Nice people thread part 4 - sugar and spice and all things

lostinrates

Davesnave, that looks amazing.

How often do you have to replace the plastic cover on polytunnels? Is the hedge the north boundary? How do you find ventilation in them?


I've just been looking at a couple of buildings here with someone who might want to use them in spring. Also....at the floor we have to redo out there....I can't believe how much concrete costs. When doozer is less busy moving I'll post the pictures here for her husband's advice on practical things.

MFW_10YRS_4

lostinrates wrote: »

Anything is fine in here so long as its ''nice''

Cool.

I saw you mention having solar thermal fitted, with a wood burning stove to supply your water heating/space heating requirements. We have installed a Heat Bank*, which allows both of these technologies to be connected and heat a large cylinder full of water that supplies heating and hot water. You can also connect a Ground Source Heat Pump* to the cylinder, which would be idea for you if you have a lot of land in which to bury the pipes.

We have a large/old house that may be similar to yours and we installed a heat bank connected to a gas boiler (we are lucky to be on mains gas) and to a wood burning stove. It works brilliantly and we are really please with it. Once we save up a bit we will be looking to add solar thermal to the mix, especially once the Heat Incentive Tarrrifs are published.

Just thought this might be an option for you.

*Sorry, I can't attach links to these but if you google the underlined it will show you what I mean.

lostinrates

MFW_10YRS wrote: »

Cool.

I saw you mention having solar thermal fitted, with a wood burning stove to supply your water heating/space heating requirements. We have installed a Heat Bank*, which allows both of these technologies to be connected and heat a large cylinder full of water that supplies heating and hot water. You can also connect a Ground Source Heat Pump* to the cylinder, which would be idea for you if you have a lot of land in which to bury the pipes.

We have a large/old house that may be similar to yours and we installed a heat bank connected to a gas boiler (we are lucky to be on mains gas) and to a wood burning stove. It works brilliantly and we are really please with it. Once we save up a bit we will be looking to add solar thermal to the mix, especially once the Heat Incentive Tarrrifs are published.

Just thought this might be an option for you.

*Sorry, I can't attach links to these but if you google the underlined it will show you what I mean.

Thanks, I will google. Set up possibility is actually a little more complicated than described. We're also looking at ground sourcing and ''pond bottom heat sourcing'' (waits for lake v pond debate to start again and PN to work out how many g ads it would take to buy a swan pedalo ).

we're planning underfloor throughout kitchen area....but not sure a bout practicality of elsewhere...there is a really rubbish but sound concrete floor through the rest, not sure how much to damage it for the sake of underfloor heating. (undecided element is ok, because we have time to think about it.

We're currently working on the idea we'll have possibly a range (undecided), 5? (cant't think atm!)open fires ...and we DO want open fires not burners in those rooms, two of those will be very rarely used, and one woodburner. We have another outbuilding which will run for heat/hotwater off a woodburner and another specific (non domestic) application for which we have decided grudgingly bottled gas probably is our best solution.

I do NOT want more than the fireplaces we currently have provision for upstairs (two) because I recognise the impracticality.


Its all complicated, isn't it! The need to use multiple different sources for best results.


I'd be interested to hear more about your ground source. What we have read suggessts it gets less efficient the later you get into the season...as the surrounding area drawn on for heat is depleted. Do have the shallower laid one or the borehole?

lostinrates

I have recently found some old school exam certificates and school books. I thought I'd binned all my school books. I'm not really sentimental about anything. The certs are particularly bugging me and I think I should throw them away but dh thinks I'll regret it...

anyone else chucked their old music/speach and drama stuff? Its not like I'm ever going to use them again and ...well, they are hardly special.

I'm not terribly sentimental about stuff...if you don't bin this sort of junk what do you do with it?

MFW_10YRS_4

We don't have a GSHP, just the capability of adding one if we wanted to. I researched it and found that the costs of installation and running didn't compare very favourably with mains gas, so we didn't take it any further.

From what I read, horizontally laid pipes have been known to cause freeze the ground if they are not buried deeply enough and if the loops are too close together. I think these problems occured in countries much colder than the UK in winter like Canada and Scandinavia. A borehole has its own problems with higher costs for installation and running costs pumping all that saline solution down and then up holes that can be anything upto 100m deep.

Open fires are only 20-25% efficient with most of the heat going up the chimney. Modern wood burning stoves can be over 80% efficient. We have two wood burners, with one connected to the heat bank and it's almost a full day's job keeping them both running, plus you wouldn't believe the amount of wood they can get through. You might want to install your main wood burner first to see just what hard work they can be!

How old is your house? If it's a period property then its unlikely to have been built with a damp proof course. A concrete floor laid on top of a plastic sheet will often force damp under the slab and up into the walls, causing rising damp. Our house had a concrete slab like this and we are slowly removing it and replacing it with an insulated limecrete slab that lets the floor breathe and stops rising damp.

lostinrates

MFW_10YRS wrote: »

We don't have a GSHP, just the capability of adding one if we wanted to. I researched it and found that the costs of installation and running didn't compare very favourably with mains gas, so we didn't take it any further.

