Hey friends,

No real progress on the house this week as we've been prepping for our holiday 'digital nomadism adventure'. For one, I've been setting up Abi's old macbook with Final Cut Pro and other bits which in theory should take just a few minutes but due to technical hitches and copious back and forths with Apple, seem to take up whole afternoons. For this week's newsletter I thought I'd document the process.

🛫 Travel

Car hire

Whenever I have to do an infrequent money related thing, my first port of call is Money Saving Expert. The advice there is to go to a comparison website and select the cheapest one. With finger over the buy button I quickly jumped onto Trip Advisor to read reviews where I found out that the company has in its small print that you cannot take it off road. As the last stretch of road to most beaches in GC are untarmacked, this would be an issue, especially, as it turns out, the company sends its staff out to take photographic evidence of you parked off road to keep from returning your deposit. From those reviews I found recommended car hire companies which a) weren't on comparison sites b) were cheaper and c) had glowing reviews. So we've got ourselves a Vauxall (or Opel over there) Crossland X 'or similar' which should be a nice step up from the Astra we drive here.

I'm a fan of an affiliate link. When done right it's a win-win-win (for company, website and reader) and aids in delivering free information to the masses. So while Martin Lewis may be considered a national treasure, it's worth remembering MSE is an affiliate based website so the route of finding a smaller independent car hire company isn't mentioned.

Flights

This was simple, Easyjet's my fave for Europe. There's one airline I refuse to fly on due to the CEO and his airline's practices so while slightly cheaper, Ryan Air are on MY no-fly-list.

Travel insurance

While you can get baggage cover running into the £thousands it's really hard to find insurance that will cover valuables (jewellery & electronics) for more than £500 and rarely can one item be covered for more than that. So if our phones, laptops and camera get nicked...we get £500. Meanwhile the other £3,500-odd of baggage insurance covers some cheap clothes and pair of flippers.

Additionally, annual cover was cheaper than single trip. Go figure.

Baby stuff

Travel has become more complicated with endless paraphernalia to take with us. Fortunately, the car rental offer free baby seats, the AirBnB host is supplying a travel cot but there's no baby bath available, so the kitchen sink will have to do.

I can imagine the eye rolling we'll get when we enter the plane holding him (I used to be one of them) so perhaps we'll pick up some sweets or something to hand out to curry favour in case of a screaming fit.

Covid

We've got the NHS app to show we've been double vaccinated and downloaded proof to a laptop in case our phones decide to break on the day (Abi's nearly new iPhone went kaput the other day so it's front of mind).

Selfishly, my concern is that with covid rates so high a lockdown could be introduced just in time to ruin our trip which given the government's refusal to reintroduce even the most minor controls isn't entirely unfeasible, though I think unlikely in the next couple of weeks. 🤞

💭 Your Take on Heat Pumps

I had some great responses on the heat pumps issue discussed last week. Overall, it doesn't seem that many, indeed any, of you are keen to make the shift anytime soon which is helpful to confirm I'm thinking along the right tracks. I can't post all the replies without making this super lengthy but here are a couple from Dan, who has a HP and Rod who's been thinking about them.

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As a quick response, I bought a 1950s bungalow 7 years ago and inherited a Worcester Bosch air source heat pump.

As I decorated each room I added oversized radiators as we didn't have wet underfloor heating, but basically it cost a fortune to run and we were always chilly in winter as the cost to crank it up a degree or 2 was massive. The efficiency is a function of the increase in temperature you need between the outside air temperature and the temperature of the water it produces to circulate around your radiators/underfloor heating to achieve a warm home.

In the winter obviously these two temperatures head in opposite directions and it becomes very expensive. I personally would never consider retrofitting a heat pump to an existing house which previously had a boiler due to the running costs. A brand new well insulated air tight house with wet underfloor heating might cost in, but never to replace a boiler in my opinion.

The was the Renewable Heat Incentive previously which led to many people fitting them, and when I realised it seemed very expensive I went on the internet and found plenty of horror stories like mine. It's also no coincidence that hardly any plumbers now have done any manufacturers training on air source heat pumps. I fixed my one a few times as I had learnt a lot about it (I'm an engineer by trade) and felt I would pay good money for a plumber to come out and they may well know less than me. If anything an air con engineer might have been a better option.

