Owning your own home

I think your feeling is right here on the ballpark amounts - if you want a turnkey solution with a high finish then you will pay for it. If you have the time and inclination to spend more time on it you can reduce that.

You can certainly get an unvented cylinder with an immersion heater built-in, because I have one (although I'd only use it as back-up in case of boiler problems).

I'd like a sealed tank with a power diverter for a solar PV system. And a solar PV system

I'd also like world peace and a lottery win.

It’s not “normal” to run it just off the immersion heater is it? Is that only because electric is ££££/kWH or some other reason?

It’s scary what you see when you look closely on Rightmove. Maybe we should stay where we are.

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It’s like a back up, cheaper to heat with gas and faster but if you don’t have gas you can use leccy.

What do you see?

I'd love a room like that to hide in (aside from the shed). There is really nowhere to hide in my house.....

It’s the things sticking up behind the standard lamp on the left that particularly struck me.

Apart from looking somewhat phallic probably knives/swords?

Its the fact that the whole stupid room could fit onto a kindle that gets me.

Could it though? I thought kindles are good for text but not great for visuals. That huge stack on the right of the desk for example all look like picture books. (That's my excuse for having lots of books anyway.)

the whole stupid room could fit onto a kindle

For lots of people the physical form of a book is part of the pleasure of reading.

For some people album sleeve notes are an integral part of music listening, something that isn't really duplicated on downloaded/streamed versions.

Decent heat and sound insulation too. Probably a reasonably quiet and snug room.

That room is like a much much much tidier version of my mum's room.

I'd guess most of those books predate kindles.

My mum's got about 50 year's worth of books, plus a load that she got from older relatives over the years, and she still loves buying second hand books from charity shops. She's not going to rebuy them all just so they can fit on a kindle.

When we first viewed our house, a two bedroom Victorian terrace, it had about two thousand records and eight thousand books in it. Books were all art tomes and the records classical music. One of the downstairs rooms was a narrow sliver of space between books and every wall was shelved. The shelves were very well engineered so much so that the walls were wrecked after taking them down.
The vendors, it was a probate sale, started a small business selling all the books and records off.

I used to have a job that involved going into houses in Cambridge.

That’s massively below average for untidiness and book count for a serious academic.

Good CD selection and all the books, looks a great room to spend winter in

Ha yes that is my mum, she was a uni lecturer from the 70s to the 00s. She's finally tackling the piles of stuff so we are throwing out boxes of stuff like 30 year old typewritten lecture plans and language exams on audio tapes.

We did it with my in laws when they moved to a smaller place 6 years ago. It stayed tidy a month or two, it now looks just like their old place. Older nerds gonna nerd.

it’s a complex question with different answers.
i have a modern unvented cylinder that is well insulated (a stainless tub that is inside an insulated sleeve) which is heated overnight with cheaper nighttime electricity as i’m on economy 7 so it’s reasonably efficient even though i’m keeping 125 lt of water warm at a high temp, if you like baths you can wash your hands/do dishes etc and still have enough for a bath at the end of the day. I shower though so have an electric shower, what i should have done is fitted a shower tap to the bath as well which means i could have easily got 2 showers a day out of the hot water tank and saved a few pounds a month by not using the electric shower.
what I don’t do is put the daytime immersion on as that will really cost a lot more and only warms the water a few ° which is unnecessary as the cylinder is so well insulated and hardly drops in temp through the day unless you decide you want a 100lt bath in the morning, modern cylinders have a floating baffle in them to help deal with the influx of cold water mixing with the hot but the laws of thermodynamics cannot be avoided.

whatever system you have it’s going to be expensive compared to current gas boilers and unless you don’t care about running costs you will have to think about how you use hot water.

If you have an old fashioned bare copper tank with with an insulation jacket tied round it then it’s probably worth having a new modern cylinder fitted as this will bring the cost down of having hot water.

So you can have a shower off an immersion but i would want an electric shower also as this means you can have a hot shower even if your dear partner decides they want to fill the bath to the brim with piping hot water and then leave it to cool down before they can get in it.....

long term we will have to wean off gas but electricity should be cheaper as the percentage of renewables grows and heatpumps become viable once homes are better insulated.

long term we will have to wean off gas but electricity should be cheaper as the percentage of renewables grows and heatpumps become viable once homes are better insulated

Along with a grid controlled immersion heater that comes on when there is spare capacity and switches off in the evening peak.

What’s the U value of walls lined with a kindle vs physical books?

Yes, got a Gledhill stainless cyclinder here with direct heating, which means a threaded hole for a single or double immersion, they only loose around 1kwh worth of heat during 24 hours (depending on room temp, water temp, science etc) which is very low, literally a waste of time to try and put another insulated layer over it as it is already a very efficient system.

But you can get them with a single or a double coil, or indirect, which means you can heat the water with a boiler on a separate circuit, or using solar pv type panels (lots of new builds use this method so you get what you get from the solar setup, then use the immersions if needed to heat the water the rest of the way).

Using nighttime rates works best with these as they are so well insulated the 0.5 to 1.0 kwh you could possibly loose at the worst case scenario due to loss is outweighed by the cheaper energy rate.

needs to be installed by someone competant, there is a 'G3' requirement. We got a plumber from over 2 hours away to install ours, but I actually threw him off the job as he literally had no idea what he was doing, spent best part of 3 hours swearing about regulations and why his way was better. Insurance assessors would likely be able to spot the 'imaginative' plumbing solution he had dream't up to provide the D1/D2 pipe a waste route. Ended up doing it myself, not so bad if you are competent and dealt with plumbing at least once in your life before. But would recommend an actual qualified plumber, least it maintains a longer warranty for the cylinder.

I too have a gledhill, you also learn a new word when you have one fitted.
‘tundish’

My neighbour has a fucking huge one off his wood boiler. Will stay hot for 5 days!

We don't have gas, just an immersion tank now. Fitting a big cylinder is on my list.