Finding the chase and cutting to it

This has been inspired by https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2468067222001201 .

Having funded a pump myself, I appreciate that the pump itself is an expensive piece of kit, but that isn’t where the costs lie. Let me take you through this.

Examination of cost of buying and running a pump.

Item	Frequency of payment	Cost over life time.
Pump	1xfour years	£3,350
Cartridges	2 boxes a month, so 10 a year @ £32.25 a go for the four years.	£1,290
Infusion sets	2 boxes a month, so 11 a year @ 89.90 a go for the four years	£3,955.60
Grand total	Prices during 2020. This is almost certainly out of date.	£8,595.60

What if we do something different? Take the open source design and gear it towards something that costs less to get going and less to keep running. The trick is the cartridge cost, I feel. If we reuse a mechanism that already existing, preloaded insulin pen cartridges, all we need to do is provide an adapter, which should be a much lower cost.

Item	Frequency of payment	Cost over life time.
Pump	1xfour years	£100
Adapter	2 boxes a month, so 10 a year @ £10 a go for the four years.	£100
Infusion sets	2 boxes a month, so 11 a year @ 89.90 a go for the four years	£3,955.60
Grand total		£4,155.60

Which is a big difference! The clever thing here is the removal of the cartridge in the design of the open pump source pump. By reusing insulin pen cartridges, we just need an adapter, literally a needle piercing the cartridge and providing an anchor point for the tubing and cannula.

Pen cartridges are available for Lispro (300iu for Admelog, Humalog and Lyumjev), Fiasp (300iu) (a modified aspart), Novorapid (300iu) (aspart), Apidra (300iu) (glulisine).

I’m also keen to swap the mini-USB for a USB C connector. I’m looking to build an app that allows today’s basal to be preloaded through that interface. I think we could use that port to recharge the battery too, which would strengthen the case construction.

Why not use bluetooth for the communication?

Good question, for two reasons: bluetooth is hard to secure, it can be done but it is a broadcast protocol; secondly, I want something that isn’t going to date too quickly. USB C looks good from both points of view. Cables are cheap and it is a common protocol.

Are you allowed to do this?

It’s a good question. I don’t know. Even if I did, it would need testing and refining. One of the big issues with pump therapy is that you can do more damage than good.

So it needs careful examination.

This may seem like an odd thing to say, given my posts are all about what I/we have done as a family to lower our carbon footprint, but I am a very private person.

Being type 1 diabetic, I don’t feel that that is something I can do easily. It’s a relatively obscure condition for most people. Yes, they know we need insulin (often), but our day to day lives and how we do things are not well known and that leads to some weird conversations.

Here are some myth busting things you might want in your back pocket.

Yes, I wear my insulin pump 24/7. All day, every day. Even my hybrid pump needs me to do things, like give extra insulin when I eat. Or programme in a starting “basal rate” or background insulin programme. It does not run itself, it is not a cure or artifical pancreas.

The rest of my pancreas works just fine, thank you. My beta cells are one of 8 endocrine cells in the pancreas and the rest are working just fine – that’s not the case if I were type 3c.

My pump needs filling with insulin and its insulin cartridges, tubing and cannulas (tubes that go into the skin) all need changing regularly. Yes, it is more suitable for me than injections, no, I am not a bad diabetic and that’s why I have the pump. For me to do what I do with the pump using injections is extremely difficult.

Yes, my pump does get my sensor readings, but only if I allow it do can it do anything based on the readings. No, it does not outperform me in terms of blood glucose control – because it is only reacting to my blood glucose, it can make mind-blowingly bad decisions.

No, I am not ignoring you, I’m just checking stupid, I mean my insulin pump, isn’t making such a decision.

Yes, I do use the automation sometimes, because I do need a break sometimes. No, I do not do that and not check on what it is doing.

Often, when exercising I need more insulin, not less. No, it is not a good idea to do vigorus exercise when my blood sugar is high without having some insulin available – that can lead to diabetic keto-acidosis.

Even if I don’t eat, I still need insulin. There is no food that can as insulin.

