Total energy consumption per m2 per annum

[pdf27]

6 hours ago, NSS said:

Projected total imported electricity cost for first 12 months (we have no gas) - £790

 

Projected FiT payments - £280

RHI payments - £444

 

Net energy cost - £66

 

165m2 = 40p/m2a

 

Exclude the RHI and that rises to £3.09/m2a

 

It's a rather different calculation from that I originally proposed, but provides a very stark comparison to our previous home where the same calculation would have given a figure of £9.79/m2a 

Maybe not the best comparison - excluding subsidies (FIT and RHI), you're at £4.78/m²a: all the work you've put into the fabric is only worth as much as the government subsidy for some of the additional technology you're using.

[Cpd]

11 hours ago, Onoff said:

Nom:

 

Oil 2K

Leccy 1K

Poll Tax 2.5K

 

Well it’s going to get worse before it gets better but...... 

 

Electric £2500

Council Tax band C £1,110

Gas £120

No Water or sewage 

 

Virtually no insulation and living in a south westerly wind funnel between two hills...... 

This is a barbaric house and one day I will strip it back to bare walls and  rebuild but for the moment it’s home. 

5.5mx11.5m 1.5 storey So  63.25m2  

2 children and  3 adults min. 

£59.44per m2 ....... dooomed 

Thank god I don’t have any debts / mortgage. 

 

 

[NSS]

1 hour ago, pdf27 said:

Maybe not the best comparison - excluding subsidies (FIT and RHI), you're at £4.78/m²a: all the work you've put into the fabric is only worth as much as the government subsidy for some of the additional technology you're using.

Should perhaps have mentioned that we'd spent a pile on the old place improving the insulation, glazing and installing a high efficiency boiler and LED lighting. 

 

And it's not all about cost. Comfort has to come into it too.

[pdf27]

9 minutes ago, NSS said:

And it's not all about cost. Comfort has to come into it too.

That's one of the places where just providing bills falls down - humans have a strong tendency to take improved efficiency as comfort, rather than cost savings. If the sort of thermal comfort acceptable in the 1950s were applied to a Passivhaus, they really wouldn't need any heating system at all.

[ProDave]

Interesting.

 

Our electricity for the last 12 months has cost £800,  Mostly that has been in the caravan and not much of that has been heating (WBS) nor cooking (LPG).  We clearly use too much "stuff" as that is mostly just washing, tumble drying  fridge, freezer, tv's, computers etc etc.

 

So if we assume in the house now we use the same "stuff" that's £5.70 per square metre of house, even before we add water and space heating (now ASHP) and an electric oven.

 

I get the impression, space and water heating might cost less than all the other "stuff" we use.

 

Solar PV will bring that down (but there won't be any FIT) when we eventually add it.

[Jeremy Harris]

I think it's reasonable to not include the FIT, and definitely right and proper to exclude RHI, but when doing this sort of calculation I think we do need to include any export payment, as that is energy going back to the grid for others to use.  If I re-jig our costs to ignore the FIT payment, but include the export payment, then the figures are (including VAT):

 

Council Tax = £2081.32

Imported electricity cost p.a. (inc. standing charge) = £436.69 (includes some winter electric car charging)

Imported electricity energy p.a. = 2,445 kWh

Exported electricity energy (deemed 50% of generation) = 2,493 kWh

Exported electricity payment = -£130.63 (2,493 kWh * £0.0524)

Net cost of imported electricity = £306.06

Water and sewerage = £0.00

Gas = £0.00

Floor area = 130m²

Total grid energy consumption per m²/p.a (including partial car energy, excluding exported energy) = 18.81 kWh/m²/p.a.

Total house (and partial car energy) energy running cost per m² (allowing for exported energy payment) = £2.35/m²/p.a.

Total house running cost per m² including Council Tax = £8.05/m²/p.a

 

Council tax makes up about 71% of our total house running cost, excluding the FIT payment.

