) for your own control system *. At the moment it seems that the better option is to keep it simple and either tune your house / life around times when it generates solar, and accept that Agile Export is a pretty good lazy way of sort-of-maximising your benefit if you do not have a house battery (perhaps 60-70% as good - guessing), or have a house battery (or base load) and a divert device to use everything you generate (in which case getting Agile may be an irrelevance). Octopus also have various tariffs for cheap-overnight, Tesla cars etc. At present it's a very flexible environment in which you can innovate. But therefore also you could end up dazed by the 27 different options, like the proverbial centipede **, and end up doing nothing. So doing *something* beneficial is perhaps more important than getting analysis-paralysed. You pays your money, and takes your choice. I'd say start simple. In your position it will be imo advantageous to move your Exports (Contract 2) to an export tariff, but hang on to your FIT payments (which are guaranteed at 50- 60p per unit until 203x) like a limpet. Make damned sure that you track any change process - which is a bit like the Children of Israel and their 40 years in the wilderness - closely enough that you do not lose your FITs (Contract 1) by mistake. I have not known it happen, but it is a drawn out process, and you need all of your paperwork to hand. HTH Ferdinand * We discussed these control and programming aspects here last year: ** The centipede was happy, quite until the frog, in fun, said: "pray which leg goes after which?" He worked her mind to such a pitch she lay distracted in a ditch ... considering how to run. *** One further complication is that part of SSE (my FIT provider) have been bought out by Ovo, and now use Ovo for their FIT meter (solar generation meter) reading service, but will still tell you to talk to SSE about the export contract. I am still hacking through this last bit of undergrowth, because Octopus need my confirmation email from SSE that my final meter reading has been accepted before they give me any Agile Export money, and the computo-email from the meter reading service says it will be processed "in the next quarter".

Yes - that all seems well expressed, @Gus Potter. This is the comment from the linked FAQ page, which a - specifies that a person accessing the loft shall temporarily be supportable, and b - is 1996 building regs, so earlier lofts need to be considered separately (and Wickes quotes 50kg). I'd do a couple of joist dimension and spacing measurements and span calculations and compare with load and span tables making conservativer assumptions eg *: https://www.timberbeamcalculator.co.uk/en-gb/span-table/floor-joists?load=1.5&class=C24 (Notes: 1 - a sensible assumption will need to be made about timber grade. 2 - a 1kg load imposes about 0.01 kN ) British Standards BS6399-1:1996 for new build homes installed with a loft hatch require trusses to be designed to carry a 25Kg per square metre storage load plus the temporary load of a person moving around in the loft. Some homes may have been designed to exceed this but if you want to exceed 25Kg per square metre we would recommend consulting a structural engineer. One tactic is deliberately to board only near the hatch so no large people climb into the loft. As for putting things like boilers and batteries in lofts - not something I like. I have one in a loft in a rental, and it is a bit of a sod. I boarded out a walkway to the boiler in 2ft wide OSB over the bottom layer of insulation, then put the top layer of insulation in the same direction so that removal of one stripe would clear the walkway, and put a sign next to the loft hatch. I would not put a potential fire hazard or weight like a battery anywhere near a loft. They go in the garage or in a fireproof booth. F

Add glass to the list of energy intensive materials. My 2G man has told me to hold off replacing units unless it is urgent. As a perhaps typical data point, Wickes 2.4m 3x2 CLS is about 15% below 5-6 months ago, which was when I think I bought some and what I paid.

I had a sheet of toughened naked secondary glazing (full height, half width of a Georgian sash window) approx 1600 high x 600 wide explode on me when I held it about 30 degrees off the vertical face (not edge) up gripped too close to lower end. No impacts - just the tension in a weak dimension by holding at the wrong angle. Quite an education.

If you care concerned about floor loadings then I would do some general load and point load calcs, as the weight will more be in your supplementary wood and the boarding than in a 50kg tent. I used loft legs when a T needed storage space, and they soon add up once your need a decent area. Depending how you intend to load it, the loft legs may allow you to dispense with your extra lengths of wood. Wickes say 50kg per sqm, and have a short vid hjere:

Revisiting this thread briefly, I am delighted I ran away at post 4 on page 1. Play nicely, peeps. 😉

You need to check carefully whether you need PP and Bulding Regs Approval, and what will apply in your circs. The requirements for insulation etc just hiked upwards quite seriously in June. I'd ask them "what is it in planning terms?" eg extension not needing Building Regs approval, porch etc. There are also factors such as closeness to the boundary that they do not seem to mention. Given that they seem strangely backward in coming forward with details of the insulation - eg material, u-value etc - even on the "specification" page, I'd speculate that you might possibly be better off with a second hand 'panel' (rather than 'dwarf-wall') type conservatory. You might still get quite toasted, so I'd suggest an install on the shaded side if you can. Careful research needed, I think. I'd certainly recommend going to see a couple in situ. ATB F