Theoretically, I can die from a hypo, but I am much more scared of complications from high blood sugars (hypers). I have been type 1 diabetic for 48 years this year and don’t have any (yet).

No, giving up meat will not “reverse” my diabetes – my autoimmune system destroyed my beta cells. There’s a chance they grow back every so often, but my immune system goes and kills them again, so until anyone can stop that mechanism. I need insulin.

No, going for a keto diet will not remove my need for insulin.

No, doing hours of exercise a week will not remove my need of insulin.

No, I am not “used to it” yet. Despite being four, I remember what it was like to not be diabetic.

Insulin is way better than the alternative.

No, the insulin pump does not give me a treatment that is as good as not being diabetic. But it is better than injections. It is hard work, even a hybrid loop is hard work, much harder than injections – but the results can be better.

No, I can’t take “human” or “animal” insulin any more: the immune system that destroyed my beta cell functionality learnt to attack them too. I’m on my second analogue insulin. I am not sure what happens in 15 years or so if that stops being effective. I guess there’s glulisine…

Yes, I should get more than my insulin for free on prescription. I am really glad that was decided, because while I didn’t understand it when I was younger, I get why that decision was made.

If there was a cure available tomorrow, I would be in the queue to get it.

Yes, I would still test for a while to guarantee that cure was effective.

No, the injections/pump is not the bad thing about being diabetic. The testing, decision making, and being out of ideal range are the things that take their toll.

My glucose sensor is not as accurate as taking capillary blood samples. It can be affected by many different things which can stop it working completely or skew the results. It is a great deal more convienent.

I have spent 30 years of my life paying rent: 6 years to landlords and 24 to a bank for a mortgage.

Thankfully, those days are over – we decided to overpay our mortgage once we were off a fixed rate deal because our interest rate had gone from 1.34% to 8.2% – as that was partially what we wanted to do anyway, but partially because we didn’t want to be accuring a large debt just from not paying attention.

Which might sound great, we suddenly had quite a bit of money left in our bank accounts each month but not actually working for us and helping us to retire early. Yes, I know I complained a few blogs ago about my beloved getting old before his time, but I do not want to be going out to work everyday while my beloved is at home on his own.

But what does a budget look like post-mortgage?

Most people use the 50:30:20 rule

• 50% towards needs: rent/mortgage and living expenses, including property taxes.
• 30% towards wants: leisure activities, entertainment, etc.
• 20% towards savings: funding future plans and investments.

Which is what we used to pay off our mortgage early but we were lucky to be earning relatively more than our other outgoings.

Post-mortgage, we can do something more interesting.

• 38% towards needs: rent/mortgage, working and living expenses, running vehicles for commuting and fun, including property taxes and energy payments.
• 30% towards wants: leisure activities, entertainment, etc.
• 32% towards savings: funding future plans and investments.

After-all, we’re not paying rent and can comfortably afford the essentials.

Same for the wants, largely we’re easily self-funding and don’t need anything more. We pay for holidays out of this money too.

Which is all well and good until your world gets turned upside down and you are made redundant. If you are lucky, you will get a pay out, the basic case is statutory or a maximum of 1.5 weeks’ pay for each year of service for each year you worked over the age of 41 years of age capped at 20 years: 30 weeks pay or just over six months pay.

Many firms do voluntary leaver terms (which you must physically accept), which can be up to a year’s pay.

You get £30,000 of that tax free, the rest may take you over your normal tax threshold though, so watch what you do with it.

If you are lucky, the notice period can mean you walk into another role. Or take a break with a comfortable month’s cushion.

But none of these are the same as having a job. For some, it can be the chance for rebirth, a chance to do something different. Some ease back and take on lesser roles, others spring board in to promotions that were hard to realise in their old firms.

Others go and found their own businesses. Sole traders do not need to make nearly as much money for tasks as bigger firms. Famously, a well known musician and programmer in our part of the world, paid for their home using the earnings from a game no-one would buy from them. What bought them a house was considered too small for the gaming firms to buy!