 

I can separate out the heating energy element from this reasonably well, as I have an energy meter on the ASHP supply, so I know that we use a bit under 12 kWh/m²/p.a. for space heating, but a small part of that will come from self-generation, so it's impossible to work out how much grid energy we use for space heating, or how much grid energy we use  for everything else, including a bit of car charging. 

 

Worth noting that at least 80% of the hot water comes from energy we self-generate, plus quite a lot of the other house energy use comes from self-generated energy as well.  Our energy use is heavily skewed towards the winter, with the summer bill being dominated by the standing charge.

 

 

[Guest Alphonsox]

2 hours ago, Triassic said:

Out of interest, could you define “decent broadband”? So I have something to benchmark against.

 

Currently the best we can get is less than 1Mb/s. I really need to be able to conduct multi-way video conferencing to reduce travelling, a good 10Mb/s link would be enough to provide this capability.

[Triassic]

11 minutes ago, Alphonsox said:

 

Currently the best we can get is less than 1Mb/s. I really need to be able to conduct multi-way video conferencing to reduce travelling, a good 10Mb/s link would be enough to provide this capability.

We live in s rural area, but luckily we have a primary school and a residential school for disabled kids and part of the Governments commitment was to have Internet in all school, as a result our broadband shot up from around 2mbps to over 50, recently its down to around 22mbps. Not sure why it’s dropped recently?

[Onoff]

I'll gladly swap my 7.72Mbps down / 0.83Mbps up for some heating oil!

Edited August 25, 2018 by Onoff

[Triassic]

I see the government have implemented a speed obligation.

 

The Government has confirmed that universal high speed broadband will be delivered by a regulatory Universal Service Obligation (USO), giving everyone in the UK access to speeds of at least 10 Mbps by 2020.

 

This is the speed that Ofcom, the independent regulator, says is needed to meet the requirements of an average family. After careful consideration the government has decided that regulation is the best way of making sure everyone in the UK can get a decent broadband connection of at least 10 Mbps as soon as possible.

[Guest Alphonsox]

2 minutes ago, Triassic said:

I see the government have implemented a speed obligation.

 

The Government has confirmed that universal high speed broadband will be delivered by a regulatory Universal Service Obligation (USO), giving everyone in the UK access to speeds of at least 10 Mbps by 2020.

 

This is the speed that Ofcom, the independent regulator, says is needed to meet the requirements of an average family. After careful consideration the government has decided that regulation is the best way of making sure everyone in the UK can get a decent broadband connection of at least 10 Mbps as soon as possible.

 

I saw that when it was announced and filed it under "I'll believe it when I see it". It looks to me like the latest in stream of well intentioned announcements made more to generate headlines than to actually improve anything.

There was supposed to be a £150million fund to improve broadband in Northern Ireland as part of the DUP "bung". This could go some way to improving rural broadband here, However the money can't be distributed while the politicians refuse to form a working government so nothing happens. Anyone who sees this changing in the next 18months is more optimistic than me.

 

[Cpd]

37 minutes ago, Alphonsox said:

Currently the best we can get is less than 1Mb/s. 

Interesting as I live in the sticks and get a download of 2.17mbps and an upload of 0.40 mbps....... 

its pitiful but manageable.

  

[newhome]

1 hour ago, ProDave said:

We clearly use too much "stuff" as that is mostly just washing, tumble drying  fridge, freezer, tv's, computers etc etc.

 

So if we assume in the house now we use the same "stuff" that's £5.70 per square metre of house, even before we add water and space heating (now ASHP) and an electric oven.

 

I get the impression, space and water heating might cost less than all the other "stuff" we use.

