Finding the chase and cutting to it

It’s 2.6°C at this moment in time and I don’t feel too much of a whimp saying it’s cold outside. Today is day three of our “replacement windows, making a hole bigger, and centrering a window in an existing wall” adventure or our trek into how cold can we go in our house? It’s going […]

The standard says, Space heating <= 15 kWh/m²/yr, an airtightness limit of 0.6ACH@50Pa (air changes per hour at 50 Pascals), total primary energy demand <= 60 kWh/m²/yr. For our house, at 244m², this works out at: Heating <= 3,660 kWh over the year. Total primary energy need <= 14,640 kWh over the year. This year […]

It’s the 2nd weekend of October, and, technically, we did past the milestone earlier in the year of having generated more than the whole of 2024, but we are currently sitting at having generated 3.5MWh off our roof mounted solar panels since 1st January 2025. It’s the first year we have had batteries in play, […]

Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it as born in the USA.  But right this moment, I am pretty proud of my little corner of planet Earth. Go on, I’ll bite, why? Why, as you can see, right this moment, the electricity hitting my bit of the UK grid is being produced with 0g […]

Like many, we got the email saying we were getting a smart meter to replace our old meter. As you know, I’m a big fan of smart meters, giving people the ability to see their usage as they are actually using it. But, I do think it was badly done when it came to energy […]

It’s a sunny Sunday afternoon in September, which is an great time to air the house! In historic times, houses breathed – they were cool in the summer, and potentially, freezing in the winter without heating. But, even in the wettest of seasons, the houses were not damp, if the roofs, walls, and windows were […]

Our heat pump is a year old (ASHP, air sourced heat pump).  Its present was a service. Now, at this point, I remember every annual boiler service being a good £170 plus what-ever parts were needed and the cost of fitting them – largely opaque on the invoice. Last year, when the boiler died, it […]

You’re one in a million is one of those adages that crops up from time to time. In a world with 8,224,932,469 people (at time of writing, please see the latest figure at https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/ ) in it, it is meant to make you feel a little bit special – it is such a great marketing […]

This is another look at how our heat pump is working for us. Our home energy set-up is reasonably straight-forward. We have power coming in from the grid and our roof-mounted solar panels. The power from the roof is either used directly, or stored in our batteries (27kWh of storage). We also have an EV, […]

I am not a nationalist, so this is going to be a big disappointment to anyone expecting that kind of rhetoric… This picture sums it up for me: a lavendar bush we planted in 2022 which is hosting a cabbage white butterfly, several types of bee, and a moth of some kind. It’s a little […]