Life is rarely plain sailing, even a small wave can capsize your plans. It’s what you do afterwards that matters.

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 was barely 13 years, and our plumber thought that was beyond its expected life-span!

The ASHP should last 15-20 years. Transparency is the word here with the invoice we got. From pressure rebalancing to filter replacements, everything was listed and priced. A bit more, £218 including VAT, which is a bit more than a gas boiler service, but it should be something we can budget around.

You mug!

To be honest, we did shop around. Olive Air had a cancellation, so the fact our previous appointment had been cancelled by the other firm meant we got our servicing completed only three days later than planned.

There is far less competition out there for the hearty band of sourced pump service engineers than there is for gas boiler engineers – hopefully that will change over time.

Whatever, I guess it’s your life…

I am really happy with the decision we made to change. Ideally, the house would have been built with it and an air to air system but this is not a bad half-way house.

We also see it as our bit to help reduce the costs of such systems in the long term. 76,000 homes had made use of the Boiler Upgrade Scheme (BUS) by May 2025 and we were one of those homes.

More people in rural areas have made use of the scheme than people in towns – the suspicion is that they have more land and home space to make the move – I have friends in London and Cambridge who don’t have room for a small hot water tank let alone one the size of ours which nestles in our garage.

Rural areas are also much less likely to have mains gas: an air sourced heat pump removes the need for a LPG or oil tank for the boiler. Ironically, the big air pump takes much less space than a big liquid petroleum gas (LPG) or oil tank!

Of course, it is not the only way to move from gas or oil central heating to an electrically powered system. Let’s do a quick summary of what is out there. I am going to talk about efficiencies in terms of x00% – which means for every unit of electricity (1kWh) you put into the systems, how much “heat power” do you get out – 300% efficiency means you get out 3kWh of heat for every 1kWh you “buy”.

Bear in mind, a very efficient gas boiler gives 80% efficiency, or for 1kWh you buy you get 0.8kWh of heat.

Electric storage heaters:

Convert 100% of the electricity into heat. Teamed with an electric immersion heater, this is a very simple way to get heat into your home.

They work by getting warm for a short period then dissipate the heat until the next heating period.

The immersion heater can be powered from solar diverters: when you are generating more solar power than you are using, the solar diverter sends the electrons to the immersion heater rather than a grid – think of it as a water heating battery! We are on our second one.

Traditionally, you would power your heaters from the grid over night and enjoy the heat over the day. If your house is well insulated, or you work from home, this is a great solution, more efficient than a boiler any day of the week.

With home solar power, this is not how to work the system. Get the storage to heat during the day off your solar heat and give off heat once the sun goes down. Free electricity to heat when the sun is shining.

(Ironically, most solar cells work best when it is cold).

Air sourced heat pumps:

With efficiencies of between 300% 400% over the winter, and 600% to 700% over the summer, this is a good option if you have radiators in situ.

They work by using a heat exchanger to take any “heat” out of the input air, and using that to heat either water or air, depending on your heating system type.

If you don’t have radiators in your house already, an air to air system allows you to have hot air pumped through your house during the winter and cold air during the summer. Used a great deal in America, houses are built with vents which allow the air to be pumped through. In the USA and Canada, these systems are called “Heat and air”. It is really unusual in the UK.

Teamed with a well insulated house, an air to water system sends cooler water than a boiler does round the house. Weirdly, you heat for longer in the day but it costs you fair less.

The air pump can also heat stored hot water. During the summer, we have spent very little to have hot showers and lovely baths during the summer where we haven’t used our solar.

People occassionally ask about noise, but even in the rooms near the pump or standing outside by the pump when it is going, it is very quiet.

Water or Ground sourced heat pump:

These work on a similar principle to the air sourced heat pump but use coils of water or another fluid sunk in a body of water or buried in your property’s garden.

Very expensive to put in after the building has been constructed, and may need planning permission.

The efficiencies used to be much higher than any air sourced heat pump, but I think these still out perform an air sourced system in the winter, delivering between 300% and 500% efficiencies. Expensive to buy, cheaper to run.