From what I read, horizaontally laid pipes have been known to cause freeze the ground if they are not buried deeply enough and if the loops are too close together. I think these problems occured in countries much colder than the UK in winter like Canada and Scandinavia. A borehole has its own problems with higher costs for installation and running costs pumping all that saline solution down and then up holes that can be anything upto 100m deep.

Open fires are only 20-25% efficient with most of the heat going up the chimney. Modern wood burning stoves can be over 80% efficient. We have two wood burners, with one connected to the heat bank and it's almost a full day's job keeping them both running, plus you wouldn't believe the amount of wood they can get through. You might want to install your main wood burner first to see just what hard work they can be!

How old is your house? If it's a period property then its unlikely to have been built with a damp proof course. A concrete floor laid on top of a plastic sheet will often force damp under the slab and up into the walls, causing rising damp. Our house had a concrete slab like this and we are slowly removing it and replacing it with an insulated limecrete slab that lets the floor breathe and stops rising damp.

yueah, we know all about the open fire v wood burner debate, having lived with both. (woodburners much less though, but solid fuel ranges )

DH and I are happier with open fires tbh. The other virtue with big fireplaces with no kids in the house...or being parents like dh's and mine were is you can stick really huge logs of less vigourous burn properties and feed them less often. Two of our fireplaces are that sort and we really, really hate woodburners in that sort of space...in this sort of house.

The woodburner here atm has to be taken out for various reasons and it is really greedy. MSEers on oldstyle assure me I'm doing something wrong for it to be so greedy, I find it needier than a fire.

we don't like an overly warm house, if underfloor brought the house up to say 12 degrees in the coldest part of the year and I have a woodburner going half the day when in side and a fire the other half it will be fine. No different to now but letting me heat more than one room.

re boreholes...they can also me but in at the same time as footings if you have a certain sort of footing issue...which we may or may not have when it comes to the rebuild. We'll probably go borehole I think.

House was built at different times, victorian, Geoirgian and un confirmed date but very significantly older than that. In fact the Georgian bit also shows adaptation from previous date, but is an addition. we have, remarkably, NO serious damp problem...hurrah! We have some damp patches (cause id'd) and some flashing problems which see the rain come down through part of the house.
Probably because of the helpful; breeze provide by the [STRIKE]gaping holes[/STRIKE] cracks.

I've seen a lot of trouble with damp proofing in houses in recent years. When the west country suddenly because popular with ''weekends'' people rushed to replace the earth floors and put in damp proof courses etc and replaster. People forgot these houses are made of materials that need to breathe! I know a few homes with flag over earth still that are wonderfully comfortbale homes when treated appropriately.

We were hoping to be further along with heating than we are now. We're heading into winter with only the dodgy woodburner (gulp) but the search for something which we can use the poop in has been less straightforward than planned and determining what that will be/how it will work is very much the decider. I've read a bit about them, and they are meant to be vastly more eco friendly than the forms of heating currently ''subsidised'' by government...but as not subsidised not often found.

MFW_10YRS_4

Good luck with your renovations, especially with the UFH. One word of advice with UHF and a GSHP is that they only work efficiently at low temperatures (low in comparison with traditional radiators) and so you need to make sure that your house is very well insulated or the heat loss will be faster than the heat gain.

Cram as much insulation into your house as you possibly can!!

PasturesNew

lostinrates wrote: »

anyone else chucked their old music/speach and drama stuff?

We never did those at school.... so no, I've not chucked the stuff I never had.

I have still got my CSE certificates from the mid 70s.... although they were chewed by silverfish in my home bedroom (which was damp). I now keep them all in a big resealable sandwich bag.

lostinrates

PasturesNew wrote: »

We never did those at school.... so no, I've not chucked the stuff I never had.

I have still got my CSE certificates from the mid 70s.... although they were chewed by silverfish in my home bedroom (which was damp). I now keep them all in a big resealable sandwich bag.

I'm pretty sure my gcse certs are lost....or well filed. That's the thing, I don't really care, I feel as if someone else did a lot of that stuff, different lifetime.

vivatifosi

lostinrates wrote: »

I have recently found some old school exam certificates and school books. I thought I'd binned all my school books. I'm not really sentimental about anything. The certs are particularly bugging me and I think I should throw them away but dh thinks I'll regret it...

I know its unlikely, but if you ever work in public service its worth keeping them. They ask for a ridiculous amount of paperwork. I have in the past been asked for my exam certificates from school - which should be irrelevant considering I've got degree paperwork instead. The worst though was when I was asked for paperwork for day long IT courses I'd done where I used to work (Word, Excel, that sort of thing). I had chucked them out so I was expected to resit the courses. Thankfully they saw sense eventually but it was like pulling teeth. I'd kept the useful bit - the coursework books - because I could actually use those, but they were no good as they didn't prove I'd sat the courses.