You are right to steer well clear, I genuinely don't think they are a viable option for retrofitting to existing properties. I could easily have a £300 pound electric bill per month in the winter with it said to 8/19 degrees just to take some of the chill out the air!

-Dan

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Thank you for your, as usual, thoughtful piece on heat pumps.

I drove 300+ miles down from Scotland yesterday, so had some enforced time to think about the subject! My take on the situation is this:

If you can afford a heat pump and the complementary mods needed, then consider getting one anyway to preserve the environment for your grandkids. But everyone should consider the following…..

An air-source heat pump is only likely to be good for you if you significantly reduce the power required to heat your house. So, in terms of bang for your buck, why not do the enabling mods and reduce your gas usage significantly but without spending the huge cost of installing a heat pump as you do it?

Gas boilers, particularly the condensing boilers which most are these days, are significantly more efficient with a lower output temperature from the boiler. The Viessmann boiler website suggests 10 to 20% difference. By adding an outside temperature sensor (£30 ish) you can get most modern boilers to reduce their output temperature in sync with the outside air temperature increasing. So, in Spring and Autumn, you can run the boiler much more efficiently without adjusting anything or compromising your indoor temperature. I have put one of these on my new Worcester-Bosch boiler and it spends a lot of the time humming away at about 50 degrees output temperature and thus close to max efficiency.

Just as for heat pumps, if you want this to work in the depths of Winter, you need larger radiators. If we would have been prepared to fit them for a heat pump, why not to increase the efficiency of the gas boiler in the Winter, when it uses most of the gas?

But, what about the pipes? While technically, the pipes should be larger bore, we are making the assumption that they are already being used at their maximum capacity and that exceeding the normal design constraint would be unacceptable. The two issues are, of course, noise and the pumping power required to get the water around. The difference in flow between a high temperature system and a low temperature one is about 45/35 (the ratio of the delta temperature between the radiator mean temperature and the desired air temperature). This is less than a third more water flow. I’d say it’s worth a punt on noise in order to save the planet. And, if you can’t get the flow, adding a second circulating pump in series would not be rocket science, nor expensive.

As your projects demonstrate, building in insulation to all home projects is sensible however you heat your home. And, again, the bang for your buck is pretty good in most cases. I’m quite a fan of 35mm insulated plasterboard on outside walls and upstairs ceilings. A fairly low thermal inertia solution, although not the best on its own for out-and-out steady-state heat loss.

Heat pumps only work (in most cases) by keeping the house warm all of the time, rather than heating it up from colder each day. Another way of saying this is that the house is warmer overnight than it needs to be and there is therefore additional heat loss compared with a system that only heats during the day. Sticking with your gas boiler on a low temperature system doesn’t carry this penalty.

-Rod

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Thanks chaps. For now I'll:

• hope our boiler doesn't fail
• carry on insulating
• add under floor heating when we do the extension
• go with solar panels one day too.

I think by then it will be clearer whether HPs are the answer. If they are then hopefully they're more efficient and can heat water up to higher temperatures so pipe bore and radiator size isn't such a concern.

🔨 Next Project

This is the bedroom which is next on the list and is now cleared. Beauty isn't it? First job is to insulate the wall with the window as I've done before and turned out well. Behind the wood-chip wallpaper is a thin layer of polystyrene so it's clear that the heat loss through the solid walls was a problem for the previous owners too. If I can strip the room back and get the wall insulation done before we go away, I'll be pleased with that.

This is how Abi wants it to look like when finished which is a relief as I don't fancy stripping back more wallpaper in a few years when he gets tired of the design. I do rather like these animal stickers though.

In our NCT class there were parents that rushed to get their nursery Pinterest ready prior to their baby being born, but honestly ours would be none the wiser if he'd slept in a washing basket this past year, so I'm happy we waited.

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Hit "reply" if you've got any comments on this week's newsletter – otherwise I'll see you next time. Have an epic week :)

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