When the coils need replacing, a ground system can be expensive to do too.

Infrared panel heaters:

Like storage heaters, the efficiencies are not as high as heat pumps but out perform boilers dramatically, at nearly 100%.

Unlike storage heaters and radiators or air vents, infrared panels heat objects, like your walls and you! So long as your home is shielding from wind, that means the produced heat is enjoyed by you and insulation performing a subtly different function.

The panels can be ceiling mounted too, freeing up wall space.

I have friends who did this recently and can confirm, as a guest, I couldn’t tell the difference on a cold December day.

If I was moving into a house which hadn’t had radiators or under floor heating, I would definitely consider this as an option. It could be done as a DIY tasks, too. Here is a quick walk through by a supplier: infrared heaters complete guide top recommendations for 2025.

An immersion heater is then used for hot water.

That’s all well and good, what if I don’t have a water tank for an immersion heater!?

Condensing boiler system do not need to have a hot water tank, and in some homes, that allowed space to be freed up. Going back to having one is not an option for everyone.

So what do you do instead? I’m sure we’ve all seen the restaurants, cafes, and bars which have “instanteous water heaters” for the hot water tap – you don’t have a traditional tap but a box with a dial and there are a few seconds before you get hot water through.

All in all, one thing becomes clear, if you want to make the move, you can.

I would seriously consider whether you generate your own electricity, and if you do, what your appetite is for your total cost of ownership. Heat pumps are not just high purchase and installation costs. Servicing is required for complex machinery.

I am looking at my friends battery, solar, and infrared heaters as a good way to go, potentially done over a long period of time until you can be gas or oil free… the final step would be to get the individual water heaters.

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 tool.

Cynicism aside, it’s not the first time we’ve been in this position – I was in the first 500,000 on facebook, we were one of the first million to buy a Nissan Leaf (reached in July 2023) (Nissan beat Tesla to the figure by some margin thanks to being a lovely car for only £35,000 a pop giving you a top of a line Leaf compared to over £50,000 for the base model Tesla), one of the first million homes to get solar (reached in November 2021).

This time it’s for our Powerwall, our home battery. Nearly a million people have bought them across the world.

Batteries make a great deal of sense if you have solar or wind power. Around 1.6 million homes in August 2025 have solar panels fitted, about 5.5% of the housing stock. That’s given that the estimate is for 50% of homes to have ideal roofs to generate solar power. And another 17% could make some use of solar power.

Prices have come down for all these technologies. Given the increase in electrical power being supplied to homes – when we first moved into this house the charge per kWh (aka a unit in the UK) was 11p. The price is currently 25p per kWh with a solar export guarantee price being 12p a unit – as much as we used to buy electricity for…

Which really brings me to the point of this article, and its inspiration apart from being one in a million.

Carl Sagan used to teach his students that any intelligent civilisation on any planet will eventually have to harness the energy from its parent star exclusively. In the 19th and 20th Century humanity did this through the use of fossilised vegetation through coal and oil or gas.

But solar power can easily replace that – as a planet we are barely taking advantage of the 111,600 petawatt-hours the sun delivers daily. Given our solar cells only efficient enough to grab 20% of that power – covering just 0.3% of our planet in solar cells would grab all the power we need as a species.

Elevating those panels allows plants and farm animals to thrive in the shade cast by the panels. Placing them on roofs allows humans to live under them. Team solar panels with wind turbines or hydroelectric plants and we have a completely sustainable means of supplying the tools which enable life as we know it.

We can’t do this today due to cost. If we made the choice as a planet to do so, we could easily form a plan to do so before the damage is non-reversible.

The current news streams are all about immigration and the weather – I know which one I am significantly more concerned about!

Tenacious is a word often used to describe me, whether a small kid working out how insulin worked or playing bridge with my family on a Sunday evening, I am a sticker. I learn what I need to do something to the best of my ability and have goals saying whether that process is complete.

Whether it was working out how the Rubik cube worked in the 1980s (20 minutes a day before I went to sleep) or passing my motorcycle test, I keep on until the job is done.

