Kelvin

Welcome and congratulations on a brave project to take on.

I would suggest the best thing most folk could do to reduce heating costs is remove their shitty 80s conservatory.

Sure but the change is spread over 4 years so it’s not the increase in floor area or certainly not just that. I never read the report so don’t know if you can assume an increased floor area either for ‘most’ people. ‘Most’ folk have no clue how to efficiently run their heating systems. Moreover most folk seem to run their houses far too warm. That may well have changed of course due to the energy cost increases. My guess is that people don’t change their behaviour after improving insulation and are more likely to open windows in a too hot room than reduce the heat input in that room. I’ve witnessed this with my sister and BiL. They have 4 degrees and two PhDs between them.

I like the Ripple Energy approach in principle. They are also doing some thermal storage proof of concept designs with Sunamp and will be looking for 100 houses to trial it. I also like what Octopus are doing. They’ve taken the fight to big energy dinosaurs and will force them to change in time. We’ve had an interesting social experiment over the Christmas period. We’ve had a lot of folk stay with us over the last 10 days. They all live in modern houses compared to this old farmhouse we rent. I don’t have any gizmos in the house so no Alexa, Ring doorbells, cameras, etc. The house is poorly insulated so while you can heat it up quite quickly, as it has large radiators everywhere, it doesn’t retain the heat. What everyone has said is that they run their houses too hot.

The house we rent is supplied by Bulb who have recently been taken over by Octopus so at some point I assume they’ll merge systems and we’ll have two Octopus accounts. We haven’t started building yet so the Octopus supply at the plot has over £400 of credit in the account and we’re just on their variable tariff.

They are. I signed up with them last year for a new supply (not just switching)

Sign up to Octopus Agile and take the cash use the cash to buy Ripple Energy shares. You’d need to front the money first of course. Anything left over buy a nice cardi.

I rented the house we are in just now last December 2021. However we didn’t move in until March (our house sale fell through) I filled in a form to say that the house was unoccupied and unfurnished and consequently didn’t pay any council tax until we moved in. The limit was 6 months. This was in Perthshire.

You can get shallow downlights. Our ceiling void is made up of 38mm battens and 15mm plasterboard which allows shallow 45mm downlights.

Do the sums. £300/month since 2021 with a 300% uplift due to it being empty.

Yes in hindsight we should have gone with MBC…

I don’t see how they are different as you still end up with a wooden sole plate at the top of a block on the cold side assuming a traditional foundation design.

Sure but that’s something that will happen relatively quickly. If it lasts 10 years (length of warranty) it should last decades. It would also affect timber framed buildings and there are thousands of those being built and most new houses in Scotland are timber frame. It is possible to add EPS on the outside of the SIP panel above and below the sole plate and affix the sole plate to a foamglass type product.

They’ve been around longer that 60 years. First experiments of SIPs build go back as far as the 1930s and the first real commercial use goes back to the early 1950s. There’s no reason not to expect them to last as long as any other construction method if well built and well maintained.

We looked at it as other half was keen (I wasn’t) We eventually crossed it off the list for all the reasons mentioned plus the added complexity in your plumbing system.

I bought a trailer instead of a van. If I need a van I’ll hire one. Your budget plus tax, insurance, MOT etc will hire a lot of vans and that’s assuming it doesn’t need fixing while you have it.

In my case it was slow to start to change and then slow to actually change. It interrupted the flow enough to cause the error but only occasionally. I suspect it was failing for a long time but the original pump’s flow rate was higher than the replacement pump so was hiding the problem. The two way valves seem to be a common failure point on every system as I’ve had at least one fail in every house I’ve lived in and replaced a few for neighbours. Consequently I kept one on the shelf just in case. That was how I stumbled across the fix as after exhausting everything else I replaced the valve and it cured the problem.

His opening post refers to a house design so that’s a reasonable assumption…

Metal roofs are relatively cost effective depending on type. Zinc is dear but coated steel isn’t too bad.

I was plagued with this on a Samsung unit after a pump change with it working for several days then randomly failing with flow rate errors. Fortunately we had a flow meter installed so could see the flow rate. I chased my tail for a bit thinking it must be the new pump as it was a different model from the failed pump. However it turned out to be a two way valve that was very slow to operate.

Nope and no idea. You could experiment with a metal cooking dish. Fill with hot water and measure the temp every five minutes over an hour. Then do the same after adding a layer of foam to the bottom of it.

Yes it will help. Pre-heating the tub with much hotter water than you’d bathe in also helps. Also use bubble bath as the bubbles slow down the evaporative cooling process.

They aren’t warranty issues. Integrated combination micro-wave ovens seem a poor compromise going by my research so we aren’t fitting one. Instead we’ll have a free standing one in the utility room.

Look at Longhouses. Barns are simple rectangles so very straightforward designs.

I doubt anyone is getting ‘wound up’. Let’s say you had the very granular detail you are looking for, what will you do with the information to help you plan your planning application? In my case I was told planning was taking a long time therefore it drove me to get everything in place as quickly as I could to get my planning application in as quickly as possible after we completed the land purchase. We still ended up with significant delays and ironically both planning and warrant were the quickest processes. The longest delay was the Structural Engineering which took 15 weeks in total.