Kelvin

Highly likely. There’s no accounting for people and how they respond in the equations really. I know they modelled this for the COVID response.

Aye. The visit to the factory was fun he said. My wife’s dad went with him also an architect. It literally is choosing the house and fittings from a huge catalogue and they give you the fixed price straight away. It’s been up 10 years and looks as fresh and contemporary today as it did then.

My wife’s uncle has a Huf Haus. He’s a retired architect but still went with the ‘Ikea’ house as he calls it. The Huf come round every 2 or 3 years to see if anything needs sorting out.

Economy of scale. That was for a one off they don’t normally build. What they didn’t tell us was how much the block of them cost per unit that Kevin showed. I also doubt it was way over the market value of the house.

Yes we just had that very conversation.

I like last night’s house. Modern pre-fab.

If the grant is more than your usage I expect the energy supplier will just credit the difference to your energy account. It would be somewhat mental to create a situation where people need to use more energy to make sure they get the grant. It ought to be means tested anyway.

I got a recent quote for 1200x600 porcelain tiles that was £160/m2 fitted. They said their tile prices have increased dramatically since the start of the year. The engineered oak flooring from the same place was £150/m2 fitted.

It depends. Are you doing anything yourself, are you employing trades and managing yourself, are using a main contractor etc £1500 would be hard enough to achieve even if you did a lot of it yourself. Look at some of the recent quotes on here going with a main contractor for example. Way above £2500.

Your costs per sqm are probably out unless doing a lot yourself. You can spend a lot more on the fabric of the building to make it more air tight and more energy efficient none of which you can actually see. Whether you consider that as high spec is down to you but it will increase your sqm costs.

We are effectively in a proxy war with Russia therefore all the normal rules for how economies are expected to work are being set aside. We are trying to collapse their economy with sanctions they are trying to collapse ours by forcing energy prices up. Insolvency groups have seen a marked uptick in SMEs who are saying they will go bust without support.

What’s interesting about the Smaug appointment is that it doesn’t include climate as that’s been given to Graham Stuart who will attend cabinet meetings.

True but the press has been full of £7000 electricity bills in January so it will feel like a let off for millions of people. The Government is also in a quandary as it now needs to keep this cap in place more or less. Therefore it needs to use the next 6-9 months to work with the energy industry to come up with a complete overhaul of the charging schemes. Just as well we have the renewable energy champion Smaug in charge of energy now. 🙄No doubt he’ll be re-opening coal mines and encouraging Londoners to burn it.

The challenge with freezing the prices at the current rate is that people won’t change their behaviour to reduce their energy use. Whereas increased cost would have done. It’s not very free market economy. Therefore, the Government really needs to make it clear that freezing prices hasn’t solved the problem and everyone needs to do their bit to reduce wasted energy use.

My guess is load shifting is the likely direction of travel especially with increased number of EVs. I had planned battery storage for our build but still in two minds about it.

Lots of things are means tested this could be too albeit it’s undoubtedly complicated but they managed it with child tax credits. Giving people £400 that don’t need it isn’t very efficient.

They really ought to pull the plug on the £400 for all and put the money into the very poorest in society and those on some form of disability allowance. If they also freeze the unit rate at the current rates then the rest of us benefit.

My installer has provided me with a very reasonable quote. I checked the model they have specced: Mitsubishi Ecodan PUZ-WM85VAA-BS (R32) + FTC6 Typical. Although it seems to be at the lower end of the scale in terms of standby energy use.

It’s why our insurance is with NFUM for nearly everything and especially the animals. They aren’t the cheapest but they are very easy to deal with when we have had to claim which has mostly been for our fragile flat coated retrievers. 😂

The significant fall was reported last week.

Our friends lost their self-build to a fire that was a result of faulty wiring in their PV system. They’d been in the house for three months. The insurance settled quickly and it was rebuilt but they never moved back in to it and sold it instead.

BT will probably ask for it back. If so, you can buy routers cheaply enough second hand. Many offer the ability to share a hard disk from a USB port. You can also set up a Raspberry Pi to do the same thing only better.

Just enable Wi-Fi calling.

Yes but you still have an ugly static caravan in the garden.

Yes very dear. Our quote for a large German kitchen big island all Siemens appliances and utility room was £28k and £25k from a family run business here in Scotland.