Stubborn is another would that could be used with things like the motorcycle, but tenacious sounds much more positive, somehow.

I write this as I am recovering from the local lurgy that has been doing the rounds. I am OK. until I try to move, eat, or sleep, then everything goes to pot.

Before we go any further, there are a couple of things you may not appreciate about me. I never expected to get to 50 odd, and the whole “protecting your brain” from age related fatigue (or dare we say it macular dementia) was just not on my radar.

It was on my husband’s and when he got Vista, he started playing some of the “Microsoft games” as a work-out for his brain. Like going to the gym, he saw that as a way to preserve what he had.

Long story short, I started doing the same thing 6 years ago, although even then I resisted Solitaire – shocking waste of time and a feature on Andy Hamiliton’s Old Harry’s Game gave our protagonist his score when he entered hell. “What’s that for?” “That’s how many points you earned playing solitaire”…

Well, when I finally got a Window’s 7 machine in 2019, I promised myself I’d get to 3000 on Spider (one of the games). Which I did within a couple of years. I have done all my favourite games: Klondike, Pyramid, Freecell.

I had one left, a game I really don’t like very much at all. Tri-peaks. Today, I finished that final goal.

So why the title of this piece? Surely, I am not going to let this honed skill die? No, there are daily challenges, which I can typically do in five minutes before breakfast. I also do a few crosswords and word games.

I can’t see that part of my daily routine stopping.

But I have been doing extra games and competitions to get the total points. Now that I have reached my goal, I can learn a new skill.

Or write an update for my book.

My presentation at Snoopcon went reasonably well, I might try developing that skill or use the 45-60 minutes a day I have spent doing solitaire on learning a new game or skill.

Or writing one. Or playing bridge – I have taken a bit of a break from that.

The world is my oyster!

You know how much I love a three day weekend.  When my husband asked what I wanted to do with the last useful bank holiday in the UK this year, I said “clean the gutters”.

One of the few big benefits of a “chalet bungalow” is having gutters that can be easily reached reached with a step ladder without being dangerous or terrifying, is that we can really benefit from using “gutter hedgehogs”.

These stops leaves and other debris from blocking your gutter pipes. For us, living near so many deciduous trees, they are essential.

The downside is that they do need cleaning. On average, we do it every couple of years and with two or three of you, doing the whole house takes two to three hours.

Slackers!

Not really. Partly due to lockdown and not wanting to risk being in hospital, it had been a while. So, you have to relearn how to do things. I am sharing this for next time (2027).

Front of house.

Steps:

1. Starting from garage, pull out the gutter hedgehogs.
2. Shake the looser debris from each hog – ideally over the garden recycling bin or a wheelbarrow for your compost.
3. Wearing gardening gloves, “bristle” the spikes.
4. Starting at one end, use the other end to brush out the final debris.
5. Meanwhile, the person up the ladder cleans out the debris that has fallen of the hedgehog during removal.
6. Return the length of gutter hedgehog to the roof.

We have several lenghts for the front and back of the house, so repeat the above instructions for each length.

The beauty about this technique is that it doesn’t use any water or power.

It does make an awful mess of the driveway or garden in the back, but all this sweeps away fairly easily.

All in all, a job well done, and many cups of tea were used in the cleaning of our gutters.

And a note for how to do this next time 🙂

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, a 2014 Nissan Leaf (24kWh battery) and a vehicle to grid charger, so theoretically, we can draw from that source too. (We haven’t done that for a while).

We then have our air sourced heat pump, providing all our hot water and any heating we need.

Like everyone else, we have fridges, ovens, toasters, hobs, microwave ovens, computers, TVs, LED lighting, exhaust fans in bathrooms and the kitchen, vacuums, steam cleaners, an iron, dishwasher, washing machine, a condensing tumble dryer, hair dryers, etc. The modern tools of life.

Cut to the chase: how much power did you use over the summer, please?

Oh, yes, that’s why we’re here.

Firstly, summer is everything from the 1st June 2025 to the 31st August 2025.

