Energy tariffs

The pipes were buried in the concrete floor and power flushing revealed them to be in an advanced state of deterioration. They would have failed soon enough if we’d gone on using them with a gas system.

As for what comes next, I’m chewing over various forms of hybrid solution. Electric radiators would be easy but would need a lot of battery storage to make them affordable to run. Air-to-air heat pumps would be easy to install and cheap to run but I’m concerned about noise. I’m thinking a big f-off storage heater in the hall would provide a useful base level of heat for the entire ground floor and stairs (the house is almost a cube and this would be close to the centre of it) and augmenting that with battery-fed devices in the rooms, that would then have to work much less hard. But expect that idea to change once our installers have offered their revised plan!

Not yet, but the roof would take 16 of them, about 7kW peak, so they're very much a possibility - not least because the batteries will then be VAT-exempt.

It’s been more the domestic and personal stuff than anything at work — although writing that feels like tempting fate. I’ve documented the plumbing upheaval here, but not the precautionary (we hope) visit from our insurer’s assessor in case the water leak has wrecked the concrete. (Unlikely, but avoids the ‘when did you know?’ question if there is a problem.)

Add to that the mystery shoulder impingement that’s wrecked my cricket season, kept me off the bike and now returned with a vengeance to the point of affecting my sleep, plus the whole emptying-nest thing and you’ll get to why the bent bumper was a bit less welcome even than a bent bumper usually is.

Anyway, I feel I’m on the way to solving the electrification problem, and getting some surprisingly enthusiastic backing from MrsB1. In a few months we could well have the more modern looking, feeling and working house that the electric mobility machines deserve to sit outside. Staying positive, mostly.

We are all reaching the age where minor niggles can become bigger and unresolvable problems if ignored. Hence my decision to have a weekly PR session concentrating on resistance training. Need to get back in the pool more often.

Then there are life's other issues like the house and children..

Glad you are feeling more positive Dubya. A lot of what we suffer mentally is about our perception of how others view us rather than how things really are. We have become a society which is too dependent upon affirmation by others when really it should be a simple self-affirmation that 'I can deal with this; I may be a bit poorer but it doesn't matter, as life will fine afterwards'.

I saw an advert in yesterday's Telegraph about electric boilers. Looked interesting and I can see why you wanted to go in that direction. But maybe the pipes issue has steered you in the right direction without realising.

The ZEB can be used to divert heat into a hot water cylinder but we’d chosen not to configure it that way, our house being at the upper end of its heating capacity anyway. We’d planned a ‘smart’ double-immersion cylinder to sit next to it but we’re now looking at Sunamp Thermino phase-change storage that will store grid and/or PV electricity as heat to release as hot water during the day. It will give us the dual-shower capability that’s handy for overnight guests, and give us somewhere to dump excess summertime PV if we decide to stay below the 3.68kW easy-export limit.

I’ve got some money sums to do, of course, some of which is offsetting one cost against a saving elsewhere and seeing whether we end up any worse off. The radiators, for example, had to be replaced because they were either about to fail or already had. The room devices (I’m favouring far-infrared panels at the moment) will, item for item, cost about the same.

We no longer need a central heat source, but we do need electricity storage, so we can offset the cancelled ZEB against the battery. I want to do PV anyway but the solution is viable without it, given that heating matters most when PV contributes least. The big gain there might be either export revenue or charging the cars in summer for 0p instead of 7p. Given that energy prices will rise again at some point, it makes sense to protect ourselves from that — and increasing overall renewal capacity is just the right thing to do anyway.

Feeling reasonably calm about it now. Where we have decisions to make — IR panels v air-to-air heat pump v electric radiators — nothing is so expensive that we couldn’t tear out and replace one if we hated it. Better to get something in and working and get on with making the house how we really want it.

Yes. I now know we had a little warning of this a few years ago. We have a rather attractive modern gas fire in the old fireplace (houses were still getting those in 1971) and I started noticing a persistent whiff of gas in the living room. Nothing wrong with the appliance or its installation, but the engineer found the pressure at the appliance end was lower than the meter end. The gas pipe was laid the same way, in the floor, without lagging to protect it from the concrete. That permits chemical corrosion of the copper, and gas was escaping through the resulting pinprick holes.

That pipe is still there but doesn’t carry gas any more. We had it capped and a new one laid, halfway around the external walls. Water is more benign than gas, especially when it can escape downwards into the foundations rather than up into the room. But power-flushing was just too much for what copper was left.

Our whole system had reached crisis point: radiators failing through internal corrosion, and sludged-up supply pipes — not to mention the failed boiler. Better, I suppose, to have discovered it like this and not through mysterious problems with a new system in a freshly-decorated house. And this way, I get to do something entirely new. Central heating was a mid-20th century improvement on room-by-room fireplaces and, like the internal combustion engine, just became the thing we’re used to. There are cleaner and more controllable options now.

In two previous 'old' period houses, the pipework was accessible if needed from the cellar for downstairs and under floorboards upstairs. When built there would have been no central heating. Ironically an older house had an advantage there, especially one with cellar space. Current house is about 20ish years old but I do know the pipework is buried away in floor/walls and I wondered about this before WDB's info.

It's irrelevant you wanted to go electric... if you'd have a new gas boiler and pressure cleaned the pipes the same. As would having a heat exchange based system. I wonder how many other houses will find this costly building oversight - lots I guess.

Al, I assume you've checked for air and tried balancing them. Could you now clean out the system with a chemical under normal pressure?