Keeping your home warm / heating / energy crisis / insulation etc

Ive had one for 5 years its been great, wouild recommend

Could you post a link?

Noticed that amazon has tado on sale at the moment, but not sure where you'd start with the various packs

Ask Tado, Just did this and ordered from their webshop on amazon.
you mail them details of your boiler/pics and they advise you what you need.
they did give me a link to the installer shop for the ‘starter kit wireless smart thermostat V3 inc hot water control’ which was more expensive than elsewhere and out of stock. but i had done my own research and the hot water control model which is for S/Y plan systems with a hot water tank also works with combi boilers.
seems the UK is unique in using this kind of system so they had to offer a product that works for those kind of installs.

Cheers

FYI Toolstation currently/still has the hot-water-controlling-model for 10 quid cheaper https://www.toolstation.com/tado0-wireless-smart-thermostat-starter-kit-v3-with-hot-water-control/p73699 (which is what I recently puchased along with 2x 4-pack TRV valves... 1 of the 4-pack didn't arrive so had to buy a 3-pack instead... so will have 7 smart valves. Still waiting on the plumber for the upstairs TRV "upgrades")

Here's my part of the IoT thread for it: https://www.lfgss.com/comments/16775467/

Tado valves are also £50ea ar Screwfix presently. Just bought 4 to schedule some rooms during the day

There are 2 types of Tado valves, one with the large display and one not (the "basic" version) differences are here: https://www.tado.com/gb-en/basic-srt-add-on

Best deal I found so far (for the fancy ones) was the £199-for-4-pack ("quattro pack") deal, which ran out of stock quickly. Amazon has them for £160-for-3, similar but not the lowest.

Oh yeah, we got the more basic ones. They'd been on offer for £160 for 4 but they're also all gone.

Wish I'd not slept on it, the 4 packs of posh valves were still in stock yesterday.

I'm looking at Karcher window vacs now too. I know @EB got the WV 2 - anyone else got an opinion on that over the WV 5? WV 5 looks to come with a smaller wiper thing as well. Otherwise just seems to be slightly bigger and slightly heavier!

I bought the WV1 last week, which was £32 on Amazon and works an absolute treat

Ta

We've had the WV1 for about a month. Not sure what any of the other features would be useful for, we just use it to suck up condensation.

My wife bought a heated clothes airer. It’s great when you want to heat just one room.

Here’s what we’ve done over the last 3 years;
Insulated the lofts to 400mm wicks had a load of rolls on sale and quite a few split packaged ones for super cheaps:
Replaced our drafty windows with better double glazing. Including loosing some opening ones.
Got a dehumidifier and run it most of the time on its lowest setting.
Replaced the oil fuelled boiler with an air source pump (no gas in the village)
Set the hot water to 40 degrees (remember to use the immersion heater to bring it up to 60 once a month for 15mins to kill bugs)
Have the heating set to 19 24/7 and set a maximum temperature of 22 in the lounge no matter how much you push the up button.
It’s cost a fuck ton, but it’s making quite a bit of difference (I think) and most of the costs are off set be the increase in the house’s value against the leaky thing we started with.
We’re also got a wood stove in the living room with a massively over sized brick chimney (thermal mass) which warms up that end of the house in no time and stays warm for an age.

Next up is to clad the outside walls with insulation between the brick and the barn cladding. That should help a bit more and look so much nicer than the miss matched brick that you see at the minute.

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Excellent work. Minus the wood stove, we’ll end up with something similar. We do have a tiny fireplace so might have the odd surreptitious burning of oak offcuts from the workshop now and then.

Living the dream!

Are you heating the house with radiators or underfloor?

I need to look into heat pumps. We currently have a 45kW wood boiler for radiators but plan is to move to something like this.

Cheers, the air pump has only been in for a couple of months so I have no idea on how much it costs to run, but we were spending £3,500 ish a year on oil and that includes through lockdown when oil was super super cheap. So we’re hoping on it making a real difference no matter what.

Not sure if asking here or the van thread is best (possibly some cross over); looking to keep an out of house office/workshop warm over winter. It’s got electric, it’s well insulated but also gets full sun on the roof. Only really need a low level of heat to keep the damp/condensation out and protects the batteries/electrics etc of the things that are in there.

Does such a thing as a solar powered storage heater exist? Or, failing that was thinking about the small space heater type things that campervans use but apart from solar panels, car battery and inverter as some of the parts have no idea if that’s feasible or realistic! Don’t want to spend a ton, would only be used in winter/when it gets properly cold to keep the temperature always above 5C ish so outright power isn’t needed, but quick, easy and mostly painless to install would be.

We have rads, which isn’t the best to be honest, but we are using a higher heat set up so it should work. That’s why the lowest temperature is quite high. It means the water in the system shouldn’t get too cool which in turn causes a massive spike on start up. Well that’s the idea…
Underfloor is really the best route if starting from scratch.

I’m going to say do it, but it is very different to normal on demand heating, you have to plan what temperature you want to hit and when rather than just cranking up the boiler. It’ll do it but the heaters eat your money!

I'd need to look into electric on it. We are limited there too.

We're similar. Takes 30mina for wood boiler to warm house but then I can keep at 19 easy just putting logs on every 4ish hours.

The issue is wood is free (for a little labour) so not inclined untill got solar

Some other stuff we have/are doing;
We’ve got heavy weight close fitting Roman blinds in all the windows (thanks to the MiL a curtain maker)
The side wall has 2 windows on it and in summer the sun hits it and melts stuff on the coffee table and in winter it gets the full blast of our icy winds, so they are getting barn style exterior sliding shutters.
When I insulated the lofts I picked up every piece of ‘king span’ I saw in skips, by the side of the road etc and put that between the joists before installing rock wool. I also picked up discarded bits of pipe insulation to thrown up there as well. You can’t have too much up there. Just as long as you let the air circulate around the edges. I also decided that we wouldn’t be using the area for storage so just put the new rolls over the boarded out bits of loft. The air gap helps even more with keeping the warmth out.
Even though the hot water tank is fully insulated inside it’s still got a tank jacket on as the out side still gets warm, sure it’s not hot, but it was something like £10 from the plumb centre because it had a rip in it.
When we fitted out the kitchen I wish we’d used concrete or stone for the worktops as they would store heat from the oven better than the oak we have.
I’m trying to convince Liz that a big concrete coffee table in front of the fire is a good idea, but she’s not having it. My other idea of a large fish tank is also meeting a stony face (Thermal mass baby)
I also want to put on a storm porch. I’d like to glaze it fully, but even an open sided one would help to stop the cold coming in when you open the door.

I’d love solar or wind, but we are surrounded be massive oak trees so that’s a none starter.

Thanks for reading my musings.

Makes so much sense for a rural location with no mains gas but electricity (and usually plenty of space).

I've read the immersion should be once a week rather than once a month, but that may well be wrong.

Looking forward to getting used to an ASHP in Feb. We have 9m2 of UFH then big alu rads in the rest of the house.

Nice. If the woods free and you have the time, I’d stick with it. It sounds like until the electricity is free it’s a no brainer. Solar and a pre warmer are the gold standard.