Weather-wise, it has been a warm, dry season in the East of England. A little cloudy but being near the coast, we have that cloud on occassion. It makes our temperatures a little cooler, but does mean we don’t get quite as much power off our roof. So, let us look at those figures first.

Solar generation.

Month	Power generated (kWh)
June	497.6
July	393.3
August	422.1

Which is a reasonable year, not great, but not terrible.

Our usage is broken into two categories: heat and hot water, and general use.

Month	Heating (kWh)	Other (kWh)	Total (kWh)
June	38.1	409.5	447.6
July	43	361.6	404.6
August	41.4	390.2	431.6

Heavy users!

Yes, but some of that is the car. A good 100kWh a month, at that point we’re looking at much more usual usage.

So, what energy have we bought from the grid?

Month	Generated (kWH)	Used (kWH)	Net (kWH)	Bought from the grid (kWH)
June	497.6	447.6	-50	68
July	393.3	404.6	11.3	53.70
August	422.1	431.6	10.5	73.4

Hold on, how come you’re generating more energy than you’re using in June and still buying from the grid?

The batteries are not perfect, we get between 10% and 11% loss from the power stored in the battery – so for every 1kWh stored, we get 900Wh or 890Wh out. This is called the round trip efficiency, and is given in terms of 100%-loss %, so ours is 89% to 90% efficient.

We buy some power from the grid – the battery software does its best to match our demand with our usuage but without going into “island mode” and delibrately going “off-grid”, that is going to happen.

We can’t programme the system to only use the battery during the summer. It has to be done manually, which needs a great deal of discipline, and working full time, that is a big ask.

It’s also likely to hurt the batteries if we drain them consistently – there are definitely days we could have been off-grid without dropping below 20% of the battery, but it is hard to spot them ahead of time…

We have managed to donate some back to the grid too – the Powerwall does try to even out what it takes from the grid with what it donates. That is captured by a separate meter and for us is about 170 kWh which earns us our SEG (solar export guarantee) is just under £0.12, so circa £20.

What about the moolah?

It’s so dirty to talk about money – only kidding.

So, we have 92 days of standing charge, and 195.10 kWh of usage, giving us a total of £49.20 for energy charges and £40.25 of standing charge.

Summer we paid £89.45 for using that energy off the grid, or £29.81 a month. (We could say that we take the SEG money off this bill, which would be £69.45 or £23.15 a month).

I know some are doing better than this by using their batteries to store energy from off peak times, but I don’t think £29.81 is too bad, when 46% of that is from the standing charge and VAT.

Our standing charge rate is relatively low – in our circumstances, that makes much more sense as there are some days we only pay £0.04 for the electricity we use off the grid…

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 blurry because the butterfly mostly had its wings closed.

We started our ecology journey to protect what we love about the UK, it’s countryside. We felt we should do everything we could to make the world better than when we came into it.

Some steps were small (swapping out our halogen bulbs for LED ones), some large (getting the electric vehicle, the solar panels, swapping our gas boiler for the air sourced heat pump, getting the batteries), some in the middle (smart radiators and thermostats).

It wasn’t all done as a big bang, and some results have been a while to realise – the heat pump being a good example of this as we had to wait for winter to be over to see the results.

But on a grey day in July, it is good to see so many insects enjoying some of the planting we did in 2020 is really welcome.

We tend to plant small and let things grow – it reduces the CO₂ footprint of the planting and moving of preniuals. Once a plant has established, we take cuttings or plant seeds from the original plant. It’s not only CO₂ friendly, but cost effective.

That is of course ignoring the beauty of such a traditional and beneficial plant as lavendar. It’s aroma deters many rodents which should form a friendly and natural barrier from some pests.

We can also cook with it. Not only is it flavouring some of the local harvested honey, but we can add it to lamb and chicken.

The other big success we’ve had this year is that the £85 hedge I bought in 2015 is now big enough and mature enough to be a proper barrier. I bought 60-90cm whips and planted as they arrived. They are now 155cm tall!

That initial planting and success in the first two years led to us replacing more of the laurel hedge. Birds nest in it and we work round their breeding season when we prune. The idea is to promote bio-diversity not scarifice it!

