Power stations burning bio mass

[difflock]

Actually a modified mini digger could now easily do the work.

Of cleaning the leat/lead

BUT...................what does one do with the silt in these Environment Agency lunitic dominated days.

At work it is going to cost us a conservative 1/2 million £ sterling to de-silt a duck pond, because the arisings have to be treated as "special" waste or some such utter nonsense.

there is nor never was any heavy industry, indeed any industry upstream, yest it has to be tested for heavy metals etc etc.

FFS!

[Compo]

Just managed to cheer myself up and someone mentions the Environment Agency. Don't see why you should have to pay so much for desilting when one of our neighbours was permitted to dump stored horse manure by a watercourse. According to the EA we'd need to wait and see if the fish died and then do something. That stream has been poisoned twice to my knowledge. I'm not restocking again.

[openspaceman]

The main issues are cost of materials (which can be tolerated in some cases) and the fact that insulation takes up space if applied internally. With lower cost materials you're talking about 6" or so, so making each room smaller all round by about a foot. Not very popular!

 

This is the position I find myself in, house built 1862, solid walls, 2 up 2 down semi detached for farm workers, subsequent poor quality flat roofed extension for kitchen with bathroom over in 1959.

 

I have 2 woodburners in the downstairs rooms but will soon be too decrepit to gather and convert the couple of m3 wood I burn in the front room.

 

As far as I can see, subject to sorting vapour barriers correctly I can reach current building regs of 0.28Wm2/deg K with 40mm celotex on the inside of the exterior walls which means losing 40mm in width and depth. Problem is the cost of re plastering. I will do it but part L of the building regs requires this to have notification and the local building inspector is being awkward about the 50 year old extension.

 

I can easily afford to lose 100mm on the ceiling ( not worth adding to loft as we have coombed ceilings (slope of roof forms part of the upstairs ceiling).

 

Add £5k of double glazing and a whole house ventilation unit, job done, about £13k I guess plus redecorating. Just need to find someone to do one room at a time to avoid having to move my hoard of junk accumulated over 35 years here all at once.

 

The thing to remember is that most/many people expect to maintain the whole house above 20C regardless of occupancy. I heat the kitchen with a radiator, the sitting room with a radiator and very occasionally a pellet stove and the front room with wood. There is a towel rail in the bathroom but other than that no heating, so my energy input is minimal even though the insulation is poor. Were I to heat it to 20C the energy required would be several times more.

[Compo]

Oh and by the way, last time the leat was cleaned a dragline was used - minidigger would be way out of it's depth, literally. We nearly lost a 360 excavator too. Granted it had been a while since the last dredging!

[renewablejohn]

We excavate and de-silt 100 mtrs of drainage dykes each year but not allowed to do both banks at the same time. Silt is spread on the land for which we have a licence from the environment agency.