 

Mine is definitely 'stuff' that accounts for the lion's share of my electric bill (no other energy source used). I worked it out and space heating and DHW comes in much less than 'the rest'. But I charge my car (maybe that shouldn't be counted as other people aren't counting fuel costs for their cars?) and I use appliances to suit my lifestyle, not to worry all the time about how much they cost to run. I have 2 full size fridge freezers, and a separate fridge and freezer for example. And I use the tumble dryer for pretty much everything. It doesn't cost that much (relatively) in my view and it's way too windy here most of the time to risk my smalls taking off and flying down the road lol and I hate ironing so it comes out of the dryer pretty crease free mostly. Plus it generates heat. I have it on during the day when I am here. I'm not on a night time inventivised tariff and nor do I like running the tumble dryer when I'm not around or asleep, and it does help to heat the space IMO. 

 

My bill may go up this winter as now that my heating is working properly across the house I will probably heat more rooms so I will need to see how it goes, but ultimately it is comfort that is important to me. 

 

[newhome]

50 minutes ago, Alphonsox said:

 

Currently the best we can get is less than 1Mb/s. I really need to be able to conduct multi-way video conferencing to reduce travelling, a good 10Mb/s link would be enough to provide this capability.

 

Mine isn't great (less than 2 quite a lot even though BT say that I should get 4) but I can just about get away with video conferencing / webex etc. What sort of mobile speeds do you get? Even though I only get 3G here the speed is much faster. If I upload photos to BH for example I have to remember to switch off the wifi on my phone otherwise it takes forever. Over 3G it's much faster. Might be worth seeing if you can look at using the mobile connection for conferencing if faster. 

 

 

[ProDave]

1 hour ago, Triassic said:

I see the government have implemented a speed obligation.

 

The Government has confirmed that universal high speed broadband will be delivered by a regulatory Universal Service Obligation (USO), giving everyone in the UK access to speeds of at least 10 Mbps by 2020.

 

This is the speed that Ofcom, the independent regulator, says is needed to meet the requirements of an average family. After careful consideration the government has decided that regulation is the best way of making sure everyone in the UK can get a decent broadband connection of at least 10 Mbps as soon as possible.

I think this s a case of be careful what you wish for.

 

We currently get about 3Mbps via BT landline for about £24 per month including line rental.

 

It will be interesting to see if BT improve that.

 

I have often talked about a community council led scheme.  It is now coming to fruition with the surveyors doing the rounds and we have a proposal for our area.  There will be a large mast in a neighbours paddock to get a signal from about 10 miles away, and then smaller "wifi" aerials on each property.  They haven't quoted a speed, but that will cost £35 per month just for broadband.  So if I want to keep a landline and landline number that will still be an additional cost.

 

At the moment I am minded not to bother and just stick with what we have. For general browsing 3Mbps is not bad.

 

But I suspect the result of this is fast broadband will be "available" to us, so Open Reach won't have any obligation to speed up their landline offering.  So I would much prefer this wireless scheme was not available and OR were forced to improve their network.

[Stones]

We use the following:

 

9.75 kWh per day on general use (TV, washing machine, cooking which is all electric) figure is a bit higher in winter when more lighting used, lower in summer

1.4 kWh per day on running the treatment plant air pump

6.5kWh per day for DHW (input)

1763kWh for the year heating

 

Depending on how you look at it our house is 165m2 floor area or 210m2 equivalent (if you factored in all the vaulted areas which could very easily have been made into useable floor area)

 

Overall not bad, DHW circa £300 a year (should reduce when the kids leave home), £225 for heating, £65 running the treatment plant pump, £90 p.a. de-sludge (assuming de-sludge every 2 years),  Water £247 (paid with Council tax), 

 

In terms of how to encourage people to start caring about the energy efficiency of their homes, taxation is probably the only way.  I recently read about a proposal for local government taxation which was a combination of a land value tax (based on a value per m2) and an energy element, with no charge being applied to super efficient / properties with negative energy impact, higher charges for the least efficient.  Sounds great in principle until you start thinking about the consequences.  The main element of any charge will I think always be based on property or land, as it doesn't move and is easy to tax, so energy efficiency is only ever going to be a minor part of any charge, and all political parties will be wary of bringing in another 'poll tax' which hits people hard (or at least hits a lot of people hard).  If assessing energy, you need a methodology which can be applied, and I think even government understands there are issues with SAP and rdSAP.  I suspect that Valuation boards would have to take on responsibility for doing such energy assessments to avoid the issue of private assessors being overly generous or slapdash in conducting assessments.  Presumably such assessments would also need to be open to appeal and you can readily envisage the arguments - the methodology is wrong we only use x per year - see our energy bills.  Not easy...