We still have a small section of laurel to go, and that provides really good screening for us. Which means we’ll take a different approach.

We’re likely to spend five times as much for that section, as each whip will be 150cm tall from day one and they will need a great deal of care that first couple of years unlike the youngsters I got before.

Outside of the hedging, we have a peach tree, an apple tree, and a load of raspberries. There’s a thorn-free blackberry and this weekend we should have a cooking apple and some blackberries. Then there’s the strawberry patch. I tend this by covering with netting and straw to stop birds and slugs taking advantage.

We have a rose bed with climbers and hybrid teas providing food for us (rose petals are wonderful in salads) and other insects.

We have a small asparagus patch that we enjoy end of May begining of June. Fresh, microwaved asparagus is delicious. That is sharing space with some flowers and parsely, sage, and thyme – just need some rosemary…

We have a big house project this year – replacing our double glazing – hopefully triple glazing in the north facing wall and windows with blinds in them for the south facing aspect. The idea to promote our insulation capability and reduce the need to cool in the summer while benefiting from solar gain in the winter.

Hopefully then we can spend much more time and effort on the garden!

This is a short piece on how we went about the changes we needed to make to ensure we were eligible for the boiler upgrade scheme (BUS).

Ideally, we would have got a ground sourced heat pump (GSHP), but it is much more expensive to do that once the house has been built. When we first made the decision to go heat pump, the recommendations were to get ground source to get a system with a reasonable/good seasonal performance factor (the multiplier of heat in the source to heat produced).

At that time, there was also a difference in how much money you got too – air sourced heat pumps (ASHP) were less efficient and you got less money!

Times have changed. Our ASHP returns a SPF of 5.7 during summer and 3.5 during the winter, giving an average of 4.15 (during the lifetime of our heat pump, we have consummed 3.97 MWh and enjoyed heat worth 17 MWh).

Yawn, and not giving me the details!

Sorry, it came down to understanding that we needed to ensure we were eligible for BUS. We mortgaged/owned the house and had a fossil fuel heating system, we had a gas central heating system to replace: two of the criteria successfully met.

We just needed the fulfill the last one: I needed to ensure our “property is suitable for a low carbon heating system.”

Heat pumps work a little different to fossil fuel boilers. Boilers tend to overheat water to send to your radiators and underfloor heating circuits.

That means working to reduce the amount of energy needed to keep the space warm and we worked to get our kWh/m² down as low as possible. A “passive house” is rated at 60 kWh/m², we’re at 64 kWh/m², so we’re close. By comparison, a “new build house” is typically rated at 95 kWh/m² and older house at 140 kWh/m² . Your figure will be given in your EPC report.

By upgrading our room thermostats and radiator thermostatic values, we cut our gas requirements down from 15MWh to 12MWh. Which meant we could have a reasonably efficient single ASHP.

Having made those changes, (over quite a few months to spread the cost), I got evidence of the improvements and applied for a new EPC certificate.

To prove the “property is suitable for a low carbon heating system,” you need to score at least a Grade C EPC. Because the house was built to 2012 standards, our insulation was good enough (floor, walls, ceilings), our double glazing was good enough, etc. We also had fitted our solar cells in August 2014, with the solar diverter for hot water heating.

Because of our heating controls and LED lighting, we scored a Grade B off our original C.

The irritating thing, this time, was there were no recommendations given, as it was deemed too expensive to make changes to our house.

Which meant we applied to the company fitting our pump and claiming the BUS in late May 2024 and got everything sorted out for fitting with the BUS in that’s year’s mid-July.

You need evidence that your electricity supply box is good too – we had upgraded our electricity fuse box the year before to 2022 standards, so had all the paperwork available.

Can you sum that up, please?

Table below is the check list.

Criteria.	Your status.
House owned or mortgaged by you.
Using fossil fuel powered boiler, which you are completely replacing.
Recent EPC ≥ C.
Proof of wiring standard.
Have an installer that is registered to make the claim on your behalf.