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

http://www.red-limited.com/

It will be - Octopus invested in them last year

Does anyone have any experience with secondary glazing?

We're gonna get some this Autumn but I'm finding it difficult to work out which is the best option between glass and plastic.

Can't seem to find an impartial source for which has the lower u value. Glass sellers say glass does, and vice versa with plastic sellers.

I would trust the BBA qualification data for each material over any sales person (if that data is available)

Yes, I’ve installed 4 secondary glazing units myself from Clearview. All glass acoustic with vertical slide so you can open/clean etc. primarily done as we live on a road and couldn’t get triple glazed in the new sash and case units.

The quality is really good, the process was easy even though measuring was a worry as these are in bays but you can do pretty much anything.

The difference is incredible, can’t hear cars, heat loss is reduced and with blinds up you don’t even notice them.

Edit, no idea about U value, I just wanted something with high acoustic reducing properties so opted for specific acoustic 6 and 8mm glass

Plastic will always scratch up, haze, and if you accidentally clean it with the wrong detergent it will make the surface craze. It will naturally insulate better than glass but it really isn’t the right material for secondary glazing imo. I’d go with glass whatever.

Switched to Octopus Tracker.

Immediate reduction in bills.

But.

Was this the absolute worst time to do so? Contention for energy (domestic and presumably wholesale ) is only going to go up over winter, right?

Did it exist / was anyone on it last year who can chip in?

I don't think it existed last winter. You can switch to the rate cap deal at any time I believe.

I’ve been on it since end of Jan.

Gas prices at the on 31st Jan were 7p/kWh
Electricity prices were 24p/kWh.

Although it’s fluctuated, it’s been consistently around a 1/3 less than standard tariffs.

We spent Sunday ferrying shit from the loft to the tip and now we've got £700 of insulation and boards coming so hopefully by next weekend we may have a warm house again

That's on my list too

Yeah, two weeks switchover.

Ta. Guess I'll be paying the numbers on the meter some attention in the coming months.

Dehumidifier question (which is v. much a "how long is a piece of string" one).

We have a Maeco 10l that we got a couple of months ago. Been using it on and off but even when we had it on for extended periods (36h +, and with three+ emptyings of the reservoir in that time) the humidity would never drop below ~58%, and quickly gets back to ~70%.

The house has always been a bit damp, but never had serious mould issues. Is it plausible that this is still all moisture coming from the building fabric itself? I'm worried that we're effectively just drawing damp air through a leak somewhere and effectively dehumidifying the outside and paying a decent amount in electricity bills for the privilege

You can get wireless hygrometers for about £15-20, maybe put a couple around the house to see what's happening elsewhere while you run the dehumidifier, and compare it to outside humidity from your weather app?

Current conditions are really humid FWIW. If you gaff is leaky, it won't take long to completely cycle the air inside with new, moist air from outside.

@eskay @andos @Jonny69 thanks for the replies folks.

Clearview are on our shorlist as it happens, so it's good to hear of first hand experience with them. A big part of the concern is whether/how they'll change the look of the windows.

We got a quote from them and they were cheaper than expected, but still twice the price of removable (but non-opening) plastic jobbies

@tyeness I can send some photos but honestly I don't notice them and no-one else does either, other than commenting on not being able to hear the road outside. You also can't see them from the outside which was a bigger concern for me.

We have venetian blinds on our windows which completely hides the edges. Clearview had some of the lower profile edges from memory so they are pretty discreet IMO.

Does anyone have pictures of an unobtrusive heat pump install?

Been to see several amazing and beautiful houses with ASHP recently, yet they all just have one of these dumped by the front door in a super clunky fashion.

I know they can't be boxed in completely, but there must be a way to do better....

1 Attachment

I think Maeco advise that it's probably for a dehumidifier to run constantly for a couple of weeks when you first get it to get towards a target humidity.

As said, it's been humid and no house is airtight. Have you been drying laundry inside?

A photo or two would be amazing if you have some to hand? The images on Clearview's site are pretty crap.

We're also looking at Storm who do the magnetic-fixing type, but with low-E glass rather than the plastic, which could be a decent middle ground.

I had this too. No idea what it was, ran the thing for literally months. I figure that I was just grabbing damp air from outside.

Current plan is to try and isolate individual rooms, and assuming they get down to a good low level of humidity, to the see how they look in x (24? 48?) hours time to at least build up a picture of what the rooms are like, rather than just running it in a hallway and never making any appreciable progress

I’m looking into this too for our windows, so will be interested to hear how you get on.

We have a bay with single glaze sash windows that we need doing and I’m hoping we can install something that does look shit.

1 Attachment

What are the symptoms you're trying to treat with the dehumidifier?

We run ours when we start to get condensation on the windows in the sitting room (most other rooms are double glazed). We start to get this in late Sep/Oct as we dry clothes indoors and usually in that room. During the summer months there's no condensation as we can have all of the windows wide open, and clothes indoors dry relatively quickly.

It's a big old house that's been converted into flats with little thought for air circulation, but it's not draughty. We can dry stuff on a line in the garden but it's a faff to get down and round to our bit of the garden and there's only a few weeks of the year where it's better to this in the garden than it is indoors.

The humidifier comes out roughly around the time we start to turn the heating on, and we only ever have to put the humidifier on in the room where the clothes are drying. That keeps the condensation on the single-glazed windows down to a minimum.

You can see this from the temp/humidity graph below. Humidity is generally around 60-70%RH throughout the year, albeit with no humidifier action between April and October. Dropping as low as 50%RH is rare so no point ever chasing that.

Thermostat generally turned to 18 deg C come October time (it sits at ~15 deg C otherwise) and that means the heating is off/on all the way through to April. Thermostat is turned down to 16 deg C at night, and back up to 18 deg C when someone gets up. It's also left down at 15 if we're out for the day or longer (there's at least one of us WFH Mon-Fri so it's kept warm during most of the week).

We make sure we close the bathroom door and crack the bathroom window open after a bath/shower to keep the humid air away from the rest of the flat. Fitting a humidity controlled extractor fan will be on the list for the grand rewiring.

As for running costs, the old rule of thumb was a 1W light bulb on 24/7 for a year would cost £1. So a dehumidifier rated at 140W and on for ~8h a day for 5 months means we're looking at £20/year in old electricity costs, more like £60/year now with current prices. That's a bargain. And any energy the dehumidifier throws out as heat means we use our heating just a little bit less.

1 Attachment

That's useful info, so possibly chasing low 50s is just not feasible in most UK homes? And just use it to target specific spikes in humidity - laundry and when there is visible condensation