[Ed Davies]

On 25/08/2018 at 12:01, ProDave said:

So if I want to keep a landline and landline number that will still be an additional cost.

 

Voice over IP works fine for me, but I'm a very low user of telephones anyway. I have a “wires-only” internet connection - that is, a normal Openreach copper pair to the exchange but with only internet on it, not voice.

 

I then, separately, have a VoIP account (with http://sipgate.co.uk/) which allows me make and answer calls to the public switched telephone network via any convenient internet connection. I use Linphone on my laptop. The Sipgate account is free and incoming calls are free to me and charged as normal national-rate calls to the caller (Sipgate get a termination fee from the caller's carrier, I assume). You need to put some credit on the Sipgate account, though, for outgoing calls which are charged at a reasonable rate though without all the usual BT “friends & family” and weekend calls discounts.

 

It's a bit like Skype but with better integration with the public phone network and not run by an NSA front. It's even free calls (including video) between other users of SIP phones (anybody can put Linphone or similar on their computer - you don't need an associated phone number as there are other providers of free SIP accounts. I have one with ekiga.net but, though I'm signed on all the time, I haven't actually used it.)

 

You can have any area code you like. I chose to have the local one covering both where I'm renting at the moment and where I'm building just to avoid having to explain when I give local people my number.

 

I also have an analogue telephone adaptor (ATA). This is a little box which has an ethernet connection which plugs into my router and a telephone socket into which I plug a normal BT cordless phone  base station for incoming calls when the computer's off, etc. So, costs so far: approx £40 for the ATA plus about £20 credit put on the Sipgate account of which I've used less than £10 so far.

 

Big advantage for self-builders is the portability. I anticipate a transition period when I might be wanting to answer landline calls in the almost complete house during the day but in the rented house in the evening. And when I finally move there'll be no need to deal with BT to get the number moved.

 

Disadvantage is the landline doesn't work in a power cut. A UPS might be nice but I haven't bothered yet. A couple of years ago there was a 36 hour power cut here but since then the longest has been about 2 hours. Off grid they won't matter, of course.

 

Update 2018-08-26: expanded this into a blog post: https://edavies.me.uk/2018/08/telephones/

Edited August 26, 2018 by Ed Davies

[ProDave]

The problem for me at the moment is my landline is used for people to contact me in relation to my business.  Any VOIP offering as far as I know will not allow me to port an existing landline number to it?

[Onoff]

24 minutes ago, ProDave said:

The problem for me at the moment is my landline is used for people to contact me in relation to my business.  Any VOIP offering as far as I know will not allow me to port an existing landline number to it?

 

With Skype for instance you can buy a "Skype Number". Normal landline / mobile users can ring that.

 

If your current landline supplier supports call forwarding then you can forward calls to the Skype Number.

[Ed Davies]

26 minutes ago, ProDave said:

Any VOIP offering as far as I know will not allow me to port an existing landline number to it?

Sipgate, at least, can: https://www.sipgatebasic.co.uk/numbers

 

Not sure if they always can, of course, but worth asking if you're considering going this way.

[Ed Davies]

4 minutes ago, Onoff said:

If your current landline supplier supports call forwarding then you can forward calls to the Skype Number.

But then he'd have to keep paying for the landline anyway.

[Jeremy Harris]

1 hour ago, Ed Davies said:

 

Voice over IP works fine for me, but I'm a very low user of telephones anyway. I have a “wires-only” internet connection - that is, a normal Openreach copper pair to the exchange but with only internet on it, not voice.

 

I then, separately, have a VoIP account (with http://sipgate.co.uk/) which allows me make and answer calls to the public switched telephone network via any convenient internet connection. I use Linphone on my laptop. The Sipgate account is free and incoming calls are free to me and charged as normal national-rate calls to the caller (Sipgate get a termination fee from the caller's carrier, I assume). You need to put some credit on the Sipgate account, though, for outgoing calls which are charged at a reasonable rate though without all the usual BT “friends & family” and weekend calls discounts.

 

It's a bit like Skype but with better integration with the public phone network and not run by an NSA front. It's even free calls (including video) between other users of SIP phones (anybody can put Linphone or similar on their computer - you don't need an associated phone number as there are other providers of free SIP accounts. I have one with ekiga.net but, though I'm signed on all the time, I haven't actually used it.)

 

You can have any area code you like. I chose to have the local one covering both where I'm renting at the moment and where I'm building just to avoid having to explain when I give local people my number.

 

I also have an analogue telephone adaptor (ATA). This is a little box which has an ethernet connection which plugs into my router and a telephone socket into which I plug a normal BT cordless phone  base station for incoming calls when the computer's off, etc. So, costs so far: approx £40 for the ATA plus about £20 credit put on the Sipgate account of which I've used less than £10 so far.

 

Big advantage for self-builders is the portability. I anticipate a transition period when I might be wanting to answer landline calls in the almost complete house during the day but in the rented house in the evening. And when I finally move there'll be no need to deal with BT to get the number moved.

 

Disadvantage is the landline doesn't work in a power cut. A UPS might be nice but I haven't bothered yet. A couple of years ago there was a 36 hour power cut here but since then the longest has been about 2 hours. Off grid they won't matter, of course.

 

 

Thanks for the tips re: VOIP options, very helpful.

 

I've made our internet connectivity tolerant of power cuts by running the modem, router, switch, file server etc from battery power.  I did away with all the wall warts for power and made up a box that has a high efficiency 15V switched mode power supply, trimmed down to deliver a fixed 13.5V.  This then charges a bank of 12V sealed lead acid batteries (about to be changed for a new large single cell lithium pack).  I then derive the nominal 12V or 5V power for all the widgets from the battery supply using high efficiency switched mode DC-DC converters and run some of them via a crude PoE system, where I run power down the two unused pairs in the Ethernet cable.  In practice this works well, even over 10 metres or so.  As a safeguard against over-discharge, I have a latching relay and microcontroller that's set to detect too low a battery voltage and turn the load off, but this only happens after about 36 hours, which is longer than any power cut we've had so far.

 

Being able to have the internet and LAN/WLAN running during a power cut is very useful, my main restriction now is how long the battery back up in the local cabinet in the village lasts during a power cut.  I've not managed to find this out yet, but do know from experience that it lasts at least 4 hours.

 

 

 

 

[billt]

Any decent VOIP service should be able to port in a BT number, however, there does seem to be a potential issue in that your current BT line would have to be renumbered which would probably disconnect your existing BB service, possibly resulting in extra fees. Andrews and Arnold seem to have a solution, but they would have to take over your landline to do it. https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2016/05/aaisp-finds-solution-porting-bt-fixed-line-phone-numbers-voip.html

[ProDave]

Back to energy usage.

 

I have just taken a meter reading so now have the first full months usage now we are in the house.  It comes out at 15.08 KWh per day, and with my present energy supplier that's £2.46 per day.

 

Extrapolating that to a full year gives a total of 5504KWh and a cost of £897.  In square metre terms, that's 39KWh per square metre or £6.48 per square metre.

 

That is everything other than space heating which obviously not using at the moment.  That is still an unknown.   I am not expecting winter lighting to add much as the house is all LED lighting.

 

That figure worries me because so much of it is "stuff" not actually running the house. But I struggle to think of any major saving I can make to that other than use the desktop pc a lot less and use a more energy eficcient laptop more (e.g when I am only browsing)

[A_L]

@ProDave , can you estimate how much of that is DHW?